Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

“It’s not like gingersnaps,” said the Baker.

“So it is like flour and it’s not like gingersnaps and you’re still the person in charge of this whole world, so why can’t you just decide that what you’re baking now is a happy ending for everyone involved?” Cora folded her arms, resisting the urge to scowl. “I’m tired, I’m confused, and I’m not made for a Nonsense world, so I’d be really pleased if you’d just fix it.”

“Sometimes you say ‘nonsense’ like it’s an idea and sometimes you say it like it’s a proper name,” said the Baker. “Why is that?”

“You found a door,” said Kade.

The Baker turned to him, blinking. He shrugged.

“Maybe it was in the back of the pantry, or maybe it was in your bedroom, or heck, maybe it was in the middle of the street, but you found a door, and when you went through it, everything was different. You had a kitchen, and all the supplies you could want, and a world that wanted you to bake it a future.”

“I do that literally,” murmured the Baker. “The prophecies that make the future run the way it should? I pipe them onto sugar cookies and toss them to the wind for distribution. It takes a lot of time. Frosting isn’t a good medium for lengthy dissertations on fate.”

“I guess it wouldn’t be,” said Kade. “But you found a door, and it brought you here, and you know you’re not the first person to work in this kitchen, so I’m guessing you’re afraid that the door will come back one day and send you back to wherever you came from.”

“Brooklyn,” said the Baker, and just like that, she wasn’t a god, or a creator figure, or anything of the sort: she was a teenager in a hijab, with flour on her hands and a downcast expression on her face. “How did you know that? Are you here to take me back?”

“We’d never do that to anyone,” said Cora. “Ever. But you asked why we talk the way we do.”

“If your door ever reappears, if you ever find yourself back in a world that you don’t want any part of, look up Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, and see if you can get your parents to send you there,” said Christopher. “You’ll be with people who understand.”

The Baker frowned. “Right,” she said finally. “But that’s not going to happen, because I’m going to stay here forever.”

Cora and Christopher, who both knew better, exchanged a look, and said nothing. There was nothing appropriate to say.

“That’s lovely for you, miss, but we’d like to get back to school and back to the business of looking for our own doors,” said Kade politely. “Can’t you whip up a new batch of nonsense for Sumi, so we can put her all the way back together?”

“I don’t know how,” said the Baker, sounding frustrated. “Nonsense happens on its own. It’s in the air, the water—the ground.”

“Which is made of graham crackers,” said Cora.

“Exactly! It makes no sense, so it makes more nonsense. I can’t just whip up a batch of something that doesn’t have a recipe.”

“Can’t you improvise?” Cora shook her head. “Please. We’ve come so far, and we’ve already paid for this. Sumi needs help. Sumi needs a miracle. Right now, you’re the one who makes the miracles. So please.”

The Baker looked to each of them in turn, finally stopping on Rini, who was still weeping, even as she seemed less and less tethered to the world.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll try.”

*

WHEN THE BAKER had beckoned to Sumi, Sumi had gone willingly. How could she do anything else? This was the divinity of her chosen world calling her home, and even as a combination of skeleton and shade, she knew where she belonged.

Kade had helped the Baker lift Sumi up onto a long metal table that looked, if seen from the right angle, disturbingly like the autopsy table that used to occupy the basement, the one where a girl named Jack had slept and dreamed of a world defined by blood and thunder. Then he had stepped back, along with the others, and watched as she got to work.

The kitchen had no walls, and no pantry. When she needed something, she would step outside its bounds and reach down into the junkyard surrounding, coming up over and over again with the right ingredients in her hands. Eggs, milk, flour, butter, vanilla beans and ginger roots, they were all there, waiting for her to scavenge them out of the dust. She didn’t seem to understand that this was strange, that when the rest of them looked at the junkyard, they saw only failures, not the building blocks of new successes. This wasn’t their place. There was no question that it was hers.

Bit by bit, she had built up Sumi’s limbs with rice cereal mixed with melted marshmallow and honey, covering each layer with a thin sheet of modeling chocolate, until the combined confection began to look like human musculature. She was working on Sumi’s shoulders when the timer dinged on one of her ovens. She crossed to it, opened it, and withdrew a sheet of sugar cookie organs, each dusted with a different color of sugar.

“It helps that bones don’t melt,” she said, using a spatula to slide the organs off the cookie sheet and onto a cooling rack. “I don’t need to worry about putting something hot on top of them and losing the whole structure. That happens with the volcanos around here sometimes. It’s really tedious.”

“Um,” said Christopher. “All of this is cool to watch, if a little nightmare fuel-esque, but people are usually made of meat, not Rice Krispy treats. We need a functional Sumi. You’re making a cake that looks sort of like her.”

“Baking something transforms it, and anyone who’s ever eaten a piece of cake will tell you that sometimes we can take baked goods and turn them into a part of ourselves,” said the Baker serenely. She was in her element: she knew exactly what she was doing, and was content to continue doing it until the job was done. “If this works, she’ll be made of the same stuff as you and I.”

Cora, who had heard plenty of jokes about cake and brownies going straight to her thighs, looked down at her short-clipped fingernails, picking at them to dislodge the last bits of sticky pinkness left over from the Strawberry Sea, and said nothing at all.

“Huh,” said Christopher.

The Baker laughed. It was a bright, utterly joyful sound. “I love baking,” she said. “It lets you make the world you want, and it makes everything delicious.” She picked up a large pastry bag, beginning to pipe frosting intestines into the hollow of Sumi’s gut.