Brock led us down another street. “Last spring, when people from White Rock were here for the Planting Festival, we found out that my grandpa’s arthritis was so bad he couldn’t do things himself. He needed help, so my mom decided it would be best to move to White Rock. We could take care of my grandpa, be better protected from bandits, and have Estie closer to your mom, Aaren, since the doctor here can’t do anything more for her. I left to help him the next day with the people going back to White Rock.”
“So after your dad died, you were pretty much the dad in your family,” Aaren said.
“Yeah.”
“And then you had to leave them.” Aaren looked over at Brock. “It must’ve been hard.”
Brock looked down. He continued walking, retracing the steps we’d taken to get from his house to the barracks. “It wouldn’t have been safe to move all our stuff to White Rock in a small group, so my family was going to go with the big group when they headed to the Harvest Festival six months later. But Estie’s tumor grew, and it made her legs less stable. Right before they were supposed to leave, she fell. There was swelling, and for a few weeks, they were afraid that if they moved her, they’d do more damage. By the time she was well enough to walk with crutches, they’d missed their chance to leave.”
Brock’s conversation at the inventions show with the man from Browning popped into my mind. “You found out your family wasn’t joining you during the Harvest Festival.”
“Yep,” Brock said.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Aaren asked.
Brock shrugged. “I wasn’t looking for people to feel sorry for me.”
We turned onto Brock’s street and walked in silence. I thought back through the eight months I’d known him. And about how far he’d been from his family the whole time, and we hadn’t even known it.
“I’m sorry,” I said as we stepped up to his door. “I hope you get to be with your family again soon.”
Brock shrugged and opened the door. Then I couldn’t think of anything but the warm house with the warm soup and the warm blankets.
A pair of hands shook me, but I was so deeply asleep I didn’t realize they weren’t part of my dream. In the dim light from the fire, I made out the face of Mrs. Sances.
“Time to wake up, Hope. It’s a little after three a.m.”
I groaned my way to a sitting position, and Mrs. Sances clucked. “I don’t think any of you so much as rolled over during the night.”
I believed her. Every single muscle in my body ached.
Brenna. She’d been asleep when we got back, and even though Mrs. Sances had assured us she was doing better, I wanted to see for myself.
Brenna was sitting on the couch, holding a mug. “Brock’s mom gave me hot cider!”
Relief at her being alive and okay washed over me. She was still pale and weak, though, and it seemed like talking was hard for her, when normally it seemed hard for her to stop talking.
Aaren and I both climbed out of our bedrolls and hobbled to her, our muscles too sore to run. “How are you feeling?” Aaren asked as he put a hand on her forehead.
“She’s doing okay,” Mrs. Sances said. “She woke up a couple hours ago, starving, and ate two bowls of soup. Her body temperature is almost back to normal. She needs sleep, but she wouldn’t lie down until you three were awake.”
“Is she ready to go?” Aaren asked Mrs. Sances.
“About that.” Mrs. Sances pulled Aaren to the side.
“She may look like she’s got a little life back in her, but she’s far from healed. She goes into the cold right now, and she’ll get as bad as she was almost instantly.”
Aaren looked at Brenna and bit his lip. “My parents didn’t know she snuck out to join us. If I don’t bring her home—”
“I know,” Mrs. Sances said, her voice softening. “But I bet they’d rather hear she’s doing fine in Browning than see her in your arms, knocking on death’s door.”
Aaren’s face fell just like mine did. I hadn’t even considered leaving her. But when I’d carried her down the mountain, she had been so sick. As much as it hurt my guts, I knew Mrs. Sances was right. It helped that Aaren’s mom had been in this house. Surely she’d know Brenna would be well cared for.
Aaren cleared his throat. “Hey, Brenna. I met Brock’s sister Estie last night. Did you know she’s your age?”
“Yep!” Brenna said. “Mrs. Sances told me.”
“I bet she’s fun to play with. Want to stay and play with her?”
She smiled and nodded, but I didn’t think she realized what that meant. I thought she should. “Brenna,” I said, “we need to go back to White Rock right now, but it’s still so cold outside. Will you stay here?”
Brenna shivered just thinking about the cold. “Without you?” she asked.
“Yes. And it might be a few weeks before we can come back to get you. But Mrs. Sances will take good care of you and you won’t have to be cold.”
She looked at me, then Aaren, with big trusting eyes. “I don’t want to be cold.”
Brock’s gaze went to the hallway, with the doors to his siblings’ bedrooms. The expression on his face made my heart hurt. It was awful to leave Brenna behind. He had to leave his entire family.
“You could stay.” I barely recognized Mrs. Sances’s whispered voice. It was full of sadness and hope at the same time, and so much softer than usual.
Brock met her eyes for a few moments before he shook his head. “Grandpa still needs me just as much.”
She swallowed hard. “They’ll keep you all safe, right? You’ll be careful?” We nodded. Then she cleared her throat and clapped her hands together, her gruff kindness returning. “Well, no sense wallowing, especially when breakfast’s on the table.” She nudged us out of the room, then laid Brenna down in a bed of blankets near the fire.
The kitchen table held plates with pancakes and bacon, and a big pitcher of milk. I shoveled food into my mouth as quickly as I could chew, while Mrs. Sances packed extra food into a bag.
The food probably tasted good, but I ate too fast to tell. My stomach ached with worries. “We gotta go,” I said, gulping down the last of my milk as I stood up.
“They aren’t gonna leave without you,” Mrs. Sances said as she carried a bag into the front room.
I wasn’t so sure. White Rock was the guards’ town, too—they were as anxious to get back to help as we were. There was no way they’d wait past four a.m. My feet wouldn’t stay still. Neither would my fingers. They drummed the doorknob, aching to turn it. Mrs. Sances finished tying scarves on us, then added item after item to our bags. It had to be 3:30, and we were still standing in Brock’s living room.
Finally, Mrs. Sances put the last item in Brock’s bag, and we stepped out into the snow-covered streets.
The sun wouldn’t be up for hours, but the light of the moon reflected off the snow and brightened everything. The snow lay piled on top of roofs, trees, fence posts, and roads, but it no longer fell from the sky. In fact, the sky looked calm and clear and innocent. Like it wasn’t even capable of creating the blizzard we’d trudged through for so many hours.
I plodded along for the first block with tired, achy muscles; then my body seemed to think that walking nonstop for hours on end was what it was supposed to do now. I got into a rhythm, and the pains faded into the background. After three blocks, the soreness went away enough that we thought we could run. Or maybe it was just panic at the thought of being left behind.
When we rounded the last corner, out of breath, we saw the guard all together, making preparations to leave. Stott gestured and talked with Beckett, his second-in-command, as he walked in our direction. “No Brenna?” he called out. Aaren shook his head. Stott nodded, as if checking one more thing off his mental list, then said, “You’re with Travin,” and jabbed his thumb toward a group of horses and men behind him.
I couldn’t believe how many horses I saw in the moonlight, tromping down the snow. One or two as pack horses I’d expected,
but there were probably enough for everyone. All the horses had saddles, even. We sidestepped horse hooves, bustling guard members, and piles of horse poop that steamed in the snow, and made our way to Aaren’s brother Travin.
“Where’s Brenna?” he asked as we neared him.
Aaren’s shoulders sagged. “She was too sick. Think Mom and Dad are going to kill me for leaving her behind?”
Travin put his arm around Aaren’s shoulders. “I can guarantee it.”
Aaren looked at me in alarm. “He’s kidding,” I said.
“Yeah. They’re much more likely to just send you back out here in the snow to get her.”
I turned to see Aaren’s darker-haired, older brother Cole as he walked up to us. He patted the neck of the horse closest to Travin. “Nice, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said as I stroked the horse’s rich, deep brown mane. She reminded me of Arabelle. “Do we get to take these with us?”
Travin grinned. “Yep. Stott met with Browning’s captain after you guys left last night. He surprised us with the horses—he said he’ll do anything to help White Rock, but I think he just wants us back here quicker. I don’t blame him. I’d worry bandits would attack while they didn’t have us here, too.”
Travin and I climbed onto the brown horse, Aaren and Brock got on a gray one, and Cole walked back into the group to his horse, while Stott and Beckett strode around and made last-minute checks. We moved out less than ten minutes after we got there.
When we passed through the city gates, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The mountains that encircled White Rock and the hills that rippled out from it were on my right, but in front of me and to my left lay the flattest ground I’d ever seen, and it went on forever. I’d heard this area was covered with houses and roads and schools and stores before the bombs. I tried to picture all of that spread across the flatness. There was so much land! I couldn’t imagine there ever being enough buildings to cover that much space. Miles and miles of dark sky stretched everywhere, and only came down to meet the moonlit snow way off in the distance. Everything in White Rock—everything I had spent my entire life looking at—sloped upward. But here things sloped gently downward so far away, it was mesmerizing. It was good that Travin was guiding the horse, because I couldn’t take my eyes off the plains.
Except the view of the outside of White Rock was pretty amazing, too. The flat land for miles and miles around made White Rock’s crater look massive. No wonder my grandparents and the survivors with them headed toward it when they were looking for a place to call home.
We rode in a long line two horses wide on the main road toward White Rock—the same road we’d take if we were going to enter White Rock through the pass, since it also led to the bridge over White Rock River and the road that circled the crater.
“Have you ever gone anywhere besides Browning?” I asked Cole.
“No.”
“Stott has,” Travin said. “He’s been to both Bergen and Hayes.”
“Are there ruins there?” Aaren asked.
“Not that close,” Cole said. “You have to go more than two hundred miles away for that. The big cities were mostly wiped out, but I heard there are still a few ruins. Tall buildings used steel framework, though. When the bombs changed the properties of metals, it made them unstable. What’s left of the old cities is a death trap—they’re nothing like the towns around here. They have their problems; we have ours.”
Yeah. I sighed. We definitely have our own problems.
As we rode, Travin filled us in on Stott’s plan. They were going to leave us at my cousin Carina’s house on their way to City Circle; then they’d capture the bandits surrounding the community center and go through multiple doors to overtake the bandits inside. All I could think was how much I wanted to be there when they won. I wanted to make sure my dad was okay. I wanted to see the looks on everyone’s faces. I hated the thought of sitting at Carina’s house, waiting and waiting for someone to tell us it was over.
By sunrise, we’d reached the pass—the opening in the crater that lead into White Rock—and I wished we could just go through it instead of having to travel nearly halfway around the mountain. I tilted my head up, amazed at how high the drifts of snow were that filled the pass. Even if I stood on my horse, I wasn’t sure I could reach the top of the snow.
A few guards used pickaxes to crack the ice on White Rock River, and we let the horses drink. As soon as they finished, we crossed over the bridge and onto the road that led through the forest around the mountain. If you could call it a road—parts were so narrow we had to go single file. It went around boulders and trees, and over the hills of ripples from the crater. And then back over the hills. And then over them again. I had flashbacks from the night before.
The worst part of the road, though, was when the trees blocked the sun. I was glad I had Travin’s warmth behind me, and my horse’s warm neck in front of me. But my hands were frozen right through my gloves.
The mountain sat on our right as we circled it. And the roads weren’t all bad. Part of the way they were even smooth, but the trees were so thick through that part, I couldn’t see the amazing plains. I had to be content with watching Brock play with his bale-grabber invention. He said he’d made it for the big bales of cotton they have in Browning, but when he presented it to our class, he told them it was for hay bales. It had a long adjustable rope, with weights on both ends that looked like balls. Aaren rode in front and guided the horse, while Brock rode behind and adjusted the rope as short as it would go, twirled the weights at the ends around and around, then threw it forward. The balls swung to the backside of a tree and wrapped around each other. As their horse reached the tree, Brock would pull it off and go through the process again.
When we stopped to get lunch out of the packs and to stretch our legs, Brock widened his grabber as big as it would go, and he and Aaren each took an end and swung it. The grabber hit a huge boulder and wrapped around it, balls clattering together at the back. He had done a really good job making it. No wonder he won.
“Brock?” I asked. “Do they have competitions for inventions in Browning?”
He glanced at me, then back to the boulder he was aiming at. “Not like they do in White Rock. I don’t think people miss the inventions from before the bombs as much. We don’t have many books to remind us about them, plus most of the old people who were around before have already died.”
It struck me how different life was in Browning. I knew it wasn’t as safe, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the harder life might have killed off so many. Maybe they didn’t care about inventing, but it seemed they had to live in fear of being attacked all the time. I watched Brock swing the bale grabber with Aaren until Stott gave the order to mount up again.
We passed the time predicting what was going on in each of the rooms back at the community center, and what each council member was doing. It helped to distract everyone, but judging by the tense voices of the guards, they were just as anxious as I was. I glanced at the sun to gauge how much time we had before it touched the horizon. Sundown. The time when bad things would happen if we weren’t there.
Travin must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, “Two hours. We’ll make it.”
The sun was dangerously close to the horizon when we finally reached the spot where White Rock River came out of the mountain. We picketed the horses and Stott assigned two men to stay behind with them. He told Clive and Lee to enter first, Beckett to bring up the rear, and the rest of us to keep the person in front of us in sight at all times. After most of the men lit torches, then got on their hands and knees to crawl into an opening just to the left of the river, I went in, with Brock and Aaren right behind me.
“Whoa,” Aaren whispered as our eyes adjusted to the torchlight.
The river wasn’t as wide here as it was in White Rock—probably not more than forty feet. Inside the cave, a rock ledge a few feet wide ran along the left side of the river, which was a good thing because we neede
d something to stand on. Ice didn’t cover the river inside the mountain. The rock ceiling gradually rose until it was taller than my house, and the cavern was at least fifty feet wide.
The light from the torches bounced off the water in the river and reflected it back onto the walls and ceiling of the cave, so it looked like it was all underwater. A lot of the rock in the cave was white limestone, but all across the ceiling there were big sections that were almost black. It made the ceiling look like a zebra.
“Don’t block the way!” Beckett’s voice called out from behind me.
I put my back against the wall and shuffled sideways along the stone ledge as fast as I could to catch up.
The ceiling lowered as we traveled into the cave, and the river narrowed and deepened. I moved my schoolbag around to my back and kept my left hand against the wall as we moved forward. In some places the ceiling was so low, I had to crawl. The ground was rough and rocks dug into my knees, ripping through my pants. But at least I didn’t have to crawl on my belly like the guard in front of me. The noise of the rushing river was so loud, no one even tried to talk over it.
Most of the way, the ledge was about the same height as the river, but for a terrifying stretch as long as our field at home, it was ten feet above the surface of the water, almost touching the cave ceiling, and barely wide enough to crawl on. I looked down at the water and imagined what would happen if I fell in. The water was so cold, I’d probably freeze instantly; then the river would carry me downstream and shove me under the ice as it exited the mountain. I suppressed a full-body shudder and huddled closer to the wall, focusing on the boots of the guard in front of me.
Once we got past the fall-and-you-die part, the ceiling was tall enough to stand again. I rubbed at my sore knees and hobbled along. After a long stretch, the cave roof lowered to a small opening and I figured it meant more crawling. Instead, I climbed through the opening into a massive cavern. A guard at the opening touched my shoulder, then held a finger to his lips.
Sky Jumpers Series, Book 1 Page 14