The shepherd’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? I’ve heard of those match things, but I’ve never—” Then quickly she put on her cagey expression again. “I mean, really? You’re offering me just one? For this extremely ancient and important book? I think three would be more like it.”
Lina glanced at Doon.
“Never mind, then,” he said.
“All right, all right,” the roamer said quickly. “Two.”
“One,” Lina said. “That book is in terrible shape.” She took a match from her pocket and offered it. The roamer shrugged and gave Doon the book, smirking, clearly thinking she had gotten the better deal.
Doon picked up the book. Lina saw right away that it was in ruins—the roamer had torn out so many of its pages that the cover’s edges clapped together. Some torn strips still remained near the book’s spine, where the roamer had ripped pages out unevenly, but there seemed to be only a very few pages left whole, and even those were stained and warped. That was a waste of a good match, Lina thought.
Doon turned the book over in his hands and looked at its cover. Then he looked up at the roamer. “You got this up in the mountains?”
“Yep. Right near a—” She clapped a hand over her mouth and cackled. “But he told me not to tell,” she said between her grubby fingers.
“Near what?” Doon demanded. “Who told you not to tell?”
The roamer just grinned and shook her head. She tossed the last of her trading goods back into the wagon, and as she worked, she hummed a little tune—a tune that somehow sounded familiar to Lina, though she didn’t know why. When the bags and boxes were all stowed away, the roamer took hold of the horse’s harness.
“Wait,” Lina said. “May I touch that horse?”
The roamer looked surprised, but she nodded. Lina patted the horse’s shaggy side, and it rolled its big eye at her and huffed gently through its black nose holes. She combed her fingers through the tangled hair on its neck; she reached up high and stroked its soft ear.
“When he was young,” said the roamer, “I used to ride him.”
“Ride? You mean you got on his back? Does he go fast?”
“He used to,” said the roamer, giving the horse a couple of pats.
“Faster than a bicycle?” asked Lina.
The roamer laughed. “Faster than the water in the river.” Then she tugged the reins, and the horse picked up a lanky leg and started forward. The roamer, leading the horse, walked away. Her sheep straggled behind.
Lina was about to say goodbye to Doon, but he took hold of her arm. “Lina,” he said, “look at this.” There was something in his voice that made her turn to him in surprise. He held out the book, showing her the cover. “Directions for Use,” it said in large print.
“Use of what?” said Lina. “I don’t understand.”
“No, look down here,” said Doon, pointing at smaller print at the cover’s lower edge.
Lina peered at it. “For the people from Em,” it said, and then there was a blot of something on the last part of the word. But it didn’t matter. She knew what the word was. She looked up at Doon, wide-eyed.
“Ember,” they said, both speaking at the same time.
CHAPTER 3
________________________
The Book of Eight Pages
The next morning, Doon showed up at the door of the doctor’s house, looking for Lina. “She’s out in back,” said Mrs. Murdo, “hanging up the wash.”
Doon found her in the midst of clothes and covers flapping in the chilly wind. She was hoisting things up over a cord strung between the house and a tree, pinning them in place with split sticks. “Lina,” he said. “I have to talk to you.”
She came out from behind a large damp skirt (one of Doctor Hester’s). “Good,” she said. “What have you figured out?” The day before, after they’d recognized the word “Ember” on the cover, Doon had gone quickly back home to read through what was left of the book’s pages.
“It’s definitely something from the ancient world,” he said now, “but I can’t tell exactly what. You know how many pages are left in this book? Eight! And most of them are from the back. That roamer must have started tearing them out one by one from the beginning. But the back pages are mostly diagrams and math and words I don’t understand.”
“Can you understand any of it?” Lina asked, pulling a wet shirt out of the laundry basket.
“Just a little, here and there, but it’s enough to give me a few clues. I think the book must be about a machine of some sort, maybe something electric. I can make out the word ‘current,’ for instance. Doesn’t that sound like electricity?”
“I don’t know,” said Lina. “It could mean the current of a river.” Doon was so fascinated by electricity that anything could sound electric to him, she thought.
“There’s also ‘crystal’ and ‘shine,’ ” Doon said.
Lina flopped the shirt over the clothesline. “That sounds more like jewels.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Doon said. “I think it’s some kind of machine.” He seemed full of pent-up energy. He paced back and forth beside the clothesline, batting the windblown clothes out of his way. “I just know that book is important, Lina,” he said. “And it was meant for us! For the people from Ember.”
Lina was trying to pin the shirt to the line, but the wind kept snatching it away from her. “Would you help me with this shirt? I can’t make it stay up.”
Doon grabbed one sleeve of the shirt and wrapped it around the clothesline. “I’ve been thinking so much about all this, Lina. About this book and what it might mean and about what happened to the Ark and how I’d like to . . .” He trailed off. The shirt came loose from the line and fell into the dirt before Lina could catch it. “I don’t know for sure,” Doon went on, not noticing. “But I feel . . .” He looked away, and his eyebrows drew together as if he were figuring out a puzzle written in the sky. “I feel the way we did about the Instructions that Poppy chewed up. It was our mystery to figure out. It came to us. This feels the same.”
Lina, picking up the shirt and shaking the dirt off it, thought of the tattered book with dismay. “You mean we have to figure out what it says? What all those missing pages are about?”
“No, no, we can’t do that. Too much is gone. But we have to do something. We can’t just ignore it.” The wind blew his hair into his eyes, and he swiped it away impatiently. “There are so many troubles here, Lina. It’s cold and dark, and there isn’t enough food, and people are sick. . . . Maybe the book is about something that would make things better.”
“Did you show it to your father?”
“No,” Doon said. “I haven’t shown it to anyone.”
“Why not?”
Doon went on as if he hadn’t heard this question. “I think there’s something up near Ember that we were meant to find. Look at the title of the book: ‘Directions for Use.’ It’s so much like ‘Instructions for Egress’!”
“It is,” Lina admitted.
“I think we should go and look for it,” Doon said.
Lina gave a short laugh of disbelief. “No one would let us,” she said.
“I know. That’s why I haven’t told anyone. We’d be forbidden to go.”
“But how can we go?” asked Lina. “We don’t even know what we’d be looking for.” An uneasy feeling twisted in her stomach. She wasn’t sure if it was excitement or fear.
“I’ve been thinking and thinking about it,” Doon said. “I know it’s risky. We might not find anything at all. But I want to go back to Ember, Lina. And I want you to come with me.”
But of course that was impossible. Lina had tried to laugh when Doon said it, but she couldn’t quite laugh, because she saw that he was serious. She could tell that he would have explained all his plans to her right there, in the cold yard with the laundry flying, if Mrs. Murdo hadn’t called out the kitchen window for Lina to come in and peel potatoes. “Meet me tomorrow,” Doon said. “At the Ark, at sunrise. Can you?
I’ll tell you more then.”
She agreed. That afternoon, as she peeled potatoes, fetched wood for the fire, dug a hole in the garden for the garbage, and scraped up wax drippings to melt down for more candles, she was too busy to do much thinking. But in the evening, she finally had time to be still. Dinner was over. It hadn’t been much of a dinner—just a thin carrot soup, dry bread, and some bits of cheese with the mold cut off. Lina had gotten used to having a half-empty stomach most of the time.
She settled herself in a chair by the fire. Torren was sitting on the floor nearby, poking the logs with a long fork and watching the sparks fly up. Poppy was asleep upstairs. On the table beside Lina was an unfinished drawing she’d been working on for weeks in her brief spare moments. She’d always loved to draw. When she’d lived in Ember, she had drawn pictures of a city that she saw in her imagination—a bright, beautiful city not like Ember at all, with white buildings and a blue sky. It was just a dream, she knew, something she’d made up (she’d never seen a sky that wasn’t black), but it held a fascination for her, and she drew it over and over. She had left those pictures behind when she left Ember. She wished she still had them, and she’d tried once or twice to draw them again. But it didn’t work somehow. These days, she wanted to draw what she saw around her—the houses and animals and trees of Sparks.
The drawing she’d been working on lately was of a chicken. It wasn’t coming out well. Most of the time, she had to use bits of charcoal for drawing, so her pictures turned out clumsy and smeared. Now and then, Doon found a pencil stub for her at the hotel, which let her draw clear lines for a while. But she missed the colored pencils she’d had in Ember. They would have been perfect for this chicken picture.
Her paper came from Doon, too. He had been working with Edward Pocket, who’d been the librarian in Ember. Here in Sparks, Edward had put himself in charge of the huge disorderly pile of books that had accumulated over the years in the back room of the Ark. Little by little, with Doon’s help, he was putting these books in order so that people could actually find them and read them. Doon had discovered that old books sometimes had blank pages in the back. He tore them out and brought them to Lina.
She turned her thoughts to Ember. The very name filled her with both sadness and longing. Ember, where she had grown up, where all the people she cared about had lived. Ember, whose streets and buildings she had known so well, every alley, every corner, every doorway. She thought about what Doon had said. Could she go back there? Would she want to?
Mrs. Murdo came in with a candle in one hand and a cup of tea in the other—mint, Lina could tell from the scent of it. She sank into a chair by the dying fire. “Doctor Hester’s asleep,” she said. “I finally convinced her she needed to rest. She’s been rushing around taking care of everyone else for weeks, and she’s worn herself out.”
To Lina, a room always felt more safe and comfortable when Mrs. Murdo was in it. She was a neat, upright, sharp-featured woman, not the soft and cozy sort at all, but she was kind and sensible, and Lina trusted her completely.
“We should get to bed,” said Mrs. Murdo.
“I don’t want to go to bed,” said Torren. He hunched up his shoulders and pinched his face into a frown.
“You’ll want to after the fire burns down and it gets cold,” said Mrs. Murdo.
“I’ll go then,” said Torren. “Not now.” He prodded the burnt logs with the fork until they fell into glowing pieces.
“Embers,” Lina said, looking at them. “That’s what our city was named after.”
“I don’t see how you could have lived underground,” said Torren. “I still think you might be making it all up.”
“We’re not,” said Lina. “Why would we?”
“Maybe you really came from outer space,” Torren said. “On an airplane.”
“You were there when we came,” Lina said. “Did you notice any airplane?”
“No,” Torren said. He swept the fork around in the fireplace, scattering the coals. “I’d just like to see that underground place, that’s all.”
Maybe I would, too, thought Lina. But when she thought about how Ember would be now—completely dark, completely abandoned—she shivered. No, they couldn’t possibly go. She would say that to Doon tomorrow, and surely he would come to his senses and agree.
She went down to the Ark early the next morning. It was a blustery day. Clouds rose from the western horizon, immense, looking like carved wood painted white with blue shadows. Up on the roof of the main part of the building, workers were ripping away rotted, sodden wood, hurrying to repair the hole before the next rain. The roof of the back room, where Edward Pocket was making his library, hadn’t been damaged, and some people had grumbled about that. Why couldn’t the useless books have gotten ruined instead of the food?
Doon was standing outside the back room door. The wind flapped his jacket. He wasn’t wearing the old brown jacket he’d always worn before. In just the last month or so, that one had gotten impossibly small for him, and he now had a dark green one that came from the donation pile the people of Sparks had put together for their new citizens. It was a bit frayed around the cuffs, but at least his bare wrists didn’t poke out from the sleeves.
“Come inside,” Doon said, “out of the wind.” He led her into the back room, where a giant heap of books had accumulated over the years. They picked their way among the tumbled piles in the dim light coming from the one dirty window. Doon made two book stacks for them to sit on. Before Lina could say anything, he began explaining. “I know you think I’ve lost my mind,” he said.
“Well,” Lina said, “I do think so, sort of. I don’t see how we could find our way to Ember. Even if we could, it would take too long to get there—we’d have to be out in the cold at night. It took us four days to get to Sparks after we came out of Ember.”
“But you and I could go much faster,” Doon said. “When we came from Ember, we had old people and small children with us, and we didn’t know where we were going. You and I could do it in one long day’s walk, I’m sure.”
“But even if we could get there,” said Lina, “we couldn’t get into the city. We couldn’t go against the current up the river.”
“I know,” said Doon. “But we might be able to get in from above. I’m thinking we could go back to that ledge we threw the message from. We could check the slope of the cliff. Maybe we could get down it.”
“But even if we could get down,” Lina said, “the city’s completely dark. We’d never find anything there—even if we did know what we were looking for.”
“But we have candles now,” Doon said. “We’ll take lots of them with us. I’ll study every word of that book for clues about what we’re looking for and where it is. And listen—we might not find the thing in the book, but we could find other things. There might still be food there. Or medicine. Remember that salve we used to rub on cuts? If some of that was left, it could help my father. He won’t say so, but I can tell his hand hurts him terribly. It might be infected.”
“I remember that salve,” Lina said. “It was called Anti-B. I think we still had an old tube of it at Granny’s, mostly empty.”
“Even a little would help,” Doon said. “And there might be other useful things people could trade with. We could find out.”
Lina could see how excited he was, how much he wanted to do this. To her it seemed dangerous, difficult, and probably hopeless. But she had to admit that his excitement inspired her a bit. Life had been hard and dull lately; an adventure would change that. She wasn’t a bit sure that Doon’s plans would succeed. Things were always so much neater in a person’s imagination than they were in real life. But just to go on a journey, even if they found nothing and had to turn right around and come home . . . She was tempted.
“But we can’t just disappear,” Lina said. “People would worry.” She remembered how terribly anxious Mrs. Murdo had been the two times before when she’d gone away without saying where she was going: when she left E
mber on the day of the Singing, and just a few months ago when she went off to the ancient ruined city. She didn’t want to put Mrs. Murdo through that again.
But Doon had all this figured out, too. It was complicated, but he was sure it would work. Lina, he said, must go and talk to Maddy. She was the one who’d come to town during the summer with Torren’s brother, Caspar, and stayed on, after Caspar’s quest failed, to help with the garden. There wasn’t much to do on the garden in winter, so Maddy would have extra time. Lina should ask her if she’d be willing to move to the doctor’s house for a few days and help Mrs. Murdo. If Maddy said yes—Doon was sure she would—Lina should tell Mrs. Murdo that she needed a bit of a change and would like to stay at the Pioneer for a while. “Tell her that you and Maddy will just switch places,” he said. “Then, once Maddy has left, I’ll tell my father I’m going to stay with you at the doctor’s house for a few days because you need some extra help.”
“But won’t your father wonder why we need Maddy and you?” Lina asked.
“No. With so many people sick and the doctor always away, he’ll know she needs lots and lots of help.”
The sun went behind a cloud, and the light in the room grew even dimmer than before. Lina pondered. Her sensible self and her adventurous self tugged against each other. She looked at the serious expression in Doon’s dark eyes. He was determined to do this. She wasn’t sure if he was being brave or reckless, wise or foolish. Maybe a little of each.
“So,” Doon said, “shall we go?”
She thought of the empty lands, the wolves that ranged there, the rain and cold and wind. She thought of peeling potatoes, cleaning the outhouse, washing medicine bottles, hanging up laundry. She thought of Ember, where—just possibly—something important might be waiting for them. She pushed her doubts aside and took a deep breath.