“There is no other way out,” he said. “The cavern only goes deeper.”
“Deeper?” Galadriel asked. “No. There was just a wall. There was nothing else.”
She walked to the back of the cavern where she expected to find the wall that would stop her just as it did in the cavern earlier. She quickly realized, though, that this cavern went back further than the one that she had been in earlier and expanded to either side with other tunnels. She turned back to the man and found him lying on the ground, his closed eyelids fluttering. She gasped and ran toward him, letting her bag slip off of her arm as she dropped down to her knees beside him. His breath was rapid and shallow, and she started pulling at his clothing again, trying to get as much air circulating around his body as she could.
Grabbing her bag, she reached for the second bottle of water and opened it. She lifted the man’s head and poured a little of the water down over his hair, hoping to cool him. The water seemed to do its job, and his eyes lifted.
“Is there anywhere else that I can bring you? Anywhere with water?”
The man nodded, and she saw him straining, trying to stand. Galadriel helped him to his feet and leaned him to the side so that he could use the wall of the cavern for support. She grabbed the torch as they passed so that they could continue to have light as they went further into the cavern. They moved slowly toward the back of the cavern, and she followed him down one of the deep corridors. Galadriel struggled to make sense of what was happening around her. She had been so sure that this was the cavern where she had been when she found the engravings and that brought her to the desert. It had looked so similar when she saw the crack in the rock and then when she stepped inside. Now that she walked further into it, however, she knew that it wasn’t; it couldn’t possibly be.
They had only been walking for a few moments when the tunnel opened up and she stepped into another chamber. This space seemed to be outfitted as a meager home. One corner contained a pile of dried plants that she assumed could be used as a fire, though she still didn’t know where he would have gotten the plants in the wide and seemingly empty desert. Several feet away from this area was a pile of blankets that was likely his bed. Rocks were arranged as if like furniture and close to the wall. She saw another pouch, larger than the one that he was wearing at his hip, and something that looked like a small stack of sticks. There was a fresh smell in the room that made her think of water, and when she listened carefully, Galadriel could hear the faint sound of dripping. A sense of relief rolled over her and she took hold of the man’s elbow to guide him over to the blankets.
“Lay down here. Where is the water?”
“In the back,” he said weakly.
Galadriel rushed toward the back of the cavern, following the sound of the water dripping until she found a wide, deep pool set into the stone ground. A continuous drip came from the ceiling, creating ripples across the surface of the pool. The glow of the torch shimmered across the surface of the water, showing that it was clear and crisp, obviously fed both by the drip from the ceiling and some unseen underground spring. She looked around and saw several coarse bowls that seemed to have been hewn from rocks and positioned carefully by the side of the water. She grabbed one and swept it through the water, gathering as much as she could so that she could still carry it with one hand while using the torch with the other.
When she made it back to the other chamber, Galadriel found the man sitting with his back propped against the wall. His arm was crossed over his torso, and the expression on his face told her that he was in pain that he hadn’t expressed earlier. She remembered the holder for the torch in the front of the cavern and looked around on the walls of this chamber, hoping that she was going to be able to find the same type of holder. She finally found one several feet away and, lowering the bowl of water to the floor, left the man’s side just long enough to settle the torch into the holder.
Galadriel lifted the bowl and held it to the man’s lips to encourage him to drink. He finally parted his lips and let her pour some of the water into his mouth. He swallowed and then continued to drink eagerly as if the feeling of the water against his throat suddenly triggered the feelings of thirst within him. When he finished, she pulled the bowl away from his lips and tilted her head to look into his face.
“More?” she asked.
He rested his head back against the wall again and shook his head.
“No. Thank you. I’m feeling better.”
He tried to straighten, and winced. Galadriel saw his hand grip at his waist even tighter.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head again.
“Nothing.”
“Obviously, it's something. Let me look.”
The man reluctantly pulled his hand away from his body and Galadriel reached forward to lift the hem of his shirt up. One side only revealed an expanse of smooth, muscled belly that sent a flicker of interest through Galadriel. The other, however, took that feeling away from her sharply as she saw a deep gouge running from his ribs around to his belly button. She rested her fingertips on it, and he hissed.
“What happened?” she asked. “You didn't do this when you fell down the hill after me, did you?”
He pushed his hands away from her and shook his head again. It seemed to be the one response that she could rely on him giving her.
“No. This happened before I found you.”
“Take off your shirt,” she insisted.
“What?”
“Take off your shirt,” she repeated. “I need to look at it better. That looks like a serious injury. You could get an infection.”
The man stared at her for a few moments and then peeled away the vest that he was wearing, letting it drop to the side. Galadriel focused in on the injury rather than his beautiful body, not wanting to allow herself to admire him in that moment. The gouge looked even worse now that it was completely exposed, and Galadriel knew that she had to get it clean and protected so that it didn’t get worse.
“Wait here,” she said, realizing that she had left her bag in the other chamber of the cavern when she found him lying on the ground. “I’ll be right back. Are you going to be okay if I take the torch with me?”
“Yes,” he said. “This is my home. I’ve been here without light before.”
The arrogant tone in his voice was back, and Galadriel fought the feeling of frustration from returning. She had to keep telling herself that much of his attitude stemmed from the pain that he had to be in and the impact that the level of dehydration he was suffering had to have on him. Without saying anything else, she walked back to the torch holder and took the flame down. She let it guide her back toward the opening of the cavern. Outside, the sun was still burning brightly, but she kept the torch close to her as she scanned the floor to make sure that nothing had fallen out of her bag when she dropped it. Something about the dancing fire made her feel safer and more in control than continuing to rely on the sun to guide her.
She was happy to find the man still conscious when she got back to the chamber and settled the torch back into its holder. She knelt on the floor beside him and rummaged through her bag until she found the small black box at the bottom. Withdrawing it, she placed it on the floor and opened it.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s my first aid kit.”
“Your what?”
She looked at him strangely.
“My first aid kit. You know, supplies to take care of injuries and illnesses. Pain relievers, bandages, tweezers.”
He still didn’t look entirely confident that he understood what she was saying, and Galadriel started to get a strange feeling in her belly. There was something about this massive man that she didn’t know, and it went beyond just his sudden appearance in the desert and rage toward the boulder.
“Why do you have it with you?” he asked.
“It’s a first aid kit,” she said. “It’s just kind of
something that people carry with them.”
“Not anyone I know.”
The response was nearly whispered, as if he hadn’t entirely intended her to hear it, or that he didn’t realize that he had actually said it. Galadriel drew an alcohol wipe from the box and gently wiped his torso, starting with cleaning the skin around the cut before touching it directly. She knew that it was going to sting when she cleaned it and wanted to give him a moment to get accustomed to her touch before subjecting him to that. She finally drew the cloth across the cut and heard him draw in another sharp, pained breath.
“If you must know,” she said, hoping to distract him by talking to him as she continued to clean the cut, “I wanted to be a nurse for a while.”
“You did?” he asked, still gritting his teeth through the pain.
Galadriel nodded. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt drawn to the man in a way that was off-balanced and somewhat confusing. He was cold and arrogant, and there was some underlying quality that made her feel as though she wasn’t really seeing all of him, as if part of him was hidden in shadows that followed him constantly. Despite that, though, when she spoke, she felt as though the words simply came out, unfiltered and unrestrained.
“There was a time when I really didn’t want to be judged because of my father’s money.”
“What do you mean?”
Galadriel lifted her eyes to his briefly and then turned her attention back to using a second cloth to finish cleaning the wound on his torso.
“My father is extremely wealthy. His father was wealthy before him, and his father was wealthy before him. So my entire life, I’ve been known first as the rich girl. A lot of times, people didn’t even bother to get to know me or even find out my name because they automatically judged me based on the fact that I was my father’s daughter.”
“And it bothered you that he is wealthy?” the man asked.
“It wasn’t really that it bothered me that he is wealthy,” she told him. She reached for antibiotic ointment and started spreading it across his skin. “What bothered me was that my mother wasn’t. She didn’t come from money the way that he did, so I didn’t feel like I was completely like him. I felt like if people were going to assume things about me because of one of my parents, that they should assume things about me because of both of them. Does that make sense?”
He shook his head. “Not really.”
Galadriel gave a short, mirthless laugh.
“That’s what everyone else said, too. I knew that I was privileged because my father had money, and that meant that I was going to get through life easier than other people if I was willing to take advantage of that privilege. That seemed really nice, but at the same time, I always felt like no one cared about who I was or what I was capable of doing. Then, I would look at my mother and see how hard she had worked her entire life before she met my father. She had accomplished so much and knew that everything that she had right up until she met him was because of what she had put herself through.”
“So you decided to be more like her.”
Galadriel could feel emotion starting to build in her throat. She avoided making eye contact with him as she reached for the roll of gauze in the box. She snipped a few pieces and began putting them in place on his wound.
“I decided that I was going to be someone beyond what everybody expected of me. So I left home and went to school to be a nurse.”
“I thought you said that you just wanted to be a nurse.”
She nodded.
“I did, and I was fairly good at it.”
“So what happened?”
Galadriel used the tiny, sharp scissors from her kit to portion off pieces of surgical tape and started smoothing them along the edges of the gauze to hold it to place on the skin surrounding the injury.
“It turned out that one of the girls in my class was the dirty little secret of one of the guys I grew up with. At graduation, she was furious when he showed up to watch me graduate and didn’t acknowledge her. He told me that he thought it was cute that I had entertained myself by going to school. She heard that and was really angry. She told me that I was never going to be anything more than just a little rich girl, and there was no point in me ever trying to pretend that I was anything else. I didn’t know what it was to be anything more than the daughter of a powerful man, and just because I pretended that I was going to live a normal life didn’t mean that I was ever actually going to. In the end, I was going to fall back on the privilege of my family and forget what it was to work and have to actually accomplish things on my own.”
Just saying the words reminded Galadriel how painful that had been for her. In those moments, she felt gutted – like the world around her was telling her just how dumb she had been to even think for a second that she could choose her life’s path. She was born on a leash, and there was no way that she was ever going to escape it. No matter what she did, as soon as anyone found out who her family was, she was going to be evaluated based on them.
“So what did you do?” he asked.
Galadriel sighed as she finished taping the gauze in place and packed everything back into her kit.
“I put my diploma away. I smiled as the older women laughed at my ‘flight of fancy’ and saying that it was good that I had gotten that out of my system while I was young, because soon it would be time for me to find a husband. I ignored the men who clicked their tongues and said that going to school had been a waste of time, that I should have been volunteering with the Junior League and building my social network.”
“What is the Junior League?”
Galadriel laughed.
“I have asked myself that same question many times. In the end, it didn’t really matter.”
“Why not?”
“My mother died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am, too. When it happened, I kind of gave up on everything. I just didn’t care about being nothing that anyone thought that I should be, or everything that everyone thought I should be. I came of age for my trust fund, I left home, and I’ve been living on my own ever since.”
“Alone?”
She nodded.
“I have my best friend. That’s it, though. When I was younger, it was like everyone saw me, but no one cared who I was other than another debutante, another rich girl to marry off and build empires. Now, they still don’t care who I am, but no one sees me, either.”
“Do you like it better that way?” he asked. “When they don’t see you?”
“Sometimes.”
There were a few seconds of silence as Galadriel slid everything back into her bag and shifted back away from him.
“I see you,” he said.
Her eyes met his, and she saw him staring deeply into her, locking her in place with a gaze that was intense and deliberate.
“What?” she breathed.
“I see you,” he repeated. “I don’t know anything more about your family than what you told me, and I don’t care. All I see right now is you. My name is Vyker.”
“I’m Galadriel,” she said.
“Thank you for helping me, Galadriel.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Where did you come from, Galadriel?” Vyker asked.
They were still sitting on the floor of the cavern, but there was now a plate of food between them that Vyker had directed her to get from a small, cool recess in the wall near the water. The items were unrecognizable, but Galadriel felt the gnawing hunger in her belly that reminded her that hours had passed since her meager breakfast, so she was willing to try whatever he had to offer her.
“I told you,” she said, reaching for a small dark orb on the plate. “I was in the desert, and I went into a cavern that looked very much like the one at the front of this one. I fell and ended up in the desert by the boulder.”
“I know all that,” he said. “I mean where did you come from before you made it into the cavern?”
�
��Virginia,” she said.
He looked at her with the same confusion-veiled expression that he had when she showed him her first aid kit, and she got another flicker in the back of her mind. Something about Vyker was different, and it seemed that she was creeping ever closer to finding out exactly what that was.
“Earlier when you were talking about being in the desert, you said that you were at an excavation site. What did you mean by that?”
“I was at the site of where they discovered the HM-1313 wall segment,” she told him.
He shook his head at her.
“What is that?”
She started to answer, but her words were cut off by a wide yawn. The tiredness in her body suddenly dragged her down, making her feel as though she couldn’t move. She tried again to answer him, but her mind was foggy. The exhaustion made her feel like she was being pulled away from him and the cavern, and she fought against it, remembering what it was like when she fell into the cavern and felt similarly out of control of her mind and body.
“Galadriel?” Vyker’s voice came to her through the fog. “Are you alright?”
“I’m just tired,” she managed to say.
“When was the last time you slept?”
There was depth in that question that she didn’t understand. She shook her head.
“I’m not sure. I don’t know how long I’ve been in the desert. I can’t tell.”
“You need to rest. If you have any chance of getting out, you are going to need as much strength and energy as you can get.”
Her eyelids were falling, but Galadriel was still struggling to keep herself awake. She didn’t want to fall asleep somewhere she wasn’t familiar with and be so vulnerable to someone that she didn’t know. His words were making the nervousness even more pronounced.
“What do you mean if I have a chance of getting out?” she asked, her voice sounding weak and distant even in her own ears.
“Go to sleep,” Vyker told her. “I won’t leave you. I will tell you everything when you wake up.”
Alien Portals: A SciFi Alien Multiverse Romance Novel Page 8