Page 9 of Beneath the Sugar Sky

But this was not his home. Here, skeletons were silent, and only the sliver of Mariposa that he carried always with him was even enough to call them from the grave.

“She’s dead,” said Rini, like she was realizing this for the first time. “How can she be dead?”

“Everyone is, eventually,” said Christopher. “This next part is harder. Cora, can you open the jar with her hands, please?”

Cora grimaced as she knelt and wrested the lid off the jar, spilling sharp-smelling liquid onto the ground. She looked to Christopher. On his nod, she dumped the jar’s contents out, jumping to her feet and stumbling back to avoid the splash.

Christopher raised his flute and began to play again.

“I’m going to barf,” announced Nadya.

The flesh on Sumi’s hands began peeling back like a flower in the process of opening, revealing clean white bone. As they all watched, the bone grew bright with rainbows, like the rest of Sumi’s skeleton.

When the flesh had peeled away entirely, Christopher tucked his flute into his belt and bent to pick up the two skeletal hands. He offered them to Sumi. She leaned forward and touched the severed ends of her wrists to the base of the carpals. The rainbow glow intensified. She leaned back again, and she was whole, every bone in its place, every piece of her skeleton where it belonged.

“If we’re trying to get to an Underworld, starting from a cemetery seems like the best way to do it,” said Christopher. He looked to Rini. “You can tell those beads where to take us, right?”

“I can tell them who I want, and they get me there,” said Rini. “I couldn’t find my mother, no matter how hard I looked, so I looked for Miss Elly. That was who Mom always said made the school go.”

“Okay,” said Christopher. “Tell the bead to take us to Nancy.”

“I don’t know Nancy,” protested Rini.

“Nancy’s smart,” said Kade. “She’s quiet, so sometimes people don’t know she’s smart, but the smart’s always there.”

“She can stand so still she looks like a statue,” said Christopher.

“She has white hair with black streaks in it and she says it isn’t dyed and her roots never grew out so she probably wasn’t lying,” said Nadya. The others looked at her, and she shrugged. “We weren’t friends. I had one group therapy session with her, and stayed out of her way. Too dry for me. Dry as bones.”

Cora, who had come to the school after Nancy was already gone, said nothing at all.

Rini frowned at each of them in turn. “What about the sugar?”

“Red,” said Kade. “They mix it with pomegranate juice. It’s bitter, but it still sweetens.” His gaze remained steady, fixed on her. The fact that he had never seen the sugar in Nancy’s world didn’t matter. He knew what it should be, and that was as good as knowing what it was.

Rini nodded before lifting her wrist to her mouth and taking one of the beads on her bracelet between her teeth. She bit down hard, the bead shattering with a crunch, and swallowed.

“Wait,” said Nadya. “Those are sugar, too?”

“Where I come from, everything is sugar,” said Rini. She reached imperiously in front of herself, grasping an invisible doorknob. “Come on. They never stay open long, and sometimes they don’t match up very well.”

“Hence the falling out of the sky, one assumes,” said Christopher.

Rini nodded, and opened the door that wasn’t there.

The other side was a grove of trees with dark green leaves and gently twisted trunks. Their boughs were heavy with red fruit. Some of it had split open, showing the ruby seeds within. The grass around the trees looked soft as velvet, and the sky was no sky at all, but the high, vaulted ceiling of an impossible hall.

“The pomegranate grove,” breathed Kade.

“It’s the right place? Good,” said Rini. “Come on.” She stepped through the door, with the skeleton of her mother close on her heels. The others followed, and when it swung shut behind Cora, it wasn’t there anymore, just like it had never been there in the first place.

5

PLACES OF THE LIVING, PLACES OF THE DEAD

THE SIX OF THEM—five living, one dead—walked through the velvety grass, making no attempt to disguise their gawking. Christopher kept his bone flute in his hand, fingers tracing silent arpeggios. Sumi stayed close to her daughter, bones clacking faintly, like the distant whisper of wind through the branches of a tree. Rini tried her best not to look back. Every time she caught a glimpse of Sumi she shuddered and bit her lip before looking away again.

Nadya reached up with her single hand and traced the outline of a pomegranate with her fingers, biting her lip and staring at the fruit like it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.