Sky Jumpers Book 2 Page 16

  It hit me then that I might not ever see her again. “Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”

  She curtsied. “I think you make an excellent Sky Surfer.”

  I grinned. “You too.”

  She glanced from Luke to me. “I’m surprised your uncle came back.”

  I shrugged. “I think he’s more loyal than he thought he was.”

  She bounced on her toes. “I hope he finds his lost city of metal someday. I hope you all do.” It looked like she wanted to leave with us in search of it right now.

  “We’re about to sit on a cart full of rocks and hang out in the wind,” Brock said. “Wanna come?”

  Alondra laughed. “As much as I want to, I think I’d better stay here.” She reached for Ruben’s reins, and the man who rode the cart down took Buck’s. “I’ll miss you all,” Alondra said; then they both headed back toward the path.

  Before long, the cart was out in the open, with the two horses hitched to it, the sail lying on top of the seforium like a giant cover.

  It took an hour and a half of walking to reach the rickety bridge that crossed over White Rock River and into Desolation Alley. Once we got to the other side, I was more than ready to turn toward home. As we lifted the sail, the sun rose in the distance and made the seforium shine the most beautiful orange I’d ever seen.

  “Here we go,” Luke said as he placed the sail mast in the hole in the middle of the cart. Then he led us out into the wind.

  Aaren and I rode on the cart first, and practiced a bit to figure out how to steer. As soon as we got the hang of it, I realized that we were only going at the speed of walking.

  “Luke?” I called out. “Is this as fast as we’ll go?”

  He chuckled. “No. The wind isn’t as strong the closer to the river you get. I figured you’d want a chance to get used to it before we threw you into Desolation Alley. Are you ready?”

  I’d been ready since I first heard their idea of using a cart and sail.

  “Go about fifty feet that direction, and you’ll be in the thick of it. We’ll keep the horses near the river and out of the wind—try to go the same speed as us.”

  We veered to the left. The wind caught the sail and jerked us ahead, then made us fly forward. The trees on my right whipped by faster than I’ve ever seen them pass me. It took every bit of our focus to steer over all the bumps and rocks in the dirt. We were probably going twice as fast as the fastest I’ve ever raced a horse before.

  The horses!

  I had been paying so much attention to the path, I’d forgotten that we were supposed to go their speed. I twisted in the seat. The horses were so far behind us, they looked like little bugs. I tugged on Aaren’s sleeve and yelled, “Slow down!” I pointed to the right, so he’d get what I meant even if he couldn’t hear me over the wind. He did, and we adjusted the wheels, slowing as we got farther and farther from the center of Desolation Alley. Eventually, we reached the side of the river, where the wind barely moved us, and then waited for Luke and Brock.

  It was too bad we couldn’t go as fast as the wind would take us. We’d make it home to White Rock in no time! But we’d need the horses for the last 125 miles, and if they were days behind us, it really wouldn’t matter that we got there more quickly.

  When Brock and Luke caught up, I jumped off the seat to give Brock a turn. “You’re going to love this,” I said.

  Brock and Aaren stayed closer to the speed of the horses than Aaren and I had. We took turns trading off about every hour. Sometimes I was with Brock, sometimes with Aaren, and sometimes with Luke.

  I couldn’t believe that Luke and his dad had come this entire distance, but traveling the other direction, the wind in their faces the whole time. It never stopped blowing!

  At the end of the day, we set up camp in the middle of some poor wind-beaten trees as close to the river and away from the worst of the wind as we could get. We detached the sail, set it down on the ground, untied our bedding from the frame, and laid our bedrolls on top of the frame so it wouldn’t blow away. Then we sat on the bedrolls while we ate so they wouldn’t be lost to the wind, either. Before crawling into bed, the three of us told Luke about Anna’s theories and what we figured out. When I explained that ruthenium could hold a permanent magnetic charge, his eyes went from surprised to excited to eager.

  “You’re going to find the ruthenium, aren’t you?”

  He gave me that mischievous smile that made him look like a kid who was planning something fun. I hoped he would find it.

  “How far do you think we traveled today?” Aaren asked.

  Luke looked back at the road. “Let’s just say ‘far.’ ”

  By the fourth day of our trip back, I was sore from sitting on the hard bench of the bumpy cart or on the hard saddle of the bumpy horse, but the fun of flying across the ground in the cart never got old. I wondered if this was what riding in a car felt like before the bombs.

  When we stopped for lunch, we saw Glacier in the distance across the river. That meant we were nearly 125 miles from home! We hadn’t seen another person on our side of the river the whole time.

  My skin was so dry from the constant wind, it was cracking. I tried to get my fingers through my hair to pull it into a ponytail, and Aaren laughed at me. “When we get back, it’s going to take weeks to brush through that mess.”

  Aaren had needed a haircut before we left, and it had gotten even longer since we’d been gone. “We’re going have to shave you bald!” I said.

  “While mine,” Brock said as he tried to flip his hair out of his eyes, except it was so tangled, it moved as one solid mass, “has stayed perfect.”

  * * *

  In the middle of day five, the cart was going slower than the horses no matter where we aimed it.

  Luke rode over. “We’ve reached the end of Desolation Alley.”

  I looked behind me at the land we’d crossed, where it fell off into the sky so far away. My lips, skin, and hair were glad to see Desolation Alley gone. The part of me that loves to sky jump was heartbroken. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to travel that far again, or spend nearly five days sailing across the land in a cart.

  I thought back to the thrill of figuring out what Anna had been trying to solve all along. Something about exploring and discovering things felt more like me than inventing ever had. But even though I was going to miss this, I didn’t want to be the same as Luke and always be out here. In front of me, White Rock was finally visible. It was teeny on the horizon, but it called me home. Not everything about me came from my birth family—I got a lot of things from my parents and even from my town. That part of me wanted to be back. To see my family.

  To be home.

  Early the next afternoon, with the horses pulling the cart, we circled around the back side of our crater enough to see Browning. It wasn’t home, but it was a familiar sight, and it meant the tunnel to White Rock was only ten miles farther.

  Then I heard a sound, like a far-off roar. I whipped my head to it—back toward Browning. The main gates were open, and people were streaming out. All of them were shouting. It took a minute before I realized that the shouts we were hearing were actually cheers.

  “Why are the people of Browning out here?” I asked.

  “I don’t think those are the people of Browning,” Brock said.

  I squinted when the ones on horses got close enough that we could start to see faces. The riders were from White Rock! But the only faces I really saw were the two on the front horse—my parents. My dad rode right up to us, grabbed his injured leg, and slid down, then held out a hand to help my mom.

  “You’re safe! You’re back!” my mom repeated as she checked to make sure all my body parts were still attached.

  More and more people reached us, all talking at the same time.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “The rest of the group made it back late last night,” my dad said. “Without you.” His voice cracked on the last two words. I looked fr
om him to my mom and noticed their red swollen eyes.

  My mom motioned to two trailers outside of Browning’s gate. “A rescue party was just leaving to go save you.”

  My dad glanced at the cart of seforium. “I should’ve known that it’d be you saving us.”

  “Did we get here in time?” Brock asked Mr. Hudson.

  Mr. Hudson smiled. “You did.”

  We did it. We actually did it.

  I turned to my parents. “Why were you in Browning?”

  My dad took a deep breath before answering. “We were watching the horizon. As a town, we agreed that if we didn’t see any sign of you by three days ago, we’d evacuate.”

  “What?” I said. “The entire town is in Browning?”

  “Every last one of us,” my dad said. “They’ve been good to have us.”

  Brenna came running up to us, ahead of the rest of Aaren’s family, and wrapped her arms around Aaren’s legs. “I missed you!” Then she reached out an arm to me, squishing the three of us together. “What did you bring me?”

  “What? I—” Aaren fumbled.

  “You didn’t let me go with you, and then you forgot about me?”

  I rifled through my bag. “Of course we didn’t forget you.” I pulled out the piece of pavement I had found when I went to Downwind. It had almost completely slipped my mind. I hadn’t even shown it to Aaren or Brock. I put it in her hand and said, “We brought this back for you. It’s what the roads were made out of before the bombs.”

  Brenna looked up at us as if she’d never seen anything so amazing. “Really? This is for me?”

  I nodded, and she brushed her fingers across it a few times. After a moment, she said, “I was faking asleep when Mr. Williams came last night to tell Mom and Dad what happened. Mom freaked out.”

  Aaren sighed. “She’s never letting me go anywhere again.”

  I heard my name called. I turned to see Luke, standing as though he wasn’t going to walk any farther.

  “Luke?” I said. “Are you—” But then I didn’t need to ask. I saw it in his eyes. “You’re not staying.”

  He shook his head.

  I tried not to be sad. I didn’t think he would stay anyway—he had a lost city of metal to find. “Will I see you again?”

  “You will. I know you’re glad to be back home, but someday I’ll stop by to ask if you’re up to leaving again to make a world-changing discovery.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise. We’ll race horses at an inappropriate time again soon.”

  I reached out and shook his hand. “Deal.”

  We stood next to the cracks in the earth, where Mr. Hudson and his team had crushed the seforium into powder, readying it to be spread in the crevices. Instead of looking in the cracks, though, I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the Bomb’s Breath. The gray that had looked like haze before was now so thick that I couldn’t see the sky above it. White Rock was thrown into shadows enough that it felt like dusk. And it was so low! I knew that it was dropping at a continually faster pace and that it would be almost to the top of the tunnel—less than five feet above my head—by the time we got back. I just didn’t anticipate how suffocated it would make me feel.

  “No wonder they evacuated,” Brock said.

  I spotted a tree with an oddly shaped trunk that had the bottom of one branch below the Bomb’s Breath. The rest of it disappeared into the gray. As I kept my eye on it, I swore I could see the grayness lowering.

  “Do you three want to throw in the first of it?” Mr. Hudson said.

  I put my hands together and scooped up as much of the orange powder as I could hold; then Brock and Aaren walked with me to the edge of the crevice.

  The three of us tossed our handfuls into the opening. The orange powder blew into a cloud as it fell to the bottom. Mr. Hudson’s team started shoveling the seforium along the entire length of the crevices, and we grabbed shovels and helped.

  Once all of it was spread along the openings, my dad stood next to me and we both stared up at the Bomb’s Breath.

  “I think it’s working!” Aaren called out.

  I squinted up to the grayness in the Bomb’s Breath. Was it getting lighter? It was so hard to tell. I found the tree I had been watching and kept staring at that bottom branch. “It is!” I yelled. “I can see it moving up!”

  I was so happy, I wanted to shout that we did it to everyone everywhere. We all stood in silence, our heads toward the skies, watching as everything changed so slowly, we hardly noticed it was changing at all. Until we saw the blue sky again, peeking through the gray more and more.

  My dad looked over at me. “You seem different now,” he said.

  “It’s my new hairdo.” I smoothed my windblown hair, which I was pretty sure I’d never get a comb through again.

  My dad touched my hair, as if it was some fascinating science experiment that Mr. Hudson had made. “Nope. That’s not it. I think it’s that you … look older.”

  “Really?” I said.

  He examined me closely, trying to guess what the change was. I wondered if he’d see that I figured out a lot of things about not giving up. And that I wasn’t just like my parents or just like my birth family—that I was somewhere in the middle. Or that I realized I might be good at discovering things, and that we made a discovery that might someday change the world.

  Or maybe he couldn’t see past the windblown hair. I couldn’t blame him.

  Acknowledgments

  In many ways, writing book two in a series is more difficult than writing book one, and I relied on my core group of support so much more. A few people deserve greater thanks than I could ever do justice on a couple of pages.

  Many thanks and much gratitude go to my family, especially to my husband, Lance, for all his help with brainstorming plotting, giving feedback, providing encouragement, generating ideas, showing unconditional love, covering for me each time writing took me away from home, and making me laugh (especially when I have “Tuesday Face”). I love you, sweetie! To my kids, Kyle, Cory, and Alecia—thanks for all the encouragement, the prayers, the laughs, the support, and the love. You are even more amazing than you know (and you already know you’re pretty amazing). To my siblings, for making sure my life growing up was full of adventure (and only occasionally full of peril); my parents, for believing we were capable of doing big things on our own (and for going on dates every Friday night, leaving us to some creative boredom busting); and my sister Kristine for being the kind of adult that made me want her as a best friend (and a trusted assistant).

  To my editor, Shana Corey, who is brilliant and insightful and kind and dedicated and isn’t afraid to suggest big changes that’ll make the book infinitely better—thank you times a million! (My book thanks you, too. It knows how much better it is under your direction.)

  To my agent, Sara Crowe—thanks for being encouraging when I need encouragement, for being excited when I’m excited, for being calm when I’m stressed, and for being amazing all the time.

  I’m grateful that Sky Jumpers found a home at Random House. I owe many people thanks for helping it get into the hands of so many readers. Especially Nicole Banholzer, my remarkable publicist, who is incredible and a joy to work with; Paula Sadler, who is delightful (and has the most beautiful handwriting!); Mallory Loehr, my phenomenal publisher; Nicole de las Heras, for her art direction; Alison Kolani, who is a fantastic copy chief; Adrienne Waintraub, for getting my book into school libraries and promoting it at conferences; and sales, for all their tireless work.

  Many thanks to my critique partners. To Erin Summerill, who is not only an impressive sounding board, but spunky, energetic, stylish, serious, lighthearted, and loyal, all wrapped into one. To Jessie Humphries, who is loving, happy, helpful, fun, and supportive (and doesn’t let a little thing like a six-hour drive stop her from being here anytime she’s needed). To Rob Code, the setting and arc master, and Jason Manwaring, emotion and logic savant. To Elana Johnson. Dude. I owe you so mu
ch more than cookies. If I listed all the ways you’ve helped over the years, it would take pages. Hulk smash! And Clint Johnson—you definitely should’ve been thanked in book one for being an insightful critiquer and helping a new author find her way. To Skipper Coates, scientist extraordinaire: your brain is incredible. I brought an armful of random geology-shaped puzzle pieces, and you helped me make a picture.

  I’m privileged to be a part of some fantastic writing groups. A huge thank-you to the Lucky 13s, the League of Extraordinary Writers, Eight Times Up, all of the Story-makers, the Rock Canyon group, and the Writing Group of Joy and Awesomeness—you girls definitely live up to your name. Chantele Sedgwick, Katie Dodge, Ruth Josse, Kim Krey, Donna Nolan, Jeigh Meredith, Taffy Lovell, Julie Donaldson, Sandy Ponton, Julie Maughon, Shelly Morris, Christene Houston, and Jamie Thompson—let’s laugh long into the night again soon.

  Most of all, much gratitude to everyone who reads The Forbidden Flats. Your kind words and the way you’ve enthusiastically shared Sky Jumpers with your friends has meant the world to me. Thank you.

  About the Author

  PEGGY EDDLEMAN lives at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Utah with her husband and their three kids. In addition to writing, Peggy has worked as a newspaper delivery girl, a software tester, a fast-food worker, a bank teller, a technical writer, and a tutor for fourth graders. You can visit Peggy online at peggyeddleman.com or on Twitter at @PeggyEddleman.