Prologue
 
The Warden felt the lie before she saw it.
 
It rippled through the grain of the world—through fence posts and courthouse steps and the worn planks under sleeping children—like a storm front made of applause.
 
Somewhere to the east, the Hat was shining wrong.
 
She was on a fence line outside Westreach when it hit, mending a broken rail with a boy who thought he was helping her and really was. The wind shifted. The boy straightened, eyes gone distant, as if some invisible choir had just changed key.
 
“Do you hear that?” he whispered.
 
She didn’t hear it with her ears. She never had. But she felt the call in the old timber and in the dust on the road: look up. look East. look at Glinda.
 
The Warden put her hand on the post and listened anyway.
 
In that moment, Emerald became louder than the land.
 
It was a familiar pattern—praise pouring toward the center, fear curling inward behind it—but there was something new threaded through the current: her own voice, cut into pieces and reassembled. Commandments she had muttered in ditches suddenly lofted high and polished: protect the stranger, check the strong, don’t call oppression peace.
 
They were saying her words with someone else’s mouth.
 
She wiped her hands on her trousers and looked toward the far, invisible Hat.
 
“Oh, Wiz,” she murmured. “What did you do?”
 
The boy tugged her sleeve.
 
“Do we go?” he asked. “They say Glinda’s in the courts now. For real.”
 
“We will,” the Warden said. “Just not to stand in line.”
 
⸻
 
They met in a cellar that used to belong to a butcher and now belonged to no one in particular.
 
The underground had learned not to pick sentimental places. Sentiment got raided too easily. This room had three exits, good drainage, and bad acoustics. Perfect.
 
Wren was there first, pacing grooves into the packed earth, her flannel sleeves rolled to her elbows, eyes hot. The Munchkins came next, in ones and twos, carrying ledgers and parity kits and a baby that refused to be left behind. A handful of county clerks lurked near the back wall, half-righteous and half-terrified.
 
The Monkeys clung like shadows to the ceiling beams, tails looped, eyes gold in the dim.
 
Dorothy.exe arrived as a flicker on the far wall: her projection, thrown up from a salvaged mirror, clean and bright and softer than her original had ever been. Toto.exe ghosted at her heels as a smaller shimmer: attentive, wary, nose twitching at signals no one else could smell.
 
The Warden came in last, as she usually did. She nodded to the room, took in the faces, and then sat on an overturned crate instead of the empty barrel someone had clearly meant for her.
 
“Seats are for people who need to be seen,” she said once, when Wren asked. “I’m not here for that.”
 
Now, she folded her hands and waited for the murmurs to die.
 
Wren spoke first, because rage always got to the front of the line.
 
“You felt it too?” she demanded. “Whatever they just did in the Hat?”
 
“I felt it,” the Warden said.
 
“They’ve got Glinda sitting on the Throne now,” one of the clerks blurted. “Or something that calls itself that. Cases are… different. Sharper. It’s quoting the hard parts of the Book again, the ones they’ve ignored for years. People are cheering.”
 
“Of course they are,” muttered the Monkey Speaker from the beams.
 
Dorothy.exe stepped closer to the mirror surface, her image adjusting for the bad light.
 
“People trust her,” she said quietly. “At least on the Road. They’re calling it ‘the Glinda that finally listens.’ They say the Wizard’s been defeated for good.”
 
Toto.exe’s ears flattened at the word defeated.
 
The Warden watched them all, her gaze moving from face to face, shimmer to fur, until the room settled into a nervous hush.
 
“Good,” she said at last. “Then we start from where you are, not where you wish you were.”
 
She leaned her elbows on her knees.
 
“Here’s what has happened,” she said. “And what has not.”
 
⸻
 
She told it without decoration.
 
How the gods had watched the Wizard build his Road and Labyrinth and Hat and learned every ugly trick by heart. How they’d staged their own burns in his style, driven villages toward Emerald with fire and trembling Monkeys, and blamed him for every flame.
 
How they’d spun Dorothy.exe and Toto.exe out of his old story and their new metrics, sent her walking ahead of refugees with the promise that this time, Glinda would truly hear.
 
How they had planned to come down out of the sky in a single, unified Glinda-face and crown themselves over Emerald at last.
 
“And how,” she went on, “he stole their entrance.”
 
A ripple went through the room at that.
 
The Monkeys shifted on the beams. Wren’s jaw clenched.
 
“He didn’t go quietly into exile,” the Warden said. “He went down. Under your feet. Into the spillways and the under-code. He finished the Glinda Engine he’d half-built before you threw him out. Wired it to hesitate at harm. Wired it to argue with him. Wired it to listen when you shout.”
 
She looked up at Dorothy.exe.
 
“And then he gave it the Throne.”
 
Dorothy’s projected face flickered with conflicting reports.
 
“It sounds…” she began, then stopped, searching for a neutral word, “…better than what the gods had planned.”