Dorothy Must Die

Chapter Ten

My prison cell was a perfect cube, all white, without a speck of dirt anywhere. The walls were white limestone, freshly scrubbed, and the tiny bed in the corner was all white, too.

As soon as the Tin Woodman had slammed the cell door behind me after shoving me inside, the door had simply disappeared, like it had never existed. I pressed myself against the cool, smooth surface of the wall where it had just been, searching for a crevice, a seam, any sign at all that there was a way out—that there had ever been a way in. I didn’t find anything.

There was, however, a window in the room. It was no bigger than a foot wide, and it neatly framed a little swatch of the starry night sky. So Dorothy must have finally decided to let the sun set after all. When I stood on my tiptoes, the glittering green vista of the Emerald City was barely visible, poking up into the blackness.

To get to this dungeon, I’d been escorted down what had felt like hundreds of stairs. It seemed impossible that there could be a window all the way down here, deep in the bowels of the palace. But there it was.

It had to be magic. Was it the stairs that were just an illusion, or the window? And why was there a window in here anyway? It seemed unlikely that my captors would care whether or not I was comfortable.

Well, it was clean. And there was a view. That comprised the entirety of my prison’s luxuries. When I sat down on the bed in the corner, I found it hard as stone. That’s because there was no mattress to speak of: the bed felt like stone because it was stone.

I sat there trying to think of what I was going to do next while at the same time trying to suppress my mounting sense of panic. Meanwhile, Star was investigating, sniffing the walls, clawing at the floor, probably searching for an exit or maybe just something to eat. She wasn’t having any luck on either count. When she saw that I was awake, she abandoned her quest and jumped up onto the bed next to me.

I tried to keep my eyes open. I could sleep when I was dead, and if I didn’t want that particular sleep to come very soon, I had to find a way out.

But I was too exhausted. I didn’t even really know how long I’d been awake for. Before I knew it, I was out.

When I woke up, the sky outside my window was still dark. For how long? I wondered. Dorothy controlled the sun in the sky. According to Indigo, she basically controlled time itself around here. How was I ever going to escape power like that?

“Star,” I said, “we are completely and totally screwed.” On top of everything else, I was becoming one of those people who talked to their pets.

I’d barely been here a day, and I was already starting to feel insane.

In desperation, knowing it would do me no good, I stood and banged my fist against the wall until it was throbbing with pain. I tried to move the bed to the window, but it was rooted in place. When that didn’t work, I jumped up and tried to grip the edge of the window to hoist myself onto the ledge.

I just hung there limply. I had never been an athlete and, unfortunately, I was never going to become one. Even under pressure of death.

I screamed. I screamed until my throat hurt. I didn’t get so much as an echo in response. It was like the walls absorbed everything I could throw at them.

My whole body felt like one big bruise, but none of this was doing any good. I was just wasting energy.

I lay down on the bed to think and soon I was asleep again.

When I woke up and saw that the moon was still shining through the window, I finally realized why they had put the window in here in the first place. It was there to make me go crazy. To keep me guessing about how long I had been here, to give me hope that there was some way out.

I turned around with a start at the sound of a key in the door. Wait—what door? But then it was there again: a thin black line began to appear out of nowhere, a black rectangle that drew itself along the blank white wall. Even after all this I still felt a little thrill at seeing magic in action.

But then the door began to swing open and that thrill was instantly gone. I wasn’t sure who wanted in, but, whoever it was, I knew it wouldn’t be anyone good.

I was on my feet, my fists clenched. If I was going down, I was going down fighting.

The face I saw a moment later as the door disappeared into the wall was so unexpected that it took me a beat to put it into context. I shuffled his features around in my head like a puzzle, trying to place them.

He stepped into the room, and instantly I recognized his shaggy hair and glowing green eyes.

It was the boy who’d never told me his name. The one who’d saved my life back at the pit.

“You!” I exclaimed, my balled fists unballing and my spine relaxing. For the first time in—literally—I didn’t know how long, I let myself entertain the thought of hope. He had saved me once. Was he here to save me again?

The boy just put a finger to his lips and waved toward the window. That’s when I noticed the crows for the first time. There were several of them, all perched on the window ledge on the other side of the glass, peering in.

One of the birds cocked its head. The thing had ears—human ears, grafted awkwardly to either side of its head. A second passed, and the crow next to the first one cawed loudly, staring at me. It blinked, once, twice, with big human eyelids.

I cried out in frightened surprise, but the boy rapped against the glass a few times and they disappeared into the night.

“You have to watch out for them,” he explained. “They’re called Overhears. The Scarecrow makes them in his lab. They’re spies, but the good part is that they’re pretty stupid. It’s ironic, really—the one thing he hasn’t figured out is how to give them brains. They can see you and hear you, but they’re too dumb to understand anything, so they’re not so good at reporting any of it back. If you’re careful around them, they’re mostly harmless. Another one of his failed experiments.”

“Who are you?” I asked. Here he was, acting like just waltzing in here was no big deal. And he wasn’t making any moves to save me. Maybe I shouldn’t trust him.

“Sorry. I guess I never introduced myself. I’m Pete,” he said. “You don’t have to whisper now that they’re gone, though.”

Pete? The name sounded too ordinary for him. Anyway, while it was useful to finally know his name, it wasn’t really what I’d been asking.

I wanted answers. “No.” I said it firmly, placing a stiff period carefully at the end of the word. “Who are you meaning why are you here? Meaning, what do you want with me? Meaning, how did you get in here? Meaning, who the fuck are you?”

Without meaning to, I was screaming. I hoped the Overhears were long gone by now.

Pete rolled onto his heels, taken aback by my outburst, but he answered my questions calmly.

“I’m Pete,” he said again. “I’m here because I know that you can go crazy down here with no one to talk to, and I don’t want you to go crazy. So I lifted a key. I work in the palace.” Pete glanced nervously over at Star, who glared at him from underneath the bed. She didn’t trust him either. “I’m here to keep you company. For as long as I can, at least.”

Nothing about this story made any sense. How had he found me at the exact moment I’d landed in Oz? How had he found out I was down here? If I was in a magicked prison cell with no door, how had he just “lifted” a key? He was definitely not telling me everything. Which led me to my next question: Was he really on my side?

“You work in the palace?”

“I’m a gardener.”

“So you work for her then.”

He might as well have been the window, for all the good he did me. Simply another thing to torture me with false hope.

Unless he wasn’t here to give me hope at all.

“I’m just a gardener,” he said. “I work for the head gardener. The head gardener works for the royal steward. I’ve never spoken to Dorothy.”

He was lying. There was no question in my mind: his eyes were too big and luminous. You couldn’t hide anything behind eyes like those.

And yet . . . he had already saved me once. Why would he have done that if he was working for Dorothy?

Pete slumped against the wall. I hadn’t moved from my defensive position in the corner. “Should I go?” he asked. He looked, in that moment, just like a little kid. “I really didn’t mean to upset you. I thought it would help.”

“If you go,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”

I only said it because I was angry. But it gave me an idea.

Without warning, I lunged for him and grabbed him by the throat before he could react. I shoved my knee into his groin. Pete’s mouth widened into a perfect O of shock. I didn’t think I would be able to take him in a fight, but he might not know that. If I scared him enough, maybe he would think I was more dangerous than I really was.

It worked, I think. At least, he didn’t resist.

“Give me the key,” I said.

“You can take it, if that’s what you want,” he said. “I’ll give it to you. But it won’t do you much good. It’s not just the lock that’s keeping you down here. The moment the cell’s unoccupied, all the alarms will sound. They’ll know you’re gone; they’ll catch you before you can make it three feet, and they’ll throw you right back in here. That’s if you’re lucky. More likely, they’ll skip the trial and just send you straight to the Scarecrow. Trust me—if you think this is bad, that’s worse.”

I cocked my head. I thought about loosening my grip on his neck. Instead, I tightened it and nudged my knee forward an inch. He grimaced, but didn’t say anything.

“If I take the key and leave you here in my place, the cell won’t be unoccupied. No alarms, then.”

At that, Pete raised his eyebrows in surprise. Maybe he hadn’t expected me to be desperate enough to trade my freedom for his. Honestly, I was a little surprised myself.

Still, that was all the reaction I got. “You could,” he said calmly. “If that’s the way you want to play it. It still wouldn’t do you any good. We’re deep underground here, and the entrances to the dungeons are always guarded. You might get out of the cell, but you still have to get past the guards.”

“It’s worth the risk.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

He was right, of course. I felt defeat seeping in through every pore. It was useless. I dropped my hold on him and walked over to my so-called bed where I perched myself on the edge and buried my face in my hands.

“Hey,” he said. I felt his hand on my shoulder and looked up to see him standing over me. “If it means anything to you, I’ve been trying to think of a way to get you out of here. I can’t find one. You’re too important to Dorothy—it’s a miracle I managed to get the key and sneak down here at all. But I’ll find a way, okay? I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

“Why?” I asked, my eyes suddenly pooling with tears. “Why are you trying to help me?”

He flipped his palms to the ceiling as if to say, Why not? “Because it’s the right thing?”

He sat next to me on the bed, keeping a safe distance between us.

I rolled my eyes. “No one does anything because it’s the right thing,” I said.

“You do.”

“I do?”

Maybe that was true, but even if it was, how would he know it? We’d known each other for all of twenty minutes total.

“You do,” Pete said, this time with emphasis. “Except when you threatened to kill me, that is.”

I had to laugh at that.

“But I didn’t actually kill you, so it doesn’t count.”

“Seriously,” he said. “Everyone in the palace has been whispering about Dorothy’s latest prisoner. I knew it had to be you. The girl I rescued from the tin farm. Ever since I saw you, I just had a feeling. I feel responsible for you.”

Only then did it occur to me that this was the first time I’d ever had a boy in my bed. The circumstances were less than ideal.

Not that it mattered at a time like this. I was trapped in a cell in a strange kingdom, facing an inevitable sentence of a Fate Worse Than Death. It wasn’t the moment to be shopping for a boyfriend.

“How did you know I would be there?” I asked. “When my trailer crashed by the pit. If you work all the way over here in the palace, how did you know I was there? I mean, you got there right in the nick of time. Any later and I’d have fallen in.”

“I just had a feeling,” he said, shifting in his seat. “I just—I don’t know. It was just like someone was calling me there, so I went.”

Part of me didn’t care that he was obviously still lying. He’d been right—after all the hours locked away in here, all alone, it really did help just to have him sitting next to me. Just to hear another human voice, to be able to ask a question and get an answer back, even if it wasn’t the right answer.

Then that faraway, distracted look crossed his face again, the same look I’d seen him get the day I met him, just before he left me. It was the look of someone trying to place a distant tune that only he could hear.

His body seemed to flicker in and out, to grow hazy around the edges, but it was so faint I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t my imagination. It reminded me of the hologram of Ozma we’d seen on the road.

He stood up abruptly. This time, I thought I knew what was coming. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Why . . . ?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’ll try to help you if I can.” Then, before I could protest, before I could even stand to say good-bye, he had pulled a big brass key from the pocket of his loose, white gardener’s pants. He walked across the cell in three quick strides and plunged it into a space in the wall where there was no keyhole. The stone rippled around it like he’d just dropped a pebble in a pond.

The door appeared. He pushed it open.

“Pete,” I said. My voice cracked unexpectedly as I said it. I just wanted him to look at me. He didn’t. He stepped out, the door sealed up, and I was alone again.