Sky Jumpers Book 2 (8 page)

When he neared Brock and me, he said in a low voice, “That might be bandits up ahead. Follow me.”

Luke led everyone down the small incline to the river, where the high bank would mostly hide us. Once we were all huddled next to the river, I whispered to Luke, “Are they going to attack?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “We don’t even know if they’re bandits. They’re far away, and we hid quickly. Plus, we weren’t traveling fast enough to kick up much dust. The best way to stay safe on the Forbidden Flats is to take cover if you see them in the distance. Don’t give them a reason to come your way, and you’ll be fine.”

We stayed still on our horses, our muscles tight with worry even after Luke’s words. I pulled my pendant from behind my shirt and clutched it so tight, it left indents in my hand from the tiny conglomerate rocks that formed its surface. When Ruben sidestepped and snorted, I let go of it and patted his neck, telling him everything was fine.

“That’s a nice necklace,” Luke said. “Where’d you get it?”

I looked down at the necklace I wore every second of every day. “I’ve always had it.”

Luke pursed his lips and stared at me for the length of a few breaths, as though he was trying to figure me out. He looked away for the smallest of moments, then turned right back to me, almost like my necklace was pulling him. “Did you find it? Or trade someone for it?”

I peeked down at it. “No. The chain is from my parents—it was made before the bombs. The pendant is from my birth mom. She died right after I was born. She told my parents that it was special to her, and that she wanted me to have it.”

Luke gazed at the Forbidden Flats again and the dust cloud disappearing far off into the distance. He didn’t say a word. Eventually, he looked at me and reached out, almost as if he was going to touch the pendant but changed his mind at the last minute and pulled his hand away. “I made that pendant for my sister on her wedding day.”

I grasped the pendant. I didn’t understand. It took a few minutes before the pieces clicked into place and I noticed all those familiar things about him again. His thick brown hair, his skin that looked tanned, his green eyes with little flecks of gold. Did he look familiar because he looked like me? “You’re … my birth mom’s brother?”

I looked around at the others, knowing they were close enough to hear Luke and me, hoping there would be answers on their faces. But their faces held confusion and fascination, wariness and wonder.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I was away when bandits hit our town—I didn’t find out until I arrived home weeks later. I never saw her again.” He paused for a moment. “She was pregnant. Her baby would be about your age.”

No.
No
. He couldn’t be my uncle. This was too weird. Things like this didn’t happen. A family member you never knew existed doesn’t just show up! Maybe Luke was lying. Although I had no idea why he’d lie about something like that.

“I know it isn’t the prettiest stone,” Luke said. “But when I was thirteen, my sister and I—”

“Anna?” I whispered.

Luke nodded slowly, as if he hadn’t truly believed I had gotten the necklace from her until he heard me say her name. “Anna and I were on a trip with our dad, camped by mountains. Anna had a thing for rocks—all rocks—and she found some conglomerate ones that she loved. She put a bunch in her pockets, even though I told her they were ugly. Later that day, we found a cave and went exploring. The cave forked and Anna worried we’d get lost, but I told her it was fine—I never got lost. Still, though, she put one of those stones at each fork in the cave to mark our way. My lantern wasn’t very bright, so I didn’t see a large drop-off and fell.”

I put my hand over my mouth to cover a gasp. “You broke one arm and cut the other,” I said, remembering the story that my mom had told me many times about my birth mom. “Anna helped you out of the pit, and if it weren’t for the rocks she left behind, you wouldn’t have
found your way out of the cave to get help before you lost too much blood.”

Luke absently brushed his fingers across a scar on his left arm. “The stones didn’t seem so ugly after that.”

Aaren’s dad searched my face as if he was trying to figure out what I was feeling. I didn’t know what he was going to find. I had no idea how I felt.

“You’re my uncle?” I whispered.

Everyone looked from Luke to me and back again, but I could only stare in confusion at Luke.

Aaren’s dad cleared his throat. “Your sister and her husband made it to White Rock after the bandit attack. It was a long trip in a terrible blizzard. He died as soon as he got your sister here, and she lived only long enough to give birth to Hope.” He paused for a minute. “They had lived in a town right near Arris.”

Luke looked at Aaren’s dad with sad eyes for a bit. “Hope looks like my sister.”

Mr. Grenwood nodded. “I remember Anna. She does.”

There was a long pause before Luke finally said to me, “My sister and I grew up in the ruins. We’ll pass by them along the way to Heaven’s Reach. I can show you.”

I knew almost nothing about my birth mom. My whole life, I’d had so many questions about her. And now I might
get to see where she grew up? Where she lived when she was my age?

The expression on Luke’s face was close to what I guessed mine looked like—dazed and unsure. And so different from the way I saw him a few minutes ago, before I knew that he was my uncle.

“Think it’s safe to move on?” Cole asked.

Luke shook his head, as though he’d forgotten why we were there, and looked back toward the horizon. “Yeah. I don’t think we were noticed.”

We all rode in silence for a long time, my thoughts a jumbled mess that I was trying to untangle. I took a breath and let some of the tangled thoughts out. “Brock, if you didn’t know anything at all about your dad before he died, would you want to be told?”

“Of course! Why wouldn’t I?” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Don’t you want to know about your birth mom?”

I shrugged. It surprised me that I didn’t know whether I did or not. I never even thought I’d have a chance to—I thought my entire birth family had been wiped out when their town was destroyed. “I’ve never known much about her, so I had to make up her story myself. What if I learn
more, then wish I hadn’t, that I could go back to believing my own story?”

“I guess that’s the risk you take.”

I hoped it would be a good risk. Now I just had to work up the courage to ask Luke.

The next morning, Luke rode his horse next to mine. “Are you excited to see Glacier?”

“I am. It’ll be interesting to see another town.”

“Glacier isn’t just ‘another town.’ ” Luke twisted in his saddle and fumbled around in one of his saddlebags. Then he pulled out something that looked similar to a tree branch or root, but made of stone. It was as long as his hand and as skinny as his thumb. It had a slightly bumpy texture with a golden color, and as he turned it, I could tell that it was mostly hollow.

“Is that”—Aaren squinted at the rock—“fulgurite?”

Luke looked at Aaren. “I’m impressed you knew that.”

“Aaren reads a lot,” I said.

“What’s fulgurite?” Brock asked.

Luke motioned to Aaren with a flourish, so Aaren explained. “When lightning strikes sand, it super-heats it, melts the sand, and forms a rock the shape of the path the lightning took.”

Luke bounced the rock in his hand once, then put it back in his saddlebag. “That’s right. But do you know what was infinitely stronger, hotter, bigger, and more powerful than lightning?”

Everything suddenly fell into place. “The green bombs.”

“Yep. There’s a lot of places with sand around here, which means there’s fulgurite buried all over this area. And not only small pieces like the ones lightning makes. Some are massive.”

Aaren cocked his head to the side. “And Glacier …?”

“Before the bombs,” Luke said, “the place where Glacier now sits was a mine where they extracted pure silica sand.” He said each of the last three words as if they had more meaning than the others.

I looked back and forth between Aaren, who stared at Luke with wide eyes and his mouth dropped open, and Luke, smiling at Aaren. “What?” I asked.

Aaren shook his head and fumbled over his words.
“That much heat, that much pressure—with silica sand, it would make glass!”

“And that,” Luke said, “is how the city of Glacier was formed.”

“The city walls are made of glass?” Brock asked.

“Most of them. A few months after the bombs first hit, when the weather still hadn’t calmed down, bad windstorms blew through here, uncovering the top and most of the outside of it. A group of people claimed it, stuck together, and undertook the monumental job of digging out the sand from the inside, then formed a town. It’s more impressive than the pyramids from way back when, if you ask me. Hopefully, one day you’ll get to spend some time there when your town isn’t in danger and speed isn’t an issue.”

As we rode toward Glacier, I kept sneaking glances at Luke, a million questions filling my mind. One of them was whether or not I could ask him a million questions, and I suddenly realized that I was ready to hear about my birth mom. I took a deep breath and then let out the question that had been burning in my mind for more years than I could remember. “What was Anna like?”

Luke smiled, as though he was glad that I asked, and I let a warmth settle over me. “Anna. She was … cautious.
But brave. Smart. And selfless. Extremely logical, but still easy to talk into things.”

He looked up at the sky for a minute, then laughed. “Our dad—your grandpa—was a fixer. He couldn’t see something broken and not find a way to fix it. He traveled a lot to scavenge things from towns with ruins. You know that since the bombs, metals can no longer hold a magnetic charge, and to make an electric motor, we need a metal that can, right?”

“Of course,” Aaren said. “We learned about that back in Sixes and Sevens.”

“Good. Anyway, our mom died from Shadel’s when I was five, so when our dad left to go on a scavenging trip, we usually stayed in town with a neighbor lady.” Luke squinted at me. “You’re what? About twelve?” I nodded. “This one time,” he continued, “when Anna was your age, and I was ten, our dad heard rumors of a clean zone. Kind of like the legendary Lost City of Gold, only it was our lost city of metal—a triangle of land that got missed by the overlapping circles of destruction made by three bombs. That happened almost nowhere, and he was convinced that if he went there, he could find some metals that were untouched by the side effects—that there’d be some that could hold a long-term magnetic charge. If he could find that, he could build an engine.
And he decided that it was high time Anna and I went on a trip with him.

“So we took three horses, and sped across the Forbidden Flats for nearly two weeks before we reached the clean zone.”

Aaren’s eyes grew wide. “It was really there?”

“Yep. A little section of land that was once called Carrington, North Dakota, including the county medical center, a dozen homes, and an office building. Completely abandoned. The office building seemed smack in the middle of the clean zone, so my dad thought it’d be our best chance of finding metals. Anna and I thought the medical center would be better—there were probably trays and equipment made of metal. It was at the very edge of the clean zone, though, so my dad didn’t agree. We waited until he was busy in the office building, and we went two streets down to the medical center.

“The inside had long been stripped of any medical supplies, but it still had a few metal carts and rolling beds. The carts were thin metal, though. Anna worried they wouldn’t hold a magnetic charge, so we kept looking. Finally, we found a room with a giant metal swinging arm attached to the ceiling. It was perfect. Anna thought we should run to tell our dad, but I could see how it attached to the ceiling, and convinced her we could get it ourselves.”

He paused a minute and laughed some more. “Anna didn’t think it would be safe, but I ignored her and started stacking things so I could climb up to reach it. I got to the top and used a rusty scalpel I’d found to turn the screws that held the arm to the ceiling. It was stuck, and when I pushed extra hard, the stack of boxes and crates and carts under me wobbled, and I lost my balance. I grabbed the metal arm and held on, and Anna dashed to the next room to get a rolling bed.

“We didn’t realize the building was within the range of the bomb effects, though, and before she got back, I heard metal creak, and the whole wall and ceiling collapsed! I got knocked unconscious when I fell to the ground.

“I came to not long after. I was lying on the rolling hospital bed, and Anna was running down the streets pushing me, yelling for my dad. I felt something hard at my side, and looked over to see the metal arm on the bed with me.”

We all laughed, but no one as much as me. I couldn’t believe how much Anna was like Aaren, and how much Luke was like me. My mom and dad weren’t daring—at least not in physical ways. Maybe my daring was something I inherited from my birth family. I had always wondered.

Luke wiped a tear from all the laughing, and I grinned.
He looked at me for a moment, then said, “You have her smile.”