Beneath the Sugar Sky

by Seanan McGuire

  Cora had never had a friend like Nadya before. She thought she liked it. It was hard to say: the novelty of it all was still too overwhelming.

  The turtle pond was a flat silver disk in the field, burnished by the sunlight, surface broken by the flat disks of the turtles themselves, sailing off to whatever strange turtle errands they had in the months before their hibernation. Nadya grabbed a stick off the ground and took off running, leaving Cora to trail behind her like a faithful balloon.

  “Turtles!” Nadya howled. “Your queen returns!”

  She didn’t stop when she reached the edge of the pond, but plunged gleefully onward, splashing into the shallows, breaking the perfect smoothness of the surface. Cora stopped a few feet back from the water. She preferred the ocean, preferred saltwater and the slight sting of the waves against her skin. Fresh water wasn’t enough.

  “Come back, turtles!” shouted Nadya. “Come back and let me love you!”

  That was when the girl fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of the turtle pond with an enormous splash, sending turtles skyward, and drenching both Cora and Nadya in a wave of muddy pond water.

  2

  GRAVITY HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US

  THE GIRL IN THE pond rose up sputtering, with algae in her hair and a very confused turtle snagged in the complicated draperies of her dress, which seemed to be the result of someone deciding to hybridize a ball gown with a wedding cake, after dyeing both of them electric pink. It also seemed to be dissolving, running down her arms in streaks, coming apart at the seams. She was going to be naked soon.

  The girl in the pond didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she just didn’t care. She wiped water and dissolving dress out of her eyes, flicking them to the side, and cast wildly about until she spotted Cora and Nadya standing on the shore, mouths open, gaping at her.

  “You!” she yelled, pointing in their direction. “Take me to your leader!”

  Cora’s mouth shut with a snap. Nadya continued to gawk. Both of them had traveled to places where the rules were different—Cora to a world of beautiful Reason, Nadya to a world of impeccable Logic. None of this had prepared them for women who dropped out of the sky in a shower of turtles and started yelling, especially not here, in a world they both thought of as tragically predictable and dull.

  Cora recovered first. “Do you mean Miss Eleanor?” she asked. Relief followed the question. Yes. The girl—she looked to be about seventeen—would want to talk to Miss Eleanor. Maybe she was a new student, and this was how admissions worked mid-term.

  “No,” said the girl sullenly, and crossed her arms, dislodging the turtle on her shoulder. It fell back to the pond with a resounding plop. “I mean my mother. She’s in charge at home, so she must be in charge here. It’s only”—her lip curled, and she spat out her next word like it tasted bad—“logical.”

  “What’s your mother’s name?” asked Cora.

  “Onishi Sumi,” said the girl.

  Nadya finally shook off her shock. “That’s not possible,” she said, glaring at the girl. “Sumi’s dead.”

  The girl stared at Nadya. The girl bent, reaching into the pond, and came up with a turtle, which she hurled as hard as she could at Nadya’s head. Nadya ducked. The girl’s dress, finally chewed to pieces by the water, fell off entirely, leaving her naked and covered with a pinkish slime. Cora put her hand over her eyes.

  Maybe leaving her room today hadn’t been the best idea after all.

  * * *

  MOST PEOPLE ASSUMED, upon meeting Cora, that being fat also meant she was lazy, or at least that she was unhealthy. It was true she had to wrap her knees and ankles before she did any heavy exercise—a few strips of tape now could save her from a lot of aching later—but that was as far as that assumption went. She had always been a runner. When she’d been little, her mother hadn’t worried about her weight, because no one who watched Cora race around the yard could possibly believe there was anything wrong with her. She was chubby because she was preparing for a growth spurt, that was all.

  The growth spurt, when it had come, hadn’t been enough to consume Cora’s reserves, but still she ran. She ran with the sort of speed that people thought should be reserved for girls like Nadya, girls who could cut through the wind like knives, instead of being borne along like living clouds, large and soft and swift.

  She reached the front steps with feet pounding and arms pumping, so consumed by the act of running that she wasn’t exactly looking where she was going, and slammed straight into Christopher, sending both of them sprawling. She yelped. Christopher shouted. They landed in a tangle of limbs at the base of the porch, him mostly under her.

  “Uh,” said Christopher.

  “Ohfuck!” The exclamation came out as a single word, glued together by stress and terror. This was it: this was the moment where she stopped being the new student, and became the clumsy fat girl. She pushed herself away from him as fast as she could, overbalancing in the process, so that she rolled away rather than getting back to her feet. When she was far enough that they were no longer in physical contact, she shoved herself up onto her hands and knees, looking warily back at him. He was going to yell, and then she was going to cry, and meanwhile Nadya would be alone with the stranger who was asking for a dead person. And this day had started so well.

  Christopher was staring back at her, looking equally wary, looking equally wounded. As she watched, he picked his bone flute out of the dust and said, in a hurt tone, “It’s not contagious, you know.”

  “What’s not contagious?”

  “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 exp
lode 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.

  “Go,” said Eleanor. “I’ll clean up here. Bring her to the office when you’re finished.”

  Kade nodded and slid off his seat, leaving his mug behind as he hurried to collect Cora and Christopher and usher them both out the door. Eleanor watched the three of them go, silent. When the door was closed behind them, she put her head down in her hands.

  Sumi’s world, Confection, had been a Nonsense world, untethered to the normal laws that governed the order of things. There had been a prophecy of some sort, saying that Sumi would one day return, and overthrow the armies of the Queen of Cakes, establishing her own benevolent monarchy in its place. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that the future had felt comfortable going about its business, once there was a prophecy. And now Sumi was dead, and the future, whatever it had once been, was falling apart.

  Everything did, if left long enough to its own devices. Futures, pasts, it didn’t matter. Everything fell apart.

  3

  DEAD WOMAN’S DAUGHTER

  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 w
as 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.”