Beneath the Sugar Sky

  “I’m so sorry, dear, but death doesn’t work that way in this world,” said Eleanor. Each word seemed to pain her, driving her shoulders deeper and deeper into their slump. “This is a logical world. Actions have consequences here. Dead is dead, and buried is buried.”

  Rini frowned. “That’s silly and it’s stupid and I’m not from a logical world, and neither is my mother, so that shouldn’t matter for us. I need her back. I need to be born. It’s important. I’m important.”

  “Everyone is important,” said Eleanor.

  Rini looked around at the rest of them. “Please,” she pleaded. “Please, make the silly old woman stop being awful, and give me back my mother.”

  “Don’t call my aunt a silly old woman,” said Kade.

  “It’s all right, dear,” said Eleanor. “I am a silly old woman, and I’ve been called worse with less reason. I can’t fix this. I wish I could.”

  Cora, who had been frowning more and more since Rini had finished her story, looked up, looked at Rini, and asked, “How did you get here?”

  “I just told you,” said Rini. “My mother and father had sex before bringing in the candy corn harvest, the year after she defeated the Queen of Cakes at the Raspberry Bridge. You do have sex here, don’t you? Or do people in a logical world reproduce by budding? Is that why you were so upset by my vagina?”

  Kade put his hand over his face.

  “Um,” said Cora, cheeks flaring red. “Yes, we, uh, we have sex, and can we please stop saying ‘vagina’ so much, but I meant how did you get here. How did you wind up in our turtle pond?”

  “Oh!” Rini held up her right hand, the one that still had all its fingers and had yet to start fading from existence. There was a bracelet clasped around her wrist, the sort of thing a child might wear, beads on a piece of string tied tight to keep her from losing it. “The Fondant Wizard gave me a way for back-and-forth, so I could get here and find Mom and tell her to stop doing whatever she was doing that was making me never have been born. I’m supposed to be sneaking through the Treacle Bogs right now, you know, to look for threats along our western border. Important stuff. So if we could hurry up, that would be amazing.”

  Silence followed her words, silence like a bowstring, stretched tight and ready to snap. Slowly, Rini lowered her arm and looked around. Everyone was staring at her. Christopher was swallowing hard, the muscles in his throat jumping wildly. There were tears in Nadya’s eyes.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Why did you leave her here?” Kade’s voice was suddenly low and dangerous. He stood, stalking toward Rini. “When Sumi got to the school, she was a mess. I thought we were gonna lose her. I thought she was going to slice herself open to try to get the candy out of her veins, and now here you are, and you have something that means you can just … just come here and go back again, like it’s nothing. Like the doors don’t even matter. Why did you leave her here? Why didn’t someone come and get her before it was too late?”

  Rini shied back, away from him, glancing frantically to Christopher and Nadya for support. Nadya looked away. Christopher shook his head.

  “I didn’t know!” she cried. “Mom always said she’d loved it here at your school, that she made friends and learned stuff and got her head straight enough to know that she wanted it to be crooked! She never asked me to come get her sooner!”

  “If she had, you might never have been born,” said Eleanor. She cleared her throat before saying, a little more loudly, “Dearest, please don’t torture our guest. Done is done and past is past, and while we’re looking for a way to change that, I think we should focus on what can still be done, and what hasn’t already been omitted.”

  “Can those beads take us anywhere?” asked Christopher. “Any world at all?”

  “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 sh
e 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.

  It was going to be a miracle if they got where they were going without getting themselves killed. Kade supposed that joining Sumi in whatever afterlife she was in—presumably one that catered to teenagers who’d gone through impossible doors—would be a bad thing. All of them winding up dead would upset Eleanor, as well as leaving the school without a van. Kade ground his teeth and focused on the road.

  This would have been easier if they’d been driving during the day. Sumi’s remaining family lived six hours from the school grounds, and her body was interred at a local cemetery. That was good. Grave robbing was still viewed as socially inappropriate, and doing it when the sun was up was generally viewed as unwise. Which meant it was after midnight and they were on the road, and everything about this little adventure was a terrible idea from start to finish.

  Nadya leaned over the seat to ask, “Are we there yet?”

  “Why are you even here?” Kade countered. “You can’t pipe the dead out of the ground, you can’t drive, and we’d be a lot more comfortable with only three people in the backseat.”

  “I got doused in turtle water,” said Nadya. “That means I get to come.”

  Kade sighed. “I want to argue, but I’m too damn tired. Can you at least stay in your seat? We get pulled over, we’re going to have one hell of a time explaining the severed hands, or why Christopher keeps a human ulna in his pocket.”

  “Just tell them we’re on a quest,” said Nadya.

  “Mmm,” said Kade noncommittally.

  “So are we there yet?”

  “Almost. We are almost there.” The cemetery was another five miles down the road. He’d looked it up on Google Maps. There was a convenient copse of trees about a quarter of a mile away. They could stow the van there while they went about the business of desecrating Sumi’s grave.

  Kade wasn’t religious—hadn’t been since he’d come back from Prism, forced into a body that was too young and too small and too dressed in frilly, girlish clothes by parents who refused to understand that they had a son and not a daughter—but he’d been to church often enough when he was little to be faintly worried that they were all going to wind up getting smote for crimes against God.

  “Not the way I wanted to die,” he muttered, and pulled off the road, driving toward the trees.

  “I want to die in a bed of marigolds, with butterflies hanging over me in a living canopy and the Skeleton Girl holding our marriage knife in her hand,” said Christopher.

  “What?” said Kade.

  “Nothing,” said Christopher.

  Kade rolled slowly to a stop under a spreading oak, hopefully out of sight of the road, and parked. “All right, we’re here. Everybody out.”

  He didn’t have to tell Cora twice. She had the door open before he had finished speaking, practically tumbling out into the grass. Riding in backseats always made her feel huge and worthless, taking up more space than she had any right to. The only reason she’d been able to stand it was that Nadya had been crammed into the middle, leaving Rini, still a virtual stranger, on the other side of the car. If Cora had been told she’d have to spend the entire drive pressed against someone she didn’t know, she would probably have skipped having an adventure in favor of hiding in her room.

  The others got out more sedately, even Rini, who turned in a slow circle, eyes turned toward the sky and jaw gone slack.

  “What are those?” she asked, jabbing a finger at the distant streak of the Milky Way.

  “Stars, stupid,” said Nadya.

  “I’m not stupid, I just don’t know stuff,” said Rini. “How do they stay up?”

  “They’re very far away,” said Kade. “Don’t you have stars in Confection?”

  “No,” said Rini. “There’s a moon—it’s made of buttercream frosting, very sticky, not good for picnicking on—and there’s a sun, and a long time ago, the First Confectioner threw handfuls of candy into the sky, where it stuck really high, but it’s still candy. You can see the stripes on the humbugs and the sugar speckles on the gumdrops.”

  “Huh,” said Kade. He looked to Christopher. “We need a shovel?”

  “Not if she’s willing to dance.” Christopher’s fingers played over his bone flute, sketching anxious arpeggios, outlining the tune he would play for Sumi. “If she’s willing to dance, she’d move heaven and earth to come to me.”

  “Then lead the way, piper.”

  Christopher nodded and raised his flute to his mouth, taking a deep breath before he began to play. There was no sound. There was never any sound when Christopher played the flute, not as far as the living were concerned. There was only the idea of sound, the sketchy outline of the place where it should have been, sliced out of the air like a piece of chocolate pie.

  No one knew how far he could be from the dead and still call them out of the grave, and they weren’t sure exactly where in the cemetery Sumi’s body was buried, and so he played as they walked toward the gates, putting everything he had into calling her and only her, Sumi, the wild girl who died too soon and too cruelly, rather than all the sleeping bones the graveyard had to offer. It had been too long since he’d been to a proper dance, one where the women wore garlands of flowers low on their hips and the men rattled their finger bones like castanets, where the dancers traded garments and genders and positions as easily as trading a blossom for a bolero. It was tempting, to call all the skeletons of this place to him, to lose himself in a revel while the moon was high.

  But that wouldn’t save Rini, and it wouldn’t be what he had promised Miss Eleanor he’d do. So he played for an audience of one, and when he heard Cora gasp, he smiled around his flute and continued fingering the stops, calling Sumi from her slumber.

  She came, a lithe, delicate skeleton wrapped in a pearlescent sheen, like opal, like sugar glass. The cemetery gates had been designed to keep the living out, not the dead in; she stepped sideways and slipped right through the bars, her fleshless body fitting perfectly in the gap. Christopher stopped walking but kept playing as Sumi, risen from the grave, walked across the field to meet them.

  “Where’s the rest of her?” demanded Nadya.

  “He doesn’t pipe flesh, only bone,” said Kade. “He’s called what will listen to him.” The flesh, softened by time, if not yet rotted away, must have shrugged away like an old overcoat, leaving Sumi shining, wrapped in rainbows, to answer Christopher’s call.

  Rini raised her hands to cover her mouth. Another of her fingers was gone, replaced by that strange, eye-rejecting void. “Mom?” she whispered.

  Sumi cocked her head to the side, more like a bird than a girl, and said nothing. Christopher hesitated before lowering his flute. When Sumi didn’t collapse into a pile of bones, he let out a long sigh, shoulders slumping with relief.

  “She can’t talk,” he said. “She doesn’t have lungs, or a voice, or anything.” At home in Mariposa, she would have been able to speak. The magic that powered that land was happy to give a voice to the dead.

  But this was not his home. Here, skeletons were silent, and only the sliver of Mariposa that he carried always with him was even enough to call them from the grave.

  “She’s dead,” said Rini, like she was realizing this for the first time. “How can she be dead?”

  “Everyone is, eventually,” said Christopher. “This next part is harder. Cora, can you open the jar with her hands, please?”

  Cora grimaced as she knelt and wrested the lid off the jar, spilling sharp-smelling liquid onto the ground. She looked to Christopher. On his nod, she dumped the jar’s contents out, jumping to her feet and stumbling back to avoid the splash.

  Christopher raised his flute and
began to play again.

  “I’m going to barf,” announced Nadya.

  The flesh on Sumi’s hands began peeling back like a flower in the process of opening, revealing clean white bone. As they all watched, the bone grew bright with rainbows, like the rest of Sumi’s skeleton.

  When the flesh had peeled away entirely, Christopher tucked his flute into his belt and bent to pick up the two skeletal hands. He offered them to Sumi. She leaned forward and touched the severed ends of her wrists to the base of the carpals. The rainbow glow intensified. She leaned back again, and she was whole, every bone in its place, every piece of her skeleton where it belonged.

  “If we’re trying to get to an Underworld, starting from a cemetery seems like the best way to do it,” said Christopher. He looked to Rini. “You can tell those beads where to take us, right?”

  “I can tell them who I want, and they get me there,” said Rini. “I couldn’t find my mother, no matter how hard I looked, so I looked for Miss Elly. That was who Mom always said made the school go.”

  “Okay,” said Christopher. “Tell the bead to take us to Nancy.”

  “I don’t know Nancy,” protested Rini.

  “Nancy’s smart,” said Kade. “She’s quiet, so sometimes people don’t know she’s smart, but the smart’s always there.”

  “She can stand so still she looks like a statue,” said Christopher.

  “She has white hair with black streaks in it and she says it isn’t dyed and her roots never grew out so she probably wasn’t lying,” said Nadya. The others looked at her, and she shrugged. “We weren’t friends. I had one group therapy session with her, and stayed out of her way. Too dry for me. Dry as bones.”

  Cora, who had come to the school after Nancy was already gone, said nothing at all.

  Rini frowned at each of them in turn. “What about the sugar?”