Sky Jumpers Series, Book 1

by Peggy Eddleman

  Even with the extra science knowledge and practice, the height still scared me, which meant there was no way Mickelson would jump.

  I stepped to the edge, filled my lungs with air, and jumped off the cliff, trying not to freak out that the Bomb’s Breath wasn’t going to slow my fall. I concentrated on where I’d place my hands and legs, and pictured what I was going to do when I landed, while the wind rushed past me. I hit the ground in a roll, and what air I had left was knocked out of me. With my forward momentum, I rolled into a standing position and coughed a few heaving breaths. As I brushed the snow off, I looked at the top of the cliff. It was so high, I couldn’t believe I’d actually jumped!

  Mickelson stood silhouetted at the cliff’s edge, the sunset glowing a brilliant pink and orange behind him. His posture showed how haggard he was. Still, I could tell he was considering jumping. Chances were he’d chicken out, but I glanced downhill for an escape route anyway.

  A huge clump of trees grew directly above a spot that everyone called the Dimple. You could see it from almost anywhere in White Rock. The woods looked like a man’s beard, the group of trees to my left looked like the mustache, and a pit in the ground below it, right in the middle of the Bomb’s Breath, looked like a dimple on his cheek. If Mickelson jumped, that was where I’d go. I waited to see if he’d actually do it.

  He did. And his jump was beautiful. He soared through the air with his arms slightly windmilling, the sunset behind him, his curly hair blown back by the wind as it rushed past him. By the time he neared the ground, his body was perfectly upright. He landed straight down on his feet, but he didn’t tuck and roll. The force propelled him forward, knocking him facedown. If it wasn’t for the snow, he’d have broken both legs for sure.

  Mickelson staggered to a standing position, looking like everything hurt, and took a step toward me.

  I backed in the direction of the trees above the Dimple, keeping my eyes on Mickelson. He took careful steps toward me until I stopped behind two tree trunks about three feet apart, only a couple of feet uphill from the Dimple.

  The lowest branch on either tree was eight feet off the ground. I put one foot on one tree trunk, then jumped my second foot onto the second trunk, with one hand on each tree. I alternated my weight between my feet as I scaled up the trees. When I was high enough, I pushed off one trunk and swung onto a branch of the other, a nice sturdy branch that stuck straight out. As I hunched down on it, I saw exactly what I’d hoped to see—Mickelson standing between me and the Dimple. I knew from playing here and almost falling from that drop-off, it was deep enough that the bottom had normal air and the Bomb’s Breath covered the top like a lid.

  Mickelson’s feet were already in the Bomb’s Breath, but because of the snow, he didn’t notice. He shifted his weight off his hurt leg and looked up at me, trying to figure out what I was doing.

  Out of habit, I grabbed my necklace as I watched Mickelson. I held the stone in my palm and ran my finger and thumb down the chain. At that second, I realized the pendant and the chain did go together. There were parts of me that were rough, and parts that were polished. There were things I was great at and things I stank at. Everything together made up me. Imperfect me, but capable me. Definitely find-a-way-out-of-this-mess me.

  And right now, I could get out of this mess if I could get Mickelson trapped in the Dimple. If I could swing down from the branch I crouched on, I could use my feet to push him in.

  “I don’t want you to die,” I said.

  “Funny. The longer you keep that bag of Ameiphus, the more I want you to die.” He looked up at me with his controlled, confident expression. “You can’t stay up there all day. The second you come down, I’m going to throw you off that cliff.” He nodded toward his left. “The Ameiphus won’t be so hard to take from you when you’re lying broken at the bottom. You’re trapped. You’ve got nowhere to run. It’s over. The only way to save yourself is to drop the Ameiphus to me now.”

  “I still don’t want you to die,” I repeated. “So take a big breath and hold it, okay?”

  He tilted his head to the side and crinkled his forehead.

  “Now!” I yelled. I reached down and grabbed the branch with my hands, then threw my feet behind me. As I held on to the branch, my legs went under the tree, and I pulled my feet together as they swung toward Mickelson. I aimed right for his chest. He gasped; then my feet hit him with enough force that he flew backward. The jerk of the hit pulled my hands off the branch, and I dropped flat on my back in the snow as he tumbled and fell right into the Dimple.

  I got up and ran to the edge of the Bomb’s Breath. Mickelson had landed in the pit on his back. I let out a huge breath that was equal parts exhaustion, relief, and pure joy. Mickelson was trapped.

  He jumped to his feet, even though the motion looked painful, and attempted to scramble up the walls of the pit.

  “Don’t!” I shouted. “If you climb up, you’ll be in the Bomb’s Breath, and you’ll die.”

  He froze. And for the first time since he stepped through the Bomb’s Breath, he was speechless.

  “Stay there,” I said. “I’ll get people to haul you up with a rope.”

  I reached into my schoolbag as I walked away from him, pulled out the sack of Ameiphus, and grinned. It was safe. I opened it, just to see the little white pills.

  Except they were no longer white.

  Most of the pills in the bag had changed to the blue of the sky on a summer’s day. I just stared at them, baffled. These pills were always white. I didn’t know what could have changed them.

  My eyes flashed to the Bomb’s Breath. That was the one thing different with these pills than every other Ameiphus pill I’d seen. They had gone through the Bomb’s Breath.

  Some of the pills were still mostly white—probably the ones that had been in the middle of the sack while it sat in the snow, waiting for me to find it. I knelt down and felt around for the start of the dense air. With several of the ones that were white in the palm of my hand, and with my breath quivering, I moved them into the air of the Bomb’s Breath.

  I watched with fascination as they changed from white to a faint blue, then to a light blue, and finally to a brilliant sky blue. What was going on? Were they ruined? I stared at them, biting my lip and wondering what the change meant before returning the pills to their sack.

  With my schoolbag over my shoulders again and the Ameiphus safe inside, I backed up quite a bit, ran as fast as I could, and leapt into the air just before I reached the Bomb’s Breath. I wasn’t high above it, so I took a deep breath the moment my feet left the ground. My forward momentum shot me past the Dimple, and I put my arms and legs straight out. The Bomb’s Breath wouldn’t hold me forever, but for a moment I didn’t think about that. I just enjoyed the weightlessness. I had the Ameiphus. My town was safe. As impossible as it seemed, I had actually won.

  I was flying.

  I curled into a ball, feet down, as I neared the bottom of the Bomb’s Breath, then dropped out of it and landed with a thump in the snow. The only sound I heard was my own breath as it made frozen clouds in front of my face, then the sound of Arabelle’s snort from somewhere in the trees.

  She galloped toward me from the edge of the woods and nuzzled into my shoulder. I laid my cheek on her forehead and patted her jaw. “Thanks for waiting for me, Arabelle.”

  I climbed into her saddle, wrapped my arms around her neck, and together we rode toward City Circle.

  Arabelle must have sensed my impatience to get to my family, because she rode in the straightest line possible to City Circle, jumping over fences, bushes, ditches, and the occasional doghouse. After only a few minutes, I saw the rooftop of the community center.

  When Arabelle and I passed between the last two merchant shops, I saw a long stream of people trudging up the tram path to help our guard. I leapt off Arabelle and ran through a demolished door of the community center, heading straight to the gym. They must have just broken free, because everything was chaotic.r />
  No one noticed me slip into the room, which I was grateful for. All I wanted was my parents. I searched the crowd, but I couldn’t see them anywhere. Then someone grabbed my arm. I turned to see Mrs. Davies.

  “Hope! You’re alive!” she said. Then her face crinkled into a concerned expression. “Your parents are in the clinic. Hurry!”

  Fear grabbed my heart. I pushed through the crowd and into the hallway, then burst through the clinic doors into a room almost as crowded as the gym. All three beds were occupied, with worried family members on and around them, but my eyes could only focus on my parents.

  My dad was asleep in one of the beds, looking pained, his skin not even close to the right color. My mom was sitting on the edge of the bed, her eyes red and puffy. The moment she saw me, she jumped up and hugged me tight. I melted into her arms. After a moment, she whispered, “I knew you weren’t dead.”

  I bent down and wrapped my arms around my dad, pressing my cheek into the stubble on his cheek. His skin burned against mine. I looked to my mom in alarm.

  “The antibiotic cream wasn’t enough,” she whispered. “The infection spread. When people see him, it’s like they know he’s going to die.” She sniffed and wiped away a tear. “When we decided to hand the Ameiphus over to Mickelson, everyone gave up on your dad.” She paused and met my eyes. “But I knew you wouldn’t.”

  I pulled Dr. Grenwood’s sack full of the medicine from my bag, and my mom’s breath caught at the sight of it. When I tipped a blue pill into my hand, she gave me a puzzled look. “It’s all right,” I said. “I think.”

  We gently shook my dad’s shoulders, and his eyes fluttered open. “Hope?” he said with confused eyes.

  “It’s me,” I said. “I’m okay. I need you to take this.” I held the pill to his lips. He opened his mouth and my mom gave him a drink of water. His eyes closed again, and he was asleep instantly.

  “You did good,” Brock said behind me.

  I turned and smiled. “Thanks. So did you guys.”

  “The Ameiphus is blue?” Aaren asked.

  I held the bag out to him. “Yep. Something happened when they went through the Bomb’s Breath.”

  Aaren’s eyes flicked back and forth, and he got his focused-on-science look while his mind worked through the details of what must have happened when the pills were exposed to the Bomb’s Breath. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some to Mr. Hudson and Melina.”

  Mr. Hudson’s wife and sons wore faces full of relief. Mr. Hudson looked as bad as my dad. Worse, if you counted the blotchy spots all over his skin. Aaren put his arm under Mr. Hudson’s shoulders to lift him up a bit, then put one of the pills in his mouth and gave him a drink. Brock took a pill to Melina in the third bed. She was so little—only a year or two older than Brenna. She didn’t have the blotchy skin yet. Maybe with the medicine, she wouldn’t get as bad as Mr. Hudson was.

  When Dr. Grenwood returned to the community center from her stint as a hostage, we heard the happy reunion in the hallway. Aaren ran out to join them. A moment later, his mom walked into the clinic with Aaren’s dad’s arm around her shoulders and Aaren and his siblings surrounding her. I could tell that the past few days had been even worse for her than for us. When she saw me with the bag of Ameiphus, the look on her face made our entire trip worth it. I hoped she would forgive us for leaving her daughter behind in Browning.

  A group of people rounded up all the bandits, while Dr. Grenwood and Aaren moved between the three patients in the clinic and the chaos of the celebration and the nine wounded guards in the gym. The whole time, I sat with my mom in a bubble of calm on my dad’s bed.

  “Before the fever got bad,” she said, “your dad decided he’s going to run for council head.”

  I looked at my dad’s face, then at my mom’s. “What? How?” Nothing had changed. I wasn’t any better at inventing.

  She reached out and ran her hand down my hair. “I think you reminded us both how to be strong.”

  I smiled. “I did?”

  She nodded. “Most of the town has been begging him to run, and I told him I support him one hundred percent. I think we’re both finally ready.”

  I looked up at her in shock. “It wasn’t me?” My mom gave me a confused look. I swallowed my own confusion and searched her eyes for the truth. “I’m not the reason he wouldn’t run? Because I’m such an embarrassment?”

  “Hope.” Her voice was so sad, like maybe her heart hurt. “You’ve never embarrassed us.”

  My mom put her arm around me. I leaned into her shoulder, finally relaxing, and fell asleep.

  After two hours, my dad’s fever broke and he woke up. I was awake and skimming my fingertips across his big, thick fingers when I heard his voice, sounding more like a croak.

  “You’re alive.”

  I looked at his face, which was much more normal-colored than it had been, and smiled. “You too.”

  He squeezed my hand. “Course we are. I told you—you’re the most capable girl I know, Hope.” He paused a moment and smiled. “You do know you’re grounded, right?”

  I squeezed his hand back and grinned. “Yep, I know.”

  I shivered in the cavern below the hole in the mine floor as I waited with Brock, Aaren, and Aaren’s family. I linked my arms in Aaren’s and Brock’s, hoping to share some of their warmth. “What’s taking them so long?” I asked.

  I knew Aaren was as anxious as I was. It had been a long three weeks since we’d last seen Brenna. And two days since Aaren’s dad, his brother Cole, and a couple of guards left for Browning to get her and bring her back.

  Aaren’s little brothers, James, Quin, and Nick, ran to where the cave room and river narrowed to a tunnel. Nick tilted his ear toward the opening and pointed. “I hear voices!”

  Everyone strained to hear Brenna’s chattering from the tunnel opening. I couldn’t believe how much I had missed that voice! A few minutes later, Beckett crawled through the tunnel into the cave room, followed by Brenna, Mr. Grenwood, Cole, and Clive.

  They were immediately surrounded, and I joined the reunion like it was my family. Brenna breathlessly told us about her trip home and her stay at Brock’s house with her new best friend, Estie. She looked like she might explode if she didn’t tell all three weeks’ worth of news soon.

  “Oh! Oh!” Brenna said. “I didn’t tell you the best part! They’re all going to move here the second the snow melts in the tunnel. So you’ll get your family, Brock, and I’ll get Estie!”

  I wondered if Brock would shout for joy or jump up and down, but what I saw on his face was even better. His look of a million worries had come back as soon as we left Browning, but when Brenna gave him the news, all that lifted and he smiled bigger than I’d ever seen him smile. Until Brenna almost knocked him over when she plowed into him with a hug.

  “Come on,” Mr. Grenwood said as he lifted Brenna onto the ladder leading up to the mines. “Let’s talk on the way. I’m sure the sledding races are over, but there’s still a lot of Winter Festival fun to be had.”

  We usually held the Winter Festival in the gym at the community center, but our town had spent too much time in the gym lately. Everyone agreed that having the Winter Festival outside where it actually felt like winter was the best thing anyway. One of the city office rooms in the community center had been turned into a temporary jail until a real one could be built. It held six of Mickelson’s men, so that helped make the decision, too.

  By the time guards reached the woods to pull Mickelson out of the Dimple, he was gone, and he hadn’t been seen again. Until the mine workers could seal the hole in the mine floor, a few of our guards watched it constantly so he couldn’t come back.

  As we stepped out of the cave, the last bit of sun dipped behind the top of the mountain, and we followed the river by the light of the sunset. In the distance, the smoke from the fires rose into the sky. If I squinted, I could see past the fires to the place where we’d held the remembrance ceremony just over two weeks ago for
the three guards who died in the battle with the bandits. I closed my eyes and thanked them again for saving everyone.

  The closer we got to the party, the louder the voices of everyone in town became, the darker the skies got, and the more my teeth chattered.

  When we rounded the last bend in the river, the Winter Festival was in sight. Dozens of fires burned in a massive circle, with a circle of tables inside that, and the performance platform right in the middle. All the tables that had held the inventions at the Harvest Festival were ready for our feast. The smells drifted along the air like happiness itself. We raced between two of the fires to join our town in the celebration, and a group formed around Brenna, Cole, Dr. Grenwood, Clive, and Beckett.

  My parents waved me over, and I ran to them.

  “I see Brenna made it back safely,” my dad said.

  “Yep.” I glanced at Brenna and the others.

  “Then it’s time to get this party started.” There hadn’t been an official vote yet to see if my dad was the new council head, but everyone except Mr. Newberry acted like he was. My dad walked to the center of the platform, grabbed the bullhorn, and said the words the council head says every year: “Let the feast begin!”

  Once everyone finished eating, we found a spot in front of the performance platform to sit and watch the storytellers, and I snuggled up next to Aaren, Brock, and Brenna. A few people placed torches around the obelisk in the center of the platform so we could see.

  A hush came over the crowd as Mr. Hudson walked onto the platform. I nudged Aaren. “Why is he up there?”

  Aaren shrugged.

  I couldn’t believe how healthy Mr. Hudson looked! He’d come down with Shadel’s only three weeks ago. Even with Ameiphus, he should have been in bed for another three weeks, yet here he was, looking normal. I heard that Melina had healed even more quickly.