Then another possibility occurred to her. Where the fence crossed the gully, there was space beneath it, enough so that she might be able to lie on her back in the dry streambed and wriggle under the bottom wire. It would still be an ordeal—to reach the gully, she’d have to scooch twenty or thirty yards across the field, slide down the bank, which was rough with roots and prickles, and lie flat against the stones, which would bruise her back.
For a moment, Eva felt the urge to crumple into a ball and wait for whatever might happen. Instead, she made her slow way across the field, slid down the bank, lay down in the gully, and slithered under the fence. And it was an ordeal, but afterward, she felt a moment of pure happiness at her accomplishment.
Another fifteen minutes or so, and she was down off the hillside and in the apple orchard. The pain in her leg was slightly better, although her ankle looked terrible, swollen and turning violet. She could hop between the trees—three or four hops, and then she would cling to a trunk and rest for a few seconds. Almost there. Just through the orchard, down the lane, up Walnut Street, across the playing field, and then she would pound on the gym door and they would let her in.
In the distance she heard the roar of engines. She stopped moving, holding on to the gnarled trunk of a tree, and looked up. Not a flock of fliers this time—only one. It flew low toward the valley, straight at her as if it saw her, like a hornet aiming to sting.
Airman J flew through mile after mile of dust and smoke. As he went inland, the air became slightly clearer. He had an urge to fly home, but his home was on the other side of the world, and his plane would run out of fuel long before he could get there.
Up ahead to the right was a wide line of green—the valley the drones had photographed. He turned in that direction.
Bud Davis stopped in the middle of what he was saying. “Listen.”
The people in the gym fell silent and in the silence heard an engine. A steady rumble, coming closer. “A plane,” said Ralph.
“Quick, outside! Signal for help!” cried someone, and right away someone else called, “No! It’s an enemy plane!”
“We have to see!” Eva’s mother ran for the gym’s west door and had almost got to it before Bud stopped her and dragged her down.
The people in the gym huddled closer together as the plane flew over and the sound of its engine faded.
The plane passed over the valley and disappeared, and Eva made a desperate, lurching run, gasping at the pain, stumbling and picking herself up over and over. She was in the middle of the football field when the plane came again, this time from the east.
It sees me, she thought. She stopped where she was, looking up toward whatever might come at her. Something dropped from the plane. Eva squeezed her eyes shut. Her mind went blank.
The roar of the plane faded. There was no explosion. She opened her eyes, and she saw in the blue-gray sky a white flower opening. It grew tremendous, and at the base of it was a man, swinging from long threads. He floated toward the earth. Down by the far goalpost of the football field, he landed, rolled, tangled in his cords, and got to his feet, facing her.
Eva stood frozen, watching. The man reached into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out—a piece of white cloth. He waved it slowly back and forth as he took a step toward her, and then another, slowly closing the distance between them.
He wore some kind of military uniform. His face was round and young, and he looked frightened. He dropped the white cloth and put his two hands together as if he were praying, fingers pointing under his chin. He said, in English, “No … more … war.” He paused, then added: “For … me.”
If someone else—Bud Davis, say—had been the one out there on the football field that day, things would have turned out differently. But it was Eva, and not the everyday Eva but a wounded and exhausted and afraid Eva, an Eva with nothing left in her but her essential self, which was clear as a blue sky. She didn’t question whether this man was telling the truth. She saw that he was.
“Follow me,” she said, and she limped across the field to the door of the gym, where she pounded and called out, and when Bud opened the door with a gun in his hand, she stood in front of the soldier and cried out, “Don’t shoot him!”
A few hundred miles away, Airman J’s bomber plane, flying without a pilot, splashed down into the ocean, raising a wave that swept across the water for miles and slammed up against the side of the aircraft carrier, though not hard enough to attract any notice from Commander T.
For the people of Arbor Valley, the months that followed were terrible, as they were for survivors of the Disaster all over the world. Vast stretches of land were charred and poisoned. Fires burned everywhere, and a pall of smoke dimmed the sky for a long time. There was no water in the pipes, and no electricity traveled through the wires.
Ragged bands of people, many of them sick or injured, crept across the landscape, looking for water and food. The people of Arbor Valley, with others who had lived nearby, formed a convoy while they could still find cars with gas in them. Gradually they moved northward. They learned to find what they needed in the remains of old buildings, and some years later, when that was no longer possible, they looked for a place by a river, where they could build houses and grow food and begin to live like civilized beings again.
Eva was a grown woman by the time she and her people established their village. Though she always walked with a limp after the day of the bombs, she was otherwise healthy and strong. She was the one who came up with the name Sparks for the town they built, because it was a spark of light in a world that had become dark.
Airman J—people had come to call him simply Jay—lived out his life in the village and was never for one moment sorry that he’d decided, that day in his plane, not to drop the bombs he was carrying, but to drop himself instead.
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Torren was out at the edge of the cabbage field that day, the day the people came. He was supposed to be fetching a couple of cabbages for Dr. Hester to use in the soup that night, but, as usual, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t have some fun while he was at it. So he climbed up the wind tower, which he wasn’t supposed to do because, they said, he might fall or get his head sliced off by the big blades going round and round.
The wind tower was four-sided, made of boards nailed one above the next like the rungs of a ladder. Torren climbed the back side of it, the side that faced the hills and not the village, so that the little group of workers hoeing the cabbage rows wouldn’t see him. At the top, he turned around and sat on the flat place behind the blades, which turned slowly in the idle summer breeze. He had brought a pocketful of small stones up with him, planning on some target practice: he liked to try to hit the chickens that rummaged around between the rows of cabbages. He thought it might be fun to bounce a few pebbles off the hats of the workers, too. But before he had even taken the stones from his pocket, he caught sight of something that made him stop and stare.
Out beyond the cabbage field was another field, where young tomato and corn and squash plants were growing, and beyond that the land sloped up into a grassy hillside dotted, at this time of year, with yellow mustard flowers. Torren saw something strange at the top of the hill. Something dark.
There were bits of darkness at first—for a second he thought maybe it was a deer, or several deer, black ones instead of the usual light brown, but the shape was wrong for deer, and the way these things moved was wrong, too. He realized very soon that he was seeing people, a few people at first and then more and more of them. They came up from the other side of the hill and gathered at the top and stood there, a long line of them against the sky, like a row of black teeth. There must have been a hundred, Torren thought, or more than a hundred.
In all his life, Torren had never seen more than three or four people at a time arrive at the village from elsewhere. Almost always, the people who came were roamers, passing through with
a truckload of stuff from the old towns to sell. This massing of people on the hilltop terrified him. For a moment he couldn’t move. Then his heart started up a furious pounding, and he scrambled down off the wind tower so fast that he scraped his hands on the rough boards.
“Someone’s coming!” he shouted as he passed the workers. They looked up, startled. Torren ran at full speed toward the low cluster of brown buildings at the far end of the field. He turned up a dirt lane, his feet raising swirls of dust, and dashed through the gate in the wall and across the courtyard and in through the open door, all the time yelling, “Someone’s coming! Up on the hill! Auntie Hester! Someone’s coming!”
He found his aunt in the kitchen, and he grabbed her by the waist of her pants and cried, “Come and see! There’s people on the hill!” His voice was so shrill and urgent and loud that his aunt dropped the spoon into the pot of soup she’d been stirring and hurried after him. By the time they got outside, others from the village were leaving their houses, too, and looking toward the hillside.
The people were coming down. Over the crest of the hill they came and kept coming, dozens of them, more and more, like a mudslide.
The people of the village crowded into the streets. “Get Mary Waters!” someone called. “Where’s Ben and Wilmer? Find them, tell them to get out here!”
Torren was less frightened now that he was surrounded by the townspeople. “I saw them first,” he said to Hattie Carranza, who happened to be hurrying along next to him. “I was the one who told the news.”
“Is that right,” said Hattie.
“We won’t let them do anything bad to us,” said Torren. “If they do, we’ll do something worse to them. Won’t we?”
But she just glanced down at him with a vague frown and didn’t answer.
The three village leaders—Mary Waters, Ben Barlow, and Wilmer Dent—had joined the crowd by now and were leading the way across the cabbage field. Torren kept close behind them. The strangers were getting nearer, and he wanted to hear what they would say. He could see that they were terrible-looking people. Their clothes were all wrong—coats and sweaters, though the weather was warm, and not nice coats and sweaters but raggedy ones, patched, unraveling, faded, and grimy. They carried bundles, all of them: sacks made of what looked like tablecloths or blankets gathered up and tied with string around the neck. They moved clumsily and slowly. Some of them tripped on the uneven ground and had to be helped up by others.
In the center of the field, where the smell of new cabbages and fresh dirt and chicken manure was strong, those at the front of the crowd of strangers met the village leaders. Mary Waters stepped to the front, and the villagers crowded up behind her. Torren, being small, wriggled between people until he had a good view. He stared at the ragged people. Where were their leaders? Facing Mary were a girl and a boy who looked only a little older than he was himself. Next to them was a bald man, and next to him a sharp-eyed woman holding a small child. Maybe she was the leader.
But when Mary stepped forward and said, “Who are you?” it was the boy who answered. He spoke in a clear, loud voice that surprised Torren, who had expected a pitiful voice from someone so bedraggled. “We come from the city of Ember,” the boy said. “We left there because our city was dying. We need help.”
Mary, Ben, and Wilmer exchanged glances. Mary frowned. “The city of Ember? Where’s that? We’ve never heard of it.”
The boy gestured back the way they had come, to the east. “That way,” he said. “It’s under the ground.”
The frowns deepened. “Tell us the truth,” said Ben, “not childish nonsense.”
This time the girl spoke up. She had long, snarled hair with bits of grass caught in it. “It isn’t a lie,” she said. “Really. Our city was underground. We didn’t know it until we came out.”
Ben snorted impatiently, folding his arms across his chest. “Who is in charge here?” He looked at the bald man. “Is it you?”
The bald man shook his head and gestured toward the boy and the girl. “They’re as in charge as anyone,” he said. “The mayor of our city is no longer with us. These young people are speaking the truth. We have come out of a city built underground.”
The people around him all nodded and murmured, “Yes” and “It’s true.”
“My name is Doon Harrow,” said the boy. “And this is Lina Mayfleet. We found the way out of Ember.”
He thinks he’s pretty great, thought Torren, hearing a note of pride in the boy’s voice. He didn’t look so great. His hair was shaggy, and he was wearing an old jacket that was coming apart at the seams and grimy at the cuffs. But his eyes shone out confidently from under his dark eyebrows.
“We’re hungry,” the boy said. “And thirsty. Will you help us?”
Mary, Ben, and Wilmer stood silent for a moment. Then Mary took Ben and Wilmer by the arms and led them aside a few steps. They whispered to each other, glanced up at the great swarm of strangers, frowned, whispered some more. While he waited to hear what they’d say, Torren studied the people who said they came from underground.
It might be true. They did in fact look as if they had crawled up out of a hole. Most of them were scrawny and pale, like the sprouts you see when you lift up a board that’s been lying on the ground, feeble things that have tried to grow in the dark. They huddled together, looking frightened. They looked exhausted, too. Many of them had sat down on the ground now, and some had their heads in the laps of others.
The three village leaders turned again to the crowd of strangers. “How many of you are there?” Mary Waters asked.
“About four hundred,” said the boy, Doon.
Mary’s dark eyebrows jumped upward.
Four hundred! In Torren’s whole village, there were only three hundred and twenty-two. He swept his gaze out over this vast horde. They filled half the cabbage field and were still coming over the hill, like a swarm of ants.
The girl with the ratty hair stepped forward and raised a hand, as if she were in school. “Excuse me, Madam Mayor,” she said.
Torren snickered. Madam Mayor! Nobody called Mary Waters Madam Mayor. They just called her Mary.
“Madam Mayor,” said the girl, “my little sister is very sick.” She pointed to the baby being held by the sharp-eyed woman. It did look sick. Its eyes were half closed, and its mouth hung open. “Some others of us are sick, too,” the girl went on, “or hurt—Lotty Hoover tripped and hurt her ankle, and Nammy Proggs is exhausted from walking so far. She’s nearly eighty years old. Is there a doctor in your town? Is there a place where sick people can lie down and be taken care of?”
Mary turned to Ben and Wilmer again, and they spoke to each other in low voices. Torren could catch only a few words of what they said. “Too many …” “… but human kindness …” “… maybe take a few in …” Ben rubbed his beard and scowled. Wilmer kept glancing at the sick baby. After a few minutes, they nodded to each other. Mary said, “All right. Hoist me up.”
Ben and Wilmer bent down and grasped Mary’s legs. With a grunt, they lifted her so that she was high enough to see out over the crowd. She raised both her arms and cried, in a voice that came from the depths of her deep chest, “People from Ember! Welcome! We will do what we can to help you. Please follow us!” Ben and Wilmer set her down, and the three of them turned and walked out of the cabbage field and toward the road that entered the village. Led by the boy and the girl, the crowd of shabby people followed.
Torren dashed ahead, ran down the lane, and got up onto the low wall that bordered his house. From here, he watched the people from underground go by. They were strangely silent. Why weren’t they jabbering to each other? But they seemed too tired to speak, or too stupid. They stared at everything, wide-eyed and drop-jawed—as if they had never seen a house before, or a tree, or a chicken. In fact, the chickens seemed to frighten them—they shrank back when they saw them, making startled sounds. It took a long time for the whole raggedy crowd to pass Torren’s house, and when the last people
had gone by, he jumped down off the wall and followed them. They were being led, he knew, to the town center, down by the river, where there would be water for them to drink. After that, what would happen? What would they eat? Where would they sleep? Not in my room, he thought.
Excerpt copyright © 2004 by Jeanne DuPrau.
Published by Random House Children’s Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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