“If the oven hadn’t wanted to put her back together, she wouldn’t have hair now.” Layla beamed. “She’d have a sticky black mess attached to a bunch of melted fondant—you’re not supposed to bake fondant, by the way, or frosting, or most of the other things I put onto her skeleton. Confection wanted her back, so Confection gave her back. I’m just the Baker. I put things in the oven, and the world does as it will.”

It seemed like a very precise way of avoiding accusations of magic. Kade didn’t say anything. Getting into an argument with someone who was helping was never a good idea, and in this case, making Layla doubt her place in Confection could result in a door and an expulsion, and then all of this would have been for nothing.

Sumi looked so real.

“Was making a new body out of candy and cake and everything enough?” asked Cora. “Will that give her back her nonsense?” Or would Sumi’s quiet, solemn ghost open her new eyes and ask to be taken home—not to the school, but to the parents who believed that she was dead, the ones who’d been willing to send their daughter away when she turned out to be someone other than the good girl they had raised her to be.

“I don’t know,” said Layla. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if anyone has.”

That was a lie, but it was a necessary one. Of course someone here had done this before. This was Confection, land of the culinary art become miracle: land of lonely children whose hands itched for pie tins or rolling pins, for the comfortable predictability of timers and sugar scoops and heaping cups of flour. This was a land where perfectly measured ingredients created nonsensical towers of whimsy and wonder—and maybe that was why they could be here, logical creatures that they were, without feeling assaulted by the world around them. Kade remembered his aunt’s tales of her own Nonsense realm all too well, including the way it had turned against her once she was old enough to think as an adult did, rigidly and methodically. She would always be Nonsense-touched, but somewhere along the way, time had caught up with her enough to turn her mind against the realm that was her natural home.

Confection wasn’t like that. Confection was Nonsense with rules, where baking soda would always leaven your cake and yeast would always rise. Confection could be Nonsensical because it had rules, and so Logical people could survive there, could even thrive there, once they had accepted that things weren’t quite the same as they were in other worlds.

Layla reached over and carefully touched the first two fingers of her right hand to the curve of Sumi’s remade wrist. She smiled.

“She’s cool enough,” she said. “We can wake her up now.”