Sky Jumpers Book 2 (9 page)

I looked away so he wouldn’t see that my eyes watered. I had my birth mom’s smile! I smiled again, to see how it felt now that I knew.

Everyone chatted as we rode, and the wind picked up. It blew in our faces for hours and hours and I didn’t think it would ever stop. The wind finally died down about the time we dismounted for the day. Cole put together sandwiches while everyone watered the horses, set up their pen, and built a fire. So much dirt had hit us, I used the time before dinner to go to the horse pen and brush Ruben’s coat.

When I finished, I pushed my hair off my forehead and wondered how it was possible for so much dirt to be in one place! I tried to run my fingers through my hair, but I could barely wiggle them in. And my scalp felt caked in dust. So were my skin and my clothes. And my shoes. And my bag. The wind had brought cooler weather, but that didn’t stop most of us from walking right out into the river to wash off.

We huddled around the campfire, trying to dry off and warm up, before burrowing into our bedrolls. The third night in a row with no tents. It would’ve been nicer to have them, but everyone was tired. We all just scrunched in closer to the fire.

Aaren whispered to Brock and me, “My dad talked nonstop about Glacier City today.”

“What’s it like?” Brock asked.

Aaren shrugged. “He’s never been there. It’s right in the middle of the Forbidden Flats, and it’s the only trading town in any direction for at least one hundred miles, so they have a lot more stuff than feed for the horses.”

While everyone around us slept, we stayed awake, whispering about Glacier. Eventually, Brock and Aaren fell asleep, too, but I couldn’t. Instead, I stared at the stars, trying to imagine how high up the Bomb’s Breath was. I’d imagined the same thing inside White Rock plenty of times, but there, the Bomb’s Breath touched the mountains all the way around in a circle. It was baffling to think that here, it went on and on, spreading across the immense sky in every direction.

But at least out here, it was staying the right height in the sky.

I held my necklace and brushed my finger and thumb down the smooth chain, over and over as I listened to the murmur of the river and the chirping of crickets, and thought about home and how a single necklace helped me find out I had an uncle.

Luke steered his horse toward me as we rode. “Notice anything yet?”

I squinted and in the distance, I saw something shining—almost like heat waves coming off hot sand. The more I looked at it, the more I could tell that it had distinct edges, even though we were still too far away to see it well.

“Is that it?” Brock asked.

“Yes. Keep watching.”

Over the next hour, the city seemed to grow bigger and bigger the closer we got to it. The ground gradually sloped down as we rode, and eventually we neared it.

After seeing it as only ripples on the horizon, I never imagined it would be this big. The gate was huge—probably
twenty feet wide and twenty feet tall. It didn’t look as if they broke the glass to make room for the gate. It looked like there wasn’t any glass where it was to begin with. The glass started at the bottom edges of each side of the gate, and rose higher and higher as it circled around on both sides. In the parts closest to the gate where the glass wasn’t very high, they built a wooden wall so that the entire city had at least a twenty-foot-high border.

When Luke said the walls were made of glass, I had thought of the kind of glass we had in windows in White Rock—mostly smooth, thin, flat, and rectangular. This was nothing like that at all. The glass was thick and anything but flat. It curved around and bent in ripples and bulges. In some places, it looked as though it might only be a foot thick, but in others, it was three or four feet thick. I could see that there were things inside the city—like houses and people—but everything was so distorted through the glass, it was impossible to tell what they were.

“This place doesn’t look too friendly,” Aaren’s dad said.

I followed his gaze to the armed guards that patrolled the top of the city wall.

“Of course it doesn’t,” Luke said. “People come from all around to set up shops or to make trades. Between the goods that are held here until they’re traded, and the fact
that there’s no one else to rob anywhere nearby, things are a little more dangerous for them. They protect themselves well.”

“The walls are so tall,” I said. “This whole place really used to be filled with sand?”

Luke nodded. “People can do some pretty amazing things when they work together.”

We stopped our horses right before we reached the gate. Two guards stood at the top of the tall wall on either side. “State your business,” one called down.

Mr. Williams slid off the trailer’s bench and landed on the ground, grabbed the reins from the two horses, and walked them forward. “We’re here from White Rock. We’re stopping to buy feed for our horses on our way to Heaven’s Reach.”

The guard motioned to someone behind the gate, and after a minute, one side of the gate opened, and two more guards stood just inside it. The closest one, a burly man with short hair, spoke. “We have a strict ‘no guns’ policy.” He motioned to the guard standing next to him, who held a big wooden box. “We’ll return them when you leave. Stay on the main roads, don’t start any fights, and don’t cause trouble, or you’ll be banned.”

“We won’t,” Mr. Williams said to the man, then turned
to our group. “You heard him—give him your gun as you enter.” He took off his gun and holster, placed them into the box, then tipped his head to the guard and rode in.

Brock and I steered Ruben as close to the glass wall as possible while we rode in. The surface in places was as smooth as the glass back home, but in other places, it was grainy—as if sand was stuck in it. On one whole section to our right, there appeared to be more sand than glass. I wanted to jump off my horse and run forward to touch it.

Brock gasped next to me, then pointed at a thick part of the wall that had something in it. “Look!”

It took a minute to figure out what I was seeing. Something big and dark was encased in the glass itself, similar to a stick in the river getting frozen in the ice during winter. “It’s the scoop part of one of those tractors they had before the bombs!”

“And over there—a metal wheel!” Aaren said, pointing to another part of the glass wall. “Like the ones cars used to have.”

“Stay with us,” Mr. Williams called back, and we galloped to catch up with the group.

From what I could tell, Glacier City was more or less circle-shaped. The glass was shortest in the front part where we came in, and highest in the back. It was probably thirty feet high there, and curved inward, so it made a
bit of a roof over the back part. A tall wooden wall divided the front half of the city from the back half. There was a road to our left, bordered with buildings. A man with a navy vest stood in the middle of the road, directing us to continue on the road in front of us.

We rode ahead to catch up with Luke, our horses’ hooves clomping on the packed sand.

“What’s down there?” Brock asked as he pointed toward the road the guard blocked.

“Work areas for their town,” Luke said. “That entire road is off-limits to visitors. These shops,” he said as he gestured to tables under wooden roofs on either side of the road we traveled on, “are run by people who come here to make trades.” He jerked his head toward a shopkeeper sitting next to a table covered with a bluish cloth. The man’s yellow teeth showed between his wiry mustache and beard as he called out to us about some jewelry he had for sale. “None of these people live here, except maybe in the hotel. But when the road turns left up there, you’ll see the shops run by the people of Glacier. That’s where the feed store is.”

I tried to see everything, but there was so much, and the voices from the shopkeepers all mixed together. There were relics from before the bombs, metal bent into strange shapes, clothing, different-colored liquids that came in
little jars, and trinkets that were intricate enough they must’ve been from before the bombs. I wished I wasn’t on a horse so I could look more closely.

We rounded the corner onto a long, wide road lined with shops. Real shops. There were some that were the same as the merchant shops we had in White Rock, and some I’d never seen before. A metal shop, a tailor, one where they sold food supplies, a doctor’s clinic, and the hotel. I’d heard that word before, but if Luke hadn’t said it, I probably wouldn’t have remembered what it meant. And they had a restaurant! I knew it was a place where strangers went to eat meals together, but I hadn’t ever seen one.

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.