“Oh, well, at least there are some good things about it. Guess what, Lina? I have a boyfriend. I met him at work. He really likes me—he says my hair is the exact color of a red-hot burner on a stove.”
Lina laughed. “It’s true, Lizzie,” she said. “You look like your head is on fire.”
Lizzie laughed, too, and lifted one hand to fluff her hair. She puckered her lips and fluttered her eyelashes. “He says I’m as beautiful as a red tomato.”
They were crossing Torrick Square now. It was crowded in the square. People had just left work and were lining up at the shops and hurrying along with packages. A cluster of children sat on the pavement, playing some sort of game.
“Who is this boyfriend?” asked Lina.
But just at that moment, Lizzie tripped. She’d been strutting along being beautiful, not paying attention to her feet, and the edge of her shoe caught on an uneven place in the pavement. She staggered and fell, and as she fell she lost her grip on the sack. It hit the ground and toppled sideways, and some cans spilled out. They rolled in all different directions.
Lina reached for Lizzie’s arm. “Did you hurt yourself?” she asked, but Lizzie went scrambling after the cans so quickly it was clear she wasn’t hurt. Wanting to help, Lina went after the cans, too. Two had rolled under a bench. Another was going toward the children, who were on their feet now, watching Lizzie’s wild spider-like motions. Lina picked up the cans under the bench, and for a second her breath stopped. One of them was a can of peaches. “Peaches,” it said right on it, and there was a picture of a yellow globe. No one she knew had seen a can of peaches in years. She looked at the other one. It was just as amazing—“Creamed Corn,” it said. Lina remembered having creamed corn once, as a thrilling treat, when she was five years old.
There was a shout. She looked up. One of the children had picked up a can. “Look at this!” he cried, and the other children gathered around him. “Applesauce!” he said, and the children murmured, “Applesauce, applesauce,” as if they had never heard the word before.
Lizzie was on her feet. She had all the cans except for the two in Lina’s hands and the one the child had picked up. She stood there for a moment, her eyes flicking back and forth from Lina to the children. Then she smiled, a bright fake-looking smile. “Thanks for helping me,” she said. “I found these on a back shelf at the market. What a surprise, huh? You can keep those.” She waved the back of her hand at the children, waved again at Lina, and then took off, holding the sack by its neck so it hung beside her and banged against her legs.
Lina didn’t follow her. She walked home, thinking about Lizzie’s sack of cans. You simply did not find cans of peaches and applesauce and creamed corn on the back shelves of markets. Lizzie was lying. And if the cans hadn’t come from a market, where had they come from? There was only one answer: they had come from the storerooms. Somehow, Lizzie had gotten them because she worked in the storeroom office. Had she paid for them? How much? Or had she taken them without paying?
Mrs. Murdo had cooked a dinner of beet-and-bean stew for them that night. When Lina showed her the two cans, she gasped in astonishment. “Where did you get these?” she asked.
“From a friend,” said Lina.
“And where did your friend get them?”
Lina shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Mrs. Murdo frowned slightly but didn’t ask any more questions. She opened the cans, and they had a feast: creamed corn with their stew, and peaches for dessert. It was the best meal Lina had had in a very long time—but her enjoyment of it was tainted just a little by the question of where it had come from.
The next morning, Lina headed for Broad Street. Before she started delivering messages today, she was going to have a talk with Lizzie.
She spied her half a block from the storeroom office. She was sauntering along looking in shop windows. A long green scarf was wound around her neck.
Lina ran up swiftly behind her. “Lizzie,” she said.
Lizzie whirled around. When she saw Lina, she flinched. She didn’t say anything, just turned around and kept walking.
Lina caught hold of one end of the green scarf and jerked Lizzie to a halt. “Lizzie!” she said. “Stop!”
“What for?” Lizzie said. “I’m going to work.” She tried to pull away, but she didn’t get far, because Lina had a firm grip on her scarf.
Lina spoke in a low voice. There were people all around them—a couple of old men leaning against the wall, a group of chattering children just ahead, workers going toward the storerooms—and she didn’t want to be overheard. “You have to tell me where you got those cans,” she said.
“I told you. I found them on a back shelf at the market. Let go of my scarf.” Lizzie tried to wrench her scarf out of Lina’s grip, but Lina held on.
“You didn’t,” Lina said. “No market would just forget about things like that. Tell me the truth.” She gave a yank on the end of the scarf.
“Stop it!” Lizzie reached out and grabbed a handful of Lina’s hair. Lina yelped and pulled harder on the scarf, and the two of them scuffled, snatching at each other’s hair and coats. They knocked against a woman who snapped at them angrily, and finally they toppled over, sitting down hard on the pavement.
Lina was the first one to laugh. It was so much like what they used to do in fun, chasing each other and screaming with laughter. Now here they were again, nearly grown girls, sitting in a heap on the pavement.
After a moment, Lizzie laughed, too. “You dope,” she said. “All right, I’ll tell you. I sort of wanted to anyway.” Lizzie leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and lowered her voice. “Well, it’s this,” she said. “There’s a storeroom worker named Looper. He’s a carrier. Do you know him? He was two classes ahead of us. Looper Windly.”
“I know who he is,” said Lina. “I took a message for him on my first day of work. Tall, with a long skinny neck. Big teeth. Funny-looking.”
Lizzie looked hurt. “Well, I wouldn’t describe him that way. I think he’s handsome.”
Lina shrugged. “Okay. Go on.”
“Looper explores the storerooms. He goes into every room that isn’t locked. He wants to know the true situation, Lina. He’s not like most workers, who just plod along doing their jobs and then go home. He wants to find things out.”
“And what has he found out?” Lina asked.
“He’s found out that there’s still a little bit left of some rare things, just a few things in rooms here and there that have been forgotten. You know, Lina,” she said, “there are so many rooms down there. Some of them, way out at the edges, are marked ‘Empty’ in the ledger book, and so no one ever goes there anymore. But Looper found out that they’re not all empty.”
“So he’s been taking things.”
“Just a few things! And not often.”
“And he’s giving some to you.”
“Yes. Because he likes me.” Lizzie smiled a little smile and hugged her arms together. I see, Lina thought. She feels that way about Looper.
“But Looper’s stealing,” said Lina. “And Lizzie—he isn’t just stealing things for you. He has a store! He steals things and sells them for huge prices!”
“He does not,” said Lizzie, but she looked worried.
“He does. I know because I bought something from him just a few weeks ago. He has a whole box of colored pencils.”
Lizzie scowled. “He never gave me any colored pencils.”
“He shouldn’t be giving you anything—or selling things. Don’t you think everyone should know about this food he found?”
“No!” Lizzie cried. “Because listen. If there’s only one can of peaches left, only one person gets to have it, right? So why should everyone know? They’d just end up fighting over it. What good would that be?” Lizzie reached out and put a hand on Lina’s knee. “Listen,” she said. “I’ll ask Looper to find some good stuff for you, too. I know he will, if I ask him.”
Before she had time to think, Lina heard herself saying,
“What kind of good stuff?”
Lizzie’s eyes gleamed. “There’s two packages of colored paper, he told me. And some cough medicine. And there’s three pairs of girls’ shoes.”
It was treasure. Colored paper! And cough medicine to cure sickness, and shoes … she hadn’t had new ones for almost two years. Lina’s heart raced. What Lizzie said was true: if everyone knew there were still a few wonderful things in the storerooms, people would fight each other trying to get them. But what if no one knew? What difference would it make if she had the colored paper, or the shoes? She suddenly wanted those things so badly she felt weak. A picture arose in her mind’s eye—the shelves at Mrs. Murdo’s house stocked with good things, and the three of them happier and safer than other people.
Lizzie leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Looper found a can of pineapple. I was going to split it with him, but I’ll give you a bite if you promise not to tell.”
Pineapple! That delectable long-lost thing that her grandmother had told her about. Was there anything wrong with having a bite of it, just to see what it was like?
“I’ve already tasted peaches, applesauce, and a thing called fruit cocktail,” said Lizzie. “And prunes and creamed corn and cranberry sauce and asparagus …”
“All that?” Lina was astonished. “Then there’s a lot of special things like that still?”
“No,” said Lizzie. “Not a lot at all. In fact, we’ve finished all those.”
“You and Looper?”
Lizzie nodded, smiling smugly. “Looper says it’s all going to be gone soon anyway, why not live as well as we can right now?”
“But Lizzie, why should you get all that? Why you and not other people?”
“Because we found it. Because we can get at it.”
“I don’t think it’s fair,” said Lina.
Lizzie spoke as if she were talking to a not-very-bright child. “You can have some, too. That’s what I’m telling you. There are still a few good things left.”
But that wasn’t the unfairness Lina was thinking of. It was that just two people were getting things that everyone would have wanted. She couldn’t think how it should have been done. You couldn’t divide a can of applesauce evenly among all the people in the city. Still, something was wrong with grabbing the good things just because you could. It seemed not only unfair to everyone else but bad for the person who was doing it, somehow. She remembered the hunger she’d felt when Looper showed her the colored pencils. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. She didn’t want to want things that way.
She stood up. “I don’t want anything from Looper.”
Lizzie shrugged. “Okay,” she said, but there was a look of dismay on her small pale face. “Too bad for you.”
“Thanks anyway,” said Lina, and she set off across Torrick Square, walking fast at first and then breaking into a run.
About a week after he and Lina had seen the man come out the mysterious door, Doon was assigned to fix a clog in Tunnel 207. It turned out to be easy. He undid the pipe, rammed a long thin brush down it, and a jet of water spurted into his face. Once he’d put the pipe back together, he had nothing else to do. So he decided to go out to Tunnel 351 and take another look at the locked door. It was strange, he thought, that no announcement about a way out of Ember had come. Maybe that door had not been what they thought it was.
So he set out for the south end of the Pipeworks. When he came to the roped-off passage in Tunnel 351, he ducked in and walked along through the dark, feeling his way. He was pretty sure the door would be locked as usual. His mind was on other things. He was thinking of his green worm, which had been behaving oddly, refusing to eat and hanging from the side of its box with its chin tucked in. And he was thinking about Lina, whom he hadn’t seen for several days. He wondered where she was. When he came to the door, he reached absently for the knob, and what he felt startled him so much that he snatched his hand back as if he’d been stung. He felt again, carefully. There was a key in the lock!
For a long moment, Doon stood as still as a statue. Then he took hold of the doorknob and turned it. Very slowly, he pushed on the door. It swung inward without a sound.
He opened it only a few inches, just enough to peer around the edge. What he saw made him gasp.
There was no road, or passage, or stairway behind the door. There was a brightly lit room, whose size he could not guess at because it was so crowded with things. On all sides were crates and boxes, sacks and bundles and packages. There were mounds of cans, heaps of clothes, rows of jars and bottles, stacks of light-bulb packages. Piles rose to the low ceiling and leaned against the walls, blocking all but a small space in the center. In that small space, a little living room had been set up. There was a greenish rug, and on the rug an armchair and a table. On the table were dishes smeared with the remains of food, and in the armchair facing Doon was a great blob of a person whose head was flopped backward, so that all Doon could see of it was an upthrust chin. The blob stirred and muttered, and Doon, in the second before he stepped back and pulled the door closed, caught a glimpse of a fleshy ear, a slab of gray cheek, and a loose, purplish mouth.
That day, Lina had more messages to carry than ever. There had been five blackouts in a row during the week. They were all fairly short—the longest was four and a half minutes, Lina had heard—but there had never been so many so close together. Everyone was nervous. People who might ordinarily walk to someone’s house were sending messages instead. Often they didn’t even come out into the street but beckoned to a messenger from their doorway.
By five o’clock, Lina had carried thirty-nine messages. Most of them were more or less the same: “I’m not coming to the meeting tonight, decided to stay home.” “I won’t be in to work tomorrow.” “Instead of meeting me in Cloving Square, why don’t you come to my house?” The citizens of Ember were hunkering down, burrowing in. Fewer people stood around talking in groups under the lights in the squares. Instead, they would pause briefly to murmur a few words to each other and then hasten onward.
Lina was on her way home to Mrs. Murdo’s—she and Poppy had moved in with all their things—when she heard rapid footsteps. Startled, she turned and saw Doon racing toward her.
At first he was so out of breath he couldn’t speak.
“What is it? What is it?” said Lina.
“The door,” he panted. “The door in 351. I opened it.”
Lina’s heart leapt. “You did?”
Doon nodded.
“Is it the way out?” Lina whispered fiercely.
“No,” Doon said. He glanced behind him. Clutching Lina’s arm, he pulled her into a shadowy spot on the street. “It doesn’t lead out of Ember,” he whispered. “It leads to a big room.”
Lina’s face fell. “A room? What’s in there?”
“Everything. Food, clothes, boxes, cans. Light bulbs, stacks of them. Everything. Piles and piles up to the ceiling.” His eyes grew wide. “And someone was there, in the middle of it all, asleep.”
“Who?”
A look of horror passed over Doon’s face. “The mayor,” he said. “Conked out in a big armchair, with an empty plate in front of him.”
“The mayor!” Lina whispered.
“Yes. The mayor has a secret treasure room in the Pipeworks.”
They stared at each other, speechless. Then Doon suddenly stamped hard on the pavement. His face flushed red. “That’s the solution he keeps telling us about. It’s a solution for him, not the rest of us. He gets everything he needs, and we get the leftovers! He doesn’t care about the city. All he cares about is his fat stomach!”
Lina felt dizzy, as if she’d been hit on the head. “What will we do?” She couldn’t think, she was so stunned.
“Tell everyone!” said Doon. He was shaking with anger. “Tell the whole city the mayor is robbing us!”
“Wait, wait.” Lina put a hand on Doon’s arm and concentrated for a minute. “Come on,” she said at last. “Let’s go sit in Harken Square. I have som
ething to tell you, too.”
At the north end of Harken Square stood a circle of Believers, clapping their hands and singing one of their songs. Lately they seemed to be singing more loudly and cheerfully than ever. Their voices were shrill. “Coming soon to save us!” they wailed. “Happy, happy day!”
Near the Gathering Hall steps, something unusual was happening. Twenty or so people were pacing around and around, carrying big signs painted on old planks and on big banners made of sheets. The signs said “WHAT solutions, Mayor Cole?” and “We want ANSWERS!” Every now and then the demonstrators would yell these slogans out loud. Lina wondered if the mayor was paying any attention.
Doon and Lina found an empty bench on the south side of Harken Square and sat down.
“Now, listen,” said Lina.
“I am listening,” said Doon, though his face was still red and the look on his face was stormy.
“I saw Lizzie coming out of the storerooms yesterday,” Lina said. She told him about the cans, and Lizzie’s new friend, Looper, and what Looper was doing.
Doon pounded his fist on his leg. “That’s two of them doing it, then,” he said.
“Wait, there’s more. Remember how I thought there was something familiar about the man who came out the door? I’ve remembered what. It was that way he walked, sort of dipping over sideways, and also that hair, that black hair all unbrushed and sticking out. I’ve seen him twice. I don’t know why I didn’t remember who it was right away—maybe because I’ve only seen him from the front. I took a message for him on my first day.”
Doon was jiggling with impatience. “Well, who was it, who was it?”
“It was Looper. Looper, who works in the storerooms. Lizzie’s boyfriend. And Doon—” Lina leaned forward. “It was a message to the mayor that he gave me, and it was this: ‘Delivery at eight.’ ”
Doon’s mouth dropped open. “So that means …”
“He’s taking things from the storeroom for the mayor. And he’s giving some to Lizzie, and selling some in his store.”
“Oh!” cried Doon. He slapped his hand against his head. “Why didn’t I get it before? There’s a hatch in the ceiling near Tunnel 351. It must go right up into the storerooms. Looper comes through there! That’s what we heard that day, remember? A sort of scraping—that would have been the hatch opening. Then a thud—his sack of stuff dropping through—and then a sound like someone jumping down and landing hard on the ground.”