“Well, anyhow, he opened that door and we can’t,” said Doon. “If it does go somewhere, if it does lead out of Ember, he’ll be telling the whole city pretty soon. He’ll be a hero.” Doon sat down again. “If he’s found the way out, we’ll be glad, of course,” he said glumly. “It doesn’t matter who finds it, as long as it helps the city.”
“That’s right,” Lina said.
“It’s just that I thought we were going to find it,” said Doon.
“Yes,” Lina said, thinking how grand it would have been to stand before all of Ember, announcing their discovery.
They sat without talking for a while, lost in their own thoughts. A man pulling a cart full of wood scraps went by. A woman leaned from a lighted window on Gappery Street and called out to some boys playing in the square below. A couple of guards, in their red and brown uniforms, ambled across the square, laughing. The town clock rang out six deep booms that Lina could feel, like shudders, beneath her ribs.
Doon said, “I guess what we do now is wait to see if there’s an announcement.”
“I guess so,” said Lina.
“Maybe that door is nothing special after all,” said Doon. “Maybe it’s just an old unused supply closet.”
But Lina wasn’t ready to believe that. Maybe it wasn’t the door out of Ember, but it was a mystery nevertheless—a mystery connected, she was sure, to the bigger mystery they were trying to solve.
Lina slept restlessly that night. She had frightening dreams in which something dangerous was lurking in the darkness. When the lights went on in the morning and she opened her eyes, her first thought was of the door in the Pipeworks—and then right away she felt a thud of disappointment, because the door was locked and someone else, not her, knew what was behind it.
She went in to wake Granny. “Time to get up,” she said, but Granny didn’t answer. She was lying with her mouth half open and breathing in a strange hoarse way. “Don’t feel too good,” she finally said in a weak voice.
Lina felt Granny’s forehead. It was hot. Her hands were very cold. She ran for Mrs. Murdo and after that to Cloving Square to tell Captain Fleery she would not be coming to work today. Then she ran to Oliver Street, to the office of Dr. Tower, where she banged on the door until the doctor opened it.
Dr. Tower was a thin woman with uncombed hair and shadows under her eyes. When she saw Lina, she seemed to grow even more tired.
“Dr. Tower,” Lina said, “my grandmother is sick. Will you come?”
“I will,” she said. “But I can’t promise to help her. I’m low on medicine.”
“But come and look. Maybe she doesn’t need medicine.”
Lina led the doctor the few blocks to her house. When she saw Granny, the doctor sighed. “How are you, Granny Mayfleet?” she asked.
Granny looked at the doctor blearily. “I think ill,” she said.
Dr. Tower laid a hand across her forehead. She asked her to stick out her tongue, and she listened to her heart and her breathing.
“She has a fever,” the doctor told Lina. “You’ll need to stay home with her today. Make her some soup. Give her water to drink. Put rags in cool water and lay them across her forehead.” She picked up Granny’s bony hand in her rough, reddish one. “What’s best for you is to sleep today,” she said. “Your good granddaughter will take care of you.”
And all day, that’s what Lina did. She made a thin soup of spinach and onions and fed it to Granny a spoonful at a time. She stroked Granny’s forehead, held her hand, and talked to her about cheerful things. She kept Poppy as quiet as she could. But as she did all this, in the back of her mind was the memory of the days of her father’s illness, when he seemed to grow dim like a lamp losing power, and the sound of his breathing was like water gurgling through a clogged pipe. Though she didn’t want to, she also remembered the evening when her father let out one last short breath and didn’t take another, and the morning a few months later when Dr. Tower emerged from her mother’s bedroom with a crying baby and a face that was heavy with bad news.
In the late afternoon, Granny got restless. She lifted herself up on one elbow. “Did we find it?” she asked Lina. “Did we ever find it?”
“Find what, Granny?”
“The thing that was lost,” Granny said. “The old thing that my grandfather lost …”
“Yes,” said Lina. “Don’t worry, Granny, we found it, it’s safe now.”
“Oh, good.” Granny sank back onto her pillows and smiled at the ceiling. “What a relief,” she said. She coughed a couple of times, closed her eyes, and fell asleep.
Lina stayed home from work the next day as well. It was a long day. Granny dozed most of the time. Poppy, delighted to have Lina at home to play with, kept toddling over with things she found—dust rags, kitchen spoons, stray shoes—and whacking them against Lina’s knees, saying, “Play wif dis! Play wif dis!” Lina was glad to play with her, but after a while she’d had enough of spoon-banging and rag-tugging and shoe-rolling. “Let’s do something else,” she said to Poppy. “Shall we draw?”
Granny had drunk a full cup of soup for dinner and was falling asleep again, so Lina got out her colored pencils and two of the can labels she’d been saving—they were white on the back and made good enough drawing paper, if you flattened them out. With their sharpest kitchen knife, she whittled the pencils into points. She gave the green pencil and one can label to Poppy, and she herself took the blue pencil and smoothed out the other can label on the table.
What would she draw? Taking hold of a pencil was like opening a tap inside her mind through which her imagination flowed. She could feel the pictures ready to come out. It was a sort of pressure, like water in a pipe. She always thought she would draw something wonderful, but what she actually drew never quite matched the feeling. It was like when she tried to tell a dream—the words never really captured how it felt.
Poppy was grasping the pencil in her fist and making a wild scribble. “Lookit!” she cried.
“Lovely,” said Lina. Then, without even a clear idea of what it was to be, she began her own picture. She started on the left side of the can label. First she drew a tall, narrow box—a building. Then more boxes next to it—a cluster of buildings. Next she drew a few tiny people walking on the street below the buildings. It was what she nearly always drew—the other city—and every time she drew it, she had the same frustrating feeling: there was more to be drawn. There were other things in this city, there were marvels there—but she couldn’t imagine what they were. All she knew was that this city was bright in a different way from Ember. Where the brightness came from she didn’t know.
She drew more buildings and filled in the windows and doors; she put in streetlamps; she added a greenhouse. All the way across the paper, she drew buildings of different sizes. All the buildings were white, because that was the color of the paper.
She set her pencil down for a moment and studied what she’d done. It was time to fill in the sky. In the pictures she’d done with regular pencils, the sky was its true color, black. But this time she made it blue, since she was using her blue pencil. Methodically, as Poppy scratched and scribbled beside her, Lina colored in the space above the buildings, her pencil moving back and forth in short lines, until the entire sky was blue.
She sat back and looked at her picture. Wouldn’t it be strange, she thought, to have a blue sky? But she liked the way it looked. It would be beautiful—a blue sky.
Poppy had started using her pencil to poke holes in her paper. Lina folded up her own picture and took Poppy’s away from her. “Time for dinner,” she said.
Sometime deep in the night, Lina woke suddenly, thinking she’d heard something. Had she been dreaming? She lay still, her eyes open in the darkness. The sound came again, a weak, trembling call: “Lina …”
She got up and started for Granny’s room. Though she had lived in the same house all her life, she still had trouble finding her way at night, when the darkness was complete. It was as if wall
s had shifted slightly, and furniture moved to new places. Lina stayed close to the walls, feeling her way along. Here was her bedroom door. Here was the kitchen and the table—she winced as she stubbed her toe on one of its legs. A little farther and she’d come to the far wall and the door to Granny’s room. Granny’s voice was like a thin line in the dark air. “Lina … Come and help … I need …”
“I’m coming, Granny,” she called.
She stumbled over something—a shoe, maybe—and fell against the bed. “Here I am, Granny!” she said. She felt for Granny’s hand—it was very cold.
“I feel so strange,” said Granny. Her voice was a whisper. “I dreamed … I dreamed about my baby … or someone’s baby …”
Lina sat down on the bed. Carefully she moved her hands over the narrow ridge of her grandmother’s body until she came to her shoulders. There her fingers tangled in the long wisps of Granny’s hair. She pressed a finger against the side of Granny’s throat to feel for her pulse, as the doctor had shown her. It was fluttery, like a moth that has hurt itself and is flapping in crooked circles.
“Can I get you some water, Granny?” Lina asked. She couldn’t think what else to do.
“No water,” Granny said. “Just stay for a while.”
Lina tucked one foot underneath her and pulled part of the blanket over her lap. She took hold of Granny’s hand again and stroked it gently with one finger.
For a long time neither of them said anything. Lina sat listening to her grandmother’s breathing. She would take a deep, shuddering breath and let it out in a sigh. Then there would be a long silence before the next breath began. Lina closed her eyes. No use keeping them open—there was nothing to see but the dark. She was aware only of her grandmother’s cold, thin hand and the sound of her breathing. Every now and then Granny would mumble a few words Lina couldn’t make out, and then Lina would stroke her forehead and say, “Don’t worry, it’s all right. It’s almost morning,” though she didn’t know if it was or not.
After a long time, Granny stirred slightly and seemed to come awake. “You go to bed, dear,” she said. “I’m all right now.” Her voice was clear but very faint. “You go back to sleep.”
Lina bent forward until her head rested against Granny’s shoulder. Granny’s soft hair tickled her face. “All right, then,” she whispered. “Good night, Granny.” She squeezed her grandmother’s shoulders gently, and as she stood up a wave of terrible loneliness swept over her. She wanted to see Granny’s face. But the darkness hid everything. It might still be a long time until morning—she didn’t know. She groped her way back to her own bed and fell into a deep sleep, and when, hours later, the clock tower struck six and the lights came on, Lina went fearfully into her grandmother’s room. She found her very pale and very still, all the life gone out of her.
Lina spent all that day in Mrs. Murdo’s house, which was just like theirs, only neater. There was one couch, and one fat chair covered in fuzzy striped material, and one big table, only Mrs. Murdo’s table wasn’t wobbly like theirs. On the table was a basket, and in the basket were three turnips, each of them lavender on one end and white on the other. Mrs. Murdo must have put them there, Lina thought, not just because she was going to have them for dinner, but also because they were beautiful.
Lina sat sideways on the couch with her legs stretched out, and Mrs. Murdo covered her with a soft gray-green blanket. “This will keep you warm,” she said, tucking it around Lina’s legs. Lina didn’t really feel cold but she did feel sad, which was in a way the same. The blanket felt good, like someone holding her. Mrs. Murdo gave Poppy a long purple scarf to play with and made a creamy mushroom soup with potatoes, and all day Lina stayed there, snuggled under the blanket. She thought about her grandmother, who had had a long and mostly cheerful life. She cried some and fell asleep. She woke up and played with Poppy. The day had a strange but comforting feel to it, like a rest between the end of one time and the beginning of another.
On the morning of the next day, Lina got up and got ready to go to work. Mrs. Murdo gave her beet tea and spinach hash for breakfast. “The Singing’s coming up soon,” she remarked to Lina as they ate. “Do you know your part?”
“Yes,” said Lina. “I remember it pretty well from last year.”
“I rather like the Singing,” said Mrs. Murdo.
“I love it,” Lina said. “I think it’s my favorite day of the year.” Once a year, the people of the city came together to sing the three great songs of Ember. Just thinking of it made Lina feel better. She finished her breakfast and put on her red jacket.
“Don’t worry about Poppy, I’ll take care of her,” said Mrs. Murdo as Lina headed for the door. “When you come back this evening, we’ll talk about how to proceed.”
“Proceed?” said Lina.
“Well, you can’t live by yourselves, just the two of you, can you?”
“We can’t?”
“Certainly not,” said Mrs. Murdo sternly. “Who’s to take care of Poppy while you go off delivering messages? You must move in here with me. I have an empty bedroom, after all, and quite a nice one. Come and look.”
She opened a door at the far end of the living room, and Lina peeked in. She had never seen such a beautiful, cozy room. There was a big, lumpy bed covered with a faded blue blanket, and at its head four plump pillows. Next to the bed was a chest of drawers with drawer handles shaped like teardrops and a mirror attached to the top. The carpets on the floor were all different shades of blue and green, and in the corner was a sturdy square table and a chair with a back like a ladder. “This will be your room,” said Mrs. Murdo. “Yours and Poppy’s. You’ll have to share the bed, but it’s big enough.”
“It’s lovely,” Lina said. “You’re so kind, Mrs. Murdo.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Murdo briskly, “it’s just common sense. You need a place. I have one. You go on now, and I’ll see you this evening.”
Three days had passed since Lina and Doon had seen the man in the Pipeworks, and there hadn’t been any special announcements. So if that man had discovered a way out of Ember, he was keeping the news to himself. Lina couldn’t understand why.
As Lina ran through the city with her messages on her first day back to work, it seemed to her that the mood of the people was even gloomier than before. There were long, silent lines at the markets, and knots of people gathered in the squares, talking in low voices. Many shops—more each day, it seemed—displayed signs in their windows saying “Closed” or “Open Mon. Tues. only.” Every now and then, the lights flickered, and people stopped and looked up in fright. When the flickering ended and the lights stayed lit, people just took a breath and walked on.
Lina delivered her messages as usual, but inside she felt strange. Everywhere she ran, she heard the same words, like a drumbeat, in her mind: alone in the world, alone in the world. It wasn’t exactly true. She had Poppy. She had friends. And she had Mrs. Murdo, who was somewhere between a friend and a relative. But she felt as if she had suddenly gotten older in the last three days. She was a sort of mother herself now. What happened to Poppy was more or less up to her.
As the day went on, she stopped thinking alone in the world and began thinking about her new life at Mrs. Murdo’s. She thought about the blue-green room and planned how she would arrange her pictures on the walls. The one she’d drawn with her blue pencil would look especially nice, because it would match the color of the rugs. She could bring her pillows from home and add them to the ones on the bed, and then she’d have six altogether—and maybe she could find some old blue dresses or shirts and make pillow covers for them. The blue-green room, the orderly apartment, the meals cooked, and the blankets tucked in cozily at night—all this gave her a feeling of comfort, almost luxury. She was grateful for Mrs. Murdo’s kindness. I am not ready yet to be alone in the world, she thought.
Late that afternoon, Lina was given a message to take to Lampling Street. She delivered the message and, as she was coming back out onto the street, c
aught sight of Lizzie coming out the door of the Supply Depot—her orange hair was unmistakable. “Lizzie!” Lina called out.
Lizzie must not have heard her. She kept on going. Lina called again. “Lizzie, wait!” This time it was clear that Lizzie had heard, but instead of stopping, she walked faster. What’s the matter with her? Lina wondered. She ran after her and grabbed the back of her coat. “Lizzie, it’s me!”
Lizzie stopped and turned around. “Oh!” she said. Her face was flushed. “It’s you. Hi! I thought it was … I didn’t realize it was you.” She smiled brightly, but there was a distracted look in her eyes. “I was just going home,” she said. Her arms were wrapped around a small bulging sack.
“I’ll walk with you,” said Lina.
“Oh,” said Lizzie. “Oh, good.” But she didn’t look pleased.
“Lizzie, something sad has happened,” Lina said. “My grandmother died.”
Lizzie gave her a quick sideways glance, but she didn’t stop walking. “That’s too bad,” she said absently. “Poor you.”
What was wrong with her? Lizzie was ordinarily so interested in other people’s misfortunes. She could be sincerely sympathetic, too, when she wasn’t wrapped up in her own troubles.
Lina changed the subject. “What’s in the sack?” she asked.
“Oh, just some groceries,” said Lizzie. “I stopped at the market after work.”
“You did?” Lina was confused. She had seen Lizzie not two minutes ago leaving the storeroom office.
Lizzie didn’t answer. She began walking and talking quite fast. “It was so busy today at work. Work is so hard, isn’t it, Lina? I think work is much harder than school, and not as interesting. You do the same thing every day. I get so tired, don’t you, running around all day?”
Lina started to say that she liked running and hardly ever got tired, but Lizzie didn’t wait for her to answer.