Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“Your…” He waved a hand around his head. “I know that’s a religious thing a lot of the time. Are you religious?”

“My family is,” she said. “I think maybe I will be someday, but mostly I wear the hijab because I enjoy not having to worry about my hair getting in the cake batter.”

“Functional and fashionable,” said Christopher, his tone an intentional mirror to hers when she had been speaking of the milk fruit. “So is it weird for you? Being a god?”

The Baker hesitated before putting her milk down. “Let’s clear this up,” she said. “I am not a god. I’m a baker. I bake things. Any magic in my food comes from the world, not from me, and I can’t help it if here, my brownies are always perfect and mysteriously double as roofing materials.”

“Sorry,” said Christopher. “I just thought—”

“I’m not here to convert people, or to preach, or to do anything but make a lot of cookies. A continent of cookies. When I’m done, if the door opens and sends me home, I suppose I’ll make cookies there.”

“Do you have a name?” asked Kade.

“Layla,” she said.

“Nice to meet you,” he replied. “I’m Kade. These are my friends, Cora and Christopher. Rini, you already know.”

Layla nodded to each of them in turn. “Nice to meet you. You all had doors of your own?”

“Goblin Prince,” said Kade.

“Mermaid,” said Cora.

“Beloved of the Princess of Skeletons,” said Christopher.

Layla blinked. “I was with you right up until that last one.”

Christopher shrugged easily. “I get that response pretty often.”

Rini didn’t say anything. She was miserably flicking chocolate chips from the wall, sending them clattering down into the junkyard below them. Layla sighed and leaned over to put her hand on Rini’s shoulder.

“Breathe,” she said.

“I think one of my lungs has stopped existing,” said Rini.

“So breathe a little more shallowly,” said Layla. “Just keep breathing. The baking will be done soon, and then we’ll see what we’ll see.”

“Rini was worried,” blurted Cora. Rini and Layla both turned to look at her. “About the timing. Um. If Sumi died before she was born, and we bring Sumi back to life now…”

“Oh, that’s simple,” said Layla. “You bring Sumi back to life now, and she returns to school with the rest of you. For us, Sumi is a grown woman, not a teenage skeleton. She’ll have a few years with you before her door opens again.”

“Are you the one who opens it?” asked Kade.

“No,” said Layla. “I get here a year after Sumi does.”

There was a momentary silence before Christopher asked, “If we’re in the future—our future—right now, does that mean that if I looked you up on Facebook once I have Wi-Fi again, I’d find you, like, twelve years old and living in Brooklyn?”

“I didn’t have a Facebook when I was twelve, but it doesn’t matter,” said Layla. “Please don’t look me up. Please don’t try to find me. I don’t remember that happening, which means it didn’t happen for me. If you change my past, my door might never open, and I might not get to bake all these cookies. I’d been waiting my whole life to bake all these cookies.”

Everyone who wound up at Eleanor West’s School—everyone who found a door—understood what it was to spend a lifetime waiting for something that other people wouldn’t necessarily understand. Not because they were better than other people and not because they were worse, but because they had a need trapped somewhere in their bones, gnawing constantly, trying to get out.

“We won’t,” promised Kade.

Layla relaxed.

In the kitchen, a timer dinged. Layla stood, brushing cocoa powder off her knees and bottom, before saying, “Let’s see what we’ve got,” and starting back. The others followed, Rini walking slower and slower until she was pacing slightly behind Cora.

Cora turned to look at her quizzically. “Don’t you want to see your mom?” she asked.

“She won’t be, not yet,” said Rini. “If this worked, she’s not my mother today, and if it didn’t, she won’t be my mother tomorrow. Is it better, in Logic? Where time does the same thing every day, and runs in just one line, and your mother is always your mother, and can always wipe your tears and tell you that there, there, it’s going to be all right, you are my peppermint star and my sugar syrup sea, and I’ll never leave you, and I certainly won’t get killed before you can even be born?”

Cora hesitated.

“Not always,” she said finally, and looked away.

Rini looked relieved. “Good. I don’t know if I could live with the idea that everyone else had it better and we had it worse, just because we didn’t want to always do things in the same order every day.”

Kade paused at the edge of the kitchen, turning and looking back over his shoulder. “Well, come on,” he called, beckoning. “We need to get Sumi out of the oven before she gets burnt.”

“We’re coming,” said Cora, and hurried, Rini beside her, up the hill.

*