The People of Sparks (20 page)

“Maybe it can be stopped at the beginning,” Maddy said. “If someone sees what’s happening and is brave enough to reverse the direction.”

“Reverse the direction?”

“Yes, turn it around.”

“How would you do that?”

“You’d do something good,” said Maddy. “Or at least you’d keep yourself from doing something bad.”

“But how could you?” said Lina. “When people have been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?”

“You
wouldn’t
want to,” Maddy said. “That’s what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.”

Lina wondered if she was strong enough to be good. She didn’t feel strong at all right now.

“Time to sleep,” said Maddy.

Lina pulled the blankets over her head, but still she could feel the wind and hear the oxen making low, uneasy sounds. She heard Caspar still pacing, too, and muttering under his breath.

I want to go home, she thought. And for the first time, the picture that arose in her mind was not of the dark, familiar buildings of Ember but of Sparks under its bright sky. She thought of Dr. Hester’s house, and the garden blooming in the sun, and the doctor puttering with her hundred plants. She thought of Mrs. Murdo sitting in the doctor’s courtyard, basking in the warmth, and Poppy playing with a spoon beside her. Even Torren was in the picture, proudly arranging his possessions on a window ledge.

And of course there was Doon. He should have been her partner on this journey. If he were here with her, she’d feel less afraid. She missed him. Maybe when she got back to Sparks, he’d be tired of hanging around that boy named Tick and be ready to be her friend again.

CHAPTER 21

                    
Attack and Counterattack

The morning after the trouble at the fountain, Doon awoke to a clamor rising through his window from the front of the hotel. He looked out, but he could see only the tops of people’s heads, all clustered around the front steps. He ran downstairs with his shirt still unbuttoned, flapping around him, to see what was happening.

The doors of the hotel stood open. Through them, he saw that a heap of trash had been dumped on the front steps. He went closer and looked. The pile seemed to consist of rotten vegetables and filthy rags, scattered all over with shiny green leaves and sharp twigs and long creepers pulled up by their dirty roots.

Doon stared at it with the same sick feeling he’d had when he saw the black words on the hotel walls. It wasn’t so much the pile itself that made him feel sick; it was that whoever did this hated the people of Ember, and hated Doon himself in particular. This was an act of revenge.

He went outside, edging around the pile. Clary was standing on the step just below it, peering down at the leaves and branches. “Why would they bother to scatter leaves on everything?” she said. “And they’re all the same kind, too.” She picked up a sprig and looked closely at the bright green leaves, rubbing them between her fingers, sniffing them. “Strange,” she said.

But most people were too upset to pay attention to the contents of the pile. An angry buzz filled the air, and now and then one voice or another rose above the rest. “This is an outrage!” It was a clear, sharp voice—Tick’s, Doon was sure. Then a high voice: “I hate them, I hate them!” That must be Lizzie—and sure enough, there she was, standing near Tick, dunking her shoes in a bucket of water to get the dirt stains off.

After a while, Tick climbed the steps and clapped his hands. “All right, everyone!” he called. “We’ve been attacked again—and this is worse than the first time. It’s a disgusting insult, and it fills us with rage. But all we can do right now is get this mess off our doorstep. Let’s get busy and clean it up.”

Everyone did. They picked up armloads of the leafy vines and carried them away. They shoved the garbage down onto the ground and kicked it into the bushes. They brought buckets of water up from the river and sloshed them over the steps until everything was more or less clean. Tick supervised all this, calling out directions—though he didn’t do any of the actual work himself, Doon noticed. Doesn’t want to get his clothes dirty, thought Doon rather grumpily.

When the cleanup was done, people stood around and argued. Some were for marching down to the town that very minute, confronting the town leaders, and demanding that the vandals be punished. Other people said no, it wasn’t good to cause trouble, it would just make everything more unpleasant, and anyway, it wasn’t the
whole
village that was against them, only
some
of them.

“But which ones?” someone yelled. “And how do we stop them? They have to be stopped!”

“I’m tired of being blamed and punished!” cried someone else.

“I’m tired of being starved!”

“And what about winter?” someone yelled. The word had spread, and people had added this to their list of grievances.

“Are we just going to sit here and take this treatment?”

“No! No! No!”

Doon could see Tick moving through the crowd, bending to speak into the ear of one person and then another. As people listened, their eyes narrowed and their lips tightened, and they turned to Tick and nodded.

The shouting died down after a while, because people couldn’t agree on a course of action. If they didn’t go to work, they wouldn’t get any lunch. So most of them went back to their ordinary routines: they washed their hands and faces in the river, they ate what remained in their parcels for breakfast, and they headed up the road toward the village.

Doon and his father went, too, though Doon went reluctantly.

“Father,” he said, “this is the third time they’ve attacked us. Don’t you think we have to do something?”

“What do you propose to do?” his father said.

“I don’t know,” said Doon. “But we have to do
something.
We can’t just let ourselves be
trampled,
can we?”

“Son,” said Doon’s father, “I don’t know the answer. We’re in a tough situation here.” He clasped his hands behind his back and walked for a while looking down at the road. “It does seem that something is called for,” he said finally. “The trouble is that violence just leads to more violence. So I don’t know.”

Doon’s team was assigned to the cornfield that day. He and his father spent hours on their knees, yanking prickly weeds out of the ground. Doon’s arm itched. He kept having to stop and scratch it. Was a mosquito biting him? He scratched and scratched again. It felt like fifty mosquito bites, not one. He had them on his other arm, too. Both arms itched like crazy. Finally he stopped working and held his arms out in front of him. From wrist to elbow, they were carpeted with red lumps.

“Look, Father!” he cried. “I have a rash! What
is
it?”

“I don’t know, son,” his father said, “but I have it, too.”

The itchy rash spread over the arms and hands and faces of all the Emberites who had helped with the cleanup that morning. “What
is
this?” people said as they worked in the bakery and the bike shop, the brickyard and the tomato fields. They itched, they scratched, and the rash spread and oozed and itched still more.

The villagers knew what it was. “Poison oak,” they said. They explained about the oil on the leaves, how you only had to touch it to get the rash. “You must have been out scrambling around in the woods,” they said. But the Emberites had not been scrambling in the woods. They knew how they’d been poisoned. Someone had done it to them on purpose.

Fury spread among the Emberites like a fire. Those who’d heard about the poison oak raged about it to those who hadn’t, and before long everyone knew. Diggers threw down their shovels. Fruit pickers pushed the ladders to the ground and stalked out of the orchard. Someone in the bakery flung a great clump of dough at the supervisor, and someone in the egg shop hurled three eggs at the wall. The terrible itching aggravated everyone’s anger, and before long the people of Ember began to gather in the streets and in the plaza, and the gathering became a crowd, and the crowd became a mob.

Doon ran into the village with the other field workers, and he found himself in the middle of this mob. He heard Tick’s voice from somewhere nearby: “They gave us poison! What shall we give them?” When there was no response but a confused babble, the question came again, louder: “What shall we give
them
?”

This time an answer came: a crash, and a tinkling of shattered glass. Someone had thrown a rock through the window of the town hall. Cheers arose, and all around him Doon saw people suddenly bending over, looking for rocks to throw. More crashes. More yells.

People started snatching things from the stalls. A jar of jam came sailing overhead. Arms reached up to catch it, but it fell past them and landed a few feet from Doon, smashing open and splattering his legs with sticky red goo and splinters of glass. He saw people stuffing muffins into their pockets, and he saw Tick with his arm stretched backward, ready to throw a rock at the windows of the tower. He saw Miss Thorn running with her hands shielding her head, and the Hoover sisters backing up into the egg shop, trying to get away. He was frightened, suddenly.

At that moment, the doors of the town hall opened, and Ben Barlow strode out. His face was twisted with rage. “Stop them!” he shouted. “Stop these thieves and vandals!”

“You poisoned us!” shouted someone in the crowd.

“We’ve had enough!” shouted someone else, and threw a potato right at Ben. It hit him in the stomach, and he bent over, his mouth dropping open.

A roar came from the crowd. Tick’s voice rose above the others: “Fill your pockets!” he screamed. “Fill your pockets and run!”

There was a mad scramble, and then the Emberites pushed their way out of the plaza and raced down the streets to the river road. Doon ran, too. He saw Tick up ahead of him, sprinting fast, his shirttails flying.

Now we really are thieves and vandals, Doon thought. Was this a bad thing? Or was it exactly what the people of Sparks deserved?

That night, Tick went up and down the corridors of the hotel, knocking on doors and urging people to come to his meeting. They did come—at least a hundred of them, by Doon’s count. They gathered at the head of the road as the daylight was fading. Doon saw Chet and Gill and Allie and Elvan from his old class at the Ember school, along with people he knew from the Pipeworks, people he knew from Ember’s shops, and others. Most of them were boys and men, but there were women and girls, too. Most were silent, but some whispered excitedly to each other. They formed a semicircle in front of Tick, who had climbed onto a tree stump. Doon saw Lizzie standing near Tick, gazing up at him wide-eyed. The moon shone behind Tick’s head; it gave a silver edge to his hair but left his face in darkness.

“All right,” Tick said. His voice was quiet, but instantly the whispering stopped. “Our time has come. They have attacked us three times now. Today we showed them a little of our anger. We made them understand that we won’t be taken advantage of any- more. They must know that if they hurt us, they will be hurt, too. We will strike back. We are warriors now.”

Murmurs of approval rumbled through the crowd. Doon, who was standing at the rear, heard several people echo Tick’s words: “Strike back, yes, we have to strike back. We are warriors.”

“We must be ready,” Tick said. “When the next confrontation comes, we won’t be as disorganized as we were today. We’ll have a plan. And we’ll be armed.”

More murmurs, and a ripple of excitement.

“How will we arm ourselves?” Tick asked. He answered the question himself. “We have what we need right here where we live,” he said. “Look in your bathrooms. You’ll find strong metal rods there, just the right length, and enough for everyone.”

People looked at each other in puzzlement. Metal rods in the bathroom? But Doon knew immediately what Tick meant: the towel racks. Take them off the wall, and you have a sturdy weapon that could do real damage—bruise soft flesh, even break hard bone.

Tick waited until the word was passed through the crowd and everyone understood about the weapons in the bathrooms. Then he said, “There are other ways to arm yourself, too. Did you bring a knife with you from Ember? Are there still slivers of glass left in the windows of your room? Have you noticed that some of the stones by the river are just the size to fit in a fist?”

Again, he waited. All around Doon, people were nodding and whispering. Doon tried to imagine what the uprising earlier that day would have been like if the rioters had been swinging steel rods and striking out with knives and broken glass. People would have been hurt; there would have been blood. But think of the hurt the villagers had inflicted on the Emberites—the pangs of hunger, the humiliation, the name calling, the terrible itchy rash. Didn’t one hurt deserve another? Wasn’t he simply being squeamish to shrink from it? He would have to strengthen himself, he thought—not just his body, but his spirit, his will. It would take a kind of strength he didn’t have yet to strike another person with the intent to harm.

Tick was bending forward now and speaking in a softer voice. People shushed each other and listened. “Go back now and sleep, my warriors,” Tick said. “In the next days, prepare your weapons and prepare your will. Remember how you felt when you saw those ugly words scrawled on our walls. Remember how you felt when the poison rash crawled up your arms. The people of Sparks will wrong us again, we can be sure of that. When it happens, we’ll be ready.”

After the meeting, Doon walked back to the hotel feeling vaguely uneasy. Tick must be right, but somehow Doon couldn’t feel wholehearted about being a warrior. Was it because he was a coward? He didn’t want to be a coward. He didn’t really think he was one. What was his problem, then?

CHAPTER 22

                    
Discoveries

When Lina awoke the next morning, she thought there was something wrong with her eyes. Everything had gone gray. She sat up and looked around. No, it wasn’t her eyes—it was the air that was wrong. It was so thick she could hardly see through it. The truck was merely a dark shadow. The buildings of the city had vanished entirely.