“I’ll find a way,” she said. “And if I can’t, I’ll find a way home. At least there I can live out my life in however much time is left without wasting a second of it with someone who only cares about himself.”
Vyker was starting to say something else, but Galadriel picked up her bag and rushed past him before he could speak. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say. There was nothing that he could say at this moment to convince her to stop. Jem followed close behind her, a large bag slung over his shoulder and a sheath on his hip. They had gone deep into the jungle for a few minutes before she turned to him.
“If there is no one else on this planet except for the birds, why do you have a sheath?”
“When I fell, I didn’t fall alone,” he told her. “I was in battle, fighting against the oldest enemy of my clan. Sacrificing myself was the only way that I could save the rest of the compound and the future of the planet, and possibly the galaxy. I grabbed onto them, and I jumped. Sometime in the fall, I let go of them. I haven’t seen them since, but if I ended up here, there is always a chance that they did, too.”
“If you were in battle with them, and you tried to kill them, wouldn’t they have come after you as soon as they could?” Galadriel asked.
“They are a scheming, devious species,” Jem said. “They would just as soon wait until my clan came for me so that they were better able to have their revenge.”
“That’s a terrifying thought,” she said.
“You never know what’s going to happen in the next moment,” Jem told her, helping her step up onto a tree that had fallen across a ravine. “You always have to be ready. And sometimes you have to be willing to just let go.”
Her hand was wrapped in a vine that gave her stability as she started to walk across the tree toward the other side of the ravine. She was about to step down when she heard the crashing of heavy footsteps coming toward them through the trees.
“Stop,” Vyker’s voice called desperately to her. “Galadriel, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Galadriel started to turn to face him when something glittered in the corner of her eye. She looked down and saw a rock jutting out from the side of the ravine, and in it were two shimmering stones. Her eyes locked on them, and she felt a surge of hope flood through her. Tightening her grip on the vine, she bent down toward the stones.
“What are you doing?” Vyker demanded. “You’re going to fall!”
Galadriel lowered herself to her knees on the tree, trying to get down further so that she could reach the stones. Her fingertips brushed them, but she couldn’t get enough of a grip to pull them up.
“Stop!” Vyker called.
He stepped onto the tree and it shook under the combined weight of all three of them. She gasped as she felt it shifting beneath her. She looked up and saw him scrambling backwards, trying to get off of the tree in an effort to stop it from breaking. As he stepped off, the tree cracked again, and she felt Jem grab onto her. She reached for the stones again, but they were out of her grasp. With one final reach, she felt herself stumbling forward. Vyker screamed, but she felt Jem latch onto her waist, holding her up.
“Vyker!” she screamed. “The stones! Get them!”
The tree gave a sickening crack and collapsed beneath her. She tried to hold onto the vine to keep herself from plummeting into the ravine, but her hand was slipping, and the weight of Jem hanging from her made it impossible for her to maintain her grip. Lifting her eyes to Vyker, she told him she loved him and felt her hands pull further down the vine. She had to let go.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Galadriel clawed for something, anything that she could grab onto as she plummeted into the ravine. Her hand grasped onto the necklace that hung around Jem’s neck, and she felt his hand join hers, tugging it to try to pull it away so that she wouldn’t choke him. In an instant, she felt the tearing feeling within her, and it seemed her chest would crush beneath the pressure. The air suddenly whipped past her with greater speed, and she could no longer keep her eyes open against the sickening blur of the world going past her. Vyker’s voice had disappeared into the screaming in her own mind, but she desperately sought the sound, wanting to hear it if only for a second longer.
The pulling feeling within her was so intense that she couldn’t breathe, and she fought against the pressure of the air around her to cup her hand over her belly protectively. The sensation became painful, and she gritted her teeth against it, trying to stretch her back to ease the feeling that she was both collapsing in on herself and being pulled inside out. She was still vaguely aware of Jem gripping her waist, and she found it both comforting and gut-wrenching to know that he was still with her. As much as she wouldn’t have wanted to be alone, she also hated the idea of taking him even further away from everything that he already knew. She had come to understand by now that moving through the portals meant that she would have no idea where she was going to end up, or if she would ever be able to find her way back. Though she hadn’t touched anything as she fell, she knew that that was what was happening. It was the only explanation for the feeling that she was going through and the fact that they hadn’t yet hit the rock bottom of the ravine.
The tension within her hit a peak so harsh she didn’t think that she would be able to bear it, and she opened her mouth to scream. As the sound tore from her chest, the blackness engulfed her. She expected it to take her away, to send her into the helpless unconsciousness that would leave her completely unaware of what was happening around her. Instead, the darkness washed over her, and moments later she felt the hard hit of her body landing.
To one side of her, she heard Jem draw in a gasping breath. She took a few slow breaths in an effort to calm her shaking and opened her eyes. She expected to see the sky above her, or the rock walls of another cavern. She saw neither. Instead, what she saw above her sent new panic coursing through her mind, and her heart jumped into her throat. She squeezed her eyes closed tightly, willing it to go away – willing what she saw above her to change. When she opened them again, however, she could still see it.
She squinted against the intense glare of the exit sign burning red above the door to one side and turned away from the low guide lights recessed into the ceiling to provide some illumination in the darkness caused by the primary lights being off. She could see the charcoal grey orbs of those lights against the ceiling, familiar and yet strange. She had seen those lights countless times before, but now that it had been weeks since she had seen any kind of electricity, they seemed foreign and uncomfortable. Tears started to stream down her cheeks and a sob rose into her chest, bursting from her as she realized where she was.
Somewhere in the near distance, she heard footsteps rushing toward them and she sat up sharply.
“Jem,” she whispered loudly, “we need to get up. We need to go.”
She turned and saw him sitting up a few feet away from her, rubbing his head with one hand. He looked up at her and she gestured at him to follow her. They got up and rushed down the empty, shadowy museum corridor toward the cavernous exhibit at the end. She knew that a security guard was behind them, likely coming to check on the loud sound that they heard when Galadriel and Jem hit the floor. When they reached the exhibit, Galadriel pulled Jem into an alcove, concealing them in darkness. Moments later, the security guard ran past them, his flashlight dancing across the floor. Galadriel felt like she couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t get caught in the museum. She couldn’t explain where she had been, and if they put them in jail, she would have no chance of finding her way back to Vyker.
As that thought went through her mind, realization hit her. The final engraving had said one simple choice. In those moments of fury toward Vyker, she had said that she wanted to come back here; she had made the choice that she would continue forward on her own. Her heart sank as she realized that this was what the engraving was telling them. Just as Vyker had said they would be, they were apart again, and she
had no way to get back to him.
Her heart ached, and she felt like she was going to crumble in on herself. The brief time when she went through the portal in the frozen spring without him and ended up in the jungle were horrible. They had vowed to never be apart again, but now she was impossibly far from him, back in the place where this had all began, and didn’t know what she was going to do.
When the security guard made his way back past them, and his footsteps disappeared into the other sections of the museum, Galadriel stepped out of the alcove and gestured for Jem to follow her.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“A museum.”
“On Earth?” he asked.
Galadriel nodded. They continued until she stepped into the spot that she, for a brief moment, thought that she would never stand in again. The segment of the wall looked smaller and more worn than she remembered it. She dropped to her knees in front of it and reached beyond the velvet rope to touch her fingers to it. As soon as her fingers touched the final engraving that Vyker had made, she turned sharply to Jem.
“Show me your necklace,” she demanded.
“What?” he said, sounding flustered.
“Show me your necklace. Pick it up by the chain, not the pendant.”
Jem reached beneath his shirt and pulled out the necklace that she remembered grabbing as they fell. At first, it looked like just a small piece of rock hanging from a piece of braided fabric, but as he held it out toward her, the pendant spun, and she was able to see the fine etchings of characters on one side.
“Take it off,” she said. “Don’t touch the pendant.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, complying with her demand.
“Where did you get that pendant?” she asked.
She reached forward and took the necklace from him, taking it by the braid so that her fingers wouldn’t touch the stone.
“I made it,” he said. “When I first arrived in the jungle, I spent most of my time beside a cave. It wasn’t big enough for me to actually live in, but sometimes when it was storming, I would go into it. After a while, I knew that I had to move on, but I felt a sense of connection to that cave. I had looked at the carving on the wall every day, wondering who had made it, and why they weren’t around anymore. Before I left, I broke this section of the wall off and put it on my necklace so that I could bring it with me.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why did you do that?”
“I was already so far from home. I felt like I had nothing left. That place had become the closest thing to a home that I had, and somehow I felt connected to this carving. I just didn’t want to leave it behind. What is it?”
“This is the portal,” she said. “You never touched the engraving before? Never put your fingers directly on it?”
“I don’t know. I guess not.”
“When we were falling, we both grabbed at it. We must have touched it without realizing it. It brought us here.”
“I don’t understand,” Jem said. “Why would there be a portal to a museum?”
Galadriel looked back to the wall.
“It wasn’t to the museum,” she said. “It was to the wall.” She took a breath, reaching forward to touch the stone again. Suddenly, she drew in a sharp breath. “Oh my gosh. We need to get out of here. I need to find Rick.”
“Who?” Jem asked as Galadriel took off down the corridor toward the front entrance to the museum.
“Rick. He’s the only other person who knows as much about the wall as I do. He knew things that I didn’t. But how is that? How could he know those things when no one else did? I need to talk to him.”
Keeping watch for another security guard who might be patrolling the front entrance, she ran across the wide atrium toward the door. She remembered all of the nights that she stayed in the museum long after they closed and Leo had to escort her to the door. When she stepped outside he would close the door behind her and turn two thumb locks, then slide a latch into place. It had always struck her as strange that a door that was primarily glass would have such an unsophisticated security approach, but now she was thankful for the trusting nature of the museum foundation. She rushed to the door, turned the locks, and forced the latch out of place. As she pushed the door open, an alarm starting screaming around her, but she and Jem were already running down the front steps of the museum and disappearing into the night.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Galadriel ran up the steps to the front door of Ty’s apartment and pounded on it, shouting his name through the thick wood. Jem had taken a worn shirt from his bag and put it on, smoothing his shock of white hair into a tail behind his head that he tied in place with a length of leather. Nothing, though, was making him less blatant.
“Ty!” she shouted again. “Come on! Open the door. Please!”
She heard the clamoring of the locks releasing on the other side of the door and it yanked open. Ty stared out at her with wide eyes and open mouth, looking pale and drawn as though looking at a ghost. She realized that he probably thought he was.
“Galadriel!”
“I need to use your computer and your phone.”
She pushed into the apartment and heard Jem follow her.
“What the fuck is going on?” Ty asked, sounding both happy and angry. “Where have you been?”
“I can’t explain any of that right now. I need to get in touch with Rick.”
“Rick Abernathy?” Ty asked.
Galadriel nodded.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“He’s been trying to find you since you’ve been gone. I found notes from him on your apartment door and when the police wouldn’t let him file a missing person’s report, he contacted the newspapers and had them run an article about you. What’s going on? After the article ran, the security guard at the excavation site found your phone in some cave.”
“Do you have it?”
“No, the police kept it. They wouldn’t even give it to your parents.”
“Shit, my parents. What have they been doing?”
“Nothing, mostly. They said that you must be off on one of your little flights of fancy and that they didn’t have any way to find you. They paid your rent for the last couple of months, though.”
“Well, that’s nice.”
“I think out of your trust fund.”
“That sounds like them.”
Galadriel finally worked her way through Rick’s complicated website to find his contact information and reached over to grab Ty’s phone. She dialed the number frantically and waited impatiently as it rang.
“Hello?” Rick’s voice answered.
“Rick?”
“Galadriel? Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me. I need to talk to you. Can you come by Ty’s apartment?”
“Tell me the address, and I’ll be there as fast as I can. Are you alright?”
“I don’t know.”
When the call ended, Galadriel dropped the phone back to the table.
“I need a shower and something to eat,” she said, knowing that she would drive herself crazy waiting for Rick and needed to do something that had some semblance of normalcy until he got there.
“You need to tell me what’s going on.”
“This is Jem,” she said, gesturing at the massive man who was standing awkwardly a few feet away. “He will tell you what he knows. I’ll fill you in on the rest when Rick gets here. Please, Ty. I need you to trust me.”
Her best friend sighed heavily.
“I always have,” he said.
Galadriel jumped up and stepped into Ty’s arms, letting him pull her into a familiar embrace that made her feel more grounded in the chaos that was happening around her. When she stepped away from him, she walked down the hallway toward the bathroom and closed the door behind her. In the privacy of the room, she cried, letting out all of the emotion that she had been holding for the entire time that she had been away from home. Sh
e knew that the hardest part of her journey was ahead of her, and she was going to need to be as strong as she could to get through it – for herself, for Vyker, and for their baby.
She stepped beneath the shower and let the hot water beat down on her, the shower massager loosening the tension in her muscles and rinsing away the film of sweat and dirt that never seemed to go away even after hours spent swimming under the waterfall. Even with the sweet smell of the soap around her and the comfort of the hot water, she would have done anything to be back in that waterfall with Vyker. She felt like a part of her was missing, and she hated herself for ever saying that she wanted to be away from him. Her hands ran across her belly and even though she knew that she was months from showing anything, she told herself that she could feel the presence of the little one within her. It helped to keep her connected to Vyker on a deeper level – a level that kept her mind clear and her focus sharp.
****
When she stepped out of the shower, she found a set of Ty’s sweatpants and a T-shirt waiting for her. She took a moment to luxuriate in the clean, soft fabric and then stepped out into the living room. Rick was already sitting on the couch waiting for her, a spread of cheese, crackers, fruit, cookies, and beer on the table in front of him. As soon as he saw her, Rick stood and took a step toward her.
“Galadriel,” he said. “What happened? Where did you go?”
“Who are you?” she demanded. Rick looked startled and took a step back away from her. “Who are you?” she asked again.
“Galadriel,” Ty said, coming forward as if to intervene, “it’s Rick. This is who has been looking for you.”
“I know that he says he’s Rick Abernathy, but I don’t think that that’s his name, and I don’t think that he’s a researcher. Who the hell are you?”
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