Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

Cora frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Says the girl whose hair grows in green and blue all over,” said Nadya. “It’s a miracle your parents got you here before the beauty companies snatched you up to try to figure out the mystery of the girl with the seaweed pubes.”

“Hey!” yelped Cora.

Nadya laughed and started down the porch, taking the steps two at a time, like she didn’t trust them to get her where she needed to go. “I only tell the truth, because I love you, and because one day you’re going to be on the front of the supermarket magazines. Right next to Tom Cruise and the Scientology aliens.”

“Only because you’re going to turn me in,” said Cora. “Miss West told me to remind you to bring a coat.”

“Miss West can bring me a coat herself if she wants me to have one so bad,” said Nadya. “I don’t get cold.”

“No, but you catch colds all the time, and I guess she’s tired of listening to you hack up a lung.”

Nadya waved her hand dismissively. “We must suffer for our chance to return home. Now come, come, hurry. Those turtles aren’t going to tip themselves.”

Cora shook her head, and hurried.

Nadya was one of the school’s long-timers: five years so far, from the age of eleven to the age of sixteen. There had been no sign in those five years of her doorway appearing, or of her asking her adoptive parents to take her home. That was unusual. Everyone knew that parents could withdraw their children at any time; that all Nadya had to do was ask and she’d be able to return to the life she’d lived before … well, before everything.

According to everyone Cora had spoken to, most students chose to go back to their old lives after four years had passed without a doorway.

“That’s when they give up,” Kade had said, expression turning sad. “That’s when they say, ‘I can’t live for a world that doesn’t want me, so I guess I’d better learn to live in the world I have.’”

Not Nadya. She didn’t belong to any clique or social circle, didn’t have many close friends—or seem to want them—but she didn’t leave, either. She went from classroom to turtle pond, from bathtub to bed, and she kept her hair perpetually wet, no matter how many colds she caught, and she never stopped watching the water for the bubbles that would mark her way back to Belyyreka, the Drowned World and the Land Beneath the Lake.

Nadya had walked up to Cora on her first day at the school, when she was standing frozen in the door of the dining hall, terrified to eat—what if they called her names?—and terrified to turn and run away—what if they made fun of her behind her back?




“You, new girl,” she had said. “Angela tells me you were a mermaid. Is that so?”

Cora had sputtered and stammered and somehow signaled her agreement. Nadya had smirked and taken Cora’s arm in hers.

“Good,” she’d said. “I’ve been ordered to make more friends, and you seem to fit the bill. We damp girls have to stick together.”

In the weeks since then, Nadya had been the best of friends and the worst of friends, prone to bursting into Cora’s room without knocking, pestering her roommate and trying to convince Miss West to reassign one or both of them so they could room together. Miss West kept refusing, on the grounds that no one else in the school would be able to find a towel if the two girls who took the most baths were in the same place to egg each other on.

Cora had never had a friend like Nadya before. She thought she liked it. It was hard to say: the novelty of it all was still too overwhelming.

The turtle pond was a flat silver disk in the field, burnished by the sunlight, surface broken by the flat disks of the turtles themselves, sailing off to whatever strange turtle errands they had in the months before their hibernation. Nadya grabbed a stick off the ground and took off running, leaving Cora to trail behind her like a faithful balloon.

“Turtles!” Nadya howled. “Your queen returns!”

She didn’t stop when she reached the edge of the pond, but plunged gleefully onward, splashing into the shallows, breaking the perfect smoothness of the surface. Cora stopped a few feet back from the water. She preferred the ocean, preferred saltwater and the slight sting of the waves against her skin. Fresh water wasn’t enough.

“Come back, turtles!” shouted Nadya. “Come back and let me love you!”

That was when the girl fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of the turtle pond with an enormous splash, sending turtles skyward, and drenching both Cora and Nadya in a wave of muddy pond water.





2

GRAVITY HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US

THE GIRL IN THE pond rose up sputtering, with algae in her hair and a very confused turtle snagged in the complicated draperies of her dress, which seemed to be the result of someone deciding to hybridize a ball gown with a wedding cake, after dyeing both of them electric pink. It also seemed to be dissolving, running down her arms in streaks, coming apart at the seams. She was going to be naked soon.

The girl in the pond didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she just didn’t care. She wiped water and dissolving dress out of her eyes, flicking them to the side, and cast wildly about until she spotted Cora and Nadya standing on the shore, mouths open, gaping at her.

“You!” she yelled, pointing in their direction. “Take me to your leader!”

Cora’s mouth shut with a snap. Nadya continued to gawk. Both of them had traveled to places where the rules were different—Cora to a world of beautiful Reason, Nadya to a world of impeccable Logic. None of this had prepared them for women who dropped out of the sky in a shower of turtles and started yelling, especially not here, in a world they both thought of as tragically predictable and dull.

Cora recovered first. “Do you mean Miss Eleanor?” she asked. Relief followed the question. Yes. The girl—she looked to be about seventeen—would want to talk to Miss Eleanor. Maybe she was a new student, and this was how admissions worked mid-term.

“No,” said the girl sullenly, and crossed her arms, dislodging the turtle on her shoulder. It fell back to the pond with a resounding plop. “I mean my mother. She’s in charge at home, so she must be in charge here. It’s only”—her lip curled, and she spat out her next word like it tasted bad—“logical.”

“What’s your mother’s name?” asked Cora.

“Onishi Sumi,” said the girl.

Nadya finally shook off her shock. “That’s not possible,” she said, glaring at the girl. “Sumi’s dead.”

The girl stared at Nadya. The girl bent, reaching into the pond, and came up with a turtle, which she hurled as hard as she could at Nadya’s head. Nadya ducked. The girl’s dress, finally chewed to pieces by the water, fell off entirely, leaving her naked and covered with a pinkish slime. Cora put her hand over her eyes.

Maybe leaving her room today hadn’t been the best idea after all.