Maybe Luke was right. Or maybe Anna was. Only I couldn’t help thinking that she was recording everything she found out about new minerals and ores because she was trying to understand what they had in common. Because maybe if she figured out what changed, she could figure out how to find magnetic metal. I looked down at the notebook in my hands, then at Aaren and Brock. “Will you help me? Maybe with all of us, we can make sense of it.”
Sometime after I realized that the bumpy horizon I could occasionally see between the trees was actually the Rocky Mountains, I remembered about the negotiations with the mayor that I was now in charge of. How was I supposed to know how to negotiate? I couldn’t even talk myself out of detention. And now that there were only four of us, we couldn’t search for a seam of seforium to mine ourselves as a backup plan. I had to talk the mayor into giving it to us.
The bag of Ameiphus over my shoulder felt heavy, as though it was trying to drag me down. I put my hand on it and felt something hard. When I looked inside, I found the seforium rock among the Ameiphus pills, and held it up high, the orange hue shining in the sun.
“You okay?” Aaren asked, looking at me with a concerned face.
I put the rock back into the bag and almost said that I was fine, but at the last second, “I’m nervous” came out instead.
“About the negotiations?” he asked, and I nodded. “Remember back on your front porch, that night when we decided to come on this trip?”
“Yeah.”
“We really didn’t have any idea what we were getting ourselves into, did we?”
I thought back to how many things had happened on this trip that we hadn’t anticipated. “No, we really didn’t.”
“We’ll help you get ready,” Aaren said. “We’ll give you tips. Like … compliment him, but don’t overcompliment because then he won’t think you’re sincere.”
“And try to forget what’s at stake so you won’t be nervous,” Brock said. “Don’t let him forget what’s at stake, though.”
“Don’t show all your cards at once or you lose negotiating power,” Luke said.
“If things aren’t working out,” Aaren said, “start to cry; he’ll get all flustered and give you anything you want.”
“No, don’t cry,” Brock said. “Be strong—as if there’s no way you’re going to let him bully you.”
“Ask lots of questions, so you can find out what’s important to him, and then let him think you’re giving him what he wants.”
“If he isn’t willing to give you everything you need, walk away. Then he’ll be more willing to talk it out.”
“Don’t tell him how much Ameiphus you have.”
“Don’t rush the negotiations. But remember that the Bomb’s Breath is getting lower and lower every single second.”
“Stop!” I yelled. All this advice was making it hard to think. I was even less sure I could do this now. I steered Arabelle a little away from the others, so my brain could quiet. It’s not that I was afraid to try. But at home if I failed at something, it didn’t matter much. Here if I failed, my town would lose everything. It scared me.
That night, after everyone had crawled into their bedrolls, I couldn’t fall asleep. I missed my parents. I wondered how everyone in town was dealing with the fact that the Bomb’s Breath was getting closer and closer. My stomach felt sick from all the layers of worry piled on top of each other—worry for Cole and Cass, worry for Mr. Williams and Aaren’s dad, worry for the people back in White Rock, worry that I’d never figure out what my birth mom had been trying to figure out, and most of all, worry for the negotiations.
I sat up. There was no way I was ever going to get to sleep if I let my mind continue. And if I kept lying there, my mind was never going to stop. I pulled the smaller, softer blanket out of my bedroll, crawled out of the tent, and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. Tonight was the warmest, clearest night we’d had in days. I sat on the roots of a large tree, leaning my back against its trunk. I didn’t see that Brock had come out of the tent, too, until he sat down next to me.
“Can’t sleep?” he whispered.
I shook my head, then adjusted my blanket so it covered both of our shoulders. “Do you miss your family?”
He let out a quiet laugh. “I lived in White Rock without them for almost a year. I can handle being away from them for this long.”
I could tell by his voice that he did miss them, though. “They’ve only been in White Rock with you for a month. It’s okay to miss them.”
He stared into the fire. “I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have left without telling my mom. It’s just—”
I watched his face and tried to figure out what he wasn’t saying.
It was a while before he spoke again. “It’s important to stick together. You were there when I needed help, so I should be here helping you—not sitting at home doing nothing.”
I thought back to how I felt before I knew I could come. I wouldn’t have been able to sit home and do nothing, either. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“So,” Brock said, “how long after we get back before you leave again for weeks to go exploring?”
I laughed. I wanted to go out exploring again sometime. I did. But I knew Brock would be the first of us to miss this, and to be aching for the next adventure. “Give me a few weeks to recover from all this horse riding. Oh, and you’d better give my parents a good ten years to get over saying yes to me going on this trip.”
Brock raised an eyebrow and scoffed. “As if you could wait ten years to come out here again. I’ve seen the way you look at all this open space. There’s no way you could sit at home.”
“Sure I could,” I said. “I’m thinking of learning how to knit.”
He chuckled, and I gazed down at my hand on my knee, suddenly very aware of the fact that we sat so close together that our knees almost touched. And then Brock moved his hand forward and linked his pinky finger in mine.
He looked up at the stars, and I looked at our pinkies. Was this because he missed his family? Or was this him showing me that he liked-liked me? And if he did actually like me, would that make being my friend weird? No. He didn’t like-like me. We were just friends. Right? I couldn’t figure out how to ask him without it being awkward.
Who needed the ability to communicate with people across the world? I couldn’t manage to communicate with the person sitting next to me. “We’d better get to sleep,” I blurted out.
He agreed, and I let go of his pinky and took my blanket back to my bedroll. Yeah. I was going to have no problem at all falling asleep now. No problem at all.
Trying to figure out the things Anna hadn’t figured out about the metals was a great distraction. It kept the hours and hours we spent on horses from being so monotonous, and kept the anxiety for our town from making us sick. But our progress on figuring any of it out remained exactly zero. Aaren was somehow managing to read Anna’s textbook and notes while riding on his bumpy horse. He blurted out that iron wasn’t the only metal that could hold a magnetic charge—that there were four others that could, too. We thought we had found the solution. But then Luke said that all five could no longer hold a permanent magnetic charge. He had already checked each of them.
So we were back to square one. Every time we thought we’d figured something out, we’d realize we hadn’t figured anything out at all.
The Rocky Mountains were finally in view over the trees. It was nice to have something to focus on, and to see something getting bigger as we rode along. Especially since we no longer had the mileage trackers, so it was impossible to tell how far we traveled each day.
When we neared what Luke guessed was the four-hundred-mile mark, we found remnants of homes. They weren’t complete homes—everything we saw had at least two sides missing, but there were parts there! Some had parts of kitchens in them still—cabinets that hadn’t been completely destroyed, sinks, refrigerators—and a few houses even had a bathtub or toilet, all covered in years of dust and dirt and lea
ves that had blown in. I imagined the family who might’ve lived in each one.
That afternoon, Luke informed us that if we rode hard, we would get to Heaven’s Reach by tomorrow, and Aaren, Brock, and I cheered. If we arrived tomorrow, then that meant we’d made the last half of the trip there in just four days.
“Luke,” I said, “what are the people of Heaven’s Reach like?” I figured it was better to know. Sometimes my brain thought of the worst when it was left to wonder.
Luke shrugged. “They’re open to trade, if it benefits them. They’re sitting on a wealth of minerals, and there are things they could use that they don’t have. I met the mayor once—we were both in Downwind at the same time.”
“What’s he like?” Brock asked.
“Pompous. Thinks he’s better than most people. Focus on getting him to like you, and you’ll be fine.”
I was going to be sick.
“You should go up there with us,” I blurted out.
Luke studied me, as though he was trying to decide if I was serious. “Through the Bomb’s Breath.”
“I know you can do it—it’s not that hard,” I said. “We can show you.” I paused for a minute, and Luke didn’t say anything. He just sat on his horse looking unsure.
Then he said, “I can’t very well have my niece besting me when it comes to being daring now, can I? Once we get there, show me.”
When I woke up in the morning, I brushed Arabelle’s coat before I put her saddle on. “It’s okay, girl. A little farther, and you’ll get to rest.”
The mountains looked even bigger, and we rode into areas with deeper and deeper drop-offs. The ground would be level, then suddenly it would dip down, and after a few miles, it would rise back up.
At the second drop-off, Luke gestured toward the space. “Before the bombs changed the flow of rivers, these were lakes.”
“I was wondering,” Aaren said. “The soil is different here—like dried-out sediment.”
The mountains that formed White Rock’s crater and surrounded us back home were big. But I couldn’t believe the size of the Rocky Mountains! They made White Rock’s seem teeny. The closer we got, the more they towered over us, and made me feel teeny. Like an ant. And they kept going for as far as I could see in either direction. I had been amazed by the Forbidden Flats and how they went on forever. I think I was even more amazed by the mountains, and how they went up forever.
As we rode, I noticed some ruins in the distance—far off to the left of where we were headed. It was from a city that must’ve been much larger than the ruins Luke and my birth mom were from. There were dozens and dozens of buildings glinting in the sun, angled every direction imaginable.
I pointed to them. “Do people live there?”
“Yep,” Luke said. “Several hundred, actually. That’s Downwind.”
“That’s Downwind? That place looks like a death trap!”
“It is,” Luke said. “At least it is to outsiders—the metal on the buildings’ framework is very unstable. The people who live there know the tricks of every spot, though, and have a nice town set up in the middle.”
That made me think of the story Luke told about his dad saying you could use a different tool when you didn’t have the right one. Maybe every town turned one of their weaknesses—or one of their dangers—into a strength. Into something that could protect them.
Even though the mountains looked close, it took four hours for us to get there. Luke pointed ahead to a place at the base of the mountains. “See those two ridges that form a V where the mountains rise almost straight up? That’s where we’re headed. There’s a waterfall coming off that ridge to the left of the V. It’s nice and cold from the spring runoff. We’ll find a spot not far from there where we can leave the horses.”
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that we wouldn’t be able to take the horses up to Heaven’s Reach. I panicked for a moment until Luke said, “It’ll be okay. I’m good at finding places to picket a horse where it’ll be safe.”
When we finally made it to the V in the mountain, we ate a quick lunch of stale rolls, some beef jerky, and an apple.
My hands were shaking while I tied Arabelle to a tree in the area Luke showed us. I grabbed hold of the bag of Ameiphus over my shoulder, to make the shaking less obvious. I had never been this nervous before.
“Will you go with me?” I said to Luke. “When I talk to the mayor, can you come in with me to make sure I don’t say something stupid or forget to ask something, or help me if I don’t know what to say?”
Luke looked up the mountain, probably to where the Bomb’s Breath was, seeming rather nervous himself. After a minute, he turned back to me and said, “Sure. You aren’t going to need me, though.”
I was so relieved that he said yes!
Luke took us to the base of the mountain and up a zigzagging trail full of switchbacks that led to Heaven’s Reach while I thought about all the advice they had given me. I was pretty sure I couldn’t do even one of those things right. Luke was wrong. I was going to need him. A lot.
The path was steeper than anything we had to climb to get to the Bomb’s Breath in White Rock. A lot less dirt and a lot more rock covered the trail, too. It wound back and forth, getting close to the waterfall, then getting farther away, then back again. We waved our arms above us almost the whole way to feel for the Bomb’s Breath, but we hadn’t felt it yet when we reached a set of stairs carved into the stone.
“From what I know, the Bomb’s Breath begins here.” Luke took a few steps back down the path.
“All you have to do is hold your breath,” Aaren said.
“And then feel around to see where it starts.” Brock waved his arm in the air to demonstrate.
“No matter what,” I told Luke, “don’t breathe until you are absolutely sure that your head is out of the Bomb’s Breath. Even if something startles you or if you have to stay in it longer than you planned. Not even a teeny tiny breath.” When I saw the look on Luke’s face, I realized that I had done the same thing everyone else did when they were giving me tips on negotiating—said way too much. “Sorry. All you really need to know is to hold your breath while you’re in it.”
“Ready?” Aaren asked.
Luke nodded. Aaren and Brock went ahead of us; then I put my arm up to see where the dense air began. “See? It’s right here. Feel it.” Luke waved his arm where I showed him, a look of fascination on his face. “Now take a breath,” I said, and then we walked up the stairs.
The Bomb’s Breath covered everywhere the same as it covered White Rock, and it was all the same thickness as it was back home—fifteen feet, but climbing up stairs made it seem much faster, because we were going uphill so quickly. It was strange—I was in a place I’d never been to before, but walking through the Bomb’s Breath made it feel a little like home. Within moments, I felt my head break out of the dense air, and I told Luke he could breathe again while we climbed the last few stairs.
He took a breath. “That was … interesting.” He dipped his foot back into the air of the Bomb’s Breath and moved it around. “Huh.”
I was proud of him. And proud of me for talking him through it.
“Can we help you?”
The voice startled me. I spun around to find two guards standing not far from us on the other side of a small clearing, in the shade of some aspen trees. One of them—a big man with a thick beard and a bald head—looked surprised to see us. The other guard was a tall, thin woman who narrowed her eyes.
I took one stride forward and made my voice sound as adult as possible. “We’re here representing White Rock, and we need to talk with your mayor about a trade.”
“Wait here,” the man said. “I’ll inform the mayor.” Then he walked into the trees.
We waited a long time before the guard returned, and it felt even longer with the other guard staring at us the whole time. I didn’t think she appreciated strangers. And based on how often she peered over her shoulder to see if the other guard w
as on the trail behind her, I guessed she didn’t expect him to take so long, either.
When the guard finally returned, he said, “Follow me,” and took us along an overgrown pathway meandering through the aspen trees. In a few minutes, we stepped out of the trees into a clearing overlooking a small valley. The guard gestured to the area in front of us. “Welcome,” he said, “to Heaven’s Reach.”
We were on a hill only about ten feet higher than the valley, and a hundred yards from the nearest building, but from our vantage point, we could see all of it. The ground the city was on was mostly flat, but sloped slightly uphill as it went back; then the mountain rose straight up behind it. The mountains curved, and the layout of the town curved, too. Almost as if a giant had scooped the area for the town right out of the mountain itself.
The building closest to us was large and bent the opposite direction of the mountain. Then there was a grassy area, and three rows of homes curved the same direction as the mountain right behind it, as though they were all forming a giant piece of pie, with roads at both sides of the pie.
The most incredible part of it all was a towering sculpture that stood in front of the main building. It was made from lots of different kinds of metals, each a distinct shade, from almost whitish-silver to a dark pewter gray to metals that were slightly red, orange, brown, or blue. Some were shiny and others were dull. Each of the metals started with the others at the base, then rose outward and upward, as if they were all reaching toward the sky, some twisting as they went up. In the middle of it all was a glass ball, about the size of a watermelon, only round, and filled with an orange powder. The metal around it was almost white, so the sun caught it and made the ball look like it was glowing.
“This place is amazing!” Aaren said.
Luke raised his eyebrows. “I’m impressed. The mayor talked big about this place when I saw him, but I guess I thought he was embellishing.”
We walked across the clearing toward the building with the grass in front. Hundreds of people—probably their entire town—gathered in groups on the grassy hill, finishing their lunch. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch us. I straightened my shirt, and suddenly wished I’d thought to brush my hair before we came.
Sky Jumpers Book 2 Page 11