Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

Beehives were set up around the edge of the field, and fat striped humbugs and butterscotch candies crawled on the outside, their forms suggesting their insect progenitors only vaguely, their wings thin sheets of toffee that turned the sunlight soft and golden.

Like the castle of the Queen of Cakes, the farmhouse and barn were both built of gingerbread, a holiday craft taken to its absolute extreme. Unlike the castle, they were perfectly symmetrical and well designed, built with an eye for function as well as form, not just to use as much edible glitter as was humanly possible. The farmhouse was low and long, stretching halfway along the edge of the far field, its windows made of the same toffee as the wings of the bees. Rini smiled when she saw it, relief suffusing her remaining features and making her look young and bright and peaceful.

“My father will know what to do,” she said. “My father always knows what to do.”

Kade and Cora exchanged a glance. Neither of them contradicted her. If she wanted to believe that her father was an all-knowing sage who would solve everything, who were they to argue? Besides, this wasn’t their world. For all they knew, she was right.

“Come on, Mom!” said Rini, exhorting Sumi to follow her into the candy corn field. “Dad’s waiting!” She plunged into the green. The skeleton followed more sedately after, with the three visitors from another world bringing up the rear.

“I always thought that if I found another door, to anywhere, I’d take it, because anywhere had to be better than the world where my parents were asking me awful questions all the time,” said Christopher. “There was this telenovela about a bunch of sick kids in a hospital that my mother made me watch like, two whole seasons of after I got back, giving me these hopeful little looks after every episode, like I was finally going to confess that yes, the Skeleton Girl was another patient with an eating disorder, or a homeless girl, or something, and not, you know, a fucking skeleton.”

“Let’s be fair here,” said Kade. “If my son came back from a journey to a magical land and told me straight up that he wanted to marry a woman who didn’t have any internal organs, I’d probably spend some time trying to find a way to spin it so that he wasn’t saying that.”

“Oh, like you’re attracted to girls because you think they have pretty kidneys,” said Christopher.

Kade shrugged. “I like girls. Girls are beautiful. I like how they’re soft and pretty and have skin and fatty deposits in all the places evolution has deemed appropriate. My favorite part, though, is how they have actual structural stability, on account of how they’re not skeletons.”

“Are all boys as weird as the two of you, or did I get really lucky?” asked Cora.

“We’re teenagers in a magical land following a dead girl and a disappearing girl into a field of organic, pesticide-free candy corn,” said Kade. “I think weird is a totally reasonable response to the situation. We’re whistling through the graveyard to keep ourselves from totally losing our shit.”

“Besides,” said Christopher. “You don’t choose your dates based on their internal organs, do you? Settle this.”

“Sorry, but I have to side with Kade if you’re dragging me into your little weirdness parade.” Cora relaxed a little. This was starting to feel more like one of her walks around the school grounds with Nadya than a life-threatening quest. Maybe Rini was right, and her father would fix everything. Maybe they’d be able to go home s—

Cora stopped dead. “The bracelet.”

“What?” Kade and Christopher stopped in turn, looking anxiously at her.

“We didn’t get Rini’s bracelet back from the Queen of Cakes,” said Cora. She shook her head, wide-eyed, feeling her chest start to tighten. “We were so worried about getting Christopher’s flute that we didn’t look for the bracelet. How are we going to get back to the school?”

“We’ll figure it out,” said Kade. “If nothing else, the Wizard she got the first set of beads from will be able to take care of us. Breathe. It’s going to be okay.”

Cora took a deep breath, eyeing him. “You really think so?”

“No,” he said baldly. “It’s never okay. But I told myself that every night when I was in Prism. I told myself that every morning when I woke up, still in Prism. And I got through. Sometimes that’s all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don’t have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.”

“That sounds…” Cora paused. “Actually, that sounds really nice. I’m not that good at lying to myself.”

“Whereas I am a king of telling myself bullshit things I don’t really believe but need to accept for the sake of everyone around me.” Kade spread his arms, framing the moment. “I can make anything sound reasonable for five minutes.”

“I can’t,” said Christopher. “I just refuse to die where the Skeleton Girl can’t find me. I don’t think this is the sort of world that connects to Mariposa. It’s too far out of sync.”

“What do you mean?” Cora started walking again, matching her step to theirs.

“You know Rini isn’t the first person to come to our world—call it ‘Earth,’ since that’s technically its name—from somewhere else, right?” Kade paused barely long enough for Cora to nod before he said, “Well, every time it’s happened and we’ve known about it, someone’s done their best to sit them down and ask a bunch of questions. Getting a baseline, getting more details for the Compass. Most of them, they have their own stories about doors. They knew someone who knew someone whose great-aunt disappeared for twenty years and came back the same age she’d been when she went away, full of stories that didn’t make sense and with a king’s ransom in diamonds in her pocket, or salt, or snakeskins. Currencies tend to differ a bit, world to world. And what we’ve found is that there are worlds to and worlds from.”

“What do you mean?”

“Confection, it was made by the doors. Its rules were set by the bakers, and maybe those bakers came from Logical worlds, but what they wanted out of life was Nonsense, so they whipped themselves up a Nonsense world, one layer at a time. Half the nonsense probably comes from having so many cooks in the kitchen. Thirty people bake the same wedding cake, it doesn’t matter if they’re all masters of their craft, they’re still going to come up with something that tastes a little funny.”

Cora nodded slowly. “So this is a world to.”