“You think Dorothy did something to her.”
Indigo nodded. “I don’t know what,” she said. “But Ozma would never let this happen to Oz. She must have been tricked . . . or . . .”
“Or she’s dead,” Ollie said.
“No!” Indigo nearly shouted. “She can’t be dead. Dorothy’s not powerful enough. No one’s powerful enough. Once Ozma had the crown, nothing could take it away from her. It’s fairy magic—that’s the strongest there is. Nothing can break it. Nothing can kill her.”
Ollie didn’t look so sure. “What if the magic’s gone?” he asked. Indigo didn’t answer him.
The whole time they’d been giving me a primer on Oz’s history—which I still wasn’t sure I understood—we’d been walking, and now we had come to a wide, stagnant river. The water was mossy and still and rotten-smelling, and had a toxic green tint to it. At the muddy bank, a tangle of thick black vines twisted like snakes.
Luckily, we didn’t have to swim through that muck: as it neared the water, the yellow bricks began to ascend, stretching up and out into the air in a meandering path. There was nothing supporting them—no cables or columns or beams—and the whole road swayed and fluttered back and forth like a ribbon in the wind.
I gulped. “Are we supposed to cross that?” I asked. Heights weren’t exactly my favorite thing.
But the height was the least of our problems.
“Monkeys,” Ollie breathed, pointing at the tiny silhouettes that swooped and dove against the newsprint-gray of an endless cloud that hovered just above the road. “They’re patrolling the bridge.”
I laughed nervously. “Time to turn back, I guess.” But I knew we couldn’t. Where would we go? We had seen what there was to see back there. The only direction was straight ahead.
Indigo looked up at the monkeys in thought. “I think we can make it past them,” she said. “I know a spell that might work.”
“Wait,” I said. “You can do magic? You didn’t tell me that.”
Indigo cocked her head and raised her eyebrows like she was offended. “My grandmother was a sorceress,” she said. “She may not have been as powerful as Glinda, but she taught me a thing or two. She would have taught me more, if Dorothy hadn’t banned it. But the Winged Ones are more susceptible to magic than almost anyone. I think a misdirection charm will get us past them.”
She closed her eyes and raised her hands, moving her fingers in front of her in rapid, fluttery movements. I looked down at myself, waiting to see what would happen—was I going to turn invisible or something? But nothing changed.
After a minute, Indigo opened her eyes. “I think we’re good to go,” she said. “Just don’t talk. Don’t do anything that will attract attention.”
“I don’t think it worked,” I said.
“It worked. Misdirection’s not that powerful, but it will do the job. It won’t hide us from them totally; it just makes us easy to overlook. They’ll simply be distracted every time they look in our direction. Trust me.”
The thing is, I was having a really hard time concentrating on what she was saying. But I got the idea.
Crossing the flying road was like trying to walk on a breeze. It rippled and dipped and swayed back and forth, and every time you lifted your foot you had to wonder if there would be anything under it when you put it back down.
Ollie was fine: he went scampering on ahead on all fours as easily as if we were still on solid ground. Indigo didn’t have too much trouble either. She was so squat and compact that it would take a wrecking ball to knock her over. But I was neither a monkey nor a Munchkin and I had to stretch my arms out at my sides and consider each step carefully.
I didn’t look down. I just kept my eyes on the road; the bricks yellower than ever against the dull gray of the sky.
Well, I tried to. Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep your eye trained on a moving target. Every time the narrow swath of road shifted, it revealed the water a million feet below us and still as menacing as ever. I didn’t know which would be worse: the fall, or what would be waiting for me underneath the surface of the nasty, slimy river.
With every step, I wanted to panic. I wanted to sit down in the middle of the road and hug my legs to my knees and give up. But I didn’t do any of those things.
Tornado or no tornado, a girl from Kansas doesn’t let much get to her. So I set my fear aside, put one foot in front of the other, and as the road carried me high into the sky, I felt myself becoming less and less afraid. I wasn’t going to let anything as stupid as a breeze or a few wobbly bricks knock me off my feet.
That’s what it means to be from the prairie. It was something I had in common with Dorothy.
I knew exactly how high up I was when I felt my fingertips scraping clouds.
After my dad left, my mom and I would watch Wheel of Fortune every night after dinner. I wasn’t very good at it, but my mom always guessed the answer before the contestants. At the end of each episode, Pat would thank their sponsors, and as he reminded us about the joys of Flying the Friendly Skies, an airplane would drift across the screen, bound for Sunny Aruba or Fabulous Orlando or wherever, floating in slow motion across a sunset-pink landscape of fluffy clouds.
I didn’t like the idea of airplanes, and I didn’t really want to go to Orlando anyway. But I’d always wondered what it would be like to touch a cloud.
Now I knew the answer to that, at least when it came to Oz clouds. It turned out they were just as soft and fluffy as they looked on Wheel of Fortune, as solid as cotton balls, but they were nothing you’d want to curl up and take a nap on. Every time my fingers grazed one, it sent an icy shock up my arm and down my spine into my toes. Some of them were as small as party balloons and others were as big as couch cushions, and soon they were so thick in the air that I had to swat them out of my path in order to keep moving.
Meanwhile, I could hear monkeys screeching, getting louder and louder. They were so close that I could feel their wings flapping just inches above my head. Every now and then I’d hear a scream so loud it straightened my spine. The sour smell of monkey breath filled my nostrils.
But Indigo’s spell had worked. They were close enough to touch, but the monkeys were ignoring me, acting like I wasn’t even there.
Finally the road began to curl in on itself, rising up in a steep, tight coil until I came to the top and stepped onto a small, circular platform twice as wide around as a hula hoop. This was the top. I was so high up that even the monkeys were beneath me now. It was all downhill from here. Literally: on the far edge of the platform, the yellow road plunged back toward the ground at a steep, straight incline, the rough texture of the bricks suddenly slick and smooth. It was a Yellow Brick Slide.
But that was nothing in comparison to the sight on the horizon. The Emerald City had come into view. Nothing I’d seen so far had prepared me for it. It seemed to have come out of nowhere, just when I was least expecting it, and now that I was looking at it, it was hard to understand how it hadn’t been visible all along, with its swooping skyline that was so green it colored in the sky around it, and the palace with towers so high that they disappeared beyond the clouds.
From up here, looking down on the city in the distance, you could almost forget everything that had gone wrong here. From up here, you could almost pretend that this was the Oz that should have been.
But as much as I would have liked to have stayed up here forever with that fantasy, I knew the monkeys would spot me eventually if I didn’t keep moving. I gulped, looking down. Just pretend you’re going down a waterslide at AquaLand, I told myself. It might have made me feel a little better if I’d ever actually been to AquaLand. My mom had never taken me.