The wings didn’t look like they would move, but when I pressed gingerly on them, they ceded easily to my touch and folded up neatly against the side of the bird’s body. As they did, the knife sparkled in my hand and then evaporated into smoke that drifted off into the air.

“Where’d it go?” I asked.

“It’s still with you,” Nox said. “Just not anywhere someone else can find it. Now picture it in your hand again.”

I looked down at my empty, open palm and imagined I was clutching the weapon. Its image entered my mind, and as it did, I was holding it again.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. I wrapped my fingers gently around the hilt. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had given me anything, and this was something that Nox had made just for me. Something magic. I felt my spirit lift inside myself. The corners of my mouth threatened to turn upward, but I didn’t want him to see how happy the present had made me. “What kind of bird is this?” I asked. It didn’t look like any bird I’d seen before.

“It’s a Magril—a bird that’s native to Gillikin Country. It spends half its life as a beetle, and when it’s an adult, it goes to sleep for a year and wakes up as this majestic creature.”

“Kind of like a butterfly.”

“Kind of like you,” he said. I didn’t have an answer to that.

I didn’t need one. At that moment, Mombi appeared before us. She looked down at the knife and up at me, and then Nox.

“It’s time to go,” she said.

We all gathered a few minutes later in the training room—me, Nox, Gert, and Mombi—and held hands. Glamora would be staying behind, along with Melindra and Annabel.

Melindra complained about being left behind—she wasn’t the type to want to miss out on any action—but she seemed placated when Mombi reminded her that it was important that our most skilled fighter guard the headquarters in case it was a trap. Melindra didn’t look happy about it, but she knew better than to argue with Mombi.

I felt myself envying her. Now that it was time to go, I suddenly wondered if I should have been so eager to fight.

But it was too late to think about that. In the training area, we all stood in a circle, all of us chanting at once as we worked together to cast the spell that would take us to the village.

Glamora took a step back, still chanting, and stepped out of the circle, followed by Annabel and Melindra. We all joined hands.

Nox looked over at me. “Hold on,” he warned me with a sly, nervous grin.

He squeezed tight.

I felt an invisible force start to lift me, then it yanked me upward like a bullet, and we shot straight up.

I screamed and closed my eyes, knowing I was about to be smushed like a bug against the roof of the cave.

Instead, I felt wind on my face. I opened my eyes and found that my body was horizontal, my arms strained to their limits as I held on to Nox. Everyone else still had their eyes closed, their mouths forming the same chant over and over and over, and we were all fanned out like skydivers in formation, the mountain below us, hurtling out of sight.

We were flying.

It was the most incredible feeling I’d ever had. The sensation of free-falling made me giddy and light-headed, like I was a balloon and my insides were helium. I laughed, almost forgetting that I, Salvation Amy, was on my way to battle the Not-So-Cowardly Lion and his army of monsters. How could my stomach tie itself into knots about what was coming when I was busy tumbling into the sky?

“It never gets old,” Nox said, opening his eyes. “In case you were wondering.”

His normally spiky hair was flattened against his head by the wind, but for some reason his voice came out normal, like we were still standing right next to each other in the training room.

“You could have warned me,” I said. “I thought we were going to teleport.”

“It takes too much energy to teleport this many people,” he said. “By the time we got there, we’d all be ready to pass out from exhaustion. This is more efficient. Plus, it’s fun.”

“Won’t they see us coming?”

“Nope,” Nox said. “We’re traveling in the Space Between Space. They can’t see us if we’re not really here. It’s how we passed through the mountain.”

“Oh,” I said, pretending I knew what he was talking about.

“I’ll explain later,” he said.

“Should we still be chanting?” I asked nervously, seeing that both Mombi and Gert still had their eyes squeezed tight.

“Nah,” he said. “The takeoff is the hard part. Now that we’re on our way, it only takes Gert to keep us in the air.”

“What’s Mombi doing then?” I asked.

Nox wiggled his eyebrows and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Mombi’s afraid of heights,” he said. “She’s not casting a spell. She’s saying her prayers.”

“Who exactly do wicked witches pray to?”

Nox laughed. “Who knows? She’s just trying to stay distracted so she doesn’t piss herself before we land.”

Our ascent had slowed down by now and we floated easily through the air, a mist of lavender clouds hovering just inches above our heads. In the distance, the sun was rising over the Deadly Desert. Instead of looking down, I looked at Nox as he took in the landscape.

Seeing him like this, away from the caves, away from the cause, I could almost see the boy he could have been. The boy he would have been if Dorothy had never come back. He looked happy. He looked beautiful.