Page 4 of Beneath the Sugar Sky

“Going to a world that wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows. It’s not catching. Touching me doesn’t change where you went.”

Cora’s cheeks flared red. “Oh, no!” she said, hands fluttering in front of her like captive parrotfish, trying to escape. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—I mean, I—”

“It’s okay.” Christopher stood. He was tall and lean, with brown skin and black hair, and a small, skull-shaped pin on his left lapel. He always wore a jacket, partially for the pockets, and partially for the readiness to run. Most of them were like that. They always had their shoes, their scissors, whatever talisman they wanted to have to hand when their doorways reappeared and they had to make the choice to stay or go. “You’re not the first.”

“I thought you were going to be mad at me for running into you and call me fat,” blurted Cora.

Christopher’s eyebrows rose. “I … okay, not what I expected. I, um. Not sure what to say to that.”

“I know I’m fat, but it’s all in how people say it,” said Cora, hands finally drifting back to rest. “I thought you’d say it the bad way.”

“I get it,” said Christopher. “I’m Mexican-American. It was gross, the number of people at my old school who thought it was funny to call me an anchor baby, or to ask, all fake concerned, if my parents were legal. It got to where I didn’t want to say ‘Mexican,’ because it sounded like an insult in their mouths when it was really my culture, and my heritage, and my family. So I get it. I don’t like it, but that’s not your fault.”

“Oh, good,” said Cora, sighing her relief. Then she wrinkled her nose and said, “I have to go. I have to find Miss Eleanor.”

“Is that why you were in such a hurry?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded quickly. “There’s a strange girl in the turtle pond and she says she’s the daughter of someone I’ve never heard of, but who Nadya says is dead, so I think we need an adult.”

“If you need an adult, you should be looking for Kade, not Eleanor,” said Christopher. He started toward the door. “Who’s the dead person?”

“Someone named Sumi.”

Christopher’s fingers clamped down hard on his bone flute. “Walk faster,” he said, and Cora did, following him up the steps and into the school.

The halls were cool and empty. There were no classes in session; the other students would be scattered across the campus, chatting in the kitchen, sleeping in their rooms. For a place that could explode with noise and life under the right circumstances, it was often surprisingly quiet.

“Sumi was a student before you got here,” said Christopher. “She went to a world called Confection, where she pissed off the Countess of Candy Floss and got herself kicked out as a political exile.”

“Did her parents take her away?”

“She was murdered.”

Cora nodded solemnly. She had heard about the murders, about the girl named Jill who had decided the way to open her own door home was to cut away the doors of as many others as she deemed necessary. There was a certain amount of horror in those tales, and also a certain amount of shameful understanding. Many of them—not all, not even most, but many—would have done the same if they’d had the necessary skills. Some people even seemed to possess a certain grudging respect for what Jill had done. Sure, she’d killed people. In the end, it had been enough to take her home.

“The person who killed her wasn’t a friend of mine, not really, but her sister kind of was. We were … Jack and Jill went to a world called the Moors, which was sort of horror movie-y, from the way they described it. A lot of people lumped me in with them, because of Mariposa.”

“That’s the world you went to?”

Christopher nodded. “Eleanor still can’t decide whether it was a Fairyland or an Underworld or something new and in-between. That’s why people shouldn’t get too hung up on labels. Sometimes I think that’s part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they’re never going to.”

Cora didn’t say anything.

The hall ended at the closed door to Eleanor’s studio. Christopher rapped his knuckles twice against the wood, then opened it without waiting to be asked.

Eleanor was inside, a paintbrush in her hand, layering oil paint onto a canvas that looked like it had already been subjected to more than a few layers. Kade was there as well, sitting in the window seat, a coffee mug cupped between his hands. Both of them looked at the open door, Eleanor with delight, Kade with slow confusion.

“Cora!” she said. “Have you come to paint with me, dear? And Christopher. It’s wonderful to see you making friends, after everything.”

Christopher grimaced. “Yes, Miss Eleanor,” he said. “We’re not actually here for an art class. There’s someone in the turtle pond.”

“Is it Nadya?” asked Kade.

“Not this time,” said Cora. “She fell out of the sky, and she has black hair, and her dress fell apart when it got wet, and she says—” She stopped, reaching a degree of impossibility past which even she, who had once fought the Serpent of Frozen Tears, could not proceed.

Luckily, Christopher had no such boundaries. “She says Sumi’s her mother. Can someone please come to the turtle pond and figure out what the hell is going on?”

Kade sat up straight. “I’ll go,” he said.