“It’s not real,” Ollie explained, standing, too. “Just a recording. You come across them every now and then, to keep us in line. I bet it means we’re getting closer to the Emerald City, though.”
“Who is she?” I asked. “That’s not Dorothy. Is it?”
“It’s Ozma. Oz’s true ruler,” Indigo said. “She’s still technically in charge, but no one’s seen the real Ozma outside the palace in ages. It’s always just these illusion things. Look.”
She wound her arm up like a pitcher and went to slap the girl. Her hand passed easily through the princess’s head.
“See? Fake. The real Ozma doesn’t care about us anymore.”
“I am pleased to announce this auspicious day for all the people of Oz!” Ozma kept babbling.
Ollie looked away from the hologram like it hurt him to stare at her even a second longer, and then Indigo stepped right through her and we all just kept on walking. Ozma’s canned speech faded slowly away into the distance.
“We waited a long time for a ruler like her.” Ollie sighed. “She was supposed to be in charge all along—she’s descended from the fairy who gave Oz its magic. But she was just a baby when the Wizard came here, and he didn’t want her getting in his way. So he sent her off somewhere. Then, when he left, he made the Scarecrow the king. That didn’t go well.”
“The Scarecrow was evil, too? Like Dorothy?” I asked. I was having a hard time keeping track of all this, but something about it seemed important.
“No,” he said, and then chuckled ruefully to himself. “Not then at least. He just wasn’t a very good king.”
“He wanted to sit around the palace thinking all day,” Indigo cut in. “If you ask me, brains aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Anyway, everything went to hell, until Ozma came back.”
“Where was she that whole time?”
“No one knows,” Ollie said. “She would never talk about it. But she has fairy blood, which meant she had a right to the crown. It’s deep magic—since she was finally of age, no one could do anything to take it away from her.”
“Dorothy did,” I pointed out.
“Not exactly,” Ollie said.
“Ozma was in charge for a long time,” Indigo said. “Things were good with her. The best. The sun rose and set on time. There was magic everywhere. . . .”
“The monkeys flew wherever they wanted while Ozma reigned,” Ollie interjected.
“It was what Oz was supposed to be all along,” Indigo said. “The funny part is that when Dorothy came back, everyone was happy at first. She was a hero, you know. And nothing changed for a while, except that she moved into the palace. She and Ozma became friends. They did everything together. No one even minded when Ozma made her a princess, too. It seemed like she deserved it.”
“And then?”
“Then came the Happiness Decree. After that, we stopped seeing so much of Ozma. It was, like, all Dorothy all the time. Ozma was just . . . gone.”
“You think Dorothy did something to her.”
Indigo nodded. “I don’t know what,” she said. “But Ozma would never let this happen to Oz. She must have been tricked . . . or . . .”
“Or she’s dead,” Ollie said.
“No!” Indigo nearly shouted. “She can’t be dead. Dorothy’s not powerful enough. No one’s powerful enough. Once Ozma had the crown, nothing could take it away from her. It’s fairy magic—that’s the strongest there is. Nothing can break it. Nothing can kill her.”
Ollie didn’t look so sure. “What if the magic’s gone?” he asked. Indigo didn’t answer him.
The whole time they’d been giving me a primer on Oz’s history—which I still wasn’t sure I understood—we’d been walking, and now we had come to a wide, stagnant river. The water was mossy and still and rotten-smelling, and had a toxic green tint to it. At the muddy bank, a tangle of thick black vines twisted like snakes.
Luckily, we didn’t have to swim through that muck: as it neared the water, the yellow bricks began to ascend, stretching up and out into the air in a meandering path. There was nothing supporting them—no cables or columns or beams—and the whole road swayed and fluttered back and forth like a ribbon in the wind.
I gulped. “Are we supposed to cross that?” I asked. Heights weren’t exactly my favorite thing.
But the height was the least of our problems.
“Monkeys,” Ollie breathed, pointing at the tiny silhouettes that swooped and dove against the newsprint-gray of an endless cloud that hovered just above the road. “They’re patrolling the bridge.”
I laughed nervously. “Time to turn back, I guess.” But I knew we couldn’t. Where would we go? We had seen what there was to see back there. The only direction was straight ahead.
Indigo looked up at the monkeys in thought. “I think we can make it past them,” she said. “I know a spell that might work.”
“Wait,” I said. “You can do magic? You didn’t tell me that.”
Indigo cocked her head and raised her eyebrows like she was offended. “My grandmother was a sorceress,” she said. “She may not have been as powerful as Glinda, but she taught me a thing or two. She would have taught me more, if Dorothy hadn’t banned it. But the Winged Ones are more susceptible to magic than almost anyone. I think a misdirection charm will get us past them.”
She closed her eyes and raised her hands, moving her fingers in front of her in rapid, fluttery movements. I looked down at myself, waiting to see what would happen—was I going to turn invisible or something? But nothing changed.
After a minute, Indigo opened her eyes. “I think we’re good to go,” she said. “Just don’t talk. Don’t do anything that will attract attention.”
“I don’t think it worked,” I said.
“It worked. Misdirection’s not that powerful, but it will do the job. It won’t hide us from them totally; it just makes us easy to overlook. They’ll simply be distracted every time they look in our direction. Trust me.”
The thing is, I was having a really hard time concentrating on what she was saying. But I got the idea.
Crossing the flying road was like trying to walk on a breeze. It rippled and dipped and swayed back and forth, and every time you lifted your foot you had to wonder if there would be anything under it when you put it back down.
Ollie was fine: he went scampering on ahead on all fours as easily as if we were still on solid ground. Indigo didn’t have too much trouble either. She was so squat and compact that it would take a wrecking ball to knock her over. But I was neither a monkey nor a Munchkin and I had to stretch my arms out at my sides and consider each step carefully.
I didn’t look down. I just kept my eyes on the road; the bricks yellower than ever against the dull gray of the sky.
Well, I tried to. Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep your eye trained on a moving target. Every time the narrow swath of road shifted, it revealed the water a million feet below us and still as menacing as ever. I didn’t know which would be worse: the fall, or what would be waiting for me underneath the surface of the nasty, slimy river.
With every step, I wanted to panic. I wanted to sit down in the middle of the road and hug my legs to my knees and give up. But I didn’t do any of those things.
Tornado or no tornado, a girl from Kansas doesn’t let much get to her. So I set my fear aside, put one foot in front of the other, and as the road carried me high into the sky, I felt myself becoming less and less afraid. I wasn’t going to let anything as stupid as a breeze or a few wobbly bricks knock me off my feet.
That’s what it means to be from the prairie. It was something I had in common with Dorothy.
I knew exactly how high up I was when I felt my fingertips scraping clouds.
After my dad left, my mom and I would watch Wheel of Fortune every night after dinner. I wasn’t very good at it, but my mom always guessed the answer before the contestants. At the end of each episode, Pat would thank their sponsors, and as he reminded us about the joys of F
lying the Friendly Skies, an airplane would drift across the screen, bound for Sunny Aruba or Fabulous Orlando or wherever, floating in slow motion across a sunset-pink landscape of fluffy clouds.
I didn’t like the idea of airplanes, and I didn’t really want to go to Orlando anyway. But I’d always wondered what it would be like to touch a cloud.
Now I knew the answer to that, at least when it came to Oz clouds. It turned out they were just as soft and fluffy as they looked on Wheel of Fortune, as solid as cotton balls, but they were nothing you’d want to curl up and take a nap on. Every time my fingers grazed one, it sent an icy shock up my arm and down my spine into my toes. Some of them were as small as party balloons and others were as big as couch cushions, and soon they were so thick in the air that I had to swat them out of my path in order to keep moving.
Meanwhile, I could hear monkeys screeching, getting louder and louder. They were so close that I could feel their wings flapping just inches above my head. Every now and then I’d hear a scream so loud it straightened my spine. The sour smell of monkey breath filled my nostrils.
But Indigo’s spell had worked. They were close enough to touch, but the monkeys were ignoring me, acting like I wasn’t even there.
Finally the road began to curl in on itself, rising up in a steep, tight coil until I came to the top and stepped onto a small, circular platform twice as wide around as a hula hoop. This was the top. I was so high up that even the monkeys were beneath me now. It was all downhill from here. Literally: on the far edge of the platform, the yellow road plunged back toward the ground at a steep, straight incline, the rough texture of the bricks suddenly slick and smooth. It was a Yellow Brick Slide.
But that was nothing in comparison to the sight on the horizon. The Emerald City had come into view. Nothing I’d seen so far had prepared me for it. It seemed to have come out of nowhere, just when I was least expecting it, and now that I was looking at it, it was hard to understand how it hadn’t been visible all along, with its swooping skyline that was so green it colored in the sky around it, and the palace with towers so high that they disappeared beyond the clouds.
From up here, looking down on the city in the distance, you could almost forget everything that had gone wrong here. From up here, you could almost pretend that this was the Oz that should have been.
But as much as I would have liked to have stayed up here forever with that fantasy, I knew the monkeys would spot me eventually if I didn’t keep moving. I gulped, looking down. Just pretend you’re going down a waterslide at AquaLand, I told myself. It might have made me feel a little better if I’d ever actually been to AquaLand. My mom had never taken me.
So I just took a deep breath, dropped to my butt, and reassured myself that going down had to be easier than coming up. If nothing else, it would be faster. I closed my eyes and pushed off.
My stomach dropped as I hurtled downward, the wind whipping across my face and gaining speed every second. At first I was terrified, but after a minute, I inched my eyes open and saw the clouds whipping by as the ground approached at high velocity. Feeling a rush of exhilaration, I opened my mouth to whoop with joy and caught myself just in time to remember that the monkeys would hear me. Instead, I let out a quiet little squeal, grinning from ear to ear.
I landed with a thump on solid ground, where Indigo and Ollie were waiting for me, both looking a little shaky.
“That was actually sort of fun,” I said, scooping myself to my feet and dusting myself off.
Indigo glared at me. Ollie looked away, and I instantly realized my mistake. He wasn’t thinking about the slide or the thrill of survival. He was thinking about the monkeys.
I wondered how it had felt for him to be so close to his people and to not even be able to look at them. The monkeys weren’t evil: they were slaves, and some of them had probably been his friends once. Were his parents and his sister up there somewhere? Had he recognized any of the voices that had cackled in his ears?
“Ollie,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head like it was no big deal, but when he finally spoke, it was through gritted teeth and I could tell he was angry. Maybe not at me, but it didn’t really matter.
“I would do anything to get them back,” he said quietly. “Is there anyone in your life like that? Anyone you’d do anything to help? No matter what?”
“I . . .” I bit my lip and hesitated. There was a time when I would have said my mother. Now I wasn’t sure. I had tried to help her so many times, had done everything I could possibly think of, and none of it had worked. Not even a little. Now she was probably dead. “I don’t know,” I finally said, feeling my face flush with shame.
He cocked his head like he didn’t believe me. It wasn’t the answer he had expected.
Indigo just rolled her eyes. “I feel sorry for you,” she said. “I really do.”
We didn’t say anything after that. We just trudged on ahead.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about the question Ollie had asked me. I made a decision. A promise to myself. I couldn’t help my mother anymore. If I’d ever had a chance, it was long gone now. But if I ever had a chance to help the monkeys, I would take it. No matter what it cost me. It was the least I could do. Not for him, but for myself. Just to say I had someone.
When the road turned a few minutes later we found ourselves in an apple orchard. The trees were lush and green in contrast to the icky cornfields. Huge, red apples dangled temptingly from their branches, shiny and juicy-looking.
I stepped off the road, the grumbling in my stomach outweighing what I’d seen with the mutant corn.
Star, still in my pocket, knew what was up, too. She poked her nose out and chirped hungrily as I reached for a piece of fruit.
For a split second I thought I saw the tree blink. I snatched my hand back.
I looked at the talking monkey next to me, remembering that anything was possible here. “Did that tree just move?”
“They talk, too, but they’ve taken a vow of silence.”
“Voluntarily?”
“The princess felt that their conversation ruined the apple-eating experience and was therefore a violation of the Happiness Decree.”
“What about their happiness? The trees, I mean?”
“I think we all realized a little too late that the only happiness that matters is Dorothy’s,” Indigo chimed in.
Ollie looked at me. “I know you want to, but you can’t.”
“Is it poison? Or is it forbidden?”
“It’s against the Happiness Decree. It’s not worth the risk,” Indigo said.
“But we need to eat. And Ollie needs his strength. No one is around.”
I plucked two apples and nodded at the tree, meeting its sad eyes. “Thanks,” I said. I handed one to Ollie, who took it and examined it, unsure.
The first bite melted in my mouth. It tasted like pie. Apple pie. Apple and cinnamon and sugar and butter all mosh-pitted around in my mouth. It was a magically delicious apple! Finally, something in Oz that was actually as cool as advertised.
It was too good to last. I’d just taken another satisfying bite when I saw Indigo’s face go white. She pointed behind me and opened her mouth to say something. No sound came out.
And then.
It started to get dark. But it wasn’t the sun setting. The sky was as sunny as ever. Instead, it was like the world around us was being covered in shadows, starting with the yellow road. Then the shadows began to rise up from the ground, curling and inflating and twisting into forms. They were taking on shapes. Shapes that looked oddly, eerily familiar to me.
It was the Tin Woodman. He wasn’t alone.
I knew we were really in trouble when I saw that Indigo was too scared to even mutter an I told you so. She was just a little wall of fear with wide eyes. The color seemed to drain from her tattoos until they were just gray impressions on her skin. Ollie was shaking right down to the tip of his tail, the uneaten apple still in his hand.
&nbs
p; This Tin Woodman was not the Tin Woodman I remembered. By now I shouldn’t have expected anything different—nothing was the way it was supposed to be in Dorothy’s remade Oz. Still. I wasn’t prepared for what I was looking at now.
He looked more like a machine that had been cobbled together out of spare parts, a hodgepodge of scrap metal and springs and machinery pieces all held together by screws and bolts. His long, spindly legs were a complex construction of rods and springs and joints, and bent backward at his ankles like a horse’s legs; his face was pinched and mean, with beady, flashing metal eyes and a thin, cylindrical nose that jutted out several inches from his face and ended in a nasty little point. His oversize jaw jutted out from the rest of his face in a nasty underbite, revealing a mess of little blades where his teeth should have been.
I half remembered the Tin Woodman’s story. He had been a flesh-and-blood man until a witch had enchanted his ax to make him chop off pieces of his body one by one, and one by one he had replaced them with metal parts until that was all that was left of him. From what it looked like, he had been making improvements ever since. The only thing that was really familiar about him was the funnel-shaped hat he wore. I guess some things never change.
Behind the Tin Woodman, four people in black suits materialized out of the shadows a moment after he did. They weren’t made of tin, but they weren’t exactly people either. Each of them was mostly flesh—with a few mechanical modifications.
One of them had a silver plate bolted to his face where his mouth should have been; another was round and squat with huge copper ears the size of his entire head. The third was a girl, probably about my age, with a glinting sword in place of an arm. But it was the last one who was the creepiest: He was just a disembodied head grafted to the body of a bicycle, with two robotic arms where the handlebars should have been, the knuckles of his mechanized hands scraping the bricks on the road.
“Run,” I said. It came out as more of a breath than a word. But no one moved. There was nowhere to run to, and anyway, I was so scared that my knees felt like they were made of jelly.
Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection: No Place Like Oz, Dorothy Must Die, The Witch Must Burn, The Wizard Returns, The Wicked Will Rise Page 6