“Let me come with you,” I whispered urgently. I didn’t know where she was going, but she was the best hope I had. Hope of what, I wasn’t sure, but I would figure that out later. “I promise—I’ll do whatever you want. I swear I won’t get you in trouble. But I’m alone here, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”

She bit her lip. The thing is, I could tell she was as curious about me as I was about her. I could tell part of her wanted to relent.

But then we heard that clanging noise again. This time it was louder.

“You seem like a nice person,” Indigo hissed. “And I love rats. But get your fucking hands off me and get the hell away from me. The best thing you can do right now is get your ass back to wherever it is you came from and hope you never wind up in this sorry place again.”

“I don’t know how to go home,” I said. But I let her elbow go. This wasn’t getting me anywhere.

“It looks like you’ve got problems, too, then.” Indigo folded her arms across her chest, planting her stocky body firmly in place. “See ya,” she said.

Honestly, I was starting to think this girl was kind of an asshole. But if she wasn’t going to help me, I couldn’t think of any good way to force her. All I could do was keep following the road and hope it led me somewhere better than this.

So I walked away, back to the famous road paved with yellow bricks. At least I had a general sense of where that would take me. When I looked back over my shoulder, the angry little Munchkin was watching me go.

As I passed the statue of Dorothy, I changed my mind one more time. “Just tell me one thing,” I asked her, spinning around. She shrugged, noncommittal. She hadn’t budged from the spot where I’d left her. “They talk about Oz where I’m from. I’ve heard about it my whole life. But this is messed up. What happened here?”

Indigo’s impassive face twisted into a snarl. “Dorothy happened,” she said.

Dorothy happened. I’d tried to ask Indigo what she’d meant, but her eyes had gone from blue to black and she’d threatened to punch me in the face if I came one step closer or asked her another goddamn question. I had already been punched in the face once today—that had been today, hadn’t it?—so I did what she wanted and kept on moving.

It was only a few minutes before I put the tiny little town behind me. Now I was back on the road. Ahead, it led up a steep hill that was completely devoid of any grass at all, the raw dirt interrupted only by a few stunted, sickly shrubs here and there.

Dorothy had been here, I reminded myself. She had walked this very same path. You’re like her in so many ways, the boy had said.

Kansas, tornado, blah, blah, blah. I mean, the similarities were pretty obvious, right? But there were plenty of differences between us, too. First off, from what I remembered it hadn’t taken her long at all to make friends. It was like everyone she’d run into—witches not included—had wanted to jump on the Dorothy Express.

As for me, I’d come across two people so far, and exactly both of them had wanted nothing to do with me. It was kind of depressing to think that I could travel all the way to Oz and still be just as unpopular as I was back in Flat Hill, Kansas.

I didn’t know where to go next, but the Emerald City seemed as good a place to start as any. That’s where Dorothy had gone for help. The road would take me there. It wanted to take me there.

So I trudged up the hill, and as I did, the banging sound I’d heard back in the village continued. It was still intermittent—there were a few minutes of welcome silence for every thirty seconds of racket. It was getting louder with every step I took, though, and soon it was so loud that I had to cover my ears every time it started.

When I finally reached the top of the incline I saw where it was coming from.

In the distance, across a periwinkle field of dust and dirt and beyond a tangled maze of gnarled, thorny trees, stood a towering seesaw contraption that was attached by a mess of pipes and wires to something that looked like a cross between an oil rig and a windmill.

When I squinted, I saw at least twenty people of less-than-average height piled on either end of the seesaw thing. Every few minutes, the Munchkins would start bouncing up and down in place, and as they did, the taller machine would begin spinning and clanging, jackhammering into the earth.

Above all of the action a statuesque figure in a glittering ball gown floated serenely in midair, just watching them at work. I tried to see what was holding her up but as far as I could tell she was just . . . floating.

Wait, a ball gown?

I couldn’t make up my mind which part I was more curious about: the fact that she was levitating or the fact that she was doing it above a field of dirt, dressed like she was on her way to the prom.

I stared at her with rapt curiosity. Even from here, I could tell that she was no Munchkin. Not just because she was too tall to be one either. There was just something different about her. Something familiar that I couldn’t place. She had to be at least a couple of hundred feet away, but it was like her image was burning right through all that distance and imprinting itself right onto my retinas.

She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Her hair was red, and her skin was glowing, and her body was radiating a shower of glittering pink sparks.

I smacked my head as it came to me.

Duh. It must be Glinda. She was supposed to be the Good Witch of the South, right?

I felt my face light up at the sheer insanity of it all. When I’d watched The Wizard of Oz with my mother, Glinda had always been my favorite character—because who wouldn’t want to travel around in a flying soap bubble wearing an awesome dress? She’d been my mom’s favorite character, too, but for a different reason.