I almost turned to leave but then I saw a set of double doors that led outside and I pushed through them, gulping in the fresh air as I stepped onto a balcony with a panoramic view of the kingdom.

It was some view. First, the gardens surrounding the palace, which were overgrown and trampled in places. But beyond them, I could see all the way to the mountains in one direction and the Queendom of the Wingless Ones in the other. Underneath bright blue, wide-open sky—with all of Oz laid out before me—I still felt invisible walls closing in on me. I had traveled so far, had learned so much, and fought so many battles, and I didn’t feel like it had made any difference at all. If anything, Oz seemed worse off than it had been before I came along.

“Amy?” Nox’s voice was tentative behind me. I didn’t turn around.

“I want to be alone, Nox.”

But I heard footsteps, and a moment later he was standing next to me. We were both silent for a long time.

“I used to think it was so beautiful,” I said, still not looking at him. “Even when things got really bad, it was still beautiful, you know? It was still, like, amazing. Now, though, it’s like it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is. It’s just more stuff for someone to ruin.”

“You’re right,” he said.

Now I looked at him. He seemed much older than he had when I’d first met him, even though it really hadn’t been so long ago.

“I don’t want to be right,” I said.

“What do you want me to say?” He brushed a strand of hair from his face. “You’re right. Everything got so messed up. And you know what I wonder sometimes?”

“Do I want to know?”

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s even Dorothy’s fault, or if this place was just rotten from the start, underneath everything. If maybe that’s the price you pay for magic.”

“My world doesn’t have any magic, and it’s pretty messed up, too.”

“Is it? It seemed okay to me. Better, at least.”

“You didn’t see much of it.”

“Yeah, I know,” he replied. “But you know what I liked about it?”

“What?”

“It reminded me of you. Everywhere I looked, I couldn’t stop thinking, This is where Amy’s from. This is the dirt that she walked on. This is the sky that she grew up under. It’s the place that made you who you are. And that’s what made me like it.”

“It’s made Dorothy, too.”

“Oh, screw her,” Nox said. And we both laughed. But just a little bit, because it really wasn’t that funny at all.

“I wish I could see where you came from,” I said.

“You’re looking at it, aren’t you?”

“No, I mean, like, where you really came from. Your village. The house you grew up in. All that stupid little stuff.”

He winced. “It’s gone,” he said bitterly. The pain in his voice shot through me like it was my pain, too. At this point, maybe it was. “You know that. Burned to the damn ground.”

“I know,” I said. “I wish I could see it anyway.”

“The rivers were full of sprites who sing to you while you go swimming. In the summer, you could walk through the Singing Forest and watch the mountains rearrange themselves . . .” He trailed off, with a sad, faraway look in his eyes.

“Maybe . . . ,” I started. Maybe what? Maybe everything will be okay? Maybe things aren’t really so bad? There was no way to finish the sentence without sounding faker than the knockoff Prada purse that my dad sent me for my thirteenth birthday, with the label misspelled to read Praba.

I didn’t need to finish, though, because Nox did it for me. “Maybe it’s not worth fighting for,” he said. “Maybe we should just give up.”

“No!” I said. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. It’s what I meant. I don’t think I’ve ever said it aloud, but it’s what I really think sometimes. Like, maybe it would be better to just let them all kill each other off. Mombi, Glinda, Dorothy—everyone. Let them keep fighting until they’ve destroyed every single thing. And then maybe it would all grow back. I bet it would. Eventually, I mean.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, maybe you’re right; I don’t know. But we can’t give up. Not after all of this.”

A minute ago, I had been ready to give up myself. But hearing Nox say it made me realize how wrong I had been to even think about doing something like that. <