The City of Ember: The First Book of Ember

by Jeanne DuPrau

  “Lina, where were you when the big blackout came?” she asked, but she went right on without waiting for an answer. “I was at home, luckily. But it was scary, wasn’t it?”

  Lina nodded. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened that day.

  “I hate those blackouts,” Lizzie went on. “People say there’s going to be more and more of them, and that someday—” She stopped, frowned, and started again. “Anyway, nothing bad happened to me. After that, I got up and figured out a whole new way to do my hair.”

  It seemed to Lina that Lizzie was like a clock wound too tightly and running too fast. She’d always been a little this way, but today she was more so than ever. Her gaze skipped from one spot to another, her fingers twiddled with the edge of her shirt. She looked paler than usual, too. Her freckles stood out like little smudges of dirt on her nose.

  “Lizzie,” said Lina, beckoning toward the table in the corner of her room. “I want to show you—”

  But Lizzie wasn’t listening. “You’re so lucky to be a messenger, Lina,” she said. “Is it fun? I wish I could have been one. I would have been so good at it. My job is so boring.”

  Lina turned and looked at her. “Isn’t there anything you like about it?”

  Lizzie pursed her lips in a tiny smile and looked sideways at Lina. “There’s one thing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

  “Oh,” said Lina. Then you shouldn’t have mentioned it at all, she thought.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you someday,” said Lizzie. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I like my job,” Lina said. “But what I wanted to talk to you about was what I found yesterday. It’s this.”

  She lifted the box away and took up the piece of paper covering the patched-together document. Lizzie gave it a quick look. “Is it a message someone gave you? That got torn up?”

  “No, it was in our closet. Poppy was chewing on it, that’s why it’s torn up. But look at the writing on it. Isn’t it strange?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Lizzie. “You know who has beau-tiful handwriting? Myla Bone, who works with me. You should see it, it’s got curly tails on the y’s and the g’s, and fancy loops on the capital letters. Of course Flab Face hates it, he says it’s illegible. . . .”

  Lina slid the piece of paper back over the pasted-down scraps. She wondered why she had thought Lizzie would be interested in what she’d found. She’d always had fun with Lizzie. But their fun was usually with games—hide-and-seek, tag, the kinds of games where you run and climb. Lizzie never had been much interested in anything that was written on paper.

  So Lina quietly put the document back in its place, and she sat down with Lizzie on the floor. She listened and listened until Lizzie’s chatter ran down. “I’d better go,” Lizzie said. “It was fun to see you, Lina. I miss you.” She stood up. She fluffed her hair. “What was it you wanted to show me? Oh, yes—the fancy writing. Really nice. Lucky you to find it. Come and see me again soon, all right? I get so bored in that office.”

  Lina made beet soup for dinner that night, and Poppy spilled hers and made a red lake on the table. Granny stared into her bowl, stirring and stirring the soup with her spoon, but she didn’t eat. She didn’t feel quite right, she told Lina; after a while she wandered off to bed. Lina cleaned up the kitchen quickly. As soon as her chores were out of the way, she could get back to studying her document. She washed Poppy’s clothes. She sewed on the buttons that had come off her messenger jacket. She picked up the rags and sacks and boxes and bags that Granny had tossed out of the closet. And by the time she had done all this and put Poppy to bed, she still had almost half an hour to study the fragments of paper.

  She sat down at her desk and uncovered the document. With her elbows on either side of it and her chin resting in her hands, she pored over it. Though Lizzie and Captain Fleery had paid it no attention, Lina still thought this torn-up page must be important. Why else would it have been in such a cleverly fastened box? Maybe she should show it to the mayor, she thought reluctantly. She didn’t like the mayor. She didn’t trust him, either. But if this document was important to the future of the city, he was the one who should know about it. Of course, she couldn’t ask the mayor to come to her house. She pictured him puffing up the stairs, squeezing through the door, looking disapprovingly at the clutter in their house, recoiling from Poppy’s sticky hands—no, it wouldn’t do.

  But she didn’t want to take her carefully patched- together document to the Gathering Hall, either. It was just too fragile. The best thing to do, she decided, was to write the mayor a note. She settled down to do this.

  She found a fairly unspoiled half-piece of paper, and, using a plain pencil (she wasn’t going to waste her colored ones on the mayor), she wrote:

  Dear Mayor Cole,

  I have discovered a document that was in the closet. It is Instructions for something. I believe it is important because it is written in very old printing. Unfortunately it got chewed up by my sister, so it is not all there. But you can still read some bits of it, such as:

  marked with E

  find door of bo

  small steel pan

  I will show you this document if you want to see it.

  Sincerely yours,

  Lina Mayfleet, Messenger

  34 Quillium Square

  She folded the note in half and wrote “Mayor Cole” on the front. On her way to work the next morning, she took it to the Gathering Hall. No one was sitting at the guard’s desk, so Lina left the note there, placed so that the guard would see it when he arrived. Then, feeling that she had done her duty, she went off to her station.

  Several days went by. The messages Lina carried were full of worry and fear. “Do you have any extra Baby Drink? I can’t find it at the store.” “Have you heard what they’re saying about the generator?” “We can’t come tonight—Grandpa B. won’t get out of bed.”

  Every day when she got home from work, Lina asked Granny, “Did a message come for me?” But there was nothing. Maybe the mayor hadn’t gotten her note. Maybe he’d gotten it and paid no attention. After a week, Lina decided she was tired of waiting. If the mayor wasn’t interested in what she’d found, too bad for him. She was interested. She would figure it out herself.

  Twice during the week, when Poppy and Granny were both asleep, she’d had a little free time. She’d spent this time making a copy of the document, in case anything happened to the fragile original. It had taken her a long time. She used one of her few remaining pieces of paper—an old label, slightly torn, from a can of peas. The copy was as accurate as she could make it, with the missing bits between the letters carefully indicated as dashes. She had tucked it under the mattress of her bed for safekeeping.

  Now she finally had a whole free evening. Poppy and Granny were both asleep, and the apartment was tidy. Lina sat down at her table and uncovered the patched-together document. She tied back her hair so it wouldn’t keep falling in her face, and she put a piece of paper next to her—blank except for a little bit of Poppy’s scribbling—to write down what she decoded.

  She started with the title. The first word she’d already figured out. It had to be “Instructions.” The next word could be “for.” Then came “Egres”—she wasn’t sure about that. Maybe it was someone’s name. Egresman. Egreston. “Instructions for Egreston.” She decided to call it “The Instructions” for short.

  She went on to the first line. “This offic doc” probably meant “This official document.” Maybe “secur” meant “secure.” Or “security.” Then there were the words “period” and “ears” and “city.” But after that, so much was missing.

  She studied the line next to the number 1. Exp. That could be Expect or Expert or so many things. She moved on to riv. That might be part of a word like “drive” or “strive.” What could ip and ork possibly be? They were so close together, maybe they were part of one word. What ended with -ip? Whip, Lina thought. Trip.
Slip. What ended with -ork? Fork came to mind immediately. Tripfork. Slipfork. Nothing she could think of made sense.

  Maybe it wasn’t fork. What else ended in -ork? Starting at the beginning of the alphabet, Lina went through all the words that rhymed with fork. Most of them were nonsense: bork, dork, gork, hork, jork. . . . This isn’t going to work, she thought miserably. Oh . . . work! The word could be work.

  Then what would the first part be? Tripwork? Flipwork? But maybe there was a letter between the p and the w. Dipswork? Pipswork?

  Suddenly it came to her. Pipeworks. Pipeworks! That had to be it. Something in this message was about the Pipeworks!

  Lina looked back at Exp and riv. Riv! That could be river! Rapidly she ran her eyes down the page. In line 3, she saw iverb nk—that looked like riverbank. The word door jumped out at her from line 4, whole on its scrap of paper. Lina took a quick breath. A door! What if it was the one she’d wished for, the one that led to the other city? Maybe her city was real after all, and these were instructions for finding it!

  She wanted to leap from her chair and shout. The message had something to do with the river, a door, and the Pipeworks. And who did she know who knew about the Pipeworks? Doon, of course.

  She pictured his thin, serious face, and his eyes looking out searchingly from beneath his dark eyebrows. She pictured how he used to bend over his work at school, holding his pencil in a hard grip, and how, during free time, he was usually off by himself in a corner studying a moth or a worm or a taken-apart clock. That was one thing, at least, that she liked about Doon: he was curious. He paid attention to things.

  And he cared about things, too. She remembered how he’d been on Assignment Day, so furious at the mayor, so eager to trade his good job for her bad one so he could help save the city. And he’d taken Poppy inside his father’s shop on the day of the blackout, so she wouldn’t be afraid.

  Why had she stopped being friends with Doon? She vaguely recalled the incident of the light pole. It seemed silly now, and long ago. The more she thought about Doon, the more it seemed he was the very person—the only person—who might be interested in what she had found.

  She placed the plain sheet of paper over the Instructions and put the box on top. I’ll go and find Doon, she thought. Tomorrow was Thursday—their day off. She would find him tomorrow and ask for his help.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Explorations

  Doon had taken to wandering the Pipeworks alone. He would go to his assigned tunnel and do his job quickly—once you got good at using your wrenches and brushes and tubes of glue, it wasn’t hard. Most of the workers did their jobs quickly and then gathered in little groups to play cards or have salamander races or just talk and sleep.

  But Doon didn’t care about any of that. If he was going to be stuck in the Pipeworks, he would at least not waste the time he had. Since the long blackout, everything seemed more urgent than ever. Whenever the lights flickered, he was afraid the ancient generator might be shuddering to a permanent halt.

  So while the others lounged around, he headed out toward the edges of the Pipeworks to see what he could see. “Pay attention,” his father had said, and that’s what he did. He followed his map when he could, but in some places the map was unclear. There were even tunnels that didn’t show up on the map at all. To keep from getting lost, he dropped a trail of things as he walked—washers, bolts, pieces of wire, whatever he had in his tool belt—and then he picked them up on his way back.

  His father had been at least a little bit right: there were interesting things in the Pipeworks if you paid attention. Already he had found three new crawling creatures: a black beetle the size of a pinhead, a moth with furry wings, and the best of all, a creature with a soft, shiny body and a small, spiral-patterned shell on its back. Just after he found this one, while he was sitting on the floor watching in fascination as the creature crept up his arm, a couple of workers came by and saw him. They burst into laughter. “It’s bug-boy!” one of them said. “He’s collecting bugs for his lunch!”

  Enraged, Doon jumped up and shouted at them. His sudden motion made the creature fall off his arm to the ground, and Doon felt a crunch beneath his foot. The laughing workers didn’t notice—they tossed a few more taunts at him and walked on—but Doon knew instantly what he’d done. He lifted his foot and looked at the squashed mess underneath.

  Unintended consequences, he thought miserably. He was angry at his anger, the way it surged up and took over. He picked the bits of shell and goo off the sole of his boot and thought, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

  In the days that followed, Doon went farther and farther into the Pipeworks, holding on to the hope that he might find something not only interesting but important. But what he found didn’t seem important at all. Once he came upon an old pair of pliers that someone had dropped and left behind. Twice he found a coin. He discovered a supply closet that appeared to have been completely forgotten, but all it held were some boxes of plugs and washers and a rusty box containing shriveled bits of what must once have been someone’s lunch.

  He found another supply closet at the far south end of the Pipeworks—at least, he assumed that’s what it was. It was at the end of a tunnel with a rope strung across it; a sign hanging from the rope said, “Caved In. No Entry.” Doon entered anyway, ducking under the rope. He found no sign of a cave-in, but there were no lights. He groped his way forward for twenty steps or so, and there the tunnel ended in a securely locked door—he couldn’t see it, but he felt it. He retraced his steps, ducked back under the rope again, and walked on. A short distance away, he found a hatch in the ceiling of the tunnel—a square wooden panel that must lead, he thought, up into the storerooms. If he’d had something to stand on, he could have reached it and tried to open it, but it was about a foot above his upstretched hand. Probably it was locked anyhow. He wondered if the Builders had used openings like this one during the construction of the city to get more easily from one place to another.

  On days when his job was near the main tunnel, he sometimes walked along the river after he’d finished working. He stayed away from the east end, where the generator was; he didn’t want to think about the generator. Instead, he went the other way, toward the place where the river rushed out of the Pipeworks. The path grew less level at this end, and less smooth. The river here was bordered with clumps of wrinkled rock that seemed to grow out of the ground like fungus. Doon liked to sit on these clumps, running his fingers along the strange creases and crevices that must have been carved somehow by running or dripping water. In some places there were grooves that looked almost like writing.

  But as for things of importance, Doon found none. It seemed that the Pipeworks was no use after all to a person who wanted to save the city. The generator was hopeless. He would never understand electricity. He used to think he could use electricity to invent a movable light, if he studied hard enough. He took apart light bulbs; he took apart the electric outlets on the wall to see how the wires inside wound together and in the process, got a painful, vibrating jolt all through his body. But when he tried to wind wires of his own together in exactly the same way, nothing happened. It was what came through the wires that made the light, he finally understood, and he had no idea what that was.

  Now he could see only two courses of action: he could give up and do nothing, or he could start to work on a different kind of movable light.

  Doon didn’t want to give up. So on his day off one Thursday, he went to the Ember Library to look up fire.

  The library occupied an entire building on one side of Bilbollio Square. Its door was at the end of a short passage in the middle of the building. Doon went down the passage, pushed open the door, and walked in. No one was there except for the librarian, ancient Edward Pocket, who sat behind his desk writing something with a tiny pencil clutched in his gnarled hand. The library had two big rooms, one for fiction, which was stories people made up out of their imaginations, and the o
ther for fact, which was information about the real world. The walls of both rooms were lined with shelves, and on most of the shelves were hundreds of packets of pages. Each packet was held together with stout loops of string. The packets leaned against each other at angles and lay in untidy stacks. Some were thick, and some were so slim that only a clip was needed to hold them together. The pages of the oldest packets were yellowed and warped, and their edges were uneven rows of ripples.

  These were the books of Ember, written over the years by its citizens. They contained in their close-written pages much that was imagined and everything that was known.

  Edward Pocket looked up and nodded briefly at Doon, one of his most frequent visitors. Doon nodded back. He went into the fact room, to the section of shelves labeled “F.” The books were arranged by subject, but even so, it wasn’t easy to find what you wanted. A book about moths, for instance, might be under “M” for moths, or “I” for insects, or “B” for bugs. It might even be under “F” for flying things. Usually you had to browse through the entire library to make sure you’d found all the books on one subject. But since he was looking for “fire,” he thought he might as well start with “F.”

  Fire was rare in Ember. When there was a fire, it was because there had been an accident—someone had left a dishtowel too close to an electric burner on a stove, or a cord had frayed and a spark had flown out and ignited curtains. Then the citizens would rush in with buckets of water, and the fire was quickly drowned. But it was, of course, possible to start a fire on purpose. You could hold a sliver of wood to the stove burner until it burst into flame, and then for a moment it would flare brightly, giving off orange light.