Sky Jumpers by Peggy Eddleman

Author:Peggy Eddleman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 0307981274
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
Published: 2013-09-24T07:00:00+00:00

That night was the longest of my life. Even counting the time I had the mottled cough and the constant coughing kept me awake. Just before we went to bed, Aaren’s mom came to check on my dad and said that Melina Johnson, a little girl from Sixes & Sevens, was coming down with Shadel’s Sickness. I’d lived through enough winters to know that two people getting sick so close to the same time usually meant the beginning of an outbreak. I kept thinking about how many people Dr. Grenwood said usually got the sickness each year, and how that could all happen in the next couple of weeks. Without the Ameiphus, they’d die. I stared out the high window, wishing the night sky would lighten so I could stop trying to fall asleep.

We had enough food stored in the community center to feed everyone for a few weeks, but we didn’t have blankets. The hearth fires burned low, and the winter cold seeped through the walls. I shifted back and forth on the floor, trying to make a pillow out of my coat sleeves while covering as much of myself as I could with the rest. Every time my brain turned off enough to sleep, the hourly whistle blew, and everyone fourteen and older stumbled awake and into lines to be counted. I think the bandits did it to drive us insane. It was working.

I gave up sleeping after the four a.m. whistle and was tense and ready long before the five o’clock whistle blew. If Aaren and I left at five o’clock, the sun would be coming up about the time we crossed through the Bomb’s Breath and into unfamiliar territory. We’d decided it would be best to climb the mountain in daylight.

I looked at the lumps of sleeping bodies strewn across the gym floor, and then at my parents, who slept with their heads near me. My dad’s face was barely visible in the orange light from the coals in the hearth, but judging by his scrunched-up forehead covered with little beads of sweat, he was in pain and his fever was bad. Every minute that passed meant he was getting worse. I wanted to reach out and touch his face once before I left, but I was afraid I’d wake him.

My mom’s head moved and drew my attention. She was watching me with a strange expression on her face.

“Mom? Why are you awake?”

She reached out and put her hand on mine. “When you were a baby, Hope,” she whispered, “you crawled at an impossibly young age.”

I had no idea why she was talking about crawling. Maybe she was sleep-talking.

“Before I knew it, you were this teeny little thing who could walk and get into all sorts of trouble.” She paused for a moment, then squeezed my hand. “I stepped into the yard one day when you were not more than a year and a half. You’d climbed up that wooden fence by the coops and you had your arms out, balancing while you walked across the board at the top.

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