Sky Jumpers Book 2 Read Online Free Page A

mark.
    Brenna looked up at Aaren. “So it’s getting lower? It’s going to keep coming down?”
    I looked out across my valley. At all the homes and shops and farms and buildings my town had spent forty years building. This was the only crater left behind by the bombs for hundreds and hundreds of miles—it’s not asthough there was another one we could move into. Without it, we wouldn’t be sheltered from bandits or the high winds that whip across the Forbidden Flats. We’d have to walk away from everything if the Bomb’s Breath lowered.
    I kept my eyes on the valley while I answered her. “No, Brenna. We’re going to find my dad and he’ll tell Mr. Hudson, and they’ll fix it. What time is it, Aaren?”
    “Eight forty-five.”
    “We need to get on a train to reach my dad, and the last one before dinnertime leaves City Circle at nine a.m. We have to make it!”
    We raced down the path to the warning fences and ran to the grain tram at the edge of the orchard. We pulled the platform to us and climbed on, our weight sending the platform soaring down the tram path at a high enough speed that it rocked back and forth. I scrambled to the brakes, slowing the platform only enough to keep us from flying out of it.
    The wind rushed past us, whipping my hair and making my eyes sting. We had barely passed the pole at the top of the third ring when the steam whistle at City Circle blew, signaling five minutes before the trains traveled up their tracks. Five minutes to make it a mile and a half.
    I let my foot off the brake, and the fields flew past us in a blur. When we started swinging a little too much, I putthe brake on a bit. Once I could see the end pole, I pressed on the brake even more. We came to a skidding stop three feet before the end pole. Perfect timing on the brakes, if you asked me.
    We leapt out of the tram and dashed alongside the ditch that circled the ring of shops around City Circle. If it hadn’t been full of water, we’d have run in the ditch to avoid all the weeds and rocks along the bank. We were still a hundred feet away when the whistle blew, telling the trains to go.
    “No!” Brock yelled.
    The conductor looked back and waved for us to hurry as the train began slowly moving forward on the repaired track. Steam billowed in a cloud from the small car at the front where the conductor stood, and drifted across the two open-topped passenger cars it pulled farther and farther up the hill. Aaren and Brock picked up Brenna, and I raced alongside the train, pumping my legs as the wheels on the side of the end car inched closer and closer. Finally, I got near enough to leap onto the passenger car. I reached back for Brenna, pulling her next to me right before Brock and Aaren both jumped up beside us. We collapsed onto a bench.
    “I can’t believe we made it,” Aaren said.
    Brock panted. “I can’t believe Hope didn’t kill us.”
    Brenna looked up at me with her big blue eyes. “Can we do it again?”
    My heart rate and breathing had barely returned to normal when the train reached the river at the top of the third ring, its final stop.
    We hopped off and headed straight for the mill on the edge of the river. The double doors were open, letting in the cool spring air, and we could hear the sounds coming from the mill over the chugging of the train.
    As soon as we walked in the doors, heat from the wood-drying kiln hit us, along with the
chonk
and
bang
from the nail-making machine and the whirring of the saws. When my dad noticed us, he shut down the saw, pulled out his earplugs, and took off his safety glasses.
    “Hey, pumpkin. What’s wrong?”

My dad told us not to talk to a soul about what we had found until Mr. Hudson figured out what was going on, because he didn’t want to panic anyone before he had answers. After a very long three and a half days, Mr. Hudson asked my dad, Brock, Aaren, and me to join him in the clearing by the woods on the second ring, right next to the cracks in the