Sky Jumpers Book 2 (19 page)

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.

There was no sign of Luke or the mayor, which made me even more antsy, and made me realize that we’d spent
hours
here. Hours during daylight, when we weren’t on the road, trying to get back in time. Brock plopped down on one of the benches attached to the tables, and the rest of us joined him. Judging by everyone’s faces, the excitement at figuring out Anna’s theories had worn off. We were all thinking about the dangers back home.

I hoped that Luke had gotten a lot of opportunities to talk with the mayor on their trip back to Heaven’s Reach, and that he had already talked him into trading us the seforium. They’d been gone a long time—maybe
I wouldn’t end up having to negotiate at all. Maybe they’d have it all worked out, and we’d be ready to leave as soon as they got here.

I stood up when I saw movement by the clearing out of the corner of my eye. It was Luke and another man. Based on the man’s coppery-colored hair and the way he walked tall with his shoulders back and his hands clasped behind him, I knew he must be the mayor. But Luke stopped just at the edge of the woods. The mayor kept walking through the clearing, glanced up at us, then turned and went into the main building.

My stomach dropped. Something was wrong.

I ran down the hill and through the clearing. “Luke,” I called out.

His shoulders were stiff, his hands were clenched into fists at his sides, and he glared toward the weeds at his feet. I stepped right in front of him. He finally looked up.

“The mayor is furious. He asked me to leave.”

I stared at him in shock. “What? Why? What happened?”

“During the entire trip back,” Luke said, “I talked to him about trading the Ameiphus for seforium and iron. And he’s such a stubborn—” He ground his teeth. “He wouldn’t say yes. He just kept going on about the iron
being dangerous and difficult to mine. I tried everything. When nothing else worked, I pointed out that he could’ve saved his wife from dying of Shadel’s Sickness if he’d had Ameiphus, and was he really not going to save the rest of his town from that same fate? Somehow, he took that as an attack on his character, and told me he doesn’t want me in his town.”

“And iron?”
Everything started to spin and I couldn’t get enough air. My brain wouldn’t connect any thoughts together, except the only words I managed to hear him say. “You asked the mayor to trade the Ameiphus for seforium
and
iron?”

The anger left his face, and his eyes changed to pleading. “The iron he has is really important. This whole town is one of the farthest places from where any green bombs hit, so it may be unaffected by the bombs. But not only that, this iron was
inside a mountain
. You can’t get more protected than that. This could be our lost city of metal.”

“It’s
not
the lost city of metal. Anna was right—there’s no iron anywhere that’ll work.”

Luke’s eyes flashed to mine. I saw the pain on his face. But I was so angry that he had cared about iron more than he cared about saving my town, and so afraid that we might not get seforium without his help, I didn’t care. “We’re here because the Bomb’s Breath is coming down
in White Rock, and we need to stop it. Now we might not be able to at all.” My voice came out fierce and trembling.

“Hope, it’s not possible to stop it. We left White Rock thirteen days ago. Even if we hadn’t run into a storm and no one got injured, there would be no way to make it back in eight days. The Bomb’s Breath will lower to the height where the earth is cracked, and it will stay there. Your town will have to leave White Rock and live somewhere else. Nothing we do here will change that. Not even if you did get the mayor to give you the seforium and a trailer to haul it home in. I’m sorry. But with the iron, we could’ve changed the world.”

I couldn’t hear this. Sadness and fear and hopelessness and anger filled me so full I thought I might burst. This couldn’t be the end. We couldn’t have failed.

He gazed into the woods for several long moments, then looked back at me. “Maybe we should’ve turned around long ago. Especially since I knew I’d let you down in the end.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to miss you.”

His focus shifted away to Brock, Aaren, and Alondra, then to me again. “People from your town will come for you. The mayor’s a piece of work, but he’ll let you stay here and look out for you until they arrive.”

Then he turned and walked away.

My feet were frozen to the ground. I couldn’t even make them move to run after him. He just disappeared through the trees.

Brock, Aaren, and Alondra came up behind me, but I still had my eyes on the woods.

“Are you okay?” Aaren asked.

Soon, the Bomb’s Breath would be low enough to touch my house. We were five hundred miles away, missing almost all of the people we came with, including the person who was probably my only blood relative on Earth, we had no trailer, not even the smallest pebble of seforium, and the only one who could give it to us was furious. I was very much not okay.

I wondered at what point my dad would realize that we’d failed, and that we weren’t going to make it back in time. Would my parents keep watching for us every day? Would they worry that something happened and I wouldn’t make it back at all? I could feel the ticking down of time like a heartbeat.

I wished there was some way to talk to them. I clutched my necklace in my fist. Suddenly, I missed them so much my gut hurt.

And strangely, I wished I could talk to Luke. I wanted to ask why. I wanted to ask how he could leave me when we barely found each other.

He told me that I was persistent. That I didn’t give up when everyone else would have, and that even if I didn’t have the tools I needed, I had something in me that’d work anyway. But how did all that matter when what I needed to do wasn’t even possible?

So many thoughts spun circles in my mind, I couldn’t focus. As if I reached out and picked one of them at random, I blurted, “It’s too late.”

Brock and Aaren looked at each other, like maybe I was broken.

“Luke says it’s impossible to make it back in time,” I said. “We can’t save White Rock.”

“So it’s over?” Aaren asked. “We lost?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we did.”