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.
“Oh, that’s a good smell,” she said. “That’s a right-and-ready smell. No charcoal or char.”
“How can we help?” asked Kade.
“Grab a pair of oven mitts and lift,” said Layla.
She didn’t put on oven mitts before reaching into the oven: she simply grasped the metal end of the tray in her bare hands and pulled. There was no smell of burning, and she didn’t make any sounds that would indicate that she was in pain. She might not do magic, but this world was magic, and it said that the Baker was important: the Baker would be protected.
Kade had never been very fond of cooking. Too much work for something that was too transitory. He much preferred tailoring, taking one thing and turning it into something else, something that would last. His parents had taken his interest in sewing after he got home from Prism as a sign that he was a little girl after all, until he’d started modifying his dresses, turning them into vests and shirts and other things that made him feel more comfortable.
He’d stuck his fingers with pins and cut himself with scissors more times than he could count. If someone had offered him a place where he could just sit and sew for a while, with all the fabric and findings he could ever want, with tools that wouldn’t do him harm, no matter how careless he got, well. The temptation would be more than he could handle.
Rini hung back, unable to trust her grip with so much of her hands missing, but the others lifted as Layla ordered them, two to a side, like pallbearers preparing Sumi for her final rest. They set the tray on the baker’s block at the middle of the kitchen, and Layla motioned them to step away before she reached for the sheet of parchment paper covering Sumi’s face.
Cora realized she was holding her breath.
The parchment paper came away. Sumi had been gone before Cora came to the school: there was nothing there for Cora to recognize, just a beautiful, silent, teenage girl with smooth brown skin and long black hair. Her eyes were closed, lashes resting gently on her cheeks, and her mouth was a downturned bow, mercurial even when motionless.
Rini gasped before starting to cry. “Wake her up,” she begged. “Please, please, wake her up.”
“She needs to cool,” said Layla. “If we woke her now, she’d have a fever bad enough to cook her brains and kill her all over again.”
“She looks…” Kade reached out with one shaking hand, pulling back before he could actually brush against her skin. “She looks perfect. She looks real.”
“Because she is real,” said Layla. “The hair proves it.”
“How’s that?”
“If the oven hadn’t wanted to put her back together, she wouldn’t have hair now.” Layla beamed. “She’d have a sticky black mess attached to a bunch of melted fondant—you’re not supposed to bake fondant, by the way, or frosting, or most of the other things I put onto her skeleton. Confection wanted her back, so Confection gave her back. I’m just the Baker. I put things in the oven, and the world does as it will.”
It seemed like a very precise way of avoiding accusations of magic. Kade didn’t say anything. Getting into an argument with someone who was helping was never a good idea, and in this case, making Layla doubt her place in Confection could result in a door and an expulsion, and then all of this would have been for nothing.
Sumi looked so real.
“Was making a new body out of candy and cake and everything enough?” asked Cora. “Will that give her back her nonsense?” Or would Sumi’s quiet, solemn ghost open her new eyes and ask to be taken home—not to the school, but to the parents who believed that she was dead, the ones who’d been willing to send their daughter away when she turned out to be someone other than the good girl they had raised her to be.
“I don’t know,” said Layla. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if anyone has.”
That was a lie, but it was a necessary one. Of course someone here had done this before. This was Confection, land of the culinary art become miracle: land of lonely children whose hands itched for pie tins or rolling pins, for the comfortable predictability of timers and sugar scoops and heaping cups of flour. This was a land where perfectly measured ingredients created nonsensical towers of whimsy and wonder—and maybe that was why they could be here, logical creatures that they were, without feeling assaulted by the world around them. Kade remembered his aunt’s tales of her own Nonsense realm all too well, including the way it had turned against her once she was old enough to think as an adult did, rigidly and methodically. She would always be Nonsense-touched, but somewhere along the way, time had caught up with her enough to turn her mind against the realm that was her natural home.
Confection wasn’t like that. Confection was Nonsense with rules, where baking soda would always leaven your cake and yeast would always rise. Confection could be Nonsensical because it had rules, and so Logical people could survive there, could even thrive there, once they had accepted that things weren’t quite the same as they were in other worlds.
Layla reached over and carefully touched the first two fingers of her right hand to the curve of Sumi’s remade wrist. She smiled.
“She’s cool enough,” she said. “We can wake her up now.”
“How?” asked Christopher.
“Oh.” Layla looked at him, eyes wide and surprised. “I thought you knew.”
“I do,” said Rini. She walked toward the table, and the others stood aside, letting her pass, until she was standing in front of Sumi, looking down at her with her sole remaining eye. She rested the back of her hand against her mother’s cheek. Sumi didn’t move.
“I finally had an adventure, Mama, like you’re always saying I should,” said Rini softly. “I went to see the Wizard of Fondant. I had to trade him two seasons of my share of the harvest, but he gave me traveling beads so I could go and bring you back. I went to the world where you were born. I breathed the air.…”
On and on she went, describing everything that had happened since she’d fallen out of the sky as if it were the greatest adventure the universe had ever known. How she had argued with the Queen of Turtles and bantered with the Lord of the Dead, how she had been there for the cleverest defeat of the Queen of Cakes, when a Mermaid and a Goblin Prince had conquered her at last. It was all lords and ladies and grand, noble quests, and it was magical.
Quests were a lot like dogs, Cora thought. They were much more attractive when seen from a distance, and not barking in the middle of the night or pooping all over the house. She had been there for every terrible, wearying, bone-breaking moment of this quest, and it held no magic for her. She knew it too well. But Rini described it for Sumi like it was a storybook, like it was something to whisper in a child’s ear as they were drifting off to sleep, and it was beautiful. It was truly beautiful.
“… so I need you to wake up now, Mama, and go with your friends, so you can come back here, so you can marry Papa, so I can be born.” Rini leaned forward until her head was resting on Sumi’s chest, closing her eye. “I want you to meet me. You always said I was the best thing you’d ever done, and I want you to meet me so you can know it’s true. So wake up now, okay? Wake up, and leave, so you can come home.”
“Look,” whispered Kade.
Sumi’s hands, which had never once in her life been still, were twitching. As the others watched, she raised them off the table and began stroking Rini’s hair, her eyes still closed, her face still peaceful.
Rini sobbed and lifted her head, staring at her mother, both eyes wide and bright and filled with all the colors of a candy corn field in full harvest. Cora put her hands over her mouth to hide her gasp. Christopher grinned, and said nothing.
“Mama?” asked Rini.
Sumi opened her eyes and sat up, sending Rini stumbling back, away from the table. Sumi blinked at her. Then Sumi blinked down at her own naked, re-formed body.
“I was dead a second ago, and now I’m naked,” she announced. “Do I need to be concerned?”
Kade whooped, and Christopher laughed, and Rini sobbed, and everything was different, and everything was finally the same.