Cora swallowed a cascade of giggles. They would have sounded hysterical, she knew: they would have sounded like she could no longer cope. And that wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. She was a solid, practical person, and while she had accepted the existence of magic—sort of hard not to, under the circumstances—there was a lot of ground between “magic is real, other worlds are real, mermaids can be real, in a world that wants them” and “everything is real, women fall out of the sky into turtle ponds, skeletons walk, and we left my best friend in the underworld.”

When she got back to the school, she was going to draw herself a hot bath, curl up in the tub, and sleep for days.

“This is the Strawberry Sea,” said Rini uncomfortably, looking around. “The Meringue Mountains are to the west, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain is to the east. If we chart a course between them, through the Fondant Forests, we should come to the farmlands. That’s where my home is. There’s where my mother’s supposed to be. If her nonsense were going to go anywhere, it would probably go there.”

“Just how Nonsense is this world, Rini?” asked Kade. “None of us went to nonsensical places, and Nonsense, it tends to reject what doesn’t belong inside of it. We tend to haul logic in our wake, like dirt on our shoes.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rini.

“If people don’t normally drown when they breathe water here, and Christopher almost drowned, that’s logic seeping in,” said Kade. “We need to fix your mother and get out of here before the world decides to shove us out.”

“Where would we go?” asked Cora.

“That’s the sort of philosophical question that my aunt loves and I hate,” said Kade. “Maybe we’d go back to the school, or back to the Halls of the Dead, and get stuck hanging out watching Nancy play garden gnome forever. Or maybe we’d get knocked back through our doors.” His mouth was a thin, grim line. “Good for you. Not so good for me.”

Cora didn’t know all the circumstances of Kade’s door, but she knew enough to know that he was one of the only students who had no desire to go back. While the rest of them searched, he sat back and watched, content to know that the school would be his home for the rest of his life. That was good. Someone needed to keep the lighthouse fires burning, because there would always be lost children looking for the light. It was also terrible. No one should find the place where they belonged and then reject it.

“Confection is Confection,” said Rini, sounding confused. “Mom always said it was Nonsense, and then she’d laugh and kiss me and say, ‘But things still do what they do, and babies still get born.’”