The Jump, page 20
“They set all of this up to frame us!” I say as it all sinks in for me, too. “The police want any reason to put us back in jail. We’re standing on top of Roundworld headquarters after waving around a resistance flag, as the building burns down around us. How the hell do you think this looks? They had us set up from the jump!”
A clang! cuts through the noise of the chopper blades and the crackling building as orange flames creep up and begin to lick the sides of the roof, and I turn around and realize Yas is no longer there.
“Yas!” I yell, hurrying to the side and peering over the edge. “Yas, have you lost your mind?!”
She’s really climbing down. She’s really climbing down there to save Sigge. The flames are licking the windows right next to her. She’ll be lucky if her clothes don’t catch fire before she even reaches her.
“Yas!!!!!” I scream until my voice breaks. My eyes are burning from tears and smoke, and I have to recoil from the edge before the flames reach my hands. I feel fingers on my shoulders, and Karim looks down at me in a full panic.
“We gotta go, man—there’s no other way out of this,” he says, although I can barely hear him over the chopper blades. He looks back to the middle of the roof, where there’s now a man hanging from a ladder that extends all the way up to a huge black helicopter hovering about thirty feet up.
Shit.
The man is holding his hand out and yelling at us, his voice amplified by a mic.
“I’m here to help!” he insists.
But he has a badge.
He’s in uniform, the word “SWAT” written across his lapel. And I know exactly where I’m going after climbing up that ladder and sitting down inside that helicopter.
Back to jail.
And eventually to prison.
But I have a plan. And my heart races as I step toward the man in the SWAT uniform.
“What are you doing?” hollers Karim over the noise. His purple suit is flapping in the harsh wind, and he’s looking at me like I’m betraying him. All I can do is give him a wink and hope he can keep up. Then, when I know I’m about fifteen feet from the edge of the building where Yas and Sigge disappeared down the scaffolding, I turn and bolt.
I lock my eyes onto the gap between the buildings. Flames licking up the side of the building I’m standing on, coming for my shoes if I don’t make it. The scaffolding creaks and lurches downward just before I reach the edge.
Just before I plant my shoe on the black beam, then the other.
“Jax!” hollers Karim from behind me.
But I barely hear him.
I’m flying through the air, feet-first like Yas taught me, arms outstretched, Mama’s amethyst necklace going airborne in front of me, rising up in front of my eyes as either a nod of good luck or goodbye, depending on where my feet land.
I see the brick wall in front of me rising too fast. My feet sail down, down. My hands reach out as far as they’ll go.
My fingers find the rough brick edge, and my feet find the wall, and just like Yas taught me, I bounce myself against the wall and launch myself up and over, rolling to cool, dusty safety on the other side.
I find myself looking up at the clouds, such a dark hazy gray against the navy sky that I almost can’t see them. Black plumes of smoke billow up from Roundworld’s headquarters to my right, and I take a deep breath of cool, clean-ish air. But a sharp, shrill screech cuts through the moment like a serrated knife.
“Jax! Help!” I hear Karim shriek. I look over to see his knuckles clamped over the edge of the building, and I push myself up and dive for him.
“I’m right here!” I yell, clamping my hands around his wrists. He’s looking up at me with eyes wide, full of tears, the orange glow of the flames behind him burning my eyes. Cinders are flying through the air, singeing my face, and I shut my eyes against them.
“Please don’t let me die!” He cries up at me, “Please!”
I remember how Melinda looked at me before I got out of that Range Rover, and I grit my teeth and pull with all the strength I have in me. He comes up slowly, painfully. Every muscle in my arms and back are screaming, but I don’t let go. I can’t.
I promised.
He’s up and over, and we both collapse backward.
“Oh my god!” he screams. “We made it!” And then his huge eyes narrow and his face darkens with rage. “You’re insane, you know that?! Leaping off buildings like you’re Miles Morales, what the hell’s wrong witchoo?”
I caught that last blending of “with” and “you” at the end there. Even the bougiest of us start blending words when we’re mad, huh? I smile.
“But we made it, didn’t we?”
The helicopter spotlight is trained on us in an instant, now that we’re both over here, and that bullhorn guy is at it again.
“Surrender now, and no one has to get hurt!”
Oh, before it was I’m here to help, and now all of a sudden it’s Surrender?
“You realize we’re both getting arrested tonight, right?” asks Karim as his shoulders fall in defeat.
“Not up here we’re not,” I say, lifting my hands in the air. “If I’m getting arrested or killed tonight, it’s gonna happen in front of all those phone cameras,” I say, nodding down to the crowd, then glancing at the rooftop stairwell in the corner. I keep my eyes moving, across the way and along the ground, hoping to see a trace of white amid the smoke. But it’s all too thick. I look up at Karim, who catches my drift, nods, and we both race, hands still in the air, to the stairwell before scampering down and preparing to meet whatever fate is about to befall us.
I reach up and clutch the amethyst.
Yas
I can almost reach you!” I scream, barely recognizing my own voice. A fit of coughs overtakes my throat, and I cover my mouth and nose with my graying sleeve. All I smell is the bitter stench of burning plaster. Black smoke is all around us. I reach my free hand down toward Sigge, whose hands are clamped around the bottom rung of the ladder. Her legs dangle under her, a sheer drop of about forty feet below her.
Below both of us.
I ease my body farther forward until my fingertips touch hers. Something heaves below us both, creaking and screaming as the metal buckles. Sigge’s eyes double in size, and she snatches away her hand that just touched mine and grips the scaffolding with both hands again.
This structure won’t hold much longer.
“Sigge, listen to me!” I scream, feeling a strategy bloom in my head. We’re up much too high to make such a jump. Forty feet? That means broken ankles, broken pelvises, and maybe even worse. But if we wait… if we time this just perfectly… “Sigge, when I say jump, you have to jump, okay? Not before!”
“You want me to what?!” she shrieks. I’ve never heard her sound so panicked before.
“Please, trust me!”
Creeeeeeak!
I’m thrown forward, and even I have to use both hands to hang on to the scaffolding. I feel my feet being thrown up into the air and over my head, and instead of gripping the bar so tightly to keep myself latched onto it, I loosen my grip, and fall into gravity.
I roll forward, letting the bar rotate in my fists until I’m dangling off the structure, my feet feeling nothing beneath them. And I wait.
I look down, where Sigge is still hanging on to her own bar, looking up at me, scared to death.
“Didn’t they teach you anything about timing in gymnastics?” I smirk, trying to find a scrap of humor in this moment, since it might be either of our last. Her mouth tugs at one corner and her eyes warm just barely.
“Of course,” she huffs, descending into another fit of coughs.
“You can do this,” I urge.
Another lurch from the metal, and then I realize we’re still moving.
Slowly.
This thing is still creaking.
And we’re still moving.
I look over my shoulder and… what the hell? The building is moving away from us! The scaffolding is bending behind me! It kneels and buckles so smoothly, I would never have noticed if I hadn’t looked.
“Yas?” asks Sigge.
“Not yet,” I say, almost a whisper. I concentrate, and I calculate. If I calculate this wrong, we could both lose our lives.
“Yas??” she asks again.
Twenty feet.
“Not yet!”
Ten feet.
“Yas!!” Sigge screams.
“Now!!” I holler, swinging my feet forward and uncurling my fingers from the bar. I’m flying through the air in slow motion. This has to be one of the most chaotic moments of my parkour career. Leaping from a moving base that’s falling apart due to flames from the building it’s attached to, jumping toward a ground I can barely see through black smoke, with another person somewhere else in the smoke, jumping from the same structure, hoping I don’t run into her or land on her.
But guess what.
I’m Yasmin Emami.
And Yasmin Emami always makes the jump.
My feet connect with the pavement, and I tuck and roll into it four or five times before finding my footing again, however shakily, and stumbling back against the building across the alleyway, struggling to catch my breath. I cover my nose and mouth with part of my hijab, unable to contain my coughs.
“Sigge?” I scream through the smoke. My eyes are burning, and so is my throat, but I look through this alley for any flashes of platinum blond hair. The scaffolding, even as it clings to the side of the Roundworld building, is empty. Sigge is gone.
She’s got to be somewhere on the ground.
“Sigge!” I yell again, just as I hear it.
A cough so faint, at first I think I’ve imagined it.
“Sigge?” I ask.
And then that almost-white hair, now dingy with soot and dust from the smoke. Her black sleeve is covering her nose and mouth as she stumbles forward, and I rush to grab her and hold her as she crumples to her knees.
“Sigge, this way! The scaffolding is coming down!”
She looks up at me, her face tired, her whole body wanting to go limp in my arms. But she nods weakly and pushes herself to her feet, and follows me.
Trusts me.
I sling her arm over my shoulder and push all my energy into my legs, which are throbbing with pain now that they’ve had time to absorb the shock of jumping from such a height. But I have to keep going, for both of us now. I feel Sigge’s fingers wrap around mine and squeeze.
“Yasmin?” she asks.
“Yeah?”
The crash behind us comes suddenly—we don’t have time to say more. I glance up at the mess of black metal barreling down on us, and I grip her arm and dive forward to the ground. I roll out of the way, and our hands are ripped apart as a whoosh of black dust and soot rushes straight at my face.
I cough and rub my eyes.
“Sigge?” I call out, my voice an unrecognizable croak. I sit up halfway, sideways and awkwardly, and I try to fan away the smoke and look for her hair again. Her face. Any trace of her.
“Sigge!”
And then I hear more coughing. And then I see her hair. And then she looks up at me.
She crawls closer.
“Yas?” she asks, dragging her sleeve across her mouth. Her eyebrow is marked with a red gash, a trickle of blood beginning down past her eye.
“You’re bleeding,” I say, reaching forward instinctively.
“Yas,” she says again. She reaches me, but she doesn’t stop. She climbs over my feet first, then my legs, until her legs are over my hips, warm against me. I feel a different kind of heat flood my face, my cheeks, my whole body. I feel something trickle from my hairline down my cheek, and I wonder if it’s blood or sweat or both, and she leans down close to me and whispers, like she almost can’t believe it herself.
“We’re alive.”
She’s so close to me. Her ice-blue eyes. Her soft pink lips. Her cheeks, flushed from the heat of this place, of us.
“Yeah… we are,” I say, marveling at all of this myself.
We really made it.
She brushes her fingers against my cheek.
I reach up and loop my arms around her, pulling her down into an embrace and enjoying the warmth of her. And suddenly, somehow, although I have no idea what I’m doing, I feel free.
“There’s two of them!” yells a voice I recognize. I look up, and the rush is gone. I can feel the blood draining from my face as my eyes lock in on two cops darting straight at us. That voice. I know it.
As the cops descend on us, ripping Sigge from me, even as our eyes lock onto each other’s, I hope she understands what I want to say right now: It’s going to be okay.
And then the voice, closer this time, appears again, with a “Thought you could run forever, huh?” I’m lying on my stomach, hands pressed against my back, cold handcuffs snapped over my wrists, and I see red shoes, inches from my face. I crane my neck to look up, the smoke burning my lungs with every breath. And I see a red hat.
“You’re all so goddamn stupid,” he says. “Thought you could outsmart the law. Good luck taking down Roundworld when you’re under the jail.”
Horror sinks into me as I hear him snorting in dramatically, and I shut my eyes, prepared to feel the spit on my face, but it never comes.
“Son!” exclaims the cop who’s still straddling my back. “Don’t. That’s assault. She’ll get her consequences. Both of them will.”
Son, he’d said.
So, Lucas was in on this the whole time. A mole. I wonder if Karim knew his “speed” was secretly ratting all of us out. Or if Sigge knew, for that matter. I look over at her, lying next to me with her face pressed to the pavement. She glances up at Lucas and rolls her eyes before looking back over at me.
“I should’ve seen that coming,” she says.
Spider
This car is getting toasty.
My eyes are glued to my phone. Sweat is running down my forehead as my thumbs fly. I am deep into correspondence I shouldn’t be reading. Emails. Text records. Encrypted areas of the forum most people can’t access. My eyes fly over usernames I’ve seen floating around on posts from the Order.
PLUTO: Hey how’s Clue 2?
SAMSHUNG: Great, no way to get out.
PLUTO: Brilliant with the alarm at the precinct.
SAMSHUNG: Thx
PLUTO: They’d never expect cops to attack their own.
My eyes narrow. That fire drill at Shannon High, and the one at police HQ. No wonder “The Order” was able to set off both alarms. The police have access to both systems.
PLUTO: Got confirmation letter.
SAMSHUNG: Got it.
I find an email sent just a few hours prior entitled “Pacific Insurance Inc. confirmation of coverage” and read.
“Officer Hank, please find enclosed a detailed record of general liability insurance for Roundworld Inc. If you have any questions, I’m only an email away. Godspeed.”
I open the letter to find way too much insurance talk, and then I find a reply to this email that just says, “So they’re in?” and a reply to that email with a winking emoji.
So wait…
Why is Roundworld sending the cops their insurance information? And why the hell are the cops acting all smug about it? I’ve already pieced together that the cops are behind “The Order.” I can only hope someone out there on the Vault reads this post. I hit submit.
THE ORDER IS 12, ABORT MISSION, GO HOME
I have a feeling that’s what Jax had meant when he told JERICHO to steer clear of SLU.
A fire truck blares past, flying down the street past where Han parked, startling me back into reality, and that’s when I see it.
The flames.
The flames that are flying out the glass windows of that refurbished brick MANTLE building, which is now probably as hot as the earth’s mantle. The flames that might have… consumed my friends.
My heart is racing.
What the hell do I do? What the hell do I do? What the hell do I do?!
Shit, the building’s on fire! Do I go over there? Do I stay? I send another frantic text.
ME: WHERE ARE Y’ALL?!
Please be okay.
My eyes are welling with tears at the realization that I have no idea how long the building’s even been on fire. I’ve been so engrossed in…
And then everything clicks.
The cops set up this game to catch us—a bunch of kids who have committed to taking down Roundworld—putting us in alleys and stores and dumpsters and golf carts and other places we have no business being in, hoping to arrest us. Now they’ve put us at the top of Roundworld’s headquarters, and the Duwamish representatives are inside Roundworld’s headquarters, and the cops set it on fire to make it look like we did it.
And Roundworld agreed.
For publicity. And as a bonus, insurance money.
So they’re in?
Oh, they’re in all right.
They’re in deep.
I’m still staring up at the building, the black smoke billowing from the roof, flames licking the wall outside above the windows. Please let them be okay.
Let them all be okay.
I look down at my phone and read the words again.
So they’re in?
What can I do?
Here I am, stuck in Han’s car without a key, a wanted fugitive by now, I’m pretty sure, with evidence in my hands that could ruin people’s lives if it gets into the wrong hands.
Or… the right ones. Jax’s words come back to me.
Think I won’t enforce the rules?
And the first rule of the forum: The rules must be followed.
Would leaking personal conversations between Roundworld and 12 count as breaking the rules? Or… would I be shining a light on the rule-breakers? Would breaking the rules be justified if I’m outing the original rule-breakers?
Tae-Jin Hyung’s face pops up into my head. I remember his words about lying low and keeping our heads down and—
What would this do to us? To Umma’s restaurant and everyone who works there? They’re my family! They’ve all worked so hard to be there, living in peace, working in peace in a safe place. Am I willing to put their lives on the line for this?
