Sky Jumpers Series, Book 1 (24 page)

I pushed my hands into the snow on one of the boulders, swung my feet over it, and landed below the path on another boulder. Tons of rocks of every size ran between the path and the ledge. I skipped from boulder to boulder. It felt like I was getting away, but in reality, Mickelson and his constant threats were close behind me.

He leapt and landed on a rock so close he could almost
reach me. He held my eyes as he panted, a look of victory on his face. “You can’t outrun me,” he said.

He was right.

The realization hit me like a boulder slamming into my stomach. I wasn’t going to win. No matter what I did, he got closer. My plan to lose him or go where he couldn’t had failed.

That meant I had two options. I could leap across a couple more boulders before Mickelson grabbed me, or I could jump off the ledge. I looked over the side and gulped. The cliff was higher than anything I’d jumped off without the Bomb’s Breath to catch me.

But if I couldn’t outrun Mickelson, my only choice was to outjump him.

And I actually, truly, had science on my side. A year ago, Mrs. Romanek had taught us about the Law of Conservation of Energy, which said energy couldn’t be destroyed, only transferred. Normally, I tuned out science without even trying to, but that lesson felt made for me. In a
Pay attention, Hope—this is how you’ll be able to jump from higher distances without getting hurt
kind of way. So I paid attention and found out that if I tucked and rolled as I landed, the force of the fall wouldn’t go squarely to my legs—it would be displaced through the roll. I tried it dozens of times in the week after the lesson. This was much higher than I’d ever tried, but at least I had the snow as a cushion.

Even with the extra science knowledge and practice, the height
still
scared me, which meant there was no way Mickelson would jump.

I stepped to the edge, filled my lungs with air, and jumped off the cliff, trying not to freak out that the Bomb’s Breath wasn’t going to slow my fall. I concentrated on where I’d place my hands and legs, and pictured what I was going to do when I landed, while the wind rushed past me. I hit the ground in a roll, and what air I had left was knocked out of me. With my forward momentum, I rolled into a standing position and coughed a few heaving breaths. As I brushed the snow off, I looked at the top of the cliff. It was so high, I couldn’t believe I’d actually jumped!

Mickelson stood silhouetted at the cliff’s edge, the sunset glowing a brilliant pink and orange behind him. His posture showed how haggard he was. Still, I could tell he was considering jumping. Chances were he’d chicken out, but I glanced downhill for an escape route anyway.

A huge clump of trees grew directly above a spot that everyone called the Dimple. You could see it from almost anywhere in White Rock. The woods looked like a man’s beard, the group of trees to my left looked like the mustache, and a pit in the ground below it, right in the middle of the Bomb’s Breath, looked like a dimple on his cheek. If Mickelson jumped, that was where I’d go. I waited to see if he’d actually do it.

He did. And his jump was beautiful. He soared through the air with his arms slightly windmilling, the sunset behind him, his curly hair blown back by the wind as it rushed past him. By the time he neared the ground, his body was perfectly upright. He landed straight down on his feet, but he didn’t tuck and roll. The force propelled him forward, knocking him facedown. If it wasn’t for the snow, he’d have broken both legs for sure.

Mickelson staggered to a standing position, looking like everything hurt, and took a step toward me.

I backed in the direction of the trees above the Dimple, keeping my eyes on Mickelson. He took careful steps toward me until I stopped behind two tree trunks about three feet apart, only a couple of feet uphill from the Dimple.

The lowest branch on either tree was eight feet off the ground. I put one foot on one tree trunk, then jumped my second foot onto the second trunk, with one hand on each tree. I alternated my weight between my feet as I scaled up the trees. When I was high enough, I pushed off one trunk and swung onto a branch of the other, a nice sturdy branch that stuck straight out. As I hunched down on it, I saw exactly what I’d hoped to see—Mickelson standing between me and the Dimple. I knew from playing here
and almost falling from that drop-off, it was deep enough that the bottom had normal air and the Bomb’s Breath covered the top like a lid.

Mickelson’s feet were already in the Bomb’s Breath, but because of the snow, he didn’t notice. He shifted his weight off his hurt leg and looked up at me, trying to figure out what I was doing.

Out of habit, I grabbed my necklace as I watched Mickelson. I held the stone in my palm and ran my finger and thumb down the chain. At that second, I realized the pendant and the chain
did
go together. There were parts of me that were rough, and parts that were polished. There were things I was great at and things I stank at. Everything together made up me. Imperfect me, but capable me. Definitely find-a-way-out-of-this-mess me.

And right now, I could get out of this mess if I could get Mickelson trapped in the Dimple. If I could swing down from the branch I crouched on, I could use my feet to push him in.

“I don’t want you to die,” I said.

“Funny. The longer you keep that bag of Ameiphus, the more I want you to die.” He looked up at me with his controlled, confident expression. “You can’t stay up there all day. The second you come down, I’m going to throw you off that cliff.” He nodded toward his left. “The Ameiphus won’t be so hard to take from you when you’re lying
broken at the bottom. You’re trapped. You’ve got nowhere to run. It’s over. The only way to save yourself is to drop the Ameiphus to me now.”

“I still don’t want you to die,” I repeated. “So take a big breath and hold it, okay?”

He tilted his head to the side and crinkled his forehead.

“Now!” I yelled. I reached down and grabbed the branch with my hands, then threw my feet behind me. As I held on to the branch, my legs went under the tree, and I pulled my feet together as they swung toward Mickelson. I aimed right for his chest. He gasped; then my feet hit him with enough force that he flew backward. The jerk of the hit pulled my hands off the branch, and I dropped flat on my back in the snow as he tumbled and fell right into the Dimple.

I got up and ran to the edge of the Bomb’s Breath. Mickelson had landed in the pit on his back. I let out a huge breath that was equal parts exhaustion, relief, and pure joy. Mickelson was trapped.

He jumped to his feet, even though the motion looked painful, and attempted to scramble up the walls of the pit.

“Don’t!” I shouted. “If you climb up, you’ll be in the Bomb’s Breath, and you’ll die.”

He froze. And for the first time since he stepped through the Bomb’s Breath, he was speechless.

“Stay there,” I said. “I’ll get people to haul you up with a rope.”

I reached into my schoolbag as I walked away from him, pulled out the sack of Ameiphus, and grinned. It was safe. I opened it, just to see the little white pills.

Except they were no longer white.

Most of the pills in the bag had changed to the blue of the sky on a summer’s day. I just stared at them, baffled. These pills were always white. I didn’t know what could have changed them.

My eyes flashed to the Bomb’s Breath. That was the one thing different with these pills than every other Ameiphus pill I’d seen. They had gone through the Bomb’s Breath.

Some of the pills were still mostly white—probably the ones that had been in the middle of the sack while it sat in the snow, waiting for me to find it. I knelt down and felt around for the start of the dense air. With several of the ones that were white in the palm of my hand, and with my breath quivering, I moved them into the air of the Bomb’s Breath.

I watched with fascination as they changed from white to a faint blue, then to a light blue, and finally to a brilliant sky blue.
What was going on? Were they ruined?
I stared at them, biting my lip and wondering what the change meant before returning the pills to their sack.

With my schoolbag over my shoulders again and the
Ameiphus safe inside, I backed up quite a bit, ran as fast as I could, and leapt into the air just before I reached the Bomb’s Breath. I wasn’t high above it, so I took a deep breath the moment my feet left the ground. My forward momentum shot me past the Dimple, and I put my arms and legs straight out. The Bomb’s Breath wouldn’t hold me forever, but for a moment I didn’t think about that. I just enjoyed the weightlessness. I had the Ameiphus. My town was safe. As impossible as it seemed, I had actually won.

I was flying.

I curled into a ball, feet down, as I neared the bottom of the Bomb’s Breath, then dropped out of it and landed with a thump in the snow. The only sound I heard was my own breath as it made frozen clouds in front of my face, then the sound of Arabelle’s snort from somewhere in the trees.

She galloped toward me from the edge of the woods and nuzzled into my shoulder. I laid my cheek on her forehead and patted her jaw. “Thanks for waiting for me, Arabelle.”

I climbed into her saddle, wrapped my arms around her neck, and together we rode toward City Circle.

Arabelle must have sensed my impatience to get to my family, because she rode in the straightest line possible to City Circle, jumping over fences, bushes, ditches, and the occasional doghouse. After only a few minutes, I saw the rooftop of the community center.

When Arabelle and I passed between the last two merchant shops, I saw a long stream of people trudging up the tram path to help our guard. I leapt off Arabelle and ran through a demolished door of the community center, heading straight to the gym. They must have just broken free, because everything was chaotic.

No one noticed me slip into the room, which I was grateful for. All I wanted was my parents. I searched the
crowd, but I couldn’t see them anywhere. Then someone grabbed my arm. I turned to see Mrs. Davies.

“Hope! You’re alive!” she said. Then her face crinkled into a concerned expression. “Your parents are in the clinic. Hurry!”

Fear grabbed my heart. I pushed through the crowd and into the hallway, then burst through the clinic doors into a room almost as crowded as the gym. All three beds were occupied, with worried family members on and around them, but my eyes could only focus on my parents.

My dad was asleep in one of the beds, looking pained, his skin not even close to the right color. My mom was sitting on the edge of the bed, her eyes red and puffy. The moment she saw me, she jumped up and hugged me tight. I melted into her arms. After a moment, she whispered, “I knew you weren’t dead.”

I bent down and wrapped my arms around my dad, pressing my cheek into the stubble on his cheek. His skin burned against mine. I looked to my mom in alarm.

“The antibiotic cream wasn’t enough,” she whispered. “The infection spread. When people see him, it’s like they know he’s going to die.” She sniffed and wiped away a tear. “When we decided to hand the Ameiphus over to Mickelson, everyone gave up on your dad.” She paused and met my eyes. “But I knew you wouldn’t.”

I pulled Dr. Grenwood’s sack full of the medicine from my bag, and my mom’s breath caught at the sight of it. When I tipped a blue pill into my hand, she gave me a puzzled look. “It’s all right,” I said. “I think.”

We gently shook my dad’s shoulders, and his eyes fluttered open. “Hope?” he said with confused eyes.

“It’s me,” I said. “I’m okay. I need you to take this.” I held the pill to his lips. He opened his mouth and my mom gave him a drink of water. His eyes closed again, and he was asleep instantly.

“You did good,” Brock said behind me.

I turned and smiled. “Thanks. So did you guys.”

“The Ameiphus is blue?” Aaren asked.

I held the bag out to him. “Yep. Something happened when they went through the Bomb’s Breath.”

Aaren’s eyes flicked back and forth, and he got his focused-on-science look while his mind worked through the details of what must have happened when the pills were exposed to the Bomb’s Breath. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some to Mr. Hudson and Melina.”