Cole, Cass, and the men were halfway across the open area, heading toward a room that was apparently the infirmary. We caught up and walked inside with them, and the muscled man laid Cass on her side on a padded table. Then he handed a blanket to Cole, who laid it over Cass’s soaking-wet body.
Thomas said, “I’ll go get Isha,” then left the room, while the muscled man put blankets over our shoulders.
“Is Isha the doctor?” Brock asked.
The man shook his head. “There is no doctor. Isha has some herbs, though. Might keep the infection out until the storm clears and you can get her to a doctor.”
All the color left Cole’s face. “No doctor?” He turned to Aaren. “Help her, Aaren. You have to.” His voice was pleading, begging.
Aaren hesitated. “I—I don’t know if I can. Her wound is so deep.”
“We don’t know how long it’ll be until we can leave,” Cole said, his voice desperate. “Or where to find another doctor. What if she can’t wait that long?”
Aaren focused on the corner of the table, as though he wasn’t seeing anything.
“You can do this,” I said. Then I fumbled through the bag that hung over one of his shoulders, and pulled out his med kit. It didn’t have as much stuff in it as the bag he’d carried in the trailer, but hopefully it’d be enough.
Aaren didn’t move. Normally, everything about him changed when he was helping someone. He became calm, focused, and confident. But not this time.
I set the kit next to him. “Aaren,” I said, “this is just like helping your mom.”
“I—I never really thought how it would be to do it by myself.”
“You’re not by yourself,” I said. “You’ve got us, and you know what to do. You know it so well, you’ve sleep-talked your way through surgeries almost every night on this trip.”
He blinked a few times, then looked down at his kit. “I need to clean the wound, then stitch it closed.” He lifted off the wadded shirt, and Cass sucked in a sharp breath. Aaren pulled a bottle of disinfectant out of his kit and poured some into her wound, rinsing it carefully before he cleaned the skin around it with gauze. As he worked, his movements became more Aaren-like. The same as when I’d seen him help his mom.
Aaren laid out his tools to stitch the wound closed as Thomas came back into the room with the person I assumed was Isha—a short woman with bright eyes and graying hair and hands that kept fluttering, as if she didn’t know whether she should help Aaren or give him space. Thomas put a hand up, letting the woman know to wait.
Cole held Cass’s hand while Aaren fixed his first injury without his mom nearby. Brock stood on one side of Aaren and I stood on the other, handing him everything as he asked for it.
When Aaren finished the last stitch and cut the thread, he exhaled and sagged against Cass’s bed. Then he grinned. “I did it.”
I grinned back. “You did.”
Aaren was still shaking. At first, I thought it was from being in wet clothes for so long—I was shivering, too—but then Brock said, “You need to eat something,” and I realized how hungry I was. Isha gave us dry clothes to change into, then took us back to the main area and got us each an apple, a chunk of cheese, and a cup of water. We leaned against a table near one of the fires, thrilled to finally be warm and dry.
“Is she going to be okay?” I whispered.
Aaren stared at the concrete floor. “I think so.” Then he and Brock walked back into the infirmary.
I stood next to Isha for a moment, nibbling on my cheese.
“Your necklace reminds me of someone,” she said, startling me.
“My birth mom—Anna—she used to live here,” I said.
The woman smiled and looked up at the bricks of the building above us that formed the ceiling. “Anna. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name.”
“You knew her?”
“I did. I became a substitute mom of sorts after hers died. She was a beautiful girl. Smart, too. She looked like you.”
I smiled, trying to hold in all the emotion I could. She knew my birth mom!
Isha asked what we were doing in the ruins, and I told her everything about the Bomb’s Breath lowering and our trip. I didn’t know why. There was something about her that made me feel as though it was okay to share, and I didn’t want to stop talking. As though telling all of this to her was somehow like telling it to my birth mom.
When I finished, she studied me, her blue eyes intense and perceptive. Almost as if I didn’t need to tell her anything, and she’d know it all just by watching me. Then she said, “Come here. I have something of Anna’s that I think you should have.” She motioned toward the main door we had come through.
I looked at the infirmary door, wondering if I should leave with Isha or go back in with the others. But she had something that was once my birth mom’s. How could I not go? I walked alongside her as we left through the door covered in dirt on the outside, and walked a slight incline up a tunnel that ran perpendicular to the one we came in through. The walls were dirt, like the others, and smelled damp. I wondered if that was normal, or if it was only because of all the rain.
Isha slid open another dirt-looking door and walked us into a room that wasn’t so different from the main room. Except this room was filled with beds. They were all in a chaotic order—as though maybe they were arranged in groups for families. I stared for a minute, picturing my birth mom’s bed, Luke’s bed, and my grandpa’s bed arranged in here in a little U shape for their family.
Isha and I walked over to a bed along the back wall, and she lifted up the edge of the blanket. “Can you do me a favor and pull out that box?”
I got on my knees and reached for a square box six inches tall and more than a foot wide, then placed it on the bed. Isha sat next to it, and I sat down, too, the box between us. She pushed some trinkets to one side so she could remove a thick book with a hard cover, along with a thin notebook.
“Did you know your birth mom was an expert on rocks?” she asked.
I nodded. “Luke told me she loved them.”
“The thing about your birth mom, though, is that she didn’t love rocks because they were pretty or shiny. She was a smart girl—she knew what rocks and ores and minerals were made of. She could see a rock’s worth based on what was inside, and what it was capable of becoming.” Isha stroked the worn cover of the book. “When she was eight, her dad—I guess that would make him your grandpa—found this book in a school that was run-down even before the bombs, and he brought it to her. This book meant everything to Anna. You never saw her without it—she carried it in a bag over her shoulder at all times, this notebook with her scribblings about what she discovered nestled right by it.”
Isha leaned across the box and put the textbook and the notebook into my hands. “You should be the one to have these, not me.”
I looked down at the cover of the textbook—Geology: A Study of Rocks, Minerals, Ores, and Gems. This had been my birth mom’s most prized possession. The way Isha spoke made my birth mom feel so real, I wanted her here. By me. To be the one showing me this book and her notes.
If my birth parents hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have my parents. I wouldn’t live in White Rock. I wouldn’t have my life. And although I’d never want to give that up, I still wished so many times that she hadn’t died. But in all those times I wished for her to be alive, never did I miss her like I did right now.
More than I had ever been, I was mad at the bandits who attacked my birth parents’ town. I was mad at the snowstorm that all but killed them on their way to White Rock. And I was mad at Luke. “What did he do?” I hadn’t really meant to ask, but my anger made it burst out.
“What did who do?” Isha asked.
“Luke. What did he do to get their family kicked out, so they couldn’t live here anymore? Because if he hadn’t done it, then they wouldn’t have moved to the town that got attacked by bandits. Then maybe my birth mom would still be living here, and they wouldn’t have die
d.” I didn’t even look at Isha. I just looked down at the geology book, getting angrier and angrier at Luke with each passing second.
Isha reached out and put a hand on my leg. “If she hadn’t moved away, then she wouldn’t have met your birth dad.” The calmness in her voice surprised me enough that I met her eyes. “And he’s the one who helped her find her confidence again.”
“Again?” I asked. “How’d she lose it?”
Isha stood up, plucked the box off the bed, and pushed it underneath where it belonged. Then she looked at me the way I remembered my grandma looking at me when I fell and scraped up my knees as a toddler. “It wasn’t Luke who got them kicked out of here. It was Anna. Now pick up your books. I think we’d better get you back to your friends.”
I wanted to ask Isha what Anna had done to get them kicked out, but I could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t about to tell me. I think maybe she wanted me to hear it from Luke.
Back at the infirmary, with Brock at my side and Aaren constantly checking on Cass, I couldn’t stop flipping through the book. For an entire section, each page had the name of a rock in large print at the top, showed a picture of the rock, and had paragraphs of information about it, with a chart telling about its properties at the bottom. Anna had written notes in the margins throughout the book. The notebook was set up the same way as the textbook, listing rocks with all their information. She had even drawn pictures in the places where a photograph would’ve been. I wished I had weeks to read everything. To know why this was so important to her.
But I didn’t have weeks. I didn’t even have days or hours.
I closed the two books and placed them in the bag I carried over my shoulder that also covered the bag of Ameiphus I’d been carrying since Mr. Williams pushed it into my hands. I was going to carry this book around everywhere, like my birth mom did.
I turned to Cass. “How are you feeling?”
“Better.”
I could tell. Her face wasn’t nearly as pale, and the circles under her eyes weren’t nearly as dark.
“She doesn’t have a fever,” Aaren said, “but we better give her Ameiphus to be safe.”
I pulled one of the pills out of the bag and handed it to Cass. She stared at it for a moment, then looked up. “Where’s my dad? Why isn’t he here yet?”
Cole reached out and squeezed her hand. “I’m sure he will be soon.”
“How far did Mr. Williams say this place was from Heaven’s Reach?” I asked no one in particular.
“Almost exactly halfway,” Aaren answered.
I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach. “I’m going to go up and talk to Luke, okay?”
Both Brock and Aaren looked at me and leaned forward, as though they were wondering if they should offer to go with me, then seemed to understand that I wanted to go by myself. I needed the long walk down the tunnel to get my thoughts unjumbled.
At the end of the tunnel, I climbed up the ladder, through the opening in the stone floor, and into the main building. High on the catwalk, I found Luke using a pair of ancient binoculars to look through one of the windows, in the direction of the road we’d traveled. I climbed the wooden rungs of the ladder.
“Hi,” he said, the binoculars still at his eyes.
I knew now that it wasn’t Luke’s fault that they had to leave the ruins. But for some reason, the anger hadn’t totally disappeared.
The view from this height was incredible. The hail had stopped, and raindrops shone as they pounded down on the metal of the buildings, working to push away the remnants of anger I felt.
When I was little, my dad made me some blocks with wood left over from the lumber mill. I would stack them up, building vast cities on our living room floor, similar to the cities I saw in our history books. When Brenna was a baby, she crawled through my blocks and knocked everything down. This city here was like that—the buildings were everywhere! None of them except the one we were in stood straight. Not a single one. And the closer I looked, the more I realized that the building skeletons outnumbered the buildings with sides. It kind of looked like artwork.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Luke said.
I nodded. It was beautiful.
“Have a seat.”
I sat on the catwalk and dangled my legs out the window, swinging them twenty feet above the ground, not even caring that my knees were getting soaked by the rain. This window overlooked the building that was lying on its side. What used to be the side of the building—but was now its top—was almost completely removed. Its high walls protected everything inside. Corrals, pens, coops, and stalls of every size ran along the outside walls, all filled with different kinds of animals. The parts of the roof that still remained kept the rain off them. The middle of the area was grassy, and I guessed that when it wasn’t stormy, many of the animals grazed there. And I could see Arabelle! She was in a mostly dry stall, munching on some hay.
“Whenever I needed to find Anna, I always checked there first.”
I jerked my head toward Luke. “Really?”
“She loved animals and loved being outside. She spent every second she could down there.”
I looked back at the animal area and watched the girl who had taken Arabelle’s reins from me earlier. She walked along to each of the pens, completely ignoring the rain while feeding the animals, giving them water, and petting them. I imagined my birth mom doing the same thing.
Luke searched through the binoculars for a minute or two longer, then put them down at his side and sat next to me. “We have to leave without the others,” he said. “That’s why you’re here, right?”
I hesitated for a minute, then said yes. I knew we would have to—but I hadn’t admitted it to myself until just then. It wasn’t even fully in my mind when I decided to come talk to Luke. But the truth was, if we waited any longer, there was no way we would get back in time to save White Rock. We had already used up almost nine days, and we were only halfway to Heaven’s Reach.
“I think Mr. Williams wouldn’t want us to wait—he’d want us to try to save White Rock.” Except when we were in Glacier, he didn’t even want us walking down the street without him. I actually didn’t know what he’d want us to do right now.
Luke shrugged. “He’d probably have a heart attack if he knew you were even thinking about going without him.” He paused a minute, then added, “But he would say that the people of White Rock don’t find things impossible! They invent a way to make it work.”
I snorted at both the way he summed up my town, and the voice he used to do it. But at the same time, he was right. We always found a way—it’s what we did.
“We should go,” I said. “I think it’s worth the risk.”
“We’ll go, then.” He squinted out over the city. “Storm’s going strong, but eventually it’ll die down. The muddy roads will slow our trip, but as far as chances go, I think this is it.”
“We’d have to leave Cass here,” I said. “She couldn’t make the trip in her condition.”
“I know.”
“And Cole will want to stay with her.”
“Probably so.” He peeked out at the storm-darkened sky. “You get ready. I’ll talk with Jack, and get him to keep someone on watch until Aaren’s dad and Mr. Williams make their way here. We’ll camp at the highest point we can find tonight, and I’ll get some dry wood from Jack so we can build a fire. That way when the two of them get here, Jack can send them on, telling them to watch for it.”
“Thanks,” I said. I stood up and went to the ladder, then stopped on the first rung down. “Is it nice to be back here?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Do you think you’ll ever move back?”
He looked at me for a long moment, then looked back out over the city. “No.”
While Brock and Aaren were in the main room, I told them that we needed to leave. We didn’t even have to ask Cole if he was going to stay with Cass. We all knew he would never leave her all alone in a strange place while she was
injured and knew no one.
“I know Isha’s not a doctor,” I said, “but she’ll take good care of Cass.”
Aaren nodded.
We packed up everything we had, which wasn’t much—only the stuff we happened to be carrying in our small bags when the storm hit. Then Isha, Thomas, and the muscled man walked into the infirmary and set four canvas saddlebags on the ground.
“There’s bedding and food in there,” Isha said, “along with some raincoats. And that one has a tent. It won’t be much against the rain, but it’ll be better than nothing. And they should fit with the ones you already have on your horses.”
“I …” I was so overwhelmed with gratitude, I didn’t know what to say. So instead, I reached into my bag and pulled out the smaller bag of fifty Ameiphus doses that my dad had set aside in case of emergency, and handed it to Isha. “As a thank-you.”
Isha looked down at the bag of Ameiphus and smiled, the wrinkles at the sides of her mouth making little exclamation points on her smile. Then she said, “I hope you have a safe trip. And that you find lots of answers.”
“I hope so, too,” I said.
My throat tightened at the thought of leaving Cole and Cass behind, even if it was just until both their dads arrived and they caught up to us.
“You’re sure you’ll be fine?” Aaren asked.
“Yes,” Cole said, “I think I can handle life without my little brother for a few hours.”
“Take Arabelle.” Cass motioned to her bandaged shoulder. “If I can’t ride her, I’d rather she be with you.”
Sky Jumpers Book 2: The Forbidden Flats Page 9
