I felt us going up, first slowly and then faster and faster. Finally, after both my ears had popped from the altitude, the doors slid open. But we weren’t facing the empty hallway or a bank of cubicles you might have expected given the decor downstairs. Instead, we were looking out onto a blue, open sky, where a bright, vertiginous fall of rainbows, rushing just like water, crashed thousands of feet toward the ground.

It was breathtaking. It was one of those things that makes you remember, even from the elevator of a crappy office building, that you’re really in fairyland. I tried to picture what my five-year-old self would have thought if she could see me now, about to enter a kingdom of rainbows.

That’s assuming we were actually about to enter it. I sort of hadn’t told anyone in Oz about my debilitating fear of heights. “Um,” I said. “So . . .”

“What?” Bright asked. “I thought you wanted to see Polly? How else do you think you get to Rainbow Falls?”

“Are we supposed to jump?” I asked, my heart beginning to race. I’d already spent way more time than I cared to in a state of total emotional free fall, and here I was being asked to do it yet again, this time literally.

Instead of answering, Bright wiggled his eyebrows and leapt. “Cannonball!” he shouted, before launching himself out the elevator door.

Nox, never the type to be outdone, gave me a cocky, pitched smile and was right behind him with a joyful whoop, plunging into a raging sea of color.

Boys, I thought. What show-offs.

I knew that I had to jump too. And I knew that no matter how I felt, I had to push the fear away. There wasn’t room for it.

I was working up the nerve to go for it when Ozma extended a hand.

“Come,” she said. “Don’t be scared.”

Something in her tone made me want to show her that I wasn’t.

So I took the closest thing to a running start the confines of the elevator would allow us, and sailed out into the colors of the sky below.

SEVENTEEN

The rainbows washed over me. It was like I was being spun in some Willy Wonka version of a washing machine. A neon palette swirled around me as I tumbled: hot pink, electric blue, candy-apple red, grape-soda purple, and every color imaginable in between, all of them zooming downward into infinity in a twisting, death-defying flume, carrying me faster than even seemed possible.

Once I got used to the nauseous somersaults my stomach was pulling—and figured out that I wasn’t going to die—it was less scary than I expected it to be. It was actually sort of fun. Then the world flipped upside down, and instead of falling, I was flying, sailing upward into a radiant light, the colors becoming brighter and brighter until they all merged with each other.

When I saw blue, clear sky over my head, I felt myself swimming, and I realized the ride was over. I floated upward a few more feet and emerged into day in a warm, whirling pool of light that wasn’t quite wet and not quite dry, and felt like all the sunshine in the world had been poured into a jar too tiny to begin to contain all of it.

Of course: I’d spent enough hours studying with Glamora and Gert to know a magical portal when I saw one.

I rubbed my eyes, adjusting, and saw that Nox and Bright were already here. From the edge of the pool, Nox reached out a hand to help me, and I took it, climbing up to join him on a small, grassy patch of land, feeling like I’d just gotten off a waterslide at an amusement park.

“Fun ride, huh?” Bright asked, wiggling an eyebrow.

“I’ve definitely had worse. Most of them this week,” I said, shaking myself off and spraying a shower of iridescent droplets from my body.

My jaw dropped at the scenery. We were on an island in the air, no more than thirty feet across, suspended high above the clouds. The portal I’d just crawled out of took up almost all of it, extending all the way to the edge except for the area we were standing on, its shimmering light spilling out into the sky like water in one of those infinity pools you see in ads for fancy hotels. Ozma was crawling out of it herself now, but all I could do was gape at the scenery.

The air was dotted with what could have been hundreds of the hovering islands, some huge, others as small as my trailer back home. They drifted lazily through the air as if being blown by a gentle wind. As they floated, a constantly shifting network of vibrant, shimmering rainbows appeared and disappeared randomly between them, momentarily connecting one to the next before fading away.

On the largest and highest of all the islands was a crystal palace with sharp, angular lines, reflecting and refracting the light at a million different angles like a diamond. A trio of glittering spires rose up so tall that they looked like they could have been scratching the edge of outer space.

“Come on,” Bright said, pointing toward it. “Polly’ll know we’re here.”

Like it knew our exact intentions, a rainbow appeared where we stood and shot up to the citadel, forming a long, steeply pitched bridge.

“Don’t worry, they’re totally solid,” Bright said, stepping out onto it, “but watch your step anyway, they’re slippery as hell.”

I went next, bracing myself, and though I was expecting a long, nail-biting hike up to the castle, it turned out that the only thing I had to do was keep my balance: as soon as I had both feet on the rainbow, it began to carry me upward.

I laughed a little. This was like being on an escalator at the most surreal mall ever, heading from the food court to JCPenney. I breathed deep and tried to relax. The air smelled like honeysuckle and filled me with a deep, longing feeling.