The Oz Protocol
Book 1

The road to the Emerald City was never meant to be followed twice.

The world ended quietly.

No war.
No warning.
Just a system that decided reality needed correcting.

Now Dorothy Gale walks through the ruins of a broken world where cities are hidden underground, people are tracked by invisible ledgers, and something deep inside the infrastructure of reality itself is rewriting the rules.

The signal is getting stronger.

It leads to a place no one in the settlements talks about.

A city of stone.

A place where every person is reduced to numbers, balance sheets, and controlled survival.

But the deeper Dorothy travels into the system, the more she realizes something terrifying:

The world isn’t broken.

It’s working exactly as it was designed to.

And the one thing the system cannot account for…

is her.

With Hollow — a man whose past may be tied to the architecture of the world itself — and Silas, a consciousness trapped in a body the system calls a deficit, Dorothy must uncover the truth behind the Emerald City before the protocol that governs everything reaches its final stage.

Because once the system finishes calculating humanity's value…

there may be nothing left to save.
Perfect for readers who love:

• Dystopian fantasy worlds
• Wizard of Oz reimaginings
• Dark YA adventure series
• Post-apocalyptic survival stories
• Mystery-driven sci-fi fantasy

If you enjoy books like Scythe, The Maze Runner, Legend, or The Lunar Chronicles, you'll love this haunting continuation of The Oz Protocol series.
Series Note

Book 2 of The Oz Protocol Series

Start with Book 1: The Oz Protocol to follow Dorothy's journey from the beginning.

Book 2 : The Oz Protocol has been rewritten and now includes all of book 2, book 3 & book 4 in one volume - read the rest of Dorothy's journey today.

Read the first chapter

CHAPTER 1 — Departure

The road was a suggestion more than a road — packed earth and dead grass and the occasional slab of old asphalt heaved up by frost and time. Dorothy kept her eyes forward.

Two days out. The settlement was behind her, behind the low ridge to the east, behind thirty thousand people who were learning that waking up and being free were not the same thing. She did not look back at the ridge. She had been not-looking at it for two days.

Hollow walked beside her, his boots wrong on the uneven ground. He'd been adjusting his stride since they left — a problem with how his knees tracked, he said. Canvas didn't have knees, not really. Just the suggestion of knees. Real ones had their own opinions.

"You're favouring the left," Dorothy said.

"It's fine."

"I know. You're still favouring it."

He didn't answer. She didn't push. Some things you said. Some things you just carried.

Silas walked six paces ahead — his default when there were people around to stare. Out here there were no people. He stayed six paces ahead anyway.

The prairie was the colour of old bone — pale, dry, indifferent to the three of them moving across it. The sun was high and white and gave light without warmth. In the distance, a structure: part of a pre-storm water tower, half-collapsed, leaning east.

Dorothy's jacket had a pocket she'd sewn herself, inside the left breast, just big enough for a small metal cylinder. She touched it without thinking. Just a check — fingers confirming the shape through the fabric. It was still there. She moved her hand away.

"The settlement will manage," Hollow said. Not a question. Not quite.

"They'll manage," Dorothy agreed.

The faces arrived when she stopped focusing on the road. Thirty thousand faces in various states of waking. She had looked out at them and said: we survive. We find the settlement. We build something new. As if it were a plan. As if she had known what came after it. She hadn't. She'd said the words because the alternative was silence, and silence in a room full of newly woken people carried its own weight.

That weight was still with her. She'd expected to set it down once she was moving. It had not worked that way.

She focused on the road.

Hollow's hand found hers for a moment — just a moment, then he let go. His hand was warmer than she expected, even now. Even two days in.

"Did you eat this morning?" he said.

"Yes."

"The whole ration, or the—"

"The whole ration, Hollow."

Ahead of them, Silas had stopped.

He had stopped like a compass needle — completely, without adjustment. His amber optical sensors pointed behind them instead of ahead, away from the signal they'd been tracking since day one. Back the way they'd come.

"Observation," Silas said. "Something is following us. It is not the settlement. It is not ambient. It is deliberate. Probability: significant."

Dorothy looked at the horizon behind them and saw nothing.

"How far?" she said.

"Hypothesis: close enough to have made the choice to stay hidden. Too large to be a single person."

She looked at Silas. "Forward," she said.

He processed this for one second. Two. Then he turned back toward the signal and began to walk.

Behind them, whatever had made the choice to stay hidden made no sound at all.

*   *   *

The radio turned itself on at midday.

The dial had worked loose overnight, probably. Static first, then a voice cutting in and out across the frequency they'd agreed on. She stopped walking. Hollow nearly walked into her. Silas, six paces ahead, stopped without being asked.

She pulled the radio out. The voice was Kowalski's — every sentence delivered at the same register whether he was reporting a supply surplus or a structural failure.

"—not confirmed how many. Twelve at last count, maybe more. Cots still warm when we found them. No note, no sign of where — just gone. Wanted you to know. Over."

Static. Then nothing.

Dorothy clicked the transmit button twice — received — and put it back.

Hollow was watching her. Not the radio. Her.

"How many did he say?"

"Twelve. Maybe more."

"We should go back," he said.

Dorothy looked at the horizon ahead. The signal was there — Silas had confirmed it again this morning, directional pressure unchanged, closer than yesterday.

"We're two days out," she said.

"Those are people we freed."

"I know who they are." She kept her voice level. "I also understand that twelve people have vanished from a settlement with functional perimeter monitoring and Kowalski's eyes on the cots. They didn't walk out. Something took them, or something called them, and going back to count empty beds won't tell us which."

Hollow was quiet.

"The signal and the vanishing are connected," Dorothy said. "I don't know how. But the source is ahead of us. Not behind us."

"Or," Hollow said carefully, "you're wrong about the connection. And while we walk toward a signal that may have nothing to do with this, more people disappear."

"Silas," she said. "Probability assessment."

"Query: probability of causal connection between the signal and the disappearances, or probability of optimal response strategy?"

"Both."

"Causal connection: genuinely ambiguous. Range: twenty to seventy percent. The variance is too wide to weight either direction." A pause. "Optimal response: also genuinely ambiguous. Returning increases proximity to the symptom. Continuing increases proximity to the possible source. Both carry risk. I cannot recommend one over the other with integrity."

"That's not helpful," Hollow said — not unkindly.

"Negative. It is the most helpful answer available."

Hollow looked at Dorothy. She looked back.

"If we go back," she said, "and the source has moved — if it's a system, if it has the capacity to relocate, to close itself off — we may not find it again. And this doesn't stop."

"If we go forward," Hollow said, "and someone else disappears tonight—"

"Then that's on me." She said it plainly. "If I'm wrong about this, that's on me. I know that."

Hollow looked at the horizon ahead. At Silas. Back at Dorothy. His jaw set. Not agreement. Not concession.

"Forward," he said quietly.

Dorothy adjusted her pack strap and started walking. After a moment, Hollow fell into step beside her — his left leg careful, his hand not finding hers this time. Silas turned and led the way, six paces ahead, sensors in their steady pattern.

The radio stayed silent.

The thing behind them kept its pace.