“They serve a purpose,” she said. “They keep people afraid of me.”
“By terrorizing the farms around your palace?” Nox asked drily.
She bristled. “The Wheelers are the only creatures of Ev that are surface-bound. They’re easy enough to escape in the underground tunnels; they never go belowground. And they make good guardians, if unpredictable ones.”
“But they were ready to burn people’s villages on the way,” Madison said. “And they wanted to hurt us.”
“They know their place,” Lang said curtly. “They would never dare contradict my orders. And as for the villages . . .” She shrugged. “A few casualties are unavoidable in service to the larger cause. I learned that from the best, after all.”
She shot Nox a bitter look. Something like pain flashed across his face and was gone so fast I wondered if I’d seen it at all. I had to know their history or it was going to drive me out of my mind, but I’d have to wait until I could talk to Nox alone. It was anyone’s guess when that might be.
Lang was matter-of-fact about the extreme poverty, which was obvious all around us, despite the beautifully carved tunnels decorated with jeweled murals and elaborate dragon boats. I thought about Dusty Acres as we floated by the tiny structures that passed for homes along the river’s banks. Injustice seemed like a way of life here. I wondered if Lang had always been so hardened to it, or if something had happened to her when she was part of the Order that had made her into this ruthless, pragmatic double agent. Perhaps that was the point of all the different faces she wore—she didn’t want to remain as one person.
Everything I’d seen and done, all the suffering I’d witnessed, starting with my very first hour in Oz—I’d thought I’d hardened myself to it, just the way she had. That had become clear when I’d been explaining things to Madison earlier. I’d had to, or else I’d have lost my mind. I’d had to fight to kill without regretting the death I left behind me. So did Nox.
And ultimately, so did Dorothy.
But Dorothy had taken it a step further from the very beginning. She wasn’t fighting injustice—she was creating it, ever since she’d returned to Oz. The first time she’d come to Oz, she’d been like me. She’d just tried to help her friends and keep them safe. But when she came back, she’d killed and tortured people for fun. She’d made war into a hobby. She’d enslaved her subjects and warped them into her soldiers. Something had happened to make her that way. Something had turned her from a girl like me into the monster she’d become. Whatever that thing was, it was the key. I knew it. That was what I had to find out if I wanted to end her power forever without killing her. If I wanted to use compassion—but still win. I’d stopped short of killing her directly, so I knew I was different.
I felt like I had a dozen different strands of varying textures and lengths, and I was almost ready to braid them together—but threads were still slipping through my fingers. There was something important I was missing. Something about how all of this tied together. Something that Lurline had hinted at.
The thing that bound me to Dorothy and turned orphaned kids like Nox—and, presumably, Lang—into battle-scarred warriors. If I could just undo the tangle and weave the threads together . . . but for now, the knot was too dense for me to unravel.
And, I realized, I didn’t just want to defeat Dorothy because it was my mission. I wanted to defeat her because I wanted to stay alive. I wanted to see my mom again. I wanted to have a chance at a real life with Nox—a relationship that wasn’t constantly thrown into turmoil by war and intrigue. I wanted to make sure that Madison got home safely to her family and her kid. I had responsibilities that were bigger than me. Bigger than the Order and what they wanted for me. I had family. I had friends.
The dragon boat slowed down and I stopped thinking. For now, we just had to stay alive. I could figure out the next step when we were safe.
As safe as you could get in Ev, anyway. Which didn’t seem very safe at all.
“My lady, we’re here,” the captain said, several of his mouths speaking at once. His eerie, rustling voices broke the silence.
“Good,” Lang said, her voice flat and distant. “You know the way in. Take us home.”
The dragon boat stilled in the fast-moving water, its legs moving powerfully against the current to hold us in place. The captain held up long, segmented limbs and began to chant in a low, haunting singsong. Each of his mouths shaped different words and different melodies, the individual songs weaving together into a tapestry of sound that sent a chill down my spine. The music was full of pain and longing and somehow, even though I didn’t understand any of the words, I knew all of them were sad.
Was there anything in Ev that wasn’t about heartbreak and loss?
As the boatman continued his song, a fissure appeared in the rock face in front of us. Slowly the boat moved toward it as the chant increased in intensity. The fissure widened just enough for us to slip through, and then the rock slammed closed behind us and the boatman’s song trailed off into the sudden silence.
The darkness was so intense it seemed almost alive. Suddenly I could feel the tons of rock above us, the distance between us and the open sky. I swallowed hard, trying to ease the suffocating feeling that was taking over me. Breathe, I told myself firmly. Just breathe. The ceiling isn’t collapsing. The stone isn’t moving. You’re fine.
“It takes some getting used to,” Lang said in the darkness beside me. I jumped. She sounded almost sympathetic.
There was a crack and a hiss, and then the boatman was lighting a lantern with a match. The light barely made a dent in the smothering darkness around us, but at least I could see something now. We were in a low, narrow tunnel, the rock just inches over our heads. The boat’s wings were furled tightly to its sides now, and its head was lowered close to the water to avoid brushing the tunnel roof.
“I think I liked it better when it was dark,” Madison said. Even in this dim light I could see that she was pale.
“I hated it at first, too,” Lang said as the boat moved forward again. “It’s funny how much a person can change. Now, when I go aboveground I feel naked. It’d take years up there to get used to it again.”
Nox was looking a little pale, too. I reached over and squeezed his hand, and he gave me a brief, grateful glance. Lang saw the touch and frowned, looking away again.
“We’re almost there,” she said. “Just a few more minutes.”
“What was that song?” I asked the boatman, but he didn’t respond.
“He only speaks to me,” Lang said. “It’s a spell that all my servants know; it can only be sung by a single person with many voices. It’s the only way to get to the place I’m taking you.”
“Why’d you set the magic up that way?” Madison asked. Lang was silent and Nox answered her.
“So no one can torture it out of her,” he said. “I’m guessing her servants don’t feel pain.”
After that, none of us felt like talking for a while.
Finally, the tunnel opened up into a larger cavern where the water formed a broad, flat lake that was big enough that the lantern light didn’t reach to its shore. I felt my spirits lift as the ceiling did, as if the rock itself had been oppressing us. The dragon boat sped up, probably sensing it was nearly at the end of its journey, and soon the lamplight fell on a narrow, pebbled beach. Lang kicked off her shoes. In one smooth motion, she swung herself over the boat’s side and into the water, wading toward shore.
“I guess we follow,” Nox said under his breath.
I climbed out of the boat as Nox offered Madison a hand. She waved it away. The pitch-black water was almost hip-deep, and freezing cold. I splashed my way toward the beach and something very large and very scaly slithered past my calves. Panic flooded through me and I half ran, half sloshed toward the shore. Madison made an awful noise behind me and I knew that she’d just encountered whatever it was that had passed me.
“They’re harmless!” Lang called from the beach. I didn
’t stay in the water long enough to find out whether or not she was telling the truth, and Nox and Madison were right behind me.
“You can change,” Lang said, indicating our soaked clothes with a jerk of her head. She’d unearthed a waterproofed leather bag of supplies from somewhere and was pulling on tight black leather leggings, a loose shirt, and boots. With her dark hair pulled back from her face in a high ponytail, she looked like a cross between a rocker and an aerobics instructor.
I rummaged through the bag, choosing a similar outfit. My shoes had stayed miraculously dry despite the slog to shore; apparently magic boots were water-resistant. Who knew. Nox changed with his back to us, his lean muscles rippling as he pulled on a clean shirt.
“You’re staring,” Madison said, elbowing me in the ribs.
“I am not,” I said, blushing.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
Behind us, the dragon boat was paddling away, steered by its strange captain. Lang lit another lantern, its flickering amber light playing over the rocky beach and sending looming, sinister shadows ahead of us.
“Come on,” she said. “You can rest for a few hours before we figure out what to do next. I have enough alarm spells set up to wake the dead, but we shouldn’t need them for a while. No one but me knows this place exists.”
Rest. Just the word sent a flood of longing through me. When was the last time I’d really been able to rest?
I thought of the little bedroom my mom had set up for me in Kansas while she waited for me to come home, even though everything pointed to the fact that I was dead. How she’d refused to give up on me, gotten sober in case I came back, finally started dating someone who wasn’t a greaseball or a loser. I plodded after Lang’s wobbly beacon, across the stone beach and into yet another tunnel. This one was more rough-hewn than anything in her palace. Thankfully, it also didn’t sport the Headless Horseman–themed decor. There were fewer branches and turnings; it was as if Lang was leading us deep into the heart of the earth itself. We were silent, our breath echoing in the dimly lit, narrow tunnel.
For the millionth time I wondered what my mom was doing now.
It wasn’t just me who’d vanished this time—the Nome King’s magic had destroyed the high school and pulled Madison into Oz, too. We were both missing persons—me for a second time. I wanted to believe my mom would be okay, but I knew better. She’d barely been sober for a month when I disappeared a second time. She’d lost our home, me, everything. Even her pet rat, Star. Her new boyfriend, Jake, seemed like a nice enough guy but I wondered how good he’d be at helping her stay sober, or if she’d fall back into her old bad habits.
She’d been right to hope that I was alive the first time I’d disappeared. But I couldn’t imagine that she’d be able to keep up hope a second time.
And even if we finally defeated Dorothy and I found a way to get back to Kansas, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.
“You look really sad,” Madison said quietly.
I jumped. “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking about . . .”
“Kansas?” she supplied.
“Yeah. Are you—”
“Trying not to think about it? Yeah,” she said. “I just keep going over that moment in my head, you know? When Assistant Principal Strachan turned into that freaky-ass dude and dragged me through—well, through whatever that was. And I dropped Dustin Jr. I dropped him! My kid!” She shook her head. “I can’t stop wondering if there’s something I could’ve done different. What mistake I made to end up here without him. I don’t belong here, Ames. I don’t want to be here. And now everything is . . . This all seems like some awful, fucked-up dream.”
“I know,” I said.
I did know, was the thing. I knew what she was going through in a way that no one else in Oz possibly could. Lang and Nox might’ve lost their parents, but they were still living in the place where they were from. They hadn’t literally been pulled out of their own world and into one that they’d grown up believing was just a story—a funny movie with cheesy old actors in bad face paint and a pretty girl in a checked dress.
There was no way to describe what that felt like to someone who’d grown up in a world where magic was normal, witches were real, and the Cowardly Lion ate people in front of you.
But what I wasn’t telling Madison was that when I first landed in Oz, I was happy to not be in Kansas anymore. Happy to have escaped the trailer, and my mom—and Madison. Happy to be needed by the Order, and to be chosen for something for the first time in my life. Oz had made me stronger, had given me magic and friends and love. Oz had given me something to fight for.
But I didn’t say any of that to Madison, who was missing her baby. Who was one crazy, creepy thing away from having a meltdown.
“There’s nothing you could’ve done,” I said. “I mean, I know that doesn’t help, but you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I dropped him,” she said again, and then she looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Did you ever visit Sky Island, Amy?” Lang cut into our conversation as if she hadn’t been paying attention, but I knew she’d been listening. She was giving Madison something else to think about. For the first time, I felt almost grateful to her.
“No,” I said.
“Amy learned magic in the caves,” Nox said. “After you—left, it got too dangerous to take people there. Maybe when all of this is over, Amy, you can see it.”
“What’s Sky Island?” Madison asked.
So, as we walked, Lang told us. About the place where she’d learned magic from Mombi, the old, abandoned tourist resort: a floating island, clear as glass, that drifted through rainbow-colored clouds that changed colors to the beat of your heart. The river made of lemonade, the clear blue sky, the way it was always sunny and never too hot. After all the time we’d spent underground, even just the thought of blue sky seemed so impossibly, unreachably beautiful, but the way Lang talked about the swirling, colorful mists that moved across the island was so vivid I could picture myself there. Next to me, Madison sighed softly.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing that,” she said.
“It’s hard here, I know,” Nox said. “But there are beautiful things, too. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
I could see Lang’s back stiffen and I knew Nox had said something wrong. “Is it?” she said, her voice low and hard. “Is that what the Order does, Nox? You’d think you would have at least changed the speech after all these years.”
“Langwidere . . . Lanadel,” he said, and then sighed and shrugged. “Believe what you want,” he said. “For now, we all want the same thing. To take care of Dorothy once and for all.”
“For now,” Lang agreed in that same rough tone.
All visions of Sky Island were pushed aside by the harsh intrusion of reality. Because I knew that Lang was only protecting us to protect herself. And as soon as she found a way to leave us behind, she would. I had to find a way to convince her to fight with us, or we were screwed.
Luckily, we didn’t have to walk much farther before the tunnel ended in a solid iron door. Lang placed one palm on the metal and murmured something that sounded similar to the chant her boatman had sung. At first, nothing happened. Then the door swung open with a creaking groan.
“Need to oil the hinges,” Lang remarked. “Haven’t had to use this place in a while.”
On the other side of the door, the tunnel broadened into a room off of which branched out several hallways. One led to a little kitchen, another to a bathroom where, I saw happily, there was a tub. Others led to small sleeping chambers. The main room had a rough wooden table and few comfortable-looking chairs scattered here and there. The whole place was lit by glowing veins of crystals in the walls. It was small and modest, but extremely cozy.
Lang showed us the pantry, where shelves practically groaned under the weight of jars and barrels of preserved food.
“You could last a long time in here,” No
x said.
“That’s the point,” she said coldly.
“Well, I’m passing out now,” Madison announced, and Lang softened.
“You can take any of those rooms,” she said. “Mine’s farther down the hallway. Help yourself to anything you want to eat or drink. I need to figure out what to do with you. It’s almost morning. It won’t take long for the Nome King to realize he doesn’t know where I am—and put two and two together.” She glanced involuntarily at the silver bracelet around her wrist. She saw me follow her look.
“It tells him where I am,” she said quietly. “But the wards around this place are too strong for it. He’ll figure out soon enough that I’ve gone somewhere he can’t find me.”
I still didn’t completely trust her, but I realized how much Lang was risking to help us even this much. She could just as easily have thrown us out of her palace—or turned us over to the Nome King. She didn’t care about helping us, she cared about hurting Dorothy. But for whatever reason, she was keeping us safe, no matter how she talked to us.
Somewhere, some part of her was on our side. Enough to keep us alive, anyway, even though it put her in terrible danger. For the first time in a while, I started to actually feel hopeful. Maybe there was a way out of Ev for us. Maybe we could defeat Dorothy after all. And when we did, I was getting out of this underground hell as quickly as I could.
Lang might be used to the unending, unrelenting darkness, but I ached for open air and sunlight, the smell of flowers and growing things. Anything but cold stone and blackness and dark, cold water full of unseen, terrifying creatures.
Lang brushed past us and was gone, her footsteps swallowed up by the stone as she walked down the hall.
“Okay then, good night, I guess,” Madison said.
Her voice sounded small and sad. But I knew there was nothing I could say or do to make it better. I’d check in with her in the morning, but it wasn’t like I could reunite her with her kid or send her back to Kansas with a snap of my fingers. She disappeared into one of the bedrooms, closing the door behind her with an unmistakably firm snick. She didn’t want to talk, and I wasn’t going to push her.