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RELIEVED, OVERJOYED and happy to be alive, I turned to Valcas. We were soaking wet from going through the Fire Falls. Yet I felt a sudden urge to hug him. I shivered, feeling my gratefulness toward him overwhelm me. This was the first time I genuinely wanted to embrace any version of him since I’d left his younger self at the White Tower.
Valcas knelt in front of a pool of water at the base of the interior waterfall, fumbling with his glasses, presumably making sure they were safe and still intact.
“Valcas? Is everything okay?”
Instead of looking up, he shook his head. “Something doesn’t feel right,” he whispered. “I feel—something’s different.”
I instantly worried for him because, personally, I felt absolutely amazing. “Are you hurt? Did something happen to your glasses?”
Valcas stood and spoke as he turned to face me. “No. My glasses are fine. Physically I’ve never felt better; but there’s something else going on, something unnerving. I can’t figure out what—”
His eyes met mine.
He gasped and stepped backward, which would have startled me had I not been startled already.
Our voices overlapped. “Your eyes!”
Something had changed.
Everything about Valcas was exactly the same, except for one key detail: his eerie holographic, milky irises were no longer there. They’d been replaced by the bright green emeralds of his mother and of his younger self. Green, blazing and, as Shirlyn would have said, brilliant—as if they’d never been affected by the travel glasses.
I stared, transfixed.
Valcas cleared his throat. “I’ve dreamed of being able to see you like this again.” His voice was thick with emotion. “Your brown eyes are as dark and magnificent as the day I met you for the first time—when you were a baby.”
I nodded, still mesmerized by his transformation. I suppose I should have been happier about the fact that my eyes were no longer a sickly green color, that I looked normal again. But I couldn’t get past what I was seeing with them. I’d forgotten just how beautiful Valcas could be, how beautiful he was.
Valcas raised his dark eyebrows, which made his newly restored green eyes that much more stunning. “Are my eyes repaired as well?”
My chin quivered as I held back tears. “They are. You look like you again.”
I don’t know how long we stood there like that, like two people seeing each other for the first time. I couldn’t decide whether it felt more like meeting a stranger or finding a long-lost friend.
When we finally snapped out of it, reality hit that Ray and Ivory were still on the other side of the Fire Falls. We had no way to communicate with them to find out what was happening. Assuming we did find a way to get back outside, there was no way of predicting the timing of when Ray and Ivory destroyed the Uproar. I shuddered. The Uproar could have destroyed them.
Having no other way of distracting myself from these horrible thoughts, I joined Valcas in exploring our new surroundings.
The water in the pool near the interior base of the Falls was clean and filled with fish, seaweed and other plants. The space behind the falls stretched outward, flat on the bottom and rounded in the corners. Stone walls reached high up along the interior waterfall to an enclosed ceiling of sharp crags that jutted downward.
Flames from the exterior of the Falls shined through the interior waterfall, casting a yellow-orange glow on the pool and rocky ground. The outside layer of fire provided both heat and light, not to mention protection from the Uproar. It was a perfect hiding place from anyone or anything that dared not enter through the Fire Falls.
But the space opposite the Falls wasn’t enclosed. There was a tunnel opening, and we had no idea what was on the other side. Unfortunately, the light that stretched through the waterfall wasn’t bright enough to light up the entire tunnel. Valcas and I explored by feeling along its rocky walls. The walls were smooth, as if the tunnel had been carved out by an underground source of running water. From there, we felt through a series of smaller tunnels, finding that the inside of the Falls was a cavernous network of passageways and open pockets.
We didn’t hear a sound other than our own murmurings and footsteps. It was dark and quiet. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that we weren’t alone.
***
“WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” I asked over a meal of raw fish and seaweed salad. “How will we know whether the Uproar has been destroyed?”
Valcas swallowed the bits of raw fish he’d been chewing. From the way his face contorted, I gathered that sushi was not his favorite food.
“For now, we wait,” he said. “We may run into dangers of our own here on this side. If anyone lives in the caves, I expect that they’ll need to come out here for food and water sooner or later.”
I looked at Valcas with raised eyebrows, and then quickly looked away. He’d stopped wearing his dark glasses since our transformations. I tried not to stare at him for embarrassingly long periods of time, but it wasn’t easy.
His most recent comment awakened something in me that I’d nearly forgotten since entering the Falls—that my father could be in here somewhere, hiding from the Uproar.
“How long should we wait until we start actively looking for him, Valcas?” I asked, bubbling with anticipation and longing. I was a bundle of nerves. The thought that my father could be at the end of one of the tunnels had me in a panic. Would he be as excited about meeting me? Reconnecting with Mom back at TSTA Headquarters had gone smoother than I’d thought it would. She’d welcomed me, embraced me, as if she were happy to see me and genuinely sorry for staying away for so long. How would my father react when I showed up? Was he looking forward to meeting me too?
Valcas chuckled as he awkwardly reached for me. “You sound eager to meet your father. It’s endearing, and I completely understand, but right now the most important thing is to be safe.”
Part of me cringed inside; yet, some other part of me reacted as if I wanted to give in to a different longing, one that I was certain involved the lonely version of Valcas I’d left back at the White Tower. I inhaled, remembering that Valcas was the same person deep inside regardless of whatever life-changing and hope-jading events he’d experienced. I let him place an arm around me and pull me closer to him.
“In here,” he said. “We’re safe from the Uproar. We just need to make sure there’s nothing else, here on the other side, that would compromise that safety. As for Plaka, I can’t imagine him being in any more danger now than he was before we arrived.”
I sighed, disappointed, and then rolled my eyes. It wasn’t like I could wander off without him. Not now. Noticing that Valcas was not just watching me, but smiling, I smiled back. He was right. Something definitely felt different.
I rinsed my hands in the pool of water and dried them on my jeans. Scooting closer to Valcas, I rested my head on his shoulder. “Thank you for being here with me and for keeping me safe, not just now, but for all of it.”
He tensed, leaving me to wonder whether I’d gone too far. Just because he’d tried to comfort me didn’t mean that he was all head-over-heels for me again. But he’d expressed interest in me before, even when I hadn’t done anything to encourage him. If anything, I’d pushed him away. But, he’d said that he would prove himself to me. I wondered what that meant.
His arm curled tightly around me. “Of course,” he said. “I try not to break my promises.”