I wasn’t sure if I pitied him or envied him. Would I trade away the few good memories of my mom to get rid of all the bad ones? I thought the answer was yes, but who would I be without those memories? Who was Amy Gumm without her past?

I was running away from home. Nox was marching toward home. Home was battle for him.

And maybe it was for me, too.

Nox grabbed my hands suddenly. “Magic is just energy that wants to be something different,” he reminded me. “So take what you’re feeling right now and turn it into something different. Turn it into magic.”

I looked at Nox. I wished this moment had been the starting place for today’s lesson. Not what he did on the dance floor. But I pushed that aside and I tried to do what I’d seen him do. Tried to do what I saw Glamora and Mombi and Gert do. Be both in my skin and a part of the magic around it. I felt the energy coursing through my body like warm water. I thought of my mother. I thought of the question Gert had posed: Who are you?

I focused on my sadness, the sadness I’d felt for my whole life, and I willed it to be something different. To change.

I thought of my mom again in the kitchen of our trailer, telling me what a disappointment I was. The image blotted itself out, becoming a fiery red light.

And then it happened. It was snowing. White, glistening flakes were falling all around me, around me and Nox. He looked at me with an expression that was somewhere between pride and awe.

“See?” he said quietly.

I stretched my arms out and spun around, laughing. The snow was accumulating.

“No one does this right away, not even me,” Nox said quietly. “You have power.”

I reached out my hand and let some flakes fall into it. It didn’t melt. It wasn’t snow, I realized. It was ash.

I looked up at Nox in surprise.

“Your fire burned up the sky,” he explained.

For a second, I was disappointed. Snow would have been so pure and beautiful. But ash made so much more sense with who I was.

“We should get back. Gert’s going to want to talk to you,” he said suddenly.

We walked back inside. I didn’t take his hand this time. I’d rather fall down in the dark.

When I got to Gert’s cave, she was standing in front of the scrying pool again.

“Don’t be too mad at Nox. He did what I asked of him.”

I could feel my anger bubbling up again, but I stayed in one place and my fingers didn’t feel like they were on fire. Yet.

“I’m not even sure if Nox actually knows how messed up this is. But you do. Why did you do this? Why did you tell Nox all that stuff about me? He has no right to know!” I was somehow certain that Gert’s moral compass pointed north, but she was ignoring it for the cause.

“Because we’re running out of time,” she said simply, gazing calmly into my eyes. Every line in her round face was fixed in its sincerity and certainty.

“So that justifies everything? You get to just root around in my head and mess with me because it’s convenient for you?”

Gert shook her head. “I’m sorry, Amy. It’s funny—we actually need your sense of good around here. Things have gotten murky after so many years fighting her. We need someone to remind us that not everything is complicated.”

She was apologetic for the hurt she’d caused me, but not the action. Did that mean that she would do it all over again if she had the chance? If it meant I would agree to take down Dorothy?

“I couldn’t think of any other way. Magic can be triggered by our strongest emotions,” Gert said, turning away from me. “It worked, didn’t it?”

Gert focused on her scrying pond. It was smaller than the one in the war room. Although I was still bristling with frustration over her witchy doublespeak, I moved closer to see what she was doing. Ripples began moving inward toward Gert’s finger as she mumbled words under her breath.

A face began to appear in the water. I narrowed my eyes. A familiar face.

“Mom,” I spat.

There she was. Looking completely the opposite of the angry, pill-popping mess who had stormed away from our trailer. Before the tornado. Before Oz. It all felt like so long ago.

She had a small Band-Aid on her forehead, her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing jeans and a pullover sweater I’d never seen before. She looked nice. She looked clean. But she looked sad, too.

“Is it a trick?” I demanded without looking up. Maybe there was a part of me that couldn’t believe she had changed so much. Maybe there was a part of me that didn’t want to believe she had changed so much without me there to help her.

“It’s not a trick, Amy.”

“I thought there was no way to see the Other Place.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “There are more things that can be done than people think. I can’t let the witches in on all of my secrets, now can I?”

I reached out to my mother, feeling hopeful and scared at the same time. The water rippled through my fingers but I couldn’t touch her.

The unfamiliar room she was standing in was small and gray and the furniture was that foam and wood kind that I’d seen in doctors’ offices. Where was she? Was she in a shelter? One of those places they put people who have been displaced by disaster? She was looking under the cushions of the couch, then she moved on to a tiny kitchen area and began rifling through the cabinets.

My gut twisted. I knew what she was doing. She was looking for her stash.

“I don’t need to see anymore,” I said. I’d seen this horror show before. But I couldn’t pull my eyes away. Her face lit up like she’d found what she was looking for. She pulled it out and held it at arm’s length.