THE STRANGER WAS NO longer in the turtle pond. That was an improvement, of a sort, but only of a sort: without the water and the turtles to drape her, the stranger had no clothes remaining at all. She was standing naked in the mud, arms crossed, glowering at Nadya, who was trying to look at anything but her.
Christopher whistled as he came over the rise, walking to the left of Kade. Cora, who was on Kade’s right, blushed red and turned her eyes away.
“She looks sort of like Sumi, if Sumi were older, and taller, and hotter,” said Christopher. “Did someone place an order with a company that drops beautiful Japanese girls from the sky? Do they take special requests?”
“The only kind of girl you’d want dropped on you comes from a medical supply company,” said Kade.
Christopher laughed. Cora blushed even harder.
Nadya, who had spotted the three of them, was waving her arms frantically over her head, signaling her distress. In case this wasn’t enough, she shouted, “Over here! Next to the naked lady!”
“A cake’s a cake, whether or not it’s been frosted,” said the stranger primly.
“You are not a cake, you are a human being, and I can see your vagina,” snapped Nadya.
The stranger shrugged. “It’s a nice one. I’m not ashamed of it.”
Kade walked a little faster.
Once he was close enough to speak without needing to shout, he said, “Hello. I’m Kade West. I’m the assistant headmaster here at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Can I help you?”
The naked girl swung around to face him, dropping her arms and beginning to gesticulate wildly. The fact that she was now talking to two boys, in addition to the two girls who had been there when she fell out of the sky, didn’t appear to trouble her at all.
“I’m looking for my mother,” she said loudly. “She was here, and now she’s not, and I have a problem, so find her and give her back right now, because I need her more than you do!”
“Slow down,” said Kade, and because he made the request sound so reasonable, the stranger stopped shouting and simply looked at him, blinking wide and slightly bewildered eyes. “Let’s start with something easy. What’s your name?”
“Onishi Rini,” said the stranger—said Rini. She really did look remarkably like Sumi, if Sumi had been allowed to live long enough to finish working her way through the kinks and dead-end alleys of puberty, growing tall and lithe and high-breasted. Only her eyes were different. They were a shocking shade of orange, for the most part, with a thin ring of white around the pupils and a thin ring of yellow around the outside of the irises.
She had candy corn eyes. Kade looked at them and knew, without question, without doubt, that she was Sumi’s daughter, that in some future, some impossible, broken future, Sumi had been able to make it home to her candy corn farmer. That somewhere, somehow, Sumi had been happy, until somehow her past self had been murdered, and everything had come tumbling down.
Sometimes living on the outskirts of Nonsense simply wasn’t fair.
“I’m Kade,” he said. “These are my friends, Christopher, Cora, and Nadya.”
“I’m not his friend,” said Nadya. “I’m a Drowned Girl.” She bared her teeth in mock-threat.
Kade ignored her. “It’s nice to meet you, Rini. I just wish it were under slightly better circumstances. Will you come back to the house with me? I manage the school wardrobe. I can find you something to wear.”
“Why?” asked Rini peevishly. “Are you insulted by my vagina too? Do people in this world not have them?”
“Many people do, and there’s nothing wrong with them, and also that’s your vulva, but it’s considered a little rude to run around showing your genitals to people who haven’t asked,” said Kade. “Eleanor is in the house, and once you’re dressed, we can sit down and talk.”
“I don’t have time to talk,” said Rini. “I need my mother. Please, where is she?”
“Rini—”
“You don’t understand!” Rini’s voice was an anguished howl. She held out her left hand. “I don’t have time!”
“Huh,” said Nadya.
That was the only thing any of them said. The rest were busy looking at Rini’s left hand, with its two missing fingers. They hadn’t been cut off: there was no scar tissue. She hadn’t been born that way: the place where her fingers should have been was too obviously empty, like a hole in the world. They were simply gone, fading from existence as her own future caught up to the idea that somehow, someway, her mother had never been able to conceive her, and so she had never been born.
Rini lowered her hand. “Please,” she repeated.
“This changes things,” said Kade. “Come on.”
* * *
RINI WAS TALL and thin, but many of the students were tall and thin: too many, as far as Cora was concerned. She didn’t like the idea that people who already had socially acceptable bodies would get the adventures, too. She knew it was a small and petty thought, one she shouldn’t have had in the first place, much less indulged, but she couldn’t stop herself from feeling how she felt. Rini had the fashion sense of a drunken mockingbird, attracted to the brightly colored and the shiny, and that, too, was not uncommon among the students, many of whom had traveled to worlds where the idea of subtlety was ignored in favor of the much more entertaining idea of hurting people’s eyes.
In the end, Kade had coaxed her into a rainbow sundress, dyed so that the colors melded into each other like a scoop of sherbet in the sun. He had given her slippers for her feet, both in the same style and size, but dyed differently, so that one was poppy orange and the other turquoise blue. He had given her ribbons to tie in her hair, and now they were sitting, the five of them, in Eleanor’s parlor.
Eleanor sat behind her desk, hands laced tight together, like a child about to undertake her evening prayers.
“—and that’s why she can’t be dead,” concluded Rini. Her story had been long and rambling and at times nonsensical, full of political coups and popcorn-ball fights, which were like snowball fights, only stickier. She looked around at the rest of them, expression somewhere between triumphant and hopeful. She had made her case, laid it out in front of them one piece at a time, and she was ready for her reward. “So please, can we go and tell her to stop? I need to exist. It’s important.”
“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.”