For a long moment, they stayed like this, frozen, staring at one another. Then, unhurriedly, the creature moved away. It pushed its nose among the leaves on the ground, wandering back toward the bushes, and when it raised its head again, they saw that it was holding something in its white teeth, something round and purplish. With a last glance at them, it leapt toward the bushes, its tail sailing, and disappeared.
Lina let out her breath and turned to look at Doon, whose mouth was open in astonishment. His voice shaky, he said, “That was the most wonderful thing I have ever seen, ever in my whole life.”
“Yes.”
“And it saw us,” Doon said, and Lina nodded. They both felt it—they had been seen. The creature was utterly strange, not like anything they had ever known, and yet when it looked at them, some kind of recognition passed between them. “I know now,” said Doon. “This is the world we belong in.”
A few minutes later, Poppy woke up and made fretful noises, and Lina gave her the last of the peas in Doon’s pack. “What was that, do you think, in the creature’s mouth?” she asked. “Would it be something we could eat, a fruit of some kind? It looked like the pictures of peaches on cans, except for the color.”
They got up and poked around, and soon they came across a plant whose branches were laden with the purple fruits, about the size of small beets, only softer. Doon picked one and cut it open with his knife. There was a stone inside. Red juice ran out over his hands. Cautiously, he touched his tongue to it. “Sweet,” he said.
“If the creature can eat it, maybe we can, too,” said Lina. “Shall we?”
They did. Nothing had ever tasted better. Lina cut the stones out and gave chunks of the fruit to Poppy. Juice ran down their chins. When they had eaten five or six apiece, they licked their sticky fingers clean and started to explore again.
They went higher up the slope they were on, wading through flowers as high as their waists, and near the top they came upon a kind of dent in the ground, as if a bit of the earth had caved in. They walked down into it, and at the end of the dent they found a crack about as tall as a person but not nearly as wide as a door. Lina edged through it sideways and discovered a narrow tunnel. “Send Poppy through,” she called back to Doon, “and come yourself.” But it was dark inside, and Doon had to go back to where he’d left his pack to get a candle. By candlelight, they crept along until they came to a place where the tunnel ended abruptly. But it ended not with a wall but with a sudden huge nothingness that made them gasp and step back. A few feet beyond their shoes was a sheer, dizzying drop. They looked out into a cave so enormous that it seemed almost as big as the world outside. Far down at the bottom shone a cluster of lights.
“It’s Ember,” Lina whispered.
They could see the tiny bright streets crossing each other, and the squares, little chips of light, and the dark tops of buildings. Just beyond the edges was the immense darkness.
“Oh, our city, Doon. Our city is at the bottom of a hole!” She gazed down through the gulf, and all of what she had believed about the world began to slowly break apart. “We were underground,” she said. “Not just the Pipeworks. Everything!” She could hardly make sense of what she was saying.
Doon crouched on his hands and knees, looking over the edge. He squinted, trying to see minute specks that might be people. “What’s happening there, I wonder?”
“Could they hear us if we shouted?”
“I don’t think so. We’re much too far up.”
“Maybe if they looked into the sky they’d see our candle,” said Lina. “But no, I guess they wouldn’t. The streetlamps would be too bright.”
“Somehow, we have to get word to them,” said Doon, and that was when the idea came to Lina.
“Our message!” she cried. “We could send our message!”
And they did. From her pocket, Lina took the message that Doon had written, the one that was supposed to have gone to Clary, explaining everything. In small writing, they squeezed in this note at the top:
Dear People of Ember,
We came down the river from the Pipeworks and found the way to another place. It is green here and very big. Light comes from the sky. You must follow the instructions in this message and come on the river. Bring food with you. Come as quickly as you can.
Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow
They wrapped the message in Doon’s shirt and put a rock inside it. Then they stood in a row at the edge of the chasm, Doon in the middle holding Poppy’s hand and Lina’s. Lina took aim at the heart of the city, far beneath her feet. With all her strength, she cast the message into the darkness, and they watched as it plunged down and down.
Mrs. Murdo, walking even more briskly than usual to keep her spirits up, was crossing Harken Square when something fell to the pavement just in front of her with a terrific thump. How extraordinary, she thought, bending to pick it up. It was a sort of bundle. She began to untie it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to the friends who read and commented helpfully on my manuscript: Susie Mader, Patrick Daly, Andrew Ramer, Charlotte Muse, Sara Jenkins, Mary Dederer, and Pat Carr. My gratitude to my agent, Nancy Gallt, who brought The City of Ember into the light, and my editor, Jim Thomas, who made it the best book it could be. And my love and thanks to my mother, my first and best writing teacher.
Turn the page
for a brand-new story
from Jeanne DuPrau
about the day
the Disaster began.…
Eva Neale was not worried about war. She had been worried, earlier in the summer, when war was the only thing people talked about. But it was August now, and nothing had happened. Everyone still kept their TVs and radios tuned to the news, and the talk of high-level negotiations and red alerts and missile readiness went on in the background like a dull headache, but most people turned their attention elsewhere.
They’d done what they could: in the event of an attack, the plan was for the citizens of Arbor Valley to take shelter in the school gym. Eva imagined this might be rather fun. People would crowd in as they did for a basketball game, and maybe they would shoot some baskets, or maybe sing, and have a sort of picnic for a few days until the worst of the war was over. Because surely the war wouldn’t come all the way to Arbor Valley, which was a small and unimportant place.
On the last Saturday in August, Eva told her mother she was going to see her friend Kim, who lived in a town called Fallgrove several miles up the road. Fallgrove was a town like Arbor Valley, with houses scattered over many acres, and it happened that Kim’s house was just over a ridge of hills that separated Fallgrove from Arbor Valley. If she didn’t take the road but went up and over the hill instead, Eva could get to Kim’s in only fifteen minutes or so.
This was what she set out to do. She and Kim were going to paint each other’s fingernails for the first day of school. Eva’s would be Sky Blue and Kim’s would be Hawaiian Sunrise. Eva didn’t dread the start of school as some kids did, even though it was said that eighth grade was much harder than seventh. School wasn’t a contest to Eva—she didn’t have to come out on top either in the learning part or the friends part. She did well when she could, and laughed easily when she couldn’t.
“You’re such a sunshine girl,” her mother often said to her. “I’m a bundle of anxieties, and your father works so hard he’s forgotten how to play. Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know,” Eva would say at these times, shrugging and smiling. “Heaven? Carol’s Bargain Shop?”
Not that she was happy every moment. People being horrible to each other and to animals made her unhappy, which was why she turned off the war news when she could and never wanted to read the kind of book where a dog dies. She couldn’t stand cauliflower; she loathed field hockey. But mostly it was easy for Eva to like things, faults and all.
She walked through the old part of her father’s apple orchard, then along the irrigation ditch, over the three-strand barbed-wire fence, up the weedy
hill, and on up toward the ridge. It was a hot day; the air was full of the scent of dry grass and of apples ready to be picked. Eva stopped for a moment and breathed it in. She looked out over the rows of trees with their red fruit, and beyond them to the square of lawn in the backyard of her house, and farther on to the school and the green football field, and she had one of those moments of love that came over her sometimes, especially in the late summer, when so much was ending and so much was ready to begin.
She took the path up a steep-sided gully, where in the winter a stream gushed down. Now the streambed was dry, just a tumble of rocks. She climbed, holding her hair back from her face so she wouldn’t miss her footing. But in spite of that, a rock rolled when she stepped on it, and though she flung her arms out and bent sideways to keep her balance, her foot slipped and wedged itself between two stones. She fell, and she heard a crack as she went down. A pain shot through her ankle like an arrow, and then grew steady and fierce.
She sat up, braced her hands behind her on the prickly ground, and pulled herself an inch or so up the side of the gully. Moving even that much made the pain so bad she felt sick.
I have to move slow, she thought. Which is closer, home or Kim’s?
Her heart was pounding, and her breath came in short gasps. Though the sun glared down on her, she felt cold.
She managed to haul herself up to the rim of the gully, but when she tried to stand, she collapsed again. She couldn’t walk. She was afraid she’d faint if she tried. She’d have to slide or crawl if she was to get anywhere.
I can do it, she thought. I’ll just rest a minute first.
She was facing west, looking out over the valley. Behind the distant hills she saw a flash of light in the sky—brilliant, blinding, like sun on metal. Then the edge of the sky darkened, and the darkness rose, a black fog. Another flash came, off to the north, and seconds later a long, deep thundering.
Then came the planes. They sped toward her in a fleet like a flock of crows, black, fast, slicing through the air. She flattened herself against the ground and covered her ears against their screaming, and they streaked over her head and were gone. In the west, the rising blackness hid the blue of the sky.
The war has come, she thought. I have to get home.
But she couldn’t move.
The people of Arbor Valley saw the planes, too. Because they always kept the news on, they heard the announcement before the power went out: bombs had fallen on major cities all over the country, and warplanes, thousands of them, were approaching or already overhead, dropping explosives as they went.
Everyone followed the plan and rushed to the school gym. Eva’s mother, remembering that Eva had gone to Kim’s, was struck with terror for her daughter. But she remembered that the people of Fallgrove had made a plan similar to theirs: to take shelter in the church basement. Eva would go with Kim’s family. She would be all right.
In the gym, they milled around, two hundred and twelve people of all ages, plus nineteen dogs and two cats. No cell phones worked. They burned candles for light, since the gym had no windows or skylights.
“We’re about fifty miles from the city,” said Hal Martin, the high school history teacher. “Will there be dangerous radiation here, do you think?” He raised one eyebrow as he asked this, because he was embarrassed not to know.
“I think so,” said Avis Archer, who worked in the post office. She had no idea if this was true. “We shouldn’t go out.”
“How long does radiation last?”
No one knew for sure. Andy Brown thought it lasted for years. Joe Stanley didn’t think so.
“One thing I know,” said Bud Davis, who owned the gas station. “After a bomb like that, there are firestorms driven by the wind.”
“But would a firestorm come this far?” asked Eva’s mother.
“If a firestorm is coming toward us, we have to get out,” said Joe Stanley.
“Get out to where?” Bud Davis gave a hard laugh. “Outside where the fire is? We’re better off staying here.”
“But we need to see,” said Eva’s mother. “I can’t bear not seeing what’s happened.”
The talk went around and around. People sat on the bleachers and on the glossy wood floor, leaning against the walls. Some of the older people lay down under the basketball hoops, using folded-up sweaters or jackets for pillows.
“We have to listen for the sound of more planes,” said Sam Gomez. “And helicopters. There might be help coming.”
“Or bombers,” said Janet Tomanelli. “How will we know if they’ve come to rescue us or attack us?”
No one had an answer to this.
Eva’s mother tried not to be anxious. In her mind, she pictured Eva in the church basement in Fallgrove, where maybe the lights were still on, Eva sitting with Kim’s sensible mother, safe and not scared at all.
It wasn’t true, though. Eva was on the hillside, curled up in the dry grass, having worn herself out shouting for help. No one came, and she understood why: they were shut inside the gym, according to plan. They couldn’t hear her.
After a while, she sat up and tried to move. She scooted downhill a few inches on the seat of her pants, but she couldn’t keep her leg from bumping against the ground, and when that happened, the pain shot through her and she felt sick and had to stop and rest.
A wind had started up. It rippled through the grass around her and brought with it the smell of smoke. Overhead, brown haze dimmed the sun.
Eva lowered her eyes and saw a sparrow land on a hillock of grass nearby. It seemed to look right at her, its eye catching whatever brightness was left in the air. Eva looked back, and when the bird sang its trilling song, she almost understood what it was saying, which came, she thought, from the heart of life.
I can stand the pain, she told herself. I have to get home.
On an aircraft carrier out in the ocean, miles from shore, Commander T of the Ninth Force sat at his computer monitor, looking at the pictures sent back by drones flying over the bomb sites. He was searching for places where life still stirred, places jet bombers might target.
“Anything yet?” asked Airman J, who would be flying one of the bombers. He was a young man with a face as round as a full moon and a dreamy nature. When war was expected and all young men in his country had to sign up with the military, he had joined the air force because he wanted to know what it was like to fly.
Commander T shook his head. “Visibility about zero,” he said. “Smoke, dust, hard to see through.” He moved the controls and sent the drones south.
Looking over the commander’s shoulder, Airman J watched as the grainy gray view wheeled around to show more swirls of gray. Every now and then a break in the clouds revealed a landscape of moving rubble—wind sweeping the wrecks of buildings and trees, and sometimes orange lines of fire crawling ahead of the wind.
“Firestorms,” Commander T commented. He turned the drones inland.
Airman J wondered what his own country might look like right now. He thought of the house he’d grown up in, where his parents still lived—if they were alive. It was a small house outside the city—far enough outside? Weathered wood, blue-painted window frames, a few yellow wildflowers in spring. His mother, buttoning her coat as she hurried out the gate; his father with his small round glasses, bending over his books …
“Here we go,” said Commander T. “Looks like some minor population centers in this area here.”
Airman J saw a line of green. A valley, he thought, east of the mountains, where it might have been protected from the worst of the blasts.
“We’ll send someone there.” He looked over his shoulder at Airman J. “You.”
In the gym, the little kids ran wild at first, thrilled by the big, echoing space. Sam Gomez, a coach at the elementary school, found a couple of basketballs for them to play with, but soon they were fighting over them, shrieking and wailing, so he took the balls away.
The older kids didn’t want to play basketball, or race each othe
r, or entertain themselves much at all. A few of them walked up the bleachers and then down again, over and over, but most of them clumped together by the side door, talking in low voices or dozing, keeping themselves apart from the adults’ nervous conversation.
As the hours went by, some people got hungry, and Karen Peabody, who had helped organize the gym shelter project, got out paper plates from the boxes of stored supplies. Those who wanted to eat spooned up cold baked beans, cold chili, and cold macaroni and cheese.
Eva’s mother couldn’t eat, though. Her stomach was too uneasy.
“Come on,” said Eva’s father. “Just a few of these peanut butter crackers.” To him, love and food were close relatives. In the fall, he made apple pies with cinnamon sauce and vanilla ice cream and held an apple pie party for the family, including aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors. “Have some of this dried fruit at least,” he said to Eva’s mother.
She shook her head. “I can’t, Mark,” she said. “Not until I know.”
“Kim’s family is dependable,” said Eva’s father. “I’m sure she’s all right.”
But Eva’s mother felt as if no one would ever be all right again.
Eva had forgotten about the fence. There it was, a little way down the hill—a row of posts with wire strung between them, marking the end of her father’s property.
On the way up the hill, she’d gone through the fence just by bending over, putting one foot between the top wire and the middle one, and then stepping all the way through. She couldn’t do that this time. She’d either have to slide under the lowest wire—which was impossible, there wasn’t enough room, the barbs would scrape her—or haul herself along the fence all the way to the south gate, nearly a quarter of a mile away.
At the thought of this, she felt her will go limp. It was too far. She couldn’t make it. Maybe it would be better to lie down right here and wait to be found.