Sky Jumpers Series, Book 1 (4 page)

I set my invention on the counter and opened the bin, which held three of the saddest potatoes I’d ever seen. They must have grown in a bed of rocks where they didn’t have space to grow normally, because they looked like they had tried to sprout potato fingers. I had to have something, so I picked the one closest to the size I needed and turned around just as Aaren came through the door.

He looked at my face, then at the potato in my hand, and forced a smile. “Come on. It’ll be okay.”

I gave Mrs. Davies one last apology, swore I’d show up next Wednesday if I could finish cleaning the bathrooms in time, then cradled my invention in one hand and the potato in the other as we headed to class. Aaren was right. It would all be okay. After working so hard for so long to prove myself, it couldn’t all go wrong because of one measly potato.

When I walked into my history class, I could barely take my eyes off the front of the room long enough to put my invention on the back counter with the projects from the rest of the class members. I didn’t know what made me happier—seeing Mr. Allen seated up front, or the table full of relics next to him.

Mr. Allen was everyone’s favorite teacher, so when we found out he had Shadel’s Sickness just before Harvest Break four and a half weeks ago, almost the entire class had cried. Mr. Allen had spent the whole month of Harvest Break in bed, recovering. Wherever his skin wasn’t red and blotchy, it was pale, and he looked weak.

But he was alive.

Aaren and I slid into our seats. It was obvious that everyone’s enthusiasm about inventions had made class start late, because Mr. Allen was just leading the class in our motto, which usually happened right at the beginning.

“Class, why do we need to learn about history?”

Everyone answered in unison, “So we don’t repeat the same mistakes.”

Mr. Allen had asked the same question every day since we began this class in January, and we answered the same. I know he meant to stress the importance of history, but it always sounded to me like a challenge. And I liked a challenge.

We finished Tens & Elevens learning about World War II, but Mrs. Kearney hated questions, so I had lots left from last year when we got into Mr. Allen’s class. That first day, I asked Mr. Allen the question that had bothered me the most—why they would build a bomb so much more powerful than the bombs of World War II, when they’d already seen the destruction the older bombs caused. It was like they hadn’t learned anything.

Mr. Allen said they did learn things—they just anticipated wrong on some things, and hoped for the best on others.

“For example,” he said, “they learned not to build a bomb that would damage the environment, like the atomic
bombs did. They went to great lengths to make the green bomb ‘green.’ We have those scientists to thank for this incredibly fertile valley we live in.”

It was true. My grandpa said the only people who survived the bombs were underground and far away from where any bomb hit. My grandparents and twenty-four others found one another and searched for a place to start over, gathering every stray animal they came across along the way. They were so happy when they discovered White Rock’s crater, the tunnel leading inside that the White Rock River flowed through, and everything green growing around and inside the crater. They knew they’d found home, even before Mr. Hudson, our town’s super-inventor, did tests to make sure the land and vegetation were safe.

It felt weird to thank the scientists for making our farming life easier, though, when they helped cause the deaths of nearly everyone in the world. I was about to bring up that point when Mr. Allen said, “You have to understand the situation they were in. General Shadel had risen in power and convinced his government that they had a legitimate claim to rule neighboring countries. His leaders gave him authority to invade. He and his army overtook the first country quickly, and he overthrew his own government even more quickly.

“General Shadel was both feared and respected as he set his sights on other countries he felt he had a claim to.
Nations began to pick sides—either to join him or to try to stop his invasions. With his charisma, General Shadel gained many allies by making promises of a better world for all who supported him, even though that
better world
meant being ruled by a tyrant. Battle lines spanned three continents. Casualties numbered in the millions, with a threat of world domination from General Shadel on the horizon.” Mr. Allen shrugged. “Our side had to do something. Since the Worldwide Nuclear Disarmament Act eighteen years earlier, we didn’t have a weapon that could force General Shadel to back down. It sounds ironic now, but we developed the green bomb in order for the people of the world to survive. We thought that with the green bomb, we could win.”

Like Mr. Allen said, we anticipated wrong.

I stared at the two maps hanging on the wall behind Mr. Allen. The detailed one from before the bombs with all the cities and states and countries clearly marked, and the one from now, where cities had been drawn in by hand in a few places but most of the map was blank.

The second day of class, I raised my hand again. “Mrs. Kearney said that after we got nuclear bombs, lots of other countries did, too. Why’d the scientists think they could build an even better bomb and no other countries would copy them?”

Mr. Allen nodded. “They knew it was a possibility—
they just didn’t expect it to happen so fast. In 2069, we moved our scientists to a secluded city they hoped was isolated enough. Anyone know where that city was?” He blinked a few times, like he couldn’t believe we hadn’t been taught that yet. “It was here, in Cook, Nebraska. Apparently it wasn’t isolated enough. Somehow plans were leaked to General Shadel’s scientists, and by the time we had a prototype, so did they. At that point, it became a race to see who could arm themselves with green bombs the fastest. We had hoped for the best and got the worst.”

We knew the rest of the story. Our side led General Shadel to believe that we were further behind in making the bombs than we actually were. Everyone assumed there would be negotiations, and that the general would demand we surrender. He didn’t negotiate. Instead, he fired the green bombs on us and our allies. Nine of them destroyed the entire United States.

He fired his other eighteen green bombs on our allies.

During the few minutes after General Shadel fired the bombs but before they hit us, all the news stations told everyone to get to a bomb shelter if they had one, while we fired our thirteen bombs on him and his allies. We made sure the first one hit right where we knew the general was stationed.

I looked at the circles on the map that were our history teachers’ best guesses of where each bomb hit. A circle
represented the two-hundred-mile radius around each bomb where everything was decimated—people, animals, technology, buildings—and a much larger circle represented the area where everyone on the surface was killed but a few ruins of cities remained. There was no place where the bigger circles didn’t overlap.

But today Mr. Allen wasn’t talking about World War III, the bombs, or General Shadel. He was talking about the inventions that existed before all that. “Before the bombs,” he said, “there were a million inventions people used every day that we no longer have.”

Mr. Allen motioned to the table next to him. There were a few things I had seen before in the library or in other classes, but some of them I had no idea about.

I loved seeing relics. But just like we gathered into groups and formed towns, bandits gathered into groups and stole from towns. It was dangerous to search for relics left over from before the bombs, and to transport them all the way back to White Rock, so we didn’t have many.

“Since everyone seems to be in the mood for inventions today, we’re going to be talking about the technology revolution of the twenty-first century.”

He reached out and grabbed something silver and shiny about three inches by two inches, and about a half inch thick. There was a strange circle thing on the front of
it, and the back was mostly black, and buttons and knobs were all over it but they were almost flat against the metal. “Anyone know what this is?”

Along with the rest of the class, I shook my head. Everything on it was so small. Even the words printed on it or carved into it were minuscule.

Nate Vanlue raised his hand. “A cell phone?”

A cell phone!
I’d heard of those. They let people talk over long distances. Aaren’s brother Travin said they didn’t just carry voices, though. He said they contained images and books and music and moving pictures and games and news, but I didn’t believe him. I heard they were teeny.

“Nope. Any other guesses?” When no one raised a hand, he told us. “It’s a camera.” I had heard of a camera before, too, but I’d never seen one. Mr. Allen picked up a book from the table and thumbed through it. “A camera could be used to take a picture of anything. Like this.” He held open a page that showed hundreds and hundreds of people sprawled out in a field, listening to people play musical instruments.

Mr. Allen showed us a cylinder called a flashlight. Then he passed around a flat object about a foot square that had individual twists of something that looked like short pieces of thick string sticking up, but it was so much softer than any string I’d ever felt. He said it was called
carpet, and that it used to cover the floors in people’s homes. When it was my turn, I just laid my cheek on the soft fibers and imagined an entire room of it. Then he showed us a picture of my favorite thing—a machine that actually washed your dishes for you!

And the best thing about the inventions before the bombs was that there were enough people—thousands and thousands in every city—so not everyone had to invent. Only the people who were really good at it invented, and only because they wanted to. It was strange to think that if World War III hadn’t happened, I’d be living with the kinds of technology he showed us.

It was even stranger that people I knew had used that stuff—all the twenty-six original members of White Rock. Since Mr. Allen was the first person born in White Rock, he was also the oldest person here who hadn’t used any of those inventions. The more Mr. Allen told us about the things that once existed, the more I understood why everyone placed such importance on inventing. They wanted that technology back.

But it wasn’t going to happen.

When the green bombs hit, they left behind side effects. Besides new plants, metals having different properties, weather patterns changing, and the existence of the Bomb’s Breath, the green bombs destroyed any ability to create a stable magnet. No magnets meant no electric
motors. And no electric motors meant no to a lot of the inventions they had back then. The people in White Rock have invented some pretty great things, but no matter what we did, we’d never get back to the technology level that existed before the bombs. It meant inventing was more difficult now than it used to be.

But just because it was difficult didn’t mean I was willing to give up.

As soon as history was over and I walked into the inventions classroom, excitement buzzed through my veins. There were 917 people living in White Rock, and everyone four and older made an invention for the Harvest Festival competition. That was a
ton
of inventions. I hoped mine wouldn’t get lost in the masses. I wanted everyone to see it.

The clock read 11:05, with Helen Johnson’s name displayed on the plaque below it. I imagined a plaque somewhere with my name on it. Maybe my potato-peeler invention would be installed in the school kitchen, and Mrs. Davies would use it all the time. Maybe people would even use it in their homes. Maybe we would use it in
my
home.

I grabbed hold of my necklace. The pendant was from my birth mom, but the chain was from my parents. It was silver and woven so intricately, it reminded me of the woven pastry my mom baked only once a year on my birthday. The chain was made long before the green bombs and was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my whole life. I ran my finger down its smooth surface and thought of my parents. I was going to make them proud!