Sky Jumpers Book 2

by Peggy Eddleman

  It also made me think about how we were enjoying the Bomb’s Breath being so close, when everyone back home was probably near hysteria with worry because it was getting too close.

  Alondra sat down next to me at the edge of the cliff, her feet dangling into the Bomb’s Breath right along with mine, and we watched Brock and Aaren surf and land on the ledge. The forest spread out below us, and the stream from the waterfall meandered off to my right for miles before it wound out of view shortly after it passed Downwind. I suddenly realized that I had been having so much fun that I hadn’t been watching the trail, and had no idea if I had missed them coming back.

  At the sound of the gong, Alondra jumped up. “That’s the dinner alert. I didn’t realize we were gone so long!” We all grabbed the boards, sails, and nulls, and Alondra shoved them back into the chest. “Luke and my dad should be there. Hurry!”

  Were we really Sky Surfing for that long? Once Alondra raced out of the woods, us trying to keep pace behind her, she slowed and walked with a straight back to the main grassy area. Everyone else in town filed in at about the same time, chatting with one another. The people in charge of food were placing platters on the tables in the front.

  I couldn’t believe how fully it had taken my mind off everything else. Now the two bags that I carried over my shoulder—the one with my birth mom’s books and the one with the Ameiphus that I needed to trade—felt extra heavy. Probably because I hadn’t been doing anything to solve either problem all afternoon.

  Luke was nowhere in sight. I stood on my tippy-toes to see if he was in the crowd, but I couldn’t spot his head of dark, thick hair.

  “My dad isn’t here, either,” Alondra said, “which means he’s probably in the middle of negotiations. I’m sure they’ll be back soon. Let’s get in line.”

  My shoulders slumped. Everything was taking so long!

  When we all had our plates, Alondra directed us up to the table at the top center of the grassy hill. “Should we be here?” I asked. It felt as if it was reserved for her dad.

  “At lunch, we eat with friends. For dinner, we eat as families.” I noticed for the first time that it did look different from lunchtime. Everyone sat chatting and eating together in families, mostly at the tables instead of sprawled on the grass. “This is where we sit—well, me and my dad, since that’s all who’s in our family. But since you’re our guests, this is your table today, too.”

  We all scooted in on the benches and set our plates down. I stuck my fork in the meat. I was trying to figure out what it might be, when I noticed Alondra staring at me.

  “Haven’t you had pork before?”

  “Pork?” I asked. “What kind of an animal is a pork?”

  She laughed. “It’s not a ‘pork,’ silly. It comes from a pig.”

  I’d seen a picture of a pig, but I had thought that they were extinct since the bombs.

  “You have pigs?” Aaren burst out. “Really?”

  Alondra laughed again. “You’re all so funny. They’re in the livestock farms.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes. I was trying not to let my anxiety show, but I could feel Alondra’s eyes on me. Eventually, she said, “I’m sure they’ll be back soon.” She looked at me, and I glanced over at her. “Worrying won’t change when they get here.”

  I shook out my hands. Maybe it wouldn’t change anything, but that didn’t stop me from worrying. Or being antsy.

  “I can tell that mining is important in your town,” Aaren said, clearly changing the subject to take my mind off my worries. “Does your dad work in the mines, too?”

  Maybe it was the mayor’s split job, the way my dad also supervised the mill back home.

  “He’s been the mayor for my whole life,” Alondra said, “but the mines are kind of his baby.” She motioned to all the people in town, seated around us. “They’re everyone’s baby, really. All the things that come from inside these mountains look like dusty, worthless rocks, but they’re not. They’re filled with treasure. Minerals and ores aren’t something that you can make and they’re not something you can grow. They only change as the Earth changes. The stuff in there has been there for millions of years—you just have to do the work to find it, and then it can be used for so many different things.”

  Hearing Alondra talk about mining made me think of rocks very differently. “Do you know much about the things you mine here?”

  She looked at me as if she was offended. “I do pay attention in mineral studies, of course.”

  “Mineral studies? You have an entire class on rocks?” Aaren glanced at us, then back to Alondra. “Well, if that’s the most important thing in your town, I guess that makes sense. We have a whole class on inventions.”

  I gasped. Alondra might know something that could help us solve the mystery my birth mom had been trying to figure out! “Do you know if any of the iron here is magnetic?”

  “Nothing is magnetic anymore. The bombs didn’t only affect iron—they affected all metals in that family.” Alondra pointed to the statue in the clearing. “We mixed every combination of metals that came from this mountain when we made that. None of them can hold a permanent magnetic charge.”

  My birth mom was right! I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I was thrilled for her that her theory was correct, but at the same time, I was sad for Luke that he had been searching so long for something that didn’t exist.

  But like he said, there had to be a metal somewhere that could hold a magnetic charge. My birth mom had told Luke that she thought she could find their lost city of metal after she told him that no iron anywhere could hold a charge, so she had to believe there was another possibility. And if she was right about iron, then maybe she was right about that, too.

  “Come with me,” Alondra said. “I want to show you something.”

  I was more than happy to go with her—sitting and waiting really just meant sitting and worrying, and I didn’t want to do that. We took our plates to the front table, then walked alongside Alondra up the road on the right-hand side of their pie-shaped town. Posts lined the street, and each one of them held a glass canister filled with an orange powder.

  Brock walked up to one of them and squinted at it. “What are these?”

  “Lights,” Alondra said. “That’s what we use seforium for. You need it for your Bomb’s Breath?”

  I told her about the earthquakes, the chemical reaction that was making the Bomb’s Breath lower, and that seforium would keep it from coming down to where our houses were, making us have to leave White Rock.

  “How scary!” Alondra blurted. “Is everyone going crazy? I think I’d go crazy!”

  Her response made me laugh. She spoke so differently when she was around only us. “You always seem so proper when you’re around other people. Are you supposed to act like that all the time?” I hoped she didn’t think my question was rude.

  “My dad would appreciate it if I did,” Alondra said. “But no. My dad thinks a proper appearance shows that we are strong without having to trade, so that people won’t manipulate us. He thinks it’s important to have the upper hand. It helps that we don’t need much.” She gestured to everything from the homes to the mountains to the fields, the livestock farms, and the waterfall. “We’d be fine without trading. What did you bring? Food? Supplies? Relics from before the bombs?”

  “Ameiphus,” Aaren said. Alondra gave him a quizzical look, so he continued. “It cures Shadel’s Sickness.”

  Alondra’s eyes grew big. “We don’t have that kind of medicine.” She walked in silence for a long time. Eventually, she said, “My mom died from Shadel’s.”

  “All my grandparents died from it, too,” I said, “before Aaren’s mom discovered the medicine.”

  “So people in White Rock don’t die from it anymore?”

  “No,” I said. “They don’t die from other infections, either.”

  Alondra walked in silence for a dozen paces, then shook her head, as though she was trying to shake off memor
ies of her mom’s death. “You seemed interested in minerals and ores, so I thought I’d show you some of the mines.”

  Alondra walked us past the town’s three rows of homes, every single one of them made out of stone. About three-fourths of the way up the road, we started seeing holes in the cliff face, of all different sizes, that were openings to mines for various minerals and metals. She stopped outside the fourth mine, picked up a hanging lantern filled with the same orange powder as the ball in the statue and the lanterns lining the streets, and shook it. The powder began to glow a brilliant orange.

  “The seforium really does that?” I asked.

  “It only glows when you mix it with another mineral,” Alondra said as she showed us inside the mine. “They separate over time, though, so every few hours you have to give it a shake. What do you use for light if you don’t have seforium?”

  “White phosphorus in clear jars, powered by electrolyte batteries,” Aaren said. “Or sometimes regular lanterns with fuel and a wick that you light. But these are so much brighter.”

  When our eyes adjusted to the orange light, Alondra said, “This is the gypsum mine.”

  We stood in a cavern with walls of gray stone. Alondra walked near the end of the mine, held up the lantern, and scraped a rock with her fingernail. It came off easily.

  “It looks like sugar that got moisture in the container and clumped together,” I said.

  Alondra smiled. “It dissolves in water, too. We put some in the soil in our cornfields, we use it to make the walls inside our houses, and we make toothpaste out of it.”

  “Really?” Aaren said. “You brush your teeth with rocks?”

  Alondra laughed and put her hand on Aaren’s shoulder. “You’re so funny.”

  “Was this always gypsum?” I asked. “Or was it something different before the bombs?”

  “Always gypsum.” Her eyes sparkled in the light of the lantern. “But the seforium’s new since the bombs. Do you want to see that mine?” She led us out of the gypsum mine and over some rocky, uneven ground littered with boulders as we rounded the rise of mountain at our right.

  She stepped into a cave whose opening wasn’t much taller than me. “The seam isn’t very wide, so this cave is a lot smaller than some of the others.”

  The cave was short enough that I could touch the top of it if I stood on my tiptoes. Alondra held the lantern as high as she could, and I reached out and ran my fingers over the orange stone at the back. It was jagged here, but smooth in a few places. My fingers got an orange powder on them from rubbing it.

  “This is what’ll save us,” I breathed out, my voice barely a whisper.

  I stared at the orange rock, nestled among other rocks, showing through in some places and mostly hidden in others. “My birth mom was trying to figure out what was the same between minerals and ores that were transformed by the bombs. She kept a book.” I pulled Anna’s notebook from my bag and showed Alondra one of the pages. “Every time she found a rock that had been changed, she recorded it in here. But she didn’t have seforium listed. Can you help us figure out what she would’ve written about it?”

  Alondra held the light closer and squinted at the page. “Yeah. I learned this in mineral studies two years ago.”

  We walked outside the cave and sat in a circle in the middle of the rocks and dirt. After finding my pencil in the bottom of my bag, I handed it and the notebook to Alondra. She opened to the first blank page; then, flipping between the blank page and the one before it, Alondra filled out the information in the same way for seforium.

  When she finished, she placed the notebook in the center of our little circle, and we all stared at it.

  “Nothing.” Aaren stood up and walked a few steps away. “That didn’t give us any new clues at all.”

  I rested my elbows on my knees and pushed my hands through my hair. There had to be something. Something we were missing.

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter what type of rock it is,” Brock said. “Or what kinds of crystals form while it’s being made. Or how fast the new mineral was created. Maybe none of the facts in the books even matter.”

  Alondra stood up. “But those kinds of things do matter! They’re what make a mineral or ore have the properties it has. Like on the periodic table of elements—”

  Alondra stopped talking when Aaren snatched the notebook from my hands. “The periodic chart! Do you remember how Mr. Hudson wrote in all the minerals and ores that were new since the bombs?”

  “He didn’t write them all on one side,” Brock said. “They were in random spots around the page.”

  I nodded and opened the textbook to the charts in the back, stopping at the periodic table of elements. It was a colorful chart that showed every element that existed before the bombs, each in its own box.

  “Maybe it wasn’t random.” Aaren paged through Anna’s notebook and stopped on a page with an odd-shaped rock that looked somewhat crystal-like. “I remember seeing the name of this one listed on Mr. Hudson’s periodic table right here.” He pointed to an empty spot, then scanned through the properties of the rock that Anna had written in. “Yes! It shares some of the same properties as the others in that column! Maybe Mr. Hudson put them in specific places on the chart because that’s where they’re supposed to go. That’s what the periodic chart does—it puts ones that are similar in the same row or column. See? All of the metals that can hold a magnetic charge are on the same row. Do you remember where seforium was on the chart?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, and thought back to that night when Mr. Hudson showed us what was happening to the Bomb’s Breath. He had pointed right at seforium on the chart. “In the blank row between the top chunk and the bottom chunk,” I said. “In the middle? Maybe?”

  “I think so,” Aaren said.

  All my birth mom’s notes started clicking into place in my mind. “Alondra, seforium was something before the bombs, right? Do you know what it used to be?”

  “Yes. We talked about it for a whole class period once. It was hassium.” She leaned over and pointed at it on the chart. “But hassium didn’t actually exist before the bombs, either. It was more …” Alondra shrugged. “A concept. Something they could only make in a lab, but it wasn’t very stable. The bombs made the hassium; then the side effects of the bombs changed it almost instantly into the seforium, which is stable.”

  Hassium was on the chart right above where Mr. Hudson had written in seforium. “But what does it mean that they’re by each other?”

  Aaren stood up and started pacing. “If seforium is right below hassium, then it’s because when hassium changed, it gave some of its properties to seforium.”

  Alondra stood up, too, biting her lip.

  Brock and I just looked at each other. I felt as if we were on the very edge of figuring things out, but couldn’t quite get there. My mind was running through everything I’d read, but as soon as I’d almost think of something, a giant stone wall went up in my mind that I couldn’t get around. I left the book sitting on my lap and leaned back on my hands, staring up at the darkening sky.

  This was useless. Even with Alondra’s help, we didn’t know enough about rocks to figure this out. I dropped my head back and closed my eyes.

  Then I jerked upright. “Which properties did hassium give it?”

  Aaren froze for a moment, then opened the notebook and compared it to the textbook on my lap. “A similar electron grouping.”

  If hassium gave some of its properties to the element right below it … I moved my finger to the top of that very same column. Then maybe iron transferred some of its properties to the element right below it, too. I moved my finger from the box that read “Iron,” sliding it down one. “When metals change, they move in the same direction,” I mumbled, repeating my birth mom’s theory.

  “Yes!” Aaren shouted. “That’s it!”

  I looked up at him. “Anna was talking about moving in the same direction on the periodic chart!”

  The four of us crowded
around the book while Aaren flipped to the page about iron. He jabbed his finger at the same list of properties. “Iron had a unique electron arrangement that made it magnetic. The one below it, ruthenium, had a slightly different arrangement, which is why it wasn’t magnetic.”

  “They’re in the same column,” Brock said. “So if hassium gave some of its properties to the element below it, then iron would’ve given some of its properties to the one below it as well.”

  I turned back to the periodic table of elements.

  “So if we wanted a metal with iron’s magnetic properties …,” Brock said.

  Alondra put her finger on the square with iron, then slid it down one. “Then you need to move down one to ruthenium.”

  Aaren grinned. “And if someone can find ruthenium—”

  “Then,” I said, “they’ll have found a metal that can hold a permanent magnetic charge!”

  “So where do we find ruthenium?” I asked Alondra.

  She shrugged. “I’ve seen it on the periodic chart, but we never talk about it in class. We only talk about the ones we have around here.”

  Aaren flipped to ruthenium in the book. “It looks like it hasn’t been found anywhere in the United States.”

  I dropped my head. I had been so excited to tell Luke what we’d figured out. Apparently, it was just another dead end that made us think we’d solved something but really wasn’t helpful at all. “It doesn’t matter. That’s not what we are here for.” As soon as I said it, all the anxiety that had gone away while we’d been working on finding a solution returned in full force.

  Brock squinted at the sun as the last bit of it dipped behind the mountain. “We’d better head back.”

  I pushed the textbook and notebook into my bag.

  It was getting more difficult to see in the darkness. As we hurried toward the grassy hill, a few people walked up the road, stopping at each seforium light. They’d pull a lever that tipped the cylinder up and down, and then the orange powder started glowing. Someone walked up to the sculpture in the clearing and gave the glass ball a spin, and it suddenly blazed the same orange hue, almost as it had during the day when the sun shone on it. The entire town glowed like sunset, making it feel warm. Like it was lit by firelight.