“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 forward, 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.
Cora kicked.
Sometimes she thought she had always been a mermaid: that her time among the two-legged people had been the fluke, and that her reality was her, well, flukes. She was meant to live a wet and watery existence, free from the tyranny of gravity—which had been trying to ruin her day even more than usual, starting with Rini’s fall into the turtle pond. She kicked, and the sea responded, propelling her ever upward, turning effort into momentum.
This, right here, this was what life was supposed to be. Just her, and an environment where her size was an asset, not an impediment. Her lungs were large. Her legs were strong. She was flying, and even having Christopher clutched in her arms did nothing to slow her down.
They broke the surface of the sea in a spray of soda and bubbles. Rini and Kade were still bobbing there, waiting, as was Sumi’s skeleton, which floated like a bath toy for the world’s most morbid child.
Christopher’s head lolled, his mouth hanging slackly open, a trickle of pink soda running from lips to chin. Cora cast wildly around until she spotted the distant streak of the shore. It wasn’t so far: maybe fifty yards. She could do that.
“Come on!” she shouted, and swam, rapidly outpacing her companions. That didn’t matter. They didn’t matter. Christopher was the one who was drowning, who had already drowned. Christopher was the one she had to save.
In what felt like the blink of an eye, she was staggering back onto her unwanted legs, carrying Christopher out of the fizzing waves and onto the shore. It was made of brown sugar and cake crumbs, she realized, as she was in the act of throwing him down onto it. Still he didn’t move. She rolled him onto his side, pounding on his back until a gush of pink liquid burst from his mouth, sinking rapidly into the sugary shore. Still he didn’t move.
Cora grimaced, realizing what she had to do, and rolled him onto his back, beginning to go through the steps of CPR. She had taken all the lifeguard courses between ninth and tenth grade, intending to spend the summer sitting by the pool, keeping kids from drowning. Maybe even protecting the shyer, fatter ones from their peers, who would always find reason to make fun.
(She hadn’t been counting on her own peers, who had been even more inclined to make fun than their younger brothers and sisters. She hadn’t counted on the notes stuffed into her locker, crueler and colder than the ones she received at school, where at least the other students were used to her, had had the time to learn to think of her as something other than “the fat girl.” She had never put on her red swimsuit or her whistle. She had done … something else, instead, and when she had woken up to find herself in the Trenches, she had thought the afterlife was surprisingly kind, not realizing that this was still the duringlife, and that life would always find a new way to be cruel.)
She breathed for him. She pushed against his chest until finally, it began moving on its own; until Christopher rolled onto his side again, this time under his own power, and vomited a second gush of fizzing pink liquid onto the sand. He began to cough, and she leaned forward, helping him into a sitting position, rubbing slow, soothing circles on his back.
“Breathe,” she said. “You need to breathe.”
There was a commotion behind her. She didn’t turn. She knew what she would see: two people who didn’t swim enough staggering out of the waves, with a skeleton following close behind. When that had become the new normal, she couldn’t possibly have said.
Christopher coughed again before his head snapped up, eyes widening in alarm. Cora sighed.
“It’s in your hand,” she said. “You didn’t drop it. I wouldn’t let you.”
He looked down, relaxing slightly when he saw the flute. He still didn’t speak.
Cora sat back on her calves, knees folded beneath her, sticky pink liquid soaking every inch of her, and for the first time since leaving the Trenches, she felt almost content. She felt almost like she was home. Turning, she told Kade and Rini, “He’s going to be all right.”
“Thank God,” said Kade. “Aunt Eleanor will forgive me for Nadya deciding to stay behind in an Underworld that might border on her own, but she wouldn’t forgive me for a drowning.”
“Why wouldn’t he have been all right?” asked Rini. “It’s just sugar.”
“People who don’t come from here can die if they breathe too much liquid,” said Cora. “It’s called ‘drowning.’”
Rini looked alarmed. “What a dreadful world you have. I wouldn’t want to live in a place where mothers die and people can’t breathe the sea.”
“Yeah, well, you work with what you have,” muttered Cora, thinking about pills and pools and drownings. She turned back to Christopher. “Feel like you can get up?”
He nodded, still silently. Leaning forward, Cora hooked her hands under his arms and stood, pulling him along with her, providing the leverage he needed to get his feet back under himself. Christopher coughed one more time, pressing a hand to the base of his throat.
“Burns,” he rasped.
“That’s the carbonation,” said Cora. “Don’t breathe soda. Don’t breathe water either, unless you’re built for it. Chlorine fucks you up pretty bad too. It’ll pass.”
Christopher nodded, lowering his hand and letting it join its partner in gripping the bone flute, which was already dry and didn’t appear to have been stained by its passage through an infinity of pink dye.
The same couldn’t be said for the rest of them. Kade’s formerly white shirt was now a pleasant shade of pink, and Rini’s dress was less “melting sherbet” and more “strawberry smoothie.” Cora had been wearing dark colors, but her white socks weren’t anymore. Even Sumi glittered with tiny beads of pink liquid, like jewels in the sun.
“This just keeps getting weirder and I’m not sure I like it,” muttered Cora.
Kade gave her a sympathetic look before running a hand back over his hair, releasing a sticky wave of soda. “Try not to think about it too hard. We don’t know how much logic this place can handle, and if it starts trying to break us because we’re applying too many rules, we’re going to have a problem.” He turned to Rini. “We’re on your home turf now. Where do we go to find your mother’s nonsense? We’re going to need that if we want to put her back together.”
Cora swallowed a cascade of giggles. They would have sounded hysterical, she knew: they would have sounded like she could no longer cope. And that wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. She was a solid, practical person, and while she had accepted the existence of magic—sort of hard not to, under the circumstances—there was a lot of ground between “magic is real, other worlds are real, mermaids can be real, in a world that wants them” and “everything is real, women fall out of the sky into turtle ponds, skeletons walk, and we left my best friend in the underworld.”
When she got back to the school, she was going to draw herself a hot bath, curl up in the tub, and sleep for days.
“This is the Strawberry Sea,” said Rini uncomfortably, looking around. “The Meringue Mountains are to the west, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain is to the east. If we chart a course between them, through the Fondant Forests, we should come to the farmlands. That’s where my home is. There’s where my mother’s supposed to be. If her nonsense were going to go anywhere, it would probably go there.”
“Just how Nonsense is this world, Rini?” asked Kade. “None of us went to nonsensical places, and Nonsense, it tends to reject what doesn’t belong inside of it. We tend to haul logic in our wake, like dirt on our shoes.”
“I don’t understand,” said Rini.
“If people don’t normally drown when they breathe water here, and Christopher almost drowned, that’s logic seeping in,” said Kade. “We need to fix your mother and get out of here before the world decides to shove us out.”
“Where would we go?” asked Cora.
“That’s the sort of philosophical question that my aunt loves and I hate,” said Kade. “Maybe we’d go back to the school, or back to the Halls of the Dead, and get stuck hanging out watching Nancy play garden gnome forever. Or maybe we’d get knocked back through our doors.” His mouth was a thin, grim line. “Good for you. Not so good for me.”
Cora didn’t know all the circumstances of Kade’s door, but she knew enough to know that he was one of the only students who had no desire to go back. While the rest of them searched, he sat back and watched, content to know that the school would be his home for the rest of his life. That was good. Someone needed to keep the lighthouse fires burning, because there would always be lost children looking for the light. It was also terrible. No one should find the place where they belonged and then reject it.
“Confection is Confection,” said Rini, sounding confused. “Mom always said it was Nonsense, and then she’d laugh and kiss me and say, ‘But things still do what they do, and babies still get born.’”
“So it’s a Nonsense world with consistent internal rules,” said Kade, sounding relieved. “You’re probably near the border of Logic, or have a strong underpinning of Reason. Either way, we’re not likely to get spit out unless we start trying to deny the reality around us. No one talk about nutrition.”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” said Christopher.
Cora, who was slowly coming to realize that she was a fat girl in a world made entirely of cake—something the students at her old school would probably have called her deepest fantasy—said nothing as her cheeks flared red.
The five of them trudged along the crumble and sugar beach, moving toward the graham cracker and shortbread bedrock up ahead. Only Sumi seemed to have no trouble with the uneven ground: she was too light to sink into the sand, and walked blithely on the top of it, leaving bony footprints behind her. She was a strange double-exposure of an impossibility, rainbow skeleton and solemn black-and-white teen at the same time, and just looking at her was enough to make Cora shudder. Either of the images Sumi currently presented would have been bad. Both of them together was somehow offensive, too contradictory to be possible, too concrete to be denied.
“How far is the walk to your farm?” asked Kade.
Rini thought a moment before saying, “No more than a day. ‘A good day’s journey is like baking soda: use it well, and the cake will rise up to meet you.’”
Christopher blinked. “You mean the world rearranges itself so that everyplace you want to go is within a day’s walk from where you are?”
“Well, sure,” said Rini. “Isn’t that how it works where you’re from?”
“Sadly, no.”
“Huh,” said Rini. “And you call my world nonsensical.”
Christopher didn’t have an answer to that.
Cora’s calves were aching by the time they reached the end of the beach, and it was sweet relief to step up onto the solid bedrock of baked goods, feeling them firm beneath her feet. The graham cracker and shortbread had more give to it than rock would have, like walking on the rubber-infused concrete at Disneyland. She still desperately wanted to sit down, but if all the roads here were like this one, she would be okay for a while.
They hadn’t walked very far when the first of the vegetation began to appear—if you could call it that. The trees had gingerbread and fudge trunks, and spun-sugar leaves surrounding clusters of gummy fruit and jelly beans. The grass looked like it had been piped from a frosting bag. Rini paused to lean up onto her toes and grab a handful of cake pops off the lower branches of a tree, beginning to munch as she resumed walking.
“It’s never a good idea to eat the ground,” she said blithely, cake between her teeth and frosting on her lips. “People walk on it.”
“But if the dirt here is edible, what does it matter if somebody’s feet are dirty?” asked Christopher.
Rini swallowed before giving him a withering look and saying, “We still pee. People pee, and then other people step in it, and they walk on the ground. I don’t want to eat something that has somebody’s pee on it. That’s gross. Do they eat pee where you come from?”
“It’s not a given!” protested Christopher. “None of the skeletons in Mariposa do … that. They eat sometimes, and they still enjoy the taste of wine and ginger beer, but they don’t have stomachs, so everything goes straight through them.”
Cora blinked at him. “But you—”
“Don’t ask.” Christopher shook his head. “It was messy and unpleasant and we worked it out eventually, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Rini,” said Kade, before she could ask Christopher to explain further, “how is it that everything here’s made out of candy except for the people?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” Rini bit into another cake pop, swallowing before she said, “Confection is like a jawbreaker. Layers and layers and layers, all stacked on top of each other, going all the way down to the very middle, which is just this hard little ball of rock and sadness. Sort of like your world, only smaller.”
“Thanks,” said Kade flatly.
Rini didn’t seem to notice. “It’s a world, so even though nobody lived there, somebody eventually had a door that led there. She looked around, and she thought, ‘Well, this is awful,’ and then she thought, ‘It would be better if I had some bread,’ and then she found a stove and all the stuff she needed for bread, because Confection was already wanting to be born. So she baked and baked and baked. She baked all the bread she could eat, and then she baked herself a bed, and then she baked herself a house to put her bed in, and then she thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I had something softer to walk on,’ and she baked enough bread to go all the way around the world twice, so that the stone was gone, and she had a whole kingdom out of bread. It was still pretty small, though, and eventually she got bored and baked herself a doorway home, and she never came back.” She paused. “But her daughter did. And her daughter didn’t much care for bread, on account of how she’d been a baker’s daughter all her life, but wow, did she like cookies.…”
Rini’s story went on and on, spinning out the creation of Confection in great, lazy loops as the bakers—what seemed like an endless succession of bakers, one after the other—came through the door the Breadmaker had baked. Each of them stayed long enough to add another layer to the world, becoming the next name in the long pantheon of Confection’s culinary gods.
“… and after the Brownie-maker put down her layer of the world, plants started growing. I guess that’s just what happens when you have that much sugar in one place.”
“No,” said Cora. “No, it’s usually really not.” She wanted to say more, like how bread got stale and moldy, and ice cream wasn’t usually stable enough to serve as the basis for a glacier, no matter how cold it got, but she bit her tongue. The rules were different here, as they had been different in the Trenches, and in the Halls of the Dead, and in all the worlds on the other side of a disappearing, impossible door.
Rini would probably be horrified to hear about bread mold and freezer burn and all the other things that could happen to the base materials of her world on the other side of the door. And maybe that explained the conception of Confection. Maybe the first baker, the girl who just wanted to make bread, had come from a place where there was never enough food, or where the bread went bad before she could eat it. So she’d baked and baked and baked, until her stomach wasn’t empty anymore, until she wasn’t afraid of starving, and then she’d gone home, having learned the only lesson that a small and empty world had to teach her.
According to Rini, Confection was like a jawbreaker. Cora thought it was more like a pearl, layers on layers on layers, all surrounding that first, all-encompassing need. Hunger was about as primal as needs got. What if all worlds were like that? What if they were all built up by the travelers who tripped over a doorway and found their way to someplace perfect, someplace hyperreal, someplace they could need? Someplace where that need could be met?
The beach was too far behind them now for the sound of the waves to reach, although the air still smelled faintly of strawberry. Cora supposed that could be a consequence of the soda soaked into their clothes, which was drying sweet and sticky on the skin. A fly buzzed over to investigate, its body made of a fat black jellybean, its legs strands of thinly twisted licorice. She swatted it away.
Rini, her cheeks still bulging with cake pop, stopped walking. “Uh-oh,” she said, voice rendered thick and gooey by the contents of her mouth. She swallowed hard. “We have a problem.”
“What is it?” asked Kade.
Rini pointed.
There, ahead, coming over a hill made of treacle tart and whipped meringue, rode what seemed like the beginnings of an army. It was impossible to tell at this distance whether their horses were real or some extremely clever bit of baking, but that didn’t really matter, because a sword made of sugar can still be sharp enough to cleave all the way to the bone. The knights who rode those implacable steeds wore foiled armor that glittered in the sun, and there was no question of their intentions.
“Run, maybe?” said Rini, and turned, and fled, with the others close behind her.
* * *
OF COURSE THEY TRIED to run: to do anything else would have been foolish.
Of course they failed. Of the five of them, only Cora ran with any regularity, and while she could be remarkably fast when she wanted to, she was more interested in endurance than in sprinting. Sumi was skeletal, lacking the large muscles that would have made it possible for her to take advantage of her light frame. Rini ran like someone who had never considered exercise to be a required part of daily life: she was slim but out of shape, and was the first to fall behind.
Kade and Christopher did the best they could, but the one was a tailor and the other had just come within a stone’s throw of drowning; neither of them were very well equipped to run. In short order, they were all surrounded by armored knights on horses.
Seen up close, the horses were clearly flesh and blood, although their armor appeared to have been made from hard candy and peanut brittle, wrapped in foil to keep it from sticking to human skin or horse hair.
“Rini Onishi, you are under arrest for crimes against the Queen of Cakes,” said the lead rider. Rini bared her teeth at him. He ignored her. “You will come with us.”
“Well, shit,” said Christopher, and that was exactly right, and there was nothing more to say.