“You were one of us,” said Cora wonderingly.

The Queen of Cakes turned, eyes narrowed, to face her. “I don’t recall inviting you to speak, dear,” she said. “Now shut that fat mouth of yours, or I’ll fill it for you.”

“You were one of us,” Cora repeated, not flinching from the venom in the word “fat.” If anything, it was too familiar to really hurt. She’d heard that sort of hatred before, always from the women in her Weight Watchers groups, or at Overeaters Anonymous, the ones who had starved themselves into thinness and somehow failed to find the promised land of happy acceptance that they had always been told waited for them on the other side of the scale.

“One of who?” asked the Queen, venom in every word, a poisoned slice of fudge waiting to be shoved past Cora’s lips.

“You found a door. You’re not from here any more than Sumi was.” Cora glanced to Kade, looking for confirmation, and felt hot validation fill her chest when he nodded, ever so slightly telling her that his suspicions were the same. She looked back to the Queen. “Were you a baker? Sumi wasn’t a baker. She was…”

“A violinist,” said Kade. “She didn’t want to bake cakes. She just wanted to do something useful with her hands. She needed Nonsense, and I guess Nonsense needed her, with you trying to make it follow rules it never wanted.”

The Queen of Cakes pursed her lips. “You must be from Sumi’s world,” she said primly. “You’re just as obnoxious as she was. She’s quiet now. How did you make her that way?”

“Well, she died, so that was a large part of it,” said Kade.

“Dead people normally stay in their graves, out of the way of the rest of us. This, though…” The Queen smiled. “What a gift you’ve given me. No one will ever stand against me again when they see that my great enemy has been reduced to a shadow over a skeleton. How did you achieve it? I’ll let you all go home, if you’ll only tell me.”

It would be a lie to say that the offer wasn’t, in some ways, tempting. They had each been called upon to save a world and save themselves in the process, but not this world. Not even Rini had been called upon to save this world. She was trying to save her mother, which was something very different, even if it was still very admirable. They could go back to the school and wait for their doors to open, wait for the chance to go back to the worlds where things made sense, leaving this place and its nonsense behind. This wasn’t their fight.