by Jada Fisher
“Oh, I think I’m gonna be sick,” Mallory said, stumbling to the side.
I wanted to agree with her, but apparently two hops in a row was not a good idea, because I felt like someone had scrambled my insides with a stick and tried to yank them out of my nose. I opened my mouth to respond but ended up falling over instead.
“Davie!”
I felt Bron’s hands on me again, trying to pull me to my feet, but my body would not respond. Clearly jumping to the hub was one thing, but punching out of there was another thing entirely. But the real question was… Where exactly had we landed?
I didn’t know, and I couldn’t move my head or eyes to figure it out. I suppose it didn’t matter where we were, we were far away from the rotted dragon and that was what mattered most.
…I hoped.
I attempted one last time to push myself up to my knees, but there wasn’t even a hint of a reaction from my body. Instead I just laid there, letting my consciousness swirl around my head until it all rushed down the drain and into oblivion.
2
A Hop, Skip and a Jump
I had several distinct memories as a child of waking up after long, drug-induced comas to find parts of my body grafted over and covered in strange things that were supposed to heal it. There was a very particular sort of confusion that went with shaking off the shackles of such strong medicines, a sort of inhuman unbelonging that made everything feel wrong, but also completely alien and unknown. It was a sensation I didn’t think I could ever forget, and as I came to, I was reminded of it.
My eyelids fluttered, trying to remember how to perform their basic function, but mostly everything was just a fuzzy, blurred mess. My ears weren’t helping much either, a persistent mix between ringing and throbbing sounding off and making all other noises seem like they were underwater.
Even swallowing was difficult, my tongue thick in my mouth and as dry as cotton. There was a terrible, sort of old shoe taste there too, and it was one of the few things that spurred me to start sitting up.
Something slid under my back and the watery noises around me increased. They sounded like they might be directed toward me, but there wasn’t much I could do to understand it.
But understanding it or not, I was pulled into a sort of sitting position and something was pressed against my lips. I didn’t fight it, and soon cool, crisp water was pouring into my mouth. I managed to swallow instead of choking on it, and it felt like life itself was flowing back into me.
The water kept going, cool and slow, until I was sated. I closed my lips, and I felt the liquid poor over my face, and then a somewhat rough cloth followed it.
The tenderness was nice and took me back to nights with Mickey where she’d tend to my torn skin and then I would help her with hers. The world started to clear, and I realized I was in some sort of forest-like place.
“Hey there, Davie. Feel better?”
I looked to the face hovering above me and blearily made out the shape of Mallory’s face. Smiling weakly, I tried to tell her that I was alright, but my mouth wasn’t willing to make the words yet.
“We need to get out of here,” Bron murmured from somewhere behind Mallory. “We’ve been here for far too long as it is, and I’m not certain taking my dragon form would be the best considering we don’t know this world. Or even if we’re back in our world.”
“I know, I know. But it’s not like we can make any sort of run for it with Davie being unconscious. Besides, if you had a seer in your back pocket, would you want her to be out of commission for your run in a new world?”
“Possibly new world,” he reminded. “It could be our own.”
“Yeah, which means that Baelfyre and all those dragon supremacists could be running all over trying to find us, and I don’t think any of us are in shape for a giant showdown.”
“I’m… I’m fine,” I finally managed to murmur, my head throbbing painfully as I ground the words out.
“Oh, hey there, she speaks!” Mallory laughed nervously and brushed my hair from my face. “Hey there, girlie, how ya feeling?”
But I didn’t have time for pleasantries. I swallowed a few times to find my words and wet my mouth. “How long was I out?”
“Just an hour or two. Are you okay? I gotta admit, your face is looking not so great.”
“Wow, rude much?” I shot back, trying to sit up a bit more. But my body still felt like jelly and I was entirely too hot.
“You’re hilarious, really. But I’m not the one sitting here with bloodshot eyes and crust all over their nose.”
“Ew, really?”
“Yeah, like I said, you’re not looking your freshest.”
I used all of my strength to pull my arm up to my face, checking out the pink, hamburger skin there. “At least that hasn’t split.”
“Does it do that often?” Bron asked.
I could finally make out his face, thick brows furrowed together over his bright eyes. “Not often, but if there’s enough stress, then yeah. And I’d call hopping dimensions twice stress enough to do that.”
“Well, I’m glad that it hasn’t done that then.”
“Yeah, one little positive in a sea of not-so-great,” Mallory spat. “Not wanting to be negative, because it’s cool that you apparently have trans-dimensional powers and all that, but this hasn’t exactly been the best day.”
“Yeah, I’d probably agree with you on that.” The pain and grogginess were beginning to ebb, leaving me mostly just achy and empty. Or was that achingly empty? Either way, I supposed the semantics didn’t matter, I was just trying to distract myself. “I’m pretty sure we’re not home, by the way. This place feels…different.”
“Different how?”
I shrugged, still far too fuzzy to figure out how to put it to words. “I don’t know. Just different.”
“Fair enough.” Mallory sat next to me and took my good hand into her own, rubbing between my fingers and along the pads of my palms like she had in art class whenever I had started cramping up from holding my brushes too hard.
High school had not been the easiest time for me…
“So, when did you know that you could hop between realities? Or that there are multiple realities? Seems like something you might want to tell your supposed best friend.”
If I was in her shoes, I wasn’t sure I would be handling it nearly as well.
“I mean… I wasn’t really sure it was a thing. I just kinda mostly thought it was a thing.” I winced at my own lame explanation. “I’m sorry. I guess I could have explained it better.”
“Probably.” Mallory shrugged. “But hey, I kept an entire world away from you, I guess this is fair play.”
Bron knelt beside us, interrupting the tender friend moment. “I am incredibly grateful for you saving us, but I do worry about my people. I would very much like to get back to them.”
“Uh, about that,” I said, wiggling up into a straighter position. “I, uh…don’t exactly know how to get back. The idea that I am getting is that in order to move anywhere along these realities, or dimensions, or whatever you want to call it, we have to go back to the hub. And if we go to the hub, our rotted dragon friend will no doubt want to pay us a visit. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of reunion yet.”
“So, what do we do then?” Mallory asked, her concerned tone matching my own. “Sit around until you feel better and then skip ourselves across the interdimensional waters until we find one that’s probably our home? How many dimensions are there? Is the hub connected to like…twenty of them, or is there some sort of infinite amount that makes random guessing impossible?”
“You’re asking a whole lot of questions, and I gotta admit I do not have an answer to any of them,” I said, shrugging slightly. “Not sure what lead you to think I would know, but I appreciate your confidence in my intelligence.”
“At least you haven’t lost that world-famous sense of humor,” she groused, sticking her tongue out at me.
> “Well, I—”
“Shhh!” I was surprised when Bron cut me off, something quite unlike him to do. But he was looking away from us, his gaze fixed on something far between the trees. “Do you hear that?”
I tried to listen, inclining my head and closing my eyes, but my senses hadn’t recovered enough yet. There was still too much muffled and reverberating in my ears, leaving me listening more to the sound of blood sloshing through my veins for anything else.
But Mallory stiffened, and she jumped to her feet. “We should go.”
“I…I agree,” Bron said, quickly reaching for me to pull me up. “I can’t be sure, but I think I remember being told of a sound like that once.”
“You wanna enlighten me?” I said as they helped me to my feet, my legs feeling like lead.
“I…I would rather not say it unless I am sure.”
Bron put one of my arms around his shoulders and Mallory gripped my waist. Between the two of them, they were able to pull me along with a slight amount of speed. We limped along, and I really tried to help, but I was just so tired, and it felt like all my limbs were disconnected from each other.
But even with our harsh breathing, and the sound of branches snapping, and leaves crunching under our feet, I began to pick up on strange noises too. They were somewhere between snorting and panting, and a strange sort of clicking. Not too soon after, I started to smell something…appalling.
It wasn’t quite rotten, but definitely had the sweetness of decay to it. There was something musky, but also…dewy about it? It reminded me of…wet dogs after the rain, but if they had rolled in something completely disgusting beforehand.
We stumbled along, and the sounds grew louder, more and more layers of gross noises layering over them. As we rushed, I felt something akin to a stab of white-hot lightning go down my brain, and suddenly, I knew that we couldn’t keep going in the same direction.
“Go left,” I said suddenly, trying to dig one of my feet in to help us pivot.
“What?”
“Go left! This isn’t a forest.” I couldn’t say what I meant by that, or what it could be if not a forest, but I just knew. “We have to go left!”
Thankfully, they didn’t argue with me anymore and we careened left, rushing through the brush and grass. The strange noises behind us clarified and I could tell that a whole horde of quadruped creatures was chasing after us, but they didn’t sound like dogs or horses or really anything that I could put my finger on.
I craned my head to look over my shoulder, and that was when the first of the creatures came into sight. It was like someone had crossed a lion with a lizard, its form stocky and powerful, but covered in a sheen of glistening scales and a throat frill around its head. I could see the bright, almost translucently neon drool dripping from its gums, and sharp, sharp claws on its feet.
Oh boy.
Surprise, surprise, my legs finally remembered how to do that whole leg thing, and I got my feet under myself. I still couldn’t run on my own, but I could hustle along, which helped my two friends go faster.
But the creatures were gaining on us. I could practically feel them breathing down our necks and nipping at our heels. Just as I was sure that I had somehow led my friends astray, the trees parted and we were stumbling onto a street.
“Was…was that the Grove Park?” Mallory asked, huffing and puffing. I felt a bit bad for her, I wasn’t exactly the lightest cargo to haul along.
“I think so,” I panted, although I didn’t feel like I had an excuse to do so. “Just massively overgrown.”
“That doesn’t bode well.”
“Neither do the wargs chasing us.”
“Oh, is that what you call them?”
We heard the sound of claws digging in and suddenly, Bron was throwing us to the side. Mallory and I clattered to the ground, but before I could turn and ask what the heck he was doing, he was tackled to the ground, one of those beasts on his back.
“Bron!”
The two of them hit the ground not too far away from us, and the white-haired man viciously elbowed the beast, getting enough leverage to roll onto his back. I could already see his jaw elongating against the twilight sky and claws growing along his fingers.
The rest of the beasts were converging on us. I tried to call upon the same panic and energy in me that had allowed me to summon a shield before, but what had once been a wellspring of potent, powerful need was now just a faint spark of adrenaline. I was too new, too tired, and spread far too thin.
I suddenly felt the faintest bubbling of a reaction within me, and a hazy, translucent wall raised a couple of feet in front of Mallory and I. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
I could feel my friend trying to get to her feet, to rise up and pull me to safety, but we were about to be surrounded. Even if I was in full fighting form, I wouldn’t be able to get away, and there were far too many of the lizard creatures to go about any noble sacrifice shenanigans.
Just when I was sure that it was all over, however, I heard something scraping beside me, and I looked over to see a pair of eyes looking up at me through a sliver of open manhole.
“You human?” a voice rasped from below, although there was certainly no need to whisper considering the loud noises from the beasts.
“For the moment,” Mallory answered, already grabbing the edges of the manhole and moving it aside. “But quickly about to be lizard food if this isn’t a way out of here.”
“Bron!” I called, the surge of hope allowing me to hold my shield just a tiny bit higher. He managed to kick off the warg on top of him, then rushed over, diving down the barely open manhole.
That just left me, but I couldn’t move and maintain the shield at the same time. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, and my body didn’t seem to be in touch with my mind, wholly stuck on the thought that I absolutely had to keep the shield up no matter what.
But then hands gripped me and pulled me backward, scraping my pants against the ground until suddenly, I was over nothing. I hovered there for a moment, absolutely terrified, then fell down, down, down.
I screamed—how could I not?—but I was caught by strong arms. I mean, it certainly still hurt, and I was sure that I would have bruises if I lived until the next day, but it was better than crashing into the hard, hard ground.
I looked up into Bron’s eyes, glowing slightly in the low light of wherever we were, and I realized that we had narrowly avoided danger yet again. But how? Who was the strange person who had popped out at the perfect time?
My eyes flicked to the ladder as Bron set me on the ground. He really was strong, wasn’t he? But I didn’t have time to contemplate that much, because the figure was coming down the ladder with Mallory right behind him.
They were small, almost child-like, but there was something about the way they moved that told me they were at least my age or maybe more. It wasn’t until they were on the ground and facing me that my breath caught in my throat.
Her face looked like it had once been cherubic but had long since been starved down into waifish. She was missing an eye, but her other was narrowed and catlike, complementing the freckles across her gaunt cheeks.
“Mallory?” I asked once I finally found my words.
“It’s Mal, actually,” the girl responded, and her voice was so eerily like my best friend’s that I didn’t quite know was to say. “Come on, we should get going before any scouts try to see why their dogs are going crazy.”
“I am…confused,” Bron said. “What is going on here?”
“You tell me,” Mal said, picking up a torch from the ground and lighting it with matches from her pocket. “I’ve been having dreams for weeks where a girl named Mickey yells at me to do things. If I don’t, I get headaches. It’s real inconvenient, as you might imagine. All I know was that I had to come here and help people who don’t look like they belong. Might have been nice if she told me about my doppelganger, though.”
My sister had sent her!? Was that
something we could do? It made sense that we could project ourselves into each other’s dreams, but throwing ourselves into strangers’ dreams and influencing their waking actions seemed like a stretch. Or did it just work because it was Mallory, and her and I were already so connected?
I didn’t know, but man, a rulebook would certainly be nice.
“This is weird…” Mallory, my Mallory, said, stepping off the ladder as well. “No offense, but I don’t think I’ve been that skinny since I was six.”
“Yeah, well, the dragons demand most of the food, so there’s not exactly a lot going around.” She looked over my curvy, muscular friend. “What are you? A bodybuilder of some sort?”
“MMA fighter, actually.”
“MMA? What’s that?”
I never thought I would hear those words come out of Mallory’s mouth, even if she wasn’t my Mallory. “It’s a type of wrestling with a bunch of kicks, punches, armbars, chokeholds, and leglocks.”
“Oh, so, like the gladiator fights that dragons hold in the arena.”
“Gladi— You know what? Sure. Like that.”
But I couldn’t help but wonder, as we walked down the sewer that she led us down, what kind of world we had tumbled into.
3
The Wrong Side of the Mirror
“So, you wanna give us the rundown of this place?” I asked, my mind full of questions.
“What, you mean this sewer?”
“No, I more meant this entire world.” She gave me an odd look and I shrugged. “Pretend we’re aliens who don’t even know the most basic of information.”
“Huh, you know, normally I would question that, but after all of this dream stuff I don’t really doubt much of anything nowadays.” She sighed and rubbed at her temples as we walked. “Well, life was going along like normal, humans running the world and all of that jazz, when suddenly the dragons decided to come out of hiding.
“It was insane. Apparently, there was a huge war between those that wanted to live with humans and those who wanted to rule them, and that war ruined a whole chunk of the planet. Entire cities were engulfed in fire.
