Page 32 of Beneath the Sugar Sky

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.