“Whereas I am a king of telling myself bullshit things I don’t really believe but need to accept for the sake of everyone around me.” Kade spread his arms, framing the moment. “I can make anything sound reasonable for five minutes.”

“I can’t,” said Christopher. “I just refuse to die where the Skeleton Girl can’t find me. I don’t think this is the sort of world that connects to Mariposa. It’s too far out of sync.”

“What do you mean?” Cora started walking again, matching her step to theirs.

“You know Rini isn’t the first person to come to our world—call it ‘Earth,’ since that’s technically its name—from somewhere else, right?” Kade paused barely long enough for Cora to nod before he said, “Well, every time it’s happened and we’ve known about it, someone’s done their best to sit them down and ask a bunch of questions. Getting a baseline, getting more details for the Compass. Most of them, they have their own stories about doors. They knew someone who knew someone whose great-aunt disappeared for twenty years and came back the same age she’d been when she went away, full of stories that didn’t make sense and with a king’s ransom in diamonds in her pocket, or salt, or snakeskins. Currencies tend to differ a bit, world to world. And what we’ve found is that there are worlds to and worlds from.”

“What do you mean?”

“Confection, it was made by the doors. Its rules were set by the bakers, and maybe those bakers came from Logical worlds, but what they wanted out of life was Nonsense, so they whipped themselves up a Nonsense world, one layer at a time. Half the nonsense probably comes from having so many cooks in the kitchen. Thirty people bake the same wedding cake, it doesn’t matter if they’re all masters of their craft, they’re still going to come up with something that tastes a little funny.”

Cora nodded slowly. “So this is a world to.”

“Yes. Earth, now, we’re a world from. When we get travelers, it’s people like Rini, people who didn’t have a choice, people who’ve been exiled, or who are looking for an old friend who came to a long time ago, and hasn’t made it back yet, even though they said they were going to.” Kade paused. “Earth isn’t the only world from. We know of at least five, and that means there are probably more out there, too far away for us to have much crossover. Worlds from tend to be mixed up. A little Wicked, a little Virtuous. A little Logic, a little Nonsense. They may trend toward one or the other—I feel Earth’s more Logical than Nonsensical, for example, although Aunt Eleanor doesn’t always agree—but they exist to provide the doors with a place to anchor.”