What was he saying? That he had trained this place?

I took a step closer.

Who are you? I wanted to ask. What do you want from me?

I wanted to ask those things. But I had asked them before. I knew he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. And if he somehow did now, I wasn’t sure I would like it.

“If you wanted to talk to me, why didn’t you just come to my room—like before? Why go through all this?” I asked instead.

“Things are about to get messy around here, Amy,” he said. “It’s not safe for me in the palace.”

I wanted to laugh. “And it’s safe in here? I hate to tell you this, but the flowers have teeth.”

Pete laughed. “Okay, true,” he said. “If you make it here to the center, though, you’re in the safest place in the whole Emerald City. Maybe in all of Oz. Dorothy’s afraid to come in here. Even Glinda’s afraid. They should be—it’s more powerful than they are. More powerful than Mombi, for that matter.”

He raised an eyebrow mischievously.

“You know Mombi,” I said. Of course he did. I should have known.

“I do,” he said. “Mombi and I go way back, too.”

“So you’re my handler. The one who’s been keeping an eye on me for the Order. Are you the one who told her to rescue me in the first place?”

Pete shook his head emphatically. “I don’t work with the Order. Just because I know Mombi doesn’t mean I like her.”

“How do you know her, then? Wait, never mind. I don’t know why I thought you’d answer that, since you haven’t answered any of my other questions.”

Pete’s expression darkened. “She may say she’s working for the good of Oz, but Mombi doesn’t do anything for the good of anyone except herself. Take it from me.”

I rolled my eyes and walked over to the edge of the fountain.

“Pete,” I said. “Why should I take anything from you?”

“I guess you shouldn’t,” he said. I couldn’t decide whether he sounded apologetic about it.

“So what do you want from me? Why did you bring me here?”

“I wanted you to know how to find the center,” he said. “I wanted you to understand this place. To introduce you, I guess. It might be useful to you someday.”

“Introduce me.”

“Yeah.”

“You wanted to introduce me to a bunch of magical hedges.” I was pissed at how evasive Pete was being, but the logical part of me knew this was a valuable place to know about. With things getting hot in the palace, the Tin Woodman sniffing around, the magic I’d used last night—I might need a place with carnivorous flowers to hide in.

Pete just shrugged. He tried to take my hand in his, but I pulled it away.

“And I wanted to say good-bye,” he said. “I have to leave the palace. I couldn’t before. But Dorothy’s weak right now. She’s being hit from too many angles. I don’t even think she realizes it. I have to leave while I can.”

I felt it like a punch in the gut. Mysterious and flighty as he was, at least Pete usually tried to be helpful. But now—just like the Order—he was leaving me behind. And I still didn’t have any answers. Was it a coincidence that he had just been walking by when my trailer fell out of the sky, that he kept showing up and disappearing?

I backed away from him. Pete was more than he seemed. That much was clear.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I had started to think that there was no hope for Oz,” he said, again not answering the question. “Things were just so bad. The day I met you I was walking around looking at all the damage. Thinking there was no way things could ever get better. That we shouldn’t even bother trying. And then you dropped out of the sky. You reminded me that there was still Good here. Even if it was just the promise of Good.”

Good. There was that word again. Back home, I had always thought of myself as a good person. Maybe a good person with a little bit of a temper, but still good. Here, in Oz, it had gotten more complicated—words like Good and Wicked had lost their meaning. What mattered was right and wrong.

At least, that’s what I’d thought. But Pete thought I was Good, and the way he said it made me wonder if it still mattered after all.

“It was selfish of me to get so close to you,” he went on. “But it wasn’t just selfishness. I wanted to make you feel like you weren’t alone, so that you could be the force for good Oz needs.”

His words made me feel unsteady. “I don’t know what that means,” I said. “I hardly know anything about you. You’re not a gardener at all, are you?”

“I wish I could tell you everything, Amy. I wish I could take you with me. But I can’t. We all have our secrets to keep.” He looked at me pointedly, and I remembered that I was still wearing Astrid’s face. “And you’re bound to Mombi now. I can’t break that. Even if I wanted to.”

He knew that, too. What else did he know about me?

I turned away from him and trailed my fingers through the water in the fountain. I half expected to feel something when I touched it—that it would be magical, charged somehow. But it was just water.

Then Pete stood up.

“Wait—” I said. I stood too. “Please.” I had so much more I wanted to ask him. Even if he wasn’t going to give me the answers.

But he was running his fingers through his hair, looking away. He had more he wanted to say, too, I could tell.