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,” Nox 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.