Beneath the Sugar Sky

  They kept walking. One moment, they were passing through the pastoral fields of green frosting and sugar flowers; the next, they were approaching the gates of what looked very much like a junkyard, if junkyards were made of the discarded remains of a thousand kitchen projects. Fallen soufflés, pieces of trimmed-off cake, and slabs of cracked fudge were everywhere, heaped into mountains of discarded treats behind a chain link fence of braided fruit vines. Kade blinked.

  “This where we’re going?” he asked.

  Rini nodded, expression almost reverent. “The Baker is here,” she breathed.

  The four of them walked toward the gate. It swung open at their approach, and silently, they stepped inside.

  * * *

  THE JUNKYARD WAS impossibly large, stretching on toward forever, like it had its own laws about things like geometry and physics and the way the land should bend. The four travelers walked close together, their hands occasionally touching, like they were afraid that even a moment’s separation might result in one or more of them disappearing into those towering piles of debris and never being seen again.

  As they walked, the piles grew fresher. There was no mold—things didn’t even seem to go truly stale—but there was a scent to fresh-baked goods that was missing from the heaps around the edge, a homey mixture of heat and sugar and comfort food that promised safety, security, and sweetness on the tongue.

  They turned a corner, and there she was. The Baker.

  She was short, and round, and had skin a few shades darker than Christopher’s, and a pretty blue cloth wrapped around her head, concealing her hair. She looked no more than seventeen. Her skirt brushed the ground as she bent to remove a pie from the oven in front of her. Somehow, she had constructed a free-standing kitchen in the middle of a junkyard—or maybe she had created the junkyard around her free-standing kitchen, building it one broken cookie and discarded cupcake at a time.

  Rini was staring at her, open-mouthed, a tear in her eye. Sumi actually took a step forward without being prompted, and a piece of biscotti cracked under her bony foot.

  The Baker looked up from her oven and smiled. “There you are,” she said, turning to put her pie down on the nearby counter. Had that counter been there a moment before? Cora wasn’t sure. “I was hoping you’d make it.”

  Rini made a stifled gasping sound and turned her face away.

  The Baker stepped out of her kitchen, walking across the broken-biscuit ground toward Rini, seemingly unaware of how the cracks smoothed out under her feet, how the cookie colors brightened, how the sugar shone. She was healing her world through her mere presence—but that presence was required. She could create. She could repair. She couldn’t be everywhere at once.

  “My poor sweet girl,” said the Baker, and reached for what remained of Rini’s hands. “You found her. You found our Sumi, and you brought her home.”

  “Can you fix her?” Rini sniffled. Tears were leaking constantly from her eye, running unchecked down her cheek. “Please, can you fix her? The Lord of the Dead said her nonsense would be here. That’s all we need to put her back together again. Can you?”

  “Oh, my dear,” said the Baker, and let go of Rini’s hands. “Nonsense returns to where it’s made, that’s true, but it’s like flour in the air: you can’t just pull it back. You have to let it settle. It goes back into everything. It makes the world continue turning. If your mother’s nonsense is here, I can’t reclaim it.”

  “Well, can you make more?” asked Cora. “You’re the Baker. You’re the one who makes this world what it is. Can’t you just … whip up a new batch of nonsense?”

  “It’s not like gingersnaps,” said the Baker.

  “So it is like flour and it’s not like gingersnaps and you’re still the person in charge of this whole world, so why can’t you just decide that what you’re baking now is a happy ending for everyone involved?” Cora folded her arms, resisting the urge to scowl. “I’m tired, I’m confused, and I’m not made for a Nonsense world, so I’d be really pleased if you’d just fix it.”

  “Sometimes you say ‘nonsense’ like it’s an idea and sometimes you say it like it’s a proper name,” said the Baker. “Why is that?”

  “You found a door,” said Kade.

  The Baker turned to him, blinking. He shrugged.

  “Maybe it was in the back of the pantry, or maybe it was in your bedroom, or heck, maybe it was in the middle of the street, but you found a door, and when you went through it, everything was different. You had a kitchen, and all the supplies you could want, and a world that wanted you to bake it a future.”

  “I do that literally,” murmured the Baker. “The prophecies that make the future run the way it should? I pipe them onto sugar cookies and toss them to the wind for distribution. It takes a lot of time. Frosting isn’t a good medium for lengthy dissertations on fate.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t be,” said Kade. “But you found a door, and it brought you here, and you know you’re not the first person to work in this kitchen, so I’m guessing you’re afraid that the door will come back one day and send you back to wherever you came from.”

  “Brooklyn,” said the Baker, and just like that, she wasn’t a god, or a creator figure, or anything of the sort: she was a teenager in a hijab, with flour on her hands and a downcast expression on her face. “How did you know that? Are you here to take me back?”

  “We’d never do that to anyone,” said Cora. “Ever. But you asked why we talk the way we do.”

  “If your door ever reappears, if you ever find yourself back in a world that you don’t want any part of, look up Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, and see if you can get your parents to send you there,” said Christopher. “You’ll be with people who understand.”

  The Baker frowned. “Right,” she said finally. “But that’s not going to happen, because I’m going to stay here forever.”

  Cora and Christopher, who both knew better, exchanged a look, and said nothing. There was nothing appropriate to say.

  “That’s lovely for you, miss, but we’d like to get back to school and back to the business of looking for our own doors,” said Kade politely. “Can’t you whip up a new batch of nonsense for Sumi, so we can put her all the way back together?”

  “I don’t know how,” said the Baker, sounding frustrated. “Nonsense happens on its own. It’s in the air, the water—the ground.”

  “Which is made of graham crackers,” said Cora.

  “Exactly! It makes no sense, so it makes more nonsense. I can’t just whip up a batch of something that doesn’t have a recipe.”

  “Can’t you improvise?” Cora shook her head. “Please. We’ve come so far, and we’ve already paid for this. Sumi needs help. Sumi needs a miracle. Right now, you’re the one who makes the miracles. So please.”

  The Baker looked to each of them in turn, finally stopping on Rini, who was still weeping, even as she seemed less and less tethered to the world.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  * * *

  WHEN THE BAKER had beckoned to Sumi, Sumi had gone willingly. How could she do anything else? This was the divinity of her chosen world calling her home, and even as a combination of skeleton and shade, she knew where she belonged.

  Kade had helped the Baker lift Sumi up onto a long metal table that looked, if seen from the right angle, disturbingly like the autopsy table that used to occupy the basement, the one where a girl named Jack had slept and dreamed of a world defined by blood and thunder. Then he had stepped back, along with the others, and watched as she got to work.

  The kitchen had no walls, and no pantry. When she needed something, she would step outside its bounds and reach down into the junkyard surrounding, coming up over and over again with the right ingredients in her hands. Eggs, milk, flour, butter, vanilla beans and ginger roots, they were all there, waiting for her to scavenge them out of the dust. She didn’t seem to understand that this was strange, that when the rest of them looked
at the junkyard, they saw only failures, not the building blocks of new successes. This wasn’t their place. There was no question that it was hers.

  Bit by bit, she had built up Sumi’s limbs with rice cereal mixed with melted marshmallow and honey, covering each layer with a thin sheet of modeling chocolate, until the combined confection began to look like human musculature. She was working on Sumi’s shoulders when the timer dinged on one of her ovens. She crossed to it, opened it, and withdrew a sheet of sugar cookie organs, each dusted with a different color of sugar.

  “It helps that bones don’t melt,” she said, using a spatula to slide the organs off the cookie sheet and onto a cooling rack. “I don’t need to worry about putting something hot on top of them and losing the whole structure. That happens with the volcanos around here sometimes. It’s really tedious.”

  “Um,” said Christopher. “All of this is cool to watch, if a little nightmare fuel-esque, but people are usually made of meat, not Rice Krispy treats. We need a functional Sumi. You’re making a cake that looks sort of like her.”

  “Baking something transforms it, and anyone who’s ever eaten a piece of cake will tell you that sometimes we can take baked goods and turn them into a part of ourselves,” said the Baker serenely. She was in her element: she knew exactly what she was doing, and was content to continue doing it until the job was done. “If this works, she’ll be made of the same stuff as you and I.”

  Cora, who had heard plenty of jokes about cake and brownies going straight to her thighs, looked down at her short-clipped fingernails, picking at them to dislodge the last bits of sticky pinkness left over from the Strawberry Sea, and said nothing at all.

  “Huh,” said Christopher.

  The Baker laughed. It was a bright, utterly joyful sound. “I love baking,” she said. “It lets you make the world you want, and it makes everything delicious.” She picked up a large pastry bag, beginning to pipe frosting intestines into the hollow of Sumi’s gut.

  Bit by bit, the glittering bone disappeared under layers of pastry. Bit by bit, the structure of the Baker’s creation was built up to overlap the silent, almost disapproving shade, until the Baker was using modeling chocolate to sculpt the fine angles and planes of Sumi’s face. Layers of yellow cake had been laid down for the fatty tissue, covered by a slightly thicker layer of gingerbread which was covered in turn by a fondant shell, dyed a few shades darker than Rini’s skin.

  “Hair, hair, hair,” hummed the Baker, and leaned out of the kitchen, snatching a fistful of what looked like black candy floss out of the mess. She held it up and beamed. “You never know when you’re going to need black cotton candy. Shouldn’t eat the stuff, though. It’ll dye your tongue black for a week.” She stuck out her own tongue, which was currently a cheery shade of blue, before beginning to apply the filmy black material to the top of Sumi’s head. When it was on, she picked up a roll of parchment paper and draped it delicately over the body. “She’s almost ready to go into the oven. Let’s hope this works.”

  “What happens if it doesn’t?” asked Rini.

  The Baker sighed. “We try something else, I suppose.”

  “Her skeleton will be fine,” said Christopher. “I don’t know whether you can bake the ghost of somebody’s boring side, but the skeleton won’t care unless that oven is way too hot.”

  “I’m not into cremating my cookies,” said the Baker.

  “There you go,” said Christopher. “No worries.”

  The Baker laughed. “All right, I like you people. Someone come and help me lift her into the oven.”

  The cake, cereal, and chocolate had added so much weight to the skeleton that it took Cora and Kade working in concert to help the Baker shift the baking sheet into the oven. The heat that flowed out when she opened the door was intense enough to make them shy back, the small hairs on their arms crisping as they drew closer.

  “In she goes,” said the Baker, and slid the tray—and Sumi—smoothly inside. The door swung closed behind her.

  “Now what?” asked Cora.

  “Now we wait,” said the Baker. “We wait, and we hope.”

  12

  THE BAKER’S STORY

  THEY SAT ON A broken gingerbread wall, feet dangling, sipping glasses of cool, surprisingly unmodified milk. It was sweet in the way milk was always sweet, but it wasn’t malted, or chocolatey, or anything else that would have made it fit better into the world. Cora gave the Baker a curious look.

  “Where did you get the milk?” she asked.

  “It grows on trees,” said the Baker serenely.

  Cora stared.

  “No, really,” said the Baker. “In these big white fruits that look sort of like eggs. One of the previous bakers came up with that. I just enjoy it.” She took another sip of her milk. “Ah. Refreshing and bizarre.”

  “Are you religious?” asked Christopher.

  The Baker turned to blink at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Your…” He waved a hand around his head. “I know that’s a religious thing a lot of the time. Are you religious?”

  “My family is,” she said. “I think maybe I will be someday, but mostly I wear the hijab because I enjoy not having to worry about my hair getting in the cake batter.”

  “Functional and fashionable,” said Christopher, his tone an intentional mirror to hers when she had been speaking of the milk fruit. “So is it weird for you? Being a god?”

  The Baker hesitated before putting her milk down. “Let’s clear this up,” she said. “I am not a god. I’m a baker. I bake things. Any magic in my food comes from the world, not from me, and I can’t help it if here, my brownies are always perfect and mysteriously double as roofing materials.”

  “Sorry,” said Christopher. “I just thought—”

  “I’m not here to convert people, or to preach, or to do anything but make a lot of cookies. A continent of cookies. When I’m done, if the door opens and sends me home, I suppose I’ll make cookies there.”

  “Do you have a name?” asked Kade.

  “Layla,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you,” he replied. “I’m Kade. These are my friends, Cora and Christopher. Rini, you already know.”

  Layla nodded to each of them in turn. “Nice to meet you. You all had doors of your own?”

  “Goblin Prince,” said Kade.

  “Mermaid,” said Cora.

  “Beloved of the Princess of Skeletons,” said Christopher.

  Layla blinked. “I was with you right up until that last one.”

  Christopher shrugged easily. “I get that response pretty often.”

  Rini didn’t say anything. She was miserably flicking chocolate chips from the wall, sending them clattering down into the junkyard below them. Layla sighed and leaned over to put her hand on Rini’s shoulder.

  “Breathe,” she said.

  “I think one of my lungs has stopped existing,” said Rini.

  “So breathe a little more shallowly,” said Layla. “Just keep breathing. The baking will be done soon, and then we’ll see what we’ll see.”

  “Rini was worried,” blurted Cora. Rini and Layla both turned to look at her. “About the timing. Um. If Sumi died before she was born, and we bring Sumi back to life now…”

  “Oh, that’s simple,” said Layla. “You bring Sumi back to life now, and she returns to school with the rest of you. For us, Sumi is a grown woman, not a teenage skeleton. She’ll have a few years with you before her door opens again.”

  “Are you the one who opens it?” asked Kade.

  “No,” said Layla. “I get here a year after Sumi does.”

  There was a momentary silence before Christopher asked, “If we’re in the future—our future—right now, does that mean that if I looked you up on Facebook once I have Wi-Fi again, I’d find you, like, twelve years old and living in Brooklyn?”

  “I didn’t have a Facebook when I was twelve, but it doesn’t matter,” said Layla. “Please don’t look me up. Please don’t try to find
me. I don’t remember that happening, which means it didn’t happen for me. If you change my past, my door might never open, and I might not get to bake all these cookies. I’d been waiting my whole life to bake all these cookies.”

  Everyone who wound up at Eleanor West’s School—everyone who found a door—understood what it was to spend a lifetime waiting for something that other people wouldn’t necessarily understand. Not because they were better than other people and not because they were worse, but because they had a need trapped somewhere in their bones, gnawing constantly, trying to get out.

  “We won’t,” promised Kade.

  Layla relaxed.

  In the kitchen, a timer dinged. Layla stood, brushing cocoa powder off her knees and bottom, before saying, “Let’s see what we’ve got,” and starting back. The others followed, Rini walking slower and slower until she was pacing slightly behind Cora.

  Cora turned to look at her quizzically. “Don’t you want to see your mom?” she asked.

  “She won’t be, not yet,” said Rini. “If this worked, she’s not my mother today, and if it didn’t, she won’t be my mother tomorrow. Is it better, in Logic? Where time does the same thing every day, and runs in just one line, and your mother is always your mother, and can always wipe your tears and tell you that there, there, it’s going to be all right, you are my peppermint star and my sugar syrup sea, and I’ll never leave you, and I certainly won’t get killed before you can even be born?”

  Cora hesitated.

  “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.