Transversals

XIII. Expedite

"Yeah. They didn't use--"

Lana was cut off by an ice monster's swing, easily dodged. Sweeping the ground and stirring up leaves with the flap of her wings, she came up behind its back and pulled her second sword out, cutting an X in a swift descent.

"Didn't use to be able to travel, sorry," she finished. "Things used to stay in their dimension." She got up off her knees and slipped her swords away again, while I distracted a smaller, slower one. Ben finished his off and had cut through mine in the blink of an eye, all three monsters now disitegrated into nothing.

I looked about the strange place again as I breathed heavily, where the leaves were blue and tree trunks cherry red, soil black and sky a constant shade of lavender. We had to travel through a train of secluded mirrors to meet Lana. And the roads were paved brown instead of black. That's where we were for the moment, in the middle of the road between two forests up in some mountains.

Wiping the sweat off my forehead and catching my breath, Ben walked over and brought out his phone, typing through a few things. "Our trail's still clean."

"Really?" Lana breathed out, hands on her hips. With a huff of effort, I put one of my swords away into a sheath and set my hands on my knees, heart rate still not quite back to normal. I hadn't done any physical exercise in years, okay. My noodle arms weren't ready to be swinging around two swords, much nonetheless one (like I had been doing). Ben and Lana did most of the work and bailed me out when I needed, but these monsters were smaller and slower, curiously enough. The larger they got, they quicker they were. But harder to cut down.

"Yep," Ben replied, shifting his weight to a foot and staring intently at his phone screen, chewing cinnamon gum. His eyes snapped up to Lana's. "How many mirrors did it take you to get here you said?"

"I took one," she responded, getting out her own phone. A smile crept across her face and she started to type, and I knew it had to be Will. He was scared shitless about this date and couldn't quit asking me for pointers during lunch. I wasn't quite sure if I was comfortable yet with the development, since, I don't know, Lana wanted to go on a fun run to plausible and certain death before a date with my best friend.

Still, I found myself being more accepting of Lana the more I saw how infatuated Will was around her, how alive and nervous he texted and talked. Still wary that she'd leave and break his heart, but I was going to have a talk with Ben and Lana about that eventually. He was falling a little quick for my taste. Understandably unavoidable, though. And if I was going to lie to Will about everything I was doing, I'd at least have his back.

So I panted in silence for a moment while they stayed enthralled with their phones, trying to take the time to think more clearly about the issue at hand.

Lana's taken leave to fight these monsters off in whatever dimension they're appearing, trying to see if there's a correlation between recently monitored portals and where they show up from what she's told me. Ben had most of the tracking done in his phone, since hers didn't have enough space to hold the software Mattie designed for them. Which narrowed it down to just Afton having no idea literally all her friends are included in this big conspiracy I've been roped into as well, and that the little blond-haired bastard had lied to my face about not knowing his friends dimension-hopped. Little salty over that, no lie.

The information about Mattie still surprised me. Him, a complete tech wizard? The kid was fourteen and could barely quit laughing about tripping over a cat just a little bit ago. He was smart though, insanely smart. Smart enough to rig up software for Ben's phone that mapped the dimensions as far as they'd travel, track the positions of monsters in nearby ones, highlight monitored portals in blue, and provide a route to getting back to their home dimension. I had a feeling Mattie was dumbing himself down a touch to only skip two grades.