There was no sign of Luke or the mayor, which made me even more antsy, and made me realize that we’d spent hours here. Hours during daylight, when we weren’t on the road, trying to get back in time. Brock plopped down on one of the benches attached to the tables, and the rest of us joined him. Judging by everyone’s faces, the excitement at figuring out Anna’s theories had worn off. We were all thinking about the dangers back home.
I hoped that Luke had gotten a lot of opportunities to talk with the mayor on their trip back to Heaven’s Reach, and that he had already talked him into trading us the seforium. They’d been gone a long time—maybe I wouldn’t end up having to negotiate at all. Maybe they’d have it all worked out, and we’d be ready to leave as soon as they got here.
I stood up when I saw movement by the clearing out of the corner of my eye. It was Luke and another man. Based on the man’s coppery-colored hair and the way he walked tall with his shoulders back and his hands clasped behind him, I knew he must be the mayor. But Luke stopped just at the edge of the woods. The mayor kept walking through the clearing, glanced up at us, then turned and went into the main building.
My stomach dropped. Something was wrong.
I ran down the hill and through the clearing. “Luke,” I called out.
His shoulders were stiff, his hands were clenched into fists at his sides, and he glared toward the weeds at his feet. I stepped right in front of him. He finally looked up.
“The mayor is furious. He asked me to leave.”
I stared at him in shock. “What? Why? What happened?”
“During the entire trip back,” Luke said, “I talked to him about trading the Ameiphus for seforium and iron. And he’s such a stubborn—” He ground his teeth. “He wouldn’t say yes. He just kept going on about the iron being dangerous and difficult to mine. I tried everything. When nothing else worked, I pointed out that he could’ve saved his wife from dying of Shadel’s Sickness if he’d had Ameiphus, and was he really not going to save the rest of his town from that same fate? Somehow, he took that as an attack on his character, and told me he doesn’t want me in his town.”
“And iron?” Everything started to spin and I couldn’t get enough air. My brain wouldn’t connect any thoughts together, except the only words I managed to hear him say. “You asked the mayor to trade the Ameiphus for seforium and iron?”
The anger left his face, and his eyes changed to pleading. “The iron he has is really important. This whole town is one of the farthest places from where any green bombs hit, so it may be unaffected by the bombs. But not only that, this iron was inside a mountain. You can’t get more protected than that. This could be our lost city of metal.”
“It’s not the lost city of metal. Anna was right—there’s no iron anywhere that’ll work.”
Luke’s eyes flashed to mine. I saw the pain on his face. But I was so angry that he had cared about iron more than he cared about saving my town, and so afraid that we might not get seforium without his help, I didn’t care. “We’re here because the Bomb’s Breath is coming down in White Rock, and we need to stop it. Now we might not be able to at all.” My voice came out fierce and trembling.
“Hope, it’s not possible to stop it. We left White Rock thirteen days ago. Even if we hadn’t run into a storm and no one got injured, there would be no way to make it back in eight days. The Bomb’s Breath will lower to the height where the earth is cracked, and it will stay there. Your town will have to leave White Rock and live somewhere else. Nothing we do here will change that. Not even if you did get the mayor to give you the seforium and a trailer to haul it home in. I’m sorry. But with the iron, we could’ve changed the world.”
I couldn’t hear this. Sadness and fear and hopelessness and anger filled me so full I thought I might burst. This couldn’t be the end. We couldn’t have failed.
He gazed into the woods for several long moments, then looked back at me. “Maybe we should’ve turned around long ago. Especially since I knew I’d let you down in the end.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to miss you.”
His focus shifted away to Brock, Aaren, and Alondra, then to me again. “People from your town will come for you. The mayor’s a piece of work, but he’ll let you stay here and look out for you until they arrive.”
Then he turned and walked away.
My feet were frozen to the ground. I couldn’t even make them move to run after him. He just disappeared through the trees.
Brock, Aaren, and Alondra came up behind me, but I still had my eyes on the woods.
“Are you okay?” Aaren asked.
Soon, the Bomb’s Breath would be low enough to touch my house. We were five hundred miles away, missing almost all of the people we came with, including the person who was probably my only blood relative on Earth, we had no trailer, not even the smallest pebble of seforium, and the only one who could give it to us was furious. I was very much not okay.
I wondered at what point my dad would realize that we’d failed, and that we weren’t going to make it back in time. Would my parents keep watching for us every day? Would they worry that something happened and I wouldn’t make it back at all? I could feel the ticking down of time like a heartbeat.
I wished there was some way to talk to them. I clutched my necklace in my fist. Suddenly, I missed them so much my gut hurt.
And strangely, I wished I could talk to Luke. I wanted to ask why. I wanted to ask how he could leave me when we barely found each other.
He told me that I was persistent. That I didn’t give up when everyone else would have, and that even if I didn’t have the tools I needed, I had something in me that’d work anyway. But how did all that matter when what I needed to do wasn’t even possible?
So many thoughts spun circles in my mind, I couldn’t focus. As if I reached out and picked one of them at random, I blurted, “It’s too late.”
Brock and Aaren looked at each other, like maybe I was broken.
“Luke says it’s impossible to make it back in time,” I said. “We can’t save White Rock.”
“So it’s over?” Aaren asked. “We lost?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we did.”
We lost. The four of us stared at the ground for a long time, not saying a word. At first, I accepted that we lost. Then, after a while, I didn’t anymore. We couldn’t have lost. Not after all we had gone through.
Luke had said that there was nothing we could do to change things. But as a town, we had changed what happened next in our history when the bandits invaded. That had seemed impossible at the time, but it wasn’t. This couldn’t be impossible now.
We needed to change things. To find a way that wasn’t impossible.
I took a deep breath. “We need a way to get home with the seforium, and we need to do it in eight days or less.”
“But how?” Aaren asked. “It took us thirteen days to get here without the seforium. With it, a trailer will be heavy. We can’t make the horses go faster.”
“Can we get home without the horses?” I asked.
“Yeah. By magic,” Brock said. “Or maybe Alondra has an airplane from before the bombs whose metal didn’t collapse in on itself, and we can fly home.”
“That’s not helping,” I said.
“You’re serious?” Brock asked. “How are we supposed to come up with a way to get home more quickly?”
“You two are the inventors,” I said. “Invent a way.” I sighed. “I guess I’m the negotiator. I’ll be off negotiating.”
They both gave me looks of pity. “Don’t,” I said. Then Alondra and I trudged back toward the mayor’s office, Brock and Aaren not far behind us, and I told her what had happened with her dad and Luke. There was a dark heaviness in my gut that had gotten worse every time I thought of this moment since we left the ruins. But all along I hadn’t imagined the circumstances would be this bad. I couldn’t afford to feel sorry for myself or to panic now. There wasn’t anyone else to take my spot, and now that Luke wa
s gone, there wasn’t anyone to help me.
“Hope,” Aaren said, “you’re not by yourself,” like I said to him before he performed his first solo surgery on Cass. “You’ve got us.”
I swallowed hard. “Thanks.”
We left Aaren and Brock at the grass, and Alondra walked beside me to the door in the main building that her dad had gone into. “Do you think Luke will be coming back?” she asked.
I thought about how final his goodbye felt, and shook my head. “He’s gone.”
When I stopped in front of the mayor’s closed door, Alondra put a hand on my arm. “I know my dad, Hope. He prides himself on making good decisions for this town, and Luke challenged that. Luke was also dishonest about what your town needed, and my dad values honesty more than anything else. Just … keep that in mind.”
I took a deep breath, trying to remember all the things that everyone suggested, but half of it jumbled in my brain and the other half didn’t seem to be there at all. I squared my shoulders and knocked. Then I wiped my sweaty hands on my pants a few times while I waited for the mayor.
When he opened the door, Alondra said, “Dad, this is my friend Hope. Her dad is the council head of White Rock.”
“Hello, Hope,” Mayor Alvey said. “Come in.” His mouth was tight, and his arms were crossed. He walked over to his desk, leaned against it, and motioned for me to sit down, so I did. Alondra left, shutting the door behind her, and we were alone.
My mind went back to every time I’d been in this situation—every time I tried to talk myself out of detention. The time I wanted to talk my teacher into letting me put my broken invention in the Harvest Festival and couldn’t even open my mouth. The time I tried to talk the council into letting us search for Ameiphus outside the crater. I could think of what to say in my head, but the words always got away before they reached my mouth. Maybe I needed to plow ahead faster, before the words could escape.
“Luke’s gone,” I said, “but we still need the seforium, and we still have the Ameiphus to trade—Luke told you all about it, right? And we don’t need the iron. Actually, we never needed that, and he didn’t tell me that he was trying to get you to give it to him. All we need is the seforium. Enough of it to save my town, which is a lot, I know.”
“You’re nervous,” Mayor Alvey said.
I nodded, and reminded myself that I wasn’t alone. Aaren, Brock, and Alondra weren’t far away, and they were rooting for me. But even though I wasn’t alone, it didn’t mean I knew what to say to try to talk him into trading with us.
Suddenly, my mind was back at the river, with Luke telling me about my birth grandpa, and how he always said, If you don’t have a wrench, use needle-nose pliers. Is this what he meant? I didn’t have negotiating skills, so I needed to use a skill I did have instead. What skill could I use? None of mine worked for this.
“Luke was dishonest and manipulative,” the mayor said in a voice made of stone. “So how am I supposed to think you’ll be any more truthful than he was? How should I believe anything you say? How do I know that the medicine is even real?”
I ducked under the strap of the bag that Mr. Williams had given me and held it out to the mayor. “No, it’s real! See?” I unfastened the flap and opened the bag to show him the blue medicine inside.
He didn’t even look in the bag—he just kept his eyes on me, his forehead scrunched. “How do I trust that it’s not fake and doesn’t really do anything? And the Bomb’s Breath isn’t lowering here—why should I believe that it’s lowering inside White Rock? Or that you’re even from White Rock? Luke certainly isn’t. For all I know, you three are orphans he found on the Forbidden Flats, and you all concocted this story to get me to hand over one of our most precious resources—our ability to make light.”
I was speechless. It never even occurred to me that the mayor might think we were making it up. Did I have any proof? We had almost nothing with us! Nothing that would prove that the medicine was real or that I was from White Rock. In fact, with as little as we had, the mayor’s orphan story was sounding more and more realistic than the truth.
I couldn’t think of any way to get him to believe a thing I said.
An idea suddenly popped into my head. “Come with me,” I said. “I can prove I’m from White Rock.”
We walked out of his office, and I didn’t see Brock, Aaren, or Alondra. I didn’t let myself even wonder if that was a good thing or a bad thing; I just headed straight for the woods. As we walked, I told him everything I could think of about Aaren’s mom discovering Ameiphus, and what kinds of illnesses it cured. About how we used to only search for it in the woods inside White Rock, but that after the bandits attacked during the winter, we decided to hunt for it outside our crater. I told him about the earthquake while I was in the tree, and Mr. Hudson’s calculation about the Bomb’s Breath coming down, how much my town was freaking out, how hard it was for my dad to let me leave to come here, and about our trip and the storm and the rest of my group. I knew I was rambling, but people only rambled when they were telling the truth, right?
The mayor listened the entire time. He didn’t ask questions, but he also didn’t look as though he believed me.
When we reached the clearing where Alondra had taken us Sky Surfing, I took both of my bags off my shoulders, laid them on the ground, and said, “Watch.” Then I moved back from the edge quite a bit, and took off running toward it.
As soon as I did, the mayor yelled, panicked, “You’re not wearing a null!”
That was kind of the point.
I sprinted right to the cliff, took a big gulp of air, leapt off the edge, and did a front flip. Since the edge of the cliff wasn’t any higher than the Bomb’s Breath, I only completed half of the flip before I hit the compressed air, lying flat on my back. For a moment, I ignored the mayor and every problem that we had and just floated, my arms and legs stretched out, looking up at the moonlit sky with the clouds that were floating the same as me.
There wasn’t anyone to tell me when I was nearing the bottom of the Bomb’s Breath and I didn’t want to take any chances that I’d fall onto the ledge flat on my back, so I pulled my arms and legs into a ball, then pushed my feet out toward the ground. When I landed, I caught my breath and looked up at the mayor, who was staring over the edge in shock and disbelief. I smiled, jogged to the stairs, felt for the air, took a deep breath, then climbed back up to him.
“There is nowhere on the Forbidden Flats between White Rock and here high enough to reach the Bomb’s Breath. The only way I would’ve learned to do that was if I lived in White Rock.”
Mayor Alvey didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. “I’m sorry that Luke said those things, and that he lied to you about what we needed. I didn’t know he was going to. And the medicine really does work. It saved a lot of people in my town who would’ve died from Shadel’s. And last winter when bandits invaded my town and shot my dad, it saved him, too.” My voice cracked at the end, remembering how pale my dad’s face had looked and how hot his skin was while he was lying in the clinic in White Rock before he had gotten the medicine.
The mayor stared out across the Forbidden Flats for a moment. Finally, he said, “I believe you.”
I grinned all the way to my ears. “So does that mean you’ll trade?”
“Metals and minerals aren’t like plants. If you use them up, you can’t just grow more. There’s a finite amount.”
I held my breath.
“And because of that,” he said, “it’s our responsibility to share. We’ll make the trade, and get you a cart so your horses can pull it home.”
“Really?” I jumped up and yelled “Yes!” so loud that Aaren, Brock, and Alondra probably heard it wherever they were. “Thank you!”
I couldn’t believe I did it! Not the way Luke would’ve done it and not the way my dad would’ve. I did it my own way. I used pliers instead of a wrench, like my birth grandpa used to say.
The mayor and I walked back through the woods, the moon lighti
ng our way, and this time he did all the talking. He mostly spoke about finding the beauty that’s in the Earth itself, when it looks so rough at first, and respecting the mountains that provided it all.
“I think my birth mom felt that way, too,” I said.
The mayor looked at me differently, as if he was meeting me for the first time.
“I’ve been studying her notes about minerals and ores that were changed by the bombs,” I said. “We’ve been trying to come up with some theories, but it didn’t work out so well.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t,” the mayor said, holding a skinny tree branch up high enough for me to walk under.
I ducked under the branch right as it occurred to me that Anna believed they—her dad, Luke, and her—could find the lost city of metal. Not that it existed somewhere in the world, but that it existed someplace where they could find it.
“Mayor Alvey,” I said, “if a book says that a mineral has only been found in another country, does that mean that is the only place it is?”
“Not at all. It means it hasn’t been found here yet. There are plenty of minerals that were thought to be in only one location until people searched for them and found them. What are you looking for?”
“Ruthenium.”
“Ahh.” The mayor looked thoughtful for a few moments, then said, “It would be found in rock formed by pressure and heat—metamorphic rock—which is buried far beneath the surface. It wouldn’t be easy to find.”
“But there’s a chance?”
He shrugged. “Possibly.”
There was a chance. Somehow, that was enough, if for no other reason than it meant that my birth mom had been right. “Thank you,” I said.
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