The Wicked Will Rise

FIFTEEN


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.”