Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

PONDER HAD GIVEN THEM each a bag of provisions and an item he thought they might find useful: a small sickle for Cora, a jar of honey for Kade, something that was either a white rock or a very hard egg for Christopher. What he had given Rini was less clear, since she walked side by side with her mother’s skeleton, hands empty, eyes fixed on the horizon.

Cora sidled over to her. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“My father gave us gifts because he had to, not because they’re going to help us in the here and now,” said Rini. “You can throw them away if you like.”

“I don’t know,” said Cora, who had never owned a sickle before. She thought it was pretty. “Maybe it’ll come in handy someday.”

“Maybe,” Rini agreed.

Cora frowned. “Okay, seriously. Are you all right?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I’ve never been to see the Baker,” said Rini. Her voice was low, even awed. “I always thought I’d do it someday, maybe, when I felt brave enough, but I haven’t done it yet, and I’m a little scared. What if she doesn’t like me? Or what if she likes me so much that she wants me to stay with her for always, to be her kitchen companion and kept thing? I would do it. For my mother, for my world, I would do it. But I’d die a little more inside every hour of every day, until I was just a candy shell filled with shadows.”

“Wait.” Cora glanced at Kade and Christopher, alarmed. The boys were talking quietly as they walked, Christopher’s fingers still tracing silent songs along the length of his flute. She looked back to Rini. “We’re not going to see the Baker. We’re going to see the oven the Baker used when she made the world. Big difference.”

“Not really,” said Rini. “You can’t go into someone’s kitchen while they’re using it and not expect to see them.”

Cora stared at her. “I thought you said the Baker left a long time ago.”

“I said a Baker left a long time ago. One of them did. Lots of them did. The current Baker, though, she’s only been here since I was a little girl. She came through a door and started making things, and she’s been making things ever since.” Rini shook her head. “I guess she’s probably still here, even though the Queen of Cakes is alive again, because the Queen was never a Baker, not really, but she was supposed to be, and the world needs to be kept up if we don’t want it to fall down.”

“Oh sweet Neptune I am getting such a headache,” muttered Cora, massaging her temple with one hand. “All right. I … all right. We’re going to see a god. We’re going to see the god of this messed-up cafeteria of a reality, and then we’re going to go the hell back to the school and stay there until our own doors open. Yes. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do that.”

“Cora?” called Kade. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Cora. “Just, you know. Coming to terms with the idea that we’re about to go hassle someone who is functionally divine in this reality. Because that’s exactly how I was planning to spend my afternoon.”

“Could be worse,” said Kade. “Could be the first god you were meeting.”

Cora frowned. “This is the first god I’m meeting.”

“Really? Because I assumed you were using the word to mean ‘absolute arbiter of the rules of the reality I’m standing in.’ Were you?” Kade cocked his head. “If you were, you’ve already met at least one god, and possibly two. Probably two. The Lord and Lady of the Dead, back in Nancy’s world, remember? They didn’t get those titles in an open election.”

Cora blanched. “Really?”

“If you ask me, they probably got the same deal the first Baker here did. Just a couple of confused kids who stumbled into a dead world and decided, for whatever reason, that they should stay.” That, or the world refused to let them go. That could happen, too. Worlds could put down roots, winding them through the heart and drawing tighter with every breath, until “home” was an empty idea with nothing on the other side of it.

“Fuck.” Cora shook her head, looking back to Rini, and to the silent, narrow shape of Sumi, wrapped in her own ghost. “I did not sign up for gods.”

“None of us signed up for any of this,” said Christopher. “I just wanted to live to see my sixteenth birthday.”

“I just wanted to have an adventure,” said Kade.

Sumi, voiceless, said nothing, and maybe that was for the best. She had been like Cora, a savior, a tool, someone who was called and offered a wonderful new existence in exchange for doing just one thing: saving the world. She’d done it, too, before she’d been killed too soon and had all her hard work revised away.

Nonsense was exhausting. Cora couldn’t wait to get back to the school, where everything was dry and dreadful, but where things at least made sense from one moment into the next.

The road was made of sandy crushed graham crackers, and wound its way through a pastoral landscape that would have been impressive even if it hadn’t been crafted entirely from living sugar. Kade paused to pick a handful of sugar buttons off a bush, and munched idly as he walked.

Cora frowned. “Rini,” she said. “If the Bakers made the world and then went home, where did the people come from? Like your father? I mean, he’s clearly enough like the people from my world for Sumi to marry him and have you, but that doesn’t make sense, not really. Everything else is sugar.”

“Oh, there were people who didn’t want to be where they were, and the world was getting so big that the Baker was spending all her time—we had the First Confectioner then, and she was very busy doing sugar work—fixing things. So she opened all the doors she could, and told the people who were scared or hungry or lonely or bored that if they came through, they’d never be able to go back, because the doors wouldn’t open for them, but that she could give them candy hearts to make them a part of this world, and then they could stay here and be happy and fix all the things she didn’t want to fix, forever.” Rini shrugged. “A lot of people came, I guess. She made them new hearts, and they found places to be, and they made homes and planted fields and built ships, and now there’s me, and my father has a candy heart and my mother had a meat one, and they both loved me just as much as the moon loves the sky.”

“The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” said Christopher, almost wonderingly.