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I expected her to inhale and dissolve into a long bout of coughing.

There is no such reaction.

“Fuck. Yes.” As she speaks, smoke eases out past her wet lips. “Not quite the same. It tastes different, a little bitter. The weed I smoke is sweeter.” She leans forward and sets the tin and the lighter on the table between us. “Thank you.”

I have misjudged her.

I might have also thought her soft and silly. Watching her smoke, it’s clear it’s a habit she’s had for a while, one she indulges in when the need arises. There is nothing soft or silly about her and I suddenly feel off-kilter.

“What have you got from the book?” I ask, trying to shift the tension away, trying to distract myself.

She takes another drag from the cigarette and opens the book in one hand. “The beginning talks about the dominion of the gods. How the East was the God of Harvest and Hearth. The West, the God of Metal and Minerals. The North was the God of Thunder and Sky. And the South, the God of the Wild.”

“So just the basics so far?”

“It would seem so.” She drops the book again, hangs her head back, closes her eyes, and smokes as she thinks. This Dorothy is different from the tiring girl who fought me for her freedom and failed.

“I almost didn’t take the book when I found it. It begs the question of whether or not we ever have free will, you know?” She rolls her head over the cushion, craning to see me better. “Even Henrietta said, what is the point? And now I’m asking myself the same thing.”

I am reading between the lines. There are things she is leaving unsaid.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

She tsks. “I already told you Henrietta warned me against Rook.”

“Ahhh. But clearly there is more.”

Heat rises in her face. “Yes. Fine. There is more. But I’m not telling you what because you’ll just think me dumb and I don’t really feel like thinking less of myself right now. Especially not with you.”

Her gaze shifts to me. Another flash of knowing, a secret buried deep.

She also told me the fortune teller warned her about me. But she is here, now, hidden away with me, alone.

“I think you’re getting stuck in the weeds at the mercy of the forest,” I tell her.

“I hate metaphors.”

“I’m just saying, you’re thinking about it too much.”

“So I should think about it less?” She is annoyed with me.

“You’re worried about the uncontrollable, about prophecy and destiny. It will drive you mad. What do you want? Start there.”

She is silent again, nursing the cigarette.

My mechanical arm is growing weaker by the minute. Time is ticking away.

Her gaze still distant and trained on a painting hung on the wall, she says, “My entire life I wanted to know my past, where I came from, who my parents were. I avoided anything that even looked like commitment because I was forever waiting. And now here I am, in a strange land, having killed…” She closes her eyes and takes another hit and is slow on the exhale.

“Go on,” I tell her, because she needs to say the hard things if we’re to do hard things.

“The West was my mother.”

It isn’t a question.

“And I killed her.”

I don’t bother pointing out that I think the West wanted to die. “She said she couldn’t see beyond that moment, but you want to know what I think?”