The Wicked Will Rise

SIXTEEN


I jumped to my feet and flung myself into Nox’s arms, practically knocking him over in the process.

If it had been a movie, the camera would have rotated around us as the orchestra swelled and Nox swept me up in his arms. Young lovers, reunited at last, happily ever after—you know the drill. If it were a movie, the strings would have come in at the very moment that our lips met in a passionate, do-or-die kiss.

But it wasn’t a movie. Instead, we held each other for a few seconds before awkwardly breaking apart and standing there, not quite looking at each other.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” Nox replied.

“So,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

Seeing him again, just when I least expected it, I was reminded of how little I knew him. We had fought against each other, and fought at each other’s sides. When he was gone, I missed him—I knew that much—but did it actually mean anything?

“So,” Nox said. “I guess we have a lot to talk about.”

“I guess so,” I mumbled. “So where do we start?”

Nox ran a hand through his hair. He looked up at the sky, where the sun was setting again. “Look,” he said. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been stuck here. Long enough to think about some stuff. And . . .”

He clenched his eyes shut, like he was in pain. “Oh, screw it,” he muttered to himself.

So here’s where the strings come in. And, more importantly, the kiss. It wasn’t a kiss from a movie. It was just a kiss: sloppy and grateful and a little awkward, as we found our footing and tried to figure out exactly how we were supposed to fit together and then settled into something that was both new and familiar at the same time.

When it was over, the credits didn’t roll. There definitely was no happily ever after. But I felt happy anyway.

We both stood there looking at each other like, what was that?, neither of us with any idea what we were supposed to say.

Then every question I had came spilling out in one breath. “How’d you get here?” I asked. “Do you know where Glamora is? Are you okay? Did you take that stupid boat, too?”

Nox tried to speak over me, answering my questions and asking his own, but I didn’t leave him any room. It was too much of a relief just to get to talk to him. After all this time. I would shut up when I was ready.

“What about the fog?” I asked. “What did you see in there?”

Nox shook his head blankly. He didn’t know what I was talking about. “Fog?”

“Didn’t you come through the Fog of Doubt?” I asked. “To get here, I mean.”

“I don’t actually know how I got here. I just kind of, uh, showed up,” he said. “One minute Mombi was teleporting us out of the Emerald City, the next minute things got all screwed up. And then I was here. Guess I got lost.”

“It sort of makes sense,” I said, rolling it over in my head. “I mean, kinda. How long have you been here?”

“No idea. Days at least. Weeks? Who knows. Time’s even screwier than normal here, I think.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing, really. Just sifting through all this stuff, hoping I’d find something useful. Mostly I was just trying not to go crazy. I probably would have, if I hadn’t known you would show up eventually.”

“Wait. How did you know I was coming? Even I didn’t know I was coming.”

“I just had a feeling telling me I should sit tight. That you were on the way.” He wiggled his fingers and made a spooky warbling sound. “I’m psychic, I guess.”

“Ha,” I said, giving him a funny look.

He gave me the exact same look right back. “No, really. I am a little psychic. You knew that, right?”

“Somehow I missed it.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“You’re serious?” I said.

“Oh. It’s really no big thing. The sixth sense comes in handy in fights, so I can figure out my opponent’s next move. Basically when my gut talks, I listen. It’s just that my gut has a lot to say. Been that way since I was a little kid. Since before I even learned magic. What, you think Mombi rescued me out of the kindness of her heart?”

“Kinda, yeah,” I said. “I guess that is what I thought.”

“Nah. I mean, she probably would have rescued me anyway, but I doubt she would have taken me under her wing the way she did. Mombi only does that when she thinks someone might be useful. Anyway, I’m half-kidding. I mean, I am a little psychic, sometimes, but I don’t think that’s how I knew you were coming. I think I just . . .” He paused. “I mean, I guess it was less like I knew you were coming and more like, I had to hope for something. Otherwise I really would have lost my mind. I’m serious.”

“Oh,” I said, taken aback. I was flattered, yes, but this was way more sincerity than I was used to from him. It was more talking than I was used to from him too. The Nox I knew wasn’t exactly what you would call an open book. He was more like a tightly locked safe.

“Sorry,” he said. “Forget it. And forget the questions, too. I don’t have any of the answers. I’ve been stuck on this island. You’re the one who’s been out in the world. Tell me what I’ve been missing.”

So I took a deep breath and then started at the beginning. Nox listened in rapt fascination.

Then he went in a direction I hadn’t expected. “You met a Magril, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“No reason,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve never heard of anyone actually seeing one before. The Magril’s more like a legend or something. I didn’t even know they were real.”

I let out a little laugh. “Come on. This is Oz. Witches are real. Fairies are real. Everything’s real here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Everything except the Magril. That’s why it’s kind of strange that you saw one. That you talked to it. Especially since . . .”

He trailed off, but I knew what he was talking about, and I pulled my knife down from the air and held it in my open palm so that we could both look at it. On the hilt, just as Nox had carved it, was the very same bird I had encountered.

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Means something,” he said. “But anyway. What happened next?”

“Oh,” I said, realizing that there were some parts of the story I wanted to keep to myself. “You know. Fog. Doubt. A really dumb boat. Then I was here.”

Nox raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t press any further. “So here we are,” he said. “I guess it would have been too easy for you to show up and tell me that Dorothy was dead, the kingdom was restored, and all wrongs had been reversed, huh?”

I gave him an in your dreams look. “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe you did go crazy out here.”

“Maybe,” he said. Then something struck him. “Hey,” he said with a touch of excitement in his voice. “I want to show you something.”

I nodded, figuring that it would be something useful. Something to lead us where we were going. Instead, Nox pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, carefully smoothing the creases.

“I searched this island up and down. Didn’t find anything. Except this.” He handed me the paper with a cockeyed expression that was both proud and bashful.

It was a photograph. In it, a chubby kid—really just a baby—sat wedged between two handsome grown-ups. On the left, the man was stern-mouthed, but his eyes were twinkling like he was laughing inwardly at a secret joke. The woman, on the right, was beautiful, but with a certain goofiness to her, which was accentuated by the fact that her hair, like Nox’s, was so wild that it looked like she’d just stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Meanwhile, the kid looked like he would never in his life be able to take anything in the world seriously. His face was all scrunched up like he couldn’t stop laughing long enough for the shutter to snap. If it weren’t for the full head of hair so black that it was almost purple, I would never have guessed.

“It’s you,” I said.

Nox nodded, blushing furiously. I didn’t think I had ever seen Nox blush before. It was basically adorable.

“Are those your parents?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t even really remember what they looked like, until I found it. It must have gotten lost when our village got ransacked.”

I looked at the picture again, this time trying to imagine another life for Nox. In the picture, he was just a little kid who couldn’t stop laughing, who had two parents who loved him, and all the opportunity in the world to look forward to. It broke my heart, a little bit, to see him like this, knowing what was in store for him—knowing how the picture would have been different if it had been taken just a few years later.

I wondered who he would have become if Dorothy had never come back to Oz. If his parents hadn’t been murdered when Dorothy’s soldiers had raided his village, if he hadn’t had to be rescued by Mombi and raised to fight, if he’d been able to make his own choices about what he wanted for his life, rather than having them all made for him.

“Things should have been different for you,” I said quietly. I wasn’t sure he would know what I meant, but he did.

“We’re the same like that,” he said. “Aren’t we?”

I had never thought of it that way, but I realized that he was right, sort of. I hadn’t grown up in Oz or had my life ripped apart by a monster like Dorothy Gale, but it’s not like things had gone the way they could have for me either.

Once upon a time, my mother, my father, and I had all lived together in a house that was full of sunlight. On Sunday mornings, I would wake up to the smell of pancakes and bacon and the country station turned up loud to George and Tammy singing a duet, and even when things hadn’t been completely perfect, it had always felt a little bit like the world was just waiting for me to step out into it.

That was before my dad lost his job, before he’d left, before we’d lost the house. It was before my mom’s accident, and the drugs that took her away, too. Before the tornado that brought me to Oz, whether I wanted it to or not.

If those things hadn’t happened, would I have grown up into someone happier and easier, with a smile, someone who could just laugh things off? Someone prettier, more popular, someone who didn’t always feel a little uncomfortable in my own skin?

Would I still have had this angry thing always coiled up inside of me like a rattlesnake itching to strike?

I looked at Nox.

“Sometimes I wish things had been easier for me,” I said. “But in the weirdest way, I’m kind of glad for it, too. Because I don’t think I would have wanted to be anything else.”

“I know,” he said. “Same.” We didn’t have to say anything else. He put a hand on mine and let it rest there for a while.

In its own way, I realized, the island was beautiful. Like us.

It was messed up to think it, but it felt like everything—for now at least—was perfect.

“Do you think Glamora’s somewhere on the island, too?” I wondered aloud.

“Not likely,” Nox said. “I’ve pretty much covered the whole place. There’s no one here. The city is just past the trees. It’s unbelievable; I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I saw the skyscrapers from the water,” I said. “I didn’t realize there was a whole city though. I wonder how it got here. You don’t think there’s anyone hiding out in there?”

“I guess you never know, but if there is, they’re hiding pretty good. Anyway, Glamora’s got to be okay. She’s second to Mombi when it comes to sorcery. Sometimes first. I’m sure she found her way out of the in-between just fine. She’s probably biding her time, resting up until she gets her power back. Like Mombi.”

I hoped he was right.

“So what do you think we do next?” I wondered, casting my eyes across the terrain, trying to see where Ozma had gone. She was still digging through the piles of lost objects, but she was doing it aimlessly, like she had lost whatever trail she’d been following all this time.

“Well,” he said, “we should probably find Polychrome, right? If that’s what Mombi Dearest says.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I guess so. Ozma should be leading us, but ever since we got in that boat, it’s like her radar’s been jammed. Something about this place is messing with her, I guess.”

“Or maybe she wasn’t bringing you to Polychrome at all,” he said. “Maybe she’s not as suggestible as Mombi thinks.”

We sat there for a minute quietly. When I looked at him, I realized he was looking at me in this intense, serious way.

“What?” I asked.

Instead of answering me, he touched my cheek softly.

“We can change things,” he said. “Forget Mombi, forget Glamora, forget the Order. We don’t need to do it for anyone else. Let’s just do it for us.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant, and then I did. He meant that we had both been through some terrible shit, but that the credits weren’t rolling yet. There was still time for us to write ourselves a happy ending.

He leaned toward me, and I leaned in to meet him halfway.

This kiss was different than the first one. It was slower, and longer, and still awkward, but in a different way. It was a kiss that felt right.