Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (6 page)

“Or what?” The challenge left my lips before I had a chance to think it through. I winced.

“Or I find a new ambassador to keep the crossovers in line. A proper Ozite, perhaps, one who will have the
nation’s best interests at heart.” Ozma kept smiling. “And you, my dear Dorothy, can look forward to an endless string of cloudless days. Sunshine does keep spirits up in the winter, don’t you think? Rinn will stay here to show you to the body. Whenever you’re ready—but it had best be soon, for everyone’s sake.”

She turned, leaving me staring, and swept out of the room. Her guard remained behind, standing uncomfortably beside the door. Jack stepped up beside me, his big orange pumpkin-head tilted downward to show the unhappiness his carved grin wouldn’t let him express.

“Well, that wasn’t very nice,” he said.

“Get my pack,” I replied, snapping out of my fugue. “I’ve got a murder to solve.”

The Wizard was the first person to cross the shifting sands of the Deadly Desert with body and soul intact. He wasn’t the last, not by a long shot. We should have known something was wrong with the spells that protected Oz when I made the crossing over and over again, traveling by every natural disaster in the book, but what did I know? I was just a kid, and Oz was the country of my dreams. I would have done anything to get back there. When Ozma told me I could stay, that we could be best friends and playmates forever, I cried. I would have done anything she asked me, back then. I would have died for her.

The one thing I couldn’t do, not even when she asked, was stop the slow trickle of crossovers from appearing in Oz. They each found their own way across the sands, some intentionally, some by mistake…and since each method of crossing back to the “real world” seemed to be a one-shot,
once they were in Oz, they were in Oz for keeps. At first Ozma left them to find their own way. It had worked well enough for the early arrivals, but fewer and fewer crossovers were coming from places like Kansas. The farmlands found themselves overrun with people who didn’t know which end of the plow was which. They threw the newcomers out, and one by one, the crossovers came to the only destination they had left.

The City of Emeralds. Which was now the Emerald City in nothing but name; only the oldest, richest denizens still wore their green-tinted glasses, updated with a special enchantment that made anyone who wasn’t born in Oz disappear completely. This led to a few collisions on the streets, but as far as they were concerned, it was worth it. For them, the Emerald City was still the pristine paradise it had been before the crossovers came. For the rest of us…

Jack and I left the apartment by the back door, with Ozma’s guard tagging along awkwardly behind us. He looked as unhappy about the situation as I felt. His look of unhappiness deepened as he realized that we were heading for the stairs. “Are we not taking the skyways?” he asked hesitantly.

My status as Princess-cum-Ambassador-cum-Wicked Witch was confusing for some people—especially the kind of strapping young lad that Ozma liked to employ. “No, we’re not,” I said curtly and promptly regretted my tone. It wasn’t his fault. More kindly I explained, “We’re going Downtown, remember? Not every building in this area has connections to both the streets and the skyways. It’s better if we go down low as soon as we can. If we take the skyways, we’ll come out miles from Wizard’s Square.”

“I have a piece of the road of yellow brick attuned to my comrades in arms. It would lead us where we needed to go,”
he said with the pride of a farm boy who’d never had his own magic before.

I remembered being that young, and that naive. I hated him a little in that moment for reminding me. “That’s just dandy, but I know where we’re going. This door lets out within half a mile of the Square, and I’d rather not walk any farther if I can avoid it. You don’t want to walk that far through Downtown either. It’s not safe.”

“I am in service to the Undying Empress,” he said proudly. “I fear nothing in this city.”

“Just keep telling yourself that.”

Jack snorted. It was an oddly musical sound thanks to the acoustics of his head.

Rinn frowned at us. “I am sorry. Is there something I am unaware of?”

“We’re going
Downtown
,” I said. “Have you ever been there before? Yes or no?”

“No,” he said sullenly.

“I didn’t think so. All right. First rule of Downtown: don’t act like your position means anything to the people who live there. Most of them were city folks before they crossed, and they’re still city folks. They don’t appreciate being reminded that things are different now. Second rule of Downtown: don’t mention Ozma.”

“But why not?” Rinn sounded honestly confused. “Surely they’re grateful.”

“Grateful? She herds them into slums. She coddles the ones who catch her eye and leaves the rest to fight for scraps. She lets them kill one another, steal from one another, and do whatever they want, as long as she doesn’t have to look at them. Downtown isn’t grateful. They hate her more than almost anyone or any
thing
in Oz.”

Rinn’s eyes widened. To him I was speaking blasphemy. “What do they hate more?”

My smile was thin as a poppy’s petal. “Me.”

We’d been descending as we walked, moving out of the rarefied air of the upper city and down, down, down where the lost things lived. Buildings like mine are rare these days. They’re technically considered Uptown since they’re connected to the skyways, but they also have doors leading Downtown, making them vulnerable to compromise no matter how many spells are layered on to keep them secure. Good Ozites refuse to live in places like mine.

Good thing I’m not a good Ozite anymore. My building is a liminal space, like me, neither part of Uptown nor Downtown…and like me, it’s never going to fit quite right anywhere again.

Jack pushed open the beaten copper door separating our stairwell from the street, and we stepped out into the humid, sour-smelling air of Oz’s undercity. The door slammed behind us as soon as we were through, its built-in enchantments forming a seal that couldn’t be broken without the appropriate countercharm. A dog barked in the distance. A baby wailed. And even though the sun was shining, so many walkways and structures blocked the light that it was suddenly twilight—a twilight that would never end.

I turned to Rinn, who was still looking staggered by my last word, and gave him my best Princess of Oz curtsey. “Welcome to Downtown.”

“Prince—Miss—Sorcer—” Rinn stopped, done in by the perils of nomenclature, and gave me a look so pitiful that I couldn’t help thawing a little. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m meant to call you.”

“Dot is fine,” I said and started walking along the cracked brick sidewalk toward the Square. This used to be one of the
thoroughfares to the Palace, back when you could get there at ground level; the yellow still showed through in patches, where the grime hadn’t managed to turn it as gray as everything else. That’s the sick joke of Downtown. I left Kansas for Oz because I was tired of the color gray. Now I’m the Ambassador to the Gray Country of Oz, built in the basement of the City of Emeralds. “If that’s too informal, you can call me Dorothy.”

“Miss Dorothy, why is the Empress…what I mean to say is…”

“He wants to know why Her Royal Bitchness is threatening you with sunshine,” said Jack. Rinn cast him a shocked look. The pumpkin-headed man was walking with more assurance now that we were Downtown. Maybe it was the fact that his shoulders were straight for the first time, showing just how tall he really was. “Weather isn’t usually a good incentive.”

“You mustn’t speak of the Empress like that,” said Rinn, sounding stunned. “What would even make you
think
such a thing?”

“My father and I go way, way back,” said Jack. The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable. “I’m allowed to say anything about her that I feel like saying.”

I patted him on the arm as comfortingly as I could manage. Ozma was a boy named Tip when she created Jack. She’d never liked to talk about that period in her life, and I knew better than to go into it in detail around one of her men. Rinn had probably been trained to regard all mentions of Ozma’s boyhood as treason. Instead I said to him, “I’m dating a girl named Polychrome. She’s the daughter of the Rainbow. No clouds, no rain. No rain, no rainbows. No rainbows, no girlfriend. She needs clouds if she wants to be here, and that means she’ll be gone for as long as the sun
stays out. So when Ozma wants me to dance to her song, she threatens me with the weather.” I shook my head. “Now get moving. We’ve got a dead body to see.”

Rinn held his official-issue lance at the ready as we progressed through Downtown, waiting for a brigand or a hungry Kalidah to spring out of the shadows. I slouched along next to Jack, eyeing the various speakeasies we passed with an undisguised longing. Jack followed my gaze and sighed.

“No, Dot.”

“But—”

“No. Poly doesn’t want you drinking, and neither do I.”

“I just want a little pick-me-up, that’s all.”

“Dot, the stuff you can buy here stands a good chance of being a put-you-down one of these days. Poppy juice isn’t safe for crossovers.”

“Yeah, well.” I shook my head, the charms on my ears chiming against one another. “What is?”

“We’ll take care of this. Poly will be back by tomorrow night. You’ll see.”

I sighed. “Stop being optimistic. Or did Ozma remember your name this time?”

Jack didn’t answer me.

I wasn’t Ozma’s first castoff, and I won’t be her last. Jack was part of the group responsible for helping her claim her throne, back when she first came out of exile. He was also unpredictable—thanks to the slow decay of the pumpkins he used for heads—and he didn’t clean up well for her court. She tolerated him for a long time, first out of love and later out of loyalty, but the day came when Jack was more of a liability than a friend, and he’d found himself banished to
the City of Emeralds to sink or swim on his own. I’d chased him down before he could leave the Palace, pressing the key to my then-unused apartment into his hand.

It was an impulsive gesture that I didn’t think anything of until years later, when the growing unease over the number of crossovers made it politically unwise for Ozma to keep one as a pet and boon companion. When I’d found myself in Jack’s position, I’d staggered to my apartment on instinct, unsure what was going to happen when I got there. I was half-afraid he’d claim squatter’s rights and leave me alone in the dark.

Instead he’d proudly shown me the furniture he’d built for my eventual arrival and tucked me safe and warm into my very own bedroom that I didn’t have to share and that no one could ever turn me out of. He’d been waiting for me. I guess once you’re thrown away you come to recognize the impending signs of someone else being discarded.

Jack was never really my friend when we both lived in the Palace. These days, there’s no one I trust more. My first companions in Oz have long since found their place in the political structure. So have I, I suppose. It’s just that the place I’ve found isn’t one they can afford to associate with.

This deep into Downtown, things were a curious combination of Ozite tech and crossover ingenuity. Shacks built from every material imaginable squatted on corners and clustered in the bands of watery sunlight that pool between the distant skyways, their solar heaters out and soaking up every drop of energy they could collect. Half the shacks were on wheels, allowing them to move with the sun. The other half belonged to the light-farmers, who jealously guarded their turf against all comers. It would have been enough to make me feel bad about my longing for rain if it wasn’t for the fact that rain was actually better for Downtown. It was
harder to catch and control, for one thing. It washed everything clean, and it filled the water batteries, which worked just as well as the solar kind. Rain was the most precious commodity Downtown had.

Ozma probably wouldn’t have thought to threaten them with a lack of rain if it hadn’t been for my relationship with Polychrome. That, if nothing else, I was willing to feel bad about.

People appeared from alleys and shacks, watching us walk by. We made a curious parade, to be sure: a man in Ozma’s colors; another with a pumpkin for a head; and me, their hated Ambassador, in my witchy white. Even if they didn’t know my face, they knew what the color meant. There were three witches left in Oz, and I was the only one who ever came anywhere near Downtown.