CHAPTER 2

Taffyta took several deep breaths in and out, staring at her feet. This was a dream. This had to be a dream. There was no way that she'd gone to bed nine years old and woken up, what?

Twenty-five,her mind whispered. Her new programming whispered.

No. No way. This wasn't real. She shut her eyes tightly and pinched herself. "Ouch!" she yelped. Okay, so maybe she wasn't asleep. Maybe it was just…like…a hallucination. Sure. She'd been dreaming when she'd woken up, and she'd still been half-asleep when she saw herself in the mirror. When she looked again, she'd see her normal, nine-year-old self.

Steeling herself, Taffyta scrunched her face up and opened one eye. There was still a young woman in the mirror, making a stupid, wrinkly face at herself.

Her breath hitched in something close to panic, but she opened her other eye and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Experimentally, she prodded at her chest. It felt real enough. Trying not to hyperventilate, she peeked under the neckline of her nightgown, then quickly clapped a hand over it as she turned red. Yep, definitely, for sure real.

She swiveled around, trying to see her back in the mirror, and poked her backside. That seemed pretty real too. Turning to face the mirror once more, she said to the figure there—er, well, herself, "What the atomic fireball is going on?" Startled, she touched her throat. Even her voice sounded a little different. It was recognizably her, but she sounded…grown up. "This is really weird," she said. Obviously there was more going on here than an issue in the code vault. Something fundamental had changed in Sugar Rush.

One thing was for sure—she needed to talk to King Candy, like, ten minutes ago. She started to head for the bedroom door, but then she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Had her nightgown always been this short? She tugged at it, which did absolutely nothing. Sugar-frosted cookies, it was hardly covering anything in the back. With a frustrated noise she grabbed her tights and pulled them on underneath her nightgown. There.

The rest of the house looked the same. Nothing was out of place, everything was exactly the way they'd left it before both of them had gone to bed. Taffyta hopped down the three steps that led to the new—well, not new anymore, considering it had been there for over six years—wing of the house and tried the doorknob to the hallway. It turned in her hand and she padded down the corridor to his bedroom door. When she reached it, she raised a fist and knocked.

Silence.

Furrowing her brow, Taffyta knocked again, louder this time. When there was still no answer, she said through the door, "King Candy?"

He must have been asleep. But he still didn't respond, and it was unlike him to sleep this deeply. He always said he hadn't been programmed for the amount of sugar he consumed in this game and that he hadn't had a full night's sleep in decades because he was so wired all the time. When she suggested he eat less candy, he always looked at her like she was crazy and said, "But I like candy." She knocked for a third time, loud enough that it would definitely wake him up if he was just sound asleep.

When her knock was met with continued silence, she said, "Hey, are you okay? I'm coming in."

Luckily, this door was unlocked too, and as she pushed it open, she said, "Something really weird happened, I don't know what's—" But she stopped in the middle of her sentence and in the doorway as she looked around the room and saw that it was empty. She looked around in confusion. The bed didn't even look slept in. But he'd definitely said he was going to bed after they'd finished coding for the night. Would he have gone out again?

Taffyta looked around, as though the empty room was going to answer her unspoken questions. She didn't come in here often. It was pretty bare, though not as bare as it had been at first. He'd been accumulating things over the past six years. Next to the window was a painting she'd done for him six years ago, and it always made her feel warm and happy to see that he still treasured it.

Something caught her eye then. The door that led outside to the wraparound porch on the second storey (hey, she'd asked for an addition, no reason not to add on a few things from her own wishlist) was ajar. She approached it and peeked outside, shivering in the cold air. King Candy wasn't out there, either. Snow was accumulating on the porch. She didn't see any footsteps.

This was weird. Where was he? Could he have known something was going on and gone to check it out? She supposed that made as much sense as anything else. But where would he go? The castle? That was where the code vault was, that probably made the most sense. Maybe the town square, it was as much of a gathering place as anywhere else in the game. The starting line in the stadium was a possibility, too. She bit her lip, thinking. Well, it would be easy to check all three. And she'd probably run into someone who had seen him.

It occurred to her that all of her fellow racers were probably in their twenties now. What a bizarre thought. She caught sight of her legs and felt another rush of discomfiture.

Well, if she was going to find King Candy, she needed to put something warmer on. Was it winter everywhere, or just in Strawberry Fields? When she went back to her room and opened her closet, the question seemed to be answered for her, because she found a wool coat hanging there. It was bright pink, with a mint green fake fur collar, and she slipped it on over her nightgown gratefully.

Before she left, she checked the rest of the house for King Candy, but she wasn't surprised when she didn't find him. No, he'd be at one of the places she'd already thought of.

Stepping outside was a shock, not because she'd never been cold before—it was way colder in the Frosty Mountains—but because she'd never seen Strawberry Fields anything other than warm and summery, with honey pot bees buzzing around the white and pink blossoms. The snow in her yard sparkled in the bright sunlight and she paused for a moment to look at it. It was pretty.

Then, she opened the door to the garage and started. Pink Lightning was right where she'd left her, but so was the Royal Racer. Surely King Candy would have taken it somewhere if he'd gone out?

A tendril of unease snaked through her. Something wasn't adding up.

Her first stop was Sugar Rush Castle, where the Oreo guards that still watched the code vault informed her no one had come in or out of the castle in days. The guard who had opened the door kept staring at her after he'd told her this, and she snapped, "What?"

"You look different," he said.

"No kidding," she said, whirling and stomping away.

She tried the stadium next, but no one was there at all, so she went straight to Chocolate Town square. Here, at least, she had some luck. The first person she spotted was Crumbelina, standing over the fountain staring at her reflection. Taffyta hurried over to her after getting out of her kart and then stopped dead in her tracks. "Whoa, Crumbelina."

The other girl—woman—spun around. A look of profound relief washed over her face. "Oh my god, Taffyta, thank gumdrops, it's not just me!"

Taffyta practically had to pick her jaw up off the ground. "Crumbelina, you're like…really, really pretty." What an understatement. Crumbelina looked like a model. She was gorgeous, like, just as pretty as any of the DDR characters.

"You think so?" Crumbelina glanced over her shoulder into the fountain again and put a hand on her hip. "Now that I know I'm not the only one, this is kind of cool, right?"

"Um, I guess so," Taffyta said. Why did she feel so…so…inadequate? She hadn't even come to terms with the fact that she was a twenty-five-year-old woman and she already felt like she wasn't measuring up to her peers? That was messed up. "Hey, Crumbelina, have you seen King Candy?"

"Huh? No," Crumbelina said, looking back to her. "Wasn't he with you at your house?"

Taffyta wrapped her arms around herself. "No."

The roar of karts made her turn around to see Candlehead, Rancis, Jubileena, and Snowanna come roaring into the town square. They were all grown up, too, and looking at each one of them as they got out of their karts and approached the fountain was jarring. Candlehead hadn't put a jacket on before coming out. Well, at least nothing had changed there.

"Taffyta!" Candlehead shouted, throwing her arms around her. "What's going on?"

Snowanna was marveling at the new, slenderer shape of her hand. "Do you think this is some kind of glitch?"

Shaking his head, Rancis said, "No way. Why would a glitch turn us all into twenty-somethings?" His voice sent another jolt of shock through Taffyta. It was deeper than it had been just four hours ago.

"What's going on, then?" Jubileena asked.

All five of them swiveled to look at Taffyta. She blinked, then crossed her arms across her chest. It was a reminder that it wasn't flat anymore and she immediately moved them again, weirded out. "Why would I know?"

"Because you and King Candy are so tight," Snowanna replied, as if this was obvious.

Pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes, Taffyta said, "Seriously?" Like what, just because King Candy was her best friend, she'd absorbed all his coding skills through osmosis or something? He'd been teaching her some rudimentary coding, which she'd had no real world experience using because no one was going to let them code anything for real. Sure, maybe people weren't screaming and running from him anymore, but it didn't mean anyone was going to let him near a code vault. And she'd tied herself to him irrevocably now. No one would trust her around one, either.

But she looked at all of their faces, and they really did seem…well, like they thought she knew what she was talking about. On the track, sure. She was the best racer out of all of them. But this stuff? She hardly knew anything at all. Then again, hardly anything at all was still more than they knew.

Taking a breath, Taffyta said, "I think…I think the game must have gotten upgraded or something." This thought had occurred to her on the drive over from the stadium. The weather, the age-up, it wasn't a glitch. It was too purposeful. There were noises of shock and understanding from the rest of them, and this encouraged her to go on, "Rancis told me earlier that the company that makes the game got bought, right?"

"Yeah," Rancis said, clearly annoyed that he hadn't made this connection himself.

"Okay, so, I think…" What did she think? Ugh, she wished King Candy were here. "I think they must have wanted to like, drum up interest in the game again. We're probably old enough to be retro, right? So they released an upgrade." Who knew if she was right, but it sounded plausible, and they were all nodding like they thought she knew what she was talking about.

Candlehead looked pensive. "Were people getting bored with Sugar Rush?"

With a snort, Rancis said, "Remember how Litwak wouldn't even fork over two hundred dollars to buy the new steering wheel when ours broke? He said we don't make that much in a year."

"He unplugged our other cabinet, too," Crumbelina pointed out.

They all fell silent at that memory. Then, Jubileena said, "Guys, I don't think it's us." She hesitated. "I think it's just the arcade. There aren't as many gamers."

A shadow crossed Snowanna's face. "It's because of the internet. I mean, Vanellope even thought it was more exciting than here."

The six of them were quiet for a moment, considering this. The wound was still pretty raw for most of them. Sugar Rush just hadn't been good enough for Vanellope. When Ralph had come back without her the previous year, he'd glossed over the more damning stuff, but all of them could read between the lines. Sugar Rush was boring. Vanellope had gotten what she'd wanted out of it and she needed more. It had made the rest of them—well, at least it had made Taffyta—feel like bumpkins. Were they boring? They were all content to drive the same tracks day after day, year after year, and none of them had ever wanted to leave.

Er, with the exception of Taffyta going Turbo seven years ago, of course, but that had been because she was upset at…well, pretty much everything, not because she was bored. She'd left because she wasn't getting to race on those same boring tracks. It was the only thing she'd wanted to do.

Taffyta's ears pricked up at the sound of more karts approaching, but she could tell by the sound alone that the Royal Racer wasn't among them. "Have any of you seen King Candy?" she asked. They all shook their heads. Candlehead looked surprised to hear the question.

The remaining racers arrived in ones and twos, and Taffyta's heart sank when King Candy wasn't one of them. The tendril of unease in her stomach exploded like a grenade into full-blown anxiety, sending shrapnel shards of panic ricocheting through her. Something was wrong. Where could he possibly be?

When she asked again, Swizzle crossed his arms over his chest and smirked. "Maybe he game-jumped."

Candlehead rounded on him. "Shut up, Swizz," she snapped. Taffyta had never heard her talk to anyone like that and it touched her. Moving to Taffyta's side and putting an arm around her, Candlehead said, "He wouldn't do that."

Rolling his eyes, Swizz asked, "Why? You guys act like he's some kind of good guy now, but maybe he was just waiting for the right opportunity. I mean, he lied to all of us for fifteen years, no reason he couldn't have been lying for the past seven."

"Come on, man," Rancis said, shooting Swizz a warning look. Could the rest of them see Taffyta's legs shaking? Her face felt bloodless suddenly and her stomach was roiling.

Swizz shrugged. "Whatever. I'm just saying."

"Yeah well, maybe cut it out," Rancis said, a little bit of a growl in his voice.

This finally shut Swizzle up. Taffyta wished she could express her gratitude to Rancis for sticking up for King Candy, but she couldn't seem to make a single sound. Probably because there was a cold, hard ball blocking her throat, like a jawbreaker she'd swallowed too soon.

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Adorabeezle asked, "Has anyone gone to Game Central Station to let everyone else know what happened?" When all of them stared at her blankly, she looked exasperated and said, "I'll go." Then, she hesitated. "Taff, I'll ask about King Candy. I'm sure someone's seen him."

"Thanks, Dora," Taffyta said, trying to make her voice come out as normal as possible. It didn't work.

By this time, NPCs were gathering in the town square as well, wondering what had happened and marveling at the racers' new appearances. Some of Taffyta's fans kept looking at Rancis, Gloyd, and Swizzle and giggling, while more than one NPC gushed to Crumbelina and Minty how beautiful they were. Taffyta just sat on a bench, one leg crossed over the other and her arms folded across her chest. Good thing she'd found the coat, because even with it on, she was cold. She wasn't used to sitting around in winter weather. The sun seemed to be getting lower in the sky too. Did they have day and night now?

Eventually, Adorabeezle returned, and at Taffyta's unspoken question, she just shook her head. The knot in Taffyta's stomach twisted tighter.

As arcade opening approached, the town square began clearing out, until only Candlehead and Rancis remained. Every once in awhile, Candlehead patted Taffyta's shoulder. It didn't help, but it was nice that they were sticking around. She thought she might lose her mind if she was left alone. Her stomach was now fully clenched into a tight, hard knot that she expected to vomit up at any moment. Her palms were sweaty, she was shaking, and there was clearly something invisible and heavy sitting on her chest, because she couldn't seem to take a real breath.

"Taff," Candlehead said suddenly. "Look."

Wreck-It Ralph was hurrying into the square. He was alone. Taffyta's heart—what was left of it—sank.

When he caught sight of her, his face did that—that thing that people's faces did when they had to deliver bad news. First the panic as they realized the moment they'd been dreading was imminent, then the regret, then a mixture of resignation and resolve: a cycle of emotions like downshifting at the end of a race you already knew you were going to lose.

Candlehead and Rancis glanced at each other, then drew back so Taffyta was sitting on the bench by herself when Ralph reached her. "Any luck?" she asked. She didn't think she needed to specify what she was talking about. Her voice came out about an octave higher than normal.

Ralph sighed and put a hand to the back of his neck. Taffyta had to grit her teeth and try hard not to throw up. "No one's seen him. Surge even pulled the branches from all the outlets to see if he went in another game."

"Branches?" Taffyta asked, confused. "Do you mean logs?"

Waving a hand, Ralph said, "Whatever." Then, he sat down next to her. The bench groaned in protest and sagged under his weight, and Taffyta flailed an arm out to stop herself from sliding into him. "Sorry," he said with a wince, adjusting so the angle of incline wasn't as extreme. "Anyway, it doesn't look like he left Sugar Rush."

Taffyta had to remind herself to breathe. "So…so where is he?"

"Kid—"

"He must still be in Sugar Rush somewhere," she said frantically, not wanting to hear what he had to say. "Maybe he's…I don't know, did anyone check the code vault here?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rancis tug Candlehead further away. With another sigh, Ralph said, "Kid. You know he wouldn't worry you like this. You're the only one he's ever shown that kind of consideration to, and he takes it pretty seriously."

Something was wrong with her heart, it wasn't beating in time, and it felt like it was leaping around from her sternum to her throat. Maybe the upgrade had messed up her internal organs, too. "Yeah well," she began, "he has to be around—"

Ralph turned towards her and put a hand on her shoulder. It was more like a finger on her shoulder, his hand was so huge. "Look, Taffyta. I'm not exactly some kind of hacker—if I was, I'd have coded myself a piece of pie once in awhile—but I think…" He trailed off and then took a breath and tried again. "He wasn't part of the game originally. So if Sugar Rush got upgraded, well…I mean, what I'm trying to say is, he might not have survived the upgrade."

Taffyta's whole world telescoped to a single point directly in front of her, and time did something really funny so that she wasn't sure if she'd been sitting there in silence for five hours or only five seconds. "But," she said. Her voice would barely come out. "But he coded himself into the game. He's part of it."

The look on Ralph's face had turned to pity. "Yeah, that's the thing, though. If everything got overwritten with the new code, he wouldn't have been in it. So…"

He didn't need to finish the sentence. Taffyta couldn't even finish it in her head. But there was no point in articulating it, because it was the thing she'd been afraid of all day, the thing that she'd kept trying to push down, to dismiss as absurd. Unthinkable. Impossible. She wouldn't say it. If she didn't say it, if she didn't even think it, maybe it wouldn't be true, even though she'd known for hours that it was.

Ralph was staring at her, his eyebrows drawn together in a craggy expression of concern. "Kid, look, I'm sorry, but I think he's gone."

The ground dropped out from under Taffyta and suddenly she didn't know if she was floating or falling or sitting completely stock still, like a rock candy sculpture. Her throat closed up and she started to shiver, her teeth chattering from shock, and her vision blurred with tears. He'd said it. Ralph had said it. And as stupid as she knew it was, it was like he'd made it real. She hated him for it.

She shot to her feet and almost lost her balance. She hated all of this. She hated her stupid new body, she hated the weather. Sugar Rush had been perfect the way it was, why had anyone wanted to change it? Why had Litwak done this to them?

It was hard to see through the slick of tears, but Candlehead and Rancis were coming towards her and Ralph was getting up. But she was crying now, her breath starting to hitch in hysterical sobs, and the last thing she wanted was to be around any of them. She turned and hurried in the opposite direction, tripping over her feet, which somehow made everything seem so much worse.

"Taffyta!" Candlehead called in an anguished tone, but no way was she stopping. Taffyta walked faster, then broke into a run, not caring where she was going, only knowing that she had to get away from them. She blundered to the edge of the square and somehow spotted her kart. She barely remembered driving here earlier, but, now sobbing in earnest, she got in, started it, and tore out of Chocolate Town.

She didn't have a destination in mind. All she could do was drive; hold her foot down on the pedal and clench her fist around the gearstick and feel the kart hum through her body. She couldn't even see what she was passing, and she wasn't thinking about anything, because to think, she'd have to face the gaping black pit inside her; have to look directly at it and acknowledge it there and if she did she'd fall in and there'd be no getting out, there'd be no coming back.

Without meaning to, she found herself in the Frosty Mountains. It felt ten times colder than normal and the road seemed icier, and it occurred to her that maybe the tracks would be different. Maybe none of them were the way she remembered and none of the accumulated muscle memory from the past twenty-two years would do her any good.

It occurred to her, but not in time to prepare for the hairpin turn in the track that she knew exactly how fast to take—at least, she had known. Now, the moment she slid into it, she knew she'd miscalculated. Her kart fishtailed and she panicked, cranking the wheel in the opposite direction to try to correct. But she lost control, and Pink Lightning went careening off the track into a huge snow drift, crashing into it with an explosion of powdered sugar snow.

Taffyta stumbled out of the drift, not caring that she was covered in snow. It was caked all over her coat and in her hair, but all she did was stand there, shivering in the wind. Of course she was here. Of course.

Putting her head down, she trudged away from her kart towards a small side road, not part of any track, that wound up the highest peak in the Frosty Mountains. The walk seemed to take an eternity and no time at all. When she reached the end of the road, she hugged her arms around herself and blinked ice out of her eyelashes. Tears were frozen to her cheeks and as new ones formed and squeezed out of her eyes, they felt boiling on her skin. Had she been crying this whole time? Probably.

This had been their spot. Their favorite place in the game, this overlook in the Frosty Mountains, where you could see all of Sugar Rush laid out at your feet like a sparkling jewel in a Ring Pop. It was the place where their friendship had taken root, so many years ago, when he'd told her that she, out of all the racers, was his favorite, that she reminded him of himself, and that he would take her under his wing and mentor her. It had always been special, a place where Taffyta could go whether she was happy or sad, a place that always held the memory of a day that her heart had been so full that she hadn't known what to do with herself.

For a long moment, she stood there, her fingers digging into her arms so hard that she could feel bruises forming. The sun was definitely moving across the sky, and right now it was getting close to setting. It was just starting to turn the sky pink and the snow that had fallen earlier was sparkling in the fading light. It was beautiful. At any other other time, it would have taken her breath away.

But now she let out a wounded, keening sound and sank to her knees, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed. After everything, after all the hard times they'd been through, how could this happen? King Candy had survived getting TurboTime and RoadBlasters unplugged. He'd kept himself alive in Game Central Station for ten years. He'd survived being eaten by a Cy-bug, turning into one, getting boiled alive in Diet Cola Mountain. And then he'd survived another unplugging when Sugar Rush had broken last year.

Taffyta choked on her own tears and snot, unable to make her lungs draw air in because she was crying so hard. She hated this, every single bit of this horrible upgrade, her stupid new adult body, the stupid weather, the stupid beautiful setting sun.

King Candy was dead. She didn't know what she was going to do.