ONE

The first time I flew, it was under very different circumstances. That time, my trailer had been picked up by a tornado from Flat Hill, Kansas, and dropped into the middle of Oz. Now I was being hoisted up into the sky by a flying Road of Yellow Brick with Nox and my old-enemy-turned-new-friend Madison Pendleton, zipping away from a battle with the Nome King, who’d showed up unexpectedly when Glamora turned out to actually be (mostly) her evil twin sister, Glinda, and had opened a portal back to Kansas. The Nome King wanted to take over all of Oz, and to do it he apparently needed my shoes, which were originally Dorothy’s shoes, and which, as far as I knew, weren’t turning me evil the way Dorothy’s second pair of shoes transformed her into a super-evil bloodthirsty homicidal tyrant.

Okay, so it’s kind of complicated. Like, really complicated. Believe me, I know. I’m living it. And right now, Nox, Madison, and I were being carried to who even knows where by the Road of Yellow Brick, which apparently is sort of . . . sentient.

Below us, the fields and villages of Oz were a moonlit patchwork quilt of silvery green and gold. In the far distance, I could see the snowcapped peaks of the Traveling Mountains. And beyond that, I could almost glimpse the sandy dunes of the Deadly Desert.

The air was cool and we were moving fast, but I didn’t feel cold. Just tired, and hungry, and worried about what we’d left behind. Mombi’s death. The chaos after Ozma’s coronation. The Nome King. And Glinda . . .

Mombi was gone. And for all intents and purposes, she had been Nox’s mother. And he was acting like it hadn’t happened at all.

The bad dream was supposed to be over. I had spent the better part of months plotting Dorothy’s death with the Order to try to save the world. But the Order had a very particular recipe for her death. Dorothy couldn’t just be killed. I had had to take out the Tin Woodman’s inky heart, cut off the Lion’s courage (which happened to reside in his tail), and obtain the Scarecrow’s brain before I could finally end Dorothy for good. And it was done. Tin, Scare, and the Lion were dead, and I had just watched a palace fall on Dorothy. It was done. Dorothy was dead but my fight was far from over.

“We have to go back,” I commanded, thinking of the fight we left behind.

“We can’t.”

“But Glinda. And Mombi . . . I am so sorry Nox.” I climbed closer to him on the road.

“She did her duty. All of the Order knew the risk,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Madison who began screaming her head off as the road hurtled forward into the night.

“What the fuck was that?” Madison yelled.

“Which part?”

She stared at me, her eyes wild. “Where’s my kid? What did Assistant Principal Strachan just turn into? Where are we? Who’s that?” She pointed at Nox.

“I’m Nox,” Nox said unhelpfully. He yawned and carefully sat down, stretching his legs and holding on to the yellow bricks.

“Is he kidding?” Madison whirled toward me, almost losing her balance on the narrow road. “We’re, like, flying? On some bricks? I don’t know if you noticed but that’s not possible? Where is my kid?”

“I think Dustin Jr. is safe,” I said, picking the easiest question out of her barrage. At least she’d stopped screaming.

“You think?”

“His dad caught him,” I said. “I’m sure he’s fine. And the Nome King is here now. So, um, Kansas is definitely, totally safe.”

“What do you mean, here? Where is here? WHY ARE WE FLYING?”

“You’re not going to believe me,” I said, “but we’re in Oz.”

She stared at me. “That’s . . . super not funny, Amy. And what kind of name is Nox?”

Nox smiled. “What kind of name is Madison?” he echoed.

“I’m not joking about the Oz thing,” I interrupted hastily. Madison was looking at Nox sort of like she wanted to eat him. Or murder him. I knew the feeling.

Madison looked around. She looked up. She looked down at the landscape flying by beneath us. She looked like she wanted to start screaming again but was carefully reconsidering wasting that much energy.

She took a deep breath. “Okay, Amy. Cut it. Seriously, what’s going on?”

“You’re in Oz,” Nox said curtly. Madison looked back and forth between the two of us.

“Madison, you’re on a flying road,” I pointed out. “I know it sounds totally crazy, but Oz is real, and you’re in it.”

Madison sat down abruptly with a thump. A brick jolted loose from the road and tumbled away. “Careful,” I said sharply. “We have no idea if this thing will actually hold together.”

She watched the brick fall until we could no longer see it. She looked around: at the pointy silver stars as they flew by, at a hooting night owl as it floated past, staring at us in startled confusion, at the ground far below. She patted the road as if checking whether it was real. And then she pinched herself.

“You’re not dreaming,” I said gently, sitting down next to her.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I felt like this the first time I came here, too.”

“Like the Scarecrow and the Lion and Emerald City and Munchkins and all of that shit? It’s real?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The Scarecrow and the Lion are dead, though.”

She blinked. “Dorothy? Toto?”

“Dorothy is definitely real,” Nox said darkly. “Way too real, if you ask me.”

“Toto’s actually dead, too,” I clarified. “He turned into this giant, super-evil monster Toto, and I killed him, and then for a while there were these, like, zombie Toto reproductions? But they . . .”

I trailed off, catching sight of the expression on Mad’s face. “Uh, anyway, I don’t think we have to worry about them anymore.”

“Your research project,” Madison said abruptly. “Your whole thing with the archive at the high school. You were—you were serious. You thought all that stuff was real.” She looked down at the countryside flying by below us and swallowed hard. “When you disappeared after the tornado,” she said slowly. “You were . . . here?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I had just as much trouble believing it was real at first, too. I mean, it sounds ridiculous. A tornado picked up my mom’s trailer and dumped me here?”

I thought suddenly of Star, my mom’s beloved pet rat. Like a lot of other people and things I cared about, she hadn’t made it. But she’d been the only thing that kept me going through the early days in Oz—the only connection I had to the world I’d left behind, and the one thing letting me know I wasn’t crazy, that what was happening to me was real. Madison had nothing like that. Nothing, anyway, except me.

“It’s all crazy, I know. The thing is that Dorothy is—was—actually evil. I mean, Dorothy’s dead now, too. But the fight isn’t over. We still have to clean up the mess she left behind.”

“Is anyone not dead? You know what, don’t answer that,” Madison said. “Okay, so let’s say theoretically we’re in Oz and I believe you. How do we get home?”

Nox and I exchanged glances. “I don’t know,” I said.