“Yeah, really? And what’s mine?”
“I don’t know,” Taavi answers honestly, coming over to stand in front of me. “It’s best that we don’t. If we don’t know, then nobody else will either.” He glances over at the open front door, and a chill skitters down my spine.
It’s time to leave, isn’t it?
“You told me you didn’t mean Kansas when you said that it was never home. What did you mean?”
“I meant the human world, Ozora,” Taavi says, his brown eyes focused on my face. “You were never truly human.”How Ozora Saved a Sexy Scarecrow Named StrykerThere are several roads nearby, but it doesn’t take long to find the one paved with yellow bricks.
It’s also nothing at all like I expected.
“This is … not as glamorous as I’d imagined,” I start as I study the numerous signs clustered on either side of the road. Some of them have arrows, pointing in various directions with place names carved into the wood. Others are more ominous, with words like Danger, Warning, and Death scrawled in dripping paint. The vast majority I can’t read at all—they’re in languages I’ve never seen before.
“The Y.B.R. is not a particularly safe place to be,” Taavi admits, studying the fields of crops on one side, bordered by blue-painted fences, and the trees on the other. “But it’s the fastest, easiest way to the City of Emeralds. We risk more trying to take a longer, alternative route.”
“What gives the bricks this yellow hue?” I ask, toeing at one with my sparkly Vans.
“You don’t want to know,” Taavi says, and the tight, strained sound of his voice makes me really, really want to know. “Let’s go. The longer we take, the more we’ll be exposed to.”
He starts walking, and I follow along, jogging to catch up to his right side.
“I thought the shoes were supposed to be red,” I muse, as the sun catches on the silver sparkles.
“The shoes are only red in the movie retelling of Dorothy’s story,” Taavi says, looking over at me with a closed-off facial expression. It’s very clear that he’s trying to put some emotional distance between us. “The moviemakers had just gotten access to Technicolor, and knew audiences would respond better to ruby red shoes over silver ones. In the original book—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—the shoes were always silver.”
“Explain to me this. If you know about the book and the movie, then how do you explain all of this?” I smirk, throwing my arms up and turning in a circle, pausing to walk backwards in front of Taavi and his barefoot, shirtless beauty. Damn, he’s hot. And again, how creepy is it that I turned my dog into a super-hot dude? “This is a pretty dead-on retelling, huh? I mean, except for the dead kelpie, and the rude witch with the really nice hair.”
Taavi snorts, glancing toward the fields on our left, like he’s on the lookout for danger. Considering I just met a horse with sharp teeth who looked at me like I was a sausage McMuffin with egg, I’m grateful for his vigilance.
“Because Lyman was obsessed with Dorothy, and when he fled Oz for the H.W., he wrote a book about her. Simple as that.”
“Lyman?” I ask, scrunching up my face. “Who the hell is Lyman? And what’s H.W. stand for?”
“You might know him as L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Taavi turns his attention from the fields to the forest. Despite the bright sunshine, and the sweetly singing birds, something feels … off. The hair on the back of my neck lifts up in warning. “H.W. stands for Human World. It’s where your father was from.”
“But not Mom?” I ask, and Taavi shakes his head.
“Dorothy drove your mother into the H.W. with her morality laws,” Taavi says, exhaling sharply. I notice when I look down at his fist, clenched tight around the strap of the duffel bag, that his claws are out.
“Dorothy?” I ask, squinting hard. “How was Dorothy around in the year 1900 for Lyman to write a book about? And yet she’s not as dead as he is?”
“Lifespans are longer for residents of Oz; as I mentioned, there are no humans here,” Taavi says as we pass a round house with a domed roof, painted the same garish blue as all the fences around here. “In this country of the East, blue is the favorite color,” he explains, without my having to ask.
As we continue down the road, we pass by several other houses, all of them the same style and color. Every once in a while, the Munchkins come out of the houses, looking at me, bowing low. News spreads fast here, apparently.
“You’re taking this all very well,” Taavi admits as I tuck my hands into the pockets on the gingham dress, remembering my mother doing the same thing just a few years back. It really hasn’t been that long since I lost my family. Sometimes, it feels like it was yesterday. Sometimes, it feels like it was a hundred years ago.
