Page 20 of Beneath the Sugar Sky

“My mother offered the first slice of cake to the First Baker, as is right and proper, and she didn’t invite any dead people to my party,” said Rini smartly. “Not that we’d have invited you if you hadn’t been dead. She always said you were the sort of person who never met a party she couldn’t spoil.”

The Queen of Cakes scowled for a moment—but only for a moment, her face smoothing back into pleasant placidity so fast that it felt like the scowl might well have been a lie. “Your mother was wrong about so many things. I can still remember her pouring hot grease on my hands. My beautiful hands.” She held them up, showing that they were perfect and intact. “She thought to stop me, but look at me now. I’m here, healthy and hale and resuming my rule, and you, her precious little potential, you’re fading away to nothing. How long do you think you have before the world realizes that you never existed and swallows you completely? I’ll want to know when to plan my own party. The one to celebrate living forever.”

“You were one of us,” said Cora wonderingly.

The Queen of Cakes turned, eyes narrowed, to face her. “I don’t recall inviting you to speak, dear,” she said. “Now shut that fat mouth of yours, or I’ll fill it for you.”

“You were one of us,” Cora repeated, not flinching from the venom in the word “fat.” If anything, it was too familiar to really hurt. She’d heard that sort of hatred before, always from the women in her Weight Watchers groups, or at Overeaters Anonymous, the ones who had starved themselves into thinness and somehow failed to find the promised land of happy acceptance that they had always been told waited for them on the other side of the scale.

“One of who?” asked the Queen, venom in every word, a poisoned slice of fudge waiting to be shoved past Cora’s lips.

“You found a door. You’re not from here any more than Sumi was.” Cora glanced to Kade, looking for confirmation, and felt hot validation fill her chest when he nodded, ever so slightly telling her that his suspicions were the same. She looked back to the Queen. “Were you a baker? Sumi wasn’t a baker. She was…”

“A violinist,” said Kade. “She didn’t want to bake cakes. She just wanted to do something useful with her hands. She needed Nonsense, and I guess Nonsense needed her, with you trying to make it follow rules it never wanted.”

The Queen of Cakes pursed her lips. “You must be from Sumi’s world,” she said primly. “You’re just as obnoxious as she was. She’s quiet now. How did you make her that way?”

“Well, she died, so that was a large part of it,” said Kade.

“Dead people normally stay in their graves, out of the way of the rest of us. This, though…” The Queen smiled. “What a gift you’ve given me. No one will ever stand against me again when they see that my great enemy has been reduced to a shadow over a skeleton. How did you achieve it? I’ll let you all go home, if you’ll only tell me.”

It would be a lie to say that the offer wasn’t, in some ways, tempting. They had each been called upon to save a world and save themselves in the process, but not this world. Not even Rini had been called upon to save this world. She was trying to save her mother, which was something very different, even if it was still very admirable. They could go back to the school and wait for their doors to open, wait for the chance to go back to the worlds where things made sense, leaving this place and its nonsense behind. This wasn’t their fight.

But Sumi was a silent skeleton, wreathed in shadows and rainbows, and Rini was disappearing an inch at a time, fading away according to the rules of her reality. If they left now, they couldn’t save Rini. They could only leave her to be unmade, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but a memory.

(Would even that endure? If she had never been born, if she had never existed, would they remember her after she disappeared? Or would this whole madcap adventure be revised away, filed under things that never actually happened outside of a dream? What would they think had happened to Nadya, if Rini faded completely? Would they think she had found her door, gone home again, another success story for the other students to whisper about after curfew, hoping that their own doors would open now that someone else’s had? Somehow, that seemed like the worst possibility of all. Nadya should be remembered for what she’d done to help them, not for what people invented to fill the space where she wasn’t anymore.)

“No, thank you,” said Cora primly, and she spoke for all three of them, for Kade, standing stalwart and steady, for Christopher, shaking and pale.

He didn’t look well. Even Rini looked better, and she was being written out of existence.

“I didn’t think you would, but I had to offer,” said the Queen, leaning back in her throne. A chunk of her dress fell off and tumbled to the floor, where a butterscotch mouse with candy floss whiskers snatched it up and whisked it away. “I ask again: how is my old enemy here? What’s dead is dead.”

None of them said a word.

The Queen sighed. “Stubborn little children find that I can be a very cruel woman, when I want to. Did it have something to do with this?” She reached behind herself, pulling out Christopher’s bone flute. “It’s an odd little instrument. I blow and blow, but it doesn’t make a sound.”

The effect on Christopher was electric. He stood suddenly upright, vibrating, the color returning by drips to his cheeks, until they burned like he had a fever. “Give it to me,” he said, and his voice was an aching whisper that somehow carried all the same.

“Oh, is this yours?” asked the Queen. “It’s a funny color. What is it made of?”

“Bone.” He took a jerky step forward, knees knocking. “My bone. It’s mine, it’s made of me, give it back.”

“Bone?” The Queen looked at the flute again, this time with fascinated disgust. “Liar. There’s no way you could lose a bone this big and still be whole.”

“The Skeleton Girl gave me another bone to replace it and it’s mine you have to give it back you have to give it back.” Christopher’s voice broke into a howl on his final words, and he took off running, the rope still dangling from his neck, launching himself at the Queen of Cakes.

His hands were only a few feet from her throat when one of the knights stomped on the end of the rope, jerking him backward. Christopher slammed into the floor, landing in a heap, and began to sob.

“Fascinating,” breathed the Queen. “What terrible worlds you must all come from, to think this sort of thing is normal, or should be allowed to continue. Don’t worry, children. You’re in Confection now. You’ll be safe and happy here, and as soon as that”—she indicated Rini—“finishes fading away, you’ll be able to stay forever.”

She snapped her fingers.

“Guards,” she said, sweetly. “Find them someplace nice to be, where I won’t have to hear them screaming. And leave the skeleton here. I want to play with it.”

The Queen of Cakes leaned back in her throne and smiled as her latest enemies were dragged away. What a lovely day this was shaping up to be.

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