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True to his word, Mr.Stregone had disappeared by the next morning. Emily felt that she could breathe properly again for the first time in a week.

Nobody was sorry to see him go. They had all accepted that the experiment had not only failed but had never been likely to succeed.

Dorothy was especially disappointed. “My silver shoes didn’t work, Auntie Em. My wishes for rain didn’t come true. Maybe they’re broken, and now none of my wishes will come true.”

Emily encouraged her not to lose heart, but she felt the lingering sense of disappointment herself.

The air was unusually crisp and clear that day.

No dust, no wind, not a cloud to be seen.

It was a rare calm day, and Emily didn’t trust it.

Prairie folk knew well that the calm always came before a storm: that when the air stilled and the bedsheets hung as lifeless as a hanged man on the line, that was the time to prepare.

A sense of sorry resignation clung to her as she looked out at the drab lifeless prairie.

It was no longer the dream—the home—it had once been.

They’d watched countless others pack up and head west, and even as it broke her heart to admit it, she knew it was the right thing for them to do, too.

There were no medals given out to those who stubbornly refused to leave, no accolades awarded for foolish determination.

Besides, the decision to stay or leave was no longer about her and Henry.

It was about Dorothy: what was best for her.

Where was safest for her. Kansas, with its cruel choking dust, was no place to raise a child.

It was no place for any sensible person to call home.

—

By midafternoon, the air was still curiously calm. The house, even more so. Taking advantage of the clear day, Adelaide had taken the motorcar into Liberal to fetch supplies for her next trip. She was planning to head east, where she could better prepare for her transatlantic flight.

Dorothy was still terribly upset about Miss West’s threats to send Toto away and wouldn’t let the dog out of her sight.

The two of them had gone off to the creek, as they had every day recently, to check the rain catcher.

Emily knew the child would only come back disappointed and disillusioned again and had encouraged her to stay and help with the chores instead, but Dorothy had her mind set.

“Mr.Stregone said I should check it every day, just in case.”

Emily swept her frustration into the unrelenting dust, corralling it into restless piles, each one an ever-shifting hourglass to measure the months without rain. She no longer knew where the parched earth stopped and she began.

Suddenly the broom stilled in her hands. The dust piles at her feet had started to blow, swirling and shifting. A prickle of static electricity stirred the sun-bleached hairs on her arms—a sure sign of a duster approaching.

Dread settled in her stomach as she looked to the west.

A huge black cloud towered hundreds of feet above the prairie, as wide as it was tall. It had arrived without warning, devouring the gentle day in furious gulps as it rolled toward them with the ominous rumble of a hundred steam locomotives.

The wind picked up, blowing faster and stronger by the second until Emily felt herself rocked by it. She grasped the broom handle to steady herself.

“Em! Emily! Get inside!”

Henry’s cries from the direction of the barn whipped around the eaves of the house as her neat piles of dust became whirling cyclones at her feet. She drew in a sharp shocked breath as the first fine particles of grit peppered her skin like pinpricks.

The broom fell to the ground with a clatter. The sun guttered like a candle flame, the light fading fast as Emily rushed to meet Henry, unable to tear her eyes away from the terrifying mountain of earth rolling toward them as the wind blew harder still, gathering the strength of a tornado.

Fear flared in her chest.

“Henry! My God, it’s a monster!”

“Go back to the house, Em! You know what to do.” Henry’s words were snatched in gasping breaths and smothered by the screeching wind. “I’ll see to the animals.”

As he spoke, a bird dropped like a stone beside them. Emily recalled the piseoga her mammy used to speak of, old Irish folklore about dead birds and bad luck.

“Hurry!” Henry urged. “And find Dorothy.”

His eyes carried a wildness Emily hadn’t seen before. Dorothy and Toto hadn’t returned from their trip to the creek.

She hurried back to the house, shouting for the child. “Dorothy! Dorothy!”

Fear pressed down on her as the sky boiled above, the dense black cloud expanding as it gorged on the parched land.

Emily could taste the dust now, gritty against her teeth.

She imagined it spreading inside her, filling her lungs until it choked her.

Panic rose in her chest as she turned in every direction, eyes narrowed against the unrelenting dust and the snarling wind as she searched, desperately, for any sign of the child.

“Dorothy! Dorothy, come home!”

Inside the house, she worked quickly to seal the windows and doors, pushing wet rags into every possible crack and crevice to stop the dust from coming inside.

It was a futile exercise. Even as she worked, dust covered the sink and smothered the table.

She called for the child, again and again, her cries increasingly urgent, but still Dorothy didn’t answer, still she didn’t come running through the fields with Toto at her heels.

Please, Dorothy! Please come home!

Her mind raced. For a moment, she was back in the fortune teller’s tent. “I see a dark cloud approaching…such darkness…a black swirling wind…”

A terrible blackness.

Within minutes, the temperature had plummeted. The sky was now pitch black, swollen and heavy with the earth it had inhaled. The storm was almost upon them.

“Is she here?” Henry’s face was black with dirt, his eyes narrowed against the painful grit as he stumbled inside.

“No! She must still be down at the creek.” Emily ran to the child’s bed. It made no sense to expect to find her there, but she had to do something.

Henry glanced at the door, then back at Emily as the house began to rattle. “I’m going to look for her.”

“Henry, no!” Emily was desperate—terrified for the child, terrified of losing Henry.

“It’s too dangerous.” She ran to the door again, disoriented by the deafening noise, the dirt, the choking dust. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.

“Dorothy! Dorothy!” Her strangled cries were snatched away by the wind.

Henry grabbed her arm. “It’s too late, Em. We have to go down.” He opened the hatch to the cyclone cellar and almost pushed her inside. “Now, Em. Hurry.”

Frantic with fear, Emily climbed down the ladder into the small space, slipping and stumbling in the dark.

Henry was right behind her. They put wet cloths to their faces and clung to each other as the mournful rumbling intensified and the house shook violently.

Above them, glass shattered. Earth rained down, slamming against the house as the dust blew hard, sifting down onto them in endless waves until Emily was certain they would be buried alive.

And all the while, the terrible noise continued: scraping and banging, creaking and roaring. On and on and on.

And Dorothy was still out there.

Again and again, Emily desperately cried out for her, until her voice was hoarse and she couldn’t bear it any longer.

She turned to go back up the ladder. “We can’t leave her, Henry! She’ll be killed out there.”

In the dark, Henry grabbed her hand. “It’s madness to try and look for her in this, Em. I’ll go out when it’s over. She’ll have found somewhere to shelter. She knows what to do.”

But this dust storm felt different. Nobody was prepared for anything this big.

Emily was suffocated by fear. They had left it too late, waited too long to leave Kansas, and now the child was in grave danger.

“This is all his fault,” she said. “He should never have come here!”

“Who?”

“Leonardo. Dorothy wouldn’t have gone to the creek if it weren’t for his silly rain catcher. He should have stayed away.”

Henry disagreed. “It’s my fault for bringing him here in the first place.”

Emily gripped his hand tight. She couldn’t bear for him to take the blame when she knew the truth. “It isn’t your fault, Henry. None of this is your fault.”

As the wind roared and the dirt blew and great drifts of dust smothered everything and everyone in its path, the awful words Emily had once spoken in temper swirled around her.

“I wish she’d never come here, Henry. We’ve had nothing but bad luck and cross words since.

I wish things could go back to how they were before Dorothy Gale ever set foot in Kansas!

” She would do anything to take those words back now, undo such wicked thoughts, but some things, once shared, became a storm of their own.

Then the last scraps of light were extinguished.

Pitch black.

It was worse than any twister they’d known, worse than any hailstorm, worse than all the other dust storms combined.

This was a monster, the most appalling terrifying thing Emily had ever experienced.

She clung to Henry in the dark. There was nothing they could do but wait.

—

For too long, the dust heaved and the wind rampaged above.

And then, silence.

It was over.

Coughing violently, Emily clambered out of the cellar.

A thick layer of dirt and dust had settled over everything inside.

She kicked open the front door, pushing against a drift of dirt that had settled against it.

The devastation that greeted her took her breath away.

It was barely recognizable from the scene she’d looked out on not thirty minutes earlier.

Huge mounds of dirt and dust lay everywhere. The fence posts that lined their farm track only stuck out a few inches above the earth. Some drifts were as tall as a child: as tall as Dorothy.

Emily sank to her knees and retched into the dirt as fear and filth purged from her in pulsing waves and the child’s name fell from her lips in a strangled whisper.

“Oh, Dorothy! My dear, darling Dorothy, I’m so sorry.”

Henry appeared beside her. “I’m going to look for her.”

“How, Henry? How can you get farther than the end of the lane? Look at it. You’ll have to dig your way through.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do. Stay here in case she comes back.” He grabbed Emily’s hands and looked into her eyes. “I’ll bring her home, Em. I promise I’ll bring her home.”

He waded through the dust toward the barn, dug out his shovel with his bare hands, and set off toward the creek.

—

It was several agonizing hours until he returned.

Emily hadn’t moved.

She stood up when she saw him stumbling through the dirt, almost unrecognizable he was so covered in dust, and there, lifeless in his arms, was Dorothy, and Toto peering out of a knapsack at Henry’s side.

“I found her,” he said as he collapsed at the porch. “She needs to go straight to the hospital.”

In that moment, Emily cared nothing for failed crops, or drought, or any hardship they’d ever endured. She would keep it all, every awful part of it, if only Dorothy could be safe.

Dorothy was all that mattered now.