Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“If you ever find yourself back in Brooklyn, give us a call,” said Christopher. “We take students throughout the year, and it’d be nice to know that you were going to where there were familiar faces.”

“I’ll keep you in mind,” said Layla, and flicked her hand toward the door, which swung lazily open, revealing nothing but a filmy pinkness beyond. “Now get out of here, so the timeline can stop getting tied into knots.”

“Wait!” said Rini. She darted forward, pulling Sumi into a rough hug. “I love you, Mama,” she whispered, before letting the younger woman go and turning away, wiping her eyes with her fully restored hand.

Sumi looked bemused. “I don’t love you,” she said. Rini stiffened. Sumi continued: “But I think I’m going to. See you in a few years, gumdrop.”

Turning, she started for the door, with her classmates tagging after her.

The last thing Layla and Rini heard before the door swung shut behind them was Sumi asking, “So why didn’t Nancy come?”

Then the door was closed, and the strangers were gone. Bit by bit, the door crumbled away, joining the debris that covered the ground. Layla looked at Rini and smiled.

“Well?” she asked. “What are you waiting for? You have about a day’s walk between here and home, and I bet your parents want to see you.”

The sound Rini made was half laugh, half sob, and then she was off and running, leaving the junkyard and the girl who only wanted to make cookies behind, racing into the bright Confection hills.

*

FOUR STUDENTS HAD LEFT and four students returned, even if they weren’t the same ones, stepping out of a door-shaped hole in the air and onto the dry brown grass of the front lawn. Eleanor was standing on the front porch, smiling wistfully—an expression that transformed into a gasp of open-mouthed delight when she saw Sumi.

“Sumi!” she cried, and started down the stairs, moving faster than such a frail-looking woman should have been able. “My darling girl, you’re home!”

“Eleanor-Ely!” cried Sumi, and threw herself into Eleanor’s arms, and held her tight.

Kade and Cora exchanged a glance. There would be time, soon enough, to tell Eleanor about everything that had happened: about leaving Nadya behind, about Layla, who might someday join them at the school, about the ways that Nonsense could be underpinned with Logic, and how this changed the Compass. There would be time for Kade to find Layla’s family, to seize the chance to watch someone—from a distance, never interfering—who was about to be chosen by a door. There would be time for so many, many things. But for right now …

For right now, the only thing that mattered was an old woman and a young girl, embracing in the grass, under a bright and cloudless autumn sky.

Everything else could wait.





14

THE DROWNED GIRL

WELL. PERHAPS NOT EVERYTHING.

Nadya sat on the bank of the River of Forgotten Souls, one leg drawn up against her chest so she could rest her chin atop her knee. Turtles basked on the bank around her, their hard-shelled bodies pressing against her hip and ankle. They followed her everywhere she went, a terrapin train of devoted acolytes keeping her company in this most uncompanionable of places.

It was nice, being in the company of turtles again. The turtles back in the pond at school (which seemed more like a dream with every endless, languid day that passed here, time defined by the lapping of the water against the riverbanks, by the occasional sound of music drifting from the Hall) had never wanted to spend time with her. There wasn’t enough magic in the world of her birth. Some magic worked there—Christopher’s flute, or Nancy’s stillness, back when she’d been a student, although Nadya had to admit that it was nothing compared to what Nancy could do here, in her natural habitat—but most magic was just too much for the local laws of nature to bear.

These turtles, though … these were proper, magical turtles. They didn’t talk to her, not like the turtles back in Belyyreka, and the largest of them was only the size of a dinner plate, instead of being wide enough to ride upon, like her beloved Burian, who had been her steed and dearest companion in the Drowned World, but they were still willing to let her tickle their shells and stroke their long, finely pebbled necks. They let her exist among them, ever-damp and ever-weeping, and she loved them all, and she hated them all, because they were a constant reminder that what she had here was not enough. This, none of this, was enough.

“I hate everything,” she said, and grabbed a stone off the bank and skipped it hard across the water, watching it hit the surface three, four, five times before it plopped and sank, joining the others she had already thrown to the bottom. Then she froze.