“It’s never a good idea to eat the ground,” she said blithely, cake between her teeth and frosting on her lips. “People walk on it.”

“But if the dirt here is edible, what does it matter if somebody’s feet are dirty?” asked Christopher.

Rini swallowed before giving him a withering look and saying, “We still pee. People pee, and then other people step in it, and they walk on the ground. I don’t want to eat something that has somebody’s pee on it. That’s gross. Do they eat pee where you come from?”

“It’s not a given!” protested Christopher. “None of the skeletons in Mariposa do … that. They eat sometimes, and they still enjoy the taste of wine and ginger beer, but they don’t have stomachs, so everything goes straight through them.”

Cora blinked at him. “But you—”

“Don’t ask.” Christopher shook his head. “It was messy and unpleasant and we worked it out eventually, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Rini,” said Kade, before she could ask Christopher to explain further, “how is it that everything here’s made out of candy except for the people?”

“Oh, that’s easy.” Rini bit into another cake pop, swallowing before she said, “Confection is like a jawbreaker. Layers and layers and layers, all stacked on top of each other, going all the way down to the very middle, which is just this hard little ball of rock and sadness. Sort of like your world, only smaller.”

“Thanks,” said Kade flatly.

Rini didn’t seem to notice. “It’s a world, so even though nobody lived there, somebody eventually had a door that led there. She looked around, and she thought, ‘Well, this is awful,’ and then she thought, ‘It would be better if I had some bread,’ and then she found a stove and all the stuff she needed for bread, because Confection was already wanting to be born. So she baked and baked and baked. She baked all the bread she could eat, and then she baked herself a bed, and then she baked herself a house to put her bed in, and then she thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I had something softer to walk on,’ and she baked enough bread to go all the way around the world twice, so that the stone was gone, and she had a whole kingdom out of bread. It was still pretty small, though, and eventually she got bored and baked herself a doorway home, and she never came back.” She paused. “But her daughter did. And her daughter didn’t much care for bread, on account of how she’d been a baker’s daughter all her life, but wow, did she like cookies.…”