“Where are you going?” I asked in a low voice, and he practically flinched.
“Gert and Glamora want me to protect—” he began, but Glamora cut him off with a breezy wave of her hand. Gert and Glamora exchanged glances.
“We’re sending him out to do reconnaissance. Make sure the area is safe.”
Safe? That was a joke. The scariest thing about Dusty Acres was how empty it was. There was obviously something they weren’t telling me. Nox mumbled something incoherent that could have been “good-bye,” “I love you,” or “go to hell,” and stalked off toward the road into town.
I caught Gert studying me with a soulful expression that seemed almost sympathetic. They were trying to keep us apart, I realized. If Nox and I couldn’t be together, the witches were going to make sure we weren’t around to distract each other. I felt a brief surge of fury. Shouldn’t that be up to us? Did I not get a say in my own life? What game were they playing anyway? I’d already decided to keep my distance from Nox. But that was my decision, not theirs.
After a picnic-style breakfast of bacon and eggs, Glamora waved the dishes and picnic blanket away, and I stood up. “I want to get this over with,” I said tiredly. “Where’s my mom?”
Apparently, Gert had been using her extended involuntary Kansas vacation for recon as well as recovery. “I used what we already knew from the vision of your mother you saw in my cave,” she explained. “Her hut is right near the high school.”
“At least I won’t have to take the bus to school,” I said. “And it’s called an apartment.”
Mombi snorted. “Keep your attitude in check, missy.”
The apartment where my mom was living wasn’t far from Dusty Acres, either, and we all agreed it would be better if I just walked there. Glamora was more tired than she should have been from whipping up our tent and breakfast, and Gert and Mombi admitted Kansas was having an effect on their magic, too. At least it wasn’t just me who was suffering, although it wasn’t much comfort knowing the witches would have a hard time helping me if anything went wrong. Quadrant or no Quadrant, I was on my own.
It seemed like a bad idea to use their power to transport me a distance I was perfectly capable of walking. The witches offered to escort me, but I only laughed.
“Yeah, right,” I said. “No offense, but this is the twenty-first century. I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining how I got here, let alone three old bats who look like extras from a senior citizens’ Dungeons and Dragons role-playing party.”
Mombi smoothed her blue cloak huffily. “We don’t have dragons in Oz,” she said.
“Never mind,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m fine on my own.”
Gert stepped forward and hugged me, and for a second I let myself get lost in her familiar, comforting embrace. No matter how much the witches had kept from me, and no matter how much I felt like they were using me half the time for some secret, complicated plan of their own, Gert’s hugs were still the best. Somehow, she always managed to make me feel like everything was going to be okay. Even when it pretty clearly wasn’t.
“We won’t be with you here, Amy,” she said. “Mombi will take us all into the Darklands to wait. We’ll be safe there, and we can conserve our power.”
“Great,” I said. “So I can’t use my magic, I’m completely on my own, I have barely any time to accomplish the basically impossible task you’ve given me, and on top of all that, I have to move back in with my mom.”
Glamora nodded earnestly, her blue eyes wide. “Yes,” she said. “That’s really all you have to do.”
I sighed. Sarcasm was wasted on pretty much everyone in Oz except Lulu. And Nox, a little voice piped up in the back of my head. I told it to shut up.
“We’ll be with you in spirit,” Gert said, squeezing my hands. “And when you need us—when you’re ready to use the shoes to open the portal back to Oz—send us a sign, and we’ll rejoin you.”
“What, like the bat signal?” I said, rolling my eyes.
“What do bats have to do with anything?” Mombi asked.
“Never mind,” I said.
The three of them hugged me in turn—even Mombi—and then joined hands. Mombi closed her eyes and muttered something under her breath. Weakened as she was, she was still far more powerful than I was—I’d only ever managed to get myself into the Darklands for a brief period when I was fighting Dorothy, and she was taking two other people for an indefinite stay without even batting an eyelash. Not that Mombi really had much in the way of eyelashes. Slowly, the witches began to turn gray and then fade, like watching a color movie degrade into black-and-white. The brightness seeped from their bodies and their images flattened and grew transparent. Gert opened her eyes and blew me a kiss, and then they faded away altogether.
This was it. Yet again, I was on my own, and the future of everything was in my hands. I sighed and started walking.
FIVE
My mom’s new apartment was right downtown in Flat Hill—if downtown was the right word for a town that didn’t have an up. The downtown of my hometown consisted of four blocks of struggling businesses: an always-empty Chinese restaurant, a coffee shop that also sold dusty stuffed animals and sad-looking helium balloons with cheery slogans for holidays long since passed, three bars (luckily for my mom, since she’d been 86’d for life from two of them), a drugstore, a feed store, and a hardware store that still rented VHS tapes out of a curtained room in the back you had to be eighteen with ID to enter. I’d always known my hometown was a dump, but seeing it again after the magic and beauty of Oz was like being punched in the gut. How could anyone stand to live here? How had I managed to do it for sixteen years? I’d known there were other places—I’d just never been to any of them.
And then it hit me—of course. Dorothy must have felt the same way. And in Dorothy’s Kansas, they didn’t even have indoor plumbing. No wonder she’d wanted to go back to Oz, and no wonder she’d fought so desperately to stay. Everyone kept alluding to how the magic of Oz ended up transforming people from the Other Place—people like me and Dorothy. If she and I were alike in one way, did that mean I was destined to . . . No, I told myself fiercely. I wasn’t anything like Dorothy. I would never do the kinds of things she did.
You already have. I buried that thought so far down that I’d never be able to dig it up again. I had enough to deal with already.
Looking at Flat Hill made me strangely grateful for the tornado that had given me a free ride out of this hellhole. Sure, things had been tough in Oz, but at least a lot of the time they’d been beautiful, too. Most of the people I went to high school with wouldn’t ever see the next state over, let alone a flying monkey or a waterfall made out of rainbows.
Suddenly, I remembered one of the last things my mom had ever said to me. One second, you have everything, your whole life ahead of you. And then, boom. They just suck it all out of you like little vampires till there’s nothing left of you. She’d been talking about me.
Unexpectedly, I felt tears well up in my eyes, and I scrubbed them away angrily with the heel of my hand. I didn’t need this shit. Not now, not ever. I almost turned around right there. Gert and Mombi and Glamora could go to hell. I’d figure something else out. I always had.
But what? I couldn’t get back to Oz without Dorothy’s stupid shoes, and it’s not like I was going to set up a trailer of my very own in Flat Hill. So maybe my only option right now was my mom. That didn’t mean I had to like it. Or forgive her. I blinked away the last of my tears and kept walking.
The tornado had wiped out Dusty Acres, but it had missed most of the main part of town. Here and there I saw scattered piles of debris, and one house at the edge of town had had its roof lifted clean off, though the rest of the building was untouched. Someone had tacked blue tarps over the gaping hole where the roof had been. One of them was coming loose and flapped idly in the humid breeze.