“Sleeping on the floor!” The voice came from somewhere behind Doon. Its tone was somewhere between outrage and amused disbelief. Doon turned around to see whose it was. In the middle of the crowd he spotted a tall boy, a young man really, who seemed to be standing up on something—maybe a rock or tree stump—so he could look out over people’s heads. He was handsome in a sharp-edged way. His jaw was square-cornered. His shoulders were straight as a board. His dark hair was combed back from his face and slicked down, so his head looked neat and round and hard, and his eyes were as pale as bits of sky.
Doon recognized this boy, though he didn’t know him—his name was Mick, or Trick, or Mack, or something like that.
“On the floor, yes,” said Ben. “But we’ll give you as many blankets as we can.”
The boy’s sharp voice came again, rising above the others. “One more question, sir: What about food?”
The question rippled through the crowd: Yes, food. What will we eat?
Ben raised his voice. “Please listen!” he shouted. “Listen!” All faces turned toward him again. Doon could see that Ben’s eyes were fixed on the boy with the sharp voice. Ben had the look of a teacher speaking to a slightly unruly class. “Eating will work this way,” he said. “You will be assigned to households in the village—four or five people to each house. At noontime, you’ll go there for your main meal.” He paused and frowned. “As for breakfast and dinner—your lunchtime family will give you food to take away with you, some to eat in the evening, and some to save for the next morning. They will be as generous as they can. But remember—we do not have an abundance of extra food. Your arrival means less for everyone.” He gazed at the crowd for a moment and took a breath. “Is that clear?” he said. “Any questions?”
No one spoke for a moment, and then the tall boy said, “No, sir. Lead on.”
So Ben led the way into the lobby of the ancient Pioneer Hotel. Doon and his father stayed close together, stepping carefully. It was hard to see. The only light came from the doorway behind them and from a hole in a great dirt-encrusted glass dome three stories above their heads. The floor was littered with chunks of fallen plaster and gritty with dirt that had blown in over the years.
“This place needs work,” Doon whispered to his father.
His father brushed a spiderweb away from his face. “Yes,” he said. “But we’re lucky to be here. We could be sleeping on the ground.”
Ben led them down a hall to the left, to a vast room with high windows, where dusty sunshine slanted across the broken tiles of the floor. “This was the dining room,” Ben called out. Doon saw only a few chairs, lying on their sides, most of them with a leg broken or missing.
Beyond the dining room was a room even more immense, with a raised platform at one end, a high ceiling, and a wooden floor. “The ballroom,” Ben said. “In earlier years, before the Disaster, musicians sat up there on the stage. People danced out here.” At the great high windows hung tatters of faded rose-colored cloth that had been curtains years ago.
“Smells moldy in here.” It was that boy again. His clear, sharp voice carried over other voices even though it wasn’t much louder. “Reminds me of home.”
People laughed. It was true—the smell of mold was common in the underground city of Ember. There was a bit of comfort in it.
Doon suddenly remembered the name of this tall boy who kept speaking out. It was Tick—Tick Hassler. In Ember, Doon recalled, Tick had been a hauler. He had pulled carts full of produce from the greenhouses to the stores, and garbage from the stores out to the trash heaps. Doon hadn’t known him then, but he remembered seeing him, pulling his loaded cart with his whole long body slanted forward and a fierce grin of effort on his face. He’d pulled his carts faster than anyone else.
Ben led them to the stairs, and they climbed to the floors above. Long, dim corridors lined with doors stretched the length of the building. Some of the doors were open. Doon looked through them as he passed. All the rooms were more or less the same: windows across one wall, a stained and faded carpet, a couple of broken lamps lying on the floor. A few of the rooms had beds, and several had other furniture—chests with their drawers hanging crookedly out, end tables, a chair or two. He stepped into some of the rooms and found that they had bathrooms as well, with rust-stained sinks and bathtubs that were homes to spiders.
For the next couple of hours, people swarmed through the corridors and up and down the stairs, calling to each other as they chose their rooms and decided who to share them with. People grouped together, chose a room, then changed their minds and teamed up with another group. Shouts rang through the halls.
“Jake! Down here!”
“No, this one is better, it has a chair!”
“Mama! Where are you?”
“This room’s full! No more people!”
Doon heard Tick’s voice ringing out over the others now and then. He wondered which room he was choosing, and who he was choosing to live with.
Finally everyone was settled. Doon and his father chose a room on the second floor, room 215, along with two other people. One was Edward Pocket, who had been Ember’s librarian. He was a friend of Doon’s, in a way. He was old and often crabby, but he liked Doon, who had been a frequent visitor to the library. The other was Sadge Merrall, the man who had tried to venture out into the Unknown Regions beyond the city of Ember. For a while after that experience, he’d gone out of his mind with fright and raved in Harken Square about monsters and doom. He’d recovered somewhat since then. In spite of his terror, he’d managed to climb into one of the boats that took people out of the city to the new world. But he was still a fearful, trembling sort of person. Nearly everything about this unfamiliar place scared him. He refused to go near the window of their new room. “Something might come in,” he said. “There are things here that fly.”
The four of them set to work fixing up the room. It was full of cobwebs, two of its three windows were broken, and bits of dry leaves and splinters of glass littered the carpet. It also had a dresser with three drawers, a padded armchair with a sunken seat, and two end tables with lamps.
They took their socks off and used them as dust rags to sweep away the cobwebs. They picked up the leaves and glass and tossed them out the windows. They put the lamps out in the hall—they were useless, of course, since there was no electricity—and they lined up the dresser and end tables in the middle of the room to make a sort of wall dividing the space in two. There was enough room for Doon and his father to spread their blankets on the floor on one side, and Sadge to spread his on the other. Edward Pocket, who was very short, decided to spread his blanket on the floor of the large closet, which had a sliding door. He said he didn’t mind being slightly cramped; he liked the privacy.
That night, Doon didn’t sleep much. He lay on his folded blankets and stared up through the window at the dark sky. His mind teemed with possibilities—so much to do, so much to learn! He felt suddenly older and stronger, though it had been less than a week since he’d left Ember. But he was a new person in this new world. He would do new things and be friends with new people. Maybe, he thought, remembering the voice that had stood out above the others that day, he’d be friends with Tick.
CHAPTER 6
Breakfast with Disaster
Lina’s first morning in the doctor’s house did not go well. Poppy was still sleeping when she awakened, and so was Mrs. Murdo, so she got up quietly, put on the same pricker-stuck clothes she’d been wearing the day before, and went down the stairs. The doctor was standing by the table in what must have been her nightgown—a patched brown sack that hung to her knees. The hair at the back of her head was sticking up. She was leafing through a big book that lay on the table.
“Oh!” said the doctor, seeing Lina. “You’re up. I was just looking for . . . I was trying to find . . . Well. I suppose it’s time for breakfast.”
The doctor’s kitchen looked like a complete mess to Lina. In Ember, the kitchens had been spare, stocked
with only what was needed—some shelves, an electric stove, a refrigerator. But in Dr. Hester’s kitchen there were a thousand things. Wide wooden counters ran along two sides, and on the counters was a jumble of jugs and pans and tubs and pitchers, big spoons and knives and scoops, and jars and bottles full of things that looked like pebbles and brown powder and tiny white teeth. There were baskets piled with vegetables Lina had never seen before. In the corner squatted a bulging black iron box. She thought it might be a cabinet, since there was a door in its front.
“We’ll see if we have any eggs this morning,” said Dr. Hester. “That would be a start.”
Torren appeared suddenly from the other room. “Eggs!” he cried. “I want one!”
Eggs? Lina didn’t know what that meant. She followed the doctor and Torren through a door that led outside. Beyond the door was a place like an open-air version of the Ember greenhouses, only the plants growing here were far bigger and wilder, curling and twining and shooting upward with tremendous energy. Lina recognized some of them: bean vines climbed up frames of netting, tomato vines grew on wooden towers, chard and kale plants spurted up like big green fountains.
In among the rows of plants, some fat, fluffed-up, two-legged creatures of the kind she’d seen on her way into town yesterday waddled along, poking at the ground with a sharp thing like a tooth that stuck out from their faces.
“What are those?” asked Lina.
“Chickens,” said the doctor. “We’ll check their nests and see if they’ve left us anything.” She bent down and went through the door of a wooden hut in the back of the garden, and when she came out she had spiderwebs in her hair and a white ball in her hand—not a round ball, but one that looked as if it had been stretched sideways. “Just one today,” she said.
“I want it!” cried Torren.
“No,” said the doctor. “You’ve had plenty of eggs. This one is for our guest.” She handed the egg to Lina, who took it gingerly. It was smooth and warm. She had no idea what it was. It felt more like a stone than food. Was it some sort of large bean? Or a fruit with a hard white peel?
“Thank you,” she said doubtfully.
“See, she doesn’t even want it!” Torren said. “She doesn’t even know what it is!” He gave her a hard shove, making her stagger sideways.
“Quit that!” cried Lina. “You almost pushed me over!”
“Torren—” said the doctor, stretching out a hand. But Torren ignored her.
“I’ll push you again,” he said, and he did, harder.
Lina stumbled backward and caught herself just in time to keep from falling into the cabbage bed. She felt a flash of fury. She raised her arm and threw the egg at Torren, and it hit him on the shoulder. But instead of bouncing off, it broke open, and a slimy yellow mess dripped down his shirt.
“Now look what you’ve done!” Torren screamed. “It’s ruined!” He put his head down as if to run at Lina and butt her, but the doctor grabbed his arm.
“Stop this,” she said.
Lina was horrified. Disgusted, too. That yellow goop was something people ate? She was glad she didn’t have to. But she felt stupid for what she’d done. “I’m sorry I wrecked the egg,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was.”
“You wrecked my shirt, too!” shouted Torren, wriggling in the doctor’s grasp.
“But you pushed me,” Lina said.
“Well, yes,” said the doctor in a weary voice. “That’s how it goes, doesn’t it? Someone pushes, someone pushes back. Pretty soon everything’s ruined.”
“Everything?” said Lina. “But can’t his shirt be washed?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” the doctor said. “I didn’t mean that. Never mind.” She let go of Torren. “I guess we’ll have bread and apricots for breakfast.”
Mrs. Murdo had come downstairs now, leaving the still-sleeping Poppy in bed. They all had breakfast together. Lina ate five apricots. She loved them for their taste and for the feel of them, too—their rosy-orange skins were velvety, like a baby’s cheek. She also liked the bread, which was toasted and crunchy, and the jam, which was dark purple and sweet. Mrs. Murdo kept saying, “My, this is tasty,” and asking questions about what bread was made of, and what a blackberry looked like, and why apricots had a sort of wooden rock in the middle. Dr. Hester seemed a bit flummoxed by these questions, but she did her best to explain. She was nice, Lina decided, but distracted. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere. She didn’t notice that Torren was putting all his apricot pits into his pocket, for instance—or maybe she didn’t care.
When breakfast was over, Torren went up to the loft and came back down carrying a bulging bag. “These are my things,” he said loudly. “I don’t want anyone touching them.” He knelt down and opened the doors of the cabinet under the window seat and thrust the bag inside. “Caspar gave them to me, and anyone who touches them gets in big trouble.” He closed the cabinet doors and glared at Lina. What an awful boy, Lina thought. How could nice Dr. Hester have such a horrid son?
Lina had thought she’d go back to the plaza and find Doon right after breakfast. But she changed her mind when she went upstairs to waken her little sister. Poppy seemed so sick that Lina was frightened. She didn’t want to leave her. She brought her downstairs, and all that morning, Poppy lay on the couch, sometimes sleeping, sometimes wailing, sometimes just lying much too still with her mouth open and her breath coming in short gasps. Lina and Mrs. Murdo sat on either side of her, putting cool cloths on her forehead and trying to get her to drink the water and the medicine the doctor provided. “I don’t know what’s causing this child’s fever,” the doctor said. “All I can do is try to bring it down.”
After all the walking of the days before, Lina was glad to sit still. She settled into a corner of the couch, her legs tucked under her, and watched the doctor dither about. She seemed to have a hundred things to do and a hundred things on her mind. She’d stand for a second staring into the air, murmuring to herself, “Now. All right. First I must look up . . . ,” and then dart over to her enormous book and shuffle through its pages. After a second or two, she’d suddenly set the book down and hurry off to the kitchen, where she would take a bottle of liquid or jar of powder down from a shelf and measure some of it into a pot. Or she’d dash out to the garden and come back with an armload of onions. Or she’d vanish out the back door and appear again with a sheaf of dried stems or leaves. It was hard to tell what she was doing, or if she was really accomplishing anything at all. Every now and then she would come back to Poppy and spoon some medicine into her mouth or put a cold, damp cloth on her forehead.
“What is that enormous book?” Lina asked her.
“Oh!” said the doctor. She always seemed a little startled to be spoken to. “Well, it’s about medicine. A lot of it is useless, though.” She picked up the book from the floor and riffled its pages. “You look up ‘infection’ and it says, ‘Prescribe antibiotics.’ What are antibiotics? Or you look up ‘fever’ and it says, ‘Give aspirin.’ Aspirin is some kind of painkiller, I think, but we don’t have it.”
“We had aspirin in Ember,” said Mrs. Murdo, rather proudly. “Although I believe it had nearly run out by the end.”
“Is that so,” said the doctor. “Well, what we have is plants. Herbs, roots, funguses, that sort of thing. I have a couple of old books that tell about which ones to use. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.” She ran a hand through her short, wiry hair, making it poke out on one side. “So much to know,” she said, “and so much to do . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I suppose your son is a help to you,” said Mrs. Murdo.
“My son?”
“The boy, Torren.”
“Oh,” said Dr. Hester. “He’s not my son.”
“He’s not?” said Lina.
“No, no,” the doctor said. “Torren and his brother, Caspar—they’re my sister’s boys. They live with me because their parents were killed in an avalanche years ago. They were in the mountains, on an ice-gat
hering trip.”
“And the boy has no other relatives?” asked Mrs. Murdo.
“He has an uncle,” said the doctor. “But the uncle didn’t want the trouble of bringing up the boys. He offered to have this house built for me if I’d take them on.” The doctor shrugged. “So I did.”
“What is an avalanche?” Lina asked. “What are mountains?”
“Lina,” said Mrs. Murdo. “It’s not polite to ask too many questions.”
“I don’t mind,” the doctor said. “I forgot that you wouldn’t know these things. You really lived underground?”
“Yes,” said Lina.
Dr. Hester scrunched her gray eyebrows together. “But why would there be a city underground?”
Lina said she didn’t know. All she knew was what was in the notebook she and Doon had found on their way out. It was a journal kept by one of the first inhabitants of Ember, who told of the fifty couples brought in from the outside world, each with two babies to raise in the underground city. “They thought there was some danger,” Lina said. “They made Ember as a place to keep people safe.”
“It was that long ago, then,” said the doctor. “Before the Disaster.”
“I don’t know,” said Lina. “I guess so. What disaster?”
“The Disaster that just about wiped out the human race,” said Dr. Hester. “I’ll tell you about it sometime, but not right now. I have to go and see to Burt Webb’s infected finger.”
“Can I ask one more question?” said Lina.
The doctor nodded.
“Why is this place called Sparks?”
“Oh,” said the doctor, smiling a little. “It was the People of the Last Truck who gave it that name—our twenty-two founders. They were among the very few people who survived the Disaster. For a while they found food by driving around from one place to another in the old towns, using cars and trucks that still had a sort of energy-making stuff called gasleen—‘gas’ for short.”