Bound. I was bound, too—Mombi had used that very word to describe it. But that wasn’t why I was here. I was no one’s slave, and I was acting of my own free will.
Wasn’t I?
I let the question go for now.
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Are you looking for your parents?”
“My parents would turn me over to Dorothy the second they saw me.”
“Then why?” I waved at our surroundings, thinking of their sadistic owner. “You know you’re nuts breaking in here, right?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Ollie replied. “It’s my sister. Maude. She’s here somewhere. The Scarecrow has her.”
“Is your sister . . . ?”
He answered my question before it was out of my mouth. “She’s a traitor, too—one of the ones who kept their wings. But she’s still my sister. I can’t let him have her. I can’t let him . . .” His eyes glistened as his voice trailed off.
I knelt down to Ollie’s level and grabbed his hands in mine. I squeezed them tight. “What does he want from her?” I asked urgently.
“I don’t know,” Ollie replied. “The Wingless Ones have our spies in the palace, but all they were able to tell us is that she was taken. That the Scarecrow has plans for her.”
“What kind of plans?” I asked, thinking of the big experiment the Scarecrow was hard at work on.
Ollie looked down at his little red patent-leather slippers. They matched mine, right down to the square, gold buckles.
“Maude was always special,” he said slowly. “A genius. The smartest monkey our kind had ever seen. Maybe smarter than the Scarecrow himself. It’s possible . . .”
“He wants her brains,” I said.
Ollie nodded, shaking loose from my hands and clenching his fists. “She tried to convince me to stay—to keep my wings and become Dorothy’s slave. She thought that compromising was our best chance for survival. For the first time in our lives, I was right and she was wrong. Those who have sacrificed always have the most to lose,” he said.
Frustrated, Ollie pounded his fists against the floor, stirring up loose pieces of straw. I wanted to comfort him, to tell him everything was going to be okay. But how could I? For all I knew, Maude could already be dead, her liquefied brains jammed into one of the Scarecrow’s needles.
Then something else occurred to me. Those who have sacrificed always have the most to lose.
“Ollie,” I began carefully. “What does that mean? That thing you just said.”
He looked at me blankly. “That is the motto of the Wingless Ones,” he said. “To remind us how much we have sacrificed for others, and how much we have lost because of it. It reminds us that compromise is death—that we must remain free.”
I let the words roll over in my head. Where had I heard them before?
Then I knew: the Wizard had used that exact phrase. It hadn’t made any sense at the time—I’d had no idea what he was talking about. He had hinted that something terrible was going on in the lab. He had used the motto of the Wingless Ones. He had been trying to tell me something. But why? Whatever his reason, it definitely wasn’t a coincidence.
Ollie paced across the Scarecrow’s floor, gazing into the distance. “The last time I saw Maude, Dorothy had just handed down my punishment. She allowed the Winged Ones to confront me before I was taken to the field, to be strung up. Maude spit in my face and told me that she hoped my punishment would improve my thinking.”
He winced as he told the story. I knew the feeling. Every unkind thing my mom had ever said to me was etched in my memory, too.
“Ollie—”
“My point is, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that she abandoned me. She’s my sister. I won’t abandon her. I need to find her. I don’t care what the risk is.”
I nodded. “All right,” I said matter-of-factly, “I’ll help.”
It was a split-second decision, not something I really thought through. But I’d hesitated yesterday, with Dorothy right under my knife, and that’d just bought me another day of feeling useless. If I could strike a blow against Dorothy and her regime, no matter how small, I was going to do it. That was my new policy. Screw waiting around.
But Ollie shook his head. “No, it’s not your fight. I have to do it myself.”
“It may not be my fight,” I replied. “But I know the palace better than you do, and I’m not a monkey wearing a dress. You’ll get killed if you keep traipsing around like that.”
“I wasn’t traipsing.”
“It was a miracle I spotted you instead of someone else.” I shook my head, thinking about the Wizard, the serendipity of it all. “I have a better chance of finding Maude than you ever would.”
An affronted look passed over his features, but then Ollie paused to consider it. “What would the Order say about this?” he asked. “What do they care about my little sister?”
He was right. I knew exactly what Nox would have said: that one winged monkey—no matter whose sister she was—wasn’t worth risking my cover. That my mission was about something bigger and that nothing could get in the way of it.
Well, maybe all that was true. But they weren’t here. They didn’t understand what it was like to stand by and watch Dorothy’s casual cruelty, to feel like a powerless coward hidden under a borrowed face. I was tired of waiting. I was my own person. Bound to the Order or not, I was still going to make my own decisions. And I felt deep down in my gut that this was the right one.
“The Wizard told me the Scarecrow is at work on something big. Something that could make everything the Order is fighting for irrelevant. They’ll probably thank me for finding out what it is,” I told Ollie, even though I knew it probably wasn’t true. “If Maude’s a part of it, I promise, I’ll get her out.”
Ollie scratched the top of his head. “I don’t know. How will you even find her?”
“I haven’t quite worked that out yet,” I replied.
“No way,” Ollie said, shaking his head. “You don’t even have a plan and you want me to just leave? Abandon my sister? No way.”
“You don’t have a plan either,” I reminded him. “And besides, I have this.”
With a flourish, my dagger appeared in my hand. I stuck it under Ollie’s chin and he held up his hands, eyes widening.
“Easy, Amy,” he said, glancing down at the blade. “What’s your, um, point?”
“My point is, you’ll die,” I replied. “You won’t last another hour here unarmed and in that ridiculous outfit. I’ve got weapons, I’m trained, and I sort of blend in. I’ve got a way better chance of finding her than you.”
“All right,” Ollie grunted, gently placing his hand on top of mine and pushing my dagger away from his neck. “I get it.”
I realized suddenly how long we’d been talking. Jellia would have noticed me missing by now.
“You should get out of here.” I walked to the window and flung it open. “I promise I won’t let you down.”
I looked back at him. Ollie nodded slowly, admitting to himself that I was his best option. As he walked toward me, he pointed a furry finger toward my chest.
“I’ll give you until midnight tomorrow,” he growled. “The Wingless Ones have a secret entrance in the Royal Gardens. If you’re not there, with my sister, I’m going back to Plan A—”
“Cross-dressing?”
Ollie grimaced. “You joke, but this is serious.”
“I know,” I replied, trying to sound confident. “I won’t fail.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly when he was at my side. “You’re the first kind human I’ve met since Dorothy took over.”