Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“Is that why you were in such a hurry?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded quickly. “There’s a strange girl in the turtle pond and she says she’s the daughter of someone I’ve never heard of, but who Nadya says is dead, so I think we need an adult.”

“If you need an adult, you should be looking for Kade, not Eleanor,” said Christopher. He started toward the door. “Who’s the dead person?”

“Someone named Sumi.”

Christopher’s fingers clamped down hard on his bone flute. “Walk faster,” he said, and Cora did, following him up the steps and into the school.

The halls were cool and empty. There were no classes in session; the other students would be scattered across the campus, chatting in the kitchen, sleeping in their rooms. For a place that could explode with noise and life under the right circumstances, it was often surprisingly quiet.

“Sumi was a student before you got here,” said Christopher. “She went to a world called Confection, where she pissed off the Countess of Candy Floss and got herself kicked out as a political exile.”

“Did her parents take her away?”

“She was murdered.”

Cora nodded solemnly. She had heard about the murders, about the girl named Jill who had decided the way to open her own door home was to cut away the doors of as many others as she deemed necessary. There was a certain amount of horror in those tales, and also a certain amount of shameful understanding. Many of them—not all, not even most, but many—would have done the same if they’d had the necessary skills. Some people even seemed to possess a certain grudging respect for what Jill had done. Sure, she’d killed people. In the end, it had been enough to take her home.

“The person who killed her wasn’t a friend of mine, not really, but her sister kind of was. We were … Jack and Jill went to a world called the Moors, which was sort of horror movie-y, from the way they described it. A lot of people lumped me in with them, because of Mariposa.”

“That’s the world you went to?”

Christopher nodded. “Eleanor still can’t decide whether it was a Fairyland or an Underworld or something new and in-between. That’s why people shouldn’t get too hung up on labels. Sometimes I think that’s part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they’re never going to.”

Cora didn’t say anything.

The hall ended at the closed door to Eleanor’s studio. Christopher rapped his knuckles twice against the wood, then opened it without waiting to be asked.

Eleanor was inside, a paintbrush in her hand, layering oil paint onto a canvas that looked like it had already been subjected to more than a few layers. Kade was there as well, sitting in the window seat, a coffee mug cupped between his hands. Both of them looked at the open door, Eleanor with delight, Kade with slow confusion.

“Cora!” she said. “Have you come to paint with me, dear? And Christopher. It’s wonderful to see you making friends, after everything.”

Christopher grimaced. “Yes, Miss Eleanor,” he said. “We’re not actually here for an art class. There’s someone in the turtle pond.”

“Is it Nadya?” asked Kade.

“Not this time,” said Cora. “She fell out of the sky, and she has black hair, and her dress fell apart when it got wet, and she says—” She stopped, reaching a degree of impossibility past which even she, who had once fought the Serpent of Frozen Tears, could not proceed.

Luckily, Christopher had no such boundaries. “She says Sumi’s her mother. Can someone please come to the turtle pond and figure out what the hell is going on?”

Kade sat up straight. “I’ll go,” he said.

“Go,” said Eleanor. “I’ll clean up here. Bring her to the office when you’re finished.”

Kade nodded and slid off his seat, leaving his mug behind as he hurried to collect Cora and Christopher and usher them both out the door. Eleanor watched the three of them go, silent. When the door was closed behind them, she put her head down in her hands.

Sumi’s world, Confection, had been a Nonsense world, untethered to the normal laws that governed the order of things. There had been a prophecy of some sort, saying that Sumi would one day return, and overthrow the armies of the Queen of Cakes, establishing her own benevolent monarchy in its place. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that the future had felt comfortable going about its business, once there was a prophecy. And now Sumi was dead, and the future, whatever it had once been, was falling apart.

Everything did, if left long enough to its own devices. Futures, pasts, it didn’t matter. Everything fell apart.





3

DEAD WOMAN’S DAUGHTER