The People of Sparks (2 page)

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 there, 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.

CHAPTER 2

                    
Out from Below

The people from the dying city of Ember had come up into the new world only a few days before. The first to arrive had been Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow, bringing Lina’s little sister, Poppy, with them. From a ledge high up in the great cave that held their city, they’d thrown down a message, hoping someone would find it and lead the others out. Then they’d waited. At first they’d explored the wonders around them. But as the hours passed, they began to worry that their message had not been found and that they would be alone in this world forever.

Then, in the late afternoon of the next day, Doon suddenly shouted, “Look! They’re coming!”

Lina grabbed Poppy by the hand. All three of them ran toward the mouth of the cave. Who was it? Who was it coming from home? A woman emerged from the darkness first, and then two men, and then three children, all of them squinting against the bright light.

“Hello, hello!” Lina called, leaping up the hill. She saw who it was when she got closer: the family who ran the Callay Street vegetable market. She didn’t know any of them well—she couldn’t even remember their names—and yet she was so glad to see them that tears sprang to her eyes. She flung her arms around each one in turn, crying, “Here you are! Look, isn’t it wonderful? Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! And are more coming?” The new arrivals were too breathless and amazed to answer, but it didn’t matter, because Lina could see for herself.

They came out from the cave, shading their eyes with their hands. They came in bunches, a few of them and then minutes later a few more, stumbling out into a light a thousand times brighter than any they’d ever seen. They stared in astonishment, walked a few steps, and then just stood, dropping the sacks and bundles they carried, gazing, blinking. To Lina and Doon, who felt already that they belonged here, the refugees from Ember looked strange in this bright landscape of green grass and blue sky. They were so drab and dingy in their heavy, mud-colored clothes, their coats and sweaters in colors like stone and dust and murky water. It was as if they had brought some of Ember’s darkness with them.

Doon suddenly leapt away, shouting, “Father! Father!” He threw himself against his stunned father, who fell backward, sat down on the ground, and burst into a combination of laughter and weeping to see his son again. “You
are
here,” he gasped. “I wasn’t sure. . . . I didn’t know. . . .”

All afternoon they came. Lizzie Bisco came, and others from the old High Class, along with Clary Laine from the greenhouses, and the doctor who had helped Lina’s granny, and Sadge Merrall, who had tried to go out into the Unknown Regions. Mrs. Murdo came, walking in her brisk, businesslike way, but giving a cry of joy when she saw Lina hurtling toward her. People came whose faces Lina recognized but whose names she didn’t remember, like the shoe repair man from Liverie Street, and the little puffy-faced woman who lived in Selverton Square, and the tall, black-haired boy with blue-gray eyes so light they looked like glints of metal. What was that tall boy’s name? She spent a second trying to recall it, but only a second. It didn’t matter. These were her people, the people of Ember. All of them were tired and all of them were thirsty. Lina showed them the little stream, and they splashed the water on their faces and filled their bottles there.

“What about the mayor?” Lina asked Mrs. Murdo, but she just shook her head. “He’s not with us,” she said.

Some of the older people looked terrified to be in such a huge place, a place that seemed to go on without borders in all directions. After they had stared nervously about them for a while, they sat down in the grass, hunched over, and put their heads to their knees. But the children ran around in ecstasy, touching everything, smelling the air, splashing their feet in the stream.

By evening, 417 people had arrived—Doon kept track. As the light began to fade from the sky, they shared the food they had brought, and then, using their coats as blankets and their bundles as pillows, they lay down on the warm, rough ground and slept.

The next morning they got ready to leave. Lina and Doon, when they first arrived, had spotted a narrow gray line that ran along the ground like a pencil stroke in the distance. They thought it might be a road. So the people of Ember, having no other clue about where to go, picked up their bundles and set out in that direction, a long, straggling line trailing across the hills.

It was on this walk that Mrs. Murdo told Lina and Doon about leaving Ember. The three of them walked together, Mrs. Murdo with Poppy in her arms. Doon’s father walked behind them, leaning forward now and then to hear what Mrs. Murdo was saying.

“I was the one who found your message,” Mrs. Murdo said. “It fell right at my feet. It was the day after the Singing. I was on my way home from the market, feeling sick with worry because you and Poppy had disappeared. Then there was your message.” She paused and looked up at the sky. She was keeping a couple of tears from falling, Lina saw.

Mrs. Murdo composed herself and went on. “I thought it would be best to tell the mayor first. I wasn’t sure I trusted him, but he was the one who could most easily organize the leaving. I showed him your message, and then I waited to hear the city clock ringing out the signal for a meeting.”

Mrs. Murdo paused to catch her breath. They were going uphill, over rough clumps of earth—hard walking for city people, whose feet were accustomed to pavement.

“And was there a meeting?” Lina asked.

“No,” said Mrs. Murdo. She plucked some burs off her skirt and shifted Poppy to her other shoulder. “Mercy,” she said. “It’s terribly hot.” She stood still for a moment, breathing hard.

“So there was no meeting?” Lina prompted.

Mrs. Murdo started walking again. “Nothing happened at all,” she said. “The clock didn’t chime. The guards didn’t come out and start organizing people. Nothing. But the lights kept flickering on and off. It seemed to me there was no time to lose.

“So I went to the Pipeworks and showed your message to Lister Munk. We followed the directions, and we found the rock marked with E right away—because people were there already.”

“But how could they be, if they didn’t have the directions?” Doon said. “Who was it?”

“It was the mayor,” said Mrs. Murdo grimly, “and four of his guards. Looper was there, too, that boy who used to keep company with your friend Lizzie. They had huge, bulging sacks with them, piled up on the edge of the river, and they were loading the sacks into boats. The mayor was shouting at them to work faster.

“Lister yelled, ‘What are you doing?’ but we didn’t need an answer. I could see what they were doing. They were going first. The mayor was making sure that he would get out, along with his friends and his loot, before anyone else.”

Mrs. Murdo stopped talking. She trudged along, wiping sweat from her forehead. She frowned up at the hot, bright sky. Poppy whimpered.

“Let me carry the child for a while, Mrs. Murdo,” said Doon’s father.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Murdo said. She stopped and passed the squirming Poppy to Doon’s father, and they walked on.

Lina waited a minute or so, and then she couldn’t wait any longer. “Well, what happened?” she said.

“It was awful,” Mrs. Murdo said. “Everything happened at once. Two of the guards looked up at us and lost their balance and fell into the water. They grabbed hold of the loaded boats, which made the boats tip and dump their load into the river. The other guards and Looper knelt down and tried to reach them, but they were pulled in, too. In the midst of all this, the mayor jumped onto the one boat that was still upright, but as soon as he hit it, it turned over and he plunged into the river.” Mrs. Murdo shuddered. “He screamed, children. It was a horrible sound. He bobbed in the water like a giant cork, and then he went under. In just a few seconds, he and his guards were swept away. They were gone.”

They walked in silence for a while, going downhill now. After a few minutes Mrs. Murdo went on.

“So Lister and I went back up into the city, and we had the Timekeeper ring the bell for a public meeting. We tried to explain what to do, but as soon as people heard the first bit—that a way out of Ember had been found, and that it was in the Pipeworks—everyone began shouting and rushing around. Things turned into a terrible mess. People were in too much of a hurry even to ask questions. Hundreds of them poured through the streets of the city all at once, and outside the door of the Pipeworks a huge crowd pushed and shoved to get in, so many people, so panicky, that some were trampled and crushed.”

“Oh!” cried Lina. “How horrible!” These were people she knew! It was too awful to think about.

“Horrible indeed,” said Mrs. Murdo. She frowned out across the vast landscape surrounding them, where there were no people in sight at all. “It was impossible to control them,” she went on. “They rushed to the stairway—some people lost their footing and fell all the way down the stairs. Others ran right over them. And then when they realized that they were going to have to get into these little shells and float on the river, some people were so frightened that they turned around and tried to go up the stairs again, and some were so eager to get going that they jumped into the boats and capsized them and fell into the river and were drowned.” She raised her eyes to Lina’s. “I saw everything that happened,” she said. “I’ll never forget it.”

Lina looked behind her at the citizens of Ember toiling across the hills. These were the ones who had made it out. “How many do you think were—left behind?” she asked Mrs. Murdo.

Mrs. Murdo just shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Too many.”

“And have the lights gone out forever now?”

“I don’t know that either. But if they haven’t, they will soon.”

Hot as she was, Lina shuddered. She and Doon exchanged a look. They were thinking the same thing, she was sure: their city was lost in darkness now, and anyone left there was lost, too.

Later that day the refugees from Ember came to the road they had seen from afar. It was potholed and weed-cracked, but easier to walk on than the rough ground. It led alongside a creek that flowed swiftly over round, smooth rocks. In all directions, they saw nothing but endless expanses of grass. They shared the food they had brought with them, but it wasn’t much. Some of them soon grew weak with hunger. They grew faint from the heat, too, which was hard to bear for people used to the constant chill of Ember. Poppy cried when she was set down on her feet, and her face looked flushed and hot.

Night came in the strange, gradual way so different from the sudden lights-out that signaled night in Ember. The travelers lay down on the ground and slept. They walked the next day, too, and the day after that. By then the food they had brought with them was gone. They traveled more and more slowly, stopping often to rest. Poppy was listless; her eyes were dull.

Finally, around the middle of the following day, they trudged up still another hill, and from there they saw a sight that made many of them weep with relief. Farmed fields lay below them in a wide valley, and beyond the fields, where the stream they’d been following joined a river, was a cluster of low brown buildings. It was a place where people lived.

Like the others, Lina was glad to see it. But it wasn’t a bit like the city she had imagined, the one she’d drawn pictures of back in Ember, the one she’d hoped to find in this new world. The buildings of that city had been tall and majestic and sparkling with light. That city must be somewhere else, she thought as she started down the hill. She’d find it—not today, but someday.

CHAPTER 3

                    
Through the Village

The woman who had greeted them led the people of Ember into the town. They went down a dusty street, past buildings that looked as if they’d been made out of the same brown earth that was underfoot. They were heavy-looking, imperfect buildings: their walls were fat and lumpy, rounded smooth at the corners. Lina saw cracks in the walls and crumbled places where bits of a window ledge or a step had fallen away.

Paths and alleys and strips of garden wound between the houses. It was clear that no one had planned this place, not the way the Builders had planned Ember. This town must have grown, one bit added to the next and another bit added to that. Plants grew everywhere. In Ember, the only plants were in the greenhouses—unless you counted mold and fungus, which grew on the trash heaps and sometimes in kitchens and bathrooms. Here, flowers and vegetables grew together beside every house. Plants sprang up alongside the streets, climbed walls, crawled over fences, pushed up through cracks in stairways, tumbled out of big pots and over windowsills and even down from roofs.