Sky Jumpers Book 2: The Forbidden Flats

by Peggy Eddleman

  “Thanks!” I was thrilled that I’d get to ride Arabelle again.

  We picked up the saddlebags and followed Thomas through the main tunnel. When we reached the entrance building, Luke was waiting for us. Thomas went over to the wall and slid open a part that I had no idea was actually a door. It led into the building lying on its side that held the animals, and Thomas motioned for us to go in. The ground was muddy, and my shoes stuck in it with every step, but at least the rain wasn’t falling as hard. I walked across the open space to the horses, Luke, Aaren, and Brock somewhere behind me. Arabelle nuzzled into me, and I stroked her jaw.

  We brought the horses out of their stalls and put the new saddlebags on them. Then Thomas started walking toward the door that would take us back into the main building.

  “We’re not going out to the alley?” Aaren asked.

  “No,” Thomas said. “This way’s a shortcut.”

  The four of us led our horses across the entrance building, their hooves clacking on the stone, to a door on the opposite side of the building that led to a small, closed-in area with a tiny alley leading out of it.

  Aaren walked up to the underside of a building that had fallen most of the way over, making a leaning wall behind us. Pipes of all sizes came out of the building, broken from when the building tipped. Aaren reached up and touched long, skinny cords of something in reds and greens and blues and yellows, all bunched together. “Is this electrical wiring?”

  “It is,” Luke said.

  Aaren scooted in closer, breaking away some of the colored part that seemed to be damaged by age. “This copper inside is as skinny as string! How did they ever get it formed so small?”

  “Once we find some metal untouched by the bombs,” Luke said, “we’ll need wiring like that. I’m telling you, the person who discovers that metal will change the world.”

  “You’ve been searching for your lost city of metal for a long time,” I said. “Do you think you’ll keep doing it?”

  “Yep,” Luke said. “I’ll always be searching for it. What this world needs is people to invent, and people to discover. I can’t invent like my dad could, but I can discover things.”

  I had never thought about that before. I wondered what other things were out there that needed to be discovered and explored. Luke said we were a lot alike. Maybe I could do something similar to what he’s doing—making a difference by discovering things.

  Luke pulled a pocket knife out of his saddlebag and handed it to Aaren. “You and Brock enjoy inventing, right? You should cut off a piece and take it home. Maybe you’ll use it someday.”

  Brock and Aaren each cut a strand of it and shoved it into their bags, grinning.

  “Now let’s get out of here,” Luke said.

  We climbed onto our horses, and Luke showed us into the alleyway, which was only big enough for two of us to ride side by side. I stayed even with Luke as we wound our way through the maze of buildings. The rain wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been. Eventually, we made it past the last building and onto the road, the afternoon sun peeking through one of the storm clouds and coming down in slants.

  Luke nudged his horse into a gallop, and we did the same. We were moving toward Heaven’s Reach again.

  After a couple of hours, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, and it became dark enough that Luke worried one of the horses might injure itself on a rock or a rut that we couldn’t see, so we stopped for the night. We went to the river to get a drink and to refill our waterskins, then walked the horses across the road and up a little hill. At the top of it, a big tree had fallen enough years ago that it was dried up. We all pushed on it together, scooting it far enough out of the way that we could build the fire on the drier ground where it had been.

  Then we set up our tent and sat on the fallen tree, trying to warm ourselves. With the night so dark and the fire so bright, we couldn’t see the road we’d traveled on, but that didn’t stop us from staring that direction anyway, hoping to see any sign of the others.

  “Luke?” I said, and he looked up at me, the fire casting an orange glow on his face. “Isha told me that it was Anna who got your family kicked out of the ruins.”

  Aaren’s and Brock’s heads flicked to me, and Luke looked off to the side at something I knew he couldn’t see. “Will you tell me about it?”

  He stayed quiet for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to. Then he sighed. “Anna didn’t just collect rocks or learn about them. She studied them. Came up with theories. She was searching for answers to which metals would hold a magnetic charge even more than my dad and I were. Not only did she search with us, but she researched all the time.

  “Once when she was sixteen and I was fourteen, we rode with my dad to a town about twenty-five miles south of the ruins to trade. It was a long day and things didn’t go well. We took a new shortcut home. After a few miles, we spotted a dry riverbed, and Anna was convinced that she could see a new kind of stone, even while up on her horse, and she wanted to spend some time cataloging. We were irritable and exhausted and the horses were tired, and my dad said no.

  “So we went home. Then, when it got dark, Anna snuck out and went to the riverbed. Right after she found the rocks, bandits found her. She raced away on her horse, and lost them.”

  Luke looked up from the flames for the first time, and met my eyes. “You’ve seen the people in the ruins. Safety’s so important to them, they’re willing to live underground. They have a belowground water system so they don’t have to be seen. The city doesn’t even have a real name, because they think that’d make it a target. They have very strict protocols to ensure their safety and protection.

  “One of those protocols is, if you are being chased by bandits, you go to the building on the southernmost end, and sound the silent alarm. Help will come, and they’ll prevail because they can fight back with the element of surprise, and keep the conflict away from where they live.”

  Luke’s eyes went back to the fire, and he dropped his voice low enough that I had a hard time hearing him above the crackling of the flames. “Anna thought she’d lost the bandits, so she didn’t go to the safety building—she went straight to the front door of the main building. As soon as they opened it to let her in, the bandits attacked.”

  We all gasped.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We fought back and won. We kept our secret safe, but a lot of lives were lost. When Anna violated the protocols for being followed by bandits, she broke the most basic law in the ruins, so she was banned. She made one stupid mistake, and they kicked her out, when I made so many—” His voice cracked, and he stopped talking.

  I stared into the fire, imagining what my birth mom must have felt when she realized what she’d done.

  After a minute, Luke spoke again. “Anna was convinced that she could find our lost city of metal.”

  “Did she?” I asked.

  Luke shook his head. “When we got kicked out, she said that it was her obsession with rocks that caused all the trouble. So she left her books behind, along with any desire she had of figuring it all out. She didn’t pick up a single rock or go on another exploring trip with us ever again.”

  Luke looked at me for a moment, then stood up and went to the tent.

  I didn’t move from my seat on the fallen tree. Brock and Aaren stayed with me. It made me sad to think about my birth mom’s dreams and plans, and to know that she never accomplished them. I lifted the flap of my bag and pulled out the two books—the textbook and the notebook—that she’d left behind. I brushed the tips of my fingers along the words that she had written. Somewhere in these were the clues to her theories. The things that might’ve helped her unlock the secrets of the lost city of metal, if she hadn’t quit trying.

  I decided that I was going to help my birth mom finish what she no longer could.

  I knew that the sun was about to poke the first bit of its head above the trees in the east, because it finally got light enough that I didn’t have to squ
int so much to see the words of Anna’s book. That meant my time had run out. We needed to be on the horses every second that the sun was up, or we’d have no chance of making it back to White Rock in time.

  Luke ducked under the tent flap and stepped out into the clearing near the ashes of last night’s fire. He glanced at me, then to the road, a strange expression on his face.

  “What?” I said.

  He paused, then ran his hand through his hair. “Nothing. You just looked like Anna for a minute. No sign of Mr. Williams or Aaren’s dad?”

  I spun on the tree trunk toward the road. I had been so focused on the book that I hadn’t even thought of them!

  “They haven’t come?” Aaren asked as he and Brock climbed out of the tent.

  “No,” Luke said.

  Aaren walked a few paces to get a better view of the road. “If they made it to the ruins, they would’ve ridden all during the night to get to us. They’d be here.”

  “Something must’ve held them up.” Luke took one last look at the road. “And we’ve got no time to wait. That means we’re on our own from here on out.”

  I gulped and tried to see the look on Aaren’s face. But he started packing up camp, so the rest of us did, too.

  As we folded up the tent, Brock said, “You’re okay with leading the negotiations now that Mr. Williams won’t be there to do it, right?”

  “What?” I practically yelled. “Me?”

  Luke gave me a half-smile. “I guess you hadn’t thought that far yet, huh?” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Of course it’s you. I don’t have the authority. Your dad is the council head—the mayor of Heaven’s Reach probably won’t talk to anyone but you.”

  “But … I don’t have any idea how to do something like that!”

  “You’ll do fine,” Aaren said.

  I was pretty sure I wouldn’t!

  “We’d better go,” Brock said. “We can enjoy that freaked-out look on Hope’s face along the way.”

  After a few minutes, Luke rode right beside me. “You’re brave. Why are you so nervous?”

  I frowned. “I’m bad at that stuff. I can’t talk adults into anything.”

  “I heard you saved your town before. I bet you didn’t think you could do that until you did.”

  “Only because I found a way to use my strengths. But my strengths aren’t exactly the kinds of things that help in most situations. How often do people need someone to sky jump off a cliff?”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “The way I see it, you’ve got some pretty valuable strengths.”

  “And some pretty impressive weaknesses,” I said. “This is one of them. When I said I’d come on this trip, I didn’t think I’d have to do anything like that. If I fail, we lose our town.”

  Luke stayed quiet for a long time before he spoke again. “My dad—your grandpa—always said, ‘Sometimes you won’t have the tools you need. But just because you don’t have a wrench doesn’t mean you can’t use needle-nose pliers to do the same job.’ ”

  “So …,” I said, “tools are what? Your strengths?” He nodded. “When bandits invaded, you went all the way over White Rock’s crater to Browning during a terrible snowstorm, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You keep going when things get bad enough that most people would stop. So that means you’re persistent—that’s like your hammer. You got others to follow you, so you’re a good leader—that’s your screwdriver. And you’re brave enough to take risks that would scare other people. That’s your needle-nose pliers.” He grinned. “I think you got that from my side of the family, by the way.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”

  He looked amused. “The point is, sometimes when you need a wrench and you don’t have it, needle-nose pliers will work well enough.”

  Well enough. I wasn’t sure “well enough” was going to save anyone.

  We rode all day until it got too dark, then led the horses to the river to drink. The river was wider here, and not all together, the way it was in most places. It was as if the river had split into five or six rivers, with a tiny section of land in between each one. It was at least one hundred feet wide, but probably not very deep—I guessed that was why nobody took boats on it. It wasn’t shallow enough to cross, though.

  “Is there a bridge anywhere on this river?” I asked.

  Luke flicked his hand downstream. “Yeah—there’s one close to Heaven’s Reach, for anyone who needs to go up and around to the west side of the Rockies.”

  “Then why doesn’t anyone live on that side?” Aaren asked. “They’d have the river protecting them from bandits.”

  “Wind.”

  I looked at him. “Really?”

  “The old timers say it wasn’t bad before the bombs, but it’s definitely bad now.” He let out a little laugh. “A couple of years ago, not long before my dad died, we had to go to Downwind—a town a little south of Heaven’s Reach.”

  “What?” Brock exclaimed. “The town’s name is Downwind?”

  “Yep.”

  Aaren wrinkled his nose. “Who would want to go to a place like that?”

  “That’s exactly why they gave it that name. To keep people away. But my dad and I had been there before, and we needed to make a trade with them. We decided to take a shortcut, and we came down that side of the river.

  “For the first hundred twenty-five or so miles, everything was fine, and we hadn’t come across a single bandit. We’d patted ourselves on the back for taking such a brilliant route. Then we hit the wind. It was a constant blow-you-backward sort of wind. The kind that makes you feel as though you’re walking in place. We’d hoped we’d hit a storm, but it wasn’t—it was a wind tunnel coming right from that gap down there between those two mountains.

  “It kept blowing and blowing and blowing. So much that we couldn’t set up a tent at night. We had to find a big boulder or a rise in the land to shield us from the wind. I guess there’s a good reason they call it Desolation Alley. It took us eleven days to get through it, the wind blowing into our faces the entire time. Every bit of skin was as dry and cracked as the desert by the time we reached the end. Even my eyeballs.” He winked at me. “My dad and I always joked that neither of us was allowed to come up with a brilliant plan ever again.”

  I laughed. “And did either of you?”

  “Of course we did,” Luke said. “We’re Stricklands. We always come up with brilliant plans.”

  “Like your plan to find the lost city of metal?” Brock asked.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’ll find it. It’s too important not to. I’m not just talking about being able to turn on a lightbulb or power refrigerators—we could have ways to communicate across towns. Across the country. Even across the world. And when people can communicate, they can work together. When each town isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel themselves, the whole world will progress again.”

  “How do you know it’s even out there?” Aaren asked. “If you found that spot in North Dakota and there weren’t any metals that were usable, what makes you think they’ll be somewhere else?”

  “Because they have to be. The ability to make electricity and electric motors again is what will drive civilization forward. My dad wouldn’t have spent his whole life searching for it if it didn’t exist. It has to be out there somewhere.”

  I remembered something I’d read that morning. “In her notebook, Anna wrote in the margin that when metals change, they move in the same direction. It seemed like she thought it was important.”

  “What does that mean?” Brock asked.

  I shrugged. “I have no idea—it almost feels like some kind of riddle. I wondered if maybe it meant that the metals that were changed by the bombs were only changed in lines. Maybe like spokes on a wheel moving out from where a bomb hit.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Aaren said. “They were changed everywhere, not just in some directions.”

  Luke chuckled. “I never understood what she was
talking about when she said that. I decided years ago that she just told me it was one of her theories in order to drive me insane.”

  “I hope that someday you’ll figure it out,” I said.

  Luke smiled as we led the horses back up to the road. “Me too.”

  I jolted awake, my mouth tasting like horse, and wiped my drool off Arabelle’s neck. I was so tired from waking up early to read Anna’s books that by the time afternoon hit, I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes open no matter how hard I tried.

  “Have a nice nap?” Brock asked, his mouth twitching.

  “I didn’t laugh in my sleep again, did I?”

  “No,” he said. “You mostly snored into Arabelle’s neck.” And then he made a snoring sound while fluttering his fingers in front of his mouth, mimicking Arabelle’s mane.

  “Are you finding anything in her books?” Aaren asked.

  I was mostly getting frustrated. I wished I’d had Aaren’s science brain so I could understand all that I was reading better. I reached into my bag and pulled the textbook out. “The beginning talks about boring stuff. But here”—I opened it to the back section—“it tells about all different kinds of minerals and ores. See? Each page has a picture of one and a list of facts.” Then I pulled out her notebook. “Her notes in here are set up the same, but with rocks that aren’t in the textbook.”

  Aaren steered his horse a little closer, and leaned toward the notebook. “Maybe the rocks in the notebook are the ones that have changed since the bombs.”

  “I think so,” I said.

  Luke kept his eyes on the pathway ahead, but said, “Anna told my dad and me that she didn’t think iron anywhere would be able to hold a magnetic charge. That it didn’t matter how far from the bombs it was, it would all be affected.”

  “Really?” I said. “Did you think she was right?”

  “Of course we didn’t! It has to be somewhere. It has to be.”

  “But she kept searching for your lost city of metal,” Brock said, “even after she guessed that no iron anywhere would work?”