Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection: No Place Like Oz, Dorothy Must Die, The Witch Must Burn, The Wizard Returns, The Wicked Will Rise (39 page)

“Oz has been through many changes,” she went on. “Oh, people talk about the
real
Oz, but I don’t even know what they mean by that. Oz has rarely stayed the same for long. That’s the magic, of course. Always changing.”

We were climbing the stairs now. Jellia’s smile was different from her usual phony mannequin-grin. It was sad and faraway.

“I have some fairy blood, too, you know,” she said. By now I wasn’t even sure if she was talking to me or talking to herself. “Not anywhere near as much as Ozma, of course. Not enough to make much of a difference. But enough to know that things could have been different.”

Finally, we were at my room. I looked over at Jellia questioningly. Why had she brought me here?

“I want you to be sure that your room is tidy,” she explained. There was no hint in her voice that anything was out of the ordinary. “They’ll be searching all of them, of course, and I know that you can be sloppy from time to time. I wouldn’t want them to find it out of order. It would reflect badly on me.”

She stared at me meaningfully. This was a warning. I don’t know how much Jellia knew, but she’d brought me here, taken me away from my chores so that I could make sure everything was in order. So that I wouldn’t get busted.

“Jellia, I—”

She held up her hand. “I’ll expect you in the kitchen for dishes shortly.”

Without another word, she walked away. But when I opened the door and stepped inside, I realized I was too late. Everything was out of place. The sheets had been stripped. The mattress had been cut down the center, feathers spilling everywhere.

When I saw the open drawers, overturned on the floor, I felt like I was going to throw up.

Star was gone.

Outside the window, the sky turned from blue to purple to black. Even though it was barely after breakfast, Dorothy had turned the clock.

I couldn’t bring myself to care. Star was gone. My room had been ransacked. I was sure they knew about me—about who I really was. The Tin Woodman already seemed suspicious of me. They’d put it all together.

I had to get out of here.

I turned to face the mirror, which was basically the only thing in the room that had been left undisturbed. Could it be the way out, too?

I ran my fingers over the smooth, reflective surface, hoping some kind of answer would reveal itself. “Nox,” I said, knowing in my heart that it was useless. “Please help me. Tell me what to do. I need you.”

I thought I saw my image ripple, just barely, like when you drop a penny in a pool, and a quick surge of hope rushed through me. But the mirror remained unchanged. Any movement I’d seen had just been my imagination.

I looked at my face, the face that wasn’t really my own, and tried to remember what I really looked like. For some reason, it made me wonder what my mother was doing. I wondered how much time had passed since I’d left—I knew that time didn’t work the same here as it did back home. Was she an old woman now? Had she found a new life without me? Or maybe a hundred years had passed back in Kansas and she was now long dead. I shivered.

Suddenly I found myself longing for my real face. I thought about taking out the knife and cutting myself to reverse the spell, just to get a glimpse of the girl I had been. If I was going to be captured, or have to fight my way out, I decided I would do it as Amy.

The blade came to me eagerly. It glinted in the mirror.

I was just about to slice my palm open when I heard something behind me. First a rustle, then a squeak. I spun around to see Star emerging from a crevice between the floorboards and the wall, a tiny little space I had never noticed before.

“Star!” I cried. “Where the hell were you? Where did you come from?” I was so overjoyed to see her that I didn’t even care that I was talking to a rat that had no way of answering any of my questions. She must have escaped somehow. That’s one good thing you can say about rodents: they know how to make a quick getaway. I just hoped she’d done it
before
they’d searched my dresser. Somehow I didn’t think Dorothy would take kindly to a maid harboring a rat in her room.

I knelt down to pick her up, but she darted away from me.

“Star?” I stood back up and watched her closely. Something was up—she was frantically running around in a circle like she was trying to get my attention.

“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked.

As if she understood what I was asking, she scurried over to the door and began scratching at it.

She wanted me to follow.

“Are you serious? Now?”

It was a bad idea. Worse than bad. Colossally bad. The Tin Woodman was tearing the rooms apart one by one, the whole palace was in chaos over the missing monkey, and I wasn’t sure whether or not I was a suspect. Plus, Jellia had already covered for me once this morning, and I still wasn’t sure exactly what
that
was all about. The safest course of action, for now, was to keep my head down and be ready to run.

Or ready to fight.

“Star . . . ,” I said.

She squeaked. She’d never behaved like this before. It was a far cry from her lethargic Dusty Acres days, usually spent napping in her exercise ball. Maybe there was some natural phenomena in Oz that made animals smarter. I mean, the monkeys talk after all.

I sighed. They
do
say rats are extremely intelligent. If she wanted me to follow, I would follow.

As soon as I opened the door, Star raced out without hesitation. I chased after her. I guess if anyone caught me, I could tell them I was trying to strangle the rat on Dorothy’s behalf.

I was nervous, still unsure what exactly was going on. But Star wasn’t. Star moved quickly and hugged the side of the hall as if she knew that she was supposed to be inconspicuous—as if she knew exactly where she was going, exactly what she was doing.

After a couple of turns, past rooms where other maids were too busy diligently cleaning to notice us, Star came to an unexpected stop, right in front of a life-size statue of Dorothy. I’d probably dusted this a few times—there were others like it scattered all over the palace. In this one, Dorothy peered hopefully toward the horizon (the wall), while clutching a picnic basket, Toto’s scruffy head poking out of it. This version of Dorothy reminded me of the sweet, innocent one I was familiar with, the way most people back home thought of her: sweet and smiling, her hair pulled into two plaits. Too bad she was fictional. I looked at the statue. I looked down at Star. She was twitching in expectation.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Now what?”

Star rolled over onto her back, then back to her feet, and looked up at me.

I didn’t understand rat sign language, but I knew she was trying to show me something. I looked at the statue again. I thought about all those movies where a statue conceals a hidden door and almost laughed, looking down at Star.

“Is this when I, like, lean on the statue and fall through a trapdoor?” I poked stone Dorothy in the eye for emphasis, and nothing happened.

In response, Star started running around in a circle, chasing her tail.

“Star, I don’t have time for this,” I said. “Things are already screwed up and why am I talking to you, you’re a rat.”

Star stopped chasing her tail and looked at me, lifting one of her front legs off the ground. It was like she wanted to shake hands.

Rolling over. Chasing her tail. Shaking hands. These were dog tricks.

I looked back at the statue. Toto’s front paw was sticking out of the basket. I looked dubiously back at Star, who squeaked. Feeling a little dumb for humoring my pet rat, I shook Toto’s paw.

It moved under my hand like a lever. Something inside the statue clicked, and then an almost imperceptible ripple went through the marble, like the shimmer of heat coming off a sidewalk in the summer.

Star squeaked and raced up to the statue’s base, running right through it, almost like the statue was a hologram. Tentatively, I reached out and touched what seconds ago had been cold, solid marble. Although it looked no different to the naked eye, now my hand passed right through it.

I glanced down the hallway in either direction. The coast was still clear.

Well, I’d followed Star this far.

I took a deep breath, fighting back the instinct that said I was about to smash my face against a rock, and walked through Dorothy’s statue.

I found myself on a stone staircase lit by glowing, shimmering orbs of energy that lined the cracked, ancient walls. I glanced over my shoulder and for a moment I could see the back of the Dorothy statue, but then it faded into solid rock. In front of me was a staircase that led nowhere but down. Great.

I heard Star chittering up ahead, so I pressed on. The ceiling above the staircase was so low and cramped that I had to duck my head to walk down it.
Probably built for Munchkins,
I thought.

I caught up with Star at the bottom. The ceiling opened up down here, the same orbs from the staircase illuminating an ancient chamber with a dirt floor. Dust tickled my nostrils. It didn’t seem like anyone had been down here for a long time. I wondered if this was like one of the tunnels Ollie and Maude had disappeared into last night.

“What did you get me into?” I muttered to Star.

We followed the tunnel, the only sounds my soft footfalls and Star’s clicking nails. I glanced over my shoulder once and watched as my footprints quickly filled back in, like some invisible force was making sure to erase all trace of my passing. I started walking a lot faster after that. I had the constant sense that something might start chasing me at any moment.

After only a few minutes, the tunnel came to an abrupt dead end. I looked back again and couldn’t see the staircase we’d come from, even though it didn’t seem like we’d gone that far. Instead, the tunnel stretched on forever behind me. Something told me there was no going back.

A ladder was built into the wall in front of me. It was wooden and rickety and led up through a narrow hole in the ceiling. I tested it, rattling it hesitantly to be sure it would support my weight.

It shook, but it didn’t give way. So I put Star in my pocket and began to climb, not knowing where it would lead me. It was a tight squeeze; like the staircase, this tunnel was basically Munchkin-size. I’d never been claustrophobic before, but I was still supremely relieved to see a square of light overhead.

At the top of the ladder, I reached up and lifted a square door. I opened it slowly, peeking out, not sure where I’d be popping up. From above, dirt shook loose into my face.

It was a flap carved into the grass, just like the one Ollie had used the night before. Except this one appeared to lead into a bunch of shrubs. Well, at least no one would be able to see me emerging from the earth.

I crawled and clawed my way up and out, through leaves and thorns and branches. When I was finally able to stand, I looked around, pulled a bunch of leaves from my hair, dusted myself off, and found that I was in the palace’s sculpture garden, a place I’d seen in the distance, out the window, but had never been in before. It wasn’t that far from the greenhouse, and I was a little nervous to be in the proximity of the Scarecrow’s lab again so soon, but no one was around. The search for Maude must have gone to the other side of the palace—to the Royal Gardens—where they’d probably discovered her mutilated wings by now.

The sculpture garden had always looked green and peaceful from a distance. Up close, it was nothing like that at all. Giant topiaries trimmed into the figures of Oz luminaries—the Lion, the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow and Glinda, as well as others that I didn’t recognize—all towered over my head, all of them dark and shadowy in the moonlight as they stared creepily down at me.

Life-size stone statues were mixed in among them. They were made from a flaky, brittle shale; all of them with eyes that seemed strangely lifelike, as if they were watching me sneak through their ranks. I pushed down the sudden desire to draw my dagger.

The statues were carefully arranged along a spiraling stone path through the hedges. They appeared to represent every race and creature in Oz—humans, Munchkins, Quadlings—and also stranger humanoids like an armless brute with a hammer-shaped head, and a gang of sprite-size people with horns sticking out of their foreheads.

As I moved quickly down the path, Star wriggled in my pocket. I reached down for her, but she squirmed free of my hand and jumped onto the stone path. She darted on ahead: this wild-goose chase wasn’t over. This time, I didn’t question it. Clearly, she had a destination in mind.

So I followed her as she scurried along, trying not to look at the gruesome faces of the statues staring at me until we reached the entrance to the hedge maze.

There I stopped short. This was one place I
didn’t
want to go. While the sculpture garden had always looked like a peaceful retreat from the vantage point of the palace windows, the hedge maze, on the other hand—even from a distance—had
always
given me the creeps.

I don’t know why. Maybe it was just the way it exuded magic; the way it seemed to change and rearrange itself every time you looked away from it. Even in the dark, the leaves of the hedges were Technicolor-green, so saturated that the color almost bled into the atmosphere.