Sky Jumpers Series, Book 1 (16 page)

I thought our plan to fake our deaths was brilliant, until I realized how difficult it would be after escaping. It was almost impossible to breathe shallowly when all I wanted to do was take great big heaving breaths.

I lay on my stomach in the snow and tried to pull enough air into my lungs without making my back rise, and without my breath showing up in the cold morning air. And without feeling like I was going to pass out.

The three men discussed whether we were actually dead, and if they should try to somehow drag us to their side of the Bomb’s Breath to see. None of them were willing to get anywhere near it, though.

About the time my cheek, my arms, and the fronts of my legs became numb from the cold, the men decided
that we must be dead, and that they should go back to the community center and tell Mickelson what happened. I heard the hooves of the horse and the crunching of at least one pair of boots in the snow, but I wasn’t sure if I heard the second.

“Wake up, wake up,” Brenna said in a singsong voice. “The bad guys are gone.”

I opened my eyes and said a quick “Shh!” before I dared move.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We did it! We did it! We escaped!”

The bandits weren’t in sight, though the cliff we normally jumped off blocked my view of everything downhill. I let out a huge breath of relief. They were gone!

“Come here, Brenna,” Brock said. Brenna clambered onto his back, and he took a few steps. I couldn’t believe how well the snowshoes worked.

I strapped on my snowshoes as quickly as possible. We walked up the mountain to where we usually sky jumped off the higher cliff, then we kept walking to the part of the mountain no one had stepped foot on before. It felt strange. It could have been the adrenaline from escaping the bandits, but it felt kind of exciting, too. We were doing something no one else had done.

I’d never used snowshoes before. They were wider and much longer than my shoes, but they actually kept me up on top of the snow. I had to walk like I’d spent too much
time riding Arabelle, though, to keep each snowshoe from hitting my leg when I took a step.

We walked half a mile until we reached an area where lots of trees grew close together. The firs were much taller than they looked from the valley—the lowest branches were high enough that we could walk under most of them, and they kept almost all the snow off the ground.

“Do you wanna get down?” Brock asked Brenna.

“Yep,” she said as she slipped to the ground. “I’ll keep up. Because I’m really fast.”

“You’re probably faster than me,” Brock said as we tied our snowshoes to our backs and walked under the tree canopy. Brenna ran ahead of us to prove him right.

“You’re really good with her,” Aaren said. “Thanks.”

Brock just looked ahead. “She reminds me of my sister. They’re the same age.”

I was shocked to hear that he had a sister. The only other person I knew with the last name of Sances was Brock’s grandpa. “Does she go to school?” I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway, hoping Brock would tell us more.

He looked sad and shook his head no.

Brock didn’t start school until he was twelve, so maybe his sister didn’t go to school for the same reasons. Carina was probably right about his dad. “Brock,” I said, hoping
my question wouldn’t make him mad, “why don’t you ever talk about your family? If your dad is a little crazy, that’s okay.”

Brock just looked at me for a few moments, like he was trying to decide whether to tell me. Then he shook his head and looked forward. “He’s not. But that doesn’t mean I want to talk about him.” He pushed his hands into his coat pockets, his shoulders sagging again, and walked faster to catch up with Brenna. It made me wish I hadn’t asked.

After a mile, the trees thinned and became shorter. Instead of almost all the ground being free of snow like it was through the trees, it was three feet deep everywhere. Because Brenna didn’t have her own snowshoes, she’d no longer be able to walk. We figured it was a good place to stop for breakfast.

I opened the bag my mom had given me and laughed—she’d packed three of everything. I wondered if she had guessed the third person would be Brenna or Brock. The bag was filled with rolls, biscuits, dried meat, carrots, apples, raisins, and, wrapped in a dishcloth, three of my favorites—cherry pastries. We started with the pastries. That way they wouldn’t get too squished on our journey. Each of us broke off a part of ours for Brenna. We all had our water skins, but since we still had so far to walk, we ate
snow instead of drinking the water. Once our stomachs were full and our snowshoes were on our feet, we stared at the mountain in front of us.

“How far do you think it is to the Shovel?” Brock asked.

From where we stood, we had a clear view, and it looked a lot bigger than our usual view of it from the valley.

Aaren shrugged. “Four hours? Five, maybe?”

I scoffed. “I bet we make it in two. Look how close it is! It won’t take us that long.”

“It’s not as close as you’d think,” Aaren said. “Brenna, come hop on my back.”

“We can carry her,” I said.

“I can do it.” He winced as she climbed up, but he tried to hide the pain. After adjusting Brenna on his back, he started walking. Every step looked painful.

“I’ll take her,” I said, but he held on to her just a little tighter. “Aaren—your stomach hasn’t healed enough. I can take her.”

“We all have the same goal here, right?” Brock said. “It doesn’t matter who carries her, as long as we get there safely.”

Aaren heaved a defeated sigh, then let her slide off his back. “Thanks.”

We almost never stopped to rest as we headed toward the top of the mountain. All it took for any of us to get over
feeling tired was a thought of my dad, or Mr. Hudson, or all the people who could get Shadel’s soon.

I made sure to keep the Shovel in sight whenever trees or cliffs didn’t block my way, but as we walked, the day grew darker instead of lighter. Dense storm clouds crowded the sky and blocked out the sun, making it even colder. The mountain rose steeper and steeper, with boulders or cliffs filling almost every space. Most were so big, we had to go around them. I wondered how crazy our footprints in the snow would look from above.

I didn’t want Aaren to think it was hard to carry Brenna, so I kept her on my back for far too long. After an hour, every step was difficult, and my arm muscles were numb from holding her legs. I stopped to catch my breath, and Brock said, “Let me take her.”

Brenna scooted around to my side, and I grabbed under her arms to pass her to Brock. I misjudged how exhausted my muscles were, and as Brenna’s legs let go of my waist, I dropped her. We all screamed as she fell into the snow up to her ears; then she beat the snow away from her face.

“Are you hurt?” Aaren asked. “Can you stand up?”

“I
am
standing up!” Brenna jumped a little to show us.

I had never seen snow so deep before. We couldn’t kneel to pull Brenna out or we’d sink, too. It took all three of us to pull her up. Once we finally got her onto Brock’s
back, I followed behind, brushing snow off Brenna and apologizing a million times.

It took forever to reach the Shovel—probably the four or five hours that Aaren had guessed it would take. Once we neared it, we discovered that the Shovel wasn’t all the way at the top—it only looked that way from the valley. As snowflakes began to fall, Aaren pointed. “We should stop there for lunch before the weather gets worse.”

Brock nearly collapsed as he set Brenna down. I’d been so exhausted when I handed her over to him, I had left him carrying her much longer than I should have. As soon as I opened the food bag, I handed Brock his portion first. He probably needed it the most after that. We ate biscuits, dried meat, and apples, while keeping an eye on the thick clouds overhead. They made me nervous. At least the cliff face of the Shovel kept most of the wind and snow off us.

Aaren looked around the edge of the Shovel toward the top of the mountain, then at the sky. “We need to go.
Now
.”

We packed what was left of our lunch and slung our bags over our shoulders. We’d all been caught in enough snowstorms to know we needed to move. I adjusted Brenna’s hood to make sure it covered her ears and pulled her coat sleeves over her gloves, then did the same for mine. Our coats were warm—hopefully warm enough. I just wished they covered our legs, too.

I crouched down so Brenna could climb on my back.

“Ready?” Aaren asked.

I hiked Brenna a little higher and got a good hold of her legs. “Yep.” We all took a deep breath and stepped into the wind as it blew the snow toward us in sheets. The snow felt like hundreds of needles stabbing my skin. Brenna nuzzled her face into the back of my neck. The wind blew against me so hard, making each step seem like I was staying in the same place. I leaned into the snow and pushed myself even more.

It took less than thirty minutes after we left the Shovel to reach the top of the mountain, even though it felt farther than the entire distance we’d come. I was frozen and everything hurt, but a flutter of excitement still ran through me as I thought about looking over the crest and seeing Browning, especially from so high up. To see what was outside the valley I’d spent almost my entire life in.

The wind drowned out all sounds except the beating of my heart in my ears. I stepped onto the crest to look past the miles of mountain below me, to where I knew the plains must begin. To where I knew Browning’s houses were close together, inside tall dirt walls in the shape of a square. As I looked out, I saw no color, no forms, and certainly not distance. The only thing in sight was the obscuring white of the worst blizzard I had ever seen.

The landscape was much rougher than on our side of the mountain, which made the blinding blizzard a huge problem. There were so many times we almost walked into the sheer face of a cliff, a section of forest that was impassable, or a drop-off too steep to climb down, then had to backtrack to find a different path. I felt guilty every time I led us in a direction that made us turn around. We had far enough to go without zigzagging our way down the mountain.

And then there was the issue of the Bomb’s Breath. I had made a mental note of how long it had taken us to travel from the Bomb’s Breath on White Rock’s side of the mountain to the top. I had planned to go that same distance down the outside of the mountain before starting to
feel around for the Bomb’s Breath. With all our backtracking, though, I had no idea how far we were from it. I kept trying to look behind us toward the top of the mountain, to figure out how far we’d come, but I couldn’t see more than a yard’s distance through the blizzard. And my feet felt so heavy, especially in the snowshoes, that I wasn’t sure I’d even notice if I stepped right into the Bomb’s Breath. And if we couldn’t tell when we walked into it, we could die.

I’d never been so cold in all my life. It had been forever since I last had feeling in my fingers or toes, or even my arms and legs. I constantly worried I’d drop Brenna.

I stumbled to a stop when Brock grabbed my shoulder. “I’ll take her for a bit.”

I nodded and numbly handed Brenna to him. The helplessness in Aaren’s eyes as he looked at us was too much. “Don’t,” I said. “We’ve got her.”

Brock studied me for a moment. “We should rest.”

“I agree,” Aaren said.

Nothing sounded better than curling up in the soft snow and sleeping until I was warm again. I pushed my schoolbag behind me now that Brenna wasn’t on my back and started walking before the idea of a rest settled in my mind. “We can’t,” I said, my lips feeling almost too numb to talk. “Only thing keeping our muscles warm is using them. We stop, our muscles freeze and we die.”

No one questioned me—they just followed.

We kept plodding ahead. My muscles were probably sore, so I was grateful my legs were numb. At least I had Brenna on my back again—it was nice to have her warmth and her chatter.

I wished I had a free hand to rub the stone on my necklace. My birth parents came to White Rock during a snowstorm like this when my mom was pregnant with me. Their town had been attacked by bandits, and almost no one escaped. My birth dad knew the storm and the trip could kill them, but he wanted to get me to safety. The snow was deep, but the wind hadn’t blown many drifts yet, so they were able to make it through the tunnel. Their trip had been so hard that as soon as my dad got my mom to White Rock, he died. My mom went into labor soon after that and died moments after giving birth to me. Everyone was shocked that my birth parents had made it to White Rock during such a terrible storm. But they did. And their trip was a lot longer than our trip to Browning. If they could do it, I could, too.