Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

The Queen sighed. “Stubborn little children find that I can be a very cruel woman, when I want to. Did it have something to do with this?” She reached behind herself, pulling out Christopher’s bone flute. “It’s an odd little instrument. I blow and blow, but it doesn’t make a sound.”

The effect on Christopher was electric. He stood suddenly upright, vibrating, the color returning by drips to his cheeks, until they burned like he had a fever. “Give it to me,” he said, and his voice was an aching whisper that somehow carried all the same.

“Oh, is this yours?” asked the Queen. “It’s a funny color. What is it made of?”

“Bone.” He took a jerky step forward, knees knocking. “My bone. It’s mine, it’s made of me, give it back.”

“Bone?” The Queen looked at the flute again, this time with fascinated disgust. “Liar. There’s no way you could lose a bone this big and still be whole.”

“The Skeleton Girl gave me another bone to replace it and it’s mine you have to give it back you have to give it back.” Christopher’s voice broke into a howl on his final words, and he took off running, the rope still dangling from his neck, launching himself at the Queen of Cakes.

His hands were only a few feet from her throat when one of the knights stomped on the end of the rope, jerking him back ward. Christopher slammed into the floor, landing in a heap, and began to sob.

“Fascinating,” breathed the Queen. “What terrible worlds you must all come from, to think this sort of thing is normal, or should be allowed to continue. Don’t worry, children. You’re in Confection now. You’ll be safe and happy here, and as soon as that”—she indicated Rini—“finishes fading away, you’ll be able to stay forever.”

She snapped her fingers.

“Guards,” she said, sweetly. “Find them someplace nice to be, where I won’t have to hear them screaming. And leave the skeleton here. I want to play with it.”

The Queen of Cakes leaned back in her throne and smiled as her latest enemies were dragged away. What a lovely day this was shaping up to be.





8

THE TALLEST TOWER

“SOMEPLACE NICE,” IN THE castle of the Queen of Cakes, was a large, empty room with gingerbread walls and heaps of gummy fruit on the floor, presumably to serve as bedding for the prisoners. There had been no effort to chain the four of them up or keep them apart; the guards had simply dragged them up the stairs until they reached the top of what felt like the tallest tower in the world. The only window was almost too high for Cora to reach, and looking out of it revealed a rocky chocolate quarry, studded with the jagged edges of giant almonds. Oh, yes. They were stuck. Unless they could open the door, they weren’t going anywhere.

Rini was slumped against the wall, eyes closed, the slope of one shoulder gone to whatever sucking nothingness was stealing her away one fragment at a time. Alarmingly, she wasn’t the one in the worst condition. That dubious honor belonged to Christopher, who was curled into a ball next to the door, shaking uncontrollably.

“He needs his flute,” said Kade, laying the back of one hand against Christopher’s forehead and frowning. “He’s freezing.”

“Is it really made from one of his bones?” Cora dropped back to the flats of her feet and turned to face the pair.

Kade nodded grimly. “It was part of saving Mariposa, for him. He told me when I was updating the record of the world.”

In addition to his duties as the school tailor, Kade was an amateur historian and mapmaker rolled into one, recording the stories of all the children who came through the school. He said it was because he was trying to accurately map the Compass that defined Nonsense and Logic, Virtue and Wickedness, all of the other cardinal directions of the worlds on the other side of their doors. Cora thought that was probably true, but she also thought he liked the excuse to talk to people about their shared differences, which became their shared similarities when held up to the right light. They had all survived something. The fact that they had survived different somethings didn’t change the fact that they would always be, in certain ways, the same.

“Can it be put back?”

Christopher shook his head, and muttered weakly, “Wouldn’t want it. There was something wrong inside. A dark thing. The doctors said it was a tumor. But the Skeleton Girl piped it away and freed me. Owe her … everything.”

“But…”

“It’s still mine.” There was a flicker of fierceness in Christopher’s voice, there and gone in an instant, like it had never existed in the first place.

Kade sighed, patting Christopher on the shoulder before he rose and walked over to stand next to Cora at the window. Dropping his voice to a low murmur, he said, “This doesn’t happen as much as it used to—I guess the universe figured out it was an asshole move—but it’s happened before. Kids who went through doors and came back with some magical item or other that still worked in our world, where there isn’t supposed to be much magic at all.”

“So?”

“So you want magic in our world, you pretty much have to be paying for it out of your own self, somehow. Most of the time, the magic item’d been tied to the person with blood or with tears or with something else that came out of their bodies. Or, in this case, a whole damn bone. The magic that powers the flute is Christopher. If he doesn’t get it back…”

Cora turned to gape at him, horrified. “Are you saying he’ll die?”

“Maybe not die. He’s never been separated from it for more than a few minutes. Maybe he’ll just get really sick. Or maybe the cancer will come back. I don’t know.” Kade looked frustrated. “I interview all the newbies, I write everything down, because there are so many doors, and so many little variations on the theme, and we don’t know. He might die if we don’t get it back. He wouldn’t be the first.”

Their stories were written down too, by Eleanor before his time, or by the other rare scholars of travel and consequence, of the space behind the doors. They wrote about girls who wasted to nothing when they were separated from their magic shoes or golden balls, about boys who burned alive in the night when their parents took away their cooling silver bells, about children who had been found at the bottom of the garden, magically cured of some unthinkable disease, only for the sickness to come rushing back ten years later when a sibling or one of their own children broke a little crystal statue that they had been instructed not to touch.

Travel changed people. Not all of the changes were visible, or even logical by the rules of a world where up was always up and down was always down and skeletons stayed in the ground instead of getting up and dancing around, but that didn’t make the changes go away. They existed whether they were wanted or not.

Cora, whose hair grew in naturally blue and green, all over her body, looked uneasily over her shoulder at Christopher, who was huddled in a pile of gummi bears, shivering.