Page 8 of Beneath the Sugar Sky

Kade sighed. “I want to argue, but I’m too damn tired. Can you at least stay in your seat? We get pulled over, we’re going to have one hell of a time explaining the severed hands, or why Christopher keeps a human ulna in his pocket.”

“Just tell them we’re on a quest,” said Nadya.

“Mmm,” said Kade noncommittally.

“So are we there yet?”

“Almost. We are almost there.” The cemetery was another five miles down the road. He’d looked it up on Google Maps. There was a convenient copse of trees about a quarter of a mile away. They could stow the van there while they went about the business of desecrating Sumi’s grave.

Kade wasn’t religious—hadn’t been since he’d come back from Prism, forced into a body that was too young and too small and too dressed in frilly, girlish clothes by parents who refused to understand that they had a son and not a daughter—but he’d been to church often enough when he was little to be faintly worried that they were all going to wind up getting smote for crimes against God.

“Not the way I wanted to die,” he muttered, and pulled off the road, driving toward the trees.

“I want to die in a bed of marigolds, with butterflies hanging over me in a living canopy and the Skeleton Girl holding our marriage knife in her hand,” said Christopher.

“What?” said Kade.

“Nothing,” said Christopher.

Kade rolled slowly to a stop under a spreading oak, hopefully out of sight of the road, and parked. “All right, we’re here. Everybody out.”

He didn’t have to tell Cora twice. She had the door open before he had finished speaking, practically tumbling out into the grass. Riding in backseats always made her feel huge and worthless, taking up more space than she had any right to. The only reason she’d been able to stand it was that Nadya had been crammed into the middle, leaving Rini, still a virtual stranger, on the other side of the car. If Cora had been told she’d have to spend the entire drive pressed against someone she didn’t know, she would probably have skipped having an adventure in favor of hiding in her room.

The others got out more sedately, even Rini, who turned in a slow circle, eyes turned toward the sky and jaw gone slack.

“What are those?” she asked, jabbing a finger at the distant streak of the Milky Way.

“Stars, stupid,” said Nadya.

“I’m not stupid, I just don’t know stuff,” said Rini. “How do they stay up?”

“They’re very far away,” said Kade. “Don’t you have stars in Confection?”

“No,” said Rini. “There’s a moon—it’s made of buttercream frosting, very sticky, not good for picnicking on—and there’s a sun, and a long time ago, the First Confectioner threw handfuls of candy into the sky, where it stuck really high, but it’s still candy. You can see the stripes on the humbugs and the sugar speckles on the gumdrops.”

“Huh,” said Kade. He looked to Christopher. “We need a shovel?”

“Not if she’s willing to dance.” Christopher’s fingers played over his bone flute, sketching anxious arpeggios, outlining the tune he would play for Sumi. “If she’s willing to dance, she’d move heaven and earth to come to me.”

“Then lead the way, piper.”

Christopher nodded and raised his flute to his mouth, taking a deep breath before he began to play. There was no sound. There was never any sound when Christopher played the flute, not as far as the living were concerned. There was only the idea of sound, the sketchy outline of the place where it should have been, sliced out of the air like a piece of chocolate pie.

No one knew how far he could be from the dead and still call them out of the grave, and they weren’t sure exactly where in the cemetery Sumi’s body was buried, and so he played as they walked toward the gates, putting everything he had into calling her and only her, Sumi, the wild girl who died too soon and too cruelly, rather than all the sleeping bones the graveyard had to offer. It had been too long since he’d been to a proper dance, one where the women wore garlands of flowers low on their hips and the men rattled their finger bones like castanets, where the dancers traded garments and genders and positions as easily as trading a blossom for a bolero. It was tempting, to call all the skeletons of this place to him, to lose himself in a revel while the moon was high.

But that wouldn’t save Rini, and it wouldn’t be what he had promised Miss Eleanor he’d do. So he played for an audience of one, and when he heard Cora gasp, he smiled around his flute and continued fingering the stops, calling Sumi from her slumber.

She came, a lithe, delicate skeleton wrapped in a pearlescent sheen, like opal, like sugar glass. The cemetery gates had been designed to keep the living out, not the dead in; she stepped sideways and slipped right through the bars, her fleshless body fitting perfectly in the gap. Christopher stopped walking but kept playing as Sumi, risen from the grave, walked across the field to meet them.

“Where’s the rest of her?” demanded Nadya.

“He doesn’t pipe flesh, only bone,” said Kade. “He’s called what will listen to him.” The flesh, softened by time, if not yet rotted away, must have shrugged away like an old overcoat, leaving Sumi shining, wrapped in rainbows, to answer Christopher’s call.

Rini raised her hands to cover her mouth. Another of her fingers was gone, replaced by that strange, eye-rejecting void. “Mom?” she whispered.

Sumi cocked her head to the side, more like a bird than a girl, and said nothing. Christopher hesitated before lowering his flute. When Sumi didn’t collapse into a pile of bones, he let out a long sigh, shoulders slumping with relief.

“She can’t talk,” he said. “She doesn’t have lungs, or a voice, or anything.” At home in Mariposa, she would have been able to speak. The magic that powered that land was happy to give a voice to the dead.