Sky Jumpers Book 2: The Forbidden Flats

by Peggy Eddleman

  People walked from shop to shop while the owners stood outside, shouting out sales or holding up items. About every five shops on each side of the road stood a Glacier guard wearing a gun in a holster on his hip and dressed in dark blue, similar to the one we saw blocking the other road. The guards scanned the crowds and the buildings, making sure there wasn’t trouble anywhere.

  We took our horses and trailer to a corral at the end of the street. A kid who was probably fourteen or fifteen scurried toward us and opened the gate to the corral.

  On one side of the street, the backs of the buildings were against the tall wooden wall that split the circle of the city in half. Now that we were at the end by the corral, I noticed that there was a door in the wall, with two guards standing on either side.

  “What’s on the other side of the wall?” I asked Luke.

  “That’s where the people live. They have gardens along the back part—that glass overhead works like a greenhouse. Lengthens their growing season.”

  When we finished tying up our horses, Mr. Williams called out, “Mr. Grenwood has agreed to stay with the horses and trailer while I trade for supplies. Everyone else, meet back here in an hour.”

  “What do you want to see?” I asked Brock and Aaren. “I want to go to the bakery. And the hotel. And the restaurant.”

  “The clinic, too,” Aaren said.

  Brock, Aaren, and I started toward the buildings when Aaren’s dad stopped us. “I don’t want you three going off on your own. This is a dangerous place.” He glanced down the street, as if there were hidden attackers everywhere, but all I saw were Glacier guards, making sure everyone was protected.

  “I agree,” Mr. Williams said. “I’m going to get the feed for the horses. Why don’t you come with me?”

  Luke slung his bag over his shoulder. “Oh, come on. They’re not five. They’re older than you give them credit for.”

  I gave Luke a look that was a million times nicer than the look Mr. Williams gave him.

  “I told Hope’s parents I would watch out for them,” Mr. Williams said, “and I don’t think they’d be too happy if I let them go off on their own in a place like this.”

  Luke raised an eyebrow. “They went off on their own and saved your town, right?” We did! I kind of loved Luke a little for mentioning it. “And they won’t have fun in the feed store. I’ll look after them.”

  Mr. Williams ground his teeth, and Aaren’s dad squinted down the road, then gave a single nod.

  “We’ll stay safe,” I promised. “You can trust us.”

  Mr. Williams looked at Aaren’s dad, then said, “Okay.” We took off into the town with Luke before they could change their minds.

  We walked with Luke down the road and went inside a building with a sign that read EVERYTHING.

  “This is one of my favorites,” Luke said. “I think you’ll enjoy it.”

  I didn’t know where to look first. Shelves lined the walls, and tables filled almost the entire floor, leaving only small aisles to walk through. Some tables held inventions, some games, some wooden boxes of different sizes. Furniture pieces sat in a row against one of the walls. I walked over to the shelves and touched some folded squares of the softest fabric I had ever felt. I didn’t know what it was made of, but it definitely wasn’t the wool or cotton we had in White Rock.

  Luke chatted with the person manning the shop, while Aaren, Brock, and I went to the table holding games. I felt the smooth wood of a thick, flat circle, with a ring of dips carved around the edge. Each dip held three shiny rocks. Aaren and Brock both played with a shallow wooden box that had a maze made of thin wood pieces inside it and a glass cover. They tipped the box to lead an almost perfectly round rock through the maze. I wasn’t paying attention to Luke until I heard his voice perk up.

  “Carl has metals?”

  “Yeah,” the shopkeeper said. “He traded with someone from the north a couple of days ago for a bunch of … iron, I think.”

  “Do you know where the iron was found?”

  The man scratched at his neck. “I’m pretty sure it was right above Lake Superior.”

  “Where is Carl?” Luke asked.

  He shrugged. “He was in here a bit ago, but he probably headed to his workshop. He’ll be back by sundown if you want to check then.”

  Luke thanked the man, and steered us out of the building. Once we were on the walk in front, Luke started pacing. “There weren’t bombs anywhere near that area. It may be a clean zone. I’ve never seen iron from there for trade anywhere—this could be very important. This could be it. But we aren’t going to be here at sundown.” Then he shook his head a few times. “I’ve been watching for iron from that area for years. We have to talk with him. I have to find him and see if he’ll make a trade.” He stopped pacing and stared toward the building, as though he was trying to see beyond it. “Carl’s workshop will be on that first road we passed. It runs parallel with this road. We need to get there.”

  “But we can’t, right?” I said. “It’s off-limits. There was a guard.”

  “We’ll have to sneak.”

  Aaren cocked his head to the side. “That’s against the rules.”

  Luke started walking down the street toward the corral. “It’s fine. I’ve talked with Carl enough that he’ll understand. What’s a little rule in comparison to maybe finding the metal we need to bring back electricity?”

  I wasn’t sure if it was bad to go, or if it was bad to turn down a possibly important discovery. Luke seemed to sense my uncertainty and said, “If you don’t want to go with me, you can always go to the feed store and find Mr. Williams.”

  Suddenly, it felt much more like an exciting discovery than something wrong. I looked to Brock and Aaren, and it was clear they felt the same way. Besides, we were following Luke, who was an adult, and he said it was okay. “But how are we going to get to the other road?” I asked.

  “The corrals. Just act normal.”

  Luke walked confidently down the street, and Brock, Aaren, and I did our best to look the same. When we got to the end of the shops, we were mostly hidden by our trailer, but I could still see Aaren’s dad by the horses, looking bored, with the boy who helped us not far away. After a few minutes, one of the horses in the stables reared, and they both turned their attention to the horse. We used the opportunity to run to the small space between the last building and the beginning of the stables, where a water trough blocked an alley leading to the other road.

  We shuffled sideways beside the trough. I lost my balance and almost fell into the water, but caught myself without making too much sound. As soon as we were past the trough, we crept the rest of the way through the alley.

  Luke looked down the road at the buildings. “That one.” He pointed to a building with double doors that swung open, letting in the cool air. We walked down the street and into the building, trying to look like we belonged there.

  The inside looked much the same as our inventions classroom back in White Rock. There was machinery and tools for working with metal, wood, and glass, and plenty of workbenches, but there was also a large fireplace at the back of the room, with a big metal pot next to it. There were no people in sight.

  “Carl?” Luke called out, not loudly enough that anyone outside of the workshop would’ve heard. He walked over to a workbench that held a large hammer, a couple of chisels, and two large, dark gray chunks of iron that hadn’t been formed into anything yet, so they just looked like rocks. One was bigger than the other, but both were about the size of misshapen flat cantaloupes.

  “Carl?” Luke said once more, his voice sounding completely distracted by the metal in front of him. He put his hands under the smaller rock and hefted it onto its side so he could see the bottom of it.

  “Is it what you were looking for?” I asked.

  Brock, Aaren, and I gathered around the workbench, staring at the rock, trying to guess if anything looked different from other hunks of metal.

  He tilted his head and squ
inted. “I can’t tell without doing tests. It may be. I’ve wanted metal from that area for more years than I can remember.” His voice sounded far away. He picked up the hammer and a chisel from the workbench.

  “What are you doing?” Aaren asked, alarmed.

  “Carl’s not here, and we’ll be leaving in a few minutes. I just need a small piece so I can test it. If it holds a magnetic charge, I’ll stop by later to offer a trade.”

  “Hey! You shouldn’t be in here!”

  We all spun around to see a man—Carl, probably—who’d walked in through the open double doors, his dirty forehead crinkled in anger, his shoulders tensed, and his muscled arms crossed against a shirt streaked with coal.

  “I know,” Luke said. “But I heard you had this. I came to offer a trade.”

  “And you know better than anyone that if I had any metal for trade, it would be in the shops.” Carl kept his body facing us, but looked toward the open doors. “Guards!”

  “Wait,” Luke said. “I know you’re every bit as passionate about metal as I am. Help me out?”

  The man stared at Luke for a moment, and I was sure he’d relax his muscles and his breathing. But then he noticed the chisel and hammer that were still in Luke’s hands, and his eyes narrowed as three guards rushed in.

  Carl flicked his hand toward us. “These four snuck in here without permission. Will you please show them the exit and let the guards at the gate know that they are banned?”

  Luke struggled as two navy-vested guards grabbed his arms. “Wait! I just wanted to talk!”

  Carl walked right past Luke and stopped at his workbench, his back to us. I could tell how protective he was of the metal by the way he stood between Luke and it, and that he wasn’t going to talk to Luke anymore.

  Luke could tell, too. He stopped struggling with the guards and walked toward the double doors leading to the street. “Come on, kids.”

  I ran alongside the guards. “Wait—where are you taking us?”

  The guard nearest me tipped his head in the direction of the front gate. “Out of the city.”

  “But we’re here with a group,” I said. “They don’t even know where we are! Can’t you take us back to them instead?”

  “If you don’t follow the rules, you’re banned.” Then he ushered us to the front gate and sent us outside.

  Waiting against the outside of the glass walls was awful. None of us spoke—we kept our heads down, kicking at the packed sand we stood on. From Luke’s frustrated pacing, I guessed that his mind was back on the metal, and he was mad that he lost a chance at something that could have been what he was looking for.

  I looked through the thick glass to see if any of the distorted blobs could be our trailer, and wondered if the others realized yet that we got kicked out. I had thought it was good to take risks. Then my mind went to the horse racing. Maybe not every risk was a good one.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the gate opened wide, and Cole, Cass, Aaren’s dad, and Mr. Williams rode out, leading our horses behind them. Mr. Williams walked Luke’s horse and the one Brock and I shared over to us, his face furious. Luke didn’t give Mr. Williams a chance to say anything—he just took hold of the reins of his horse, climbed on, and galloped ahead of everyone.

  Mr. Williams watched him for a moment, then faced us. “You asked me to trust you.”

  “Luke told us it was okay,” Brock said.

  Mr. Williams looked at Brock, then the rest of us. “Did you know that road was off-limits?”

  We all said yes.

  “Did Luke force you to go with him?”

  We shook our heads.

  Mr. Williams looked right at me. “I can’t trust you if you give me reasons not to.” Then he turned and mounted his horse.

  The next three days tumbled together. We rode from the moment we packed up camp until lunchtime, when we ate and ran footraces against each other to make sure our legs still worked. Then we climbed back on our horses and rode until we were so exhausted and it was so dark that we couldn’t make it another inch. We’d hobble around, sore from riding, to set up the tents and collapse into our bedrolls. We’d wake up and do it all over, even though I was pretty sure that none of us wanted to ride ever again.

  The farther we got from White Rock, the tenser everyone got. I could see it in the way Mr. Williams and Aaren’s dad rubbed their faces and fidgeted with their reins, and I could hear it in the way they spoke in clipped sentences with strained voices. Luke said that we were on the safest stretch of trail there was, but really, it wasn’t the fear of bandits that was making everyone so worried. We were traveling closer and closer to our goal—finding the seforium. At the same time, though, we were getting farther and farther from home, and it felt … wrong. Even though I knew it wasn’t.

  The tensest person, though, was Cass. It was clear that she was worried about how hard we were pushing the horses, yet equally worried about not getting there quickly enough.

  After we set up tents and ate dinner, we sat around the campfire to warm ourselves before crawling into bed. Mr. Williams stood up. “It’s been eight days, and we haven’t reached the halfway point yet. If we continue at this speed, we’ll never get back in time, and I think you all know that’s not an option. We need to stay on the lookout for any opportunity to make it work. To find faster ways. This was a hard decision, but I think we’re going to have to leave the trailer behind and hope that when we get to Heaven’s Reach, we’ll be able to trade for a new one.”

  Mouths dropped, people sat up straighter, and we all looked at each other. No trailer?

  “We won’t be able to take tents, or much in the way of extra clothes, because the space in our saddlebags will have to be used for food. We’ll have to find places for the horses to graze at night. We’ll have to leave behind cooking supplies and tie our bedrolls to our saddles. It’ll make things tougher for us, certainly. But we’ll be able to ride a lot faster, and right now, that’s all that matters.”

  Everyone was quiet after that. If they were like me, they were probably feeling a mix of worry about leaving so much of the stuff we needed behind, and relief that we could go faster, and that meeting the deadline was less impossible.

  We all climbed into our bedrolls and went to sleep under tent canvas for the last time this trip.

  As we warmed our freezing bodies around the campfire and ate hot granola cereal the next morning, Mr. Williams stood up to make an announcement. “Anyone tired of the scenery yet?” Most of us couldn’t even manage to give him a halfhearted chuckle. Yeah, you could say we were tired of it. “Because Luke informed me that we are going to reach the ruins by this afternoon.”

  I sat up straight. “Really?” That was where my birth mom grew up. I would get to walk in some of the same places she walked.

  Mr. Williams nodded, and the feeling in the group suddenly changed, as though someone had poured extra energy and excitement on us, washing away all the gloomy tiredness. We packed up camp in record time, stashed the trailer in the woods, and hid it as well as we could, hoping that someday we’d be able to come back for it. Then we set out for the day, each of us on our own horse now that they didn’t have to pull the trailer.

  “Are there homes in the ruins?” I asked as we rode.

  “No,” Luke said. “Not this close to a bomb. The smaller buildings were completely wiped out. The ruins are made entirely of structures big enough to not be decimated. The ones tall enough to use steel framework. Of course, since the bombs changed the properties of metal, the steel is no longer strong. The buildings have bent in on themselves.”

  “And people live there?” I asked. “You used to live there? Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Incredibly. Everyone adapted to the weaknesses of the buildings. We learned that if we guarded ourselves well and stayed hidden, bandits weren’t an issue. Each town finds their own way of making the best out of what they have, even if what they have could be perilous.”

  I guessed that was right. It’s
what we did in White Rock. Made the best of what we had, even though living that close to the Bomb’s Breath was dangerous.

  Lunch was the most relaxed meal we’d had in a while. I almost didn’t mind climbing back onto Ruben when it was time to leave. Almost.

  The ruins were only an hour’s ride farther. Luke, Brock, Aaren, and I hung back from the others so Luke could tell us story after story about his adventures growing up there. My guts hurt from laughing so much at all the ways he managed to get himself into trouble.

  “You enjoyed living in the ruins,” I said.

  Luke gave one quick nod, then turned away.

  “So why did you leave?”

  A dark look crossed his face. “Because they wanted us to. We got kicked out.”

  “What?” I said, a little louder than I meant to. “Why would they kick you out?” My mind immediately went to the times we’d gotten into trouble on this trip—when Luke suggested we race the horses, and when Luke took us to the off-limits part of town.

  “Because some of the leaders are unfair little—” Luke stopped himself, and looked to the horizon.

  Dark gray clouds were dashing across the sky toward us.

  “Storm coming!” Luke called out as he raced to the front of the group and pulled his horse to a stop. Everyone else steered their horses in close to him. “Storms out here approach quickly since there aren’t any mountains to stop them, and spring storms are especially bad. Those clouds are bound to bring lightning—we can’t be the highest thing on the Forbidden Flats, or we’ll get struck. Follow me!”

  As if the storm was trying to prove that Luke was correct, a lightning bolt zapped the ground in the distance, the rumbling crack of thunder catching up to us a few seconds later. We heeled our horses into a gallop and followed Luke. The drop-off between where we rode and the river was so steep, we had to ride nearly half a mile before we found a spot where we could take the horses down to the shore.