Beneath the Sugar Sky

  “Even if you can find her ghost, that’s just the part of her that’s waiting to be reborn,” said Nancy. “Who she was isn’t going to be here.”

  “We have to try,” said Rini. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

  Nancy sighed, a deep, slow sound that started at her toes and traveled all the way up her body. She uncurled her legs and slid down from her pedestal, landing without a sound. As she fell, her skirt rode up just enough for Kade to see that her feet were bare, and that there was a ring on every one of her toes, shimmering and silver.

  “Follow me,” she said, and bowed to the Lady, and walked away. Every step she took chimed like a bell as the rings on her toes struck the ground.

  Kade followed her, and the rest followed him, and they left the remaining statues and the Lady of the Dead behind.

  * * *

  KADE STOLE GLANCES at Nancy as they walked, trying to memorize the new shape of her face. She was thinner, but not alarmingly so; this was the thinness of a professional athlete at the top of their game, the thinness of someone who did something physical every hour of the day. Her hair was still white, her eyes were still dark, and she was still beautiful. God, but she was beautiful.

  Nadya shoved her way between them, demanding, “So is that all you do all day? You stand there? You left a whole world full of shit to do and people to talk to so you could stand there?”

  “It’s more than just standing there,” said Nancy. “Hello, Nadya. You’re looking well.”

  “I’m drying out, and this world has no good rivers,” said Nadya.

  “We have a few.” Nancy shook her head. “I don’t ‘just stand there.’ It’s like a dance, done entirely in stillness. I have to freeze so completely that my heart forgets to beat, my cells forget to age. Some of the statues have been here for centuries, slowing themselves to the point of near-immortality for the sake of gracing our Lord’s halls. It’s an honor and a calling, and I love it. I love it so much.”

  “It seems stupid.”

  “That’s because you weren’t called,” said Nancy, and that was true, and simple, and complete: it needed neither ornamentation nor addition.

  Nadya looked away.

  Kade took a breath. “Things have been going well at the school,” he said. “Aunt Eleanor’s feeling better. She hardly uses her cane these days. We have some new students.”

  “You brought one of them with you,” said Nancy. She laughed a little. “Is it weird that I kind of feel like that’s more disturbing than you bringing a skeleton?”

  “Her name’s Cora. She’s nice. She was a mermaid.”

  “Then she still is,” said Nancy. “There’s always hope.”

  “Sumi used to say that hope was a four-letter word.”

  “She was right. That’s why it never goes away.” They had reached another closed door, this one a filigree of silver, containing an infinity of blackness. Nancy raised her hand. The door swung open and she continued through, into the dark—which was, once entered, not so total after all.

  Gleaming silver sparks swirled through the air, darting and flitting around the room, as swift and restless as the rest of the Halls of the Dead were still. They would fly close to a nose or a cheek, only to jerk away at the last second, never quite touching living flesh.

  Rini gasped. Everyone turned.

  Sumi was covered in the dots of light. They clustered on her bones, hundreds of them, with more arriving every second. She was holding up her skeletal hands like she was admiring them, studying the shimmering specks of light that perched on her phalanges. Dots of light had even filled her eye sockets, replacing her empty gaze with something disturbingly vital.

  “If she’s here, she’s one of these,” said Nancy, spreading her arms to indicate the room. “The souls who come to rest here arrive in this room first. They dance their restlessness away before they incarnate again. Call her, and see if she comes.”

  “Christopher?” said Kade.

  “I play for skeletons, not souls,” protested Christopher, even as he raised his flute to his mouth and blew a silent, experimental note. The specks of light abandoned Sumi, rising into the air and swirling wildly around him. He continued to play, until, bit by bit, some of the light peeled away and returned to the air, while some of the light began to coalesce in front of Sumi’s skeleton. Bit by bit, particle by particle, it came together, until the glowing, translucent ghost of a teenage girl was standing there.

  She wore a sensible school uniform, white knee socks, plaid skirt, and buttoned blazer. Her hair was pulled into low braids, tamed, contained. It was Sumi, yes, but Sumi rendered motionless, Sumi stripped of laughter and nonsense. Rini gasped again, this time with pain, and raised her remaining hand and the stump of what had been its twin to cover her mouth.

  The specter of Sumi looked at the skeleton. The skeleton looked at the specter.

  “Why is she like that?” whispered Rini. “What did you do to my mother?”

  “I told you, we have her ghost, but not her shadow—not her heart. Her heart was a wild thing, and this isn’t where the wild things go,” said Nancy. “If it were, I wouldn’t be here. I was never a wild thing.” She looked at the shade of Sumi with regret and, yes, love in her eyes. “We’re all puzzle boxes, skeleton and skin, soul and shadow. You have two of the pieces now, if she’ll go with you, but I don’t think her shadow’s here.”

  “Mama…” The word belonged to the lips of a much younger girl, meant for bedtimes and bad times, for skinned knees and stomach aches. Rini offered it to Sumi’s shade like it was a promise and a prayer at the same time, like it was something precious, to be treasured. “I need you. Please. We need you. The Queen of Cakes will rise again if you don’t come home.”

  The Queen of Cakes would never have been defeated: Sumi had died before she could return to Confection and overthrow the government. Rini wasn’t just saving herself. She was saving a world, setting right what was on the verge of going wrong.

  The carefully groomed shade of Sumi looked at her blankly, uncomprehending. Nancy, who understood the dead of this place in a way that none of the others did, cleared her throat.

  “It will make a mess if you don’t go with them,” she said.

  The shade turned to look at her before nodding and stepping forward, into the skeleton, wreathing the bones in phantom flesh. Rini started to reach for her with her sole remaining hand, and stopped as she saw that two more of her fingers were gone, fading into nothing at all.

  “We have to hurry,” she said.

  “You have to pay,” said a new voice.

  All of them turned as one. Only Nancy smiled when she saw the man standing in the doorway. He was tall and thin, with skin the color of volcanic ash and hair the color of bone. Like his wife, he wore a flowing garment, almost Grecian in design, which drew the eye to the length of his limbs and the broadness of his shoulders.

  “Nothing here is free,” he said. “Eat nothing, drink nothing; visitors are told that upon arrival. What makes you think we would give our treasures away, if we will not share our water?” His voice was deep, low, and inevitable, like the death of stars.

  “What do you need us to pay, sir?” asked Kade warily.

  The Lord of the Dead looked at him with pale and merciless eyes. “One of you will have to stay behind.”

  6

  WE PAY WHAT WE PAY; THE WORLD GOES ON

  “NO,” SAID KADE, without hesitation. “We’re not for sale.”

  “This isn’t a sale,” said the Lord of the Dead. “This is an exchange. You want to take one of my residents on a fool’s errand. You want to promise her that she can be alive again, when there’s no possible way. I would forbid you entirely if I thought you would listen, but you’re not the first among the living to seek to play Orpheus and lure what’s mine away. Putting a price on the process is the only way to keep you people from robbing me blind.”

  “Sir,” said Nancy, and curtseyed, deep and low. She froze when she was folded fully for
ward, becoming a statue again.

  The Lord of the Dead smiled. He looked strangely human, when he smiled. “My Nancy,” he said, and there was no doubting the fondness in his tone. “These are your friends?”

  “From school,” she said, rising. “This is Kade.”

  “Ah. The fabled boy.” He turned to Kade. “Nancy speaks highly of you.”

  “Highly enough for you to give us a freebie?”

  “Alas.”

  “Wait.” Nadya took a step forward, nervous, glancing around at the others. Her hair, dry after so long away from either bathtub or turtle pond, was a fluffy brown cloud around her head. “Mr. Lord of the Dead, do you have turtles here? Not ghost turtles, I mean. Real turtles, the kind that swim in ponds and do turtle stuff.”

  “There are turtles in the River of Forgotten Souls,” said the Lord of the Dead, looking faintly baffled.

  “Okay,” said Nadya. “Okay, okay. Because your, um, your wife, she said she knew Belyyreka. That’s where my doorway led. To a Drowned World, where I was a Drowned Girl. I still am. It’s too dry where I come from. The air doesn’t forgive.”

  “I know the place,” said the Lord of the Dead solemnly.

  “Doors can open anywhere if the worlds are close enough together, can’t they? Rini”—she gestured toward the sniffling girl with the candy corn eyes—“said a boy from the world she comes from found his door and went away, to someplace where he was better suited. If I stayed here, and Belyyreka wanted me back, could my door still find me?”

  “Nadya, no,” said Cora.

  “Yes,” said the Lord of the Dead. “And for that, for Belyyreka, I would let you go. For that, I would stand aside and release all claim to you.”

  Nadya looked around at the others. “I’ve been at the school for five years. I’ll be seventeen in a month. A year after that and then I graduate, and my family starts expecting me to go somewhere, to make something of my life. I can’t live on a countdown. I want to go home, and that means waiting until Belyyreka calls me back. I’m not a political exile like Sumi. I’m not a cultural exile like Kade, either. I just got caught in the wrong current. I want to go home. I can wait here just as well as I can wait on campus.”

  “Nadya, no,” said Cora, with more desperation. “You can’t leave me. You’re the only real friend I’ve got.”

  Nadya’s smile was uneven and quick. “See, that’s the best reason for me to stay here. You need to make more friends, Cora. I can’t be the only estuary in your waterway.”

  “Aunt Eleanor’s going to kill me,” muttered Kade.

  “Not when you tell her it was my choice, and that this place is closer to Belyyreka than the school ever was,” said Nadya, dismissing his concerns with an airy wave of her hand. She turned to the Lord of the Dead. “If you’ll let my friends go, and you’ll let me take my door home when it appears, I’ll stay with you. I’ll haunt your rivers and terrorize your turtles and I’ll never be still, but you don’t want someone still, or you wouldn’t have asked for any of us. You just want someone to stay so you feel like you’re in charge of everything.”

  “Guilty as charged,” said the Lord of the Dead, with a very faint smile. “You will stay?”

  “I’ll stay,” said Nadya.

  Kade closed his eyes, looking pained.

  “The compact is sealed.” The Lord of the Dead turned to the group. “Your payment is given; the shade may go with you. Nancy?”

  “Yes, milord?”

  “Show your friend to the river.”

  “Yes, milord,” said Nancy, and turned to Nadya. “Follow me.”

  The others stood, silently watching, as the girl who had left them to grace her master’s hall led Nadya the Drowned Girl away, toward the river, toward the future, whatever that future might entail. Neither of them looked back. Neither of them said goodbye. The shade-shrouded skeleton of Sumi was a patient reminder of why they had decided to meet this price, and of what it would have to redeem.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Kade finally. “We’ll be going now.”

  “Wait,” said Christopher.

  The Lord of the Dead turned to him. “Yes, child of Mariposa?”

  “I can pipe the bones of the dead out of the earth, and back in Mariposa, that’s enough: nothing’s missing. Something’s missing with Sumi. The nonsense didn’t come here, Nancy said. Where did it go?”

  “The same place nonsense always goes,” said the Lord of the Dead. “It went home. Even when a door never opens during the lifetime of a wanderer, they find their rest after death.”

  “Home…” said Kade slowly. He turned to Rini. “All right. Take us to Confection.”

  Rini’s eyes lit up. She didn’t hesitate, just raised her bracelet to her mouth and bit off another bead, crunching loudly as she swallowed.

  The door opened directly under their feet, swinging wide, and then they were falling, four living teenagers and one glimmering skeleton. Rini laughed all the way down. The door slammed shut behind them.

  The Lord of the Dead looked at the place where it had been and sighed before waving his hand, sending the specks of light dancing around the room. The living were always in such a hurry. They would learn soon enough.

  * * *

  RINI’S DOOR HAD opened above what Cora would have called an ocean, had it not been bright pink and gently bubbling. Christopher curled into a ball as he fell, using his entire body to protect his flute. Kade fell like an amateur, all flailing limbs and panic. Rini was laughing, spinning wildly in the air, like she didn’t really believe that gravity would hurt her. Sumi’s skeleton merely dropped. Dead people probably didn’t worry too much about drowning.

  Cora, once the surprise powerhouse of her school swim team, curved her body into a bow, arms stretched out in front of her, hands together, head tucked down to reduce the chances of her neck snapping on impact. That didn’t happen often. She didn’t often see divers leap from this height.

  I’m flying, she thought giddily, and who cared if the sea below her was pink and the air around her smelled of sugar and strawberry syrup? Who cared? The school had a turtle pond and bathtubs big enough for her to sink down to her nose, only the small islands of her knees and the peak of her belly standing above the surface, but there was no pool, there was no ocean. She hadn’t been swimming since she’d left the Trenches, and every molecule of her body yearned for the moment when she would be surrounded by the sea.

  They hit the surface all at the same time, Kade and Christopher with enormous splashes, Rini and Sumi with smaller ones, and Cora slicing through the surface of the waves like a harpoon, cutting down, down, down into the pink, bubbling depths.

  She was the first to burst back into the air, the force of her mermaid-trained kicks driving her several feet above the pinkish foam as she sputtered and exclaimed, “It’s soda!”

  Rini laughed as she came bobbing back up. “Strawberry rhubarb soda!” she cheered. One of her ears was gone, following her fingers into nothingness. She didn’t appear to have noticed. “We’re home, we’re home, we’re home in the foam!” She splashed Cora with her remaining hand, sending soda droplets in all directions.

  Kade was sputtering when he surfaced. Sumi’s bones simply floated to the top, buoyant beyond all human measure.

  Cora frowned. “Where’s Christopher?” she asked, looking at Kade.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw where everyone was when we were falling.” She had been the only one composed enough to check. The others had been panicking, or plummeting, not trying to get their bearings. She couldn’t blame them. Everyone’s lives prepared them for something different. “He was right next to you.”

  Kade’s eyes widened. “I don’t know.”

  There wasn’t time to keep talking: not if she wanted this to end well. Cora took a deep breath before she dove, wishing briefly that she had a hair tie, or better yet, that she had her gills.

  The sea of strawberry rhubarb soda—and who did that? They were all going to
get horrible urinary tract infections after this—was translucent, lighter than normal water. The bubbles stung her eyes, but she could deal with the pain. Chlorine was worse.

  (It was hard not to think about the damage that sugar and carbonation might do—but Rini wasn’t worried, and this was Rini’s ocean, in Rini’s Nonsense world. Maybe things worked differently here. Things seemed to work differently everywhere she went. Anyway, things had to be at least slightly different, or they wouldn’t have been able to stay afloat.)

  A long eel swam by, seemingly made of living saltwater taffy. The strange shape of its body called to mind the concept of peppermint sharks and turtles with jawbreaker shells, of fish like gumdrops and jellybeans, a whole ecosystem made of living sugar, thriving in a place where the rules were different, where the rules had no concern for how things worked elsewhere. Elsewhere was a legend and a lie, until it came looking for you.

  Down, down, down into the strawberry rhubarb sea Cora dove, until she saw something falling slowly through the sea. It looked too solid to be made of candy, and too dark to be prepared for a children’s goodie bag. She swam harder, instinctively pressing her legs together and dolphin-kicking her way downward. Even in the absence of fin and scale, she had been the hero of the Trenches, the mermaid who swam as though the Devil himself were behind her. Quickly, she was at Christopher’s side, gathering him out of the soda.

  His eyes were closed. No bubbles trickled from his nose or mouth. But he was holding his bone flute tightly in one hand. Cora hoped that meant he was still alive. Wouldn’t he have let go, if he were already gone?

  He wasn’t going to let go of the flute. Normally, she would have hooked her hands under his arms, using his armpits to drag him with her, but if that caused him to lose his grip, he was going to insist on going back down to try to find his last piece of home. She could understand that. So she held him to her chest in a parody of a bridal carry, or of the Creature from the Black Lagoon carrying his beautiful victim out of the water. Christopher didn’t stir.