Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

RINI WAS TALL and thin, but many of the students were tall and thin: too many, as far as Cora was concerned. She didn’t like the idea that people who already had socially acceptable bodies would get the adventures, too. She knew it was a small and petty thought, one she shouldn’t have had in the first place, much less indulged, but she couldn’t stop herself from feeling how she felt. Rini had the fashion sense of a drunken mockingbird, attracted to the brightly colored and the shiny, and that, too, was not uncommon among the students, many of whom had traveled to worlds where the idea of subtlety was ignored in favor of the much more entertaining idea of hurting people’s eyes.

In the end, Kade had coaxed her into a rainbow sundress, dyed so that the colors melded into each other like a scoop of sherbet in the sun. He had given her slippers for her feet, both in the same style and size, but dyed differently, so that one was poppy orange and the other turquoise blue. He had given her ribbons to tie in her hair, and now they were sitting, the five of them, in Eleanor’s parlor.

Eleanor sat behind her desk, hands laced tight together, like a child about to undertake her evening prayers.

“—and that’s why she can’t be dead,” concluded Rini. Her story had been long and rambling and at times nonsensical, full of political coups and popcorn-ball fights, which were like snowball fights, only stickier. She looked around at the rest of them, expression somewhere between triumphant and hopeful. She had made her case, laid it out in front of them one piece at a time, and she was ready for her reward. “So please, can we go and tell her to stop? I need to exist. It’s important.”

“I’m so sorry, dear, but death doesn’t work that way in this world,” said Eleanor. Each word seemed to pain her, driving her shoulders deeper and deeper into their slump. “This is a logical world. Actions have consequences here. Dead is dead, and buried is buried.”

Rini frowned. “That’s silly and it’s stupid and I’m not from a logical world, and neither is my mother, so that shouldn’t matter for us. I need her back. I need to be born. It’s important. I’m important.”

“Everyone is important,” said Eleanor.

Rini looked around at the rest of them. “Please,” she pleaded. “Please, make the silly old woman stop being awful, and give me back my mother.”

“Don’t call my aunt a silly old woman,” said Kade.

“It’s all right, dear,” said Eleanor. “I am a silly old woman, and I’ve been called worse with less reason. I can’t fix this. I wish I could.”

Cora, who had been frowning more and more since Rini had finished her story, looked up, looked at Rini, and asked, “How did you get here?”

“I just told you,” said Rini. “My mother and father had sex before bringing in the candy corn harvest, the year after she defeated the Queen of Cakes at the Raspberry Bridge. You do have sex here, don’t you? Or do people in a logical world reproduce by budding? Is that why you were so upset by my vagina?”

Kade put his hand over his face.

“Um,” said Cora, cheeks flaring red. “Yes, we, uh, we have sex, and can we please stop saying ‘vagina’ so much, but I meant how did you get here. How did you wind up in our turtle pond?”

“Oh!” Rini held up her right hand, the one that still had all its fingers and had yet to start fading from existence. There was a bracelet clasped around her wrist, the sort of thing a child might wear, beads on a piece of string tied tight to keep her from losing it. “The Fondant Wizard gave me a way for back-and-forth, so I could get here and find Mom and tell her to stop doing whatever she was doing that was making me never have been born. I’m supposed to be sneaking through the Treacle Bogs right now, you know, to look for threats along our western border. Important stuff. So if we could hurry up, that would be amazing.”

Silence followed her words, silence like a bowstring, stretched tight and ready to snap. Slowly, Rini lowered her arm and looked around. Everyone was staring at her. Christopher was swallowing hard, the muscles in his throat jumping wildly. There were tears in Nadya’s eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“Why did you leave her here?” Kade’s voice was suddenly low and dangerous. He stood, stalking toward Rini. “When Sumi got to the school, she was a mess. I thought we were gonna lose her. I thought she was going to slice herself open to try to get the candy out of her veins, and now here you are, and you have something that means you can just … just come here and go back again, like it’s nothing. Like the doors don’t even matter. Why did you leave her here? Why didn’t someone come and get her before it was too late?”

Rini shied back, away from him, glancing frantically to Christopher and Nadya for support. Nadya looked away. Christopher shook his head.

“I didn’t know!” she cried. “Mom always said she’d loved it here at your school, that she made friends and learned stuff and got her head straight enough to know that she wanted it to be crooked! She never asked me to come get her sooner!”

“If she had, you might never have been born,” said Eleanor. She cleared her throat before saying, a little more loudly, “Dearest, please don’t torture our guest. Done is done and past is past, and while we’re looking for a way to change that, I think we should focus on what can still be done, and what hasn’t already been omitted.”

“Can those beads take us anywhere?” asked Christopher. “Any world at all?”

“Sure,” said Rini. “Anywhere there’s sugar.”

His fingers played across the surface of his bone flute, coaxing out the ghosts of notes. No one could hear them, but that didn’t matter. He knew that they were there.

“I think I know a way to fix this,” he said.

*

THE BASEMENT ROOM that had belonged to Jack and Jill, before they returned to the Moors, and to Nancy, before she returned to the Halls of the Dead, belonged to Christopher now. He viewed it with a certain superstitious hope, like the fact that its last three occupants had been able to find their doors meant that he would absolutely find his own. Magical thinking might seem like nonsense to some people, but he had danced with skeletons by the light of a marigold moon, he had kissed the glimmering skull of a girl with no lips and loved her as he had never loved anything or anyone in his life, and he thought he’d earned a certain amount of nonsense, as long as it helped him get by.

He led the others across the room to the velvet curtain that hung across a rack of metal shelves.

“Jack didn’t take anything with her when she left,” he said. “I mean, nothing except Jill. Her arms were sort of full.” Jack had carried Jill over the threshold like a bride on her wedding night, walking back into the unending wasteland that was their shared perfection, and she hadn’t looked back, not once. Sometimes Christopher still dreamt that he had followed her, running away to a world that would never have made him happy, but which might have made him slightly less miserable than this one.

“So?” asked Nadya. “Jack and Jill were creepy fish.”

“So I have all her things, and all Jill’s things, and Jill was building the perfect girl.” He pulled the curtain aside, revealing a dozen jars filled with amber liquid and … other things. Parts of people that had no business being viewed in isolation.

Christopher leaned up onto his toes, taking a gallon jar down from one of the higher shelves. A pair of hands floated inside, preserved like pale starfish, fingers spread in eternal surprise.