Sky Jumpers Book 2 Read Online Free

close! Why didn’t we notice?”
    “We were having too much fun,” Brock said.
    “And we felt for the Breath as we went up the hill each time,” I said. “If we hadn’t—if we had gone off our marking on the cliff instead—”
    Brenna finished my sentence for me, a horrified look on her face. “You could’ve taken a breath too late and died!”
    “We always take a breath early,” Aaren said. “We’d have been okay.”
    Brock looked across the hazy air in the valley, his eyes settling on the part of the mountainside with the widecrevices. “Do you think maybe the Bomb’s Breath hasn’t moved, but the earthquake just changed things enough that the mountain is in a different spot?”
    Aaren shook his head. “An earthquake capable of that wouldn’t have left a single building standing in White Rock. It’s something else. We need to tell someone. Hope, we have to tell your dad.”
    As much as I dreaded telling my dad that, once again, I had been jumping into the Bomb’s Breath, I knew we had to. The gnawing pit in my stomach told me this was serious.
    “Is it still lowering?” Brock said. “If it dropped a foot because of an earthquake, it’s not a huge deal—everything’s far enough away from it. If it’s
still
dropping, that’s a whole lot worse.”
    We stayed silent as that sank in. Or maybe we did because we couldn’t bear to say how bad that would be out loud. Well, all of us but Brenna.
    “The Bomb’s Breath is going to come down by our houses?” she asked. “We could jump off our roofs into it!” Then she spun toward the livestock farms on the fourth ring. “Oh, but the cows! What will they do? Is it going to kill the cows?”
    She looked up at Aaren with big concerned eyes, and he whispered, “No. Everything will be fine.”
    “We need to figure out if it’s still dropping before we cause a panic,” Brock said.
    Aaren walked over to our mark on the cliff face, picked up a rock, and waved his hand to see where the compressed air started. He drew a new line with the rock, then felt the air again and again to make sure his line was at exactly the right place. “We’ll come back tomorrow. When it’s time to leave home in the morning to go help the Johnsons, we’ll come here first. See if the Bomb’s Breath is any lower. Then we’ll tell your dad, Hope.”
    The next morning, Brock, Aaren, Brenna, and I raced across the orchards as the sun was peeking over the top of the crater.
    “Plan?” Brock asked, huffing.
    “If the Breath
hasn’t
moved, then everything is okay, and we can go to the Johnsons’ and tell my dad tonight,” I said. “If we hurry, we might get there at the right time. If it
has
lowered …” I took a deep breath. “Everything’s not okay, and we’ll take the nine a.m. train to my dad at the mill.”
    No one even asked about that part of my plan. They were probably hoping it wouldn’t matter. After all, it’s not as if the Breath would continue to lower. It had never done that. It just lowered one time because of the quakes. Ananomaly. And like Brock said, everyone stayed far enough away that a foot wasn’t going to make too much of a difference. The warning fences were at the back edge of the fourth ring, and the bottom of the Bomb’s Breath was forty feet higher. And that was if you went straight up. If you hiked the mountainside, you had to climb several hundred feet to reach it. The fact that it dropped a foot wouldn’t make a difference at all.
    We climbed over the warning fences and up our path to the cliff face where Aaren had marked the Bomb’s Breath. I squeezed Brenna’s hand tight. Aaren waved his arm in the Breath over and over, and none of us breathed.
    Finally, he picked up a rock and scratched a line on the cliff face. It was a full two inches lower than the line he had scratched yesterday afternoon.
    No one moved.
    “It’s only two inches,” Brock said. “That’s not too bad—right?”
    Aaren didn’t take his eyes off the