“He can never live a normal life,” Glamora said quietly. “Like us, he’s responsible now for the future of Oz. He can never have a family. Grow old like an ordinary person.”

“Fall in love,” Mombi added, with a significant look at me.

“He can fall in love,” Gert corrected. “He just can’t do anything about it.” She paused. “Of course you still have a place with us, if you want it. But we’re in Kansas, Amy. We’ll find a way to get back to Oz. And once we’re there, we can defeat Dorothy without you. You can go home.”

Home. I could go home. It struck me suddenly that I was in Kansas—and I could stay here.

Home was something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I didn’t know what Oz was to me anymore. When I first got there, I had thought it was a place where I could finally belong. A place where I had found friends. Then it had become something else entirely.

But had Kansas ever been home either? What was I going to go back to? My mom was gone—who knew if she was even alive. I hadn’t exactly been Miss Popularity at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High. The trailer where I’d lived with my mom wasn’t a place I ever wanted to see again—and even if I did, it was long gone. Home might not be Oz, but it sure wasn’t the empty, ruined landscape outside the tent the witches had conjured up. And I’d been through so much in Oz, seen so much, that I couldn’t even imagine going back to a normal life. I’d learned how to do things I hadn’t even known were possible in a completely new world I hadn’t known was real. I’d battled some of the most terrifying enemies imaginable. I’d flown with monkeys, hung out with royalty, killed Dorothy’s baddest minions. What was I going to do next, get a job at the mall?

“It’s up to you, Amy,” Gert said, reading my mind again and pulling me back into the moment. “You don’t have to decide right now. But you do need to decide if you want to help us get back to Oz.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So we’re not stuck here forever? What’s your plan?”

Gert sighed. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “Even with Nox as part of the circle now, we’re not powerful enough to open a portal back to Oz. The Wizard was only able to do it because he had the magical gifts he’d given to the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Woodman.” I tried not to think about that last, awful glimpse of the Wizard exploding into blood confetti as Dorothy twisted his spell. “But we do have an idea.”

Of course they did—yet another top-secret plan they only decided to clue me in on when they felt like it? I sighed, and Gert gave me a sympathetic smile. “Okay, let’s hear it,” I said, settling back into a pile of Glamora’s cushions. They even smelled heavenly—like the way the makeup counter at a mall smells, kind of glamorous and relaxing all at once.

“You remember Dorothy’s shoes,” Glamora began.

“Yeah, not likely to forget those,” I said.

“Not the shoes she has now,” Gert said. “Dorothy’s original shoes.”

I stared at them. “Wait, what do you mean her original shoes? Like, the ‘no place like home’ ones? Those are real, too?” I almost started laughing. What was I thinking? Of course they were real. If Oz was real, why not Dorothy’s magic silver shoes?

“The first time Dorothy came to Oz,” Glamora explained, “she didn’t want to stay for good.”

“If only she’d never returned,” Gert sighed.

“My sister, Glinda, sent her home with a pair of enchanted silver shoes—the predecessors to the pair that brought her back here a second time. Dorothy always assumed they’d been lost when she crossed the Deadly Desert, and though she tried to find them again, she was never able to.” I wasn’t sure how to explain to Glamora that all this Ozian history was a series of classic books—not to mention a hit movie—in Kansas, so I didn’t bother trying. “But what if the shoes are still here?”

“Here, like Kansas?”

“She means here here,” Mombi said. “Where Dorothy’s farm used to be.”

“Dorothy’s farm used to be in Dusty Acres?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Glamora said. “Dorothy’s farm used to be in the exact spot where your school is sitting right now.”

“High school,” Gert prompted. She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “Barbaric system, really. Oz’s method of apprenticeship is vastly superior.” <