Sky Jumpers Book 2 (15 page)

“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?”

Luke nodded. “I still think the key is to find iron that was completely protected from the bombs. We haven’t found it yet, but we will.”

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 leaves 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.”