Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

Nancy moved like frost melting: slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, and then with more speed, until she finished lowering her arm and chin and turned with something approaching, yet far greater than, human grace. She allowed herself to look at the people clustered around the base of her pedestal, and her eyes widened, ever so slightly.

“Kade,” she said. “Christopher … Nadya?” She looked at the others without recognition. “What are you all doing here? Is everything all right? Are you…” She stopped herself. “No, you’re not dead. If you were dead, you wouldn’t be here.”

“We’re not dead,” said Kade, and smiled. “It’s good to see you, Nancy.”

“It’s good to see you too.” She glanced to the Lady of the Dead, seeking permission. The Lady nodded, and Nancy dropped to her knees, sliding into a graceful kneeling position atop her pedestal. It was a practiced, easy motion; she had done this before. “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye.”

“I don’t think most of us would,” said Kade. “You happy?”

Nancy’s smile was brief but brilliant. Artists would have died for the chance to paint that moment of pure, unfettered bliss. “Always.”

“Then all is forgiven.” Kade gestured for Rini to step forward. “This is Rini. Sumi’s daughter.”

“What?” Nancy’s expression faded into puzzlement at the mention of her former roommate. “Sumi didn’t have children. She was too young. She would have told me.”

“She was supposed to come back to Confection and save the world and get married and make a baby,” said Rini. She held up her arm. Her hand was entirely gone now; her flesh ended at the wrist, and at the tear her disappearance was leaving in reality. “She needs to stop being dead and come home and have sex until I exist again!”

“Um,” said Nancy, looking nonplussed.

“This is Sumi,” said Christopher, gesturing to the shimmering skeleton beside him. “We were hoping you might know where the rest of her is.”

“You mean her ghost?” asked Nancy.

“Yes,” said Christopher.

Sumi said nothing, but she cocked her shining skull to the side in a gesture that was a pale shadow of her constant curious motion before she had died, her skin and flesh stripped away, leaving her in silence.

“Even if…” Nancy glanced to the Lady, who nodded permission. “Even if I could find Sumi’s ghost for you, even if she was here, how would you put her back together? You’d still be missing all the … squishy bits.”

“Let us worry about that,” said Kade.

Nancy looked to the Lady again. Again, the Lady nodded her assent. Nancy looked back to the others.

“Not all ghosts come here,” she said. “This isn’t the only Underworld. She could be in a thousand places, or she could be nothing at all. Sometimes people don’t want to linger, and so they just disappear.”

“Can we try?” asked Kade. “It seems like dying when you still had a world to save might be cause enough to stick around for a little while. And you were roommates when she was alive. Sumi never did like to be alone.”

“Even if you can find her ghost, that’s just the part of her that’s waiting to be reborn,” said Nancy. “Who she was isn’t going to be here.”

“We have to try,” said Rini. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

Nancy sighed, a deep, slow sound that started at her toes and traveled all the way up her body. She uncurled her legs and slid down from her pedestal, landing without a sound. As she fell, her skirt rode up just enough for Kade to see that her feet were bare, and that there was a ring on every one of her toes, shimmering and silver.

“Follow me,” she said, and bowed to the Lady, and walked away. Every step she took chimed like a bell as the rings on her toes struck the ground.

Kade followed her, and the rest followed him, and they left the remaining statues and the Lady of the Dead behind.

*

KADE STOLE GLANCES at Nancy as they walked, trying to memorize the new shape of her face. She was thinner, but not alarmingly so; this was the thinness of a professional athlete at the top of their game, the thinness of someone who did something physical every hour of the day. Her hair was still white, her eyes were still dark, and she was still beautiful. God, but she was beautiful.

Nadya shoved her way between them, demanding, “So is that all you do all day? You stand there? You left a whole world full of shit to do and people to talk to so you could stand there?”

“It’s more than just standing there,” said Nancy. “Hello, Nadya. You’re looking well.”

“I’m drying out, and this world has no good rivers,” said Nadya.

“We have a few.” Nancy shook her head. “I don’t ‘just stand there.’ It’s like a dance, done entirely in stillness. I have to freeze so completely that my heart forgets to beat, my cells forget to age. Some of the statues have been here for centuries, slowing themselves to the point of near-immortality for the sake of gracing our Lord’s halls. It’s an honor and a calling, and I love it. I love it so much.”

“It seems stupid.”

“That’s because you weren’t called,” said Nancy, and that was true, and simple, and complete: it needed neither ornamentation nor addition.

Nadya looked away.

Kade took a breath. “Things have been going well at the school,” he said. “Aunt Eleanor’s feeling better. She hardly uses her cane these days. We have some new students.”

“You brought one of them with you,” said Nancy. She laughed a little. “Is it weird that I kind of feel like that’s more disturbing than you bringing a skeleton?”

“Her name’s Cora. She’s nice. She was a mermaid.”

“Then she still is,” said Nancy. “There’s always hope.”

“Sumi used to say that hope was a four-letter word.”

“She was right. That’s why it never goes away.” They had reached another closed door, this one a filigree of silver, containing an infinity of blackness. Nancy raised her hand. The door swung open and she continued through, into the dark—which was, once entered, not so total after all.

Gleaming silver sparks swirled through the air, darting and flitting around the room, as swift and restless as the rest of the Halls of the Dead were still. They would fly close to a nose or a cheek, only to jerk away at the last second, never quite touching living flesh.

Rini gasped. Everyone turned.

Sumi was covered in the dots of light. They clustered on her bones, hundreds of them, with more arriving every second. She was holding up her skeletal hands like she was admiring them, studying the shimmering specks of light that perched on her phalanges. Dots of light had even filled her eye sockets, replacing her empty gaze with something disturbingly vital.

“If she’s here, she’s one of these,” said Nancy, spreading her arms to indicate the room. “The souls who come to rest here arrive in this room first. They dance their restlessness away before they incarnate again. Call her, and see if she comes.”