Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3)

“Sure,” said Rini. “Anywhere there’s sugar.”

His fingers played across the surface of his bone flute, coaxing out the ghosts of notes. No one could hear them, but that didn’t matter. He knew that they were there.

“I think I know a way to fix this,” he said.

*

THE BASEMENT ROOM that had belonged to Jack and Jill, before they returned to the Moors, and to Nancy, before she returned to the Halls of the Dead, belonged to Christopher now. He viewed it with a certain superstitious hope, like the fact that its last three occupants had been able to find their doors meant that he would absolutely find his own. Magical thinking might seem like nonsense to some people, but he had danced with skeletons by the light of a marigold moon, he had kissed the glimmering skull of a girl with no lips and loved her as he had never loved anything or anyone in his life, and he thought he’d earned a certain amount of nonsense, as long as it helped him get by.

He led the others across the room to the velvet curtain that hung across a rack of metal shelves.

“Jack didn’t take anything with her when she left,” he said. “I mean, nothing except Jill. Her arms were sort of full.” Jack had carried Jill over the threshold like a bride on her wedding night, walking back into the unending wasteland that was their shared perfection, and she hadn’t looked back, not once. Sometimes Christopher still dreamt that he had followed her, running away to a world that would never have made him happy, but which might have made him slightly less miserable than this one.

“So?” asked Nadya. “Jack and Jill were creepy fish.”

“So I have all her things, and all Jill’s things, and Jill was building the perfect girl.” He pulled the curtain aside, revealing a dozen jars filled with amber liquid and … other things. Parts of people that had no business being viewed in isolation.

Christopher leaned up onto his toes, taking a gallon jar down from one of the higher shelves. A pair of hands floated inside, preserved like pale starfish, fingers spread in eternal surprise.

Kade’s voice was frosty. “We buried those,” he said.

“I know,” said Christopher. “But I started having bad dreams after Sumi’s family took her away to bury her. Dreams about her skeleton being incomplete forever. So I … well, I got a shovel, and I got her hands. I dug up her hands. That way, if she ever came back, I could put her together again. She wouldn’t have to be broken forever.”

Kade stared at him. “Christopher, are you honestly telling me you’ve been sharing a bedroom with Sumi’s severed hands this whole time? Because boy, that ain’t normal.” His Oklahoma accent, always stronger when he was upset, was thick as honey.

Rini, on the other hand, didn’t appear disturbed in the slightest. She was looking at the jar with wide, interested eyes. “Those are my mother’s hands?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Christopher. He held the jar carefully as he turned to the others. “If we know where Sumi is buried, I can put her back together. I mean, I can pipe her out of the grave and give her back her hands.”

“What?” asked Cora.

“Ew,” said Nadya.

“Skeletons don’t usually have children,” said Kade. “What are you suggestin’?”

Christopher took a deep breath. “I’m suggesting we get Sumi out of the grave, and then we go and find Nancy. She’s in the Halls of the Dead, right? She’s got to know where the ghosts go. Maybe she can tell us where Sumi went, and we can … put her back together.”

Silence fell again, speculative this time. Finally, Eleanor smiled.

“That makes no sense at all,” she said. “That means it may well work. Go, my darlings, and bring your lost and shattered sister home.”





PART II

INTO THE HALLS OF THE DEAD





4

WHAT WE BURY IS NOT LOST, ONLY SET ASIDE

OF THE FIVE of them who were going on this journey—Nadya and Cora, Rini, Christopher and Kade—only Kade knew how to drive, and so he was the one stuck behind the wheel of the school minivan, eyes on the road and prayers on his lips as he tried to focus on getting them where they were going in one piece.

Rini had never been in a car before, and kept unfastening her seatbelt because she didn’t like the way it pinched. Nadya claimed she could only ride with all the windows down, while Cora didn’t like being cold, and kept turning the heat up. Christopher, meanwhile, insisted on turning the volume on the radio up as far as it would go, which didn’t make a damn bit of sense, since usually the songs he played were inaudible to anyone who wasn’t dead.