Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

“Then lead the way, piper.”

Christopher nodded and raised his flute to his mouth, taking a deep breath before he began to play. There was no sound. There was never any sound when Christopher played the flute, not as far as the living were concerned. There was only the idea of sound, the sketchy outline of the place where it should have been, sliced out of the air like a piece of chocolate pie.

No one knew how far he could be from the dead and still call them out of the grave, and they weren’t sure exactly where in the cemetery Sumi’s body was buried, and so he played as they walked toward the gates, putting everything he had into calling her and only her, Sumi, the wild girl who died too soon and too cruelly, rather than all the sleeping bones the graveyard had to offer. It had been too long since he’d been to a proper dance, one where the women wore garlands of flowers low on their hips and the men rattled their finger bones like castanets, where the dancers traded garments and genders and positions as easily as trading a blossom for a bolero. It was tempting, to call all the skeletons of this place to him, to lose himself in a revel while the moon was high.

But that wouldn’t save Rini, and it wouldn’t be what he had promised Miss Eleanor he’d do. So he played for an audience of one, and when he heard Cora gasp, he smiled around his flute and continued fingering the stops, calling Sumi from her slumber.

She came, a lithe, delicate skeleton wrapped in a pearlescent sheen, like opal, like sugar glass. The cemetery gates had been designed to keep the living out, not the dead in; she stepped sideways and slipped right through the bars, her fleshless body fitting perfectly in the gap. Christopher stopped walking but kept playing as Sumi, risen from the grave, walked across the field to meet them.

“Where’s the rest of her?” demanded Nadya.

“He doesn’t pipe flesh, only bone,” said Kade. “He’s called what will listen to him.” The flesh, softened by time, if not yet rotted away, must have shrugged away like an old overcoat, leaving Sumi shining, wrapped in rainbows, to answer Christopher’s call.

Rini raised her hands to cover her mouth. Another of her fingers was gone, replaced by that strange, eye-rejecting void. “Mom?” she whispered.

Sumi cocked her head to the side, more like a bird than a girl, and said nothing. Christopher hesitated before lowering his flute. When Sumi didn’t collapse into a pile of bones, he let out a long sigh, shoulders slumping with relief.

“She can’t talk,” he said. “She doesn’t have lungs, or a voice, or anything.” At home in Mariposa, she would have been able to speak. The magic that powered that land was happy to give a voice to the dead.

But this was not his home. Here, skeletons were silent, and only the sliver of Mariposa that he carried always with him was even enough to call them from the grave.

“She’s dead,” said Rini, like she was realizing this for the first time. “How can she be dead?”

“Everyone is, eventually,” said Christopher. “This next part is harder. Cora, can you open the jar with her hands, please?”

Cora grimaced as she knelt and wrested the lid off the jar, spilling sharp-smelling liquid onto the ground. She looked to Christopher. On his nod, she dumped the jar’s contents out, jumping to her feet and stumbling back to avoid the splash.

Christopher raised his flute and began to play again.

“I’m going to barf,” announced Nadya.

The flesh on Sumi’s hands began peeling back like a flower in the process of opening, revealing clean white bone. As they all watched, the bone grew bright with rainbows, like the rest of Sumi’s skeleton.

When the flesh had peeled away entirely, Christopher tucked his flute into his belt and bent to pick up the two skeletal hands. He offered them to Sumi. She leaned forward and touched the severed ends of her wrists to the base of the carpals. The rainbow glow intensified. She leaned back again, and she was whole, every bone in its place, every piece of her skeleton where it belonged.

“If we’re trying to get to an Underworld, starting from a cemetery seems like the best way to do it,” said Christopher. He looked to Rini. “You can tell those beads where to take us, right?”

“I can tell them who I want, and they get me there,” said Rini. “I couldn’t find my mother, no matter how hard I looked, so I looked for Miss Elly. That was who Mom always said made the school go.”

“Okay,” said Christopher. “Tell the bead to take us to Nancy.”

“I don’t know Nancy,” protested Rini.

“Nancy’s smart,” said Kade. “She’s quiet, so sometimes people don’t know she’s smart, but the smart’s always there.”

“She can stand so still she looks like a statue,” said Christopher.

“She has white hair with black streaks in it and she says it isn’t dyed and her roots never grew out so she probably wasn’t lying,” said Nadya. The others looked at her, and she shrugged. “We weren’t friends. I had one group therapy session with her, and stayed out of her way. Too dry for me. Dry as bones.”

Cora, who had come to the school after Nancy was already gone, said nothing at all.

Rini frowned at each of them in turn. “What about the sugar?”

“Red,” said Kade. “They mix it with pomegranate juice. It’s bitter, but it still sweetens.” His gaze remained steady, fixed on her. The fact that he had never seen the sugar in Nancy’s world didn’t matter. He knew what it should be, and that was as good as knowing what it was.

Rini nodded before lifting her wrist to her mouth and taking one of the beads on her bracelet between her teeth. She bit down hard, the bead shattering with a crunch, and swallowed.

“Wait,” said Nadya. “Those are sugar, too?”

“Where I come from, everything is sugar,” said Rini. She reached imperiously in front of herself, grasping an invisible doorknob. “Come on. They never stay open long, and sometimes they don’t match up very well.”

“Hence the falling out of the sky, one assumes,” said Christopher.

Rini nodded, and opened the door that wasn’t there.

The other side was a grove of trees with dark green leaves and gently twisted trunks. Their boughs were heavy with red fruit. Some of it had split open, showing the ruby seeds within. The grass around the trees looked soft as velvet, and the sky was no sky at all, but the high, vaulted ceiling of an impossible hall.

“The pomegranate grove,” breathed Kade.

“It’s the right place? Good,” said Rini. “Come on.” She stepped through the door, with the skeleton of her mother close on her heels. The others followed, and when it swung shut behind Cora, it wasn’t there anymore, just like it had never been there in the first place.





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