“No!” I said, more angrily than I meant to, squeezing hard as she tried to pry my fingers open. The knife was mine. I didn’t want to give it back. It could keep me safe.

Mombi clucked her tongue but didn’t really seem to care. “See? That’s the spirit. We’ll make a Wicked one out of you yet, now won’t we?”

I tried to pull my hand away, but she held it tight.

“Don’t worry—you’ll have more weapons than you know what to do with soon enough. But in the meantime . . .” Mombi mumbled a few words under her breath and I felt my fingers unlocking against my will. She took the knife and tucked it into her cloak. “Thattagirl,” she said. “Don’t you worry about a thing. You’re here now, and safe. And you’re free.” Then she chuckled at something. “Well, sort of,” she said, before letting out an uproarious cackle. Her laughter was still echoing around me as her body began to curl in on itself, like she was turning herself inside out. Then she was gone, and everything was dark again.

Free. But was I? In some ways, it felt like I had traded one prison for another.

We’ll make a Wicked one out of you yet.

What had I gotten myself into?

I stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust, but they didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t even dark at all: maybe it was just like outer space, where it’s only dark because there’s nothing to see.

I was alone.

I had been lonely a lot in my life—enough to know that there are different kinds of lonely. There’s the lonely I had felt at school, surrounded by people who only paid attention to me long enough to remind me that they didn’t like me. There was the lonely I felt when I was with my mother, which was different from the lonely that I felt when I watched her leaving just before the tornado hit, and different from the lonely that I felt when my trailer was being whisked away from everything I’d ever known.

Then there was the bottomless loneliness that I’d felt in Dorothy’s sick, white dungeon, the kind of loneliness that had made me feel like I was running through an endless maze.

Standing there in the dark, it was like all those alones had just been tiny, interlocking pieces of a picture so big that you could only see the whole thing from a mile away. Now it was clear: I had nothing except myself. No matter what happened, it would always be that way.

And yet: I took a step forward and was surprised to feel solid ground underneath my feet. I took another. I stumbled on something and caught myself before I hit the ground.

I was just about to move forward again when I heard a voice echoing all around me. It belonged to a woman, and it was kind and gentle and strangely familiar. “I think you’re starting to understand,” she said. “It will take a while, but you’re getting there.”

I stopped in my tracks and jerked my head up. “Who’s there?” I called out to the emptiness. “What do you want from me?”

Instead of an answer I heard the sound of fingers snapping. Just like that, the world returned to me. It was less like a light being turned on and more a blindness being suddenly lifted.

I was standing in a huge cave, the rocky walls pulsing eerily with a dim purple phosphorescence. High above my head, clusters of stalactites dangled perilously from the rocky ceiling.

In the center of the cavern a massive tree loomed, its trunk as thick around as five people, overgrown with vines and moss and tiny flowers. Hundreds of limbs curled upward until they merged with the rock formations on the ceiling; a tangle of roots covered the ground before disappearing into the walls.

The longer I looked at the tree, the more I couldn’t decide where it ended and the cave began.

“Why does there have to be a beginning and an ending?” the voice asked. “If you ask me, it’s all middle.”

I spun around, trying to figure out where it was coming from, and saw nothing.

“Who are you?”

And from out of the tree, a squat, round old woman in a shapeless white dress and a pointy white hat emerged like she was walking through an open door. Except there was no door. There was no opening in the tree at all.

“People have called me lots of things over the years,” the woman said. “It happens when you get old. But you can call me Grandma Gert.” She brushed a stray flower from her silvery-white cloud of hair.

Her face was old and wrinkled but it was nothing like Mombi’s. It was round and kind and so chubby that she had at least three chins. Maybe four. Her eyes twinkled as she smiled at me.

Grandma Gert. I liked the sound of that. There was something about her that I trusted.

It was all so strange. I should have been afraid. Or angry. Or at least startled or confused. I felt none of those things. When Gert reached out for my hand, I let her take it and clasp it between her own, squeezing tenderly, and I realized what I did feel. It was a warm sense of peacefulness starting in my chest and spreading through my body.

“Welcome home, dear,” she said.

“Home?” The word startled me, and when I repeated it, it caught in the back of my throat. I had no idea where I was, except that it was about as far away from home as I could possibly get. And yet . . .

“You’re a long way from Kansas, I know,” she said. “But there’s more than one kind of home. And you’re right. You are on your own. We all are, and we all have to learn it sooner or later. If you have to be alone, though, wouldn’t you rather be alone among friends?”

Alone. I looked up, startled. How had she known what I had been thinking, back there in the darkness?