Doon agreed. Then he took a piece of paper from his pocket. “I’ve made a list of things we need to take with us,” he said. He handed the paper to Lina. She read through it. The list was long: warm clothes, a blanket, candles, matches, dried food, bottles for water. . . . Lina read on.
“You’ll need a pack you can carry on your back,” Doon said. “Can you make one?”
“I guess so,” Lina said.
“We’ll meet in three days,” Doon said. “Where the river road goes out into the fields, at the north end of town.”
“All right,” Lina said. She saw in Doon the determination he’d had on that last day of school in Ember, when everything began, when he’d thrown down his job assignment and outraged the mayor, when he’d shouted out that the city was headed for disaster unless something was done. He wasn’t shouting now. But he had that same fierce look in his eyes.
At that moment, the door opened, and Edward Pocket came in. “Aha,” he said. “Do I have two helpers this morning instead of only one?”
Doon said, “No, I just had to talk to Lina for a minute; she’s going.”
“Don’t you want to see my latest find first?” Edward said. He rummaged through a heap of books near the door and brought out one with a bent purple cover. “I read this yesterday,” he said. “It’s one of the strangest yet.” He showed them the title: Famous Fairy Tales. “I read the whole thing,” Edward said, “but I’m still not sure what a fairy is. Some sort of combination of a person and an insect, I think. The strangest things happen in these stories.”
“Like what?” Lina asked, peering at the pages of the book as Edward flipped through it. There were pictures, and if she hadn’t been in the middle of such an important conversation with Doon, she would have liked to look at them.
“Oh,” said Edward, “mostly terrible things. People turn into frogs, or go to sleep for a thousand years, or fight with huge lizards. I doubt that these things are true. But even if they are, everything almost always turns out quite well. Nearly all the stories have the same last sentence: ‘They lived happily ever after.’ Of course, that can’t be true, either.”
“It can’t?” Lina said. It sounded lovely to her: happily ever after.
Doon was jiggling a foot impatiently.
“Of course not,” said Edward, “unless this world we’re in now works in a whole different way from the one where we used to live.”
“Lina,” said Doon. “I’ll walk out with you.”
“May I borrow that book sometime?” Lina asked Edward. He said of course she could, and she thanked him and went outside with Doon.
“So we’ll meet in three days,” Doon said once they were several steps away from the door. “We’ll go early, really early, before anyone is up. Can you be there just before sunrise?”
“I’ll be there,” Lina said. It will be all right, she told herself. We’ll be gone only a few days. It will be fine.
It was easy to get Maddy to come help Mrs. Murdo. When Lina found her, she was by the riverbank, making her way slowly along, head down. Maddy was the kind of person who seems scary at first. She was big, and she didn’t smile much, and she wasn’t in the least chatty. But Lina had learned that there was kindness behind Maddy’s stern appearance, so she approached her now without hesitation.
Maddy was wearing a green cape that made her look even larger than she was. Her wild swirl of red-brown hair fell in tangles on either side of her face. She glanced up when she heard Lina coming, nodded, and went back to her task.
“I’m gathering round lettuce,” she said when Lina asked what she was doing. She showed Lina a basket full of small round leaves. “It’s good for you, and it doesn’t taste too bad.”
When Lina explained about needing a change and asked Maddy if she’d trade places with her for a few days, Maddy said right away that she would. “There isn’t much going on here except building right now,” she said. “And building is not my specialty.” So they arranged it: in three days, Maddy and Lina would change places.
Persuading Mrs. Murdo was a little harder. She didn’t understand why Lina would choose this difficult time to go away.
“But it’s because it’s a difficult time,” Lina said, following after Mrs. Murdo as she went from one task to another—poking the fire, sweeping dirt out the door, wringing out clothes that had been soaking in a bucket. “I need a break from it. And Maddy needs a change, too. She’ll be just as much of a help as me. More, even.”
“Maddy is a capable person, it’s true,” Mrs. Murdo conceded, scraping candle drippings from the table.
“It’s only for a few days,” said Lina. She gave Mrs. Murdo her best pleading look, although there was still a little bit of her that wished to be forbidden, so she wouldn’t have to go.
But Mrs. Murdo gave in. So there would be no backing out, and Lina began to get ready. For the next three days, she spent a lot of time trying to do things without being noticed. She said she was tired and went to her room to work on sewing sacks together to make a backpack. She kept a sharp eye out for everyone’s comings and goings, and when no one was around, she took candles and matches from the cupboard. She took ten matches, hoping that Mrs. Murdo, who was very good at keeping the fire going, wouldn’t notice.
Two nights before they were to leave, she wrote the note for Mrs. Murdo:
Doon and I have gone back to Ember to find
something important. We have a good plan,
don’t worry. We’ll be back in just a few days.
Love, Lina
She folded the note up small and buried it in the middle of a tub of dried beans in the kitchen. Mrs. Murdo used these beans for soup, but she wasn’t likely to use half the tub before Lina and Doon got back.
After that, she had one more night of restless, wakeful sleep, and in the morning, loaded with a heavy backpack full of all the things on Doon’s list, she crept out of the house in the early darkness, long before anyone else was stirring. She paid a brief visit to the stinky, spidery outhouse in the backyard (in Ember, toilets were inside the house, right down the hall from the bedroom), and then she headed up the road. Stars shone in the black sky, and the ground, stiff with frost, crunched under her feet. When she got to the far end of the river road, she saw a shadowy figure. It was Doon, waiting for her. She hurried up to him. He had a pack on his back, and he was wearing his frayed green jacket and dark pants, but there was a dash of brightness about him, too—an orange scarf wrapped around his neck. Somehow it made him look ready for adventure.
“There you are,” Doon whispered, even though there was no one anywhere around.
Lina whispered, too. “I’m here. I’m ready, I think.”
“All right,” said Doon. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 5
________________________
Across the Hills
They set out, walking side by side. The starlight was enough to see by, at least while they were still on the road. No moon shone. The moon had disappeared in the way it did every now and then; Lina wasn’t sure why. It grew from a silver sliver to a silver circle and shrank back into a sliver and disappeared, and it did this over and over. When she asked Doctor Hester why, she said, “It’s because of the earth’s shadow,” but the doctor was in a tearing hurry that day, rushing off to help someone who’d cut himself with his axe, and that was all she said before dashing out the door.
The night was utterly still except for their footsteps on the road. No birds sang at this hour. On the left, the black bare branches of the trees stood against the slightly lighter black of the sky. On the right, the fields stretched away, scattered with the dead tomato vines that had been left to lie where they fell after the harvest.
For a while, Lina and Doon didn’t speak. They walked quickly and steadily until they were beyond the last fields and the last outlying houses of the village. Lina could feel the cold air traveling down into her chest with each breath. The tip of her nose was cold, and the tops of her ears. She pulled the kn
itted hat she was wearing farther down. It was thrilling to be out this early, starting an adventure, striding along through the darkness with Doon. But still a sense of uneasiness stayed with her, like something growling softly in the pit of her stomach.
After a while, the sky behind the distant mountains faded to a lighter shade of black, and then to a shade lighter still, and then to a beautiful deep blue-green.
“The sun’s coming up,” Lina said.
They watched as they walked. A brightness appeared above the line of the hills, first a dim orange and then a blazing yellow, until at last the gold eye of the sun sailed up from wherever it had been and the whole world filled with light.
Lina took a long deep breath. “It’s so beautiful, isn’t it, Doon? Even in winter, when everything is brown and gray, this place is still beautiful.”
Doon gazed out across the grassy meadow to where the trees began at its farthest edge. “It’s beautiful,” he said, “but hard to live in. Are things so hard everywhere, I wonder? Maybe there are places in the world where life is easier.”
“Where people live happily ever after,” Lina said, thinking of the book Edward had shown them. Maybe this quest they were on would bring happily-ever-after to Sparks.
Doon shaded his eyes with one hand and squinted upward. “We need to go northeast now,” he said, “toward the mountains. Remember how we came across the squash fields when we arrived here? They’re over that way.”
The going was harder after they left the road. Their feet turned on the rough clumps of earth, and mud clung to their shoes. Soon the way began to slope upward, and a while later they came to the top of the first ridge of hills.
Lina stopped here and turned around. “This is where we first saw the town,” she said. “Remember?”
They gazed down at it. It looked very different now from when they’d seen it that first time, nine months ago. Then a carpet of green had covered the hills, and the little buildings had looked peaceful beside their thriving fields. Now the fields were bare, and a haze of smoke hung in the air. The houses and shops had a huddled look, as if they were crowding together to keep warm.
They walked for a long time, perhaps an hour, perhaps more. Soon, Lina thought, we should come to the road we walked along when we came out of Ember, the road that ran alongside a stream. But there was no sign of it yet—only, in all directions, the gray-brown grass, the gray-green oak trees, and the small groves of trees with no leaves at all.
“I know we came this way,” Doon said, as if he were reading her thoughts. “Because look—even though it’s been so long, you can still see the path our feet trampled.”
It was true. You couldn’t see it very clearly, but if you looked hard, there it was: a wide strip of ground where the grass had not simply fallen or been blown sideways by the wind, but was flattened by the tread of eight hundred feet. It was like the ghost of a road, winding across the landscape. They followed it. Lina kept her eyes on a clump of oak trees in the distance that was shaped a bit like a hand in a mitten. Watching the trees gradually get closer was a way to tell they were making progress.
“So,” said Lina, “tell me what you’ve figured out from the book.”
Doon said nothing. He tramped on as if he hadn’t heard her, frowning at the ground. So Lina asked her question again, louder. “Doon! Did the book give you some clues?”
Doon sighed. “Well, not really,” he said. “I wish I’d gotten that roamer to tell me where she found it. I don’t know if it was in Ember or outside of Ember.”
“And did you figure out what the book is about?”
“Well, it’s directions for something, we know that. But I still can’t tell exactly what.”
“Did you bring it with you?”
Doon nodded. “The trouble is, there’s so much missing. The book doesn’t even begin until page forty-seven—all the pages before that have been torn out.”
“What’s on page forty-seven?” Lina asked.
“Just two words: ‘Technical Information.’ ”
“What does ‘technical’ mean?”
“I think it must mean hard, complicated, and impossible to understand,” said Doon.
“So what about the rest of the pages?”
“Three of them have charts and graphs and diagrams that I can’t make any sense of at all,” said Doon. “The other four are torn and smudged, but I can more or less read them. I went through and underlined things that seemed like clues. I’ll show you, later on.”
“But are they useful clues?” Lina asked. “Do they tell us what we’re looking for? And where it might be?”
Doon looked off into the distance with a slight frown. “Well, sort of,” he said. “I mean, yes, definitely, some of them are useful, I’m sure.”
Lina listened with dismay. “You mean,” she said, “that we really don’t know much more than we did three days ago?”
“We know a little more,” said Doon.
“But we’re going on this trip anyhow?”
Doon stopped walking then and turned to her with a sort of half smile. “Do you wish we hadn’t come?”
Lina realized she didn’t really wish that. A feeling of uneasiness lurked at the back of her mind, and what Doon had just said about the book made it worse. But still, it was glorious to be out here, on their own, hiking across the hills in pursuit of a mystery—even if the mystery was never solved. “No,” she said, smiling back. “I’m glad we came.”
When the sun told them it was around noon, they stopped to eat the first of the food they’d brought, and then, without resting long, went on their way again. Far up in the sky, toward the east, great black-winged birds floated in soundless circles.
“Do you see them?” Lina said, pointing. “Kenny said they come after the wolves have killed something.”
Doon gazed up, shading his eyes. “I suppose they come when anything dies, whether wolves have killed it or not.”
Lina nodded, thinking about this. It seemed horrible to her, the way animals killed each other, the pain and blood and gruesome death. She could not understand why this world, which was so full of beauty and wonder, had to also be so full of horrors.
“Doon,” she said. “I just thought of something. There might be—I mean, not everyone got out of Ember. We might find . . . we might come across—” She stopped and swallowed. “There couldn’t be anyone still alive there, could there?”
“I doubt it,” said Doon. “How could they find food in total darkness? And if the generator has stopped, there wouldn’t be water pumped up into the city.”
“Then there might be dead people.”
“I know,” Doon said. “I thought about that, too. It would be awful. But we have to be ready for it.”
After that, they walked in silence again for a while, both occupied with somber thoughts. This would not be the lively, familiar city of their memories; they knew that. It would be a dead city, and there might be dead bodies in it. They would need all their courage.
They came to the top of another ridge of hills from which they could see a great expanse of land. “The world is absolutely huge,” said Lina.
“Yes, and what we can see is only a tiny, tiny bit of it.” Doon told Lina about a map Edward had shown him in a book. Edward (who had learned this from the town schoolteacher) had explained that Sparks was no more than a minute dot in the big pink area that stood for the whole land, which was only one of the lands in the unimaginably enormous world. “There were words all over the map,” Doon said. “They were the names of cities and towns that used to be everywhere, before the Disaster.”
“Did you know,” said Lina, “that some people in faraway places speak in other languages, with completely different words from ours? Doctor Hester told me that.”
“I know it,” Doon said. “A few books in the Ark have other languages in them.”
“It’s so strange, isn’t it?” Lina said. “Why would you use all different words instead of the ones everyone already knows?” r />
“I’m not sure,” said Doon. “So much is mysterious here.”
They walked on and on. Lina’s feet hurt where her shoes rubbed against her heels. Doon stopped now and then to stare at something that interested him—once it was a lizard sunbathing on a rock, another time a huge black and yellow beetle. “Just look at it!” Doon said, picking up the beetle and letting it crawl on his hand. “It’s gorgeous! Who could ever think up such a thing?” Lina would just as soon have skipped the lizards and beetles and moved on a little faster. A sharp wind started up, and she pulled her cap farther down over her ears. It seemed to her they’d gone a tremendous distance, and still their goal wasn’t in sight. The daylight would be fading soon. She felt a nip of fear.
But a little later, they came to the stream that the refugees from Ember had followed on their first trip, and the broken, weedy road that ran beside it. Then they knew for sure they were on the right track. They circled around the base of a great rock that thrust up out of the ground like a giant’s shoulder, rising in rounded humps higher than they were tall. “I think I remember seeing this rock when we came out of Ember,” Lina said. “After we’d been walking only a little while.”
Doon thought he remembered it, too. “We should be there soon,” he said.
The sun sank lower in the sky, and the gray twilight settled down. Night was coming. Lina thought of the warm kitchen at home and shivered.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, they came to a place they instantly recognized.
“There it is!” Lina cried. She put down her pack and ran forward, up the slope, with Doon right behind her. It was the strangest feeling, to be here again, to see that opening in the mountainside that had been their gateway to a new world. It looked the same, a dark hole in the rock big enough for a wide wagon to go through.
They peered inside. Had anyone been here since that day they came out from Ember? If so, there was no sign of it. Maybe a wanderer took shelter in here now and then from the rain; maybe an animal slept here sometimes. But all they saw was the empty cave and the path leading inward and down.