Free Sky Jumpers Book 2 by Peggy Eddleman

forehead and wondered how it was possible for so much dirt to be in one place! I tried to run my fingers through my hair, but I could barely wiggle them in. And my scalp felt caked in dust. So were my skin and my clothes. And my shoes. And my bag. The wind had brought cooler weather, but that didn’t stop most of us from walking right out into the river to wash off.
    We huddled around the campfire, trying to dry off and warm up, before burrowing into our bedrolls. The third night in a row with no tents. It would’ve been nicer to have them, but everyone was tired. We all just scrunched in closer to the fire.
    Aaren whispered to Brock and me, “My dad talked nonstop about Glacier City today.”
    “What’s it like?” Brock asked.
    Aaren shrugged. “He’s never been there. It’s right in the middle of the Forbidden Flats, and it’s the only trading town in any direction for at least one hundred miles, so they have a lot more stuff than feed for the horses.”
    While everyone around us slept, we stayed awake, whispering about Glacier. Eventually, Brock and Aaren fell asleep, too, but I couldn’t. Instead, I stared at the stars, trying to imagine how high up the Bomb’s Breath was. I’d imagined the same thing inside White Rock plenty of times, but there, the Bomb’s Breath touched the mountains all the way around in a circle. It was baffling to think that here, it went on and on, spreading across the immense sky in every direction.
    But at least out here, it was staying the right height in the sky.
    I held my necklace and brushed my finger and thumb down the smooth chain, over and over as I listened to the murmur of the river and the chirping of crickets, and thought about home and how a single necklace helped me find out I had an uncle.

Luke steered his horse toward me as we rode. “Notice anything yet?”
    I squinted and in the distance, I saw something shining—almost like heat waves coming off hot sand. The more I looked at it, the more I could tell that it had distinct edges, even though we were still too far away to see it well.
    “Is that it?” Brock asked.
    “Yes. Keep watching.”
    Over the next hour, the city seemed to grow bigger and bigger the closer we got to it. The ground gradually sloped down as we rode, and eventually we neared it.
    After seeing it as only ripples on the horizon, I never imagined it would be this big. The gate was huge—probablytwenty feet wide and twenty feet tall. It didn’t look as if they broke the glass to make room for the gate. It looked like there wasn’t any glass where it was to begin with. The glass started at the bottom edges of each side of the gate, and rose higher and higher as it circled around on both sides. In the parts closest to the gate where the glass wasn’t very high, they built a wooden wall so that the entire city had at least a twenty-foot-high border.
    When Luke said the walls were made of glass, I had thought of the kind of glass we had in windows in White Rock—mostly smooth, thin, flat, and rectangular. This was nothing like that at all. The glass was thick and anything but flat. It curved around and bent in ripples and bulges. In some places, it looked as though it might only be a foot thick, but in others, it was three or four feet thick. I could see that there were things inside the city—like houses and people—but everything was so distorted through the glass, it was impossible to tell what they were.
    “This place doesn’t look too friendly,” Aaren’s dad said.
    I followed his gaze to the armed guards that patrolled the top of the city wall.
    “Of course it doesn’t,” Luke said. “People come from all around to set up shops or to make trades. Between the goods that are held here until they’re traded, and the factthat there’s no one else to rob anywhere nearby, things are a little more dangerous for them. They protect themselves well.”
    “The walls are so tall,” I said. “This whole place really used to be filled