by Unknown
Deeper within her, other changes would be taking place. Synapses would be growing and expanding, boosting her intelligence to superhuman levels. Already, studs on her brow showed that she had fitted herself with cybernetic implants so that she could access the data stored within the Witch’s Cloud.
The leader of the Winged Baboons gave a howling shriek. “All hail Dorothy!” and from every perch on the ragged peak, like loathsome gargoyles upon a castle wall, thousands of its brethren began roaring, tossing grass and leaves into the air in celebration, chanting, “All hail Dorothy!”
But Dorothy did not smile at their obeisance. Her eyes did not glow with pride. On her taut lips there was only pain. She had killed in cold blood. Did she fear what she would become?
“A Witch you may be,” Tin Man said, “but you will never be ‘wicked.’ You’ve saved my life twice now, and for that I thank you. I think we’ll have to find a new name for you. How about the Worthy Witch of the West?”
He did not say it, but he suddenly remembered something: he’d once loved her. He’d loved the little girl that she had been, and he knew that he would love the woman that she would become.
The fleshly component of his body was dead now, along with its capacity to love. But the memory still floated through his RAM, a ghost in the machine.
She was taller now—at least an inch taller than when she’d first made her appearance in Oz. She had grown in more ways than one.
The Winged Baboons finished shocking Scarecrow to life, and he began to speak. “Are we going to Oz?” Scarecrow cried in celebration. “Shall we get our reward?”
Dorothy looked sad at this, as if pitying the fool. “Oh, Scarecrow,” she said. She seemed to fight back words that would break his heart, but said carefully, “Of course I want you to have your reward.” But there was a distant look in her eyes.
She peered away toward Emerald City, gleaming there beyond the mountains. Its spires rose to heaven, and in the evening, one could see green lights among its towers, winking like stars, guiding in the zeppelin captains who ferried goods from far countries.
There was a wistfulness to Dorothy’s gaze, a haunted look, and Tin Man knew that she was accessing memories from the Cloud.
“He can’t help us,” she said. “He’s a charlatan, Scarecrow, no technomage at all. The image we saw of a sagacious wizard was nothing but a disguise, a holograph. Their wizard cannot offer you a brain. The best he might give is a third-rate memory crystal from a broken-down droid.”
At that, Scarecrow looked to the ground, hung his head in defeat, and began to bawl.
Dorothy fixed him with a commanding gaze. “I will do better, my friend. I will fit you with a brain unparalleled in the world, and you shall have access to all the data in my Cloud, for you have proven your loyalty over and over again.”
Scarecrow’s demeanor immediately changed. “Hooray!” he shouted, and he jumped up and began to dance, scattering straw from his stuffed shirt and trousers.
“And me?” the Cowardly Lion roared, stepping forward. He tucked his tail between his legs and cringed, as if afraid that she might whip him.
Dorothy smiled benevolently. “I shall fit your hypothalamus, the back of your brain, with a device that will jolt it. When faced with cruelty and injustice, your rage shall overwhelm your own self-interests, for that is all that courage is—outrage over evil.”
The Lion frowned, as if he had hoped for more.
“I’m sorry if it seems too little,” she said. “But the Wizard of Oz can offer you nothing but patronizing platitudes. He’s only an old man whose starship slipped into a wormhole. He can never return home, so he makes his living by foolery. In that industrious city, where all of his people slave beneath a cloud of fear, he produces the least of all, for he creates only lies and illusions and false assurances. He is the ultimate politician. He only takes, while his people give. He sent us on this quest hoping that we would be destroyed.”
Tin Man scanned the city where he had once placed his hopes, his electronic eyes registering the scene in infrared, so that certain pillars blazed from heat waste. It looked like a hell of burning green flames. The Wizard was no better than a murderer, he decided. “Then he cannot help you get home?”
“No,” Dorothy said. “Even if he were a mechmage, that would be beyond his power. I must make my home in Oz.”
“What of me?”
“Your heart died months ago, and your brain with it,” she said. “I would bring them back if I could…” She faltered, and a tear slid down her cheek. “I’m sorry. For you, most of all, I’m sorry.”
She looked too sad and too wise for her years, but that was the price of knowledge.
“What will you do with the ‘Wizard’?” Tin Man asked. “What he does is unjust.”
“He should pay for his crimes,” Dorothy agreed. “But I won’t harm him. In time his people will discover his evil, and then they will bring him to justice.”
He wondered why she did not take the Wizard now. He’d nearly sent Dorothy to her death. Tin Man suspected that the Winged Baboons would gladly rip him limb from limb.
He looked into her dead blue eyes, and Tin Man understood. She already grieved over what she had done. Compassion restrained her from bloodshed.
He wondered, Does she even know how beautiful she is?
Tin Man no longer suffered from human limitations, not since the Wizard of Oz had masterminded his death.
“No better time to get rid of him than now,” Tin Man said.
Activating the vibroblade of his axe, he turned and stalked downhill into the gathering darkness.
ONE FLEW OVER THE RAINBOW
BY ROBIN WASSERMAN
Crow found her first. Never let us forget it either. It was always my Dorothy and before you met Dorothy and Dorothy told me, emphasis on me. Crap like that. She staked a claim on her, like it mattered, and I guess it did, because back then we all loved Dorothy, maybe even me. But no one loved her like Crow, who found her first.
Crow’s shit at remembering things now, so I have to remember for her. But I usually spare her that one, because what’s the point?
I let Crow blame me. I’d let Roar blame me, too, if he could pull it together enough to blame anyone. And I blame me, because I listened to Dorothy, and I knew better, and I got the lighter, and because I can take it.
Because I still have the knife.
Crow was Crow because of her tattoos. Not the ones she did herself with unbent paper clips and ballpoint ink: jagged hearts and lightning bolts and stupid stick figures who all had missing limbs—because when it came to Crow, nothing hurt until it did, and then you had to STOP, even if you hadn’t gotten to both legs. It was the ink on her back that gave her the name, a murder of crows swooping up her shoulder blades and pecking at the nape of her neck.
A murder of crows. I got that from her. But I found the others on my own:
A bellowing of bullfinches.
A pride of ostriches.
A mutation of thrushes.
A brood of hens.
A charm of finches.
A parliament of owls.
I found them for her. I thought she’d like it, how everything had its own special name, like a secret only we knew, because Crow taught me that names have power, and I figured we needed all we could get. But Crow only cared about the crows.
“A murder of me,” she liked to say. She made it into a song to sing when she was bored, and sometimes, when things got dark inside her head, she screamed it, flapping her arms and jumping on tables, screaming and screaming those same four words until the monkeys with the needles came to drag her away.
Monkeys, because “they’re all monkeys,” Crow said once about the orderlies, watching them fling a softball around the exercise yard. “Look at those monkeys flinging poo,” and because she said it, it stuck. Crow was in charge of naming. She could see the you inside of you, and she knew its true name.
But Dorothy was only ever Dorothy.
&
nbsp; My first time in here, Crow and I were roommates. Stuck in south wing together—medical wing—bruised and bandaged because she’d jumped off a roof, and I’d sliced through enough skin to get gangrene or blood poisoning or who even cares what you call it, and we lay in those beds and rolled our eyes at each other when Glind came to ask us in that low, gentle voice why we wanted to die.
He didn’t even need a nickname, because: Dr. Glenn Glind, can you imagine? He’s got parents who do that to him, and he still manages to not shoot himself in the head. No wonder we confused him.
We don’t tell him:
I don’t want to die.
Crow doesn’t want to die.
She wants to feel something, that’s what she tells me one night after he runs out of questions and leaves us to our reality TV and morphine drips. That’s why she jumps.
I feel too much, I tell her. That’s why the scars crawl up my legs and down my arms, intricate jags and whirls of hardened tissue; that’s why I grid myself with the knife, quadrants of lines and angles, my diagram of pain. I was Tina then, but she’s already calling me Tiny and Tinny and Tin-Girl, tasting the sound of one name after another until one tastes right. And even though I don’t tell her, not then at least, how Tin-Girl sounds good to me—because wouldn’t that be a great deal, hard on the outside, hollow on the inside, too hard for the knife, too empty to need it—Crow somehow knows anyway, and I’m Tin from then on.
Her brain doesn’t work right, she tells me, because that’s what they all told her, and she thinks she’s stupid, but she’s smarter than any of us, something I figure out pretty fast because I’m not stupid either.
My heart doesn’t work right, but I don’t tell her that either, because then I’d have to tell her that I’m not supposed to love anymore because it hurts too much, and that even so, I stay awake at night and watch the curve of her body and listen to her breathe, and then she’d laugh, and I’d have more to cut.
Here was Dorothy: electric-blue hair bobbed at her delicate chin. Ironically checkered baby-doll dress, chunky bracelets from her left wrist to her elbow, nails painted black, ruby lips, and big baby-blue “who, me?” eyes, and all that crap that gets people to make asses of themselves and write poems about you.
Before Crow, I never much noticed girls, and I don’t notice them after her, because it’s not a girl thing, it’s a Crow thing, like she’s some separate species, some alien who got dropped on this planet by mistake and has to imitate human beings and suffer the consequences when she can’t imitate them quite well enough. That was one of Crow’s theories, at least. I don’t know whether she believed it or not, because with Crow you could never be sure. It was better to play along, not so much that she could laugh at you after if it turned out to be a joke, but enough that she wouldn’t have a freak-out and jump on the tables and then get zombified for the rest of the week. But I could believe it: Crow the alien, Crow the stranger in a strange land. Crow, who wasn’t like anyone else.
So even though Dorothy was pretty enough, that wasn’t the thing about her.
The thing about her was her shoes.
Silver combat boots that sparkled like magic under the fluorescent lights.
The thing was how she howled when they took them away.
We were pressed to the picture window overlooking the ward intake area, not because we were waiting for Dorothy to show, but because we were waiting to give the one-finger salute to the Wicked Bitch of the East. Head nurse of the east ward—excuse me, soon to be ex-head nurse, fired for drug smuggling, that’s what we heard. She was a yeller, the kind always looking for an excuse to get mad and, we heard, always smiled a creepy little smile when it came time to call in the monkeys to put someone down. Of course, they didn’t fire her for that. Even though we were in west, where we still had a Wicked Bitch of our own, we celebrated, because one down seemed pretty good, and at least someone was getting off easy, even if it was the pathetic east wingers. Nutcase solidarity and all that.
So we were watching when they brought Dorothy in, and when they took her shoes and the rest of it, because real clothes meant special privileges and new patients didn’t get any of those, she threw a grand mal seizure of a fit, sedated before she even made it onto the ward, maybe some kind of record. It seemed like a good omen, Crow said then, the new girl coming in just as the Bitch was going out, and for a while that’s all Dorothy was, the good omen with the shoe fetish. But Crow must have noticed something, something she liked, because the next time I saw Dorothy, she had Crow’s arm around her shoulder and Crow was saying to her the same thing she’d said to me, “Now you’re one of us.”
Here was us: Crow with her scrambled-egg brains. Me with my scars. And Roar, our bodyguard, big enough to scare off anyone who might think to mess with us, big enough to scare even the monkeys into keeping clear, skinhead bald with a bulldog face and barbed wire tattoos, big and mean-looking and too doped up to do much about it. We didn’t even know his real name, but he was loyal and useful and kind of sweet when you got to know him, and frightened enough that if anyone but us got too close, he let out a mighty rooooooooar. And so, his name. And so, Us.
“Those are the monkeys,” Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to the poo-flinging orderlies.
“Those are the Munchkins,” Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to the pathetic east wingers, anorexic outpatients gnawing on their doughnut holes during group therapy, lording their precious snack over the rest of us even though they could barely choke it down.
“You ever get lost, you follow the road of yellow brick,” Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to the ribbon of paint that wound through the tiled corridors, stretching from the mythical doors to the outside all the way to the bolted doors that closed down our wing. Every ward got a different color: south was sky, north was death, east was puke. Ours was sun.
“This is Roar,” Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to our giant.
“This is Tin,” Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to me.
She gave her all our secret names, and she did it like it was nothing.
“How about me?” Dorothy asked and twirled around. She had one of those song voices, and you wanted her to talk more, even when you wanted her to shut up. “What’s my name?”
Crow didn’t pause. “Dorothy. You’re nothing but Dorothy.”
Then Dorothy told me how much she loved my skin art and that she was an artist too, and she showed me the girl on fire she’d markered across her forearm.
I didn’t tell her that mine wasn’t art. Because when she said it, I thought, Maybe it is. And she’s just the first to notice.
Dorothy told us that she hated her parents, who’d stuck her in here because they couldn’t handle her light, and that her parents, who she called Emily and Henry instead of Mom and Dad, weren’t really her parents, that—depending on what kind of mood she was in—her real parents were fugitives, her real parents were deadbeats, her real parents were cult members, her real parents were dead.
“Henry and Emily just want to suffocate me,” she told us. “They want me to be as gray and lifeless as they are so I can fit in at their gray and lifeless country club and get good grades at the gray and lifeless school they send me to, then get into a gray and lifeless college, and lead a gray and lifeless life. It’s pathetic.”
We all nodded, even Roar.
Dorothy had a ragged stuffed goat named Bad Dog that she took with her everywhere because it was her totem animal, whatever that meant. As she talked, she made it do the can-can across her knee. “When that didn’t work, they decided I was crazy. Just for not wanting what they want me to want. So I decided if they wanted me to be crazy, I’d be crazy. Is that crazy?”
We shook our heads.
“Oh, it’s crazy, all right.” Her laugh was even more song than her voice, and when she laughed and shook, her hair flickered around her face like blue flame, and I thought that, crazy or not, she didn’t belong here. She was too bright. “But life is crazy, right? That’s what I figure. And if lif
e is crazy, then we’re all the sane ones, aren’t we? They probably want you to be gray and lifeless too, don’t they?” She flung her arms out at the monkeys and the Wicked Bitch and the empty paper cups in the trash, the ones that had held our morning pills. “But I think we should celebrate what we are. What we can see. We see life in color, so we know what they don’t, am I right? We live life like artists.” She pointed at me. Jabbed her finger right into my chest, then traced it across my collarbone to where the scars poked out above my collar. Concentric circles with arrows speared through their centers; I remembered every line. I remembered the cold blade warming in my hand, and I remembered carving myself into a target. You can hurt me, the arrows said to my mother and all her bullshit, to the guy in sixth period who got me up against the wall and rammed his hand up my dress and stuck his fingers inside, to the last person I was stupid enough to love and the one before that. But not as much as I can hurt myself. “Tin understands. Don’t you, Tin?”
I saw Crow’s eyes follow that finger on my skin, and I saw them narrow, because Crow was jealous for all the wrong reasons, and that made me just jealous enough to smile and say yes.
Sometimes one yes is enough to explain all the rest of them.
Yes, we were special, and yes, we shouldn’t let them take that away from us.
Yes, we were too doped up, and inside we were just like Roar, tamed and muzzled and all too willing to follow orders.
Yes, we should do something about it.
“I have an idea,” Dorothy said. She took our hands, mine and Crow’s, and she squeezed. Roar rested his paws on our shoulders, closing the circuit. “Just for fun. Are you in?”
We said yes.
Some days we took each other’s pills. Some days we didn’t take any at all. Dorothy showed us how to cheek our meds, and after that it was simple: Drop the pill in your mouth, lodge it in a warm, soft place against your tongue, swallow hard, then open wide so the Bitch could see your insides and check you off her list. Later the pills went into our palms, damp and sticky, and they were ours, to do with what we wanted.