Dorothy Must Die (7 page)

We were standing in the middle of the road and then we weren’t. The world blurred before me for a second in a swirl of colors. I blinked hard, trying to keep from getting dizzy, and when I opened my eyes again, I was standing on a glossy marble floor.

I looked up. The Tin Woodman and his metallic backup band were standing beside me. We must have traveled by magic.

The room we were in was the biggest I’d ever been in. It was bigger than my high school auditorium that doubled as a gym, and, where there should have been a ceiling, an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of rainbows formed a majestic dome, casting a shower of vivid colors down upon the pair of gold-and-emerald thrones that sat majestically on a raised dais.

On every wall, stained-glass windows seemed to tell a story. I knew most of it already: it was the story of Dorothy.

There was Dorothy’s house in the cyclone. Dorothy walking down the road of yellow bricks, arm in arm with her famous friends. Dorothy facing off with the Wicked Witch of the West. They all went on like that. The last panel showed Dorothy kneeling, as a girl I recognized as Ozma placed a crown on her head.

But where was the one that explained what happened after that?

“Don’t speak until spoken to,” the Tin Woodman was saying brusquely, and I realized that he was talking to me. “And don’t look Her Highness directly in the eye.”

I felt nauseous. He had just killed my friend, and now he was giving me an etiquette lesson.

I had never seen anyone die before. I’d thought it would leave me scared, but now all I wanted to do was fight. More than anything I wished to put my fist through the Tin Woodman’s face. Or worse.

But I was no match for him, let alone him and his whole death squad. If I tried to lift a finger against any of them, I knew that the last thing I would see was one of Dorothy’s sick, sad, phony rainbows. It wasn’t worth it.

The Tin Woodman either didn’t notice my anger or didn’t care. He was too busy lecturing me: “And for heaven’s sake, stand up straight. The princess deserves respect.” With that, he overcorrected his own already perfect posture and frowned at something on his metallic arm.

It was bubble splatter. Indigo splatter. I swallowed hard, fighting my gag reflex as he used a little blade from his Swiss Army fingertip to scrape it away with a look of private satisfaction.

Just then, a flourish of trumpets began to play out of nowhere. The Tin Woodman and his men bowed down awkwardly—all except the one on wheels who just bowed his head. Their metal limbs creaked as they kneeled. I rushed to kneel along with them. I kept my eyes trained steadily on the ground.

With a few clicks, her shoes appeared right under my nose.

They were bright-red high heels, at least six inches tall and made from the shiniest leather I’d ever seen. Or maybe they weren’t
shiny
, exactly. They didn’t reflect the light as much as they seemed to shine from within.

I heard a thumping sound beside me. It was coming from the metal shell that was the Tin Woodman.

“Well, look who we have here,” a sharp voice said. “Go ahead. Stand up.”

I took a breath and rose slowly to my feet to face the owner of the shoes. She was both exactly and nothing like I could have imagined.

This was not the same girl I’d read about. She was wearing the dress, but it wasn’t
the
dress exactly—it was as if someone had cut her familiar blue-checked jumper into a million little pieces and then put it back together again, only better. Better and, okay, a little bit more revealing. Actually, more than a little bit. Not that I was judging.

Instead of farm-girl cotton it was silk and chiffon. The cut was somewhere between haute couture and French hooker. The bodice nipped, tucked, and lifted. There was cleavage.

Lots of cleavage.

Dorothy’s boobs were out to
here
, her legs up to
there
. Her face was smooth and unblemished and perfect: her mouth shellacked in plasticky crimson, her eyes impeccably lined in silver and gold. Her eyelashes were so long and full that they probably created a breeze when she blinked. It was hard to tell how old she was. She looked like she could have been my age or years older. She looked immortal.

She had her hair pulled into two deep chestnut waves that cascaded down her shoulders, each one tied with red ribbon. Her piercing blue eyes were trained right on me. I knew I was supposed to look down, like the Tin Woodman had instructed. Instead, I found myself falling into her gaze. I couldn’t help it.

Her eyes didn’t look evil. They looked curious and almost kind. Like she was just trying to figure me out. She was so pretty that it was hard to imagine she was responsible for Indigo’s death or any of the other atrocities I’d been told were her fault.

As we stood there, face-to-face, the Tin Woodman creaked back up from his bow and began to speak.

“In the name of Ozma of Oz,” he said. “By order of Princess Dorothy, I, the Tin Woodman of Oz, Grand Inquisitor of the Emerald Police, present—”

Without looking away from me, Dorothy flicked a flawlessly manicured hand at him and he shut right up. She cut him off in a bored voice. “Let me get a look at her. What is your name?”

“Amy Gumm.” My voice came out louder than I had expected. It sounded like it belonged to someone else.

I tried to inhale as shallowly as possible as she walked in a slow circle around me, the heels of her shoes
clack-clack-clacking
against the green marble floor.

As she examined me, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that while I’d been focused on Dorothy, two more people had entered the room.

I knew them both instantly. In one of the thrones—the larger one—sat the girl I recognized from the hologram—or whatever it was—back on the road. It was Ozma, looking dazed and vacant. Her eyes were open but no one was home. I wondered if this was really her or if she was just another illusion.

At Ozma’s side stood a tall thin man dressed in a baby-blue, one-size-too-small suit. Beneath a small hat, bits of straw and yarn stuck out in every direction. His face was a skein of tightly pulled burlap with two unnervingly lifelike buttons sewn on in place of eyes. His lips were thin lines of embroidery stitched in pinkish-brown yarn underneath a painted on red triangle for a nose. His buttons were fixed right on me.

A chill shot through my body. It was the Scarecrow. Like the Tin Woodman, he had been twisted and warped into something I hardly recognized.

“Now, Amy,” Dorothy was saying. “This is very, very important—and I need you to be completely honest with me.” She casually began to amble over to the empty throne next to Ozma’s, where she sat, tossed her head, and crossed her legs.

If I hadn’t read the story, I wouldn’t believe that she had ever lived on a farm. She had shed that girl long ago and replaced it with a poised, haughty princess. Her neck stretched upward as if she were searching for the perfect light. Her voice was perky, but there was a threat lurking somewhere in there, too.

I steeled myself for whatever she was going to ask, getting the distinct impression that she would be able to see through any lie.

“What do you think of my hair?” she demanded. She ran a long red nail through one of her curls.

She had to be kidding.

“Well?” she asked.

She wasn’t kidding. My life was about to be judged by how sincerely I delivered a trivial compliment.

Luckily, I had a lot of practice with humoring popular girls. Madison Pendleton had taught me well.

“It’s
so
pretty,” I said sweetly. “And so
shiny
!” I added for good measure when she looked unconvinced.

Dorothy smiled and clapped her hands together and leaned over to Ozma with an expression of deep confidentiality. “Ozma likes my hair, too,” she said in a stage whisper. Ozma just stared straight ahead with an unchanging expression.

Feeling like I was on a roll, I decided to keep going. Maybe flattery would get me somewhere—for instance,
the hell out of here.
“I’ve read tons about you. I saw the movie like a million times.”

Dorothy beamed. “Really? What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know,” I replied shakily. “You’re, like, an icon where I come from.”

Suddenly she narrowed her eyes at me. “And where, exactly, is that?” she asked.

“Kansas,” I said. “The United States.”

Her face instantly darkened. “Kansas,” she said slowly. “You’re from Kansas.”

“You’ve heard of it?” I asked, a hint of unwise sarcasm creeping into my voice. I knew it was the wrong thing to say, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my greatest weakness: I never can.

“And how did you
get
here from Kansas, Miss Gumm?” she said sharply.

“Well . . .”

She arched an overplucked eyebrow and cocked her head, waiting for my answer. In my pocket, I felt Star wriggling, and I squeezed her tightly, hoping that she would get the message to calm down. I had a pretty good feeling the princess wouldn’t take kindly to the fact that I had brought a rodent into her royal court.

Star cooled it, thank goodness, but she had momentarily distracted me and now Dorothy was waiting for her answer. She cleared her throat testily. “What
brought
you here, Miss Gumm. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

I knew I should have made up a lie. But what was the point now? I had a feeling they knew more about me than they were letting on anyway. It was probably the only reason I was alive and Indigo wasn’t.

“A tornado,” I said, mustering a smile.

The hairs on the back of my neck were standing at attention. Inside the pocket of my hoodie, I felt Star quivering. I was pretty sure they didn’t know about
her
at least.

“Why you little . . .
liar
,” Dorothy spat. “How dare you!”

I opened my mouth to lie—an actual lie this time. To say that no, I hadn’t come from Kansas at all.

It was too late. Dorothy’s face was burning with aggrieved rage. “I am the only one. There can only
be
one.”

My gut twisted. I understood. We had the same story. It was like we were wearing the same dress to the prom. Only it wasn’t a party. Dorothy thought her landing here was fate—that it made her special. Another girl from Kansas meant that it was just a regular occurrence and that she wasn’t special at all. Or—worse—that I was here to take her place.

I did my best to scramble, trying not to trip over my words. “Your Highness, I’m just a regular girl from Kansas. I’m
nothing
like you. You’re a princess. Look at you. Me, I’m not interested in that. I just want to be myself—I’d never want anything that you have.”

I was only trying to placate her, but as I spoke the words I realized they were true. I didn’t want anything Dorothy had. I didn’t want to be anything like her.

Dorothy hooted in derision. “More lies! If you come from where I come from, all you
do
is want. And if you had even the smallest taste of what I have, you would never stop wanting.”

She tapped the tip of one of her shoes as if to illustrate her point. “There can only be one,” she repeated through gritted teeth.

Dorothy rose to her feet. Her face was pinched with barely suppressed fury. “Take her away,” she said.

The Scarecrow turned to her. “Your Highness,” he said in a calm, soothing voice. “Maybe we should let the Tin Woodman review the charges against her first?”

The Tin Woodman pulled out his stupid piece of paper and cleared his throat to read aloud. But Dorothy wasn’t having it.

“Take her
away
!”
Her scream reverberated up through the room, ringing in my ears. Her face had turned a deep red, and her fists were clenched so tight at her sides that they were vibrating.

My legs buckled inward. I felt like I was watching the whole scene unfold from somewhere far away. From my new, distant vantage, I searched myself, looking for any shred of the strength and anger and stubbornness that had always served me so well. For any secret weapon buried deep within that could help me out of this.

I found nothing. I collapsed to my knees, shaking.

No one else in the room even flinched. “Amy Gumm of Kansas,” the Tin Woodman said calmly, “you will be tried for your crimes of treason one week from today. . . .”

For the first time, Ozma acted on her own accord, letting out a high, lilting giggle. Dorothy’s eyes were still drilling through me.

“If found guilty,” the Tin Woodman said, “you will be sentenced to a Fate Worse Than Death.”

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.