Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

Kade’s voice was frosty. “We buried those,” he said.

“I know,” said Christopher. “But I started having bad dreams after Sumi’s family took her away to bury her. Dreams about her skeleton being incomplete forever. So I … well, I got a shovel, and I got her hands. I dug up her hands. That way, if she ever came back, I could put her together again. She wouldn’t have to be broken forever.”

Kade stared at him. “Christopher, are you honestly telling me you’ve been sharing a bedroom with Sumi’s severed hands this whole time? Because boy, that ain’t normal.” His Oklahoma accent, always stronger when he was upset, was thick as honey.

Rini, on the other hand, didn’t appear disturbed in the slightest. She was looking at the jar with wide, interested eyes. “Those are my mother’s hands?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Christopher. He held the jar carefully as he turned to the others. “If we know where Sumi is buried, I can put her back together. I mean, I can pipe her out of the grave and give her back her hands.”

“What?” asked Cora.

“Ew,” said Nadya.

“Skeletons don’t usually have children,” said Kade. “What are you suggestin’?”

Christopher took a deep breath. “I’m suggesting we get Sumi out of the grave, and then we go and find Nancy. She’s in the Halls of the Dead, right? She’s got to know where the ghosts go. Maybe she can tell us where Sumi went, and we can … put her back together.”

Silence fell again, speculative this time. Finally, Eleanor smiled.

“That makes no sense at all,” she said. “That means it may well work. Go, my darlings, and bring your lost and shattered sister home.”





PART II

INTO THE HALLS OF THE DEAD





4

WHAT WE BURY IS NOT LOST, ONLY SET ASIDE

OF THE FIVE of them who were going on this journey—Nadya and Cora, Rini, Christopher and Kade—only Kade knew how to drive, and so he was the one stuck behind the wheel of the school minivan, eyes on the road and prayers on his lips as he tried to focus on getting them where they were going in one piece.

Rini had never been in a car before, and kept unfastening her seatbelt because she didn’t like the way it pinched. Nadya claimed she could only ride with all the windows down, while Cora didn’t like being cold, and kept turning the heat up. Christopher, meanwhile, insisted on turning the volume on the radio up as far as it would go, which didn’t make a damn bit of sense, since usually the songs he played were inaudible to anyone who wasn’t dead.

It was going to be a miracle if they got where they were going without getting themselves killed. Kade supposed that joining Sumi in whatever afterlife she was in—presumably one that catered to teenagers who’d gone through impossible doors—would be a bad thing. All of them winding up dead would upset Eleanor, as well as leaving the school without a van. Kade ground his teeth and focused on the road.

This would have been easier if they’d been driving during the day. Sumi’s remaining family lived six hours from the school grounds, and her body was interred at a local cemetery. That was good. Grave robbing was still viewed as socially inappropriate, and doing it when the sun was up was generally viewed as unwise. Which meant it was after midnight and they were on the road, and everything about this little adventure was a terrible idea from start to finish.

Nadya leaned over the seat to ask, “Are we there yet?”

“Why are you even here?” Kade countered. “You can’t pipe the dead out of the ground, you can’t drive, and we’d be a lot more comfortable with only three people in the backseat.”

“I got doused in turtle water,” said Nadya. “That means I get to come.”

Kade sighed. “I want to argue, but I’m too damn tired. Can you at least stay in your seat? We get pulled over, we’re going to have one hell of a time explaining the severed hands, or why Christopher keeps a human ulna in his pocket.”

“Just tell them we’re on a quest,” said Nadya.

“Mmm,” said Kade noncommittally.

“So are we there yet?”

“Almost. We are almost there.” The cemetery was another five miles down the road. He’d looked it up on Google Maps. There was a convenient copse of trees about a quarter of a mile away. They could stow the van there while they went about the business of desecrating Sumi’s grave.

Kade wasn’t religious—hadn’t been since he’d come back from Prism, forced into a body that was too young and too small and too dressed in frilly, girlish clothes by parents who refused to understand that they had a son and not a daughter—but he’d been to church often enough when he was little to be faintly worried that they were all going to wind up getting smote for crimes against God.

“Not the way I wanted to die,” he muttered, and pulled off the road, driving toward the trees.

“I want to die in a bed of marigolds, with butterflies hanging over me in a living canopy and the Skeleton Girl holding our marriage knife in her hand,” said Christopher.

“What?” said Kade.

“Nothing,” said Christopher.

Kade rolled slowly to a stop under a spreading oak, hopefully out of sight of the road, and parked. “All right, we’re here. Everybody out.”

He didn’t have to tell Cora twice. She had the door open before he had finished speaking, practically tumbling out into the grass. Riding in backseats always made her feel huge and worthless, taking up more space than she had any right to. The only reason she’d been able to stand it was that Nadya had been crammed into the middle, leaving Rini, still a virtual stranger, on the other side of the car. If Cora had been told she’d have to spend the entire drive pressed against someone she didn’t know, she would probably have skipped having an adventure in favor of hiding in her room.

The others got out more sedately, even Rini, who turned in a slow circle, eyes turned toward the sky and jaw gone slack.

“What are those?” she asked, jabbing a finger at the distant streak of the Milky Way.

“Stars, stupid,” said Nadya.

“I’m not stupid, I just don’t know stuff,” said Rini. “How do they stay up?”

“They’re very far away,” said Kade. “Don’t you have stars in Confection?”

“No,” said Rini. “There’s a moon—it’s made of buttercream frosting, very sticky, not good for picnicking on—and there’s a sun, and a long time ago, the First Confectioner threw handfuls of candy into the sky, where it stuck really high, but it’s still candy. You can see the stripes on the humbugs and the sugar speckles on the gumdrops.”

“Huh,” said Kade. He looked to Christopher. “We need a shovel?”

“Not if she’s willing to dance.” Christopher’s fingers played over his bone flute, sketching anxious arpeggios, outlining the tune he would play for Sumi. “If she’s willing to dance, she’d move heaven and earth to come to me.”