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I look her right in the eye as I answer her. “Yes.”

TWENTYDorothy

I’m re-dressed in my thick underlayers again, but still I shiver at Tin’s admission.

His axe, thought to be a god killer, was not in his possession for a time, and then the gods disappeared shortly after. Almost like they were running.

This is all growing larger by the minute.

When I landed in Oz, I kept myself separate from all of its pains, all of its ills, because they weren’t mine. None of their problems were mine to deal with and I had one goal: get back to Kansas.

But now all of it seems far away and yet so close, it chafes.

My mother was the Witch of the West. She brought me to Kansas and dropped me on Aunt Em and Henry’s doorstep, arguably to protect me, and yet now I feel so alone, so fucking confused, I could scream.

Instead, I bring the glass to my lips and toss back the rum, letting the burn of the alcohol overpower the burn of my fear and anxiety.

“Tell me how you lost the axe,” I say because this is a really big part of the puzzle and I think deep down he must have been asking himself these questions all along. I need to know how it all happened.

“I didn’t lose it.” He returns to the dining table and grabs my leather breastplate, motioning me over. “I gave it up.”

“Why?”

“Because I stopped caring.”

He holds the armor up and I slip under it and he lets it settle on my shoulders. “Rook took your heart.”

Alarm bells are ringing again.

“Yes.” He comes around to face me, checking the placement of the leather. “My brother stole my heart and the absence of it was so jarring, I dropped everything I cared about. My family. My home. My life in the woods. The things I used to do to bring a sense of purpose to my life. And my father’s axe.”

When he’s happy with the armor, he reaches beneath my arm for one of the leather straps and threads it through the metal clasp. “Add in the physical issues—no heart means no blood flow—and I quickly turned to drugs to just keep my body moving. But even that was hard. I once lay in bed for a week straight, unable and unwilling to move. It was Gabriel who brought me out.”

“That must have been awful,” I say but it sounds so pitiful, so small, next to what he must have endured. Some days when my anxiety is bad or the anxiety melds with depression, I wish I could stop caring about it all, but have I ever truly desired that? To not care, to not love, must be an awfully bleak existence.

“I’m sure it was,” he says. “But did I care? No. It’s like losing all sense of taste and color and touch. There was nothing for me to grab on to. It probably was awful but still when I think about it, all I can dredge up is the boredom and the aches and pains.”

With the last strap to buckle, the bottom one, he leans in closer to reach it, and at the last second, I turn my head and our mouths nearly meet.

He pauses, hovering. His breath smells of the sweet spiciness of the rum.

It was obvious before, but it occurs to me again that all this talk of not caring means that what we just did must barely register for him. There is no guilt, no shame. Just raw pleasure for the sake of pleasure.

That, I do think, must be liberating.

He blinks and returns his attention to the buckle, yanking it tight, jostling me. I put my hands on his shoulders to brace myself and he lets me.

“So who had your axe? Was it the Wizard?” I ask.

“Glinda.”

“Your mother? Why?”

“She said she would keep it safe for me until my brother came to his senses and returned my heart.”

“But he didn’t do that.”

“No, he did not.”