The Wicked Will Rise (14 page)

“Shut up!” I screamed, dropping Ozma's hand to cover my ears and stopping in my tracks. “Just leave me alone! You're lying!”

I'd yelled it so loudly that my throat was sore, but I barely heard myself—my screams were lost in the nothingness. Meanwhile, the other voices just got louder, now an indistinguishable chorus that shook my skull.

Selfish bitch. Loser. Damaged goods. Even when you win, you lose.

No one wants to come to your birthday party. Boyfriend? Who could ever love you? Who could
you
ever love?

All you know how to do is kill. And you couldn't even kill her. You failed. Again. Just like you'll fail next time.

You're weak. You don't belong here, and you don't belong there.

My heart was racing; my breathing was shallow. I sank to my knees and took deep breaths, squeezing my eyes shut tight as I bit my lip, trying to hold back my rage and despair. I tasted blood.

It's not real. It's not real.
I kept repeating that to myself.

It wasn't. And the voices were wrong. Even if some of the things they were saying might have been true, they were still wrong.

Because I didn't care what Madison Pendleton thought of me.

Because I knew what I had done for my mother—all the sacrifices that I had made for her, and that she had left
me
, not the other way around.

Because my father was no kind of father at all.

“Who are you?” Ozma had asked, just before we'd entered the fog. I had ignored the question, but now I knew that she had been trying to help me. It didn't matter what Nox thought of me, or didn't think of me. All that mattered was that I knew who I was.

And I did. For all the ways I had changed since I'd come to Oz, I was still the same person I'd been back in Kansas. Yes I might have been quiet and shy, the kind of person who did my best to keep my head down just to get through the day. But even
then, I had never let people walk all over me. Even in the days when I didn't know a left hook from a karate kick, I'd still always found my own ways of fighting for the things I believed in.

I had never been selfish or disloyal: I'd spent more time thinking about my mother than about myself, I'd put myself in the line of Madison Pendleton's fire more times than I could count, because I saw her picking on someone even weaker than I was. I'd never given up, even when it might have been the smartest thing to do.

Oz hadn't changed any of that. It had just made me stronger. Now I had the power to win any fight I took on. I had a knife that could cut through anything, if I wanted it to. And I knew it.

Slowly, I opened my eyes. The clouds around me seemed to have lifted a little bit. And I couldn't be sure that it wasn't my imagination, but I knew that in a place like this, imagination and reality were pretty much the same thing.

Even without Ozma's hand in mine, and even without seeing her, I knew that she was next to me. I knew that she, in her stupid, nonsense way, was the one who had helped me through this. What had the Fog of Doubt showed
her
?

“Who's next?” I shouted to the nothingness. “Any more ghosts out there?”

When I got my answer, I kind of wished I'd kept the question to myself. The fog had saved its biggest gun for last: Dorothy.

And not just her voice. She was there in the flesh, hovering a few feet above the road, right in the middle of my path, haughty and imperious, her red shoes crackling with magic.

At first, she didn't seem to notice me, but when she did, her face softened into a disarmingly kind expression that bordered on sympathy. Instead of screaming or insulting me or telling me what a loser I was, she smiled.

“I knew you'd be here before long,” she said. “The Scarecrow didn't believe me, but I told him you were too smart to listen to the Fantasms. They're liars. Figments. I know you better than they do, that's for sure. You and I are alike, you know.”

“Yeah, people keep saying that,” I said.

I moved toward her slowly, not sure what I was supposed to do next. She wasn't any different from the rest of them, except that I could see her. But if she was a figment of my imagination, would she go away if I ignored her or did I still have to fight her?

She
was
a figment of my imagination, right?

Dorothy shrugged. “Aw, c'mon,” she said. “Don't make it like that. We're two of a kind. Two good old farm girls a long way from home. We could practically be sisters.”

“First off,” I said, still advancing on my probably imaginary enemy, “all I know about farms is that they stink when you pass them on the highway. Second, I don't have a sister. If I did, and she was anything like you, I would have drowned her before she'd learned to walk.”

“Back home, they call that kind of spirit
gumption
,” she said, curling a beckoning, red-nailed fingertip in my direction. “And I like a girl with gumption. I
am
a girl with gumption, after all. Join me. It's lonely at the top, you know? Plus, ruling this place is a lot of work. Between the two of us, though, we could really
turn this dump upside down. Make it a place actually worth living in, and have some fun in the meantime.”

I shot off a fireball, aiming for the center of her chest. It went right through her, just as I'd known it would, but at least it had been enough to annoy her: Dorothy's smile curdled.

“Fine,” she said sourly. “I didn't really expect anything different. Hoped, maybe. Go ahead, keep on fighting, if that's what you want. Like it even makes a difference? If you think you're really doing any good, think again. You're just winging it anyway, aren't you? You have no idea what you're doing unless someone else is telling you to do it. Guess what, none of the witches you let boss you around know shit either. Every brilliant move you make just makes me stronger.”

“Oh yeah? Maybe we should test that,” I said, faking confidence.

“You know why? Because you'll never kill me, and the harder you try, the closer you get to becoming just
like
me. Pretty soon, you'll be knocking on my door, just begging for me to clear off a throne for you. You know I'm right. I can see it in your face.”

Claim yourself,
the Magril had said. I suddenly understood. Dorothy and Glinda both thought they had my number. They both thought I was what Dorothy herself had been: a good little girl from the prairie who hadn't meant any of it, who had never
dreamed
that she would turn out evil but just needed a little help—a little temptation, a few empty promises—to get there.

“Maybe you're right,” I said. “Everyone else seems to think so. But there's one important difference between us.”

“What's that?” Dorothy asked sweetly.

“I know who I am,” I said. I thought I'd said it quietly, but when the words came out they weren't quiet at all. They reverberated like I was whispering into a microphone.

Dorothy took a step backward.

I felt my knife itching to come to me, but I willed it away, just to prove a point to myself: that I didn't need it. It was just a knife. It had a few magical bells and whistles, sure, not to mention a really nice hand-carved Magril on its hilt, but I wasn't powerful because of the knife. The knife was powerful because of me.

So instead of summoning it, I just summoned myself. I thought of every doubt I'd ever had, of every time I'd had to eat the crap sandwich that my mother, and Madison Pendleton, and Dorothy had served me. Those days were gone.

“I. Know. Who. I. AM,” I said again, more confidently this time with each word bringing forth every bit of the power, the rage, and—yeah—the
wickedness
, that had been building inside of me since I was just a little girl. “And I'm willing to fight for it.”

My hands began to vibrate, and I clenched them into fists, then thrust them forward and brought them together with a thunderclap as a bolt of black lightning came down from the sky, cutting through the fog.

Everything went dark, and then slowly, the darkness lifted. The fog was gone, the voices were gone, Dorothy was gone, and I could see again. I had passed the test.

Ozma and I were standing on a narrow, pebbly beach in a basin in the mountains where the road had led us. When I turned
around, I saw the road curving up through a narrow gap in a ridge of rocky peaks so high that I could barely see the tops when I craned my neck. Ahead of us was a vast, glassy lake, and beyond that, on the other side—it was impossible to tell how far away—were more mountains, even taller than the ones we had just come through.

As the road wended down the shore toward the water's edge, it petered out until all that was left of it were a few scattered, moss-covered yellowish bricks. Wedged into the gaps sat a small, wooden canoe so weathered by age and wind and rain that it looked ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. Next to it, staked into the muddy bank, was a hand-lettered sign.

This way to the Island of Lost Things
, it read.

The Island of Lost Things. That sounded at least slightly better than the Fog of Doubt. Actually, it sounded like it had possibilities. I kicked the side of the canoe and found it surprisingly sturdy, and as Ozma and I exchanged a glance, I sensed that we were both wondering the same thing.

If we were headed for the Island of Lost Things, was it to find something that had gone missing, or did it mean we, too, were lost?

No. I felt, for the first time, like I was found.

I rowed until my arms felt like they were about to fall off and then rowed some more while Ozma mostly dozed, every now and then waking up just long enough to look around, see that nothing much had changed, and slide back into a blissed-out nap.

I had started out paddling toward the mountains on the other side of the water, under the assumption if I just kept going in one direction long enough, I'd find the island eventually. But the mountains—which had loomed so huge in the distance from the beach—were now somehow growing smaller as I moved toward them, sinking into the horizon line until they had disappeared.

Even with a paddle, that left me pretty much up a creek. I was sitting in the middle of a smooth, almost motionless plate of water that reflected the sky to the point where it was hard to tell which was which. I couldn't even head back to where I'd started: with nothing in any direction except water, it was impossible to tell where I'd come from.

I felt like I had rowed out to the end of the world and found myself right back at the beginning of it.

The only thing I had to guide me was the sun—not that
it
seemed very trustworthy at the moment either. While the mountains had been busy doing their amazing disappearing act, the sun's movement in the sky had been speeding up, and now it was rising and sinking and rising and sinking over and over, like a time-lapse animation brought to life.

I guess it was possible that someone was going crazy with the Great Clock back in the Emerald City, but somehow I didn't think so. When I was little, and my mom had told me about the International Date Line, I'd imagined it as a real line, painted down the middle of the world, and that if you stood with your feet on either side of it and looked at your watch, it would get so confused that the hands would start spinning around, out of whack. This felt something like that—like we were trapped in a place where time didn't know which way was up anymore.

“I thought
you
were supposed to be the one leading the way,” I snapped at Ozma, who was still oblivious in her slumber, her hand dangling out of the boat, her fingers dragging in the water. “How about waking up and helping me out here?”

She sighed in her sleep and turned the other way.

Out of ideas, I tried casting a pathfinder spell, but when I conjured up the usually trusty ball of energy to guide us, all it did was flutter around in confusion, then sputter out.

I stared out at the water in frustration. “At least it's not telling me what a loser I am,” I mused aloud. Secretly, I kind of wished
it
would
, if only for the change of pace. A few Fantasms might not have been pleasant, but they would have given me someone to talk to other than myself and Sleeping Beauty over here.

The sound of my own voice made me feel giddy to the point of near drunkenness, and I began to giggle. “I guess I should have known that the Island of Lost Things wouldn't be easy to find,” I said. “It would almost be funny, right? I mean, if we weren't so totally, completely,
utterly
lost.”

Then my giggles became hysterical laughter. I wasn't laughing at my joke (which wasn't really a joke even) but from sheer joy. Because at the exact moment that my words escaped my mouth, I saw it: against the hot-pink silver dollar of the plunging sun, a tiny, crescent-shaped sliver of land had made itself suddenly apparent. Roused by my whooping, Ozma yawned, stretched, and rubbed her eyes, sitting up and cracking her neck from one side to the next.

“Finders keepers,” she said groggily.

I was too overjoyed to be annoyed at her nonsense. Now that I had spotted it, I began to paddle again in earnest and the island was approaching rapidly, rising up out of the water like some reverse Atlantis.

It made such perfect sense that I felt stupid for not thinking of it earlier.
Duh
. You couldn't find the Island of Lost Things until you had gotten yourself lost beyond any hope of finding. If I'd given up an hour, or a day ago, it would have appeared that much quicker. So much for
quitters never win.

But the sight of a destination—any destination!—had
energized me, and I pushed myself as hard as I could, gaping when I realized that the island, while small, was actually something like a city, complete with a cluster of tall, boxy, and downright
American-
looking high-rises shooting up into the sky.

As the island grew nearer and nearer, I noticed all sorts of detritus floating in the water. There were old, soggy books, loose papers, pieces of clothing, wooden toys, and other stuff I didn't recognize. Soon, there was so much of it that you couldn't see the water at all.

The boat began to drag, so I jumped overboard, into the muck, and began pulling it, behind me, with Ozma still in it, trying not to think about what I was wading through. Before long, I was crawling ashore onto blessed, wonderful, dry land.

I mean, there must have been land
somewhere
underneath all the junk strewn about. This beach was in serious need of a caretaker, considering that the whole shoreline was heaped with piles upon piles of what appeared to be trash. It struck me that maybe there
wasn't
any land underneath it. Maybe the island was just one big landfill.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that it wasn't exactly trash. Some of it might as well have been, but there seemed to be some kind of method to the way it was organized. There were heaps of old coins and silverware and laundry and magazines as well as other stuff I didn't recognize, all of it piled on top of more piles up and down the coast. The only thing natural that lay in sight was a thin barrier of palm trees that marked the end of the beach. Beyond those, the buildings I'd seen from the water loomed.

By now, Ozma had made it ashore, and she seemed just as intrigued by the island as I was. She looked around, made a beeline for what seemed to me to be a random mound of metallic scraps, and began to dig through it.

After only a few minutes of tossing stuff aside, she came back up, triumphantly holding a golden, jewel-encrusted scepter almost as tall as she was, topped with Oz's insignia. She held it forth, beaming with pride, and banged it against the ground as if to remind me not to forget that she
was
the queen, after all.

I would have been more impressed if I hadn't been distracted by something I'd spotted out of the corner of my eye. Something pastel and Argyle.

I gasped when I got a good look at it. It was a sock. It was
my
sock; the long-lost half of my favorite pair. How had it made it all the way here from Kansas? Had it shaken loose somehow when I'd been carried over in the tornado?

No. I was positive I'd lost it at the laundromat.

Oh, so what. It didn't matter where it had come from. I leaned down and scooped it up. It didn't do me a hell of a lot of good with its unmissing match still safely back in Kansas, but I was glad to see it, if only for the unexpected reminder of home. I held it to my face to find that it was warm from the sun and still smelled like the off-brand fabric softener I used to buy out of an old-fashioned coin-op dispenser.

Ozma was rooting around on the ground like a pig searching out truffles, and I felt a surge of unreasonable glee as I joined her in the hunt for who knows what. Pretty soon, I had unearthed
the final page of my tenth grade state government term paper, which I'd dropped somewhere between arriving at school and getting to class—earning myself a B minus for the quarter in the process—along with an old door key (I knew it was mine because of the battered, plastic SpongeBob key chain), a French textbook I'd had to shell out forty bucks to replace, and, most astonishingly, the beloved silver chain that my grandmother had given me for my tenth birthday just before she'd died. When I'd realized it was missing a few years later, I'd just assumed it was because my mom had pawned it for cash.

I rolled the chain over and over in my hand, admiring it, then hung it carefully around my neck. There was a satisfying click as I locked the clasp, and something about that sound, and the feeling of the metal against my collarbone, gave me a pang of regret.

Things had gotten insane so quickly since I'd arrived in Oz that I'd never really stopped to think about all the things I'd lost in coming here. Not the big things: of course I'd thought about my mother, and I'd even missed my room back in my old trailer every now and then. It was the other stuff that I hadn't thought about that came back to me now. The books I'd loved that I'd never read again—books that had nothing to do with Oz—and my favorite sweater, and the birthday cards from my father that I'd kept saved in a shoebox in the back of my closet.

Even my old self. She had been ordinary, but she had been someone, and now she was gone. I'd never taken the time to say good-bye to her.

I was so caught up in the feeling that I didn't notice at first
that Ozma and I were no longer alone on the beach.

But then I had the sense that I was being watched, and when I looked up and saw the lanky, wild-haired figure who was gazing at me, my heart practically burst open with joy.

This had to have been Pete's doing. When he'd promised to try to help, I hadn't dared to think he would actually be able to make good on it, but apparently I should have given him more credit. He had led me right where I'd asked him to, and done it in what had to be record time.

Standing there, atop a hill of ballpoint pens, looking as beautiful as I'd ever seen him, was Nox.

“I was wondering when you'd make it here,” he said. “I figured it only had to be a matter of time, but damn, you sure know how to keep a guy waiting.”