Sky Jumpers Book 2 (20 page)

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 was 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 lighting 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.

“I wish you much success in all your future research on mineral theories.”

When we neared the orange glow from the seforium lamps in the clearing, I saw Alondra drop an armful of rope and Aaren and Brock set down a bunch of long sticks. The three of them looked at us with expectant faces.

I took the bag of Ameiphus off my shoulders and handed it to the mayor. “Thank you for saying yes.”

He nodded once and shook my hand. “And thank you for the medicine.”

I turned to Aaren, Brock, and Alondra. “Did you come up with a plan?”

They all beamed, which felt like flying all over again. I knew they’d invent something.

“Well,” Brock said, “first we thought about making some kind of carrier with wings. Or using the river. We even talked about using a hot-air balloon.”

Alondra cut in, her voice as excited as Brock’s. “But seforium is too heavy for flying, the river flows the wrong direction, and according to Aaren, hot-air balloons are unpredictable, don’t usually move forward fast, and only work in the morning hours.”

“The ruins were at the halfway point, right?” Aaren asked, and I nodded. “It took us nine days to get there, but it only took us a little less than four more days to get here. If we went home as fast as we traveled that second half of the way here, we’d make it in time.”

“We made it that fast because we weren’t pulling the trailer anymore,” I said. “But the horses will have to pull a cart on the way back. It’ll be just as slow.”

“Unless,” Alondra said, “you don’t have to use horses to pull the cart. Then they can go just as fast as they did that last part of your trip.”

“It was the sails on the Sky Surfboards that gave us the idea,” Brock said. “Well, that and talking to Luke by the river that one night.”