He gripped my hands even tighter and pushed me forward in the dance like I was a puppet.
Why was he saying all this? More importantly, how did he know?
Gert. Nox wasn’t in my head reading my thoughts. Gert was. She’d fed him my secrets, my entire life it seemed.
I had never done anything, he was right. I did go through my life just reacting to other people. When I was young I had escape plans—big, grand, dumb ones. I was going to start fresh somewhere where no one knew me and no one would call me Salvation Amy. But that part didn’t sting as much as the Dad thing did. I did think about going to visit him, all the time. I’d have some excuse like I was selling candy for school. And I would see the life he left us for. The pretty wife who was no prettier than Mom before she started with the pills. The little girl or boy, technically my sister or brother, who she was pregnant with when they moved away to Jersey. I was going to show up and meet them and warn that little girl or boy that one day Dad would get tired of him or her, too.
Glamora tapped her foot on the glass floor to the beat of the music. “You’re losing the beat, Amy.”
Nox leaned in and dropped his voice to whisper words that I hadn’t heard since I stepped into Oz.
“Am I right, Salvation Amy?”
The room spun. I wasn’t sure if I was dizzy from him or from my anger. I dropped his hand.
He reached for me—but his hand missed me completely and grabbed the air next to me.
I was standing in a new spot. Across the room from where I started.
“What the hell? How did I . . . ?”
Had I—? Was it possible—? Had I moved myself across the room?
Don’t you see? You did it. I heard Gert’s voice. She appeared in the center of the room. She’d been here all along. I felt hot. More specifically, my hands felt hot from casting the spell.
She had done this on purpose, made Glamora and Nox bring me to this room and beat at me until I couldn’t take it anymore. Like dipping me under the spring, she did what she thought she needed to do. But this time she’d gone too far.
The room spun again. My hands got hotter—light seemed to shoot from them. Not the gentle glow I’d seen from Gert. A searing red glow. Like darts of fire.
The fire darts seemed to be seeking Nox. But Nox lit up with a weird blue light of his own and the darts seemed to deflect off him. More darts came off my hands even though I wasn’t actually directing them. They shot straight up into the air and showered down like firecrackers.
I was angry. Too angry. No-turning-back angry.
I wanted to run away from him, from Gert, from all of them, but I couldn’t move. Nox made a beeline toward me and grabbed my glowing hands with his own. In a blink we were standing outside the caves on the same spot he’d taken me the first day of training—the peak of the mountain, this time looking out into a deep black sky dotted with strange constellations where the familiar ones should have been.
These stars were different from any stars back home. For one thing, they were brighter. For another thing, where the constellations I was used to never seemed to match the images they were supposed to resemble, these formed themselves into clear pictures the longer you gazed at them. There was a horseshoe and a bear and a tiger and a dragon, all as clear as pictures in a book.
“Gert thought home was stopping you from doing magic. We had to push. We had to know.” He pointed into the distance. “Look. That one’s always been my favorite.” As he pointed, a group of bright-white pinpricks rearranged themselves into the image of a bicycle. As I looked at it, a memory came back to me: my mother teaching me to ride a bike when I was five, before we’d moved to Dusty Acres.
It was the first time I’d ever tried it without the training wheels, and Mom had promised to hold on so I didn’t fall. But at some point, as I’d raced down the hill, the wind in my hair, I’d let out a whoop of triumph. I was doing it. It was only at that moment that I’d realized Mom had let go. I was on my own.
That was when I went crashing to the curb. When I crawled back to my feet, my knee scraped and bloody, my bike in a tangled heap on the ground, I’d looked up the hill to see my mom standing at the top, clapping for me.
I had been pushing back thoughts of Mom on a regular basis now. All Gert’s talk of forgiveness had planted a seed that I did not want to let grow. I’d told myself that all I’d been thinking about was where my fist was going next. About trying to light a candle just by thinking about it and remembering all the stuff in all the books Glamora had given me.
But it wasn’t true. She was still there no matter how much I didn’t want her to be. And now, standing on the top of the mountain with Nox, all I could think about was my mother.
I was an idiot. For a few minutes I had been thinking about prom and dancing with Nox and how he maybe didn’t hate it—and he was just following witchy orders.
And somehow that almost made me more angry.
“It matters how you do this,” I said through clenched teeth, staring him down. “What you do to get there. You can’t just kill someone. The ends do not make it okay.”
His eyes shifted away from mine and then back again. I saw something pass over his face. Guilt. Regret. No, it was maybe something else—like curiosity or realization—like he was happening upon completely new information.
Like it had never occurred to him that I would be hurt or mad or anything like that. Like being able to do magic trumped everything.
“We’re the only ones willing to take her down. The only ones capable. It’s us or nothing. We’re doing one bad thing for the good of Oz.”
“Do you ever not speak the witch party line—do you ever make a decision that is all your own?”
His eyes flicked away from mine.
“Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Do you ever ask any? You know absolutely everything there is to know about me and I don’t know anything about any of you. Not really.”
The cockiness from the dance floor was gone. He slipped out of it so easily it was a surprise.
“Do you really want to know who I am?” he asked.
I should have said no and backed away from him. But even though I was mad at him, I still wanted to crack him open and see what was inside. I nodded.
“I’m not Nox.”
“What?”
“Nox is just the name Mombi gave me. I don’t remember my real name. I remember my parents. Their faces. The way they smelled and sounded. I remember the day that they were taken from me. But my name washed away with them. And there’s no one alive who remembers it.”
“Nox . . .”
“It was in the beginning. When Glinda and Dorothy were just starting to mine everything and everywhere. Glinda hadn’t figured it out yet. She wasn’t using the Munchkins. She was just using her own magic to mine magic. She blasted a hole in the center of the town and boom. She hit the water table. Everything flooded. We climbed up to the roof. There was this old weather vane up there that was so rusty it didn’t even move when the wind blew. I remember my mother told me to hold on to it no matter what. And I did. But my mom didn’t. Or couldn’t. I wanted to let go, too, but I held on like she told me to. When the water went down, no one in the village was left except me.”
I inhaled sharply.
“Did Mombi find you then?”
“Later, much later I think. I went from town to town. I stole when I had to eat. I slept where I could. Sometimes people were good to me. And sometimes they were horrible. Mombi saved me during one of those horrible times. I stumbled upon the wrong town. The Lion was there. But so was Mombi.”