“Maddy,” she said, “could there ever be another Disaster like the one that came before? Or even worse? What if every single person and every single animal was killed?”
“Don’t worry,” said Maddy. “People didn’t make life, so they can’t destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can’t touch the place life comes from. Whatever made plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again.”
Maddy turned over and tugged her blanket around her neck. “Time to sleep now,” she said. “More hard riding tomorrow.”
In the morning, they were on their way as soon as the sun rose. Lina groaned as she got on her bike again—her muscles were sore from yesterday. But she soon warmed up, and for a long time the road was flat and the riding was easy.
After an hour or so, Lina spotted something moving up ahead of them, a dot in the distance. “Look!” she called to Maddy, who was a little way behind her, and she pointed. “I think it’s a truck! Maybe a roamer!”
In ten minutes or so, they had caught up to it. The man driving the truck turned when he heard them calling. Surprise lit up his face, and he halted his oxen and jumped down.
“Greetings!” he cried. “Glad to see some travelers! Haven’t met anyone on the road for four days.”
He was a short, stocky man with a wild fuzz of black hair that stood out several inches all around his head. Pelton Moss was his name, and he was indeed a roamer, as was easy to see from the crates and barrels on his truck. All his containers were nearly empty, though. He had sold his most recent load of goods to a remote south-bay settlement. Now he was heading back in the direction of Sparks. “I’ll take you with me,” he said, “if you’ll help with my collecting on the way.”
And so for five days, Lina got to be a roamer. At every ancient abandoned town, they stopped and combed through the derelict houses. Not much was left; these houses had been picked nearly clean in the last two hundred years. But sometimes, if they looked carefully, they found things the previous roamers had overlooked, or things they had thought worthless.
Lina loved these searches. In some ways, it was like being a messenger back in Ember—she could go everywhere, look in every forgotten corner, and if she was lucky make discoveries. And she was lucky.
She found a silver locket with a picture of someone inside, though the picture was so old and stained she couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a baby. She found a small, round pane of glass with a handle. The glass made whatever you looked at appear bigger. “A magnifying glass,” said Pelton. “Nice.” She found a tiny red truck with wheels that still turned. She found a strip of leather with a buckle and two round metal pieces attached to it. It was too short to be a belt. There were words on the metal circles, but they were so worn she couldn’t read them. “That’s a dog collar,” Pelton told her. “Not very useful, but interesting.”
At a house that stood by itself far out in a field, she opened a cabinet on a back porch, where the screen was hanging in brown flaps. In the cabinet was a box that said “Monopoly” in faded letters on its lid. Inside were tiny dotted cubes and tiny bits of wood shaped like houses. “Wonderful!” Pelton exclaimed. “Extremely rare!” There was another box in the cabinet with a picture of a garden on top and a heap of oddly shaped pieces of cardboard inside. And at the back of the cabinet, in a clutter of broken dolls, torn pages from books, and little jars of dried-up paint, Lina found a bar of metal about three inches long that Pelton said was a magnet. “Put it up against the truck,” he said. “It’ll stick right on there.”
Even as she enjoyed the searching, though, Lina couldn’t help imagining how it would be for the people of Ember to come out into this empty land and try to start a town. How would they turn the hard, cracked earth into fields of crops? What would they build houses with? What would they eat while they chopped at the soil and put together their shelters? A picture rose in her mind of Ember’s four hundred people scattered across the brown fields like a flock of lost birds, scratching in the dry grass for seeds or bugs, huddling for shade beneath the few trees, trying to build shelters of sticks or straw. She shuddered and made the picture go away. It was best to keep her attention on searching.
Maddy didn’t do much searching. She didn’t care for bending over and creeping underneath things and wedging her large self into small spaces. While Lina and Pelton hunted, she walked around in the fields and the overgrown gardens behind the houses, looking for old fruit trees, wild grapevines, and the kinds of leaves, roots, nuts, and mushrooms that were all right to eat. Lina would look out the window of the house she was poking through and see Maddy wading through knee-high grass toward a gnarled old apple tree. Or she’d see her wide back in among the bushes as she picked berries. Sometimes Maddy simply sat. Lina would see her settled into an ancient lawn chair, gazing across a field or up a street, not moving at all. What was she thinking about? Lina wondered at those times. She looked so serious.
On the evening of the third day, they stopped by a wide, slow part of the river. As the sun went down, they sat on the riverbank, drinking cool tea that Pelton made with mint leaves, and they talked. Pelton told about the places he’d seen, and Maddy and Lina told about Caspar’s quest in the city, his mad study of the old songs about treasure.
“Oh, yes,” said Pelton. “I’ve heard those old rhymes all my life, and my father before me heard them, too. It’s an old verse, or a song, I think, come down from years ago and scrambled, probably, in the process. Everyone says it in a different way. Something like this.” He sang in a sweet but off-key voice:
“There’s buried treasure in the ancient city.
Remember, remember from times of old.
What’s hidden will come to light again.
It’s far more precious than diamonds and gold.
“That’s the way I heard it, from an old man who lives up in the mountains near Angel Rock. Then I heard another version from Maggie Pierce, over by Falter. She sings it like this:
“Remember the city, the city remember,
Where treasure is hidden under the ground.
The city, the city, always remember,
That’s where the treasure will be found.”
Lina stared at him. Her mouth dropped open, her eyebrows flew upward, and her heart thudded in her chest.
He laughed. “What are you looking so amazed at? Think you’re going to go find this treasure? Nobody believes those old things anymore. They’re nursery nonsense, old jingles made up to put babies to sleep.”
“Some still believe it,” said Maddy. “But it’s only those with a bit of madness in them. And a good measure of greed.”
“That’s right,” said the roamer. “I’ve known a few like that. One of ’em was sure it was in the old city of Sanazay and spent his whole life digging through the ruins, looking for it. Finally died when a chimney fell on him.”
Maddy snorted. “Such nonsense people believe,” she said.
Lina was shaking her head. She began to smile. “No, no,” she said. “No, you have it wrong.” She laughed, she couldn’t help it. “It isn’t nonsense, it’s true. I’m sure, I’m sure!” What she suddenly knew seemed so wonderful and astonishing that she leapt up and clapped her hands and laughed again.
“You’re a silly one,” said the roamer.
“I’m not silly! The city in that rhyme—it’s the city I come from!”
The roamer cast a sideways glance at Maddy. “What’s the matter with her?” he said. “Has she got a fever?”
Maddy reached up for Lina’s hand. “Calm down now,” she said. “Tell us what you’re talking about.”
So Lina explained. “Sing the first line again, the first line of the second song,” she said.
Pelton eyed her strangely, but he sang: “Remember the city, the city remember, where treasure is hidden under the ground.”
“That first line,” said Lina. “I’m sure it’s meant to be ‘Remember the city,
the city of Ember.’ That’s the name of my home. It was under the ground.”
“Not sure I believe that,” said Pelton.
“I think it’s true,” said Maddy. “They all say it, all the ones who came from there.”
“And what about the treasure, then?” Pelton asked.
“It was us!” cried Lina. “We were the treasure, the people of Ember!” She felt a swell of love all of a sudden for her old city. “Sing that first song again, the last lines of it.”
Pelton sang: “What’s hidden will come to light again. It’s far more precious than diamonds and gold.”
“You see?” said Lina. “Come to light! We came up into the light! And we were more precious than diamonds and gold because they thought we might be the last people—the only ones left.”
The three of them gazed at each other in wonder. “I believe she’s right,” said Maddy at last.
“Maybe so,” said Pelton. He stared curiously at Lina. “You lived underground?”
So then for the rest of the evening, Lina told about the city of Ember, and how she had been a messenger there, and how she and Doon had found the way out. It was late when they finally lay down for the night. Lina couldn’t sleep at first, thinking of the old songs and what they meant. Someone, long ago, had hoped that at least a few people would survive and had wanted them to remember her city and the treasure it held, the treasure that was most valuable of all—herself, her family, and all the generations of people who had lived in that secret place, their purpose, though they didn’t know it, to make sure that human beings did not vanish from the world, no matter what happened above.
The Third Town Meeting
After the rampage in the plaza, the three town leaders went up to the tower room for an urgent meeting. They flopped into their chairs and sat without speaking for a few moments, staring down at the mess below.
“What do we do now?” said Wilmer.
Ben curled both hands into fists and set them on the table in front of him. “The cavepeople,” he said, “must leave.”
“Leave?” said Mary.
“Leave,” said Ben. “They must go away from here.”
“But they haven’t been here six months yet,” said Wilmer.
“They must go now,” said Ben. “It’s better for them anyhow, to leave before winter really sets in.”
“They won’t want to leave,” said Wilmer, tugging anxiously at a strand of his hair. “I think they understand now that there’s nowhere for them to go.”
“They must go,” said Ben. “We can never feel safe while they are here. If they refuse to go, we will force them to. We have the means to do it.”
There was a long silence. Ben and Mary glared at each other. Wilmer’s eyes darted anxiously between them.
At last, Mary set the palms of her hands on the table and took a long breath. “You are speaking of the Weapon,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Ben. “We have it for situations of dire emergency. I think we have an emergency now.”
“We’ve never used it before,” said Wilmer. “We don’t even know how to work it.”
“I think it is unwise to use it,” said Mary. “We have always tried our best not to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors. Using the Weapon would be the first step down the path they took.”
“We may not actually have to use the Weapon,” said Ben. “All we have to do is threaten them with it. Just the sight of it will make them do what we say—that is, leave.”
“What you are proposing,” said Mary, “is sending four hundred people to their deaths.”
“Not necessarily,” said Ben. “The village of Sparks started with almost nothing, why shouldn’t they?”
“It’s not true that we started with nothing. The founders of Sparks came here from the old cities, in a truck loaded with enough food and supplies to keep them going for months. These people have nothing at all.”
“We will send a truck with them, then,” said Ben. “With barrels of water, some food, and some basic supplies.”
“That would last them about a week,” said Mary. “Besides, they have no skills. They haven’t had time to learn them.”
Ben sighed impatiently. “Are we supposed to subject our own people to hardship and danger because of a bunch of refugees from a cave? Isn’t it our job to protect our own people?”
“But if they rebel against this order,” said Wilmer, “then what?”
“I thought I had made that clear,” said Ben. “We use force. It is our only option.” He pondered for a moment, frowning into the air above Wilmer’s head. “We’ll put the Weapon on a truck and take it to the hotel. If they put up any resistance, it’ll be right there, ready to use.” He thumped a fist on the table. “I say we give them a day to prepare. The day after tomorrow they will leave Sparks. All of them. For good. Shall we vote on it?”
They nodded.
“I vote yes,” said Ben. “They must leave.”
“I vote no,” said Mary.
Wilmer stared down at his hands. He swallowed. He took a shaky breath. “I . . . ,” he said. “I vote . . . I vote yes.”
So it was decided. They would make the announcement that very night, calling the people of Ember together after they were through with work and before they went back to the hotel. Ben would be the one to tell them. He would make it clear that the decision was final.
CHAPTER 23
Getting Ready for War
The announcement shocked the people of Ember. That evening, they swarmed through the halls of the Pioneer Hotel in an uproar. People wept and shouted and moaned. In the lobby, Doon encountered a group of people embroiled in a huge argument.
“It’s the fault of that Hassler boy,” shouted someone. “He was the one who started the riot. He was egging people on.”
“No! He stood up for us! He gave them what they deserved!” cried someone else.
“He’s a troublemaker!”
“He’s a hero!”
Doon started up the stairs. Halfway up, he passed Lizzie. Her face was flushed with excitement. She grabbed his arm. “He won’t let them kick us out,” she said, “will he?”
“Will who?” said Doon.
“Tick. I’m sure he’ll save us. He’s so brave, isn’t he? He’ll make them change their minds.” She hurried on down the stairs.
It was many hours before people went to sleep that night. The noise in the hallways went on and on, as some people wailed that they were all going to die, and others vowed to fight, and others gathered up their belongings and stuffed them into sacks. Sadge was so frightened by what was happening that he curled up in the corner with his blanket over his head. But Doon and his father and Edward Pocket sat talking for a long time.
“I don’t see how we could make a town from nothing out in the Empty Lands,” said Doon. “I don’t believe they ever thought we could. We’d starve trying to do it. We can’t go—they can’t make us.”
His father, who sat leaning against the wall with his knees up, shook his head sadly. “I don’t know,” he said. “This Weapon they have—they could use that to force us out.”
“But what could it be?” Doon said. “Just one weapon? I don’t understand it.”
“To be effective,” said Edward Pocket in his most learned tone, “a weapon must come into contact with the person or persons it is used against. The question is, how can one weapon be effective against four hundred people? My guess is that it’s something very large that could be made to fall on us and crush us.”
“But where could they hide it, if it’s that large?” asked Doon. “It would have to be as big as a mountain.”
“It could be an animal,” said Doon’s father. “They might have it in a cage in the basement of the town hall. Something very fierce that they would let loose on us.”
“Or it might be something like the poison oak, only worse,” said Doon. “Some sort of poison that they could spray at us.”
His father nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” h
e said. “That could be it.”
“But Father,” said Doon, “we have to fight them, don’t you think? No matter what the Weapon is. We can’t just leave. It’s so unfair!”
Edward Pocket, who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, scrambled to his feet. He clenched both fists and raised them as if ready to pound someone. “I’m not leaving!” he shouted. “Let them try and make me! I’ll chain my leg to their big old tree!”
From under his blanket, Sadge moaned.
“Besides,” Edward went on, “I have work to do here. They need me. They need all of us!” He sat down again. “Probably tomorrow they’ll change their minds.”
“I don’t think so,” said Doon’s father. “That Ben sounded serious to me.”
“So what do we do, then, Father?” asked Doon. “We fight, don’t we?”
Doon’s father sighed. He stretched his long legs out in front of him and stared down at his knees. “Think about what it would mean to fight,” he said. “Say we barricade ourselves here in the hotel and refuse to leave. They come at us with their Weapon, whatever it is. Some of us are hurt, some die. We go out to meet them with whatever weapons we can find—sticks, maybe, or pieces of broken glass. We battle each other.” He ran his hand across his head and sighed again. “Maybe they set fire to the hotel. Maybe we march into the village and steal food from them and they come after us and beat us. We beat them back. In the end, maybe we damage them so badly that they’re too weak to make us leave. What do we have? Friends and neighbors and families dead. A place half destroyed, and those left in it full of hatred for us. And we ourselves will have to live with the memory of the terrible things we have done.”
The People of Sparks Page 17