Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

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.





5

PLACES OF THE LIVING, PLACES OF THE DEAD

THE SIX OF THEM—five living, one dead—walked through the velvety grass, making no attempt to disguise their gawking. Christopher kept his bone flute in his hand, fingers tracing silent arpeggios. Sumi stayed close to her daughter, bones clacking faintly, like the distant whisper of wind through the branches of a tree. Rini tried her best not to look back. Every time she caught a glimpse of Sumi she shuddered and bit her lip before looking away again.

Nadya reached up with her single hand and traced the outline of a pomegranate with her fingers, biting her lip and staring at the fruit like it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“Nancy said she spent most of her time as a statue in the Lady’s hall,” said Kade, pushing forward until he was in the lead. No one questioned him. It was good to have someone willing to be the leader. “I suppose that means she might be there now.”

“Is the Lord of the Dead going to be happy to see us?” asked Nadya, finally taking her hand away from the pomegranate.

“Maybe,” said Kade. “He’s got doors. He’s got to be used to people stumbling in without an invitation.”

“But you only find doors you’re suited to,” said Cora. “We didn’t find this one. We made it. Won’t he be upset about that?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Kade, and started walking.

“Why do people always say that?” muttered Cora, trailing along at the rear of the group. “There’s always more than one way to find something out. People only say there’s only one way when they want an excuse to do something incredibly stupid without getting called on it. There are lots of ways to find out, and some of them even involve not pissing off a man who goes by ‘the Lord of the Dead.’”

“Yeah, but they wouldn’t be as much fun, now would they?”

Cora glanced to the side. Christopher had dropped back to walk beside her. He was grinning, looking more at ease than she had ever seen him.

“Why are you so happy?” she asked. “Everything here is dead people.”

“That’s why I’m so happy,” he said. “Everything here is dead people.”

Somehow, when he said it, it wasn’t a complaint, or even an observation: it was virtually a prayer, packed with hope and homecoming. This wasn’t his world, wasn’t Mariposa, and the only skeleton who danced here was poor Sumi. But it was closer than he had been in a long, long time, and she could see the joy coming back into his body with every step he took.

“Do you really want to be a skeleton?” she blurted.

Christopher shrugged. “Everybody’s a skeleton someday. You die, and the soft parts drop away, and what’s left behind is all beautiful bone. I just want to go back to a place where I don’t have to die to be beautiful.”