“Really? Because I assumed you were using the word to mean ‘absolute arbiter of the rules of the reality I’m standing in.’ Were you?” Kade cocked his head. “If you were, you’ve already met at least one god, and possibly two. Probably two. The Lord and Lady of the Dead, back in Nancy’s world, remember? They didn’t get those titles in an open election.”

Cora blanched. “Really?”

“If you ask me, they probably got the same deal the first Baker here did. Just a couple of confused kids who stumbled into a dead world and decided, for whatever reason, that they should stay.” That, or the world refused to let them go. That could happen, too. Worlds could put down roots, winding them through the heart and drawing tighter with every breath, until “home” was an empty idea with nothing on the other side of it.

“Fuck.” Cora shook her head, looking back to Rini, and to the silent, narrow shape of Sumi, wrapped in her own ghost. “I did not sign up for gods.”

“None of us signed up for any of this,” said Christopher. “I just wanted to live to see my sixteenth birthday.”

“I just wanted to have an adventure,” said Kade.

Sumi, voiceless, said nothing, and maybe that was for the best. She had been like Cora, a savior, a tool, someone who was called and offered a wonderful new existence in exchange for doing just one thing: saving the world. She’d done it, too, before she’d been killed too soon and had all her hard work revised away.

Nonsense was exhausting. Cora couldn’t wait to get back to the school, where everything was dry and dreadful, but where things at least made sense from one moment into the next.

The road was made of sandy crushed graham crackers, and wound its way through a pastoral landscape that would have been impressive even if it hadn’t been crafted entirely from living sugar. Kade paused to pick a handful of sugar buttons off a bush, and munched idly as he walked.

Cora frowned. “Rini,” she said. “If the Bakers made the world and then went home, where did the people come from? Like your father? I mean, he’s clearly enough like the people from my world for Sumi to marry him and have you, but that doesn’t make sense, not really. Everything else is sugar.”