Over The Rainbow // Kyle Garrick // Wizard of Oz

There were certain kinds of silence that Kyle Garrick had come to distrust, and Kansas, for all its broad horizons and honest mornings, possessed a silence that could make even a man accustomed to keeping his own counsel feel as though the world had forgotten how to breathe.

It was not the silence of an empty house, nor the quiet that settled over a London street after the last carriage had rattled away and the lamplighter had finished his rounds. It was something older than either, something so immense and indifferent that it seemed to have been waiting beneath the prairie long before any farmer thought to drive a fence post into its earth. On certain mornings, when the sky hung pale and exhausted over fields the colour of old straw, there was nothing to hear beyond the distant complaint of a windmill, the occasional stamping of livestock, and the low, deliberate sound of his own breathing. The horizon stretched in every direction without the courtesy of a hill or a church steeple to interrupt it, and Kyle, who had spent the first portion of his life in a city where even poverty was crowded and every street seemed to lead into another, had sometimes found himself looking toward that limitless distance with the peculiar suspicion that it might swallow a man whole if he stood still long enough. Yet he had grown to love it. Not immediately, and certainly not without argument, but in the slow and unremarkable fashion by which a place became home: through the repetition of familiar labour, the comfort of particular voices, the knowledge of where a floorboard creaked beneath a midnight footstep, and the discovery that someone would notice if he failed to come in for supper.

It was a strange thing, belonging somewhere. Stranger still, Kyle thought, when a man had spent so much of his life believing that belonging was something he must earn.

He had been born beneath a different sky, in a London that smelled of coal smoke, wet masonry, horse manure, and bread cooling behind bakery windows. The city of his childhood had been restless and unequal, full of grand buildings whose clean stone fronts seemed almost an insult to the narrow streets behind them, where working families measured their lives in wages, debts, and the uncertain kindness of neighbours. Kyle had learned early to distinguish the footsteps of a man returning from honest work from those of a man looking for trouble, just as he had learned that a polished boot did not necessarily belong to a decent person and that a respectable coat could conceal an astonishing amount of cruelty. His was not an unhappy upbringing in every particular. There had been laughter, music carried through open windows, arguments conducted with affectionate theatricality, and the particular pleasure of finding enough money for a hot meal when the weather had been miserable for days. But there had also been the understanding that nothing came easily, that promises made by powerful men were worth examining, and that if someone weaker was being pushed aside, the respectable thing to do was not always the right thing.

Perhaps that was why he had entered the Metropolitan Police. Perhaps, too, there had been something naïve in his younger conviction that a uniform might allow him to stand between ordinary people and the worst impulses of a city that devoured its own without much ceremony. He had discovered quickly enough that the law and justice were not always comfortable acquaintances. There were men who followed orders because orders spared them the inconvenience of thought, and there were others who regarded authority as a personal indulgence. Kyle had little patience for either. He learned to read crowds before they became dangerous, to recognize the difference between fear and defiance, and to speak quietly enough that frightened people sometimes remembered to listen. He learned that a firm hand could steady a stranger without becoming a threat, that a properly placed question might accomplish more than a shouted command, and that admitting uncertainty was considerably more useful than pretending to know everything. He developed a reputation for being dependable, occasionally troublesome, and altogether too inclined to ask why when someone important expected an immediate yes.

Inspector John Price had found the last quality particularly irritating, although not, Kyle eventually suspected, for the reasons the older man claimed.

Price had possessed the weathered patience of someone who had already seen a hundred young constables mistake certainty for competence. He had a hard gaze, an economical way of speaking, and a habit of offering criticism with such perfect dryness that it could take several moments to recognize the reluctant affection beneath it. Where other senior officers had demanded obedience, Price had demanded judgment, which was considerably more difficult. He taught Kyle to observe before acting, to understand the consequences of moving a crowd toward a narrow exit, to recognize when panic required reassurance rather than force, and to remember that the people caught in an emergency would not necessarily behave sensibly simply because a constable wished them to.

"There's a difference between keeping order and keeping people safe, Garrick," Price had once told him, standing beneath the miserable shelter of an awning while rain ran in silver streams from the brim of his hat. "Remember which one you're being paid to do."

Kyle, younger then, with more confidence than experience and the beginnings of a moustache that had not yet settled into anything respectable, had glanced toward the crowded street.

"Thought the idea was to manage both, sir."

"It is."

"Then perhaps someone ought to tell the fellows upstairs."

Price had looked at him for several seconds, the corners of his mouth threatening a smile he evidently considered beneath his dignity. "One day, Garrick, that mouth of yours is going to land you somewhere thoroughly unpleasant."

Kyle had smiled back. "Wouldn't be the first time, sir."

For a while, he had believed that such exchanges, such ordinary arguments and small victories, might form the shape of his entire life. There would be troublesome streets, frightened citizens, long shifts, cold suppers, and the occasional satisfaction of knowing that something terrible had been prevented because he had paid attention when it mattered. He had not imagined that one evening near Piccadilly would leave him with a question no amount of careful thinking could answer.

The fire had begun in confusion. There had been smoke before anyone understood its source, shouting before anyone possessed reliable information, and the terrible movement of a crowd beginning to realize that the exits were fewer than the people who needed them. Kyle remembered the heat most clearly, although the years afterward would teach him that memory was an unreliable custodian of disaster. He remembered the unnatural colour of the air, the scrape of shoes against stone, and the sensation of a stranger gripping his sleeve so hard that the fabric nearly tore. He remembered making decisions because there was no time to wait for better ones. He directed people away from a passage already filling with smoke, caught a stumbling man beneath the arm, and pressed a frightened group toward a safer street with a voice that remained astonishingly steady even as his heart hammered against his ribs. There had been people who emerged coughing into the night because he had chosen one direction rather than another. There had also been people who did not emerge at all.

That was the cruelty of it.

He could remember the faces of those who had survived. He could remember their bewilderment, their tears, their hands clutching at one another as though affection itself might keep the buildings standing. But he could not persuade himself to forget the others, the ones he had not reached, the ones for whom there had been insufficient time, insufficient space, insufficient anything. He had done what he could. That was what the reports said. It was what Price told him afterward, and what the city appeared content to believe. Yet Kyle discovered that being told he had done his best was not the same as finding peace in the knowledge.

He had begun working longer hours. He checked details twice, then three times, and volunteered for assignments that ought properly to have belonged to men whose nights were not already being consumed by exhaustion. When he slept, it was often lightly, with the uncomfortable impression that something urgent had escaped his attention. Price noticed, naturally. Price noticed most things.

"You can't answer for every life in London," the inspector told him one evening.

Kyle had been standing beside a desk, studying a report whose words had long since ceased to mean anything. "Never said I could."

"You've been acting as though you ought to."

Kyle lowered the paper. His expression remained composed, but his jaw tightened. "Somebody ought to answer for them."

"That doesn't mean the answer is always you."

It was an observation Kyle would remember long after the room, the report, and the precise weather of that evening had blurred together. At the time, he had found it infuriating. Responsibility had always appeared to him as something simple, almost mathematical. Someone needed help, and if he possessed the ability to provide it, he ought to do so. He had been slower to understand that duty could become a kind of appetite, one that consumed everything offered to it and remained hungry regardless.

The invitation from Kansas arrived during those uncertain months, written in Aunt Em's practical hand and carrying none of the elaborate tenderness that might have made it easier to refuse. She and Uncle Henry were growing older, the farm required more work than two people could comfortably manage, and they had room for another pair of capable hands if Kyle wished to try a different life. There was no grand promise in the letter. No suggestion that crossing an ocean would cure the things a man carried inside himself. Em mentioned the weather, the livestock, the condition of the house, and the fact that Henry would sooner admit a fence needed repairing than acknowledge that he was tired. Beneath those ordinary details lay an offer of belonging that asked remarkably little of him beyond his presence.

Kyle read the letter several times before answering.

Leaving London had not been an easy decision. He knew its streets as other men knew the lines of their own palms, and despite everything, he loved the city. He loved the noise, the sharp humour of its people, the mingled smells of rain and industry, the stubborn lives conducted behind shabby doors. He even loved the familiarity of being exasperated by it. But somewhere between the fire and the long, sleepless months that followed, he had come to suspect that remaining where he was might mean spending the rest of his life attempting to correct an evening that could not be corrected. Price did not attempt to talk him out of leaving. The inspector merely studied him for a long moment when Kyle announced his intentions, then nodded as though some private calculation had finally been resolved.

"Farm work, is it?"

"Seems that way."

"You know anything about farming?"

"Animals need feeding. Fences need mending. Ground needs working. Can't imagine it's all that mysterious."

Price's expression remained perfectly still. "You're going to be educated very quickly."

Kyle had laughed then, genuinely, and discovered that the sound felt unfamiliar.

The journey across the Atlantic and into the American interior seemed, in retrospect, to belong to another man's life. There had been the long discomfort of a steamship, the salt-heavy wind along its decks, the endless restless movement of water beneath a sky that sometimes resembled polished pewter. There had been unfamiliar stations, railway carriages crowded with travellers who spoke of distances as though they were perfectly ordinary things, and a gradual transformation of the landscape from clustered towns and cultivated countryside into an immensity Kyle could scarcely comprehend. England had taught him to think of the horizon as something interrupted by buildings, trees, and hills. America appeared determined to prove that the earth could stretch forever without troubling itself to provide landmarks.

When he finally reached the farm, Aunt Em took one look at him, his travel-worn clothes, and the stubborn exhaustion he had failed to conceal, and instructed him to wash before supper. Uncle Henry shook his hand, looked him over with the sober assessment ordinarily reserved for a promising but untested piece of farm equipment, and informed him that the eastern fence was falling down.

Kyle had been there less than an hour.

He liked them both almost immediately.

The farmhouse itself was small, plain, and almost painfully modest, a single principal room whose furniture had been reduced by necessity to the things most useful for living. There was a cookstove, a table, a few chairs, beds, shelves holding dishes and supplies, and windows through which the prairie light entered without being softened by curtains of any particular luxury. The floor had been worn smooth by years of footsteps. The walls bore the faint marks of weather and work, and in the colder months the smell of woodsmoke seemed to settle permanently into the cotton of every garment. Beyond the house lay the sheds, the livestock, the stubborn fields, and the dug cyclone cellar that Henry had constructed with the grave practicality of a man who respected the weather far too much to trust it.

Kyle learned quickly that a farm did not care how competent a man had been elsewhere.

There were mornings when the livestock behaved with more ingenuity than any criminal he had ever arrested, afternoons when a repaired fence seemed determined to collapse out of spite, and evenings when he discovered muscles he had not previously known existed. He learned to carry water without wasting half of it, to recognize trouble in the movement of an animal before it became a crisis, and to coax a reluctant stove into usefulness when the damp had settled into everything. He learned the small art of mending, the patience required by repetitive work, and the humiliating fact that a man could possess a respectable understanding of crowd management while remaining entirely at the mercy of a chicken with a poor disposition.

"That one hates me," he announced one afternoon, standing in the yard with a small scratch across his wrist and an expression of profound personal betrayal.

Uncle Henry, who had witnessed the entire encounter without offering assistance, took a slow look at the offending bird. "She's not particular."

"Comforting."

"Doesn't like me either."

"Well, at least she's fair."

Henry's mouth twitched beneath his weathered moustache, and Kyle, recognizing the closest thing to an enthusiastic laugh the older man was likely to offer, considered the exchange a success.

Years passed in that fashion, distinguished less by important events than by the accumulated evidence that he had become necessary to the place and, more importantly, wanted within it. The seasons turned with a severity he had not experienced in London. Summer brought a heat that seemed to rise directly from the earth and settle beneath the skin, while winter laid its pale hand over the fields until every outdoor task became an argument between duty and the body's reasonable desire to remain beside the stove. There were long evenings beneath enormous skies, the smell of damp soil after rain, and the small, enduring pleasures of a meal shared with people whose company no longer required effort.

Aunt Em's affection was rarely elaborate. She expressed it through an extra helping placed on Kyle's plate when he had worked too long, through the repair of a torn seam he had intended to mend himself, or through the occasional sharp instruction that he was to sit down before he fell down. Uncle Henry's tenderness was quieter still. It existed in a repaired bootlace left where Kyle would find it, in the offering of a useful tool without explanation, and in the companionable silence of two men leaning against a fence after the work was finished.

Kyle had not realized how deeply those ordinary gestures affected him until he began expecting them.

There was another creature who helped make the farm feel inhabited in a way no amount of furniture ever could, although Kyle occasionally maintained that the creature in question was more nuisance than companion.

Sergeant Pom Pom was a Pomeranian of exceptional self-importance and remarkably modest physical dimensions. His thick sable-and-cream coat gave him the appearance of a small, luxuriously upholstered ball of fur, while his pointed ears, bright eyes, and proud plumed tail suggested that he considered himself the rightful proprietor of everything within smelling distance. He had acquired the title of Sergeant through Kyle's particular sense of humour, not through any observable respect for discipline. Indeed, the dog obeyed commands with the leisurely consideration of a gentleman deciding whether a social invitation deserved acceptance, and he showed a marked preference for investigating precisely those places from which he had most recently been forbidden.

Nevertheless, Pom possessed virtues that Kyle regarded as considerably more important than obedience. He was affectionate without embarrassment, courageous without the inconvenience of foresight, and capable of finding pleasure in the smallest things. A fallen leaf could occupy his attention for several minutes. A particularly interesting patch of grass might delay an entire morning's work. When Kyle returned exhausted from the fields, Pom greeted him with such extravagant enthusiasm that the man sometimes found himself laughing before he had even crossed the threshold.

"Steady on, Sergeant," Kyle would murmur, bending to scratch the little dog's chest while Pom wriggled beneath his fingers. "I've only been out mending a fence. You're behaving as though I've returned from the dead."

Pom, who was unconcerned with distinctions of that sort, would bark.

"Quite right. Terrible ordeal. Nearly lost me to a fence post."

For all the pleasure Pom brought into the household, there was at least one person in the district who considered the little dog a menace to public order, private property, and perhaps civilization itself. Miss Almira Gulch lived some distance along the road, in a house more prosperous than Henry's and considerably less welcoming. She was a severe woman, punctilious about boundaries, fiercely protective of her garden and poultry, and accustomed to having her complaints treated as instructions. The first time Pom had wandered close to her property, he had returned with burrs in his coat and an expression of such innocent triumph that Kyle had suspected mischief before the angry woman appeared at their gate. Miss Gulch insisted that the dog had frightened her hens and damaged a bed of young plants. Kyle did not dismiss the complaint. He checked the garden himself when she allowed it and promised to keep Pom away from her land. What he refused to do was accept her increasingly elaborate description of a creature scarcely larger than a loaf of bread as a dangerous beast that ought to be taken away and destroyed.

"That animal is vicious, Mr. Garrick," she informed him on one especially disagreeable afternoon, standing rigidly beside the fence in a dark travelling dress, her gloved hand tightened around the handle of a basket. "I shall take the matter to the sheriff if you cannot control it."

Kyle looked down at Pom, who had chosen that moment to sit squarely upon his boot and begin industriously washing a paw.

"You're entitled to complain about anything he's actually done, Miss Gulch," he replied, keeping his voice courteous. "And I'll see he stays off your land. But if you're asking me to agree that he's some sort of murderous fiend, I'm afraid the evidence is rather thin."

"You Englishmen think everything is a joke."

"Not at all. I've met dangerous dogs. I've also met dangerous people, and I try not to confuse the two."

Miss Gulch's face hardened. She warned him that he would regret his impertinence, that respectable families should not have to endure such disturbances, and that the law would have something to say if Pom troubled her property again. Kyle let her finish. Having once worn a constable's uniform himself, he knew better than most that a threat dressed in legal language was not automatically an expression of justice. Still, her anger troubled him more than he admitted. She possessed money, influence, and the stubborn conviction that an inconvenience was an injury, while Pom possessed only a magnificent coat, four short legs, and a rather poor understanding of fences. After she had gone, Kyle crouched to lift the dog, holding him at eye level with an expression of weary disbelief.

"You hear that, Sergeant? You've acquired a formidable enemy. Do try not to make it worse."

Pom licked his nose.

"Yes, that is precisely the sort of sound judgment I was expecting."

He kept closer watch afterward, not because he thought Miss Gulch entirely incapable of a legitimate grievance, but because her willingness to turn an ordinary quarrel into a punishment left him uneasy. Aunt Em had advised him not to provoke her, Henry had observed that the woman had been quarrelling with neighbours for years, and Kyle had resolved to keep Pom safe without surrendering to bullying. It was one more small tension in a life otherwise softened by routine, a reminder that even on the broad Kansas prairie there were people who mistook possessing a little authority for possessing the right to do as they pleased.

There were evenings when Kyle spoke to the dog more freely than he spoke to anyone else. Not because Pom understood the meaning of his words, although Kyle sometimes suspected the little creature recognized more than he was given credit for, but because an animal did not require a man to justify the existence of his thoughts. On warm nights, with the windows open and the scent of distant grass drifting through the house, Kyle would sit near the doorway with Pom settled against his leg and watch the stars emerge above the prairie. He had always liked the heavens. Their patterns possessed a reassuring order, even if the world beneath them did not. In London, he had been forced to seek the constellations between buildings and smoke. In Kansas, they spread overhead in impossible numbers, brilliant and cold and entirely indifferent to the lives unfolding beneath them.

Sometimes he thought of Price. Sometimes of familiar streets, the sound of wheels over wet cobblestones, and the voices of people whose faces had become less distinct with time. Sometimes he remembered the fire, though not with the same terrible immediacy. Distance had not erased what happened. It had merely allowed other memories to grow around it, as grass grew through cracks in a pavement that no longer received much traffic.

He was thirty-one now, and the years had settled upon him without stripping away the things that made him Kyle Garrick. His shoulders remained broad, his compact frame athletic and strong from honest labour, his hands capable of tenderness and hard work in equal measure. His warm brown skin had weathered beneath the Kansas sun, and the small scars of his former life had acquired newer companions from farm tools, careless wire, and the everyday hazards of stubborn machinery. His dark curls remained closely cropped and neatly tapered. A tidy moustache and the dark stubble along his jaw lent his expressions a maturity that sometimes made his dry amusement appear even more insolent. Beneath his clothing lay the inked botanical patterns winding over his arms, flowers and thorns that belonged to him for reasons he did not owe the world an explanation for.

His clothing in Kansas was as straightforward as his daily work required. Most mornings found him in a plain cotton shirt with sleeves he could roll above his forearms, sturdy work trousers, and a pair of brown leather boots scarred by mud and use. He mended what could be mended, replaced what had become beyond saving, and cared far more about whether a garment allowed him to lift a feed sack or climb a fence than about impressing the neighbours. Aunt Em sometimes complained that he worked too long in a shirt already fit for the wash, and he would answer that the cattle had never once objected to his appearance. Whatever else might be said of his wardrobe, there was no blue gingham dress hanging in the farmhouse and no reason for him to imagine himself wearing one.

On the morning the cyclone came, Aunt Em was more concerned with the weather than with his habit of working before breakfast had properly settled.

The day had begun beneath a sky so pale it might have been scrubbed clean of colour. There had been little rain for some time, and the fields possessed the tired, dusty appearance of land waiting for a kindness that refused to arrive. A thin wind moved through the dry grasses before disappearing altogether, leaving the air strangely heavy. Kyle noticed the stillness while carrying water from the well. The bucket's handle pressed against his palm, and the loose edge of his work shirt stirred once before falling motionless against his trousers. There was no birdsong. Even the insects seemed quieter than usual.

He paused beside the farmhouse and looked toward the horizon.

Kansas was a country of enormous skies, and he had learned to read their moods with something approaching respect. A cloud might arrive without consequence or grow into a thunderhead so vast that it appeared to possess its own geography. Summer storms could break over the prairie with astonishing violence, and the wind, unimpeded by hills or tall forests, sometimes travelled across the fields with enough force to make a man question the wisdom of building anything in its path. But this was different. The air felt compressed, as though the whole countryside had been placed beneath an invisible weight. Along the distant horizon, the sky had begun to darken, not into the familiar blue-grey of rain but into a bruised, unnatural shade that seemed to absorb the morning light.

Pom appeared beside his boot with a nervous little huff.

Kyle glanced down. "Not fond of it either, are you?"

The dog looked toward the fields, ears pricked.

"No. Thought not."

He set the bucket down and listened.

Nothing.

Then, faintly, from somewhere beyond the farthest fences, came a low rumble that did not quite resemble thunder.

Inside the farmhouse, Aunt Em was clearing the breakfast dishes. The air smelled of warm bread, soap, and the last of the morning's tea. Uncle Henry had gone to check the animals, and Kyle could see him moving near the sheds through the window, his figure small beneath the advancing darkness. For a moment, the scene appeared so ordinary that the uneasiness in Kyle's stomach seemed unreasonable. The table was where it had always been. The stove had begun to cool. A folded piece of mending waited near Em's chair. Pom trotted across the floor and investigated a familiar corner as though the house itself might explain the troubling change outside.

Kyle stepped through the doorway. "Weather's turning," he said.

Em glanced toward the window, and her expression changed so quickly that he felt the first genuine movement of fear beneath his ribs. "Henry's outside."

"I've seen him."

"The cellar needs opening."

"Already going."

She caught his sleeve before he could turn, her fingers firm despite their age. "Kyle."

He looked at her.

"Don't be foolish about it."

There were a dozen possible answers to that, and under ordinary circumstances he might have chosen the one most likely to make her roll her eyes. Instead, he covered her hand briefly with his own.

"I'll be quick."

Outside, the wind returned.

It came first as a sudden stirring of dust along the hard-packed earth, then as a stronger gust that rattled the farmhouse windows and sent dry grass skittering across the yard. Kyle hurried toward the cellar entrance, its low doors set into the ground not far from the house, and pulled them open. The hinges complained. A breath of cooler, earthen air rose from below, carrying the smell of packed soil and old timber. He checked the steps, cleared an obstruction near the entrance, and glanced toward the sheds just as Henry emerged, one hand holding his hat firmly against his head.

The old farmer looked toward the horizon.

Kyle followed his gaze.

The darkness had grown enormous.

There were two great movements in the sky, two currents of cloud advancing across the prairie with a dreadful deliberation that made the space between them seem less like open air than the jaws of some approaching creature. Beneath the nearer mass, a strange twisting formation had begun to descend, drawing dust upward from the fields. The far horizon was disappearing behind a rising wall of earth and debris. The wind carried an unfamiliar sound, a vast, grinding murmur that deepened with every passing second.

Henry did not waste time explaining. "Cellar!"

Kyle waved toward the house. "Em! Now!"

The next gust nearly tore the words from his mouth.

Aunt Em appeared in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame. Her expression was pale but composed, and Kyle recognized the determined practicality that had carried her through years of difficult seasons. She began moving toward the cellar as Henry hurried to meet her. Dust swept across the yard in thick, stinging clouds. Something loose struck the side of the shed with a sharp crack, and a horse cried out behind the fencing.

Kyle looked once toward the livestock, instinctively calculating whether he could do anything useful.

There was no time.

That realization came with the old, unpleasant clarity of a man who had once stood in a burning street and understood that every direction contained something he could not save.

He turned back to the farmhouse. "Pom!"

The little dog had been near the doorway only moments before.

Now he was gone.

Kyle's gaze searched the yard, the steps, the space beneath the table visible through the open door. A small bark sounded from inside, high and frightened. "Bloody hell."

He ran.

The wind caught the loose fabric of his work shirt and dragged it sideways as he crossed the yard, his boots striking the hard earth in quick succession. The hems of his trousers snapped against his ankles, and dust stung the backs of his bare hands. He reached the doorway just as the farmhouse gave a long, low creak. The sound seemed to come from the very bones of the building, timber protesting beneath forces it had never been meant to withstand.

"Pom! Come here, lad!"

A small flash of sable fur disappeared beneath the bed.

Naturally.

Of all the possible places in the world, Sergeant Pom Pom had selected the one that required Kyle to get down on his hands and knees while a cyclone prepared to dismantle the countryside.

"You're testing my patience, Sergeant."

The words were spoken with an absurd steadiness, a remnant of habit rather than any genuine calm.

Kyle crouched, planted one hand against the floorboards, and reached beneath the bed. The dog retreated farther into the shadows, trembling. Outside, the roar swelled, swallowing the shouts from the yard. Something struck the roof. The entire house shuddered.

"Come on, Pom. Look at me."

Two bright eyes reflected the faint light beneath the bed.

"That's it. Good lad. Come here."

The dog crept forward just far enough for Kyle to grasp him gently around the chest. He drew Pom out, gathering the trembling bundle of fur against his body, and rose just as a tremendous gust struck the farmhouse.

The door slammed shut.

The windows rattled violently. A plate fell from one of the shelves and shattered against the floor. Kyle staggered, caught himself against the table, and tightened his hold around Pom as the room seemed to tilt beneath his feet.

For a single impossible instant, everything stopped.

Not the wind, which continued to shriek beyond the walls, nor the terrible shaking of the furniture, but the ordinary sense that the ground beneath the house belonged to something solid and immovable. Kyle felt a peculiar lightness in his stomach, the sensation of stepping onto a stair that was not there. The floor shifted, not sideways as it might under a violent gust, but upward.

Upward.

The farmhouse lifted.

There was no reasonable explanation for it. Later, Kyle would struggle to determine precisely when understanding gave way to disbelief, but in that moment his body recognized the danger long before his mind could comprehend it. He stumbled toward the nearest wall, braced his shoulder against the timber, and bent protectively around Pom as the room lurched again. A chair slid across the floor and struck the table. The stove gave a dreadful metallic groan. Through the window, the familiar line of the fence dropped away, followed by the roof of the livestock shed, followed by the earth itself.

Kyle stared.

The prairie was falling beneath him.

No. That was not right. The prairie remained where it had always been, vast and indifferent, while the house, the very house in which he had eaten his supper the previous evening and mended a torn work shirt two days before, rose into the violent darkness as though seized by an invisible hand.

"Em!"

His voice was almost lost beneath the wind.

"Henry!"

There was no answer.

He could not see the cellar. He could not see the yard. Dust and cloud whirled beyond the windows in frantic, shapeless movement, occasionally interrupted by objects that passed with horrifying speed. A loose board. A branch. Something that might have been part of a fence. The farmhouse spun slowly, and Kyle's stomach lurched as the world beyond the glass tilted into an angle no horizon had any right to occupy.

He held Pom closer.

"It's all right," he whispered, although nothing about the situation justified the assurance. "I've got you."

The dog trembled against his chest.

Kyle looked toward the door, then toward the windows, making an instinctive assessment of exits before recognizing the uselessness of the exercise. There was nowhere to go. The farmhouse had become a wooden box suspended within a storm, and beyond its walls lay nothing he could safely reach. He could not climb down. He could not force the wind to release them. He could not bargain with the sky or threaten it into obedience.

For perhaps the first time in years, Kyle Garrick confronted a danger against which all his hard-earned competence was almost entirely irrelevant.

The realization frightened him more than he cared to admit.

He thought of Aunt Em descending into the cellar, of Henry's weathered hand holding the door, of the way the older man's hat had nearly been torn from his head. He tried to remember whether he had actually seen them reach the bottom of the steps. Had Em stumbled? Had Henry followed? Had the cellar doors been secured? Memory supplied fragments but no certainty, and Kyle found himself returning again and again to the same incomplete picture, as though enough thought might transform it into an answer.

He had been gone only moments.

He had gone back for Pom.

He would do so again.

And yet the old question returned, the one he had carried from London across an ocean and half a continent. Was there always something more he ought to have done?

The house rocked violently, and Kyle struck his shoulder against the wall hard enough to send pain down his arm. Pom gave a sharp, frightened whine.

"Easy," Kyle murmured, forcing his attention back to the creature in his arms. "Easy, little man."

He moved carefully toward the bed, using the table and wall for support as the floor swayed beneath him. His boots slipped once on the smooth boards. The hem of his trousers caught against a splinter near the bedframe, and he freed it with a distracted tug, scarcely aware of the movement. He sat on the mattress, then shifted farther from the windows, placing his back against the wall where the structure appeared strongest. Pom scrambled into the hollow of his lap and buried his face against Kyle's waist.

"There we are."

He ran one hand slowly along the dog's back.

"You're a dreadful nuisance, you know that?"

Pom shivered.

"Nearly had me out in that."

Another tremendous groan travelled through the timber overhead.

Kyle glanced upward. "Suppose that's beside the point now."

He did not know how long they remained suspended within the storm. Time became an unreliable thing, stretched and folded by fear, the minutes indistinguishable from the long pauses between movements of the house. At intervals the wind screamed with such violence that Kyle expected the roof to tear away. Then it would subside into a low, continuous roar, leaving him able to hear the soft panting of the dog and the occasional clatter of an unsecured object somewhere in the room. There was no daylight in any recognizable sense. The windows showed only grey and brown confusion, occasionally illuminated by a strange, diffuse brightness that seemed to have no source.

He tried to make sense of their movement. A cyclone could lift debris. It could destroy buildings, overturn wagons, carry objects improbable distances. He knew that much, although knowledge did not make the experience any less extraordinary. But the house had remained together. Its walls had not burst apart. The roof had not vanished. And though the furniture shifted and the timbers groaned, the structure seemed to be travelling through the air with a steadiness that defied every reasonable expectation.

There were moments when Kyle wondered whether he had struck his head and was experiencing some elaborate delirium. Perhaps he was lying unconscious upon the floor, dreaming that the earth had fallen away beneath him. Perhaps the storm had already ended and someone was attempting to wake him. The possibility offered little comfort, because the ache in his shoulder, the weight of Pom against his legs, and the hard edge of the bedframe beneath his palm all possessed the disagreeable conviction of reality.

He pressed his thumb against the small scar crossing one of his knuckles.

It hurt.

"Well," he muttered, "that's inconvenient."

Pom lifted his head.

Kyle regarded him with weary amusement. "Don't look at me. I've no idea either."

He wished, suddenly and with an intensity that nearly embarrassed him, for Aunt Em's kitchen. Not for anything extraordinary. Not for a miraculous rescue or some great revelation that might explain how a house could be lifted into the sky. He wanted the ordinary table beneath his hands, the smell of bread, the familiar scrape of Henry's chair, and Em telling him he ought to eat something before going back outside. He wanted to hear the windmill turning beyond the window and know that the sound belonged to a world whose rules he understood.

He thought of London, too, and the startling distance between the boy who had once watched carriages pass beneath gas lamps and the grown man now sitting in a flying farmhouse while a Pomeranian trembled against his thigh somewhere above the American prairie. The absurdity of it might have made him laugh under different circumstances. Perhaps it would later. Kyle had always possessed an unfortunate talent for discovering humour in situations that scarcely deserved it.

But there was no laughter in him now.

There was only the quiet, persistent fear that he might never see Em and Henry again.

He wondered whether the farm would survive. Whether the animals had been able to find shelter. Whether the cellar would hold. Whether the land itself might be altered beyond recognition when the storm passed. Then he tried to stop wondering, because each question led to another, and none of them offered an answer.

Instead, he checked Pom's paws, running his fingers carefully over the small pads to be certain they had not been injured when the house lurched. He examined the little dog's coat for splinters, soothed him with slow strokes, and adjusted the blanket beneath them to make a more comfortable place to rest. The ordinary acts were almost embarrassingly small in the face of such danger, yet they provided something solid to hold onto. A frightened creature needed warmth. An injured paw would require attention. The blanket was useful. These were facts, and Kyle had learned that facts, however modest, were often preferable to speculation.

The storm went on.

Gradually, however, its violence began to change.

The terrible grinding roar grew more distant. The sharp impacts against the roof became less frequent. The farmhouse still swayed, but its movement seemed less frantic, almost gentle by comparison, as though some enormous current had lifted it beyond the reach of the worst winds. Kyle looked toward the window and saw, to his astonishment, a pale opening in the cloud. It was not blue sky, not yet, but a soft light filtering through thinning grey, and the sight filled him with a cautious hope he scarcely dared examine.

He rose carefully, Pom gathered against his chest, and approached the glass.

There was nothing familiar beyond it.

No fields. No fences. No roads or distant sheds. Only clouds, shifting beneath and around the house, their upper surfaces touched by a light that seemed warmer than the one he remembered from Kansas. The effect was so extraordinary that for several seconds he forgot to be frightened. He had seen clouds from below all his life. He had watched them crawl over rooftops and sweep across the prairie like great migrating creatures. He had never imagined seeing their soft, luminous surfaces from above, nor the bewildering sensation of looking down upon something he had always associated with the heavens.

He pressed his free hand against the window frame.

"Good Lord."

Pom gave a small bark.

"Quite."

The house drifted onward.

Kyle remained by the window until a fresh tremor passed through the floor, reminding him that curiosity was not an adequate substitute for caution. He returned to the bed and sat with his back against the wall. The journey had already lasted longer than seemed possible, and exhaustion, which had been held at bay by fear, began to settle over him with heavy, patient insistence. His shoulder throbbed. His legs ached from bracing against the movement. The cuffs of his work shirt had become dusty, and one button had worked itself loose, leaving the sleeve to hang untidily at his wrist. He fastened it without thinking, the small domestic gesture made all the stranger by the knowledge that he was performing it in a house floating through the sky.

Pom had ceased trembling quite so violently.

The dog settled into Kyle's lap, turned twice with the serious deliberation of an animal preparing for an important appointment, and tucked his nose beneath his tail.

Kyle looked down at him.

"You're going to sleep?"

Pom closed his eyes.

"Marvelous. One of us has found a sensible use for the afternoon."

He scratched gently behind the little dog's ear.

"Suppose I might as well join you."

Sleep should have been impossible. Kyle knew that. The house was still moving, the ground was still absent, and everything he understood about the world had been overturned with a thoroughness that ought to have left him incapable of closing his eyes. Yet exhaustion possessed its own authority. There was only so long a man could remain frightened before his body began demanding the rest that fear had postponed.

He stretched out carefully on the bed, keeping Pom close against his side. His work shirt lay creased against the blanket, the familiar weight of his trousers and worn stockings a small comfort amid everything he could no longer explain. He drew one arm across the dog's small body and rested the other near the edge of the mattress, where he could brace himself if the house lurched again. The air had grown strangely warm. The great noise beyond the walls had diminished to a distant, continuous rushing, almost like the sound of the sea heard from a sheltered shore.

He remembered the Atlantic crossing. The movement of the ship beneath him, the salt on his lips, and the strange loneliness of watching a familiar world disappear beyond the horizon. He remembered arriving in Kansas with a case full of ordinary possessions and an exhaustion that had seemed, at the time, to have no end. He remembered Em setting an extra plate at the table without asking whether he intended to stay, and Henry telling him the eastern fence needed mending.

He remembered the first time he had realized he was no longer waiting to leave.

It had happened so quietly that he could not place the exact day. There had been no celebration, no declaration, no significant moment to mark the change. One evening he had simply looked around the farmhouse, heard Em moving near the stove and Henry clearing his throat over the newspaper, felt Pom sleeping against his ankle, and understood that he was content.

That was all.

That had been enough.

Kyle closed his eyes. "Just get us down safely," he murmured into the quiet, addressing no particular person and possessing no real expectation of an answer. "That's all I'm asking."

The house moved gently beneath him.

Somewhere in the distance, the wind gave a final, mournful cry.

He slept.

And while Kyle Garrick lay unconscious of the extraordinary journey carrying him away from everything he knew, the farmhouse travelled beyond the last familiar reaches of the storm. The great clouds loosened around it. The darkness thinned. The air grew mild and fragrant, filled with the sweetness of unfamiliar flowers and the freshness of a country that seemed never to have known the dusty exhaustion of Kansas. Far below, where the prairie ought to have stretched beneath an endless grey sky, there lay a land of green hills, bright meadows, sparkling streams, and little houses painted in shades of blue, nestled among orchards and flowering gardens. The grass was an astonishing green, the trees thick with leaves, and the sunlight possessed a brilliance almost painful in its abundance. There were birds whose songs rose through the warm air in intricate patterns, insects flashing like tiny jewels above flowerbeds, and winding paths that disappeared between fields as lush and carefully tended as the Kansas farm had been dry and weather-beaten.

Kyle saw none of it.

He knew nothing of the country beneath him, nothing of its inhabitants, its strange customs, its rival powers, or the great green city standing far beyond the place toward which the farmhouse was descending. He did not know that the sky had carried him beyond the boundaries of any map he had ever studied, nor that the simple desire to return home would soon become a problem for which neither police training nor farming experience could provide an answer. He knew nothing of witches or enchanted objects, nothing of roads whose golden stones invited travellers toward uncertain promises, and nothing of the peculiar way in which kindness, courage, deception, and desperation might mingle beneath a landscape beautiful enough to make danger seem impossible.

He was merely a man asleep in his own bed, one arm resting protectively over his dog, still dreaming in the ordinary fragments of a life that had already been lost to distance.

The descent began slowly.

At first, the farmhouse seemed to sink through the warm air with a strange, almost graceful movement, its weathered boards creaking softly as the invisible force supporting it began to weaken. The roof tilted. A loose shutter swung against the wall. Inside, a spoon slipped from the table and struck the floor with a delicate metallic sound that failed to disturb the sleeping man. Pom stirred, lifted his head, and listened with his pointed ears held erect, but even the little dog seemed reluctant to surrender the comfort of his resting place.

Then the movement changed.

The house dropped.

There was a sudden rushing sound, a terrible pressure in the air, and the sickening sensation of the entire structure surrendering to gravity. The bed shifted beneath Kyle. His body reacted before consciousness returned, one arm tightening around Pom as the floor seemed to fall away. The timber joints screamed in protest. A chair overturned. Somewhere above, the roof gave a deep, cracking groan.

The farmhouse struck the earth.

The impact was tremendous.

A heavy, shuddering crash travelled through the building, followed by a violent jolt that threw Kyle sideways against the mattress. The walls shook. Crockery shattered. Dust spilled from the ceiling in pale clouds, and the bedframe scraped across the floor with a sound like tearing wood. Beneath the house came a final, muffled collapse, something yielding beneath its considerable weight before the structure settled with a series of deep, exhausted creaks.

Then there was silence.

Not the ominous stillness that had preceded the storm, nor the deafening absence of sound that sometimes followed a catastrophe.

This silence was soft.

It held birdsong.

It held the faint stirring of leaves and the distant, delicate music of running water. Warm air slipped through a crack beside the window, carrying the scent of flowers, fresh grass, and something sweet that Kyle had no name for. Sunlight entered the room in long, golden bars, illuminating the drifting dust and the wreckage of the morning's ordinary domestic arrangements. A broken dish lay near the table. One of the chairs had fallen onto its side. The blanket had twisted around Kyle's legs, although the clothing beneath it was no longer what he had worn when he lay down to sleep. There had been no movement in the room to announce a visitor, no hands to undress him, and no voice to explain the change.

For several minutes, nothing moved.

Then Sergeant Pom Pom raised his head.

His ears pricked. His little black nose worked rapidly, testing the unfamiliar air. After a moment, he wriggled free of Kyle's arm, stepped carefully over the rumpled blanket, and stood at the edge of the mattress with his plumed tail lifting in cautious curiosity. He listened to the birds outside, looked toward the window, and gave a small, questioning bark.

Kyle did not stir.

Pom barked again.

A moment later, the dog turned, approached the sleeping man's face, and pressed a cold nose against his cheek.

Kyle made a low, displeased sound. "Mm. Not now, Sergeant."

Pom licked his jaw.

Kyle's brow tightened. "Five minutes."

The dog, apparently unconvinced that five minutes possessed any meaningful value, planted one small paw against his chest and barked directly into his ear.

Kyle opened his eyes.

For an instant, he lay motionless, his thoughts scattered and heavy with the remnants of sleep. He saw the familiar ceiling of the farmhouse, the slant of light across the wall, and the small, determined creature standing on his chest. There was an ache in his shoulder and a stiffness along his neck. Beneath his fingers, the blanket felt warm. His first confused impression was that the storm had passed and that he had somehow slept through the worst of it.

Then he heard the birds.

He turned his head.

The window stood open to a morning unlike any he had ever seen.

Beyond the glass, green leaves shimmered in the sunlight. Flowers of extraordinary colour crowded the earth outside, their petals vivid with scarlet, gold, violet, and blue. A branch heavy with blossoms swayed in a warm breeze, and somewhere beyond it rose the roof of a small house painted a bright, cheerful blue. The light was too rich, the air too sweet, the world too alive. Nothing resembled the dry Kansas prairie, the familiar sheds, or the endless stretch of muted fields that ought to have greeted him.

Kyle stared, scarcely breathing.

His dark eyes moved slowly across the unfamiliar view, searching for something he recognized and finding nothing. The ordinary instincts of a former constable began assembling questions, but every possible explanation seemed to collapse beneath the evidence before him. He remembered the wind. He remembered Em and Henry running toward the cellar. He remembered Pom beneath the bed, the farmhouse lifting, and the impossible sight of clouds below his window.

And now this.

When Kyle pushed the blanket aside, the impossible landscape beyond the window ceased, for one bewildered moment, to be the strangest thing in the room. Blue-and-white gingham lay across his waist where his plain work shirt and trousers ought to have been. He stared down at the unfamiliar fabric, then touched it with the careful disbelief of a man checking whether his senses could be trusted. A fitted, structured pinafore bodice followed the masculine breadth of his chest and narrowed at his waist over a white blouse with puffed sleeves. Eyelet lace trimmed the edges, and blue satin ribbons marked the seams with a neatness that seemed almost deliberate. Below the waist, however, the front of the dress opened entirely upon matching gingham bloomers, full and rounded over his thighs and gathered into lace-ruffled cuffs above his knees. There were no skirt panels or apron hiding the bloomers from the front. Instead, a pleated skirt flared from the back and swept along his outer hips, its short ruffled hem giving the whole arrangement the unmistakable shape of a dress from behind and in profile. White knee-high stockings had taken the place of his old ones, their gathered lace tops decorated with small blue bows, while sturdy brown lace-up boots remained upon his feet. His body had not changed. His broad shoulders, strong legs, weathered skin, scars, and dark botanical tattoos were all his own, and his jaw still carried the same familiar stubble.

For several seconds, Kyle could only look. He distinctly remembered going to sleep in his ordinary farm clothes. He had not owned this outfit, much less put it on. Whatever had happened had happened while he slept, and it had left him perfectly dressed without waking him or leaving any trace of who or what might have accomplished it. The garments themselves felt real beneath his fingers, the cotton soft and the tailoring surprisingly comfortable. They were neither a disguise he had chosen nor evidence that he had somehow become a different person. They were simply there, inexplicably, on a grown man who had already experienced rather more impossibilities than one morning ought reasonably to contain. His first impulse was to look for his missing trousers; his second was to determine whether the door had been opened. But the wrecked farmhouse offered no answers, and outside its window the bright country waited with a silence even more mysterious than the storm.

"Now, where the devil did you come from?" he murmured, catching one of the blue ribbons between his fingers.

Pom's tail wagged.

Kyle swallowed, pushed himself carefully onto one elbow, and looked again toward the brilliant, impossible landscape beyond the farmhouse.

"Well," he whispered, his voice rough with sleep and astonishment. "That's certainly not Kansas."

He had no idea where he was.

He had awakened in Oz.