Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3)

“Not always,” she said finally, and looked away.

Rini looked relieved. “Good. I don’t know if I could live with the idea that everyone else had it better and we had it worse, just because we didn’t want to always do things in the same order every day.”

Kade paused at the edge of the kitchen, turning and looking back over his shoulder. “Well, come on,” he called, beckoning. “We need to get Sumi out of the oven before she gets burnt.”

“We’re coming,” said Cora, and hurried, Rini beside her, up the hill.

*

A RUSH OF AIR flowed out of the oven when Layla pulled it open, hot and sweet and smelling of brown sugar, cinnamon, and ginger. She took a step back, laughing in evident relief.

“Oh, that’s a good smell,” she said. “That’s a right-and-ready smell. No charcoal or char.”

“How can we help?” asked Kade.

“Grab a pair of oven mitts and lift,” said Layla.

She didn’t put on oven mitts before reaching into the oven: she simply grasped the metal end of the tray in her bare hands and pulled. There was no smell of burning, and she didn’t make any sounds that would indicate that she was in pain. She might not do magic, but this world was magic, and it said that the Baker was important: the Baker would be protected.

Kade had never been very fond of cooking. Too much work for something that was too transitory. He much preferred tailoring, taking one thing and turning it into something else, something that would last. His parents had taken his interest in sewing after he got home from Prism as a sign that he was a little girl after all, until he’d started modifying his dresses, turning them into vests and shirts and other things that made him feel more comfortable.

He’d stuck his fingers with pins and cut himself with scissors more times than he could count. If someone had offered him a place where he could just sit and sew for a while, with all the fabric and findings he could ever want, with tools that wouldn’t do him harm, no matter how careless he got, well. The temptation would be more than he could handle.

Rini hung back, unable to trust her grip with so much of her hands missing, but the others lifted as Layla ordered them, two to a side, like pallbearers preparing Sumi for her final rest. They set the tray on the baker’s block at the middle of the kitchen, and Layla motioned them to step away before she reached for the sheet of parchment paper covering Sumi’s face.

Cora realized she was holding her breath.

The parchment paper came away. Sumi had been gone before Cora came to the school: there was nothing there for Cora to recognize, just a beautiful, silent, teenage girl with smooth brown skin and long black hair. Her eyes were closed, lashes resting gently on her cheeks, and her mouth was a downturned bow, mercurial even when motionless.

Rini gasped before starting to cry. “Wake her up,” she begged. “Please, please, wake her up.”

“She needs to cool,” said Layla. “If we woke her now, she’d have a fever bad enough to cook her brains and kill her all over again.”

“She looks…” Kade reached out with one shaking hand, pulling back before he could actually brush against her skin. “She looks perfect. She looks real.”

“Because she is real,” said Layla. “The hair proves it.”

“How’s that?”

“If the oven hadn’t wanted to put her back together, she wouldn’t have hair now.” Layla beamed. “She’d have a sticky black mess attached to a bunch of melted fondant—you’re not supposed to bake fondant, by the way, or frosting, or most of the other things I put onto her skeleton. Confection wanted her back, so Confection gave her back. I’m just the Baker. I put things in the oven, and the world does as it will.”

It seemed like a very precise way of avoiding accusations of magic. Kade didn’t say anything. Getting into an argument with someone who was helping was never a good idea, and in this case, making Layla doubt her place in Confection could result in a door and an expulsion, and then all of this would have been for nothing.

Sumi looked so real.

“Was making a new body out of candy and cake and everything enough?” asked Cora. “Will that give her back her nonsense?” Or would Sumi’s quiet, solemn ghost open her new eyes and ask to be taken home—not to the school, but to the parents who believed that she was dead, the ones who’d been willing to send their daughter away when she turned out to be someone other than the good girl they had raised her to be.

“I don’t know,” said Layla. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if anyone has.”

That was a lie, but it was a necessary one. Of course someone here had done this before. This was Confection, land of the culinary art become miracle: land of lonely children whose hands itched for pie tins or rolling pins, for the comfortable predictability of timers and sugar scoops and heaping cups of flour. This was a land where perfectly measured ingredients created nonsensical towers of whimsy and wonder—and maybe that was why they could be here, logical creatures that they were, without feeling assaulted by the world around them. Kade remembered his aunt’s tales of her own Nonsense realm all too well, including the way it had turned against her once she was old enough to think as an adult did, rigidly and methodically. She would always be Nonsense-touched, but somewhere along the way, time had caught up with her enough to turn her mind against the realm that was her natural home.

Confection wasn’t like that. Confection was Nonsense with rules, where baking soda would always leaven your cake and yeast would always rise. Confection could be Nonsensical because it had rules, and so Logical people could survive there, could even thrive there, once they had accepted that things weren’t quite the same as they were in other worlds.

Layla reached over and carefully touched the first two fingers of her right hand to the curve of Sumi’s remade wrist. She smiled.

“She’s cool enough,” she said. “We can wake her up now.”

“How?” asked Christopher.

“Oh.” Layla looked at him, eyes wide and surprised. “I thought you knew.”

“I do,” said Rini. She walked toward the table, and the others stood aside, letting her pass, until she was standing in front of Sumi, looking down at her with her sole remaining eye. She rested the back of her hand against her mother’s cheek. Sumi didn’t move.