Sky Jumpers Book 2: The Forbidden Flats

by Peggy Eddleman

  I put my hand over my mouth to cover a gasp. “You broke one arm and cut the other,” I said, remembering the story that my mom had told me many times about my birth mom. “Anna helped you out of the pit, and if it weren’t for the rocks she left behind, you wouldn’t have found your way out of the cave to get help before you lost too much blood.”

  Luke absently brushed his fingers across a scar on his left arm. “The stones didn’t seem so ugly after that.”

  Aaren’s dad searched my face as if he was trying to figure out what I was feeling. I didn’t know what he was going to find. I had no idea how I felt.

  “You’re my uncle?” I whispered.

  Everyone looked from Luke to me and back again, but I could only stare in confusion at Luke.

  Aaren’s dad cleared his throat. “Your sister and her husband made it to White Rock after the bandit attack. It was a long trip in a terrible blizzard. He died as soon as he got your sister here, and she lived only long enough to give birth to Hope.” He paused for a minute. “They had lived in a town right near Arris.”

  Luke looked at Aaren’s dad with sad eyes for a bit. “Hope looks like my sister.”

  Mr. Grenwood nodded. “I remember Anna. She does.”

  There was a long pause before Luke finally said to me, “My sister and I grew up in the ruins. We’ll pass by them along the way to Heaven’s Reach. I can show you.”

  I knew almost nothing about my birth mom. My whole life, I’d had so many questions about her. And now I might get to see where she grew up? Where she lived when she was my age?

  The expression on Luke’s face was close to what I guessed mine looked like—dazed and unsure. And so different from the way I saw him a few minutes ago, before I knew that he was my uncle.

  “Think it’s safe to move on?” Cole asked.

  Luke shook his head, as though he’d forgotten why we were there, and looked back toward the horizon. “Yeah. I don’t think we were noticed.”

  We all rode in silence for a long time, my thoughts a jumbled mess that I was trying to untangle. I took a breath and let some of the tangled thoughts out. “Brock, if you didn’t know anything at all about your dad before he died, would you want to be told?”

  “Of course! Why wouldn’t I?” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Don’t you want to know about your birth mom?”

  I shrugged. It surprised me that I didn’t know whether I did or not. I never even thought I’d have a chance to—I thought my entire birth family had been wiped out when their town was destroyed. “I’ve never known much about her, so I had to make up her story myself. What if I learn more, then wish I hadn’t, that I could go back to believing my own story?”

  “I guess that’s the risk you take.”

  I hoped it would be a good risk. Now I just had to work up the courage to ask Luke.

  The next morning, Luke rode his horse next to mine. “Are you excited to see Glacier?”

  “I am. It’ll be interesting to see another town.”

  “Glacier isn’t just ‘another town.’ ” Luke twisted in his saddle and fumbled around in one of his saddlebags. Then he pulled out something that looked similar to a tree branch or root, but made of stone. It was as long as his hand and as skinny as his thumb. It had a slightly bumpy texture with a golden color, and as he turned it, I could tell that it was mostly hollow.

  “Is that”—Aaren squinted at the rock—“fulgurite?”

  Luke looked at Aaren. “I’m impressed you knew that.”

  “Aaren reads a lot,” I said.

  “What’s fulgurite?” Brock asked.

  Luke motioned to Aaren with a flourish, so Aaren explained. “When lightning strikes sand, it super-heats it, melts the sand, and forms a rock the shape of the path the lightning took.”

  Luke bounced the rock in his hand once, then put it back in his saddlebag. “That’s right. But do you know what was infinitely stronger, hotter, bigger, and more powerful than lightning?”

  Everything suddenly fell into place. “The green bombs.”

  “Yep. There’s a lot of places with sand around here, which means there’s fulgurite buried all over this area. And not only small pieces like the ones lightning makes. Some are massive.”

  Aaren cocked his head to the side. “And Glacier …?”

  “Before the bombs,” Luke said, “the place where Glacier now sits was a mine where they extracted pure silica sand.” He said each of the last three words as if they had more meaning than the others.

  I looked back and forth between Aaren, who stared at Luke with wide eyes and his mouth dropped open, and Luke, smiling at Aaren. “What?” I asked.

  Aaren shook his head and fumbled over his words. “That much heat, that much pressure—with silica sand, it would make glass!”

  “And that,” Luke said, “is how the city of Glacier was formed.”

  “The city walls are made of glass?” Brock asked.

  “Most of them. A few months after the bombs first hit, when the weather still hadn’t calmed down, bad windstorms blew through here, uncovering the top and most of the outside of it. A group of people claimed it, stuck together, and undertook the monumental job of digging out the sand from the inside, then formed a town. It’s more impressive than the pyramids from way back when, if you ask me. Hopefully, one day you’ll get to spend some time there when your town isn’t in danger and speed isn’t an issue.”

  As we rode toward Glacier, I kept sneaking glances at Luke, a million questions filling my mind. One of them was whether or not I could ask him a million questions, and I suddenly realized that I was ready to hear about my birth mom. I took a deep breath and then let out the question that had been burning in my mind for more years than I could remember. “What was Anna like?”

  Luke smiled, as though he was glad that I asked, and I let a warmth settle over me. “Anna. She was … cautious. But brave. Smart. And selfless. Extremely logical, but still easy to talk into things.”

  He looked up at the sky for a minute, then laughed. “Our dad—your grandpa—was a fixer. He couldn’t see something broken and not find a way to fix it. He traveled a lot to scavenge things from towns with ruins. You know that since the bombs, metals can no longer hold a magnetic charge, and to make an electric motor, we need a metal that can, right?”

  “Of course,” Aaren said. “We learned about that back in Sixes and Sevens.”

  “Good. Anyway, our mom died from Shadel’s when I was five, so when our dad left to go on a scavenging trip, we usually stayed in town with a neighbor lady.” Luke squinted at me. “You’re what? About twelve?” I nodded. “This one time,” he continued, “when Anna was your age, and I was ten, our dad heard rumors of a clean zone. Kind of like the legendary Lost City of Gold, only it was our lost city of metal—a triangle of land that got missed by the overlapping circles of destruction made by three bombs. That happened almost nowhere, and he was convinced that if he went there, he could find some metals that were untouched by the side effects—that there’d be some that could hold a long-term magnetic charge. If he could find that, he could build an engine. And he decided that it was high time Anna and I went on a trip with him.

  “So we took three horses, and sped across the Forbidden Flats for nearly two weeks before we reached the clean zone.”

  Aaren’s eyes grew wide. “It was really there?”

  “Yep. A little section of land that was once called Carrington, North Dakota, including the county medical center, a dozen homes, and an office building. Completely abandoned. The office building seemed smack in the middle of the clean zone, so my dad thought it’d be our best chance of finding metals. Anna and I thought the medical center would be better—there were probably trays and equipment made of metal. It was at the very edge of the clean zone, though, so my dad didn’t agree. We waited until he was busy in the office building, and we went two streets down to the medical center.

  “The inside had long been stripped of any medical supplies, but it still had a
few metal carts and rolling beds. The carts were thin metal, though. Anna worried they wouldn’t hold a magnetic charge, so we kept looking. Finally, we found a room with a giant metal swinging arm attached to the ceiling. It was perfect. Anna thought we should run to tell our dad, but I could see how it attached to the ceiling, and convinced her we could get it ourselves.”

  He paused a minute and laughed some more. “Anna didn’t think it would be safe, but I ignored her and started stacking things so I could climb up to reach it. I got to the top and used a rusty scalpel I’d found to turn the screws that held the arm to the ceiling. It was stuck, and when I pushed extra hard, the stack of boxes and crates and carts under me wobbled, and I lost my balance. I grabbed the metal arm and held on, and Anna dashed to the next room to get a rolling bed.

  “We didn’t realize the building was within the range of the bomb effects, though, and before she got back, I heard metal creak, and the whole wall and ceiling collapsed! I got knocked unconscious when I fell to the ground.

  “I came to not long after. I was lying on the rolling hospital bed, and Anna was running down the streets pushing me, yelling for my dad. I felt something hard at my side, and looked over to see the metal arm on the bed with me.”

  We all laughed, but no one as much as me. I couldn’t believe how much Anna was like Aaren, and how much Luke was like me. My mom and dad weren’t daring—at least not in physical ways. Maybe my daring was something I inherited from my birth family. I had always wondered.

  Luke wiped a tear from all the laughing, and I grinned. He looked at me for a moment, then said, “You have her smile.”

  I looked away so he wouldn’t see that my eyes watered. I had my birth mom’s smile! I smiled again, to see how it felt now that I knew.

  Everyone chatted as we rode, and the wind picked up. It blew in our faces for hours and hours and I didn’t think it would ever stop. The wind finally died down about the time we dismounted for the day. Cole put together sandwiches while everyone watered the horses, set up their pen, and built a fire. So much dirt had hit us, I used the time before dinner to go to the horse pen and brush Ruben’s coat.

  When I finished, I pushed my hair off my forehead and wondered how it was possible for so much dirt to be in one place! I tried to run my fingers through my hair, but I could barely wiggle them in. And my scalp felt caked in dust. So were my skin and my clothes. And my shoes. And my bag. The wind had brought cooler weather, but that didn’t stop most of us from walking right out into the river to wash off.

  We huddled around the campfire, trying to dry off and warm up, before burrowing into our bedrolls. The third night in a row with no tents. It would’ve been nicer to have them, but everyone was tired. We all just scrunched in closer to the fire.

  Aaren whispered to Brock and me, “My dad talked nonstop about Glacier City today.”

  “What’s it like?” Brock asked.

  Aaren shrugged. “He’s never been there. It’s right in the middle of the Forbidden Flats, and it’s the only trading town in any direction for at least one hundred miles, so they have a lot more stuff than feed for the horses.”

  While everyone around us slept, we stayed awake, whispering about Glacier. Eventually, Brock and Aaren fell asleep, too, but I couldn’t. Instead, I stared at the stars, trying to imagine how high up the Bomb’s Breath was. I’d imagined the same thing inside White Rock plenty of times, but there, the Bomb’s Breath touched the mountains all the way around in a circle. It was baffling to think that here, it went on and on, spreading across the immense sky in every direction.

  But at least out here, it was staying the right height in the sky.

  I held my necklace and brushed my finger and thumb down the smooth chain, over and over as I listened to the murmur of the river and the chirping of crickets, and thought about home and how a single necklace helped me find out I had an uncle.

  Luke steered his horse toward me as we rode. “Notice anything yet?”

  I squinted and in the distance, I saw something shining—almost like heat waves coming off hot sand. The more I looked at it, the more I could tell that it had distinct edges, even though we were still too far away to see it well.

  “Is that it?” Brock asked.

  “Yes. Keep watching.”

  Over the next hour, the city seemed to grow bigger and bigger the closer we got to it. The ground gradually sloped down as we rode, and eventually we neared it.

  After seeing it as only ripples on the horizon, I never imagined it would be this big. The gate was huge—probably twenty feet wide and twenty feet tall. It didn’t look as if they broke the glass to make room for the gate. It looked like there wasn’t any glass where it was to begin with. The glass started at the bottom edges of each side of the gate, and rose higher and higher as it circled around on both sides. In the parts closest to the gate where the glass wasn’t very high, they built a wooden wall so that the entire city had at least a twenty-foot-high border.

  When Luke said the walls were made of glass, I had thought of the kind of glass we had in windows in White Rock—mostly smooth, thin, flat, and rectangular. This was nothing like that at all. The glass was thick and anything but flat. It curved around and bent in ripples and bulges. In some places, it looked as though it might only be a foot thick, but in others, it was three or four feet thick. I could see that there were things inside the city—like houses and people—but everything was so distorted through the glass, it was impossible to tell what they were.

  “This place doesn’t look too friendly,” Aaren’s dad said.

  I followed his gaze to the armed guards that patrolled the top of the city wall.

  “Of course it doesn’t,” Luke said. “People come from all around to set up shops or to make trades. Between the goods that are held here until they’re traded, and the fact that there’s no one else to rob anywhere nearby, things are a little more dangerous for them. They protect themselves well.”

  “The walls are so tall,” I said. “This whole place really used to be filled with sand?”

  Luke nodded. “People can do some pretty amazing things when they work together.”

  We stopped our horses right before we reached the gate. Two guards stood at the top of the tall wall on either side. “State your business,” one called down.

  Mr. Williams slid off the trailer’s bench and landed on the ground, grabbed the reins from the two horses, and walked them forward. “We’re here from White Rock. We’re stopping to buy feed for our horses on our way to Heaven’s Reach.”

  The guard motioned to someone behind the gate, and after a minute, one side of the gate opened, and two more guards stood just inside it. The closest one, a burly man with short hair, spoke. “We have a strict ‘no guns’ policy.” He motioned to the guard standing next to him, who held a big wooden box. “We’ll return them when you leave. Stay on the main roads, don’t start any fights, and don’t cause trouble, or you’ll be banned.”

  “We won’t,” Mr. Williams said to the man, then turned to our group. “You heard him—give him your gun as you enter.” He took off his gun and holster, placed them into the box, then tipped his head to the guard and rode in.

  Brock and I steered Ruben as close to the glass wall as possible while we rode in. The surface in places was as smooth as the glass back home, but in other places, it was grainy—as if sand was stuck in it. On one whole section to our right, there appeared to be more sand than glass. I wanted to jump off my horse and run forward to touch it.

  Brock gasped next to me, then pointed at a thick part of the wall that had something in it. “Look!”

  It took a minute to figure out what I was seeing. Something big and dark was encased in the glass itself, similar to a stick in the river getting frozen in the ice during winter. “It’s the scoop part of one of those tractors they had before the bombs!”

  “And over there—a metal wheel!” Aaren said, pointing to another part of the glass wall. “Like the ones cars used to have.”
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br />   “Stay with us,” Mr. Williams called back, and we galloped to catch up with the group.

  From what I could tell, Glacier City was more or less circle-shaped. The glass was shortest in the front part where we came in, and highest in the back. It was probably thirty feet high there, and curved inward, so it made a bit of a roof over the back part. A tall wooden wall divided the front half of the city from the back half. There was a road to our left, bordered with buildings. A man with a navy vest stood in the middle of the road, directing us to continue on the road in front of us.

  We rode ahead to catch up with Luke, our horses’ hooves clomping on the packed sand.

  “What’s down there?” Brock asked as he pointed toward the road the guard blocked.

  “Work areas for their town,” Luke said. “That entire road is off-limits to visitors. These shops,” he said as he gestured to tables under wooden roofs on either side of the road we traveled on, “are run by people who come here to make trades.” He jerked his head toward a shopkeeper sitting next to a table covered with a bluish cloth. The man’s yellow teeth showed between his wiry mustache and beard as he called out to us about some jewelry he had for sale. “None of these people live here, except maybe in the hotel. But when the road turns left up there, you’ll see the shops run by the people of Glacier. That’s where the feed store is.”

  I tried to see everything, but there was so much, and the voices from the shopkeepers all mixed together. There were relics from before the bombs, metal bent into strange shapes, clothing, different-colored liquids that came in little jars, and trinkets that were intricate enough they must’ve been from before the bombs. I wished I wasn’t on a horse so I could look more closely.

  We rounded the corner onto a long, wide road lined with shops. Real shops. There were some that were the same as the merchant shops we had in White Rock, and some I’d never seen before. A metal shop, a tailor, one where they sold food supplies, a doctor’s clinic, and the hotel. I’d heard that word before, but if Luke hadn’t said it, I probably wouldn’t have remembered what it meant. And they had a restaurant! I knew it was a place where strangers went to eat meals together, but I hadn’t ever seen one.