Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

Bit by bit, the glittering bone disappeared under layers of pastry. Bit by bit, the structure of the Baker’s creation was built up to overlap the silent, almost disapproving shade, until the Baker was using modeling chocolate to sculpt the fine angles and planes of Sumi’s face. Layers of yellow cake had been laid down for the fatty tissue, covered by a slightly thicker layer of gingerbread which was covered in turn by a fondant shell, dyed a few shades darker than Rini’s skin.

“Hair, hair, hair,” hummed the Baker, and leaned out of the kitchen, snatching a fistful of what looked like black candy floss out of the mess. She held it up and beamed. “You never know when you’re going to need black cotton candy. Shouldn’t eat the stuff, though. It’ll dye your tongue black for a week.” She stuck out her own tongue, which was currently a cheery shade of blue, before beginning to apply the filmy black material to the top of Sumi’s head. When it was on, she picked up a roll of parchment paper and draped it delicately over the body. “She’s almost ready to go into the oven. Let’s hope this works.”




“What happens if it doesn’t?” asked Rini.

The Baker sighed. “We try something else, I suppose.”

“Her skeleton will be fine,” said Christopher. “I don’t know whether you can bake the ghost of somebody’s boring side, but the skeleton won’t care unless that oven is way too hot.”

“I’m not into cremating my cookies,” said the Baker.

“There you go,” said Christopher. “No worries.”

The Baker laughed. “All right, I like you people. Someone come and help me lift her into the oven.”

The cake, cereal, and chocolate had added so much weight to the skeleton that it took Cora and Kade working in concert to help the Baker shift the baking sheet into the oven. The heat that flowed out when she opened the door was intense enough to make them shy back, the small hairs on their arms crisping as they drew closer.

“In she goes,” said the Baker, and slid the tray—and Sumi—smoothly inside. The door swung closed behind her.

“Now what?” asked Cora.

“Now we wait,” said the Baker. “We wait, and we hope.”





12

THE BAKER’S STORY

THEY SAT ON A broken gingerbread wall, feet dangling, sipping glasses of cool, surprisingly unmodified milk. It was sweet in the way milk was always sweet, but it wasn’t malted, or chocolatey, or anything else that would have made it fit better into the world. Cora gave the Baker a curious look.

“Where did you get the milk?” she asked.

“It grows on trees,” said the Baker serenely.

Cora stared.

“No, really,” said the Baker. “In these big white fruits that look sort of like eggs. One of the previous bakers came up with that. I just enjoy it.” She took another sip of her milk. “Ah. Refreshing and bizarre.”

“Are you religious?” asked Christopher.

The Baker turned to blink at him. “Excuse me?”

“Your…” He waved a hand around his head. “I know that’s a religious thing a lot of the time. Are you religious?”

“My family is,” she said. “I think maybe I will be someday, but mostly I wear the hijab because I enjoy not having to worry about my hair getting in the cake batter.”

“Functional and fashionable,” said Christopher, his tone an intentional mirror to hers when she had been speaking of the milk fruit. “So is it weird for you? Being a god?”

The Baker hesitated before putting her milk down. “Let’s clear this up,” she said. “I am not a god. I’m a baker. I bake things. Any magic in my food comes from the world, not from me, and I can’t help it if here, my brownies are always perfect and mysteriously double as roofing materials.”

“Sorry,” said Christopher. “I just thought—”

“I’m not here to convert people, or to preach, or to do anything but make a lot of cookies. A continent of cookies. When I’m done, if the door opens and sends me home, I suppose I’ll make cookies there.”

“Do you have a name?” asked Kade.

“Layla,” she said.

“Nice to meet you,” he replied. “I’m Kade. These are my friends, Cora and Christopher. Rini, you already know.”

Layla nodded to each of them in turn. “Nice to meet you. You all had doors of your own?”

“Goblin Prince,” said Kade.

“Mermaid,” said Cora.

“Beloved of the Princess of Skeletons,” said Christopher.

Layla blinked. “I was with you right up until that last one.”

Christopher shrugged easily. “I get that response pretty often.”

Rini didn’t say anything. She was miserably flicking chocolate chips from the wall, sending them clattering down into the junkyard below them. Layla sighed and leaned over to put her hand on Rini’s shoulder.

“Breathe,” she said.

“I think one of my lungs has stopped existing,” said Rini.

“So breathe a little more shallowly,” said Layla. “Just keep breathing. The baking will be done soon, and then we’ll see what we’ll see.”

“Rini was worried,” blurted Cora. Rini and Layla both turned to look at her. “About the timing. Um. If Sumi died before she was born, and we bring Sumi back to life now…”

“Oh, that’s simple,” said Layla. “You bring Sumi back to life now, and she returns to school with the rest of you. For us, Sumi is a grown woman, not a teenage skeleton. She’ll have a few years with you before her door opens again.”

“Are you the one who opens it?” asked Kade.

“No,” said Layla. “I get here a year after Sumi does.”

There was a momentary silence before Christopher asked, “If we’re in the future—our future—right now, does that mean that if I looked you up on Facebook once I have Wi-Fi again, I’d find you, like, twelve years old and living in Brooklyn?”

“I didn’t have a Facebook when I was twelve, but it doesn’t matter,” said Layla. “Please don’t look me up. Please don’t try to find me. I don’t remember that happening, which means it didn’t happen for me. If you change my past, my door might never open, and I might not get to bake all these cookies. I’d been waiting my whole life to bake all these cookies.”

Everyone who wound up at Eleanor West’s School—everyone who found a door—understood what it was to spend a lifetime waiting for something that other people wouldn’t necessarily understand. Not because they were better than other people and not because they were worse, but because they had a need trapped somewhere in their bones, gnawing constantly, trying to get out.

“We won’t,” promised Kade.

Layla relaxed.

In the kitchen, a timer dinged. Layla stood, brushing cocoa powder off her knees and bottom, before saying, “Let’s see what we’ve got,” and starting back. The others followed, Rini walking slower and slower until she was pacing slightly behind Cora.

Cora turned to look at her quizzically. “Don’t you want to see your mom?” she asked.

“She won’t be, not yet,” said Rini. “If this worked, she’s not my mother today, and if it didn’t, she won’t be my mother tomorrow. Is it better, in Logic? Where time does the same thing every day, and runs in just one line, and your mother is always your mother, and can always wipe your tears and tell you that there, there, it’s going to be all right, you are my peppermint star and my sugar syrup sea, and I’ll never leave you, and I certainly won’t get killed before you can even be born?”

Cora hesitated.