“I’m fine, I’m fine!” she said. “I’m so happy to be back! But what’s going on here? And where’s Doon?”
“I’m here!” It was Doon’s voice. There he was, just coming down the stairs. She broke away from the welcoming crowd and ran over to him. He didn’t speak, just reached out an arm and grabbed her hand. The look on his face startled her. Was he angry?
“Come outside,” he said.
She followed him down a passage and out a door in the back of the hotel. There was a small concrete terrace there, bordered by a low wall. Behind the wall, the drooping branches of a dusty tree stirred in the wind. Doon sat down on the wall and pulled her down next to him.
For a moment he said nothing. When he spoke, his voice came out in a rough shout. “Where have you been?” he said. “Don’t you know how everyone has worried about you? Don’t you know everyone has thought you were dead?”
Lina shrank back. “I didn’t mean to be gone so long,” she said. “It was a mistake. I thought—”
“Nearly a month you’ve been gone!” Doon said.
“It was because of the city, Doon. I thought the city would be like those drawings I made. I thought maybe we could go there, all of us, and live there, and . . . and be happy,” she finished weakly.
“You could have told me you were going,” Doon said. “I might have wanted to go, too. Did you think of that?”
“I didn’t really think at all,” Lina said, “I just saw the chance and went. But if I had thought about it”—she frowned, remembering—“I’d probably have figured you wouldn’t want to come. Because you were too busy with that . . . that Tick.”
Doon’s face fell. “Oh,” he said. “Well, you’re right. I guess I was . . . I thought Tick might be . . .” Doon stopped, looking flustered. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, too,” said Lina. They were silent for a moment. Then Lina said, “Shall we forgive each other?”
“All right,” said Doon. He smiled.
Lina smiled back. “But what’s going on here?” she asked. “Why is everyone so upset?”
“They’ve ordered us out, Lina! They’ve told us we have to leave tomorrow morning!”
“What?” Lina could not take this in. “Who has to leave?”
“All of us! All the people of Ember!”
“And go where?”
“Out into the Empty Lands. We have to make a new life for ourselves, they said. On our own.”
Lina’s mouth dropped open. A wild confusion filled her mind. “But how can we? What would we eat? Where would we live?” Again the frightening picture rose in her mind—the people of Ember scattered like fallen birds across a vast, dry landscape. “There are wolves out there,” she said, “and bandits!”
“I know,” said Doon. “And it will be winter soon. Have you heard of winter?”
Lina shook her head. When Doon explained, her eyes widened in shock.
“All this time you’ve been gone, Lina, they’ve done terrible things to us. The first thing was that boy Torren.” He told her about the smashed tomatoes that Torren blamed on him.
“He said he saw you?” Lina said, outraged. “Why would he do that?”
Doon shrugged. “Ask him. I don’t know.” He went on to tell her what else had happened. “They’ve thrown us out of their houses! They’ve written hateful words on our walls. They’ve poisoned us with leaves!”
“But why? What did we do to them?” Lina said. The wind blew her hair forward over her shoulders. She clutched a handful of tangled strands to hold them still.
“We ate their food,” said Doon. “That was the main thing. But other things happened, too.” He told her about the riot in the plaza, and about what happened at the fountain. “Now,” he said, “they’ve threatened to use their Weapon on us if we don’t leave. So Tick says we’ll use our weapons on them.”
“Our weapons? What weapons?”
Doon sighed. For the first time, Lina noticed how thin he was. She saw the shadows beneath his eyes.
“There’s so much to tell you,” Doon said. “And we only have today.”
“But I haven’t even been home,” Lina said. “I have to see Poppy, and Mrs. Murdo. Are they still at the doctor’s? Is Poppy all right?” A scattering of dry leaves blew against her legs. The wind whipped her hair. The whole world had changed suddenly, just in the last half hour. Her throat tightened, and she felt tears threatening.
“Yes, they’re still at the doctor’s,” Doon said. “Come on, I’ll go with you. We’ll talk there.”
“Wait,” said Lina. “I brought you a present. Two presents.” She unrolled the pack she’d carried all the way from the city, took out the magnet and the magnifying glass, and handed them to Doon. “This one is a magnet,” she said. “If you put it against metal, it sticks there. I guess it isn’t very useful, but it’s interesting. The other one is for making things bigger—I mean, making them look bigger.”
“Thank you,” Doon said. He examined his presents curiously. He held the glass up and peered through it at the back of the hotel.
“Look at something small,” Lina said. “Like a leaf or a bug.”
Doon riffled among the leaves on the ground and found an ant, which he set on the palm of his hand. Holding the glass above the ant, he looked through it. “Oh!” he said. “Look! You can see its knee joints! And even . . .” He trailed off, absorbed in looking. Then he raised his eyes to Lina. “It’s like a miracle!” he said. He blew the ant from his palm and looked around until he found a beetle. “Look at this!” he cried. “You can see it chewing!” He tried a feather, and a bit of moth wing, and a blade of grass.
“This is such an amazing world,” he said finally, putting the glass and the magnet into his pocket. “I love it here, except for the troubles with people.”
Lina and Doon went through the village and up the road to the doctor’s house. It was still early morning when they got there—when they came through the door, they saw everyone at the table, eating breakfast. Mrs. Murdo was facing the door, so she saw them first. She stood up, her spoon still in her hand. She stared for a second, her eyes round, her mouth open, words trying to come out of it. Then she rushed toward Lina and wrapped her in a hug. At the same time, Poppy jumped down from the bench, dashed toward Lina, and hugged her knees. The doctor stood up and watched this reunion wide-eyed.
Torren leapt up, too, but not to hug Lina. He ran to the door and looked out, and then he cried, “Where’s Caspar? Isn’t he here, too? Where is he?” But no one paid attention to him. They were too busy fussing over Lina, asking questions and not giving her a chance to answer. “Where have you been? Are you all right? Why didn’t you tell us . . . Do you know what’s happening here?”
Poppy yelled, “Wyna, Wyna, pick me up! Pick me up!” And the doctor, thrown into a state of even more confusion than usual, murmured, “Some tea? Or . . . let’s see. Why don’t we all . . . So glad you’re . . .” And all around the edges was Torren, pulling at Lina’s sleeve, saying, “But why isn’t he here, where is he? When is he coming?” and getting no answers.
When things calmed down a little, Lina said, “Maddy will be coming soon. She stayed in town to help the roamer for a while.”
Mrs. Murdo stopped smiling and grew stern. “Lina,” she said, “how could you go off like that and not talk to me first? And just leave that careless little note, which was not, I would point out, true. Three days, you said. It’s been twenty-eight! That was a thoughtless, foolish thing to do.”
“I know,” Lina said. “I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t know I’d be gone so long.” She explained how, when she overheard Caspar, she’d thought he’d said “a day’s journey” when really he’d said “five days’ journey.” “And then,” she said, “other things happened, and . . . it took a long time.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Murdo. “And we had a long, long time to worry about you.” She picked up Lina’s pack, which Lina had dropped on the floor, and set it on the window seat. ??
?And you know what’s happened here? You know we’ve been ordered to leave tomorrow?”
“I know,” Lina said. “But I can’t believe it’s true.”
“It’s true,” said Mrs. Murdo. “It doesn’t please me a bit, but what to do about it I don’t know. Come and have some breakfast.”
Lina and Doon sat down at the table, where the others had been eating raspberries and cream. Though Lina was so thoroughly sick of travelers’ cakes that all real food should have looked good to her, she had no appetite. Her stomach was in a knot.
“I can’t eat,” she said. “I’m not hungry. I have to—Doon and I have to talk.”
“At least take an apple,” said Mrs. Murdo.
“First of the season,” the doctor added. “From up north.”
Lina took the hard red fruit, and she and Doon went outside. The heat was baking now. They went through the courtyard, where the doctor’s plant pots were mostly empty, the plants having either been put into the ground or died. The ones still there struggled in the heat, limp or brown. They crossed the road and walked down to the riverbank. Even the river was suffering in the heat—it no longer flowed deep and smooth but ran in streams between the exposed stones. Its edges were yellow-green and smelly.
They sat on the ground. Lina said, “It would take me hours to tell you everything I’ve seen. But listen, this is the main thing: people had a beautiful city, and they wrecked it.”
“On purpose?” said Doon.
“With wars. With fighting. It was horrible, Doon!” She shuddered, remembering. “That war—it sort of whispered to me. There was a moment when I could hear screams. I could see flames.”
“And there’s nothing left?”
“Almost nothing.”
“And all across the Empty Lands—are there houses?”
“Some. But they’re old and falling down. Mostly it’s fields and fields of brown grass. There’s howling animals. If we had to go out there and try to live—well, we couldn’t.”
“That’s why some people—a lot of people—want to fight.” Doon told her about Tick, and the weapons he and his warriors had gathered. He explained the plan—how they would go into the village tomorrow, refusing to leave, prepared to fight. And he told her about the Terrible Weapon the town leaders had threatened to use.
“Yes,” Lina said, “I’ve heard about the Weapon, too. Torren mentioned it one time. But what is it?”
“We don’t know,” Doon said.
“If it’s from the old times,” Lina said, “then it is so terrible that Tick’s little weapons would be like—like twigs against it. The old weapons could burn whole cities.” She clasped her arms across her stomach and bent forward. Everything inside her felt cramped, knotted up. Her hands were slick with sweat. “There can’t be war,” she said.
“But we can’t leave, either,” said Doon.
They sat watching the water struggle along between the rocks. The sun blazed down, burning the backs of their necks.
“Don’t you think,” said Doon, “that fighting would be better than just giving in? At least it’s doing something.”
“I don’t know,” said Lina. “It scares me.” She ran her finger over the glossy red skin of the apple Mrs. Murdo had given her. “I talked a lot to Maddy on my journey,” she said at last. “She’s wise, Doon. She told me how war gets started. It’s when people say, ‘You hurt me, so I’ll hurt you back.’”
“But that’s just how people are,” said Doon. “Of course when people hurt you, you want to get back at them.”
“And then they want to get back at you. And then you want to get back at them again, only worse. It goes on and on, unless someone stops it.”
“Stops it how?”
“You have to catch it soon, Maddy said. As soon as you see it starting, you have to stop it. Otherwise, it can be too late.”
“But how do you stop it?”
“You have to reverse the direction,” said Lina. “That’s what Maddy told me. She said that if someone had been brave enough, the wars might not have started in the first place.”
“But Lina!” Doon slapped his hand down on the ground next to him. “What does that mean? How do you do it?”
Lina wasn’t entirely clear about this. She took a bite of the red fruit the doctor had handed her. It looked as hard as a polished stone, but the juice that burst into her mouth was sweet. “I think it’s this,” she said. She chewed and swallowed. “Instead of getting back at the other side with something just as bad as they did to you—or something worse—you do something good. Or at least you keep yourself from doing something bad.” She took another bite of the apple. “I think that’s it. One bad thing after another leads to worse things. So you do a good thing, and that turns it around.”
Doon sighed. “That’s not very helpful,” he said. “How are we supposed to do something good for these people who have done so many bad things to us? Why would we even want to?”
“Well, that’s it,” said Lina, wiping apple juice off her chin. “You don’t want to, but you do anyway. That’s what makes it hard. Maddy said it was very hard. It’s much harder to be good than bad, she said.”
“So what do we do, then?” said Doon. His tone was bitter. “Say we’ll be happy to work without food? Say we’ll always be nice no matter what they do to us?”
“No,” said Lina. “That can’t be right.”
“Or should we just go quietly out into the Empty Lands and not bother them anymore?”
“No,” said Lina. “That can’t be right, either.” She stared at the water rippling by. She was thinking hard. “We don’t want to leave,” she said. “And we don’t want to fight. Do you think those are the only two choices?”
“What else could there be? If we don’t fight, they’ll make us leave. If we don’t leave, we’ll have to fight.”
Lina discovered a tough part in the center of the apple, surrounding some brown seeds. She picked at the seeds with her fingernail. “There must be some other way,” she said. “What if we all just sit down in front of the hotel and refuse to move? We don’t leave, but we don’t fight? They wouldn’t use their weapon on us if we weren’t fighting, would they?”
“I don’t know,” said Doon. “They might.”
“I don’t think they would,” Lina said. “They’re not bad people.”
“But we couldn’t sit there forever,” Doon said. “Sooner or later, they’d make us leave. They’d pick us all up one by one and load us onto trucks and drive us away.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t,” said Lina. “Maybe we could talk, and work something out.”
“I don’t think so,” said Doon. “Tick and his warriors would never just sit. They want to fight.”
Lina drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. Something good, she thought. What good act would turn things around?
“We could volunteer to be roamers,” she said. “A whole lot of us, so they wouldn’t have to feed us, and we could bring things back to them.”
“We don’t know how to be roamers,” said Doon. “We don’t have trucks. Or oxen. We wouldn’t know where to go.”
“We could say we’ll do all the worst jobs,” Lina said.
“But that wouldn’t be fair,” said Doon impatiently. “Why should we? That’s no good.” He stood up, slapping the dry grass from his pants. “I think it’s too late for any of that. None of it’s going to work.”
Lina stayed where she was, still thinking. She desperately wanted to find an answer, but no answer came to her. Her spirits sank, and she suddenly felt tired. “Well, then, we just have to be on the lookout,” she said. “Some chance might turn up. We have to watch for it. I don’t know what else to do.” She knew how weak and silly this sounded.
But to her surprise, Doon smiled a little. “That’s like what my father told me when I was working in the Pipeworks. ‘Pay attention,’ he said. It was a good idea then. I suppose it still is. Anyway, I guess it’s the best we can do.”
Lina drop
ped her apple core on the ground and scuffed some dirt over it, and they trudged back to the doctor’s house. Doon stayed there for lunch instead of going to the Partons’, and then he headed back to the hotel. Lina meant to spend the rest of the day thinking as hard as she could about the choice she’d have to make tomorrow. She sat on the window seat, sideways, her legs stretched out, and she tried to get her mind to produce ideas. But she kept coming up against the two walls: fight (she didn’t want to fight) or leave (she didn’t want to leave). A slow fly buzzed against the window. Wind stirred in the grape leaves outside. Think, thought Lina. Pay attention. And then she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 26
The Weapon
Morning came. Doon got up. He had to be ready for anything. So he rolled up his blankets and made a pack for all his clothes, everything he had. His father and the others did the same. Downstairs, out in front of the hotel, the people of Ember were gathering and swarming about, loud and distressed and confused. Tick roamed among them, urging courage, inspiring them to stand up for their rights, telling them the time had come for battle. His eyes flashed with a cold light. His voice rang out like the high, urgent tone of a bell. Very often, the people he spoke to seemed to catch fire from his words and be filled with the burning desire to fight.
Over half the people of Ember joined with Tick to be warriors. Some of them had wrenched the towel racks from their bathroom walls; others grabbed rocks or branches to use as weapons. They started down the road to the village, and the rest of the Emberites followed in a confused mass.