They got down from the truck and stood beside the oxen.
“A trick of the light,” said Caspar, squinting harder. He pulled his glasses from his pocket and put them on. “When we get closer, no doubt it will look different.”
“How do you plan to get closer?” Maddy asked him, and for the first time Lina saw that a few yards in front of them, the road came to an end. There was an edge of broken pavement, and beyond it a great slab of roadway slanted downward. It had stood on pillars once; you could see a few of the pillars still standing, and rods of thick wire twisting out of them. From here on, the road was a chaos of concrete, gigantic chunks leaning against each other. There was no way the truck could go on.
The sun was nearly down now, and the brilliant red of the sky was fading. Between the ruined buildings drifted a gray mist, and the wind blew more sharply. Some white birds soared high above, screaming.
“It used to be so beautiful,” said Maddy. “I’ve seen pictures of it in books.” There was a tremor in her voice. Lina looked up and saw that tears stood in her eyes. “I knew it was destroyed,” Maddy said. “But not like this.”
“What happened to it?” Lina asked.
“It was the wars,” said Maddy. “They must have been . . .” She shook her head. “They must have been terrible,” she said.
“What were they about?” Lina asked.
Maddy shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“And the people who lived here? What happened to them?”
“All killed, I suppose,” said Maddy. “Or most of them.”
Caspar was frowning at the shadowy wilderness that lay below. “In the daylight,” he said, “I’ll be able to see how to proceed.”
“Proceed!” Maddy grabbed Caspar’s arm and wrenched him around to face her. “Are you out of your mind?”
Caspar yanked his arm away. “No,” he said. “I am not.”
Maddy swept her hand out toward the city. “It’s miles and miles of buried rubble!” she cried. “Streets buried under fallen bricks and broken glass! Mountains of concrete and melted metal! Sand and earth blown over it all, and grass growing on it!”
Caspar nodded, his face grim. “Right,” he said. “A challenge. You were right about bringing this one along.” He tipped his head toward Lina. “Someone small and light, that’s what I’ll need. Going to have to do some tunneling.”
“No, Caspar,” said Maddy. “You must give up this idea. You can’t find anything there.”
“I can,” said Caspar. “I can find it, I have the numbers, I have it all worked out.” He plunged one hand into his pocket and scrabbled around and brought out a scrap of paper. He snatched his glasses off, put the paper up close to his eyes, and squinted at it. Lina took a step closer to him and peered sideways. The paper was black with scribbling, a tangle of words and numbers and cross-outs. “Forty-seven east,” muttered Caspar. “Three ninety-five west.” His eyes flicked back and forth between the paper and the dark hills before him, flicked faster and faster. “Seventy-one,” he mumbled. “It’s just a matter of . . . In the daylight . . .” He caught sight of Lina. “What are you staring at?” he said.
“Nothing,” said Lina. She felt suddenly sick and frightened. Maddy was right. Caspar was out of his mind.
The sun disappeared behind the farthest hill, and darkness fell. Maddy turned back toward the truck. “We’ll camp right here tonight,” she said. “We still have enough water in the buckets.”
They set their blankets on the side of the truck away from the wind, but Lina shivered and couldn’t sleep. After days of longing to arrive at the city, she wanted nothing now but to leave. This was a terrible place, full of angry ghosts and sad ones. When she closed her eyes, she seemed to hear their voices—shouts and screams and a dreadful sobbing—and to see flashes of fire in the smoky sky, and sheets of flame sweeping through the streets.
A wail escaped from her. She couldn’t help it, she felt so afraid and miserable. A moment later, she heard Maddy’s voice close to her ear. “Let’s talk for a while,” Maddy said.
“Okay,” said Lina. She sat up, wrapping her blanket around her. Caspar was pacing up and down on the other side of the truck, muttering to himself. “What about him?” she said.
“Don’t worry,” answered Maddy. “He’s lost in his calculations.”
A gust of wind shook the truck. Its loose fender clattered.
“I hate it here,” said Lina.
“Yes,” said Maddy. “Terrible things happened in this place. You can still feel it.”
“Were the people in those old days extremely evil?” Lina asked.
“No more than anyone,” Maddy said.
“But then why did the wars happen? To wreck your whole city—almost your whole world—it seems like something only evil people would do.”
“No, not evil, at least not at first. Just angry and scared.” Maddy was silent for a moment. Caspar’s footsteps came closer, crunching on the gravelly ground, and then receded again. Lina inched a little closer to Maddy. “It’s like this,” Maddy said at last. “Say the A people and the B people get in an argument. The A people do something that hurts the B people. The B people strike back to get even. But that just makes the A people angry all over again. They say, ‘You hurt us, so we’re going to hurt you.’ It keeps on like that. One bad thing leads to a worse bad thing, on and on.”
It was like what Torren had said when he was telling her about the Disaster. Revenge, he’d called it.
“Can’t it be stopped?” said Lina. She shifted around under her blanket, trying to find a place to sit where rocks weren’t digging into her.
“Maybe it can be stopped at the beginning,” Maddy said. “If someone sees what’s happening and is brave enough to reverse the direction.”
“Reverse the direction?”
“Yes, turn it around.”
“How would you do that?”
“You’d do something good,” said Maddy. “Or at least you’d keep yourself from doing something bad.”
“But how could you?” said Lina. “When people have been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?”
“You wouldn’t want to,” Maddy said. “That’s what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.”
Lina wondered if she was strong enough to be good. She didn’t feel strong at all right now.
“Time to sleep,” said Maddy.
Lina pulled the blankets over her head, but still she could feel the wind and hear the oxen making low, uneasy sounds. She heard Caspar still pacing, too, and muttering under his breath.
I want to go home, she thought. And for the first time, the picture that arose in her mind was not of the dark, familiar buildings of Ember but of Sparks under its bright sky. She thought of Dr. Hester’s house, and the garden blooming in the sun, and the doctor puttering with her hundred plants. She thought of Mrs. Murdo sitting in the doctor’s courtyard, basking in the warmth, and Poppy playing with a spoon beside her. Even Torren was in the picture, proudly arranging his possessions on a window ledge.
And of course there was Doon. He should have been her partner on this journey. If he were here with her, she’d feel less afraid. She missed him. Maybe when she got back to Sparks, he’d be tired of hanging around that boy named Tick and be ready to be her friend again.
CHAPTER 21
Attack and Counterattack
The morning after the trouble at the fountain, Doon awoke to a clamor rising through his window from the front of the hotel. He looked out, but he could see only the tops of people’s heads, all clustered around the front steps. He ran downstairs with his shirt still unbuttoned, flapping around him, to see what was happening.
The doors of the hotel stood open. Through them, he saw that a heap of trash had been dumped on the front steps. He went closer and looked. The pile seemed to consist of rotten vegetables and filthy rags, scattered all over with shiny green leaves and sharp twigs and long creepers pulled up by thei
r dirty roots.
Doon stared at it with the same sick feeling he’d had when he saw the black words on the hotel walls. It wasn’t so much the pile itself that made him feel sick; it was that whoever did this hated the people of Ember, and hated Doon himself in particular. This was an act of revenge.
He went outside, edging around the pile. Clary was standing on the step just below it, peering down at the leaves and branches. “Why would they bother to scatter leaves on everything?” she said. “And they’re all the same kind, too.” She picked up a sprig and looked closely at the bright green leaves, rubbing them between her fingers, sniffing them. “Strange,” she said.
But most people were too upset to pay attention to the contents of the pile. An angry buzz filled the air, and now and then one voice or another rose above the rest. “This is an outrage!” It was a clear, sharp voice—Tick’s, Doon was sure. Then a high voice: “I hate them, I hate them!” That must be Lizzie—and sure enough, there she was, standing near Tick, dunking her shoes in a bucket of water to get the dirt stains off.
After a while, Tick climbed the steps and clapped his hands. “All right, everyone!” he called. “We’ve been attacked again—and this is worse than the first time. It’s a disgusting insult, and it fills us with rage. But all we can do right now is get this mess off our doorstep. Let’s get busy and clean it up.”
Everyone did. They picked up armloads of the leafy vines and carried them away. They shoved the garbage down onto the ground and kicked it into the bushes. They brought buckets of water up from the river and sloshed them over the steps until everything was more or less clean. Tick supervised all this, calling out directions—though he didn’t do any of the actual work himself, Doon noticed. Doesn’t want to get his clothes dirty, thought Doon rather grumpily.
When the cleanup was done, people stood around and argued. Some were for marching down to the town that very minute, confronting the town leaders, and demanding that the vandals be punished. Other people said no, it wasn’t good to cause trouble, it would just make everything more unpleasant, and anyway, it wasn’t the whole village that was against them, only some of them.
“But which ones?” someone yelled. “And how do we stop them? They have to be stopped!”
“I’m tired of being blamed and punished!” cried someone else.
“I’m tired of being starved!”
“And what about winter?” someone yelled. The word had spread, and people had added this to their list of grievances.
“Are we just going to sit here and take this treatment?”
“No! No! No!”
Doon could see Tick moving through the crowd, bending to speak into the ear of one person and then another. As people listened, their eyes narrowed and their lips tightened, and they turned to Tick and nodded.
The shouting died down after a while, because people couldn’t agree on a course of action. If they didn’t go to work, they wouldn’t get any lunch. So most of them went back to their ordinary routines: they washed their hands and faces in the river, they ate what remained in their parcels for breakfast, and they headed up the road toward the village.
Doon and his father went, too, though Doon went reluctantly.
“Father,” he said, “this is the third time they’ve attacked us. Don’t you think we have to do something?”
“What do you propose to do?” his father said.
“I don’t know,” said Doon. “But we have to do something. We can’t just let ourselves be trampled, can we?”
“Son,” said Doon’s father, “I don’t know the answer. We’re in a tough situation here.” He clasped his hands behind his back and walked for a while looking down at the road. “It does seem that something is called for,” he said finally. “The trouble is that violence just leads to more violence. So I don’t know.”
Doon’s team was assigned to the cornfield that day. He and his father spent hours on their knees, yanking prickly weeds out of the ground. Doon’s arm itched. He kept having to stop and scratch it. Was a mosquito biting him? He scratched and scratched again. It felt like fifty mosquito bites, not one. He had them on his other arm, too. Both arms itched like crazy. Finally he stopped working and held his arms out in front of him. From wrist to elbow, they were carpeted with red lumps.
“Look, Father!” he cried. “I have a rash! What is it?”
“I don’t know, son,” his father said, “but I have it, too.”
The itchy rash spread over the arms and hands and faces of all the Emberites who had helped with the cleanup that morning. “What is this?” people said as they worked in the bakery and the bike shop, the brickyard and the tomato fields. They itched, they scratched, and the rash spread and oozed and itched still more.
The villagers knew what it was. “Poison oak,” they said. They explained about the oil on the leaves, how you only had to touch it to get the rash. “You must have been out scrambling around in the woods,” they said. But the Emberites had not been scrambling in the woods. They knew how they’d been poisoned. Someone had done it to them on purpose.
Fury spread among the Emberites like a fire. Those who’d heard about the poison oak raged about it to those who hadn’t, and before long everyone knew. Diggers threw down their shovels. Fruit pickers pushed the ladders to the ground and stalked out of the orchard. Someone in the bakery flung a great clump of dough at the supervisor, and someone in the egg shop hurled three eggs at the wall. The terrible itching aggravated everyone’s anger, and before long the people of Ember began to gather in the streets and in the plaza, and the gathering became a crowd, and the crowd became a mob.
Doon ran into the village with the other field workers, and he found himself in the middle of this mob. He heard Tick’s voice from somewhere nearby: “They gave us poison! What shall we give them?” When there was no response but a confused babble, the question came again, louder: “What shall we give them?”
This time an answer came: a crash, and a tinkling of shattered glass. Someone had thrown a rock through the window of the town hall. Cheers arose, and all around him Doon saw people suddenly bending over, looking for rocks to throw. More crashes. More yells.
People started snatching things from the stalls. A jar of jam came sailing overhead. Arms reached up to catch it, but it fell past them and landed a few feet from Doon, smashing open and splattering his legs with sticky red goo and splinters of glass. He saw people stuffing muffins into their pockets, and he saw Tick with his arm stretched backward, ready to throw a rock at the windows of the tower. He saw Miss Thorn running with her hands shielding her head, and the Hoover sisters backing up into the egg shop, trying to get away. He was frightened, suddenly.
At that moment, the doors of the town hall opened, and Ben Barlow strode out. His face was twisted with rage. “Stop them!” he shouted. “Stop these thieves and vandals!”
“You poisoned us!” shouted someone in the crowd.
“We’ve had enough!” shouted someone else, and threw a potato right at Ben. It hit him in the stomach, and he bent over, his mouth dropping open.
A roar came from the crowd. Tick’s voice rose above the others: “Fill your pockets!” he screamed. “Fill your pockets and run!”
There was a mad scramble, and then the Emberites pushed their way out of the plaza and raced down the streets to the river road. Doon ran, too. He saw Tick up ahead of him, sprinting fast, his shirttails flying.
Now we really are thieves and vandals, Doon thought. Was this a bad thing? Or was it exactly what the people of Sparks deserved?
That night, Tick went up and down the corridors of the hotel, knocking on doors and urging people to come to his meeting. They did come—at least a hundred of them, by Doon’s count. They gathered at the head of the road as the daylight was fading. Doon saw Chet and Gill and Allie and Elvan from his old class at the Ember school, along with people he knew from the Pipeworks, people he knew from Ember’s shops, and others. Most of them were boys and men, but there were women and
girls, too. Most were silent, but some whispered excitedly to each other. They formed a semicircle in front of Tick, who had climbed onto a tree stump. Doon saw Lizzie standing near Tick, gazing up at him wide-eyed. The moon shone behind Tick’s head; it gave a silver edge to his hair but left his face in darkness.
“All right,” Tick said. His voice was quiet, but instantly the whispering stopped. “Our time has come. They have attacked us three times now. Today we showed them a little of our anger. We made them understand that we won’t be taken advantage of anymore. They must know that if they hurt us, they will be hurt, too. We will strike back. We are warriors now.”
Murmurs of approval rumbled through the crowd. Doon, who was standing at the rear, heard several people echo Tick’s words: “Strike back, yes, we have to strike back. We are warriors.”
“We must be ready,” Tick said. “When the next confrontation comes, we won’t be as disorganized as we were today. We’ll have a plan. And we’ll be armed.”
More murmurs, and a ripple of excitement.
“How will we arm ourselves?” Tick asked. He answered the question himself. “We have what we need right here where we live,” he said. “Look in your bathrooms. You’ll find strong metal rods there, just the right length, and enough for everyone.”
People looked at each other in puzzlement. Metal rods in the bathroom? But Doon knew immediately what Tick meant: the towel racks. Take them off the wall, and you have a sturdy weapon that could do real damage—bruise soft flesh, even break hard bone.
Tick waited until the word was passed through the crowd and everyone understood about the weapons in the bathrooms. Then he said, “There are other ways to arm yourself, too. Did you bring a knife with you from Ember? Are there still slivers of glass left in the windows of your room? Have you noticed that some of the stones by the river are just the size to fit in a fist?”
Again, he waited. All around Doon, people were nodding and whispering. Doon tried to imagine what the uprising earlier that day would have been like if the rioters had been swinging steel rods and striking out with knives and broken glass. People would have been hurt; there would have been blood. But think of the hurt the villagers had inflicted on the Emberites—the pangs of hunger, the humiliation, the name calling, the terrible itchy rash. Didn’t one hurt deserve another? Wasn’t he simply being squeamish to shrink from it? He would have to strengthen himself, he thought—not just his body, but his spirit, his will. It would take a kind of strength he didn’t have yet to strike another person with the intent to harm.