Sky Jumpers Book 2 Read Online Free Page B

earth.
    The sun had just sunk behind the crater, and Mr. Hudson already had lanterns lit, shining light on the two tables he had hauled up from his workshop. They were covered from one end to the other in piles of papers, glass beakers, a gas burner, a lantern, mortars and pestles, and a microscope. Off to the side, a bedroll and pillow lay, but it didn’tlook as if Mr. Hudson had used them for a while. His hair was a mess, his clothes were wrinkled, and he had dark circles under his eyes. A chair sat next to one of the tables, but he stood, leaning over some charts. We climbed off our horses and he looked up at us with tired eyes.
    “So they were right?” my dad said. “It’s lowering?”
    Mr. Hudson gave a single nod.
    My dad walked to the same side of the table as Mr. Hudson and in a quiet voice asked, “How much?”
    Mr. Hudson ran his hand through his dark hair, making it stick up even worse than it was already, then pulled his black case toward him. The one I’d seen him carry a million times. Lots of things changed when the green bombs hit, including minerals, ores, and plants. Right after the bombs, when Mr. Hudson was my age, he traveled with his parents and my grandparents from Holyoke, Colorado, across the Forbidden Flats, picking up other survivors along the way. They were the original members of White Rock, back before they’d even found White Rock. He began collecting samples of the minerals and metals he found on that trip, as well as every excursion they’d gone on since then to scavenge for supplies. He brought them all back, performed tests, categorized them, and found each a spot in his black case.
    He pulled a sheet of paper out of his stack that hadbeen torn from a book. Aaren, Brock, and I crowded around the table to see it—the periodic table of elements, with notes added in his own handwriting.
    He used two fingers to tap on the chart. “Chemical reactions don’t only happen with liquids. They can happen with solids.” Mr. Hudson looked at Aaren, Brock, and me. “Remember in Tens and Elevens, when I showed you a double replacement?”
    I nodded. “You put two white powders in the same vial, and when you mixed them together, they turned yellow, right?”
    Mr. Hudson smiled at me as though he was impressed that I had been paying attention enough in inventions class to remember that. “Right. Because it underwent a chemical change.” He motioned behind him toward the giant cracks that looked like claw marks in the ground. “The same type of thing happened in these fissures, only with different elements.”
    Mr. Hudson pulled two stones out of his black case. He held up the first one, a rounded stone so dark gray it was almost black, then the second stone, one with jagged edges that was at least as dark but had a purplish shine to it. “Neither of these existed before the bombs. There are seams of both of these in this mountain, running almost parallel.”
    Using a chisel, he broke a piece off each stone and put each in its own mortar. He handed one mortar to Aaren, and they both ground their stone into a powder with the pestles.
    He held them out for us to see, as if he were teaching us a class back in Tens & Elevens. “See? Separate elements. But when I combine them …” He poured them both into a vial, then put the stopper on the vial and shook it a few times.
    A light gray powder filled the bottom of the vial, but slow-moving, almost see-through smoke filled the rest of the container.
    “A double replacement. The chemical change did two things—one made the color you see in the bottom, the other created a gas.” He pulled off the stopper, and the gas lazily drifted out of the vial. “You can see the gas better when it’s in the vial, because it’s concentrated. Even though you can’t see it once it leaves the vial, it’s still rising.
    “The shaking of the quakes crashed the seams of both these minerals together, turning much of the minerals into powder and mixing