“Amy,” Mad prompted. “I don’t need a geography lesson.”

I didn’t know how to tell her that the questions she’d asked were impossible to answer. So instead, I settled for telling the last part of my story as if she hadn’t asked.

“We thought we’d finally saved Oz when Dorothy died,” I said. “But when the Nome King showed up—that’s the guy who took over Assistant Principal Strachan’s body—”

“How many villains are there in this stupid world?” Madison asked in disbelief.

“Tell me about it,” Nox said.

“Everybody’s Wicked,” I said. “Here, I mean. Good means Wicked, and Wicked means Good . . .” Madison was staring at me as if I’d started speaking Sanskrit.

“Like I said, it’s complicated,” I amended. “We don’t know what the Nome King wants, exactly. He definitely wants these.”

I pointed to my feet, where Dorothy’s shoes, which had turned into sparkly combat boots that fit me perfectly, still glittered.

“And he wants to kill me, too?”

“I don’t think that was personal,” Nox said. “He wanted to get to Amy. He didn’t care about you.”

Madison rolled her eyes. “Fine. So I’m not special. Amy’s the Chosen One, or whatever. Ames, I’m really starting to like you, but this story is crazy. And, spoiler alert, whatever’s going on here is not my problem. So why don’t you send me back to Kansas with your little spell or whatever and we’ll call it even. I’ll tell your mom—well, I’ll tell her whatever you want. I’ll tell her you’re coming home soon if you want me to. But I want to get back to my kid, and my ex-boyfriend, and my life.”

“We can’t,” Nox said. “Amy already told you. We don’t know how.”

“I know it’s all . . . a lot,” I said.

Madison sighed. “So the only way for me to get home is to find out where this stupid road is carrying us, take out the demonic dude who possessed Assistant Principal Strachan, help you kill the Good Witch of the South, and figure out a spell that nobody knows yet?” she asked.

“Basically,” I said apologetically.

“Fine, sign me up,” Madison said briskly. “Do I get to learn magic, too?”

“You can’t,” Nox said. “Oz’s magic corrupts people from your world who use it.”

“For some reason, Dorothy’s shoes let me use magic again,” I explained. “But before I found them, things got . . . bad.”

Madison huffed. “I don’t believe this crap. All right, fine. At least teach me how to use a knife or something. Sword? Bow and arrow? Battle-ax?”

“That’s The Lord of the Rings,” I said. “Different book. And only dwarves use those.”

“You are such a freak,” Madison said.

“Takes one to know one,” I said.

But we were both smiling.

“Look,” Nox said suddenly, pointing over the edge of the road. “I think we’re flying over the Deadly Desert.”

We crowded next to him, staring down at the vista below us. Madison and I both gasped aloud. I’d assumed that the Deadly Desert was an empty, desolate wasteland. I’d been completely, totally wrong.

At the far edge of the horizon, the sky was lightening with the coming dawn. And far below, the faint illumination hinted at the extraordinary place we were flying over. Huge dunes of multicolored sand stretched as far as I could see in either direction. Directly below us was a cobalt-blue wave of sand. The dune next to it was crimson red, and the one after that a bright, saffron-tinted yellow.

I saw dunes of apple green, sky blue, velvety purple, and brilliant turquoise. Streams of gold, silver, and black sand separated each of the dunes so that the whole landscape was a brilliant, colorful patchwork.

“Sand sailors!” Nox said in awe. I followed his finger and gasped again, this time in delight.

Far below us, jewel-colored lizards with huge, parachute-like wings drifted over the dunes, their tiny scales reflecting the rising sun in fiery, incandescent streaks of color.

“It’s beautiful,” Madison breathed.

For a moment, the precariousness of our situation fell away, and her face was suffused with wonder.

“It’s gorgeous,” Nox agreed, but his voice held a hint of sadness. “But as far as anyone in Oz knows, it’s lethal. It’s impossible to cross on foot. The dunes are constantly shifting, and they swallow anyone who attempts it. No one’s ever tried to navigate the Deadly Desert and survived. Not without magic, anyway.”

“The Wizard did it,” I said, remembering the original story. “Didn’t he? In his hot-air balloon? And the fairies, way back in the day.”

“So did Dorothy,” Nox said darkly.

So that part was true, too. I wished I’d thought to pick up the complete set of Wizard of Oz books back in Kansas. They might have helped solve a few problems. I’d been too busy trying to find the shoes hidden in my high school. But the Dorothy of those books was nothing like the Dorothy I knew.

I thought again about Madison’s question. How did we know she was dead?

Nox and I both knew how tough Dorothy was—and how hard she was to kill. We’d left her behind when the Emerald Palace collapsed. Was it possible she didn’t actually die down there?

No way, I thought to myself. Nox is right. The whole palace came down on top of her. She’s dead.

She had to be. Because the way Oz villains kept popping up like new heads in a whack-a-mole game, we didn’t have time to kill her again if she wasn’t.

One of the sand sailors swept down a little too close to the ground, and, in a blink, the sand rose to meet it in a tiny wave. The sand sailor struggled, but it was over in an instant as the desert swallowed it whole. Madison gasped. Nox and I remained silent.

As the sun rose in the sky, the landscape below us grew even more dazzling. Soon the hot morning light beat down on our shoulders. Without shade or shelter, our flight became uncomfortably warm.

Madison pulled off her pink, bedazzled sweatshirt and draped it over her head to ward off the sun. I sweated miserably in the soft gray dress I’d worn to Ozma’s coronation. Already, that seemed like a lifetime ago—but it was only yesterday that I’d thought everything was right in Oz again. How quickly things could change here.

“Look,” Nox said, pointing again.

“I thought nothing could live in that sand,” I said.

Huge, dust-covered worms slid through the sand, lunging upward to chomp down on sand sailors with creepy fang-filled mouths that opened like wounds.

Madison was looking a little pale. “Apparently they can,” she murmured. “And, uh, guys? Is it just me, or are we sinking?” Madison’s voice was strained.

“She’s right,” Nox said. And she was.

The road was unmistakably slowing down. And it was sinking.

Toward the desert—and the huge, yawning mouths of the sandworms.

“God, this place sucks,” Madison muttered under her breath.

“We’ll be fine,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.

The road was bucking and twisting as it lurched downward. I squatted down before it could toss me off, clutching tightly to its golden bricks. Madison was clinging tight, too, looking a little green.