Dorothy Must Die

Chapter Seven

“We need to move,” Indigo said. “That post he was tied to was probably enchanted. They’ll know that we freed him.”

“Maybe we should leave the road,” I said. “We’re too exposed. If they’re looking for us . . .”

Indigo was shaking her head emphatically. “No,” she said. “The road leads to the Emerald City. That’s where we’re going.”

Ollie agreed. “We’re in the wildest part of Munchkin Country,” he said. “Once we step off the road of yellow bricks, things get turned around. Directions stop making sense. We’ll be lost in no time.”

“You’re going to the city, too?” I asked.

Ollie nodded. “They say that the entrance to an underground tunnel is hidden somewhere in the city walls. The tunnel leads north, to where the rest of the Wingless Ones live. I’m going to find it.”

“There are others like you? Without wings?”

“Dorothy wanted to harness them,” Indigo snapped, her face suddenly red. “Make them her slaves. She wanted a thousand of them pulling her sicko flying monkey chariot. What else were they supposed to do?”

It was good to see her mad, actually. At least anger can get you somewhere. I liked this Indigo better than the Indigo I’d been sitting with on the rock an hour ago, the Indigo who seemed like she’d just given up. I liked this Indigo better than the one who had been so terrified that she’d wanted to leave Ollie strung up by the side of the road.

I just didn’t know what she was talking about. I looked at Ollie quizzically.

“My people have always been used by those who are more powerful,” he began to explain. “Even before Dorothy rose to power, we were slaves to others. It’s part of our enchantment. The wings are vulnerable to magic; they make us easy to control. When we were freed from the witches we thought we would never have to serve anyone again. But then Dorothy came back. This time, some of us decided that the price of freedom was worth paying.”

“So you cut off your wings,” I said. I couldn’t imagine that kind of sacrifice. I thought I understood it, though.

“I would rather be free than fly,” Ollie said firmly. “Not all of my people agreed.” A look of pure disgust crested his face. “The ones who would be free went north, into hiding.”

“Why are you here, then?” I asked. “Why aren’t you up north with them?”

“I couldn’t leave them.”

“Who?” I asked.

He looked at the ground. “My parents,” he said. “My sister. They thought their wings were what made them special. So they stayed behind. Now they pull Dorothy’s chariot. I thought I could help them. I thought I could convince them. . . .” He faltered, his voice breaking.

“I guess Dorothy must not have liked that plan,” I said.

Indigo was getting antsy. “We need to go,” she snapped. “We don’t have time for Oz History 101.”

There was still so much more I wanted to ask Ollie, but Indigo was right. If everything they were telling me about Dorothy was true, we were asking for trouble just sitting around like this.

“Can you make it?” I asked Ollie. “You still look pretty weak.”

But Indigo was already marching ahead of us, her boots stomping against the brick road. Ollie shrugged and he and I followed a few paces behind, moving as quickly as we could.

I was starting to get tired, not to mention hot. The sun, which had had an eerie, icy-blue tint to it back in Munchkin Country where I’d landed, was now a bright, fiery yellow, beating down on my skin. I could feel a bead of sweat forming at the base of my scalp.

The sun had changed colors; it had gotten hotter. But it hadn’t actually moved: it was still hanging in exactly the same place, dead center in the sky, that it had been when I’d set out on my way. It didn’t show any signs of budging.

“Is it just me, or has this day been really long?” I asked Ollie.

He groaned. “The day’s as long as Dorothy wants it to be,” he said. “She controls the time around here. Sometimes it’s ages before she remembers to turn the hands on the Great Clock and make it night again. The princess gets distracted easily.”

I shuddered. In addition to everything else, Dorothy controlled time itself. We kept walking.

The girl took us all by surprise when she appeared in the middle of the road out of nowhere, blocking our way. She had dark hair and flawless, ivory skin, and was dressed in a silk sheath dress in emerald green, setting off huge green eyes. She must have been about my age, and she was more beautiful than any girl I’d ever seen before. She also had way more bling: strapped to her head was a tall gold crown that burned in the endless afternoon sunlight. Her ears were covered by giant, jewel-encrusted poppies that looked like really fancy earmuffs.

As soon as they saw her, Indigo and Ollie dropped instantly to one knee. Indigo grabbed my arm and pulled me down with her.

“Dearest people of Munchkin Country!” The girl was talking to us as if she were addressing a huge audience, except there was no one else here. “I am pleased to announce this auspicious day for all of Oz! A day when sadness bids its final farewell and joy begins its eternal reign! By royal order, under punishment of death, I hereby declare Happiness henceforth!”

Indigo sighed in disgust and rose to her feet just as the girl was starting her speech all over again. It was like someone had set her on repeat. “Dearest people of Munchkin Country!” the girl cried again.

“It gets me every time,” Indigo muttered. “Just ignore her,” she said, noticing my confused expression. “Come on.”

“It’s not real,” Ollie explained, standing, too. “Just a recording. You come across them every now and then, to keep us in line. I bet it means we’re getting closer to the Emerald City, though.”

“Who is she?” I asked. “That’s not Dorothy. Is it?”

“It’s Ozma. Oz’s true ruler,” Indigo said. “She’s still technically in charge, but no one’s seen the real Ozma outside the palace in ages. It’s always just these illusion things. Look.”

She wound her arm up like a pitcher and went to slap the girl. Her hand passed easily through the princess’s head.

“See? Fake. The real Ozma doesn’t care about us anymore.”

“I am pleased to announce this auspicious day for all the people of Oz!” Ozma kept babbling.

Ollie looked away from the hologram like it hurt him to stare at her even a second longer, and then Indigo stepped right through her and we all just kept on walking. Ozma’s canned speech faded slowly away into the distance.

“We waited a long time for a ruler like her.” Ollie sighed. “She was supposed to be in charge all along—she’s descended from the fairy who gave Oz its magic. But she was just a baby when the Wizard came here, and he didn’t want her getting in his way. So he sent her off somewhere. Then, when he left, he made the Scarecrow the king. That didn’t go well.”

“The Scarecrow was evil, too? Like Dorothy?” I asked. I was having a hard time keeping track of all this, but something about it seemed important.

“No,” he said, and then chuckled ruefully to himself. “Not then at least. He just wasn’t a very good king.”

“He wanted to sit around the palace thinking all day,” Indigo cut in. “If you ask me, brains aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Anyway, everything went to hell, until Ozma came back.”

“Where was she that whole time?”

“No one knows,” Ollie said. “She would never talk about it. But she has fairy blood, which meant she had a right to the crown. It’s deep magic—since she was finally of age, no one could do anything to take it away from her.”

“Dorothy did,” I pointed out.

“Not exactly,” Ollie said.

“Ozma was in charge for a long time,” Indigo said. “Things were good with her. The best. The sun rose and set on time. There was magic everywhere. . . .”

“The monkeys flew wherever they wanted while Ozma reigned,” Ollie interjected.

“It was what Oz was supposed to be all along,” Indigo said. “The funny part is that when Dorothy came back, everyone was happy at first. She was a hero, you know. And nothing changed for a while, except that she moved into the palace. She and Ozma became friends. They did everything together. No one even minded when Ozma made her a princess, too. It seemed like she deserved it.”

“And then?”

“Then came the Happiness Decree. After that, we stopped seeing so much of Ozma. It was, like, all Dorothy all the time. Ozma was just . . . gone.”

“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.

So I just took a deep breath, dropped to my butt, and reassured myself that going down had to be easier than coming up. If nothing else, it would be faster. I closed my eyes and pushed off.

My stomach dropped as I hurtled downward, the wind whipping across my face and gaining speed every second. At first I was terrified, but after a minute, I inched my eyes open and saw the clouds whipping by as the ground approached at high velocity. Feeling a rush of exhilaration, I opened my mouth to whoop with joy and caught myself just in time to remember that the monkeys would hear me. Instead, I let out a quiet little squeal, grinning from ear to ear.

I landed with a thump on solid ground, where Indigo and Ollie were waiting for me, both looking a little shaky.

“That was actually sort of fun,” I said, scooping myself to my feet and dusting myself off.

Indigo glared at me. Ollie looked away, and I instantly realized my mistake. He wasn’t thinking about the slide or the thrill of survival. He was thinking about the monkeys.

I wondered how it had felt for him to be so close to his people and to not even be able to look at them. The monkeys weren’t evil: they were slaves, and some of them had probably been his friends once. Were his parents and his sister up there somewhere? Had he recognized any of the voices that had cackled in his ears?

“Ollie,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head like it was no big deal, but when he finally spoke, it was through gritted teeth and I could tell he was angry. Maybe not at me, but it didn’t really matter.

“I would do anything to get them back,” he said quietly. “Is there anyone in your life like that? Anyone you’d do anything to help? No matter what?”

“I . . .” I bit my lip and hesitated. There was a time when I would have said my mother. Now I wasn’t sure. I had tried to help her so many times, had done everything I could possibly think of, and none of it had worked. Not even a little. Now she was probably dead. “I don’t know,” I finally said, feeling my face flush with shame.

He cocked his head like he didn’t believe me. It wasn’t the answer he had expected.

Indigo just rolled her eyes. “I feel sorry for you,” she said. “I really do.”

We didn’t say anything after that. We just trudged on ahead.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the question Ollie had asked me. I made a decision. A promise to myself. I couldn’t help my mother anymore. If I’d ever had a chance, it was long gone now. But if I ever had a chance to help the monkeys, I would take it. No matter what it cost me. It was the least I could do. Not for him, but for myself. Just to say I had someone.

When the road turned a few minutes later we found ourselves in an apple orchard. The trees were lush and green in contrast to the icky cornfields. Huge, red apples dangled temptingly from their branches, shiny and juicy-looking.

I stepped off the road, the grumbling in my stomach outweighing what I’d seen with the mutant corn.

Star, still in my pocket, knew what was up, too. She poked her nose out and chirped hungrily as I reached for a piece of fruit.

For a split second I thought I saw the tree blink. I snatched my hand back.

I looked at the talking monkey next to me, remembering that anything was possible here. “Did that tree just move?”

“They talk, too, but they’ve taken a vow of silence.”

“Voluntarily?”

“The princess felt that their conversation ruined the apple-eating experience and was therefore a violation of the Happiness Decree.”

“What about their happiness? The trees, I mean?”

“I think we all realized a little too late that the only happiness that matters is Dorothy’s,” Indigo chimed in.

Ollie looked at me. “I know you want to, but you can’t.”

“Is it poison? Or is it forbidden?”

“It’s against the Happiness Decree. It’s not worth the risk,” Indigo said.

“But we need to eat. And Ollie needs his strength. No one is around.”

I plucked two apples and nodded at the tree, meeting its sad eyes. “Thanks,” I said. I handed one to Ollie, who took it and examined it, unsure.

The first bite melted in my mouth. It tasted like pie. Apple pie. Apple and cinnamon and sugar and butter all mosh-pitted around in my mouth. It was a magically delicious apple! Finally, something in Oz that was actually as cool as advertised.

It was too good to last. I’d just taken another satisfying bite when I saw Indigo’s face go white. She pointed behind me and opened her mouth to say something. No sound came out.

And then.

It started to get dark. But it wasn’t the sun setting. The sky was as sunny as ever. Instead, it was like the world around us was being covered in shadows, starting with the yellow road. Then the shadows began to rise up from the ground, curling and inflating and twisting into forms. They were taking on shapes. Shapes that looked oddly, eerily familiar to me.

It was the Tin Woodman. He wasn’t alone.