Sky Jumpers Book 2 (12 page)

Luke banged and banged on the door as the hail pinged off the metal of the buildings and splashed in the water streaming across the ground. I left Cass’s side so I could gather the reins for as many horses as possible. With the storm this bad and the alley so narrow, I was afraid they’d run off. I turned to reach for Ruben’s reins, and noticed that a man stood in an open window twenty feet up, in the building we huddled next to, and I flinched.

Then I noticed that a girl a couple of years older than me stood in the window of another building, across the alley, not quite as high up as the first. She held a bow with an arrow nocked. A half dozen archers stood at all different heights in the buildings surrounding me.

I couldn’t get any words to come out. I just pointed, and everyone spun around to look.

A man about my dad’s age, who stood on a chunk of broken concrete a few feet off the ground, jumped down, water spraying as he landed. The man walked up to Luke and slapped him on the shoulder twice. “Good to see you, old friend. It’s been a long time.”

“Good to see you, too, Jack. I wasn’t sure you heard me knock.”

“I think everyone from here to Glacier heard you knock.”

Luke smiled. “You got room for a bunch of soaked-to-the-bone travelers, including one injured?”

The man motioned to a small group of people standing in the alley behind him. I hadn’t heard them coming, or seen where they came from. A guy with big muscles broke away from the group and walked over to us.

He bent down to pick up Cass, and Cole stopped him. “I’ll carry her.”

The man looked at Cole for a moment, his eyebrow raised. Then, in a deep voice, he said, “I’ve got her.”

Cole tried to protest, but the man was huge and Cole looked exhausted, so he just stayed next to Cass, pressing the shirt into her wound as they walked toward the building.

The girl with the bow and arrow who had been standing on a ledge had found her way back down, the hail that had gathered on her hat bouncing to the ground with each step. She took the horse reins from my hand. “I’ll get your horses out of the storm and fed. You go with your friends.”

As much as I hated leaving the horses before I knew they were cared for, I hated leaving everyone else even more. Jack knocked on the metal, and someone from the inside slid it to the right, making an opening. We all went into the building, Brock and Aaren at my side. The sound of the hail immediately quieted, and so did my hammering heart. A boy a couple of years older than me, who I had seen up on a ledge, walked in behind me.

There were no inside walls in this building—only a large open space. I could tell where each of the upper floors used to be, but there wasn’t much left of them except a few pieces sticking out from the walls here and there. The floor under our feet looked as though it was made of large thin rocks about three feet square and impossibly flat, and all exactly the same shape and size, the sides and corners of each square fitting perfectly with the sides and corners of the next one, making the floor completely smooth. There were no townspeople, no beds, no places to cook meals—nothing.

I turned to the boy behind us. “Where is everyone?”

He had a look of disbelief on his face. “Did you think we’d live right here, where anyone could walk in and find us?”

“I—” I began, but then realized that my answer was yes. Where would they live if not here?

Luke started walking across the room, and I grabbed his arm. “What about Mr. Williams and Aaren’s dad?”

He glanced back at the door.

“They’ll never know where we are or how to find their way in here,” Aaren said, panic filling his voice.

Luke motioned toward a catwalk that bordered the second row of windows up, with a ladder leading to it. “You can see everything from there. You go with the others—I’ll stay and watch for them. Maybe they rode back to where we left the trailer, so they could get more supplies.”

I wasn’t ready to be around Luke since he said his family was kicked out of here, so I was glad for his suggestion.

“Take them to the infirmary,” Jack said to the man carrying Cass. “I’ll stay with Luke.”

The boy eyed us like he didn’t trust us and wasn’t too happy that we were inside one of their buildings. Eventually, though, he flipped his light brown hair out of his eyes and said, “I’m Thomas. This way.”

Thomas directed us to a space near the left wall. He pushed a dusty rug to the side with his foot, then bent
down and found a place on the flat stone that had a chunk missing. When he lifted up the thin stone, it exposed a three-foot-wide square hole below it. The hole went down about eight feet, with a ladder against one of the walls.

The muscled man climbed down, and Cole and another man lowered Cass to him. She groaned at all the jostling. Then the rest of us climbed down, too. When we got to the bottom, Thomas led us down a narrow tunnel with dirt walls, a dirt floor, and a dirt ceiling. I kept an eye on the support beams that were set in the walls every few feet.

Thomas glanced up, too. “Don’t worry. We haven’t had a cave-in for a long time. A month or two, at least.” My eyes darted to Thomas’s, and he smirked, as if he was happy he alarmed me. Maybe coming here was a mistake.

At Cass’s groan, the man carrying her said, “It’s safe.”

The tunnel was cool and our clothes were soaked, and none of us could stop shivering. Small lanterns attached to support beams lit the way enough for us to see where the walls were, but made it almost impossible to tell how far we’d been walking.

Eventually, we came to a spot where we had to turn left or right. Instead of turning, though, Thomas scooted past everyone and put his hands on the dirt wall right in front of us, pushing it sideways. It slid as easily as the metal wall
had above. “The door’s not dirt,” Thomas said, as though he was angry he had to give up their secrets. “It just looks like it, so if anyone finds a way into the tunnels, they won’t find us.”

We walked through the opening and into an area bigger than the first building we’d gone into, but not as tall. This one was filled with people. Some sat on chairs sewing, some worked with wood and saws and hammers, some chopped food at big tables, and a few little kids raced through, playing chase.

Then I noticed the walls and floor—they were all made of concrete. I’d seen concrete floors plenty of times, but never walls.

“What is this place?” Aaren asked.

Thomas brushed the hair out of his eyes and frowned at us, as if he was realizing that we weren’t going to disappear and that it might be easier to answer our questions. “It was the foundation of one of the biggest buildings here. The building fell over not long after the bombs, leaving this giant hole. A couple of years later, that building,” Thomas said as he pointed up, “fell on top of it, making the ceiling. Back then, the people living here dug tunnels to it, filled in some holes, and made chimneys for the cookstoves and fireplaces, then they all moved in. Before I was born, they expanded to a couple of other smaller
buildings with good foundations, and moved the sleeping quarters there.”

Cole, Cass, and the men were halfway across the open area, heading toward a room that was apparently the infirmary. We caught up and walked inside with them, and the muscled man laid Cass on her side on a padded table. Then he handed a blanket to Cole, who laid it over Cass’s soaking-wet body.

Thomas said, “I’ll go get Isha,” then left the room, while the muscled man put blankets over our shoulders.

“Is Isha the doctor?” Brock asked.

The man shook his head. “There is no doctor. Isha has some herbs, though. Might keep the infection out until the storm clears and you can get her to a doctor.”

All the color left Cole’s face. “No doctor?” He turned to Aaren. “Help her, Aaren. You have to.” His voice was pleading, begging.

Aaren hesitated. “I—I don’t know if I can. Her wound is so deep.”

“We don’t know how long it’ll be until we can leave,” Cole said, his voice desperate. “Or where to find another doctor. What if she can’t wait that long?”

Aaren focused on the corner of the table, as though he wasn’t seeing anything.

“You can do this,” I said. Then I fumbled through the
bag that hung over one of his shoulders, and pulled out his med kit. It didn’t have as much stuff in it as the bag he’d carried in the trailer, but hopefully it’d be enough.

Aaren didn’t move. Normally, everything about him changed when he was helping someone. He became calm, focused, and confident. But not this time.

I set the kit next to him. “Aaren,” I said, “this is just like helping your mom.”

“I—I never really thought how it would be to do it by myself.”

“You’re not by yourself,” I said. “You’ve got us, and you know what to do. You know it so well, you’ve sleep-talked your way through surgeries almost every night on this trip.”

He blinked a few times, then looked down at his kit. “I need to clean the wound, then stitch it closed.” He lifted off the wadded shirt, and Cass sucked in a sharp breath. Aaren pulled a bottle of disinfectant out of his kit and poured some into her wound, rinsing it carefully before he cleaned the skin around it with gauze. As he worked, his movements became more Aaren-like. The same as when I’d seen him help his mom.

Aaren laid out his tools to stitch the wound closed as Thomas came back into the room with the person I assumed was Isha—a short woman with bright eyes and
graying hair and hands that kept fluttering, as if she didn’t know whether she should help Aaren or give him space. Thomas put a hand up, letting the woman know to wait.

Cole held Cass’s hand while Aaren fixed his first injury without his mom nearby. Brock stood on one side of Aaren and I stood on the other, handing him everything as he asked for it.

When Aaren finished the last stitch and cut the thread, he exhaled and sagged against Cass’s bed. Then he grinned. “I did it.”

I grinned back. “You did.”

Aaren was still shaking. At first, I thought it was from being in wet clothes for so long—I was shivering, too—but then Brock said, “You need to eat something,” and I realized how hungry I was. Isha gave us dry clothes to change into, then took us back to the main area and got us each an apple, a chunk of cheese, and a cup of water. We leaned against a table near one of the fires, thrilled to finally be warm and dry.

“Is she going to be okay?” I whispered.

Aaren stared at the concrete floor. “I think so.” Then he and Brock walked back into the infirmary.

I stood next to Isha for a moment, nibbling on my cheese.

“Your necklace reminds me of someone,” she said, startling me.

“My birth mom—Anna—she used to live here,” I said.

The woman smiled and looked up at the bricks of the building above us that formed the ceiling. “Anna. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name.”

“You knew her?”

“I did. I became a substitute mom of sorts after hers died. She was a beautiful girl. Smart, too. She looked like you.”

I smiled, trying to hold in all the emotion I could. She knew my birth mom!

Isha asked what we were doing in the ruins, and I told her everything about the Bomb’s Breath lowering and our trip. I didn’t know why. There was something about her that made me feel as though it was okay to share, and I didn’t want to stop talking. As though telling all of this to her was somehow like telling it to my birth mom.

When I finished, she studied me, her blue eyes intense and perceptive. Almost as if I didn’t need to tell her anything, and she’d know it all just by watching me. Then she said, “Come here. I have something of Anna’s that I think you should have.” She motioned toward the main door we had come through.

I looked at the infirmary door, wondering if I should leave with Isha or go back in with the others. But she had something that was once my birth mom’s. How could I
not
go? I walked alongside her as we left through the door covered in dirt on the outside, and walked a slight incline up a tunnel that ran perpendicular to the one we came in through. The walls were dirt, like the others, and smelled damp. I wondered if that was normal, or if it was only because of all the rain.

Isha slid open another dirt-looking door and walked us into a room that wasn’t so different from the main room. Except this room was filled with beds. They were all in a chaotic order—as though maybe they were arranged
in groups for families. I stared for a minute, picturing my birth mom’s bed, Luke’s bed, and my grandpa’s bed arranged in here in a little U shape for their family.

Isha and I walked over to a bed along the back wall, and she lifted up the edge of the blanket. “Can you do me a favor and pull out that box?”

I got on my knees and reached for a square box six inches tall and more than a foot wide, then placed it on the bed. Isha sat next to it, and I sat down, too, the box between us. She pushed some trinkets to one side so she could remove a thick book with a hard cover, along with a thin notebook.

“Did you know your birth mom was an expert on rocks?” she asked.

I nodded. “Luke told me she loved them.”

“The thing about your birth mom, though, is that she didn’t love rocks because they were pretty or shiny. She was a smart girl—she knew what rocks and ores and minerals were made of. She could see a rock’s worth based on what was inside, and what it was capable of becoming.” Isha stroked the worn cover of the book. “When she was eight, her dad—I guess that would make him your grandpa—found this book in a school that was run-down even before the bombs, and he brought it to her. This book meant everything to Anna. You never saw her without
it—she carried it in a bag over her shoulder at all times, this notebook with her scribblings about what she discovered nestled right by it.”