Suddenly, I thought of my mom. Magic for me was as destructive as pills had been for her. The same addiction—and the same results. I’d fallen in love with power the way she’d fallen in love with oblivion. I’d hated her for what her addiction had done to her—to us—but was I really any different?
Where was she now? What did she think had happened to me? What time was it in Kansas? How much of the school had been destroyed by the tornado? Someone must have told her I was gone again by now. Another tornado sweeping me away—what were the odds of that one? This time, Dustin had watched me get swallowed up by the storm. And Dustin—had he survived the battle with the Nome King? Eventually, the police would have to declare me dead. How did that stuff even work? How long would it take before my mom was forced to give up hope for good? And what then? Would she start using again with no reason to stop, no one to stay sober for? If she thought I was never coming back, there was no telling what she might do. I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I was stuck in Oz with no ability to protect myself, dependent on a boy who couldn’t love me, unable to save my mom from the thing that was going to destroy her. It was too much to think about.
“I need some air,” I said, shoving my chair back from the table.
“Amy, you have to be careful,” Gert said. “Dorothy could be anywhere.”
I heard Mombi behind me, murmuring, “It’s all right, let her go. We can protect her if anything happens.”
I didn’t know where to go, so I took the first staircase up I saw, and then the next. After a few minutes of stumbling through the palace, I came to a big room that looked like it had once been a bedchamber. The air smelled faintly of machine oil. There wasn’t a bed, only a tall wooden cupboard at the far end of the room that was blackened as though someone had tried to set it on fire. I remembered the Tin Woodman’s chambers at the Emerald Palace, and I felt a creepy shiver up my spine as I realized what I’d found. He slept standing up. I was in his old bedroom.
Directly across from where I assumed he stood was a portrait of Dorothy. I had taken the heart right out of his chest, but standing here now in his room I realized—if he had never met Dorothy, he would never have become so evil. I wonder what I would be if I had never met Nox.
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.
“Look,” I said. “Things aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in my world either. You think wandering around Kansas camping on the prairie for a couple of days was good? Yeah, so it’s beautiful out there, but our planet is freaking out. The oceans are rising, people are fighting more and more wars every day, plants and animals are dying out, every other week some kid takes one of his parents’ guns to school and starts shooting. . . .” I stopped short at the look on Nox’s face. “The world I grew up in is gone, too,” I said quietly. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on it. Because if you give up—then what is there left to live for?”
We were both silent for a long time, looking deep into each other’s eyes. He was so close to me. I could smell his faint rich sandalwood smell. I could have reached up to brush the hair out of his eyes. I could have leaned in the barest amount and our mouths would have met. And I wanted it so badly my heart was thundering in my chest.