She glances up at me. Surprise pinches between her brows. “We are nothing alike.”
“If you say so.”
I turn back to the tunnel, back to the mission at hand.
Not surprisingly, Cleo follows.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Dorothy
My heart is galloping through my chest, making it hard to breathe.
Rook insists I go up the ladder first. The tunnel must have sloped slightly downhill, because the ladder back up has more rungs than the ladder that sent us down here.
The exit hatch gives way easily after Rook cleaned it of its roots and I burst into the cool night, into the darkness.
Rook hands me Toto. Toto is silent, compliant, almost like he knows danger isn’t far behind us.
Rook hurries up the ladder, emerging with his coat slung over his shoulder. Out, and on solid ground, he softly closes the hatch, then scans the surrounding forest, spotting a fallen log. He hands me his coat to hold so he can wrangle the log, lifting it by its gnarled end. He drags it, cutting through the earth, before dropping it on the hatch.
“It won’t stop him,” he tells me, “but it might slow him down.”
“It’s better than nothing,” I say. “But now what?”
He takes his coat back and swings it around, deftly shrugging into it. The collar is popped, shadowing his face.
I can’t tell what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling. We just had sex in a tunnel and now we’re being hunted by the Tinman.There’s no time to digest what we did, why we did it, or what it means after. Even though I desperately want to know.
“We keep moving.” Rook nods in a general direction that will lead us away from the curtain wall of Glimming Hollow. “But quickly.”
I tuck Toto into the crook of my arm and follow after Rook.
With the dark, ominous cloud above us and no city lights to guide us, we stumble through the forest. I seem to catch every exposed root, every fallen branch, every stump. Rook finally hooks his hand around my elbow, guiding me.
“How can you see so well?”
“My eyes have adjusted, I suppose. We’re not far from a fork in the Yellow Brick Road and I think we should—”
A screech echoes in the sky.
Toto braces himself against me, a low rumble sounding in his chest.
Another screech, and a shadow passes overhead.
“Oh shit,” I whisper. “Is that—”
Rook looks up. “Run, Kansas.”
My stomach plummets and we take off running. I stumble once, twice, praying to every god I know that I will find a path void of traps.
A shrill whistle sounds above, then a flapping of massive wings.
Tears burn in my eyes, but I don’t stop.Don’t slow, keep going, Dorothy.
“Follow my path,” Rook shouts several paces ahead of me.
I try to keep to his trail, to the forest floor he’s already tested and cleared, but his silhouette is hard to make out in the darkness with his black jacket obscuring his frame.
