The Land of What-Might-Have-Been

by Straightjacketed

After spending so many years wishing that things had been different, what happens when, halfway through their final meeting, Elphaba and Glinda find themselves unexpectedly plunged into the worst of all possible worlds? AU.

11. Light At The End Of The Tunnel

A/N: Busy month, ladies and gentlemen, busy month. This was another hard slog, but at least I didn't have to chainsaw it apart like the other chapter, and on the bright side, I had a lot of fun writing it. We're going to be confronting a wide array of events and characters in this particular chapter, and I hope it doesn't become too confusing - and certainly not boring, I pray.

Suffice to say, we'll be starting off the next ten chapters with a bang. I hope you enjoy, ladies and gentlemen, and I encourage you to provide your reviews, opinions and constructive critiques - including those of any mistakes on my part (Given how early in the morning I upload these things, I always seem to leave a few typoes here and there).

So, without further ado, read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: I don't own Wicked or Oz. I'd never be able to hang on to all of it.

---

Glinda's attempts to sleep were not very successful, to say the least.

Even if the bottom of the cupboard hadn't been cramped, poorly-cushioned and fragrant with the smell of drying vomit, she still wouldn't have been able to sleep. Even if she wasn't being jabbed painfully in the thigh by the pieces of her wand that she'd stupidly decided to keep with her, she wouldn't have been able to sleep. Even if she hadn't been recovering from her last terrifying encounter with such a cramped space, she still wouldn't have been able to sleep. Even if the wound on her torso hadn't been aching and threatening to tear open once again, she still wouldn't have been able to sleep. Even if her maddened fantasy had come true and the cupboard had turned out to be large enough to allow her to properly lie down on one of the many feather mattresses stored within and soothe the pain in her midriff with an icepack left nearby, sleep would have been impossible.

And the reason for this was because the earplugs weren't working.

Somehow, the noise of the operation sliced through the cotton wool just as easily as a pair of scissors would; every time she came close to nodding off, a horrible sound from the lecture hall outside shook her back into wakefulness: the watery hiss of motorized blades tearing through flesh, the crack of bones snapping as the treatment extended to them, the high-pitched whine of an electric drill, the students laughing and applauding... and perhaps worst of all, Walter's breathless, orgasmic giggling. And invariably, she couldn't resist taking a peek to see what had just happened, and the things she'd seen in these brief glimpses were more than enough to keep her from sleeping ever again:

She'd seen Cataphlax altering Walter's physique by tearing handfuls of fat and other unwanted tissues from his skinless paunch – idly flinging the discarded mulch over her shoulder (much to the audience's amusement). She'd seen the two lecturers gently prising the ribcage open so that they could modify the heart, idly running their magic-dripping fingers through internal organs as they went. She'd seen a cauldron bubbling on the stage behind them, filled to the brim with something that looked uncannily like human flesh, liquefied and somehow still animated. She'd seen the patient's face being subtly altered through both magic and surgical instruments, the features slowly taking on new shapes before her very eyes; the fact that Walter didn't resist or even move throughout this grisly procedure somehow made it even worse. Towards the end of the whole grisly display, she'd seen dozens upon dozens of tubes being implanted into Walter's muscles and internal organs, soaking them in the alchemical preparation that would – supposedly – preserve the bodies of the Purified over the centuries to come.

But that wasn't the very worst sight: that had occurred when Cataphlax had reached into Walter's right eye socket and somehow lifted the entire eyeball free of his skull; then, with every subtle detail visible on the colossal screens, a tiny drop of blue fluid had been applied to the eye – turning it glassy and doll-like, the iris suddenly glowing as if lit from within. Glinda had managed to keep her gorge down until this little performance was repeated with the left eye, whereupon she'd leaned forward and thrown up for the second time in as many hours.

And throughout every single monstrous spectacle, Cataphlax and Ranse had been talking: they'd lectured on what to do with the discarded flesh and bone, how to augment the organs where necessary, how to restrain difficult patients, altering the minds of unique cases without destroying their value, the history of the mechanisms and techniques, the Purified's potential for true immortality, the origins and compositions of the alchemical compound that induced it... And, as they'd begun threading delicate wires into the whorls and spirals of the patient's brain, they'd talked about "The Empress's Revelation" and "the enlightenment of true beauty" that they would bestow through this method.

It was at this point that Walter was at his most vocal – and Glinda found it necessary to block her ears again.

Once they were finished exposing Walter's hopelessly maltreated brain to Oz-only-knew what, the two mage-surgeons finally returned the top of his skull to its rightful place. Then, they took the broiling cauldron from the back of the stage and began carefully applying its ominous-looking contents (which turned out to be molten flesh-porcelain) to the skinless body, slathering it over the bare muscles and moulding it over the face until the features almost looked human again. As Cataphlax and Ranse went about ensuring that the flesh-porcelain was properly distributed across the carcass, Glinda finally shut the door and retreated into yet another not-so-comfortable attempt to sleep.

This time, she was successful.

It took quite a while, but with physical exhaustion weighing down on her like a small continent, she finally achieved slumber - or at the very least, something similar enough to mimic it. Frazzled, nervous, guilt-plagued, wounded and queasy though she may have been, she nevertheless managed to doze lightly, her body curled into a foetal ball with her knees tucked under her chin, her ears alert for the sound of footsteps approaching the hiding place. It was an awkward, fearful sleep, usually only lasting for half an hour at a time, but it was the best her aching body could manage under the circumstances.

And while she didn't exactly dream per se, she found her thoughts drifting – as she'd always known they would – towards the atrocities she'd seen in the lecture hall, the horrible act of Purification repeated before her mind's eye. But this time, it wasn't Cataphlax or Ranse doing these horrible things: it was Glinda herself, just as she'd been after that night at the Ozdust Ballroom, right down to the pink dress and the astronomically-expensive shoes. And as her younger self went about re-enacting the atrocities that had taken place, she recited that same lecture she'd given to Elphaba back at Shiz, punctuating every childish giggle and every naive turn of phrase with another mutilation.

And this time, Glinda didn't need to wait for her dream-self to open Walter's skull and go about performing what she referred to as "Personality Dialysis." By now, she knew that on some level she was to blame for the madhouse she'd arrived in; even if she hadn't taken part in its creation directly, she'd almost certainly influenced it. Unless of course I'm in hell and experiencing the first stage of my eternal punishment, she thought blearily through the haze of daydreams.

A loud thump jarred her into wakefulness, and she found herself back in the cupboard, still curled into a ball and aching worse than ever.

At first, she could only blearily wonder what had awoken her. Then, she heard the thump again, and realized with a fresh thrill of horror that it had come from somewhere just above her head, less than a few inches away. Someone (almost certainly a guard or, if she was really unlucky, one of the mage-surgeons) was hammering on the door of the cupboard, demanding that she open up. For twelve seconds, she sat there in total silence, not even daring to breathe in case the sound gave her away. Then, just as she was beginning to think that the guard had lost interest, the door began to creak open: flailing wildly, she tried to move, to slip out through the door before the guards outside had a chance to grab her, but she only succeeded in losing her balance and splaying herself helplessly across the inside of the cupboard like an upended tortoise.

She could only look up in terror as the door finally swung aside, flooding the cupboard with light: when Glinda's eyes finally adjusted to the glare of the lecture hall, she found herself staring up in terror at the wrench-toting silhouette of...

"Sorry I'm late," panted Omber. "Getting back here was trickier than I thought it'd be. But the good news is, I got the disguises." S/he gestured vaguely at the buddle under his/her right arm; for good measure, s/he was now dressed in a dark blue boilersuit – complete with a cap just large enough to conceal the face at a distance.

Glinda sagged in relief. "Are they gone?" she asked, awkwardly clambering to her feet. "Are we alone?"

"For the moment; the lecture ended about six hours ago, as far as I can tell. They had some guards marching about the corridors for a while afterwards – I spent the hour and a half dodging the tin-canned bastards – but I think they're gone by now."

"Six hours? What time is it now?"

"Oh, about 5:30 AM, give or take a few minutes. Everyone's gone back to their dormitories for the morning by now; even the cleaners won't be back for a while."

Sure enough, the hall was deserted: no trace remained of the students, the mage-surgeons, or the unfortunate Walter Luddestone. For good measure, every last inch of the operating theatre had been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected; the glass had been polished, the tiles had been scrubbed, the table had been returned to its normal "dentist's chair" position, and all the equipment that Cataplax and Ranse had brought with them had been cleared away. In fact, if Glinda didn't know better, she would have thought that the monstrous operation had never happened.

Then she noticed the screens: perhaps as an appropriate note to end the seminar on, a still image from the operation had been projected onto the two vast screens, and thanks to someone forgetting to switch the projectors off, it was this very image that now began searing itself into Glinda's memory. Even though she hadn't been awake to see the operation end, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was looking at its successful result: the new Walter Luddestone was tall, trim, handsome, and without even a hint of the heavy paunch and explosive mop of curly hair that had distinguished his former self. His once-sallow skin was now an immaculate shell of flesh-porcelain, his erratic hair now sculpted into black, elegantly curled perfection, and the dull grey eyes that had bulged and darted so wildly throughout the operation were now deathly still and almost silver in colour.

And he was smiling: clad in only in a white cotton robe, fresh from an operation that by rights should have left him dead or worse, the newly-Purified Walter Luddestone was smiling.

Glinda felt her gorge rise again, and took a very deep breath to steady her nerves. Omber must have noticed the change in her expression, because s/he glanced up at the screen and sighed deeply. "You saw it happening, then?" s/he asked.

Glinda nodded. She didn't trust herself to speak.

There was a painful silence as Omber once again visibly grappled with what to say next. After about a minute of agitatedly glancing from one end of the hall to the other, the most s/he was able to say was, "Are you going to be alright? For the moment, I mean," s/he hastily amended. "Nobody's alright after seeing this sort of thing for the first time, not for a good long while. I mean, I wasn't after I saw it for the first time, but... But do you think you're ready to get moving?"

"Mmmnn," said Glinda.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Positive?"

"Yes. Why do you need my permission for this, Omber?"

"Simple: if we want out of this city, we're going to have to travel in broad daylight and we can't afford to attract attention – even if it's only by looking suspiciously panicky."

"I'm not panicky," snapped Glinda indignantly.

"You're trembling."

Something in the back of Glinda's head snapped. "Well, of course I'm trembling!" she almost screamed. "In case you hadn't noticed, I ended up in the one place in the room that was smaller than those coffins we were locked in last night, and I had to stay there for the last few hours! And I wasn't drugged this time and I'd never thought I'd miss that sort of thing, and I had to worry about getting caught, and I had to see what those b-b-bastards were doing to... to..."

This time, she at least had the luxury of a wastebasket to vomit into. Once the dreadful lurching in her stomach had finally subsided, she leaned against the wall for a time, panting for breath and trying vainly not to think of skinless, bloodied shapes writhing under harsh fluorescent light.

"I don't understand," she babbled, suddenly on the verge of tears. "They tore off his skin and nobody tried to stop them and they were laughing and cheering and they just tore him to pieces and none of them had a problem with it and..." She took a very deep breath, and tried once again to explain herself, this time at a much slower pace. "Why didn't anyone do anything to stop it? Why wasn't anyone upset? I'd have understood if people were sick or crying, I mean, they were watching someone get cut open on stage. But they weren't. They were laughing- laughing. What in the name of the Time Dragon Clock is wrong with this country?"

As inept as s/he could be in delicate social situations, Omber at least had the decency to wait for Glinda to calm a bit further before asking, "I take it you've never seen anything like this before?"

"Never." Once again, she recalled the day when Doctor Dillamond had been fired and the Wizard's specialist had attempted to provide a demonstration of the new Animal-control techniques: quite apart from the fact that Elphaba had brought the so-called class to an end before it could really begin, none of the Shiz students had shown much in the way of enthusiasm or loyalty to the specialist; true, they hadn't dared to interfere, but they'd at least been disturbed by the brutal treatment of the lion cub. Even the most rabidly conservative of them hadn't sunk so low as to applaud the vicious display, or laugh at the cub's pained yelps.

"Does anyone outside the university know about this?" she asked. "Apart from the government, of course. I'm just saying, if the public found out what Purification really –"

"They already know," said Omber, looking even gloomier than usual.

"You're kidding."

"I wish, Glinda, I really wish. But yeah, there've been official explanations of the Purification surgery for decades, now; they don't go into too much detail, but by now I think just about everyone in the empire knows about what happens in "the noble metamorphosis" you saw. A few people complain here and there, but for the most part, nobody's interested in rocking the boat. So, leaking the details to the press probably wouldn't have much of an effect."

S/he shrugged. "Sorry to disappoint."

Glinda closed her eyes, and fought the overpowering urge to bang her head against the wall. "At this point," she said wearily, "I'll be happy enough if we can just get out of here and over the border into a country that hasn't gone completely mad." Assuming it's possible to escape from eternal punishment, she mused.

"Well, they say some weird things about the Deviant Nations, but-"

"Could you please just hand me my disguise? I'd like to leave as soon as feasifiably possible before any guards start sniffing around again." As Omber handed her the boiler suit, she happened to glance at the oversized wrench the engineer had brought with him. "And another thing, do you really need to keep that with you? I mean, if the authorities aren't fooled by the mechanic's outfits, what makes you think that'll help with the disguise?"

Omber smiled mirthlessly. "Who said I'd use it for disguise?"

---

Minutes later, the two "mechanics" crept out of the lecture hall and began the slow and tentative journey towards the gates; because walking straight across the vast courtyard would have brought them within eyeshot of the mage-surgeons' offices (or face-to-face with overly curious security guards) they had to take a somewhat roundabout route through the many passageways that connected the university complex in one way or another.

It took them out of the lavish wood-panelled corridor of the lecture hall, down a very long flight of stairs into a colossal basement dominated by the monolithic boilers that heated the university, then up a significantly shorter flight of stairs at the far end, along a bare concrete hallway, through a set of heavy metal doors and into the reinforced concrete bunker that served as the campus's magical training grounds ("For wannabe pioneers in destructive spellcraft," Omber remarked). After ten minutes of navigating the maze of sandbag barriers, rubber practice mannequins, and complicated-looking instruments, they managed to find a service duct in the wall that took them through a cramped network of cable-strung shafts and into the university archives; thankfully, beyond the vast rows of filing cabinets there was an elevator that took them into the main hub of classrooms; tiptoeing their way along the silent corridors, they made their way through no less than three entire floors of empty classrooms (most of them identical to the kind Glinda had seen at Shiz) before finally locating a secluded walkway leading into the next building.

Most of the journey was almost completely silent except for Omber's whispered explanations or directions, and the occasional grunt and hiss of effort as they navigated the more difficult routes (or the bloodcurdling swearword as Omber went about picking the lock or sabotaging the alarm). Eventually, however, Glinda found herself leaning against the wall and breaking the silence with a gasp of, "Are we nearly there yet?"

"Almost; we're in the university museum – right next to the front gates. All we've got to do is find the door and we're out of here. Good news is, we don't need to hurry: this place is only open every other day of the week, so we probably won't get caught."

"Wonderful."

She took a deep breath, tried to ignore the growing pain in her stomach (and the itch of the oversized boilersuit on her bare skin, and the chafed feet earned from a pair of shoes at least five sizes too big, and the increasingly embarrassing fact that she'd had to hide her hair under the cap for this disguise to work), and looked around at the room they'd emerged into.

Because there were no windows in the building and all the lights had been switched off long before midnight, the museum was almost pitch black except for the feeble glow of the torch Omber had brought with him/her. There were a few vague lights here and there, perhaps the crack between the door and floor, or from some exhibit that happened to glow in the dark, but they were only enough to give Glinda an inkling of how large this place was: from the brief glimpse she'd seen of it out on the walkway, she'd known that this had been quite a sizeable building, perhaps four stories high, topped with a roof that tapered into a needle-like spire, and built like a fortress. Inside, she could only peer at the tiny lights illuminating the blackness and just discern the vastness of the corridors, the high ceilings and distant walls, and the hulking, ominous shapes looming out at her from the left and right.

However, as the beam of Omber's torch swept through the darkness, details of the room around them slowly emerged from the shadows: large glass display cases, their contents barely visible; walls clustered with framed photographs and paintings; hulking suits of armour, at once imposing and beautiful; arcane-looking weapons hanging from the wall, some of them so complicated that it was impossible to guess at how they worked – if they were meant to work at all.

"What is all this stuff? And why are they keeping it at a school and not at an actual museum?"

"Prestige and advertising."

"What?"

"Prestige and... look, most of the exhibits here were invented, discovered, or seized by the university by right of dead man's boots: they get to show it off, attract new students and wealthy sponsors – and draw in some cash from paying visitors. I mean, look at this..."

The torch beam swung to the left, where one of the walls was almost completely dominated by a huge oil painting (And a small plaque titling it "Our Mighty Empress Drives Out The Deviant Horde and Undoes Their Blasphemous Mentor) : from what little Glinda could see by the torchlight, the painting depicted a epic battle taking place in the city square of a gleaming metropolis; the heroes and the villains of the piece were fairly obvious – one wore gleaming suits of armour trimmed with silver and gold, the other wore tattered black cloaks that barely succeeded in hiding a monstrous array of fanged mouths, clawed hands, tentacles and nightmarishly mutilated torsos. But the focus of the painting wasn't on the battle itself (which the heroes were clearly winning) but the leaders of the two sides: the villain commander was a monstrous figure, half-woman half-spider, with all eight of her long skeletal limbs alight with magical energy, and a hideous face twisted further by an expression of deepest loathing.

The hero commander was none other than the Empress – her face replicated perfectly on canvas, augmented only by a glowing nimbus around her head. In fact, the expression of triumph on her face was so similar to the one Elphaba had worn on the day she'd first taken flight that Glinda had to look away.

"Painted by an Exemplar U graduate," Omber explained. "Hence, the University keeps its hands on the original to draw in the crowds."

"Ah. I see." Glinda wasn't really listening at that point; her eyes were still fixed on the life-sized recreation of Elphaba's face painted on the canvas. The Empress's face, she corrected herself. She's not Elphaba, she's the Empress. Try to remember that, Bubblehead.

Desperate to focus on something else – anything, so long as it wasn't the awful puzzle of the Empress's identity –, she pointed almost at random and asked, "And what about that?"

Gradually, Omber's torch illuminated a display case containing an ornate silver staff; though snapped cleanly in two, it was still an extraordinary sight: perhaps five feet long, tipped with a pair of batlike wings and a clenched, talon-fingered hand, it still hummed with magical energy even in its current state. "Wow," Omber breathed. "I didn't think they'd get their hands on that. That's a war trophy from one of the really famous battles with the Deviant Nations; The Battle of the Blazing Sky, I think. Or was it the Battle of the Scarred Mountain? Anyway, that belonged to their Great Mentor – the Seditionist's Sceptre, we called it. Last I looked, the university people were still arguing with the War Museum over who had the rights to this old thing... but I've been away for too long."

"Is this hall just an exhibit on the war, or something like that?"

"Well, this floor of the museum, more accurately."

"Then let's move on," Glinda sighed. "I think I've seen more than enough."

So, they tiptoed along in silence, Omber keeping the torch firmly aimed at the path straight ahead, and Glinda doing her best not to look at any of the objects they passed; thankfully, the few she looked closely at didn't appear to be too closely related to the Empress for the most part: most of them were war trophies like the Seditionist's Sceptre, legendary weapons and armour pieces taken from Unbridled Radiance's enemies; others were enshrined relics from U.R.'s own forces – weapons and armour again, but this time belonging to martyred soldiers who'd numbered among the university's alumni. Alongside corroded rifles and tattered uniforms, however, the ghastly waxen face of a death-mask would occasionally appear in the torchlight, making Glinda jump in surprise.

After carrying on for perhaps thirty feet alongside rusting artillery pieces and framed campaign maps, a flight of stairs led the two of them down into another floor of displays and artefacts, this one apparently concerning Purification and its many decades of development. From what little she could see of them, the objects on display down here were much more gruesome – or at least, as gruesome as Unbridled Radiance's standards of beauty would allow: rows of disturbingly lifelike facemasks hanging from otherwise featureless mannequins; glass spheres swirling with gaseous figures, all of them pounding their ethereal fists against the walls of their prisons; human arms and legs inexplicably rendered in glittering crystal; plaster models of dissected human bodies, some of them open in grisly cross-section; there was even a trio embalmed corpses lying in state.

Glinda could only shudder, remembering how much she'd hated visits to museums when she was a child, and try not to imagine those eerily-perfect cadavers sitting up in their caskets.

Omber, to his/her credit, didn't seem especially interested in examining or explaining to the awful sights around them. So, they simply avoided the guts of the exhibit altogether, hurrying along the corridor towards the next flight of stairs leading to the exit; but, it was at that point that the two of them happened to turn a corner into a room dominated by something that made them stop dead in their tracks - Glinda only just managing to stifle a yelp of shock.

In the very centre of the room, a huge glass tank sat atop an equally sizeable plinth. It was filled to the brim with green embalming fluid, luminous enough to cast a haunting emerald glow across the room – along with the twisted shadow of the horribly mutilated corpse floating within. As far as Glinda could tell, it might have once been human, but it was almost impossible to guess at its age or even its gender. Its left arm was contorted into a grotesque parody of a bird's wing, the hand crushed into the tip of the "wingbone" and the length of the arm coated with feathers; the left leg was almost that of a bird's, too, with about half of the toes sharpened and elongated into the talons of an eagle. The crooked torso was also feathered extensively, at least on the left side; on the right side, it was little more than a rubbery blob of boneless flesh. The limbs of the body's right half were equally deformed, with both arm and leg caught in the act of withering into fingerless blobs of sickly-grey meat. The face was arguably the worst, for it was the most human: true, the eyes were colossal and took up about two thirds of the head; true the mouth was shrunken, the miniscule lips hardening into a beak... but the rest of the bald, tattooed skull was still human and all the more horrific for it.

And it was then, just as Glinda was struggling to keep the contents of her stomach from making another appearance, she heard footsteps echoing towards her; a moment later, not one but two figures stepped out of the darkness. Even in the feeble green light, there was no mistaking the eerie sheen to their skin or their unearthly glowing eyes. For six awful seconds, the duo regarded Glinda with a look of undisguised amusement; then, one of the two languidly waved a hand, magically switching on the overhead lights. And Glinda could only hang her head in despair as she realized just who they'd been caught by.

Dr Cataphlax grinned back at her; even though she'd swapped the blood-splattered surgical gown for a crisp pinstriped grey jacket and skirt in the hours since the operation, she somehow looked more unsettling than ever. "A most impressive sight, yes?" she trilled, gesturing vaguely at the corpse. "A Deviant Distorted of his own free will, his degradation forever preserved in the only way the Radiant Laws will permit: as a corpse; a fitting testament to the fate that he brought upon himself, and the punishment awaiting those like him."

Her gazed shifted towards Omber, whose once-morose face was now a mask of smouldering hatred, the androgynous features twisted into an enraged scowl. "Perhaps you will join him in this very museum once we are finished here? Miss Glinda, please step away from the Distorted and remain calm - this will not take long. And please don't run: you tripped several dozen silent alarms on your way through the campus; the Imperial Centre for Vigilance has already been contacted."

"Her Radiance's Finest shall be here shortly," Dr Ranse chimed in; he'd also donned a new outfit since the lecture – an equally immaculate tailored suit and tie, exactly the same shade of grey as his counterparts'. "And they'll be most interested to know how the two of you escaped from the Sepulchre. But perhaps your colleague located a dose of the potion that the laboratory staff overlooked? Perhaps it attempted to convert you to the Deviant cause along the way?" He tutted disapprovingly: "The Deviant cannot be trusted, Miss Glinda; the Empress would be most upset if you learned this lesson from Landless rather than from us."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Glinda demanded, having finally found her voice. "What potion? What cause? And why are you calling Omber 'it'?"

Cataphlax tittered girlishly. "Surely you didn't think that the Deviant's androgynous form was the result of anything natural?" She was circling the room now, drifting steadily closer to Glinda with every step, her voice somehow expressing disgust even though it remained high and bubbly. "No, Miss Glinda: your friend is a member of a noted Deviant sect – one of the lowest and most contemptible ever to appear within our borders."

"And what exactly made us the lowest?" Omber snarled. "How exactly are we worse than terrorist groups and spies for the Deviant nations? We never hurt anyone! We weren't doing Unbridled Radiance any harm! We never took any forms the law had declared illegal-"

"And yet your method of taking these forms was in itself an act of Distortion," Ranse interrupted. "You broke the Radiant Laws, maligned the true image with Distortion after Distortion, and corrupted dozens of people to your cause – and all for something as petty as hedonism." Ranse shook his head, once again disapproving. "You'd do well do distance yourself from it, Glinda, lest you end up like its comrade on display here. " He indicated the corpse in the tank. "...Or condemned to the life of a fugitive like all the other members of the Amorphous League."

They're trying to frighten me, she thought frantically, eyes darting between the advancing mage-surgeons. They're hoping if I'm too spooked to pay attention to one of them, the other one can catch me off-guard. Or they're stalling for time until the guards get here. Either way, the plan's working, she realized, hastily turning around to see Cataphlax gliding around the corner towards her.

Then, absently replaying the last sentence of monologue in her head, she realized she'd heard a familiar name.

The Amorphous League.

"You were talking about them at the lecture," Glinda suddenly remembered aloud.

"So you were one of the witnesses to Walter Luddestone's metamorphosis? Most studious of you, Miss Glinda. Having seen it in action and observed the transcendence of Purification I'm sure you'd agree that it is by far the most ideal means of achieving and preserving beauty – certainly more benign than the curse offered by the renegade mage-surgeons who formed the League."

"Only you'd call shapeshifting a curse, glazeface," Omber snarled.

"Wait what?"

"Wouldn't you?" Ranse carried on, ignoring Glinda's outburst. "Your heresy has left you as a twisted fusion of shapeshifter and human, male and female; a thing with neither beauty nor even the most basic certainty of being. And the state you aspired to as an active member of the league – a state of perpetual shapeshifting, with no form but that of protoplasmic gel? Oh, you are truly lost, Omberature Landless. When was the last time you were welcome in the Empress's glorious presence? When was the last time you had the luxury of knowing if you were truly man or woman?"

"What makes you think I care? Why do you think that I still want to be part of your poxy little empire?"

"Oh, we don't," said Cataphlax, sickly-sweet and dismissive. "You made your allegiance painfully apparent when you chose to flee the country, and you've since made it clear you've no interest in returning to our Empress's embrace. But perhaps your sweet companion might: after all, it's her that the Empress wants alive."

Suddenly, Glinda had the mage-surgeons' undivided attention; the two of them were talking, their voices a sweet hypnotic purr and their faces seemingly more beautiful than ever.

"Wouldn't you be interested, Glinda?"

"Wouldn't you want to accept the love of our Empress and the perfection that is your birthright?"

"You've sensed the corruption in the entity stand beside you, the living taint of Distortion and the madness of Deviancy resident in its body and mind. You know you cannot trust Omber and its ilk."

"You know the fate that awaits it and those like it – a life of misery, ugliness and pain without any chance of redemption - and it disgusts you just as it would any loyal citizen of Unbridled Radiance. But you can still be redeemed; you need not put your trust in the likes of Deviants and criminals..."

As she listened, the voices of the advancing Purified seemed to merge and combine, the words dissolving into a long, draw-out hum of mesmerising sound. It was almost like music, but much more captivating, for it seemed to coil past her eardrums and slide fluidly into the deepest regions of her brain. There, it spoke of the Empress' heartfelt embrace, of a quick end to the study of her body, of hot baths and soft beds, and a slow, blissful collapse into whatever fate was decided for her. And for one paralysing moment, it was almost impossible to resist the compulsion to step away from the tank and let the mage-surgeons lead her away. Glinda would have given in right then and there – had Walter's screaming face not chosen that moment to drift past her mind's eye.

They're going to Purify me, she remembered, a shudder of horror neatly breaking the spell of the music. And that's if they don't decide to "incorporate" me into that thinking engine.

"I can still trust Omber more than I can trust you," she snarled, backing away.

"And what have we done to inspire such paranoia, Miss Glinda?"

"You know damn well!" Glinda screamed. She was almost pressed against the shelf behind her, close enough to touch the jars and globes that cluttered it. "I saw what you did in the lecture hall! I saw what you did to Walter last night! You tore him apart – you tore his skin off, you tortured him until -"

Once again, Cataphlax's girlish titter rattled the glass of the display cases. "Oh my poor, misguided child," she giggled, "you do not yet understand the realities of Purification: deep in his heart, Walter wanted the perfection we'd attained; his conscious mind denied it, his body corrupted it with the base chemicals of fear, but in his soul, he wanted to be just as beautiful as we are now. Why do you think he worked so hard, strove for such achievement, if it wasn't for the height of perfection that we represent?"

Hastily swallowing a mouthful of bile, Glinda found her hands straying across the shelf beside her, towards one of the nearest objects in reach; it was a solid glass cube, perhaps nineteen inches from end to end, otherwise empty except for a few severed fingers trapped in the very centre of it. Maybe if she could lift it, she might be able to use it as a weapon.

"Why don't any of you people understand what happened back there?" she continued loudly. "He didn't want it to happen! He was screaming for mercy up until you started fiddling around with his brain – don't you remember?"

"We do," said Ranse. "But what you call "fiddling around," we know to be the process of freeing a human being from fear."

"We do not torture, Miss Glinda," Cataphlax clarified. "We do not mutilate; we do not perform any act unless a patient truly deserves and desires it... and Walter Luddestone was crying out for it with every fibre of his innermost being." The permanent smile widened, showing gleaming white teeth. "As are you."

That did it.

Grabbing the cube with both hands, Glinda wrenched it off the shelf and flung it at the two Purified as hard as she could. Then, barely stopping to shout "RUN!" or even listen for the sound of shattering glass, she turned and sprinting towards the staircase.

A split second later, Ranse slammed into her with the force of a runaway train, hoisting her off the ground and pinning her against the nearest wall. Glinda kicked out wildly, pummelling the doctor's body with her fists and feet, but nothing she did could loosen the vice-like grip on her shoulders. Ranse barely seemed to notice the impacts against his stomach or face, and after ten more seconds of hitting him, Glinda wasn't all that surprised: it felt like she was punching a lamp-post rather than anything living.

Over the Purified doctor's shoulder, she saw Omber charging at Cataphlax, threshing the air between the two of them with strong but awkward swings of the wrench. But on the fourth attack, Cataphlax caught the wrench in mid-swing, blocking its descent with one dainty hand and slapping it out of Omber's grip.

Then she lunged: tackling the engineer to the floor and pinning him/her down with her knees, she then grabbed Omber by the collar and smashed the ex-shapeshifter across the face with a right cross that sent blood spraying out across the carpet. Dazed and clearly groggy, s/he tried to fight back, but every single punch – no matter how well-aimed – the mage surgeon instantly swatted aside, before delivering another hammer-like blow to the jaw. And another, and another – until even Glinda couldn't fail to recognize that Cataphlax wasn't trying to subdue or even restrain Omber until the police arrived; she was trying to kill him/her and succeeding, too.

And with the other doctor holding her in place, there didn't seem to be anything Glinda could do to stop the beating. Worse still, even as she vainly struggled to escape, she could hear Ranse whispering another verse of the same mind-numbingly hypnotic chant...

Biting down hard on her lip in a desperate attempt to keep herself awake, she flailed around once more – this time, trying to reach one of the shelves for another improvised weapon. No luck, the nearest shelf was about ten feet away. She tried screaming, hoping to distract Ranse – or his counterpart, she wasn't too choosy; but the chanting didn't stop, and neither did the beating.

Finally, her hands slumped to her sides in exhaustion...

... and she felt the sharp point of the broken wand in her pocket.

Suddenly operating entirely on instinct, Glinda moved with a speed she'd never used in her entire life, drawing the sharpest sharpest piece of the lot from her pocket and swinging it upwards, right into Ranse's neck.

It struck the Purified doctor in the throat, just below the left side of his jaw, and tore deep into the gleaming flesh-porcelain with a flash of what could only be magic. Ranse's eyes went wide; for the first time, Glinda saw the smile on his face give way to a gape of astonished disbelief. Then, from the wound in his throat, forking tongues of electricity began to worm their way across his skin, cracking and burning the flesh-porcelain as it went. His eyes flashed wildly, his fingers twitched spasmodically, and as his jaw opened wider, Glinda caught a very distinctive smell of burning.

With a scream of pain, he dropped Glinda and staggered away, clutching his head as if it were about to turn inside out. Glinda herself had just enough time to duck out of the way before the spark of random magic ripped through the Purified's body and blew him apart like a porcelain doll stuffed with firecrackers.

Ducking the hail of shrapnel, Glinda ran at full pelt towards the distant brawl at the other end of the room, stopping only scoop up the wrench... and immediately dropped it.

Swearing and struggling to stay on her feet, she tried to lift it again - far easier said than done, because the damn thing was so heavy that she almost fell forward twice in a row. But with Omber's pained shouts growing ever-more desperate, she managed to just haul the thing into her arms and totter over to the two brawling figures.

Then, with every single muscle in her arms howling in protest, she swung the wrench hard as she possibly could at Cataphlax's head.

With the mage-surgeon trying to strangle Omber and too busy to look up, she didn't even see it coming: the wrench hit her side-on and sent her tumbling away.

Cataphlax was struggling to rise by the time Glinda caught up with her; unfortunately, this time she was ready: when the wrench came hurtling towards her again, she ducked neatly under it, letting the heavy iron bar whiz harmlessly over her and sending Glinda into a helpless spin. She would have fallen over had she not been able to brace herself upright with the wrench– and Cataphlax was still clambering to her feet...

Right up until Omber leaped out of nowhere and cracked her across the skull with a rusty mace, felling her once again.

Glinda wasn't entirely certain how much of what happened next was due to any intelligent decision she and Omber had made, and how much of it was due to sheer adrenaline-fuelled panic. One way or the other, as Cataphlax attempted to rise again, the two of them just started hitting her – Omber with the purloined museum exhibit, Glinda with the wrench. Neither of them were interested in giving the Purified a chance to fight back or escape; every time she came close to rising, drawing a weapon from her coat or casting a spell, they'd hit her again; every time she mustered up the strength and speed to grab one of the bludgeons out of the air before it reached her, the other one would deal her a stunning blow across the face.

Had Glinda been thinking clearly, she might have been angry, vengeful; she might have been thinking of how Cataphlax was now just as trapped and helpless as Walter had been before she and Ranse had cut him open. She might even have screamed words to that effect – something loud, something furious, a shout of "He didn't want what you did to him, you monster, HE DIDN'T WANT IT!" But Glinda wasn't thinking clearly; the only thing occupying her mind was the weight of the wrench and the desperate need to stop Cataphlax from getting up again.

Eventually, the mage-surgeon stopped moving. So, almost on instinct, the two of them finally stood back; by this time, both of them were panting and exhausted, Glinda's arms screaming from the effort of constantly swinging the wrench. And for a few seconds, that was almost all she could think about – until she looked down and saw Cataphlax lying dead at her feet, the once-perfect face now smashed almost in half.

For a split second or two, Glinda found herself wanting to celebrate: she wanted to punch the air, to yell in mad, triumphant glee and kick the body to mulch. Then, an instant later, the fog of anger faded and she found herself looking closer at the corpse lying at her feet.

Having seen Walter splayed out and bleeding, Glinda was surprised to see how little blood or gore there was: there was a faint spray of red across the fractured heart-shaped face, and a few slivers of bone, but that was about it; in fact, most of what the gaping hole exposed was a bird's nest of cables and clockwork mechanisms. It was as if, in their dedication to beauty, the mage-surgeons had insisted that the Purified should die as cleanly as possible. Even with her skull cracked open like an egg, Cataphlax still looked like a doll, smiling and almost perfect even in death.

Suddenly, she found herself wondering how long ago Cataphlax had been Purified: had she been a willing convert, and sat down obediently on the table to let the specialist cut her open? Or had she been like Walter? Did she spend her last few minutes begging for mercy, pleading to see her family before the mage-surgeons tore her apart and remade her as a monster? Glinda took a deep shuddering breath and took another step away from the body, dropping the bloodied wrench as she did so.

I just killed someone, she realized dazedly.

Omber gave her a sideways look; though Cataphlax hadn't time to do any permanent damage, the ex-shapeshifter still looked a little worse for wear: along with a burst lip, a broken nose and a jaw that Omber was still absently massaging, the coffee-coloured skin of his/her face was marred by dozens of painful-looking cuts and scratches from Cataphlax's knifelike fingernails.

"First time?" s/he panted.

She nodded. "It's my day for famous firsts," Glinda gasped (wondering if it was possible to laugh and vomit at the same time).

"You're taking it pretty well, all things considered."

Give me a minute, she thought. Before you know it, I'll be sobbing like a waterfall.

"And you saved my life, too."

"I... well, I had to return the favour at some point."

"Fair enough. But how'd you get rid of that other bastard?"

Glinda explained as quickly as possible, glad to have something to take her mind off Walter splayed out on the operating table and Cataphlax with her head torn open. When she finished, Omber turned away and began scanning the walls of the museum around them, absently chewing the joints of his/her right hand. "If it did that," s/he mused, "Then it's still got a little bit of leftover magic potential in it. Maybe if I were to patch it up a little..."

---

Elphaba silently rejoiced as the tiny indicator on the map began moving again.

For the last few hours, she'd been watching Glinda's movements across the map and desperately hoping to see some serious progress; for the most part, she hadn't seen much of it. Up until six-ish, Glinda had remained almost perfectly still. At first, Elphaba had panicked, thinking that she'd been captured, badly injured or even killed, until she realized that it would be equally logical to assume that she was just asleep. And now that the blip on the map was slowly making its way across Exemplar again, she found it almost impossible to look away – as if she could somehow affect Glinda's progress by sheer force of will.

She couldn't afford to start worrying: she needed to focus on other things – how she was going to leave Greenspectre, how she was going to get across the border without being shot down, and how she'd bring Glinda back. And of course, there were also questions of what she was going to do once she actually managed to rescue her: what to do if Glinda was injured, how to escape or fight back if someone from Unbridled Radiance was attacking her... and finally, where she was supposed to bring Glinda back to.

Have a little patience, Elphaba told herself. You don't need to focus all your attention on the damn thing. Just keep half an eye on it. A watched pot never boils as they say... and I'm too willing to listen to homespun claptrap when I'm anxious.

Sighing deeply, Elphaba sank back into the cushions and once again settled in for a very long wait...

---

By the time they managed to escape the museum and creep across the last few feet of yard between them and the gates, it was seven o'clock, and the bright blue sky above the university campus was already filled with the sleek dart-shaped airships of Her Radiance's Finest – all of them disgorging a steady stream of white-uniformed officers onto the grounds.

Thankfully, most of the ships had decided to land at the very centre of the campus, perhaps a hundred feet away from the museum, allowing Omber a few minutes to go about picking the lock on the gates before anyone noticed the two figures lurking at the entrance. Of course, that didn't stop Glinda from spending the next thirty seconds chewing her bottom lip in muted anxiety, scanning the horizon for approaching guards or airships, and wondering why – if the mage-surgeons had been telling the truth – Omber didn't just turn into a bird and fly off.

At long last, the lock finally gave way and the gates swung open with an ear-splitting groan of protesting hinges. Glinda almost jumped at the sound, half-convinced that somebody at the opposite end of the campus might have actually heard it; and though Omber did his/her best to reassure her that the sound couldn't have possibly travelled that far, that didn't stop either of them from leaving the university grounds at a brisk jog.

In fact, the two of them didn't slow down until they'd crossed the lush stretch of grassland that served as the university gardens – which was delayed by their slightly-irrational need to occasionally hide behind fruit trees and dive under topiary sculptures; it took another ten minutes for them to even work up the courage to speak out loud again, and by that time they were halfway along the lengthy tree-lined driveway leading back to the nearest road – having stopped to lean against the trunk of the larger oaks and catch their breath (and in Omber's case, to start patching up Glinda's wand with the odds and ends "borrowed" from the museum).

Glinda was the first to break the silence: "Did we have a plan for what to do next?" she asked wearily.

"More or less. Once we're off this lane, we shouldn't be too far from the docks: with a bit of luck, we might just be able to steal a ship and make it over the border. Of course, that'll depend on whether we can keep up our current disguise long enough to pick up new ones. By the way, how's that stomach injury doing?"

"It hurts, but I'll be okay for now. But do you really think we'll be able to just... fly out of here with a ship? I mean, do you know how to fly?"

"More or less. I am an engineer, remember?"

"But what if we can't find a ship that you can fly? What if there are too many guards on patrol?"

"We'll just have to improvise. Like I said, it'll probably involve disguises again."

"Speaking of which, what happened to you being a shapeshifter? I mean, wouldn't that come in handy?"

Omber's face fell. "I knew you were going to ask about that sooner or later," s/he sighed.

"Well?"

"Look, even if I wanted to shapeshift my way out of this debacle – which I do, admittedly – I couldn't. The Amorphous League didn't use spells for their transformations; they used a carefully-brewed magic potion – and my last dose of it wore off about three days after I escaped Unbridled Radiance the first time and I haven't had another dose since."

"But Cataphlax and Ranse mentioned something about 'permanent transformation'-"

"They also said that was the state I aspire to, remember? I haven't gotten there yet. I'd probably have to take the damn potion for another ten to twenty years before the side-effects added up to perpetual transformation."

"Side-effects?" Glinda echoed.

"Why do you think I look like this, Glinda? This is the sort of thing that crops up with every dose of the potion we take: distinguishing marks are erased; fingerprints fade away; gender becomes difficult to determine; fingers and toes start to merge. From what I've seen, by the time you're a senior league-member, things get really interesting. Believe me; if you'd teamed up with one of them you'd be out of this city and over the border by now; and you'd probably be having a much weirder conversation, too: when they're not shapeshifting, they look like giant bowls of jelly with eyeballs."

The ex-shapeshifter glanced around, checking to see that nobody was creeping up the lane towards them: eventually, s/he held up Glinda's wand; though it was still a far cry from its original glittering magnificence, it was thankfully back in once piece and held together by a fairly sturdy-looking mixture of metal plating and wire. "Now," s/he said briskly, "You said you might have a way of getting out of here if your wand was intact?"

Glinda nodded, wondering if the Bubble would really allow them to travel far with so many superior magicians wandering the city.

"Well, I think we might be able to get that working, but only for short distances. Trouble is, there's not much capacity for magic left in the damn thing: I've worked with magical equipment before, and this one's just about at the end of its tether. If you overuse it at this stage, it'll either go dead or explode. So, just in case we do have to use this way of yours-"

"-Keep it in reserve," Glinda finished. "I know. You're not telling me anything I don't already know. On the upside, if we do have to fight again, I won't be the one hurling spells left and right."

"Fair enough. But we're going to be heading along a main road soon, and there's going to be a lot of people on heading to work: we're officially third-class citizens at present, so keep your head down, don't take your hat off, keep your wand where they can't see it, and don't look anyone in the eye. Clear?"

"Crystal."

"Good. We've got at least a mile or two between this campus and the docks, so let's get moving..."

---

What with the university's compulsive need to impress visitors, it took almost half an hour to get off the driveway and into the street; to Glinda, who was still preoccupied with her thoughts about everything she'd seen and done in the last forty-eight hours, the transition was startling: one minute they were walking along a long, winding lane bordered with towering oak trees, verdant lawns and stout brick walls – a place so quiet and tranquil they might as well have been in the countryside; the next, they'd turned a corner and found themselves standing on the edge of a city street, gawping at the metropolis of gleaming white towers all reaching towards the airship-crowded sky, and dazzled by the reflected glare of the morning sun. Even with the buildings being hidden by the trees, even with the noise being muffled by walls and distance, it was almost impossible to imagine that anything other than magic had been involved: maybe the university and the city were in different parts of the country, bridged through enchantment; maybe not. She'd have to tell Elphaba when she saw her again, she'd know all about –

Glinda swallowed. Stop it. Just stop thinking about her. Stop thinking about anything, you idiot; people are going to ask questions if you start crying.

Omber discreetly elbowed her in the ribs, and nodded at her to follow as s/he stepped out of the university entrance and onto the pavement. So, keeping her head down and only looking at the world around her out of the corner of her eye, she shuffled awkwardly into the streets of Exemplar – her thoughts blurring wildly between Cataphlax's smashed face, Walter screaming and skinless, and Elphaba vanishing into the distance.

For the umpteenth time in recent memory, she forced herself to focus on something - anything else: immediately, she found herself once again staring up at the gigantic buildings: all of them were white marble, and so polished that they almost glowed in the sunlight, their windows glittering brilliantly enough to dazzle her again. It was almost like the first visit to the Emerald City, except the decor was pure white instead of green. If anything, these towers stretched even higher, and while the designs were much less varied, they were still astoundingly beautiful – apart from the occasional ghastly poster warning all and sundry to "BEWARE THE DEVIANT! SHUN THE DISTORTED! REPAY THE LOVE OF YOUR EMPRESS AND HELP BRING THESE ABOMINATIONS TO JUSTICE!"

But thing she couldn't help noticing; it was much quieter, too. The familiar sounds of a city were all here: shoes on pavement, vehicles thundering up and down the road, the rumble of hundreds of people talking, and so on; but it all sounded distant and somehow muffled, as if it was being heard underwater. It wasn't unpleasant – in fact, Glinda was almost happy to not have to listen to the usual hubbub – but at the same time, it was still curiously unnerving.

There was one sound that could clearly be heard, though: music. Somewhere high above them, among the gilded statues overlooking the street, a beautiful voice was singing in a language that Glinda had never heard before: the song itself was equally alien and accompanied by instruments that she couldn't even guess at, but the tone of it was downright jubilant – a song to dance to, even; it might have even been uplifting if it hadn't been played in the haunting near-silence of the street. Here, in this echoing canyon of white marble, with no-one responding to it or even acknowledging that they'd heard it, the music only sounded unnerving.

Reluctantly tearing her eyes away from the statuary, Glinda found her gaze drifting down towards the people that she now shared the streets with. As low-level workers, she and Omber were pressed very firmly against the nearest wall with all the other "menials": labourers, mechanics, errand boys, and all manner of other low-level dogsbodies marched alongside them, eyes to the ground and talking amongst themselves in low, unobtrusive voices. There weren't too many of them on the street, maybe about thirty at the most, apparently because workers generally preferred to travel by the subway instead of braving the treacherous streets. Several feet away from them, the middle class was out in force, too; dressed better than the workers and allowed more freedom of movement, they made up the lion's share of pedestrians this morning. But oddly enough, alongside the starched collars and briefcases, Glinda couldn't help noticing the fact that some of the men were wearing makeup – a sign (according to Omber) of an ambitious employee trying to cover an embarrassing flaw ("That's the sort of thing that can ruin a promotion in this city, believe me"). And despite all the natty suits and upturned gazes among the crowd, Glinda also had the impression that many of the middlemen were just as cowering and fearful as the workers...

And, as she saw the gleam of Purified skin twenty feet to her left, she realized exactly why: the Empress's Chosen were sharing the path with them, humbling the uniformed middle-class with their tailored suits and effortless panache. There was nothing uniting them with the workers and the middle-class: if the reverence for them was any evidence, they might as well have been gods incarnate for all the similarities they had with the other pedestrians.

But as her eye swept across the gleaming array of carriages and automated engines gliding along the road like motorized palaces and the heavily-armed soldiers patrolling the distant streets, there was one thing that truly got Glinda's attention: the crowd around was not exclusively human. Indeed, many of them were Animals, and unlike Oz – where, in recent years, Animals were lucky to end up as servants if they were employed at all – they weren't just functionaries, nor were they limited to the middle class.

There were Purified Animals, their brushed coats and lustrous manes almost as vibrant as their glowing eyes. And yet, once she looked past the custom-made clothes and the obvious respect shown them, she couldn't shake the impression that these elite were more like taxidermy trophies than anything alive and breathing.

Not what she would have wanted, Glinda thought, absently. Not what she would have wanted at all.

After about twenty blocks, they reached a turn in the road, and the two of them left both the main street and the majority of the traffic behind and made their way down a very long, sloping avenue leading to the city docks' employee entrance. This time, Glinda had a good view of their destination from the very top of the hill, and had time to get over the sense of awe long before they reached it – and just as well, because Exemplar's primary airship dock was a city unto itself. Even if you ignored the small metropolis of shipping crates and the hulking warehouses, it was still a hive of activity swarming with the ant-like shapes of dockers, technicians, crewmen, passengers, guards and officials, all of them dwarfed by the airships they surrounded. And we're supposed to steal a ship out of all that, she thought. This might just be the most impossible thing I've ever attempted in my entire life.

Then, she heard the awestruck shouting from the bottom of the hill: another huge crowd of people was rippling across the street, but unlike the parade of morning commuters they'd just left behind, these people weren't heading to work; as far as Glinda could tell, they were congregating around a small cluster of white-uniformed guards, and-

"Oh god," Omber groaned. "Not again..."

Glinda looked closer and recognized the familiar figure of the Radiant Empress slowly making her way towards the gates. Now dressed in resplendent white and gold robes and surrounded by a glowing nimbus of magical energy, she seemed even more beautiful than before; the crowd clearly thought so too, because every single one of them was trying to get closer to her. Many of them were tearfully praising her, crying out in supplication, some of them even going so far as to fall to their knees in worship. In fact, as they drew closer to the mob, Glinda swore she could see many of the people openly weeping tears of joy.

This wasn't the kind of reception Glinda had ever seen directed at her or even at the Wizard: as enthusiastic as the crowds in Oz had been, none of them had ever shown this level of devotion. To the people of Exemplar, the Empress wasn't just a beloved celebrity, nor was she just another cherished leader: she was a goddess.

For her part, the Empress responded to the crowd with her usual reassuring smile, occasionally nodding, bowing, and sometimes murmuring words which had the congregation howling in ecstasy. At one point, one of the worshippers somehow managed to slip past the protective cordon of guards and actually hug the Empress; if Her Radiance was in any way surprised by this development, she certainly didn't show it. She simply returned the embrace – with a kiss on the cheek, no less– and allowed the worshipper to return to the depths of the crowd in an awestruck daze.

"Okay," Omber muttered. "She hasn't seen us yet. Just keep moving slowly; look like you're interested but keep moving along towards the gates. At least the gates are unguarded now. Hopefully nobody'll ask us for ID..."

It took quite a while for them to edge past the crowd, what with them having to feign interest in the luminous figure at the very centre of it, but eventually, Glinda and Omber were able to creep through the gates and into the shipping hub of the Exemplar city docks.

Just as she'd seen from the top of the hill, it was a vast place, swarming with workers – either drawn to the entrance by the news that the Empress had made an appearance, or simply going about their daily routine. Just past the gate, armed guards patrolled almost every single corner of the facility, barking orders and conducting rough-looking inspections. Magicians wandered around, surveying containers for dangerous contents and magically incinerating anything that looked potentially hazardous. Technicians drove hovering carts of equipment to and fro, stopping only to perform repairs on some power conduit or forklift. Cargo containers rumbled back and forth across the concrete plain, some of them being stacked amongst the vast towers of crates and boxes awaiting expert survey, or being loaded onto the airships themselves. Omber briefly contemplated using a container to sneak aboard one of the ships; Glinda (who'd just about had enough of being trapped in dark suffocating coffins for one lifetime) politely declined.

With so much activity going on and so many different exits and entrances into different regions of the docks, it didn't take long for the two of them to get completely lost. Apparently, this was one of the few places in Exemplar that Omber hadn't visited during his/her many sordid adventures across Unbridled Radiance.

"I knew I should have held onto the goddamn saboteur's map," s/he fumed. "I just knew it. But no. 'I won't need it,' I said. 'I'm smuggling myself out of the country with Mead and Haugg. I'll just shapeshift into a small child and pretend to be their son. Besides, people will ask questions if they find a four-year-old carrying a map of restricted areas!' Idiot, idiot, idiot!"

"Maybe we should just ask for directions?" Glinda suggested.

"And that won't look suspicious?!"

"We'll just say we're new here; it's a lot less suspicifying than just wandering around until someone notices we don't actually work here."

"Okay, you've got a point, but what if someone asks for ID the moment we start asking around? No, I've got a better idea..."

After hastily sidestepping a few patrolling guards, they finally managed to locate a mostly unoccupied watchtower; hoping to get an overhead view of the complex and the route they'd eventually take, they tiptoed up the stairs and up onto the balcony. Immediately, they realized that they were out of luck in one aspect: the entrance to the actual airship docks was overrun with guards, all of them checking ID cards and filtering out anyone who hadn't been cleared.

However, just a few hundred feet to the south of their current position, there was a tiny passageway between the maze of crates and containers: from what little the two of them could tell from this height, it actually led them all the way into the docking area - specifically to the back of what appeared to be a private airstrip, fenced off with barbed wire and heavily-armed sentries from almost other angle of approach. And despite Omber's paranoid suggestions that there would probably be guards waiting for them the moment they got within a yard of this secret entrance ("There's nobody that stupid enough to leave an entrance like that unguarded,"), the passage appeared to be completely deserted.

With no other options in sight, the two of them traipsed back down the stairs and headed south as quickly and quietly as they could; finding the entrance was a little trickier than first expected, because it was almost completely hidden by a large stack of crates. But once they'd found the tiny gate between the containers (and quickly made sure there were no guards waiting for them there) and begun squeezing their way through the narrow corridor between stacks, they eventually emerged into a small "plaza" at the very back of the private airstrip.

Though not exactly crowded, the area was still abuzz with activity; thankfully, most of the inhabitants consisted entirely of technicians and labourers, allowing Glinda and Omber to fit in very easily without their disguises raising too many inquisitive glances. From what they could work out, most of the work involved a number of heavy crates – first lowered into the plaza by a freight crane, then emptied by a small army of harried-looking dockers. In turn, they lugged the contents - a number of large, oddly-shaped metal ingots - onto motorized trolleys and slowly wheeled them towards the far end of the dock. Waiting there, perhaps a thousand yards away from the staging area, were three airships: the first two were colossal, weapon-studded hulks that looked almost too heavy to move, let alone fly; the other was a small, knife-shaped vessel – the apparent destination of most of the ingots.

Meanwhile, back in the "plaza", a small platform had been erected at the very centre of the area, and a gaggle of robed figures were hard at work on something that could only be magical – all of them either leafing through spellbooks, tracing gestures in the air and leaving multicoloured trails through the air, or tapping the ground with ornate staffs and wands. But looking closer, Glinda could only gape in astonishment and struggle not to laugh at what she saw under the hoods of the magicians: in spite of all the heavy-duty casting at work on the platform, few of them looked a day older than fifteen years of age; in fact, quite a few of them were clearly children, almost hidden beneath adult-sized robes and struggling to complete the next sequence of gestures without their hands being swallowed up by their cavernous sleeves. The youngest of them looked barely old enough to walk, and was reading from a spellbook so large that an assistant had to hold the pages open for him.

Just as Glinda was starting to wonder if everything she'd seen over the past few hours had just been a fever dream that was only now going from nightmarish to simply ludicrous, she heard a terrifyingly familiar voice echo across the plaza: "Exactly what were you thinking?"

As one, the workers snapped to attention and bowed; for their part, the two fugitives could only duck behind a half-empty container and hope that nobody would notice them. Ignoring Omber's frustrated whispering ("Why do we keep bumping into this harridan?") Glinda peered out from behind the container to watch the approaching figures: the first was obviously the Empress, white-robed and luminous as ever – though this time, she looked somewhat irritable; the second of the two visitors was another dark-robed figure, this one barely hip-height with the Empress and struggling not to trip over the hem of her robe. With her hood off, it was clear that the girl was about six years old, with braided blonde hair, a long, skinny face and pale blue eyes.

"Do you really think I'd have been willing to take the main entrance like any other worker?" the girl demanded, her voice loud and indignant. "Do you think any of my fellow researchers would have been willing to humiliatify themselves in such a way?"

"Your ego is not the issue here," the Empress chided. "Creating a back entrance between this dock and the warehouse district is a serious breach of security. Last I looked, you still had the presence of mind to care about these things – or should I notify your attendants that your psyche is starting to regress as well?"

"It's doing no such thing! I'm just not interested in being patted on the head by every other uninformiated worker from here to the entrance. I mean, the last time this sort of thing happened, one of the guards actually gave me a lollipop – a lollipop, for Oz's sake – and asked me if I'd gotten separated from my parents! And what if my age had started fluctuatificating today, while I was passing through the public dock? The secret would be out and I'd be the laughingstock of the entire city!"

"The university already knows about your little secret. You don't seem to mind the students and teachers knowing the details of your condition; why bother worrying about the docks?"

"That's different! The teachers and students understand the meaning of discretiation! If I were to start aging or regressing in a public –"

"Can we please get back on topic? This is a very important operation, and I would prefer if you didn't jeopardize it through unnecessary egotism. I trust the researchers will be ready to open the teleportation gate to the designated locations."

"Yes, yes. Everything will be ready in a matter of minutes." There was a pause, and then in a much more hesitant tone of voice, the girl asked, "Do you remember my, um, proposal regarding Paragon and-"

"Yes, I do. And I'm afraid I must respectfully decline."

"Why? What could possibly be wrong with my researchers being able to contribute all the knowledge they've acquired over the decades? Why shouldn't their experience, their expertise in magical practise and theory be allowed to live forever as part of an immortal machine?"

"Don't try and conceal your motives behind righteousness, if you please; it was bad enough having to stomach it back when you were still in a position of authority, and it's even less tolerable now that you're a ward of the state. You want to be incorporated into Paragon so you won't have to put up with the difficulties of your current condition, but it's because of that very condition that I don't need to have you or any of the other afflicted researchers incorporated. And," the Empress added sternly, "Before you try and make up some excuse about regressing to a stage prior to your birth, I've had quite a few specialists examining the data on this syndrome for many years – including Paragon, I might add. The scale of your regressions never exceeds one month of age: you are functionally immortal and the fact that you'll occasionally have to cope with a few embarrassing side-effects is no barrier to your usefulness as a researcher."

"One of those side-effects includes the inability to talk from time to time, don't forget: if I were one with Paragon, you wouldn't be handicapped by that-"

"It's your handicap, not mine. And, meaning no offence, I'd rather if I didn't let it become Paragon's handicap as well. I'm sorry, but the difficulties faced by you and the other Childlike Researchers-"

"DON'T CALL US THAT!" the girl screamed, loud and petulant once again. "We deserve more respect for all the decades of service we've contributed, and I deserve more respect for aiding your efforts to control this rat's nest of a kingdom! Do you think you'd have gotten anything done without me helping you at the start? DO YOU?!"

The Empress very slowly crossed her arms, and gave the child a look that could have reduced the entire city to a glacial wasteland. "You have my respect," she said coldly. "The trouble is that you keep giving me reasons to revoke it. Furthermore, I can't attribute your behaviour to your condition: even as an adult you were always a spoiled brat, grabbing at anything that took your fancy even if it didn't belong to you, even if you were only planning to trade it for what you really wanted. That's the very reason we formed this little partnership if memory serves – so you could get something out of me. It's how you ended up afflicted with this syndrome in the first place; it's why you're never going to be addressed as "Chief Researcher," allowed adult quarters, be granted Purification, or incorporated into Paragon. You are a child, and thanks to your immaturity, a child you shall remain for all eternity."

The look of arrogant pride on the girl's face had vanished; now she looked almost on the verge of tears. "I thought you'd remember what I'd done for you!" she whined. "Did every favour mean nothing? I thought we might even be friends! Isn't that worth something?"

"My dear," said the Empress, clearly stressing the words "my dear" as an insult, "You and your friends have been given almost every resource you could possibly need for your research; you've been given food and accommodations that most children of your biological age couldn't even dream of; you've been given luxuries, possessions, entertainment, and you've been given all the medical care and assistance that your condition requires. I have rewarded you. Now please, swallow your pride and get back to work. And count your blessings," she added, as she drifted away towards the middle of the airstrip. "Your condition might have only swapped one disability for another, but it's still a thousand times better than what you'd have suffered without it."

The girl was left standing alone in the middle of the plaza, her face streaked with tears. "Bitch," she whimpered bitterly, wiping her nose on her sleeve. "Whore. Ungrateful little... I should have left you where I found you and never looked back..."

"With that little drama over and done with," Omber whispered, "Let's get the hell out of here; we'll stow away on the smaller ship – it looks like it shouldn't have too big a crew. Once that's teleported out of here, we won't even have to pilot it out of Exemplar."

"Sounds fair enough," Glinda hissed back. "But when should we go? Now or once the cargo's loaded?"

Omber thought for a moment. "Let's go right now. If we leave it too long, we might miss out on a hiding place."

With that, the two of them stepped out from behind the shipping container and, pausing only to take two ingots from the container, joined the long line of dockers trailing down the airstrip towards the distant ships. Though both of them were careful to keep their heads down and their poses workmanlike, it thankfully didn't seem necessary for the moment: everyone was too busy hauling the cargo back and forth to pay much attention to the faces around them.

Those of them that weren't hard at work were currently staring at the enormous circular teleportation gate that was now hovering in the air just a few yards away from the ships – a hole cut in the substance of the air itself. That's our way out, Glinda thought. It's within reach...

And then, just as she was starting to think that their luck might be improving, the little girl happened to cut across the line – and trip over Glinda's shoes, landing in a heap right in front of her.

"Oh for Oz's sake!" the girl snapped as she scrambled to her feet. "Why don't you watch where you're going-"

Her eyes widened. Too late, Glinda realized that from this angle the girl had a perfect view of the face she'd been hiding under the mechanic's cap.

"You," the child whispered, cold blue eyes lighting up in recognition.

In perfect unison, Omber and Glinda threw their cargo aside and ran for their lives towards the distant ships – just in time for the little girl's clarion-like voice to ring out across the airstrip: "EMPRESS! IT'S HER! IT'S GLINDA!"

A moment later, Glinda felt the entire world around her flip upside-down as something yanked her off the ground and sent her tumbling backwards through the sky; in the space of a few heart-stopping seconds, she flew for no less than fifty feet back into the plaza before finally jolting to a stop in midair – right in front of the Empress.

"You never cease to amaze, Glinda," she said mildly. "I would have hoped you would have remained in stasis until such time as the doctor had finished examining you for signs of Distortion. But you chose to run; you hid, you evaded, you took on so many different disguises, you even killed two of our best and brightest mage-surgeons. And now here you are, no doubt trying to escape the country altogether. Disappointing, but sadly not altogether surprising; perhaps you're more like the real Glinda than I previously thought. But let me ask you this: where would you run to?"

"I don't know," said Glinda; at this point, she wasn't entirely sure what the hell she was saying – more than anything else, she was scanning the airstrip for any sign of where Omber had run off to. "I don't know," she continued aimlessly.

"You're not planning to return to the Deviant Nations? You're not interested in reporting what you've seen to your masters, or enjoying the benefits of a promotion at their hands?"

"I'm not from the Deviant Nations!" Glinda snarled. "And what would I possibly tell them? Other than the fact that this country is a madhouse, I've got nothing to say. I don't care if I don't know where I'm going, either: anywhere's better than here."

The Empress favoured this little outburst with a quizzical tilt of her head. "And what makes you say that? What have you witnessed about Unbridled Radiance that makes it so hateful to you?"

"Purification: I saw it happening, I saw a man being cut open on stage and-"

"You saw a man being elevated from his base origins; you saw a man being given the body he truly deserved, and being cleansed of all the flaws that kept him from becoming truly perfect. You're not saying anything I haven't heard about Purification in the last few decades, Glinda. Everyone who doesn't understand the blessing it offers makes such protestations – until they see how happy their friends and relatives are among the ranks of the Purified." She smiled, and somehow Glinda found herself shuddering in open horror; hearing this explanation from the Purified themselves had been disgusting, but hearing it from Elphaba (The Empress, she corrected herself angrily) made it all the more nightmarish. "Tell me," she asked, "Who was the man you saw Purified?"

"His name was Walter Luddestone."

"Would you like to see him again? Believe me, Glinda, if you were to see how happy Walter is, how productive and contented he is without the constraints and limitations of his old body, you wouldn't fear Purification. You would beg to receive it." The smile on her face grew. "Tell me Glinda, what do you do for a living? If you admit to being a spy, you spend all your life away from home, alone and always afraid of being discovered and killed. If you persist in claiming that you really are Glinda Upland... well, if I estimate your age correctly, I'd say you're still working for the Wizard. And what kind of a life is that, really? A joyless, empty existence as a state-sponsored liar, with only one or two shallow attempts at friendships and a few pretty dresses to hide your unhappiness from the public – you told me that almost fifty years ago, Glinda, so don't pretend it's not the truth."

In that moment, Glinda wanted to cry: ever since she'd first met her, she'd been clinging to the pretence that the Empress hadn't really been Elphaba, that this had just been another facet of the dream – or of hell or the hallucination or what madness that she'd found herself tumbling into. But now, with this tiny piece of evidence, it was almost impossible to deny the truth.

"Wouldn't you want some company in your loneliness?" the Empress asked. "Wouldn't you want to be a part of a society where you wouldn't be alone? Where the beautiful and brilliant like yourself would be united by their achievements, not divided by them? Unbridled Radiance awaits you, Glinda: all you have to do is accept its generosity."

"But it's... its horrifying... everything I've seen here is-"

"-still a thousand times better than when this was still known as the Land of Oz," the Empress/Elphaba finished. "And you know what I haven't seen since I took control of the country? I haven't seen anyone persecuting Animals. I haven't seen a rumour-mill spiralling out of control. I haven't seen corruption and bribery infecting the highest offices of government. I haven't seen incompetent management relying on illusions and fakery to disguise the fact that nothing is accomplished. I haven't seen nobles and social-climbers jockeying for favour, fighting to achieve power and high office only to ruin the lives of those around them though stupidity and greed. No, Glinda; I have brought order, justice and balance to what was once an imperfect land. In my society, there is none of the past eras' ugliness: there is only peace, accomplishment, unity... and above all else, beauty. Soon you'll understand."

From somewhere to the Empress's left, there was a loud scream from the dockers and an even louder scream of metal under stress and motors fighting to remain active. Across the plaza, the enormous freight crane had abandoned the business of lowering and raising shipping containers, and was now swinging towards the Empress at a speed just fast enough to be lethal, a half-full container left in its grip hurtling towards her like a battering ram.

For her part, the Empress didn't even have the decency to look surprised: without even batting an eyebrow, she tossed Glinda aside – out of danger – with a wave of her hand; then, a split second before the crane and its shipping-container flail struck her, magic flexed outwards. Both crane and container stopped instantly, as if they'd hit a brick wall: then a solid fist of magic encircled the container and clenched shut, buckling the metal and swiftly crushing it down into a piece of scrap iron no bigger than a shoebox. Then, without warning, the entire crane was wrenched off its supports with a low, metallic tearing sound, flipped upside down and shook, as if trying to dislodge someone from its surface; then, when that didn't appear to work, the very structure of the crane appeared to spontaneously warp and rupture, the arms and the chassis itself curling inwards upon themselves. Glinda caught a brief glimpse of someone leaping out of the cab at the last minute before the entire crane turned itself inside out. Then the Empress waved her hand again, catching the falling figure in mid-drop and sending him flying backwards across the plaza towards them, to land sprawled in the dust beside Glinda.

It was Omber.

"The wand!" s/he shouted. "The wand!"

Glinda didn't need to be told twice: drawing her wand from the sleeve of her boiler suit, she grabbed Omber by the hand and brought the wand swishing down over the two of them. For one horrible moment, she thought it wouldn't work, that the only decent spell she'd ever learned in her entire life would fail them when she needed it the most.

Then the moment passed, and the two of them were hovering in mid-air, encased in the familiar transparent bubble that had become Glinda's trademark in the eyes of the Ozian public.

With another flourish of her wand, Glinda sent the bubble floating across the airstrip as fast as she could, trying to outrun anything that might possibly rupture their transport.

True to form, as they flew, the ground behind them erupted in multicoloured explosions as the Empress tried to stop them, massive green and purple fireballs tearing the concrete airstrip open and showering the fleeing dockers with shrapnel.

But for once in its existence, the bubble was actually moving faster than walking pace – certainly fast enough to outrun the creeping barrage of spellcraft – and force in her life, Glinda wasn't trying to impress anyone. She just wanted to get the hell out of this country, or the very least to the nearest airship.

At long last, the bubble finally landed on the top deck of the smallest airship, bursting open against the streamlined glass dome of the cockpit and leaving the two of them to topple helplessly onto the boards; thankfully, most of the crew were already running for their lives, allowing the two of them to make their way towards the pilot's seat without having to actually fight anyone. Omber immediately ducked behind the wheel, frantically pressing buttons and turning switches, fighting to get the ship airborne.

"How long is it going to take?" Glinda asked, almost as frantic.

"Just a few seconds; they've already got it prepped for launch, thank all the gods and demiurges. At least I don't have to demonstrate how out-of-practice I am at readying airships. How far away is the Empress?"

"She's still a good distance away from what I can see. I don't think she's actually planning to get any closer."

"Oh, great. She's planning another magical attack, is she?"

"No. She's not doing anything apart from watching us."

"What kind of sense does that make? We're fugitives about to make off with an airship filled with valuable cargo. Why the hell isn't she trying to stop us?"

Somewhere behind Glinda, the deafening boom of a gunshot split the air, and without warning, Omber's right shoulder vanished in an explosion of blood and shredded meat. With a scream of pain, the engineer toppled to the deck, immediately caught between trying to clamber upright and staunching the gushing wound to his/her shoulder. Then, another shot rang out, and this time it was Omber's left knee that erupted in a spray of gore; this time, s/he could only writhe helplessly.

In shock, Glinda instinctively turned towards the source of the noise, up to the deck of the massive warship overshadowing their tiny vessel: there, his silver mask gleaming like a beacon in the morning sunlight, stood the Empress's Champion.

Holstering the smoking hand-cannon, he took a running leap and hurtled over the railing, elegantly somersaulting through the air to land crouched on the deck of their own ship – right in front of Glinda.

For a moment, he studied her, the eyes behind the mask sweeping up and down across her body – an action more mechanical than human, she thought; then he rose, drawing the blade from his belt and wordlessly advancing on her. Glinda could only keep herself as far out of reach as possible, backing desperately away from the cockpit – and away from the struggling, mortally-wounded ex-shapeshifter struggling to reach the controls– and towards the yawning trapdoor that led into the cargo hold.

But before she could reach it, the Champion swept forward with a speed that rendered him little more than shapeless black and silver blur to Glinda's eyes, and grabbed her by the arm. For a spit second, Glinda was airborne again; then she hit the deck hard, bumping her head painfully as she landed. A moment later, the Champion loomed over her, blade ready for the killing strike.

"Please," she gasped desperately. "You don't have to do this."

The masked face titled quizzically.

"Just... let us go. You can say you made a mistake, that we caught you by surprise. Just let us go."

From somewhere beneath the mask, a hoarse, sepulchral voice whispered, "Deviancy must be punished. Deviants must not be allowed to escape the Empress's wrath."

"I'm not a Deviant," she protested. Once again, she wasn't entirely sure what she was attempting to accomplish, other than allowing Omber time to get at the controls, but at that point, dying silently was about the least attractive fate Glinda could have imagined. "I swear, I'm not a Deviant," she continued. "I'm just... Glinda Upland. That's all there is too me – no shapeshifting, no deformities, nothing."

But she could already tell she'd made a mistake: under his tunic, the muscles of the Champion's arms were slowly tensing in undisguised rage. Before she could make another move to escape, the black-clad assassin was already swinging the blade down towards her in a deadly, elegant arc: it tore deep into her midriff – neatly criss-crossing the wound that the Empress had left there – and Glinda actually felt it graze her ribs as it sliced its way free of her flesh.

"Glinda is dead," the Champion intoned, voice unnaturally calm despite the hatred evident in every muscle of his body. "Glinda is dead, as the Empress has proven. Glinda is dead... as are you."

In that moment, with every nerve alight with pain and her own blood now joining Omber's on the deck, Glinda did the only thing she possibly could do under the circumstances: she drew her wand and launched a bolt of magical energy at him, the most powerful one she'd ever cast, enough to send the Champion flying off the ship; or at least, she tried. True enough, what little energy she could muster was instantly channelled through the wand and into its tip; but instead of firing, the entire wand chose that moment to give up the ghost and explode.

For three entire seconds, Glinda's right hand was a blazing fireball and the air was filled with the smell of roasting meat; but even as she opened her mouth to scream in pain, she saw the shockwave send the Champion hurtling off the deck.

Then, miracle of miracles, the airship started to move: despite being almost immobilized by the injuries to his/her arm and leg, Omber had still been able to press a few crucial switches. Slowly, with the wounded engineer painstakingly working the controls, the tiny airship began reluctantly trundling across the open portal. In the few seconds before they reached it, Omber turned around and gasped, "Hang on to something, Glinda. These damn things can knock you flat or even off the ship if you're not careful-"

And then they hit the portal – and the acceleration hit them head on, dislodging the two badly-injured fugitives from whatever toehold they'd managed to grab in the last five seconds and sending them careening helplessly across the deck. Rolling head over heels, the last thing Glinda saw was the open trapdoor to the cargo bay gaping open beneath her – right before the two of them went hurtling down the gangway, the trapdoor slamming shut behind them under the barrage of acceleration overhead.

Then, everything went black.

---

Elphaba blinked, and double-checked the map.

Somehow, without any kind of journey between the two points, Glinda's indicator had somehow gone from the very edge of Exemplar city to the very centre of No-Man's Land. Unless the enchantments around the map had started falling apart twenty hours ahead of schedule, this could only mean that Glinda had actually been teleported out of the capital... and she was now within reach.

And in that moment, just as she was wondering what to do next, she felt the anti-magic enchantments vanish from the room around her. Mind racing, got to her feet and shoved aside the armchair she'd been sitting on, snatched up the broom and made her way straight to the window; it took just under ten seconds to smash both the bars and the glass free of their respective frames, although she had to admit that blasting the windowsill into matchsticks was overkill on her part. Now staring off into a gaping hole in the wall, and with almost nothing between her and a thousand-foot drop the ground, she turned to see if anyone had noticed the ruckus she'd made.

Dorothy and Chistery were both standing there – the flying monkey's wing's tucked together in anxiety, the girl as wide-eyed and pale as ever. "You're going to find your friend, then?" she asked tentatively.

Elphaba nodded.

"Well, um... good luck."

Why do I get the feeling I'm going to need more than my fair share of that particular resource if I'm going to survive this morning?

Out loud, she said, "We'll see what happens, won't we. Maybe, before the day's out, you might just end up learning what kind of person would befriend someone like me." She offered an ironic little grin, donned her hat and clambered aboard the broomstick, swiftly readying herself for a kick-start just in case guards chose that moment to burst in.

"Of course, it all depends on how fast this thing can move," she added. "I think the enchantments are a little different than the once used on my old broom. I can't quite tell if they'll make it faster or slower, but it shouldn't make too much of a differAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGH!"

Had Elphaba been an inch or two out of alignment at that moment, she would have tumbled off the broomstick and gone plummeting to her death at the very base of the window. As it was, the acceleration merely sent her rocketing out of the badly-abused apartment and into the air; she half-expected to see her hat spinning aimlessly across the sky alongside her, but no, it somehow just stayed on her head. Then, she happened to glance up from the blurring buildings passing below, and saw a very solid-looking tower looming out of the clouds – appropriately dead-ahead. Swerving frantically to the right, she only just managed to avoid hitting it.

Just as well, Elphaba thought. That would have been about the single most embarrassing way to die under the circumstances; to wait so long for a chance to see Glinda again and end the first thirty seconds of the journey embedded in a brick wall.

But the acceleration was not done yet: now halfway across the Greenspectre skyline, Elphaba desperately manoeuvred herself as far upwards as she could manage, away from the incoming stream of towers and skyscrapers, and tried to slow down before atmospheric friction turned the broomstick into a comet. Whoever had enchanted the damn thing had wanted something much faster than Elphaba's first creation. In fact, as far as she could tell, she wasn't even travelling at this broomstick's top speed, and the city limits of Greenspectre were nearly in sight.

At this rate, she thought, as the towers of the city passed her in a blur of motion, I might just be able to reach Glinda soon – sooner than I originally thought, at any rate. With any luck, I'll have figured out how to stop by then...

For some reason, Elphaba honestly didn't feel even slightly bothered by the situation: for the first time in what felt like years (but couldn't have been more than two days, she was in flight. She was soaring above the buildings, flying faster than she'd ever flown in her entire life... and with that came the familiar sense of invincibility, intensified a thousandfold.

She was unstoppable.

More than that: she was the Wicked Witch of the West, and nothing in Oz, Unbridled Radiance or even the Deviant Nations could possibly bring her down.

---

"Greenspectre control, come in Greenspectre control. This is border station 183 with possible emergency; do you copy?"

"Roger, 183. What is your situation?"

"We have an unannounced arrival in sector 22, moving at high speed and likely to cross the border within the next five minutes."

"Describe the visitor: is it U.R.?"

"Negative; the vessel does not match any known U.R. airship range, nor does it match any kind of airship found in our databases. It appears to be... sir, I could be wrong, but it appears to be a broomstick."

"A broomstick?"

"Affirmative, Greenspectre control."

"...hmm..."

"Control? Awaiting your orders, sir."

"183, do you have any further projections on the ... broomstick's flight path?"

"All calculations suggest that it is aligned perfectly with the recent teleportation into No-Man's Land; in all probability, it is planning an interception or rendezvous. Should we open fire?"

"...Negative."

"Sir?"

"Negative. I repeat: do not fire. The broomstick and its pilot are not to be harmed under any circumstance. Prepare one of your patrol ships for launch and have it follow the incoming vessel over the border and into No-Man's Land; your operatives are to prevent any harm from coming to the vessel and to escort it back to Greenspectre if necessary. Is that understood?"

"Roger, Greenspectre control."

"Very good. Oh, and 183..."

"Yes, sir?"

"These orders come specifically from the Great Mentor; it'd be wise not to fall back on standard procedure in this case. Over and out."

---

Commander Moxburg Wills sat back in the captain's chair and sighed with an even mixture of relief and exasperation. It had taken a little more effort than initially anticipated to overtake and halt the damnable thing, but the runaway cargo transport had finally ground to a halt and was ready to be boarded.

In all honesty, the whole situation had been more of chore than an emergency. With the two fugitives badly wounded and the transport flying unpiloted across the barrens with its acceleration slowly grinding to a halt, it had been child's play to actually pursue it through the portal, harpoon the rogue ship's hull and slowly reel it in like a trout. The real nuisance was in actually readying a ship for the job of pursuit: after the mad spectacle of the escape (during which, the fugitives had somehow managed to evade the Champion in the process – no doubt the silent brute would be brooding over it for days) the order to recapture the fleeing craft had reached perhaps thirty panicking technicians and a platoon of confused soldiers, and it had been up to Wills to get everything in order. It was no easy task, considering about half of the crew wanted to abandon ship before the situation got any worse.

It took the sudden appearance of the Empress upon the ship's bow to restore some semblance of order, and by that stage, Wills had been almost pathetically relieved to see that her Radiance was somehow taking this debacle in stride. There'd apparently been some kind of argument towards the opposite end of the airstrip, some kind of disagreement with the researchers over some blunder or another being made over the portal's destination – a magical misfire by the sound of things – but so far, the Empress was still as calm and serene as ever. With her assistance, they'd managed to get the first of the two warships airborne and into the portal, though to Wills' disappointment, she hadn't deigned to join them on this mad interception.

Shame, really. Her Radiance could have probably kept the crew motivated – and probably dragged the runaway ship into their reach by sheer force of will, too.

Of course, now that he was actually watching the tiny ship being slowly reeled towards the vast pincer-shaped hangar bay of The Triumph, he doubted it would have been really worth it. It was silly of him to imagine that Empress need concern herself with something as petty as this situation; after all, she had to contend with the chaos on the airstrip on top of planning the next stage of the assault... and of course, that next stage depended entirely upon bringing back the transport and its cargo.

That still left the question of what to do with the fugitives once they were found; so far, his men hadn't reported any sign of them apart from a few massive pools of blood drying on the ship's deck, but what was he do to if he actually found them - alive or dead? The Empress hadn't specified anything in particular, but it would probably be safe to assume she'd want them returned regardless of their condition. Besides, from little he'd been able to see of the chaos unfolding back at the airstrip, one of the fugitives had actually spoken with the Empress; if Her Radiance had been willing to tolerate the presence of a Deviant long enough to actually hold a conversation, perhaps it would be safe to imagine that she might still have some kind of vested interest.

Wills shook his head, and tried to focus on something else: his soldiers hammering on the doors of the captured airship; the technicians hard at work keeping the transport tethered; the bridge of the ship around him abuzz with guards, officers and crewmembers at work; the gleaming hull of The Triumph beneath the sun; the barren expanse of No-Man's Land stretching out on all sides and framing his view with the jagged crags and wrecked ships that this wasteland had become so well known for; the odd shape in the sky.

Hang on a minute...

He hastily groped for the microphone on the control panel in front of him. "Watchtower?" he called. "Have there been any unusual sightings in the last few minutes?"

"Affirmative," came the reply. "One small craft approaching from above, captain. It's moving too fast to-"

The rest of the gunner's explanation was lost in an ear-splitting crash from directly overhead. Something had slammed into the glass dome that shielded the bridge from the open air at high speed, tearing through the reinforced glass like crispbread and leaving a gaping hole in the canopy. Worse still, right below the wound in the dome, something was slowly getting to its feet.

From what little Commander Wills could see, the intruder was tall, thin, and dressed from head to toe in deepest black- the intruder's body almost completely hidden by a billowing jet-black cloak, the face obscured by the wide brim of a pointed black hat. In one hand, it held a plain wooden broomstick, and somehow managed to make this mundane household object look more a deadly weapon than anything else. The other hand remained hidden beneath the cloak, but even Wills could recognize a magic spell in-preparation when he saw it.

Then the figure looked up: from under the brim of the hat, a hideous, livid face stared out at them, its skin Distorted with an unnatural emerald colouration, its brow furrowed and its eyes glittering with rage.

"Alright," said the creature, its voice low and dangerous. "I've had a very trying morning, but I'm going to ask this as politely as I can under the circumstances: where is she?"

The crew could only gape, terror having frozen their vocal chords.

"Where... is... Glinda?!" the creature demanded.

Suddenly capable of movement and speech again, Wills turned to the squad of gunmen standing the doorway and shouted, "What are you waiting for? Open fire!"

The soldiers were halfway through raising their rifles to fire when the green-skinned monster waved a hand and sent a rolling tide of multicoloured flame sweeping across the deck towards them; over the screams of the ex-guards and the stench of cooking flesh, the creature spun around and caught the charging security chief square in the chest with a bolt of lightning that toppled him to the floor in a charred heap. Then, as if concluding an argument, it turned to the rest of the crew, and with a wave of its hand and a blinding flash of emerald green light, the entire bridge dissolved into chaos.

Suddenly, anyone holding a gun was firing at anything that looked vaguely like the green-skinned attacker, and thanks to the dazzling light still pouring from the centre of the room, they weren't having too much success at hitting anything except their own comrades. Wills could only hide behind his chair and try to see where the Distorted monster had gone, even as fireballs ricocheted about the bridge and writhing tongues of electricity fried crewmen where they stood. Peering through the badly-cracked bridge windows, he could see the platoon of soldiers hurrying away from the captured transport and up the stairs towards the bridge, and hear the cacophony of the gunnery crews at work below, but no sign of their assailant.

And then something shot past the nearest window at a speed that very nearly shattered what little glass was left on the bridge; as the first of many explosions rocked the deck of Triumph, Will looked close realized that the creature had retreated to the air - and was now bombarding the ship from above. The deck was suddenly lost amidst whirling maelstroms of fire, hails of razor-sharp icicles, wave after wave of Distorting energies and acidic fluids. It was almost impossible to guess at how much of it was actual destructive magic and how much of it was just illusion, and in truth it didn't matter at this point: the crew believed it was real, and that was enough for them - enough to have them deserting their posts en mass. For their part, the soldiers were caught completely off-guard: quite apart from the fact that their attacker was moving too fast for them to retaliate against, the bombardment had them so hopelessly confused and demoralized that it was a wonder that they hadn't tried to surrender yet. More than once, he saw men trampling each other apparently to death in their attempts to escape the barrage of spells, or diving back below decks (sometimes not even the deck of their own ship, a few especially panicked soldiers actually trying to batter open the transport's cargo hold); once, he even saw men willingly jumping over the railing to their deaths.

Wills could only crawl out from behind his chair and make his way across the bridge on hands and knees, desperately looking for a radio that might be in working order. This was beyond any situation he'd ever faced in his career; this wasn't some flesh-corrupted Purified-to-be running for his life, a Deviant trying to shelter Distorted children or even an enemy spy armed with a few spells; this was laughing death. Trying to tackle it head-on would be nothing short of suicidal; he had to call for backup... and to do that, he'd had to make his way down to the communications hub.

Outside, chaos reigned; very few living soldiers were left on deck, most of them either too wounded to carry on or running for the escape-vessels. But there were still a few trying to fire the ship's guns –maybe enough to buy him some time to reach the radio, enough to-

Behind him, a familiar voice snarled, "I'll ask again: where's Glinda?"

Commander Wills slowly turned to look at the Distortion now standing right behind him, magic swirling in incandescent waves around its hands.

He briefly considered telling her where Glinda was, before absently realizing he didn't know who this mysterious Glinda was, let alone where. Admitting that would almost certainly result in a swift and extremely painful death; or worse, he might even be taken prisoner - forced out of Unbridled Radiance's purifying grasp and into the very heart of Deviancy, from which there'd be no return.

But there was another way out, as it happened... just over the railing, in fact.

With a scream of desperation, he flung himself backwards over the edge of the ship, vaulting over the railing and into oblivion.

The last thing he heard – just before gravity seized him in midair and sent him plunging towards the ground – was the Distortion muttering "Well, that was anticlimactic."

---

Glinda awoke to a screaming pain in her chest, barely muffled by the thundering headache rippling through her skull – courtesy of her last three or four collisions with the deck. Coughing weakly, she tried to sit up, but almost immediately slumped back to the floor with a yowl of pain; even if her legs didn't feel half-splintered in the long fall down the gangway, even if the hand she'd been using to help herself upright hadn't been effectively barbecued, she still wouldn't be in any fit state to move.

After all, she was bleeding to death, wasn't she?

This time, there wouldn't be any stasis spell to save her life; this time, she was going to die. Assuming I'm not in hell already, she thought deliriously, and this isn't just going to land me back where I started.

She glanced around her, her eyes vainly trying to discern details amidst the shadows of the cargo bay: the most she could see – by what little light shone from between the cracks in the trapdoor above them - was Omber, lying in a heap next to her. S/he was breathing, but very shallowly, the dark, androgynous features pale and almost bloodless.

We're both going to die here. Was the escape all for nothing, then?

There was a thump from overhead: someone was trying to get in, scrabbling at the latch and struggling to lift the heavy, iron-reinforced trapdoor. It didn't take a genius to guess what had happened – and what was going to happen: Unbridled Radiance's forces had finally caught up with them, and their little airship was being boarded. Any minute now, the door would open, and the two of them would be recaptured; Omber would probably be shot dead, assuming s/he didn't bleed to death before that happened, while Glinda would be retrieved alive, to either be Purified or be "Incorporated" into Paragon.

So, she thought, It really was for nothing, in the end. Or...

No. It wasn't; because I'm not going to go out quietly; I'm not going to be like the old, weak Glinda. I'm not going to let them take me without a fight, like I did with Hayfelt and the Empress. I'm going to go out the way Elphaba would! I'm going to go down fighting, and I'm going to make sure those bastards out there can't take me alive!

Slowly, backing herself against the wall, she slowly managed to forced herself into a standing position – and not a moment too soon, because in the exact same second that she managed to stagger to her feet, the door creaked upon, flooding the hold with light: at the very centre of it, a featureless silhouette stood, peering down the gangway.

Glinda raised her left hand in her best impression of a magical gesture (right would have given away the fact that she was seriously injured); even if her wand was lost for good this time, she could still pretend she had magic on her said. "Stop right there!" she shouted, doing her best to sound fearless, to sound invincible – to sound like Elphaba. "I don't care what your Empress told you about me, but I'm not interested in living up to what she imagines would be best for me; I'm not going to be Purified or taken to Paragon, or whatever. You're going to back away and run for your life, or you're going to find out just how many ways a trained Witch can kill a human being!"

There was a pause, and the silhouette crept closer. "Glinda?" it whispered incredulously.

"I mean it!" Glinda shrilled back, waving her hand dramatically. "Take step one step closer, and this entire ship goes up in smoke! You won't even have time to-"

At that point, she lost her balance; she would have gone crashing to the ground had the shadowy figure not lunged forward and scooped her up in its arms. Glinda was about protest, when the light from the open doorway above them finally illuminated the intruder's face; suddenly, the will to fight left her. It was as if all the anger and all the fear in her body had simply drained away... and with good reason.

"Elphaba?" she whispered.

"You have absolutely no idea how good it is to see you," the figure whispered, hugging Glinda fiercely around the shoulders. "Are you hurt?"

In spite of herself, Glinda could only laugh: somehow, the ridiculousness of the question – of the whole situation, in fact – now seemed so obvious that she couldn't stop herself from laughing. For about thirty seconds, she helplessly giggled and guffawed, even as the wound in her stomach howled in protest.

Between giggles, she managed to ask, "Is this real?"

"Glinda, in case you haven't noticed, you look as though you're about to bleed to death-"

"Please... tell me this isn't a dream; tell me I'm not hallucinating, that I'm not about to be dragged back to hell - anything you like... just tell me that this is real."

Elphaba's eyes softened in pity. "Yes," she murmured. "Yes, Glinda, it's real; you're not imagining this. Everything's going to be okay."

Glinda smiled, and let out a noise that started as a laugh and ended as a sob: "Thank you," she whimpered. "Thank you..."

Then she collapsed, shivering and sobbing, into the warmth of Elphaba's arms.

---

A/N: I had to trim this down from it's initial length, particularly in the case of the confrontation between Glinda, Omber and the two mage-surgeons; that segment was originally a full-blown monologue regarding Omber's past, and after looking over it once or twice, I eventually decided to take a mincer to it. Quite apart from the issue of cramming too much detail into an already-eventful chapter, giving Omber too much "monologue-my-backstory" time at this stage of the story might just push him/her into Mary Suedom.

One way or another, I hope you enjoyed this latest chapter, and with a little luck and effort, the next installment will be here soon. Farewell for now!