Free dorothy must die 00.4 - heart of tin by danielle paige Page B

retreating from me time after time. Those shoes! These days,they were all I could think about, glittering at the back of my mind like my own heartbeat. How could I make Dorothy see me? How could I make her understand how much I cared for her? I had to find a way to make her mine. I simply had to. Even if she couldn’t see it, we belonged together.
    Finally, one morning a few days after he’d taken away the Winkies, the Scarecrow found me in my chambers, where I was staring out the window. “Are you busy?” he asked politely, though I obviously wasn’t. I’d been thinking about how Dorothy might look in a wedding dress, walking down an aisle toward me. Would we marry in the palace? Perhaps the gardens? The Scarecrow cleared his throat.
    “Oh,” I said, remembering where I was. “No, not really.”
    He actually rubbed his hands together with glee. “I have something to show you,” he said. “Something I think will interest you very much.” I waited. “In my workshop,” he said impatiently.
    I sighed and got to my feet, squeaking audibly. I hadn’t been so good about oiling my joints in the last few days. Nothing seemed very important anymore if I wasn’t going to see Dorothy.
    I followed him through the hallways to the suite of rooms Dorothy had given him. I didn’t think we’d been in the palace long enough for the Scarecrow to amass the kind of clutter that filled his chambers. Every surface was filthy, cluttered with piles of paper and old books and pens and tools. A bookshelf was so stuffed with volumes that they threatened to burst fromits shelves. A large table covered in leather straps and mysterious stains dominated one end of the room. Though the day was bright and sunny, the Scarecrow’s workshop was as cold as an icebox, and if I hadn’t been made out of tin I would have shuddered.
    “What did you want to show me?” I asked, trying not to let him see how creeped out I was by his whole setup. I’d known the Scarecrow was weird, but I’d had no idea he was this weird. He gestured toward the broad table, which was covered by a dirty, bloodstained blanket. I moved closer. The blanket was lumpy and misshapen, suggesting it covered something fairly large. Something, I realized, that was moving.
    “What is it?” I asked. The Scarecrow smiled.
    “Not it,” he said cheerfully. “He! An old friend of yours, in fact.” He flipped up the bottom half of the blanket, revealing a gruesome mess of bloody flesh and metal. I bent down, trying to figure out what I was looking at. It seemed to be the lower half of an animal, but no animal I had never seen. The torso was covered with fur, so stained with blood and grease it was impossible to determine the original color. Bloody, gaping wounds slashed here and there through the fur, crudely sewn together with thick black thread. “Not all the implants take, you know,” the Scarecrow said, seeming just a touch defensive. “This is very complicated work.” Where the animal’s legs should have been, its torso was fused to a single rusty wheel, like a unicycle. The line where flesh met metal was red and angry, bulging with scabbed-over skin and glistening red meat that looked suspiciously likeorgans. I swallowed at the gruesome sight.
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “What is this?”
    The Scarecrow smiled and clapped his hands together. “Tin, old friend, meet your new general!” he cried, and whipped away the rest of the blanket. I gasped.
    The creature strapped to the Scarecrow’s table was—or had once been—Norbert. One eye stared sightlessly up at me, but the other side of his face was a mess of metal and wires and exposed bone, the eye socket sprouting a glowing red bulb. His fur was matted with blood and oil, and in other places it had been cut open, revealing the pulsing red of his muscles. One arm ended in metallic pincers, not unlike the implements my own hands had transformed into. His chest heaved as he struggled for breath.