Sky Jumpers Series, Book 1 (18 page)

Aaren’s shoulders slumped. “What are we going to do?”

“Look!” Brock pointed into the distance. “There it is!”

“See those white lumps?” Brock asked. I squinted into the distance and could kind of see two hills through the falling snow, right next to each other. “Those are the greenhouses where Browning grows the cotton. So the farmlands must be just beyond this next hill.”

“Maybe iss just hills.” I thought of the two greenhouses we had in White Rock between the orchard and the cattle. These were huge, easily ten times the size of ours.

“It has to be them,” Brock said.

“Thass good,” Aaren said, “ ’cause you’re slurring your words, Hope.”

“So are you, Aaren,” Brock said.

Aaren pulled the too-small hood of my coat tighter. “Brains can’t handle cold. Muddles your thinking.”

With my brain working so slowly, I didn’t remember about Browning’s dirt walls in the shape of a square until we were most of the way across the farmlands. Something looked like another hill, except that it wasn’t long and spread out like the ripples from the crater or in lumps like the greenhouses. We might have totally missed it if Brock hadn’t reminded us what we were looking for. I was glad at least one of our brains worked. My sense of time was off, too, but Brock said it was about ten p.m., which meant we’d been traveling for seventeen hours.

The fifteen-foot-high snow-covered wall around Browning was sloped on the outside. I looked down at Brenna, asleep in the sling. I wished she was awake to see it.

“Iss so short,” Aaren slurred. “Don’t you think it’s short?”

I nodded yes. We had mountains as our city walls. This definitely felt short.

“I heard that before the bombs, no one had city walls,” Aaren said.

“Yeah, well, they didn’t have bandits back then,” Brock said as he grabbed my shoulders and directed me alongside the dirt wall instead of over it like I was trying. “This way. You’ll break a leg if you go over here—we have to get to the gate.”

I followed Brock as he muttered something about
Aaren’s and my brains being frozen solid. After ten minutes, we reached a locked gate but no guards manned it. Brock guessed they might be rotating guards or covering a larger than normal area because of the snow. Someone would probably be back soon, but we had to get Brenna by a warm fire quickly. My mind was so tired and cloudy, though, I couldn’t figure out what we should do.

Just beside the gate, Brock had us climb up the dirt wall. At the top, a wooden guard platform sat slightly lower than the wall, with the edge two feet away and a fifteen-foot drop-off between it and the dirt wall. Only a couple of inches of snow covered the platform, so it must have been shoveled, and footprints showed someone had been there not long before. Brock jumped to the platform and slid on the snow a bit, then held out his hand for me. It was a big step between the wall and the platform, and with Brenna strapped to me, I didn’t want to take any chances. I reached forward and grabbed his hand with my right, then reached back for Aaren’s hand with my left. Brock pulled me across, then Aaren joined us and we climbed down the ladder.

The inside walls went straight up. They weren’t dirt—in some places they were tall timbers placed right next to each other, or stone, or cement, or huge pieces of some kind of metal that must have existed before the
bombs. Somewhere in my frozen brain, I wondered how far they’d traveled to scavenge them, and how hard it was to stand them on end.

And then I wondered how long I’d stared at this tall wall that enclosed an entire city, because Brock’s voice was urgent. “Come
on
, Hope! We have to keep moving!” He grabbed me by one hand and Aaren by the other and led us down a street.

The houses stood close together in neat lines. The intersecting roads were straight, too, like the city was set up as a giant grid. Some houses were bigger than others, and they were different colors, but they all looked cozy. And I’d have bet they had nice soft beds in them. And warm food. If it weren’t for Brock pulling me, I’d have opened one of their doors and collapsed in front of one of their fires. He was probably looking for the guard barracks. I bet they had fires and warm food and soft beds there, too.

“There’s no one here,” Aaren said as we walked.

Sometimes we saw footprints, and the snow had been partly shoveled in some areas, but we didn’t see guards, and no one came out of their houses.

“They’re here,” Brock said. “The blizzard is just too thick. And the snow muffles sound. The people in their homes probably haven’t heard us over the crackling of their fires.”

I glanced at a bluish house. If I were in there, I wouldn’t open my shutters for anything. I’d just curl up next to the fire. I kissed Brenna’s cold forehead and whispered, “We’ll be warm soon.”

We walked past so many houses, I no longer cared if we made it to the guard barracks first. I just wanted to be by a fire. But Brock kept pulling us, so we kept following. Finally, we walked up to the door of a soft green house with a dark brown wooden door and dark brown shutters. Yellow light shone through the cracks. Firelight. My whole body tingled in anticipation of that fire. Brock let go of my hand and knocked on the door, and a girl about our age, with hair as dark as Brock’s, answered. When she saw us, her eyes lit up.

“Mom, Estie, Stephen, Max! It’s Brock! Brock is home!”

With my fuzzy brain, I couldn’t understand why the girl had said Brock was home. Brock lived in White Rock.

“Hey, Linet,” Brock said as he gave her a hug. Her dark hair fell in a braid halfway down her back. Brock told us to come into the house, while two dark-haired boys wearing pajamas ran into the room. One was about eight years old and one about ten, and they both looked like they’d been asleep. All of them had the same gemlike green eyes as Brock. I just stared as they hugged him.

“They’re his family?” I whispered to Aaren.

“Have to be,” he whispered back. “They look just like him.”

My attention was drawn to a clicking sound. A little girl with straight dark hair that barely touched her
shoulders—probably the five-year-old sister Brock had talked about—hobbled into the room on little wooden crutches. The mom walked next to the girl until she saw Brock; then she ran to wrap her arms around him.

“Brock! My goodness, Brock.” Her voice was gruff, but somehow kind at the same time. She put her hands on his cheeks and then his shoulders. “You all look like death, being out in a storm like this!” She turned to her children. “Stephen, put more logs on the fire. Max, make some hot cider, please. Linet, put some soup on.”

“Brock, why—” When she looked back to us, her eyes fell on me and she gasped. She could hardly see Brenna, so she must have known there was a problem by our expressions.

“She has hypothermia,” Brock said. “It’s bad.”

She unbuttoned my coat, then took Brenna from my arms. “Poor baby,” she said. As she walked toward the fire, she felt Brenna’s forehead and pulled up her eyelids.

Aaren hovered near Brenna with his forehead crinkled and his voice hoarse. “Can you help her?”

“We’ll fix her up. Don’t you worry.” Brock’s mom laid a blanket in front of the fire, then placed Brenna on it. She was so sick, she didn’t even move at all. “Stephen, her clothes are wet. Get Estie’s warmest clothes. Quickly.”

Max came into the room with mugs of hot cider and gave us each one.

“Is there any hot water on the stove?” Brock’s mom asked.

Max nodded.

“Put it in a water skin, then put more water on to heat.”

When that mug of hot cider was pressed into my hands, my whole body celebrated the warmth. As I sipped it, the heat went all the way down my throat and into my stomach. I sipped some more, and wished that Brenna felt well enough to drink. I took off my coat and laid it in front of the fire so it would start to dry, then moved as close to the fire as I could without getting burned.

Within moments, Brock’s mom had changed Brenna into dry clothes, put the water skin with warm water on her chest, and wrapped the blanket around her. She was humming a lullaby into her ear while she cradled her in front of the fire as if Brenna were her own child.

Brock’s mom had the same straight dark hair as Brock and his siblings, pulled into a ponytail. The hair that had escaped the ponytail fell by her cheeks and made her green eyes even brighter. Tiny pieces of light blue string covered her shirt and pants, but they somehow belonged. Like the way my mom always had flour on her from making pastries.

As soon as he saw that his mom was taking care of Brenna, Brock’s focus went to Estie. Her crutches
knocked on the floor as she moved as fast as she could to where Brock sat.

Brock hugged her, and she sat on his lap. “I missed you, Estie!” he said.

“I missed you, too. Are you back? Back for good?”

She was so sweet and her voice sounded so hopeful—and Brock’s face looked so sad as he shook his head no—it made me want to tell her,
Yes! Brock is back and will never leave again!
But instead, Brock changed the subject. “How long have you had these cool crutches?”

He glanced at his mom, and she gave him a sad smile. “About two months.”

Brock turned back to his sister. “Wow. Only two months, and already you’re an expert. You’ve always been my Speedy Estie.”

I’d tried to imagine what Brock’s family was like more times than I could count. Never did I picture any of this. I stared at Brock as he held Estie with a look on his face I hadn’t seen before. But the change wasn’t only in his face. His shoulders were square—like the weights that always pulled them down weren’t there.

Aaren’s focus went from Brenna to Estie every few seconds, like Estie was a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. Then his eyes widened and he gasped. Brock looked at him, and Aaren said quietly, “My mom came to see Estie during the Planting Festival.”

Brock nodded.

“I—I’m sorry,” Aaren said. “I’ve heard my mom talk about her. I never knew it was your sister.”

Brock ignored Aaren and started playing a clapping game with Estie.

Aaren turned to me and whispered, “She has a tumor on her spine that’s growing. Eventually it will paralyze her if they can’t remove it.”

The clapping game continued, but after a moment, Brock looked at Aaren again. Aaren said in a voice so convincing I would have believed him if he said it was a hot, sunny day outside, “My mom will find a cure. I know she will.”

Brock stared at Aaren, then gave him a quick nod and turned his focus back to Estie.

Behind me, a couch and a couple of chairs formed a U shape around the fire, and a pedal-operated sewing machine and stand that must have been made before the bombs stood against one wall. A long table ran along the opposite wall, covered with yards of blue cotton fabric, the same kind my school shirts were made of. Several stacks of the fabric, cut and ready to be sewn, lay near the sewing machine. Piles of the shirts, finished except for the hem, sat on the couch next to a spool of thread and a pincushion.

I knew Browning made almost all our clothing, and
that we traded food for it. It worked for everyone, because food grew really well in White Rock, and Browning had those giant greenhouses to grow cotton in. I’d just never thought about the people who sewed the clothes. I hadn’t imagined a family sitting around the fire, each doing their part to help make what I wore. I definitely hadn’t pictured Brock’s family doing it. I looked at my own shirt and wondered if maybe it had once been cut pieces of fabric, sitting in a pile on the floor of Brock’s house, waiting to be sewn.

Linet stepped back into the room and sat on the couch. She picked up a blue shirt and the needle and thread from the pincushion and began to hem the bottom of it, as if it wasn’t natural to sit without sewing.

“Now, Brock,” his mom said as she removed the water skin from Brenna’s torso and gestured for Stephen to refill it with warmer water. “I know you didn’t come all the way here during a blizzard just to say hello. What happened?”

“Mom,” he said, “these are my friends Hope, Aaren, and Brenna.”

“Friends?” A smile spread across Linet’s face. “You owe me a week’s worth of hemming.” She turned to us. “I made him a bet before he left.
I
said that within a week, his first friend would be a girl, because he’d miss me so much he couldn’t stand it,” she teased. “
He
said it would never happen.”