“You did it before,” Madison said expectantly. “You came back to high school.” She frowned. “You were here and you went back to Flat Hill? What were you thinking?”

“It’s really, really complicated,” I said. “I went back when the Wizard opened this portal—”

“The Wizard? Like, the actual Wizard of Oz?”

“Yeah, but he’s dead, too,” Nox said quietly.

Madison looked at both of us again. She was silent for a minute. And then she started to laugh. She laughed so hard she bent over, propping herself up on her hands. I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, too. Nox rolled his eyes. Finally Madison sat up, still giggling, and wiped tears from her eyes. She was ready to listen.

I took a deep breath and began. “It all started when a tornado hit Kansas about five minutes after I had wished to be anyplace but home.”

TWO

It took a long time to tell Madison the entire history of me and Oz. No surprise there, considering how much had happened. Just saying it out loud to someone who wasn’t from Oz, who had no idea what passed for normal here, made me realize just how insane the last few months of my life had been.

And talking about Oz made me realize how much I’d missed it. Back in Kansas, I’d resigned myself to never being able to return to Oz. I almost—almost—thought I might know what Dorothy felt like when she had to go back home—and why she’d wanted so badly to return to Oz. But that was where the similarity stopped. Dorothy was a killer and I wasn’t.

Well, not unless I had to be.

Madison tucked her long blond hair behind her ears in a futile effort to keep it out of her face, but the breeze fluttered at the long strands, sending them flying behind her like streamers. I thought about plucking one of Oz’s stars out of the sky to show to her, but she was freaked out enough already. Oz’s weirder wonders could wait.

“So you were in a prison? And some magic dude just showed up? And then a witch appeared?” Madison interrupted my reverie, impatiently waiting for me to finish my story.

“More like a dungeon. The witch was Mombi.” I glanced over at Nox, wondering what he was feeling. I was almost certain Mombi was dead, killed by Glamora and the Nome King as she tried to protect us. I had complicated feelings about the old witch—half the time, she’d felt more like my enemy than my friend, and despite all we’d been through together, we’d never been close. Out of all the witches, she’d made it very clear that just because she was formerly Wicked, she didn’t consider herself Good. She was gruff and rude and sometimes her words hurt as much as the purple webs she could spin and squeeze around you. But those same qualities made her possibly the fiercest fighter in the Order, so her loss was huge if we were going to right everything that had just gone wrong in Oz. More importantly, she’d raised Nox. If my feelings about her were tangled, his had to be a labyrinth. I moved on quickly to the rest of my story.

In a strange way, it was a relief to talk to someone from the real world—my world—about what I’d been through. Nox understood so much about me, but he was from Oz. To him, learning magic and fighting monsters was just a part of life. Being able to tell someone from Kansas what had happened in Oz felt totally different.

“And then I went back to the Emerald City to fight Dorothy once and for all,” I continued. “But the Wizard was there, too, controlling Dorothy. He was crazy—he wanted to merge Oz and Kansas, he thought they were the same place.”

Madison snorted softly.

“Well, in a way they are the same place,” I amended. “Oz is kind of like—it’s like another dimension, laid over the world that we know, if that makes sense. Kansas and Oz overlap. But he was going to destroy them both with his spell. And then his hold over Dorothy broke, and she killed him, and suddenly I wasn’t in Oz anymore, I was back in Kansas, stuck there with Gert and Mombi and Glamora with no way to get home—”

I stopped, aware of what I’d just said. Home. Was that how I thought of Oz now? What about my mom?

“And then you decided to go back to high school?” Madison prompted, her voice skeptical.

“The witches thought Dorothy’s original shoes were somewhere in Flat Hill,” I explained. “The ones that took her home the first time she came to Oz.”

“That whole thing where you were trying to prove Dorothy was real—that was just a cover for you trying to find some enchanted doodad and get back here?”

“Exactly. And I did find the shoes, in the high school—just where the witches thought they’d be. The shoes brought us all back to Oz. Glinda was moving against the Order without Dorothy—we fought her and thought we’d defeated her, but actually she had just taken over her twin sister’s body—”

“Are you serious?” Madison asked in disbelief.

“I know it sounds super-weird. But I’m telling you, things work differently here.” I told her about the final battle beneath the Emerald Palace, when I’d defeated Dorothy at last but been unable to kill her. How Nox and I had left her there to die as the palace crumbled around us.

“Whoa,” Madison said softly. “That’s pretty cold.”

Nox looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “Are you listening to anything Amy’s telling you? About how evil Dorothy is? She tortured people to death, Madison. She murdered whole families, whole towns. She—”

“Nox, it’s okay,” I said gently. “It’s just a lot to take in all at once. Remember, it took me a long time to get used to killing people, too. And I’m still not sure it’s a good thing I did.”

“How did you know Dorothy was dead?” Madison asked. “If you just left her there?”

“She looked pretty dead to me,” Nox muttered.

“Wait a minute,” Madison said, realizing what I’d just said. “You’ve killed people? Like . . . not just by accident?”

“Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“You? Salvation—” Madison stopped herself. “You couldn’t even punch me back a few months ago. And now you’re like a superhero.”

A couple of months ago I would have laughed at the idea of me being the key to saving Oz. It would have seemed to be the most ridiculous idea in the whole wide world. Or at least my world, which was as small as the trailer I grew up in. But time and distance and Oz had changed my mind. I knew now I had a role to play—something bigger than that trailer—bigger than the girl with pink hair and no friends and a deadbeat mom on the other side of the universe or rainbow or whatever. And I knew, too, that I wasn’t the girl who left anyone to fight without her. We couldn’t turn the road around, but we would have to go back.

“Not exactly . . .”

“Wow,” she said. “Okay. Um, am I going to have to kill people? And you still haven’t answered my question. How do I get home? How do I get back to my kid? No offense, but this place isn’t really my style.” She looked around again, and I peered over the side of the road. The landscape below us was completely unfamiliar—sparse, leafless trees sprouted out of the hard, moonlit ground.

“The Witch’s Wastelands,” Nox said, in answer to my unspoken question. “No one I know has been this close to the edge of Oz.”