Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

THE STRANGER WAS NO longer in the turtle pond. That was an improvement, of a sort, but only of a sort: without the water and the turtles to drape her, the stranger had no clothes remaining at all. She was standing naked in the mud, arms crossed, glowering at Nadya, who was trying to look at anything but her.

Christopher whistled as he came over the rise, walking to the left of Kade. Cora, who was on Kade’s right, blushed red and turned her eyes away.

“She looks sort of like Sumi, if Sumi were older, and taller, and hotter,” said Christopher. “Did someone place an order with a company that drops beautiful Japanese girls from the sky? Do they take special requests?”

“The only kind of girl you’d want dropped on you comes from a medical supply company,” said Kade.

Christopher laughed. Cora blushed even harder.

Nadya, who had spotted the three of them, was waving her arms frantically over her head, signaling her distress. In case this wasn’t enough, she shouted, “Over here! Next to the naked lady!”

“A cake’s a cake, whether or not it’s been frosted,” said the stranger primly.

“You are not a cake, you are a human being, and I can see your vagina,” snapped Nadya.

The stranger shrugged. “It’s a nice one. I’m not ashamed of it.”

Kade walked a little faster.

Once he was close enough to speak without needing to shout, he said, “Hello. I’m Kade West. I’m the assistant headmaster here at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Can I help you?”

The naked girl swung around to face him, dropping her arms and beginning to gesticulate wildly. The fact that she was now talking to two boys, in addition to the two girls who had been there when she fell out of the sky, didn’t appear to trouble her at all.

“I’m looking for my mother,” she said loudly. “She was here, and now she’s not, and I have a problem, so find her and give her back right now, because I need her more than you do!”

“Slow down,” said Kade, and because he made the request sound so reasonable, the stranger stopped shouting and simply looked at him, blinking wide and slightly bewildered eyes. “Let’s start with something easy. What’s your name?”

“Onishi Rini,” said the stranger—said Rini. She really did look remarkably like Sumi, if Sumi had been allowed to live long enough to finish working her way through the kinks and dead-end alleys of puberty, growing tall and lithe and high-breasted. Only her eyes were different. They were a shocking shade of orange, for the most part, with a thin ring of white around the pupils and a thin ring of yellow around the outside of the irises.

She had candy corn eyes. Kade looked at them and knew, without question, without doubt, that she was Sumi’s daughter, that in some future, some impossible, broken future, Sumi had been able to make it home to her candy corn farmer. That somewhere, somehow, Sumi had been happy, until somehow her past self had been murdered, and everything had come tumbling down.

Sometimes living on the outskirts of Nonsense simply wasn’t fair.

“I’m Kade,” he said. “These are my friends, Christopher, Cora, and Nadya.”

“I’m not his friend,” said Nadya. “I’m a Drowned Girl.” She bared her teeth in mock-threat.

Kade ignored her. “It’s nice to meet you, Rini. I just wish it were under slightly better circumstances. Will you come back to the house with me? I manage the school wardrobe. I can find you something to wear.”

“Why?” asked Rini peevishly. “Are you insulted by my vagina too? Do people in this world not have them?”

“Many people do, and there’s nothing wrong with them, and also that’s your vulva, but it’s considered a little rude to run around showing your genitals to people who haven’t asked,” said Kade. “Eleanor is in the house, and once you’re dressed, we can sit down and talk.”

“I don’t have time to talk,” said Rini. “I need my mother. Please, where is she?”

“Rini—”

“You don’t understand!” Rini’s voice was an anguished howl. She held out her left hand. “I don’t have time!”

“Huh,” said Nadya.

That was the only thing any of them said. The rest were busy looking at Rini’s left hand, with its two missing fingers. They hadn’t been cut off: there was no scar tissue. She hadn’t been born that way: the place where her fingers should have been was too obviously empty, like a hole in the world. They were simply gone, fading from existence as her own future caught up to the idea that somehow, someway, her mother had never been able to conceive her, and so she had never been born.

Rini lowered her hand. “Please,” she repeated.

“This changes things,” said Kade. “Come on.”

*