Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

Nadya sat on the bank of the River of Forgotten Souls, one leg drawn up against her chest so she could rest her chin atop her knee. Turtles basked on the bank around her, their hard-shelled bodies pressing against her hip and ankle. They followed her everywhere she went, a terrapin train of devoted acolytes keeping her company in this most uncompanionable of places.

It was nice, being in the company of turtles again. The turtles back in the pond at school (which seemed more like a dream with every endless, languid day that passed here, time defined by the lapping of the water against the riverbanks, by the occasional sound of music drifting from the Hall) had never wanted to spend time with her. There wasn’t enough magic in the world of her birth. Some magic worked there—Christopher’s flute, or Nancy’s stillness, back when she’d been a student, although Nadya had to admit that it was nothing compared to what Nancy could do here, in her natural habitat—but most magic was just too much for the local laws of nature to bear.

These turtles, though … these were proper, magical turtles. They didn’t talk to her, not like the turtles back in Belyyreka, and the largest of them was only the size of a dinner plate, instead of being wide enough to ride upon, like her beloved Burian, who had been her steed and dearest companion in the Drowned World, but they were still willing to let her tickle their shells and stroke their long, finely pebbled necks. They let her exist among them, ever-damp and ever-weeping, and she loved them all, and she hated them all, because they were a constant reminder that what she had here was not enough. This, none of this, was enough.

“I hate everything,” she said, and grabbed a stone off the bank and skipped it hard across the water, watching it hit the surface three, four, five times before it plopped and sank, joining the others she had already thrown to the bottom. Then she froze.

She had grabbed the stone with her right hand.

Nadya had been born without anything below the elbow on her right arm, a teratogenic trick of something her birthmother had been exposed to back in Mother Russia. Three mothers for Nadya: the one who bore her, the country that poisoned her, and the one who adopted her, American tourist on a misery tour of the rest of the world, well-meaning and well-intentioned and willing to take on a “special needs” child who liked nothing more than to flood the orphanage bathroom playing with the taps.

Her third mother had been the first to fit her with a prosthetic hand, which had pinched and dug into her skin and done nothing to improve her quality of life. The only things she hadn’t been perfectly capable of doing with one hand were things the prosthetic didn’t help her do anyway, lacking the fine motor control necessary to apply nail polish or thread a needle. If she’d been younger, maybe, or if she’d wanted it more, but the way it had been presented, like it was a great gift she wasn’t allowed to refuse, had only served to remind her that in the eyes of her adoptive family, she would always be the poor, pitiful orphan girl with a missing hand, the one they needed to help.

She had never wanted that kind of help. She had only wanted to be loved. So when the waterweeds by the turtle pond had looked like a door, so open and inviting, she hadn’t watched her footing on the muddy bank. She’d gotten too close. She’d tumbled in, and found herself somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t want to help her. Somewhere that wanted her to do the helping, and promised to love her if she only would.

She had spent a lifetime in Belyyreka, and they had always called her a Drowned Girl, even when she was away from the water, and she had never considered how literal that might be, not until she had fallen into a river and felt hands yanking her by the shoulders, away from the surface, away from the real world, back into the false one, where mothers left her, one after the other, where nothing ever stayed.

In Belyyreka, she had chosen her own prosthetic, a hand made of river water, which she could decorate as she liked, with weeds and small fish and once, with a tadpole that had grown to froghood in the sheltering embrace of her palm, looking at her with a child’s love before hopping away to find freedom. In Belyyreka, no one had called her broken for lacking a flesh and bone hand: they had seen it as an opportunity for her to craft a tool, a weapon, an extension of her own.

It had dissolved when that helpful neighbor had seen her floating face-down in the pond and pulled her to supposed “safety.” She had thought it lost forever.

Slowly, Nadya raised her right hand to her face and stared at it, its translucent flesh, its rippling skin. There was nothing inside it. She reached down with her left hand, laying it against the surface of the water. A turtle the size of a quarter crawled into her palm. She lifted it to her water hand, sliding it through the surface. It swam a content circle before poking its head up to breathe, nostrils breaking the “skin” between the left and right knuckles.

Nadya stood. The light reflecting on the water had formed the shape of a doorway, or a grave. It was eight feet long by three feet wide, and she knew that if she dove in here, no one would come to save her. Had she really been drowning the whole time she was in Belyyreka? Had it all been a lie?

But the school was real. The school was real, and Christopher could raise the dead, and Cora’s hair was like a coral reef, bright and impossible, and if magic was real, if her water hand was real, then she had only started to drown in truth when someone sought to pull her back. All she had to do was believe. All she had to do was be sure.

“We’re going on a journey, little friend,” she told the turtle in her palm. “Oh, I can’t wait for you to meet Burian.”

Nadya backed up, giving herself room for a running start before she leapt into the air, feet pointed downward like knives, set to slice through the surface of the water. She landed squarely in the middle of the dream of a door, eyes closed, hands lifted above her head, and she slid into the river without splash or ripple, and she was gone, leaving nothing but the turtles who loved her behind.

There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.