Daisy Duke's Arc

Chapter 10 of 22

By morning the line at Daisy's cart had doubled, then doubled again. Word of her comfort cakes had spread past the carousel. Customers wanted the cake that held a father's clock, the cookie tied to unfinished things. Daisy handed out orders as fast as her hands moved. Still the line grew. People pushed. A shake spilled. A child cried. She had one small counter and no room to keep the crowd moving. "I can't serve them all," she said, wiping frosting from her cheek. Skeeter came clicking through the crowd, cane tapping the ground in time. Once he had danced to draw customers to her when nobody would come. Now he tipped his hat at the mob. "A full net's a good problem, petal," he said. His one emerald eye glinted. "But a fish won't fit in a thimble. You've outgrown your bowl." He rapped his cane twice. "There's a cold house near my lounge. Empty. Waiting." "A house?" Daisy asked. "A bakery," Skeeter said. "Dark windows. Good bones. Nobody's baked there in an age." He grinned. "Space enough to lose a crowd in." He led her to it. The building stood white and blue and purple, cold as its name. Frost patterns curled across the windows. Above the door, faded letters spelled Pluto's Bakery. Daisy pressed her petals to the glass and looked in. Dust lay thick. A counter ran the whole length of one wall. Long enough for ten lines, not one. "It's a wreck," Daisy said. Her eye went wide. "It's perfect." Stellan Vega stood across the way, head a burning blue and pink star, cataloguing the sky as always. They lowered their gaze to the sign. "Pluto," they said, flat. "The forgotten one. Too far out to be a proper planet." The flame at their head flickered. "Fitting, for a shop that bakes forgotten dreams." The words landed in Daisy like an anchor. A place the waking world remembered but had set aside. She could bind her whole shop to that. She pushed the door. It stuck, then gave. Inside, the air was still and freezing. A frost flower had grown in one corner, its ice petals shining with a cold glow. Daisy set her cart tin on the dusty counter. She lit her rose lamp and its pink light spread through the dark room. "Bring them here," she told Skeeter. "All of them." By dusk the crowd had followed. The long counter swallowed the line. Daisy worked one end, handing out cakes and shakes, and the crowd flowed past instead of crushing in. Nobody spilled. Nobody cried. For the first time she had room to breathe. But the shop was cold to the bone, dark and half-broken, and the frost flower in the corner meant something else lived here now. The counter was hers. The building was not, not yet. She would have to make it ready before it made her leave.