The People of Sparks (21 page)

From somewhere in the murk, she heard Caspar’s voice. He was muttering to himself, as he had been the night before, but she could hear only a low, growly sound, no words.

A dark shape appeared and moved toward her. It was Maddy. She bent over and whispered, “Don’t get up yet. Lie back down.”

“What’s wrong with the air?” Lina asked her.

“It’s called fog,” Maddy said. “It comes in off the water. Now lie down. Curl up.”

Lina lay down and pulled the blanket up under her chin. Maddy knelt beside her and whispered, “Pretend you’re sick. Moan and groan a little. Refuse to get up. I’ll explain later.”

Lina followed instructions. She stared up into the swirling grayness and whimpered a little. It wasn’t hard to pretend she didn’t feel good. She’d rarely felt so cold and miserable in her life.

She saw Maddy and Caspar huddling together, two shadowy humps in the fog. They were talking, and their voices rose, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying.

She must have gone to sleep again. When she opened her eyes, the fog was thinner. A pale sun like a circle of paper shone through it. Without sitting up, she looked around for Maddy and saw her sitting on the back of the truck, eating. She didn’t see Caspar anywhere.

“Maddy,” she whispered.

Maddy jumped down and came over to her. “You can get up now,” she said. “He’s gone.”

Lina sat up. “Gone?”

Maddy nodded. “Into the ruins. He won’t give up this notion of finding treasure. Something in his mind has slipped, I think. He wasn’t all that steady to begin with, and now he’s lost his balance.” She took Lina’s hand and pulled her to her feet, and together they folded the blanket. “He wants you to help him with his search—go into the small spaces where he can’t go. I told him you’d help tomorrow but today you weren’t well. So he went off to look around by himself. ‘Preliminary exploration,’ he called it.”

“I don’t want to help him,” Lina said.

“You aren’t going to,” said Maddy. “We’re leaving.”

“We are? When? How?” Lina asked.

“Now,” said Maddy. “Come and help me.”

Maddy climbed up onto the truck, unstrapped the two bicycles, and handed them down to Lina. She opened the food chest and took out some of the remaining travelers’ cakes, along with two water bottles, and she wrapped these in blankets and tied them with rope.

“Here,” she said to Lina. “This pack is yours, and this bike.”

“You mean we’re going to ride all the way back to Sparks?” Lina thought with horror of the vast, empty distance, and the blazing heat.

“We won’t have to ride all the way,” Maddy said. “There are lots of roamers. Someone will help us.”

“And we just leave Caspar here by himself?” Lina wasn’t sure that even someone as unlikable as Caspar should be abandoned in this terrible place.

“He’ll be fine,” said Maddy. “He has his truck and all his supplies. He doesn’t need us.”

So they tied the packs onto their backs. They walked the bikes across the rubbly part of the road until they came to the place where it opened out into the long downhill curve. Just then the fog lifted and the air came clear. Lina turned around to take a last look at the city, the city she’d had such hopes for, the city she thought might be a home for the people of Ember. In the sunlight, it looked more sad than terrible. Over the rolling, grass-covered mounds, the skeletons of the old towers stood like watchmen. The trees bent their backs before the wind, and the wind swept ripples across the surface of the green water that wrapped around the city’s edges. Maybe, thought Lina, the sparkling city she’d seen in her mind was a vision from the distant future, not the distant past. Maybe someday the people of Ember—or the great-great-grandchildren of today’s people of Ember—would come back here and build the city again.

“All right,” said Maddy. “Let’s ride.”

Lina flung her leg over the bike and settled herself on the seat. This was a bigger bike than the one she was used to. She gripped the handlebars, gave a push with her foot, and she was off.

From the start, the bike moved so fast she hardly had to pedal. She zoomed forward, going far faster than even her fastest running. The wind in her face swept her hair out behind her, shot through her clothes, nearly peeled back her eyelids. The bumps in the road made the handlebars buck like something alive—she held on with a steel grip. It was absolutely terrifying and absolutely joyful. Down the long hill they went, she and Maddy alone on the wide, empty highway, no need to pedal at all, only steer around broken places or bits of debris. The fast air came into Lina’s mouth and buffeted down into her lungs, and she laughed out loud, it was such a glorious freedom. When the slope leveled out a little, she steered the bike in big curves, back and forth, and Maddy did, too. They whooped and laughed and raced each other, and alongside them the white birds swooped, too, screeching in their shrill voices.

Then came a long stretch of flat road and hard pedaling. With many stops for resting and eating and drinking water, they rode all day. Lina’s seat was sore and her legs grew tired. Blisters rose on her hands from holding so tight to the handlebars. But Maddy said, “Just a little farther, a little farther, and then we’ll stop,” and Lina kept going, finding strength when she thought it was gone, until at last, at the end of the day, they came to the place where the water ended and they could begin to turn eastward toward the hills.

Here they stopped for the night. They found a creek with a trickle of clear water running along the bottom. Maddy said the round green leaves that grew on the creek’s banks were good to eat, so they had those with their travelers’ cakes, along with some wild onions and a few blackberries they found deep in a thicket of bramble. There was no cold wind here, as there had been near the city. The evening was warm and still, except for the chirping of frogs in the creek. They spread their blankets on the ground. Some-where in the dark, an owl hooted softly and another answered. Maddy was lying on her back with her hands clasped over her wide stomach. To Lina, gazing at her profile against the sky, she looked like a small range of hills, solid and comforting. So Lina dared to ask a question that had been troubling her.

“Maddy,” she said, “could there ever be another Disaster like the one that came before? Or even worse? What if every single person and every single animal was killed?”

“Don’t worry,” said Maddy. “People didn’t make life, so they can’t destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can’t touch the place life comes from. Whatever made plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again.”

Maddy turned over and tugged her blanket around her neck. “Time to sleep now,” she said. “More hard riding tomorrow.”

In the morning, they were on their way as soon as the sun rose. Lina groaned as she got on her bike again—her muscles were sore from yesterday. But she soon warmed up, and for a long time the road was flat and the riding was easy.

After an hour or so, Lina spotted something moving up ahead of them, a dot in the distance. “Look!” she called to Maddy, who was a little way behind her, and she pointed. “I think it’s a truck! Maybe a roamer!”

In ten minutes or so, they had caught up to it. The man driving the truck turned when he heard them calling. Surprise lit up his face, and he halted his oxen and jumped down.

“Greetings!” he cried. “Glad to see some travelers! Haven’t met anyone on the road for four days.”

He was a short, stocky man with a wild fuzz of black hair that stood out several inches all around his head. Pelton Moss was his name, and he was indeed a roamer, as was easy to see from the crates and barrels on his truck. All his containers were nearly empty, though. He had sold his most recent load of goods to a remote south-bay settlement. Now he was heading back in the direction of Sparks. “I’ll take you with me,” he said, “if you’ll help with my collecting on the way.”

And so for five days, Lina got to be a roamer. At every ancient abandoned town, they stopped and combed through the derelict houses. Not much was left; these houses had been picked nearly clean in the last two hundred years. But sometimes, if they looked carefully, they found things the previous roamers had overlooked, or things they had thought worthless.

Lina loved these searches. In some ways, it was like being a messenger back in Ember—she could go everywhere, look in every forgotten corner, and if she was lucky make discoveries. And she was lucky.

She found a silver locket with a picture of someone inside, though the picture was so old and stained she couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a baby. She found a small, round pane of glass with a handle. The glass made whatever you looked at appear bigger. “A magnifying glass,” said Pelton. “Nice.” She found a tiny red truck with wheels that still turned. She found a strip of leather with a buckle and two round metal pieces attached to it. It was too short to be a belt. There were words on the metal circles, but they were so worn she couldn’t read them. “That’s a dog collar,” Pelton told her. “Not very useful, but interesting.”

At a house that stood by itself far out in a field, she opened a cabinet on a back porch, where the screen was hanging in brown flaps. In the cabinet was a box that said “Monopoly” in faded letters on its lid. Inside were tiny dotted cubes and tiny bits of wood shaped like houses. “Wonderful!” Pelton exclaimed. “Extremely rare!” There was another box in the cabinet with a picture of a garden on top and a heap of oddly shaped pieces of cardboard inside. And at the back of the cabinet, in a clutter of broken dolls, torn pages from books, and little jars of dried-up paint, Lina found a bar of metal about three inches long that Pelton said was a magnet. “Put it up against the truck,” he said. “It’ll stick right on there.”

Even as she enjoyed the searching, though, Lina couldn’t help imagining how it would be for the people of Ember to come out into this empty land and try to start a town. How would they turn the hard, cracked earth into fields of crops? What would they build houses with? What would they eat while they chopped at the soil and put together their shelters? A picture rose in her mind of Ember’s four hundred people scattered across the brown fields like a flock of lost birds, scratching in the dry grass for seeds or bugs, huddling for shade beneath the few trees, trying to build shelters of sticks or straw. She shuddered and made the picture go away. It was best to keep her attention on searching.

Maddy didn’t do much searching. She didn’t care for bending over and creeping underneath things and wedging her large self into small spaces. While Lina and Pelton hunted, she walked around in the fields and the overgrown gardens behind the houses, looking for old fruit trees, wild grapevines, and the kinds of leaves, roots, nuts, and mushrooms that were all right to eat. Lina would look out the window of the house she was poking through and see Maddy wading through knee-high grass toward a gnarled old apple tree. Or she’d see her wide back in among the bushes as she picked berries. Sometimes Maddy simply sat. Lina would see her settled into an ancient lawn chair, gazing across a field or up a street, not moving at all. What was she thinking about? Lina wondered at those times. She looked so serious.

On the evening of the third day, they stopped by a wide, slow part of the river. As the sun went down, they sat on the riverbank, drinking cool tea that Pelton made with mint leaves, and they talked. Pelton told about the places he’d seen, and Maddy and Lina told about Caspar’s quest in the city, his mad study of the old songs about treasure.

“Oh, yes,” said Pelton. “I’ve heard those old rhymes all my life, and my father before me heard them, too. It’s an old verse, or a song, I think, come down from years ago and scrambled, probably, in the process. Everyone says it in a different way. Something like this.” He sang in a sweet but off-key voice:

“There’s buried treasure in the ancient city.

Remember, remember from times of old.

What’s hidden will come to light again.

It’s far more precious than diamonds and gold.

“That’s the way I heard it, from an old man who lives up in the mountains near Angel Rock. Then I heard another version from Maggie Pierce, over by Falter. She sings it like this:

“Remember the city, the city remember,

Where treasure is hidden under the ground.

The city, the city, always remember,

That’s where the treasure will be found.”

Lina stared at him. Her mouth dropped open, her eyebrows flew upward, and her heart thudded in her chest.

He laughed. “What are you looking so amazed at? Think you’re going to go find this treasure? Nobody believes those old things anymore. They’re nursery nonsense, old jingles made up to put babies to sleep.”

“Some still believe it,” said Maddy. “But it’s only those with a bit of madness in them. And a good measure of greed.”

“That’s right,” said the roamer. “I’ve known a few like that. One of ’em was sure it was in the old city of Sanazay and spent his whole life digging through the ruins, looking for it. Finally died when a chimney fell on him.”

Maddy snorted. “Such nonsense people believe,” she said.

Lina was shaking her head. She began to smile. “No, no,” she said. “No, you have it wrong.” She laughed, she couldn’t help it. “It isn’t nonsense, it’s true. I’m sure, I’m sure!” What she suddenly knew seemed so wonderful and astonishing that she leapt up and clapped her hands and laughed again.

“You’re a silly one,” said the roamer.

“I’m not silly! The city in that rhyme—it’s the city I come from!”

The roamer cast a sideways glance at Maddy. “What’s the matter with her?” he said. “Has she got a fever?”

Maddy reached up for Lina’s hand. “Calm down now,” she said. “Tell us what you’re talking about.”

So Lina explained. “Sing the first line again, the first line of the second song,” she said.

Pelton eyed her strangely, but he sang: “Remember the city, the city remember, where treasure is hidden under the ground.”

“That first line,” said Lina. “I’m sure it’s meant to be ‘Remember the city, the city of
Ember.
’ That’s the name of my home. It was under the ground.”