Read Online Sky Jumpers Book 2 by Peggy Eddleman - Free Book Online Page B

Shadel’s when I was five, so when our dad left to go on a scavenging trip, we usually stayed in town with a neighbor lady.” Luke squinted at me. “You’re what? About twelve?” I nodded. “This one time,” he continued, “when Anna was your age, and I was ten, our dad heard rumors of a clean zone. Kind of like the legendary Lost City of Gold, only it was our lost city of metal—a triangle of land that got missed by the overlapping circles of destruction made by three bombs. That happened almost nowhere, and he was convinced that if he went there, he could find some metals that were untouched by the side effects—that there’d be some that could hold a long-term magnetic charge. If he could find that, he could build an engine.And he decided that it was high time Anna and I went on a trip with him.
    “So we took three horses, and sped across the Forbidden Flats for nearly two weeks before we reached the clean zone.”
    Aaren’s eyes grew wide. “It was really there?”
    “Yep. A little section of land that was once called Carrington, North Dakota, including the county medical center, a dozen homes, and an office building. Completely abandoned. The office building seemed smack in the middle of the clean zone, so my dad thought it’d be our best chance of finding metals. Anna and I thought the medical center would be better—there were probably trays and equipment made of metal. It was at the very edge of the clean zone, though, so my dad didn’t agree. We waited until he was busy in the office building, and we went two streets down to the medical center.
    “The inside had long been stripped of any medical supplies, but it still had a few metal carts and rolling beds. The carts were thin metal, though. Anna worried they wouldn’t hold a magnetic charge, so we kept looking. Finally, we found a room with a giant metal swinging arm attached to the ceiling. It was perfect. Anna thought we should run to tell our dad, but I could see how it attached to the ceiling, and convinced her we could get it ourselves.”
    He paused a minute and laughed some more. “Anna didn’t think it would be safe, but I ignored her and started stacking things so I could climb up to reach it. I got to the top and used a rusty scalpel I’d found to turn the screws that held the arm to the ceiling. It was stuck, and when I pushed extra hard, the stack of boxes and crates and carts under me wobbled, and I lost my balance. I grabbed the metal arm and held on, and Anna dashed to the next room to get a rolling bed.
    “We didn’t realize the building was within the range of the bomb effects, though, and before she got back, I heard metal creak, and the whole wall and ceiling collapsed! I got knocked unconscious when I fell to the ground.
    “I came to not long after. I was lying on the rolling hospital bed, and Anna was running down the streets pushing me, yelling for my dad. I felt something hard at my side, and looked over to see the metal arm on the bed with me.”
    We all laughed, but no one as much as me. I couldn’t believe how much Anna was like Aaren, and how much Luke was like me. My mom and dad weren’t daring—at least not in physical ways. Maybe my daring was something I inherited from my birth family. I had always wondered.
    Luke wiped a tear from all the laughing, and I grinned.He looked at me for a moment, then said, “You have her smile.”
    I looked away so he wouldn’t see that my eyes watered. I had my birth mom’s smile! I smiled again, to see how it felt now that I knew.
    Everyone chatted as we rode, and the wind picked up. It blew in our faces for hours and hours and I didn’t think it would ever stop. The wind finally died down about the time we dismounted for the day. Cole put together sandwiches while everyone watered the horses, set up their pen, and built a fire. So much dirt had hit us, I used the time before dinner to go to the horse pen and brush Ruben’s coat.
    When I finished, I pushed my hair off my