“Madison doesn’t have any stuff,” Nox said, confused.
“She’s giving us some time alone together,” I said, smiling at him.
Since it might be the last time alone together we ever get, I thought ruefully. But I didn’t truly believe that. I hadn’t come all this way to get killed underground at Dorothy’s stupid wedding. We were all going to make it out alive. I refused to allow anything else.
“Oh,” Nox said, understanding dawning on his face. “Right.”
He took my hand absently, playing with my fingers. Even though our conversation was serious, a thrill ran through me. It was just my luck to find the person of my dreams in a war-torn world where I was in danger of losing him any minute, I thought.
But maybe that was what life was like for everyone. Okay, so people weren’t literally on the verge of being killed all the time back in Kansas, but everyone around you was changing and growing all the time and turning into different people.
When my mom had turned into an addict, she’d completely wiped out the kind, generous, tough single mom who’d defended me against people like Madison. And when Madison had had a kid and lost everything, she’d become a person almost unrecognizable from the queen bitch she’d been before. No, that wasn’t true. She still had her humor. Only now that was on my side instead of working against me.
Nox had changed, but he had only gotten better. He was a good guy with a moral compass that was fixed on North. And now he was my guy, with the same compass, but with a heart that was open to me.
I squeezed my eyes shut again, harder, as if by wishing fiercely enough I could airlift us out of this world and into a safe, secret space of our own, where we could spend all the time we wanted learning everything there was to know each other.
But I knew better. I’d known better all along. Falling in love with Nox hadn’t changed why I’d been brought to Oz, and it didn’t change how much I wanted Oz to be free. And anyway, I knew Nox would never be happy with me if I asked him to choose. Oz was his home. It meant more to him than anything—more to him than I did. I couldn’t fault him for it, and I couldn’t ask him to give up on it, even if I wanted to.
“What are you thinking?” he asked softly.
“Nothing worth talking about,” I said honestly.
“You can tell me anything, Amy.”
“No, really, it’s okay. I just wish I knew everyone else was safe.”
“You know what it’s like over there.” He sighed. “None of us have ever been safe. Not in years, anyway. They’re tough. You saw them defeat Glinda. The Nome King’s been in Ev. I’m sure they’re fine. They’ll still be there when we get home.”
Home. That word again. The word that meant I had to choose—assuming I had the option. Was home here? Back with Lulu and Ozma and Gert and Mombi? Or was it in Kansas with my mom? I couldn’t imagine going back to high school—again—after all of this. The idea was so ridiculous I almost laughed. But there was so much in my own world I hadn’t experienced. I’d never even been outside Kansas.
Well, except to Oz. But Paris sounded pretty good, too. Maybe a nice beach on the Bahamas. Maybe college. I’d killed the Cowardly Lion; admissions essays would be a breeze after that.
There was so much I hadn’t done.
But Nox felt more like home than either Oz or Kansas. And if he was here, would I ever be happy in my own world?
“What do you want?” I asked suddenly, lifting my head and looking at him. “When all of this is over, I mean. When we win, and Dorothy’s gone, and the Nome King is—well, wherever we put him, I guess, and Ozma’s back in charge. What do you want to do then?”
He was silent for a long time. “It’s funny,” he said finally. “I never thought about it until . . .”
“Until?” I prompted.
“Until I met you,” he said simply.
“Oh,” I said, blushing.
He smiled, squeezing my hand. “I lost my parents when I was just a kid. And Mombi—well, you know what she’s like. I think in her own way she cared about me, but she wasn’t much of a mother. She raised me to think about nothing other than fighting, than becoming the best, most powerful warrior I could. For a long time, that seemed like the end goal in itself. And then I got stronger and stronger, and soon I was fighting all the time, and Dorothy was getting worse and worse, and it was just—things kept going like that, so that I didn’t have time to think about anything other than whether I was going to be alive the next morning to fight some more.”
“Like dominoes,” I said.
“Like what?” He looked puzzled.
“Oh, just a game we have in the Other Place,” I said. “Little tiles? You can set them up so that if you knock one over all the other ones . . . you know what, never mind.”
He laughed. “Okay, like that I guess. But that was it for me for a long time. I didn’t think about the future because deep down I assumed there wasn’t going to be one. And deep down I was fine with that. If I died fighting Dorothy, I would’ve made the ultimate sacrifice. I could finally just . . . rest. And I wouldn’t have to feel like I’d failed Oz, or the Order, or Mombi, or all the trainees I sent into the Emerald City knowing they were probably going to die, too.” The laughter was gone from his voice and his eyes were haunted. “It wasn’t just Melindra, Amy. So many people I sent to their deaths. So many of them were just children.”
“You can’t think like that,” I said urgently. “You can’t, Nox. It’s not your fault, it’s Dorothy’s. You didn’t kill them. She did. Everyone who trains with the Order knows what they’re getting into. I knew that from the moment I agreed to help Mombi. You’re the one who keeps telling me we’re at war. I don’t understand why you can’t tell yourself the same thing.”
“Because they were my responsibility,” he said roughly. “They were my charges, Amy. I trained them, every one of them. I knew their names, their stories, their hopes and dreams. I might not have believed in the future, but every last one of them did, or they never would’ve joined the Order.”
His pain was so raw and so apparent. I wished more than anything I could take it away from him. But, I realized, that was something I was learning, too. I couldn’t change his feelings. I could tell him what I thought, but he had his own path to work through. All I could do was support him through it and hope that someday he learned to forgive himself, that he realized he was caught in an impossible situation.
“What if you’d run away?” I said. “You’d hate yourself even more. You did the only thing you knew how to do, Nox. You did the only thing you knew how to do. Mombi brought you up to be a fighter, and you passed those skills on to a whole generation of trainees. Not all of us are dead, remember?”