The City of Ember (5 page)

“Got me in the ear,” he said. “What
was
that?”

“I got angry for a second,” said Doon. “I threw one of these old heels.”

“I see,” said his father. He brushed some bottle tops off a chair and sat down. “Does it have to do with your first day at work, son?”

“Yes,” said Doon.

His father nodded. “Why don’t you tell me about it,” he said.

Doon told him. When he was finished, his father ran a hand across his bald head as if smoothing down the hair that wasn’t there. He sighed. “Well,” he said, “it sounds unpleasant, I have to admit. About the generator, especially—that’s bad news. But the Pipeworks is your assignment, no way around it. What you get is what you get. What you
do
with what you get, though . . . that’s more the point, wouldn’t you say?” He looked at Doon and smiled, a bit sadly.

“I guess so,” Doon said. “But what can I do?”

“I don’t know,” said his father. “You’ll think of something. You’re a clever boy. The main thing is to pay attention. Pay close attention to everything, notice what no one else notices. Then you’ll know what no one else knows, and that’s always useful.” He took off his coat and hung it from a peg on the wall. “How’s the worm?” he asked.

“I haven’t looked at it yet,” said Doon. He went into his room and came out with a small wooden box covered with an old scarf. He set the box on the table and took the scarf off, and he and his father both bent over to look inside.

A couple of limp cabbage leaves lay on the bottom of the box. On one of the leaves was a worm about an inch long. A few days before school ended, Doon had found the worm on the underside of a cabbage leaf he was slicing up for dinner. It was a pale soft green, velvety smooth all over, with tiny stubby legs.

Doon had always been fascinated by bugs. He wrote down his observations about them in a book he had titled
Crawling and Flying Things.
Each page of the book was divided lengthwise down the center. On the left he drew his pictures, with a pencil sharpened to a needle-like point: moth wings with their branching patterns of veins; spider legs, which had minute hairs and tiny feet like claws; beetles, with their feelers and their glossy armor. On the right, he wrote what he observed about each creature. He noted what it ate, where it slept, where it laid its eggs, and—if he knew—how long it lived.

This was difficult with fast-moving creatures like moths and spiders. To learn anything about them, he had to catch what glimpses he could as they lived their lives out in the open. If he put them in a box, they scrambled around for a few days and then died.

This worm, though, was different. It seemed perfectly happy to live in the box Doon had made for it. So far, it did only three things: eat, sleep (it looked like sleeping, though Doon couldn’t tell if the worm closed its eyes—or even if it had eyes), and expel tiny black poop balls. That was it.

“I’ve had it for five days now,” said Doon. “It’s twice as big as it was when I got it. It’s eaten two square inches of cabbage leaf.”

“You’re writing all this down?”

Doon nodded.

“Maybe,” said his father, “you’ll find some interesting new bugs in the Pipeworks.”

“Maybe,” said Doon. But to himself he said, No, that’s not enough. I can’t go plodding around the Pipeworks, stopping up leaks, looking for bugs, and pretending there’s no emergency. I have to find something important down there, something that’s going to help. I have to. I just
have
to.

CHAPTER 4

Something Lost, Nothing Found

One day when Lina had been a messenger for several weeks, she came home to find that Granny had thrown all the cushions from the couch onto the floor, ripped up a corner of the couch’s lining, and was pulling out wads of stuffing.

“What are you doing?” Lina cried.

Granny looked up. Wisps of sofa stuffing stuck to the front of her dress and clung to her hair. “Something is lost,” she said. “I think it might be in here.”

“What’s lost, Granny?”

“I don’t quite recall,” said the old woman. “Something important.”

“But Granny, you’re ruining the couch. What will we sit on?”

Granny tore a bit more of the covering off the couch and yanked out another puff of stuffing. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll put it back together later.”

“Let’s put it back now,” Lina said. “I don’t think what’s lost is in there.”

“You don’t know,” said Granny darkly. But she sat back on her heels, looking tired.

Lina began cleaning up the mess. “Where’s the baby?” she asked.

Granny gazed at Lina blankly. “The baby?”

“You haven’t forgotten the baby?”

“Oh, yes. She’s . . . I think she’s down in the shop.”

“By herself?” Lina stood up and ran down the stairs. She found Poppy sitting on the floor of the shop, enmeshed in a tangle of yellow yarn. As soon as she saw Lina, Poppy began to howl.

Lina picked her up and unwound the yarn, talking soothingly, though she was so upset that her fingers trembled. For Granny to forget the baby was dangerous. Poppy could fall downstairs and hurt herself. She could wander out into the street and get lost. Granny had been forgetful lately, but this was the first time she’d completely forgotten about Poppy.

When they got upstairs, Granny was kneeling on the floor gathering up the white tufts of stuffing and jamming them back into the hole she’d made in the couch. “It wasn’t in there,” she said sadly.

“
What
wasn’t?”

“It was lost a long time ago,” said Granny. “My father told me about it.”

Lina sighed impatiently. More and more, her grandmother’s mind seemed caught in the past. She could explain the rules of pebblejacks, which she’d last played when she was eight, or tell you what happened at the Singing when she was twelve, or who she’d danced with at the Cloving Square Dance when she was sixteen, but she would forget what had happened the day before yesterday.

“They heard him talking about it when he died,” she said to Lina.

“They heard who talking?”

“My grandfather. The seventh mayor.”

“And what did they hear him say?”

“Ah,” said her grandmother with a faraway look. “That’s the mystery. He said he couldn’t get at it. ‘Now it is lost,’ he said.”

“But what
was
it?”

“He didn’t say.”

Lina gave up. It didn’t matter anyway. Probably the lost thing was the old man’s left sock, or his hairbrush. But for some reason, the story had taken root in Granny’s mind.

The next morning on her way to work, Lina stopped in at the house of their neighbor, Evaleen Murdo. Mrs. Murdo was brisk in her manner, and in her person thin and straight as a nail, but she was kind in her unsmiling way. Until a few years ago, she’d run a shop that sold paper and pencils. But when paper and pencils became scarce, her shop closed. Now she spent her days sitting by her upstairs window, watching people in the street with her sharp eyes. Lina told Mrs. Murdo about her grandmother’s forgetfulness. “Will you look in on her sometimes and make sure things are all right?” she asked.

“I will, certainly,” said Mrs. Murdo, nodding twice, firmly. Lina went away feeling better.

That day Lina was given a message by Arbin Swinn, who ran the Callay Street Vegetable Market, to be delivered to Lina’s friend Clary, the greenhouse manager. Lina was glad to carry this message, though her gladness was mixed a little with sadness. Her father had worked in the greenhouses. It still felt strange not to see him there.

The five greenhouses produced all of Ember’s fresh food. They were out past Greengate Square, at the farthest edge of the city. Nothing else was out there but the trash heaps, great moldering, stinking hills that stood on rocky ground and were lit by a few floodlights high up on poles.

It used to be that no one went to the trash heaps but the trash collectors, who dumped the trash and left it. Now and then a couple of children might go there to play, scrambling up the side of the heaps and tumbling down. Lina and Lizzie used to go when they were younger. They’d pull out the occasional treasure—some empty cans, maybe an old hat or a cracked plate. But not anymore. Now there were guards posted at the trash heaps to make sure no one poked around. Just recently, an official job called trash sifter had been created. Every day a team of people methodically sorted through the trash heaps in search of anything that might be at all useful. They’d come back with broken chair legs that could be used for repairing window frames, bent nails that could become hooks for clothes, even filthy rags, stiff with dirt, that could be washed out and used to patch holes in window blinds or mattress covers. Lina hadn’t thought about it before, but now she wondered about the trash sifters. Were they there because Ember really was running out of everything?

Beyond the trash heaps there was nothing at all—that is, only the vast Unknown Regions, where the darkness was absolute.

From the end of Diggery Street, Lina could see the long, low greenhouses. They looked like big tin cans that had been cut in half and laid on their sides. Her breath came a little faster. The greenhouses were a home to her, in a way.

She knew that she was most likely to find Clary somewhere around Greenhouse 1, where the office was, so that was where she headed first. A small tool- shed stood beside the door to Greenhouse 1; Lina peeked into it but saw only rakes and shovels. So she opened the greenhouse door. Warm, furry-smelling air washed over her, and all her love for this place came rushing back. Out of habit, she gazed up toward the ceiling, as if she might see her father there on his ladder, tinkering with the sprinkler system, the temperature gauges, and the lights.

The greenhouse light was whiter than the yellowish light of the Ember streetlamps. It came from long tubes that ran the length of the ceiling. In this light, the leaves of the plants shone so green they almost hurt Lina’s eyes. On the days when she’d come here with her father, Lina had spent hours wandering along the gravel paths that ran between the vegetable beds, sniffing the leaves, poking her fingers into the dirt, and learning to tell the plants apart by their look and smell. There were the beans and peas with their curly tendrils, the dark green spinach, the ruffled lettuce, and the hard, pale green cabbages, some of them as big a newborn baby’s head. What she loved best was to rub the leaves of the tomato plant between her fingers and breathe in their pungent, powdery smell.

A long, straight path led from one end of the building to the other. About halfway down the path, Clary was crouching by a bed of carrots. Lina ran toward her, and Clary smiled, brushed the dirt from her hands, and stood up.

Clary was tall and solid, with big hands and knobby knuckles. She had a square jaw and square shoulders, and brown hair cut in a short, squarish way. You might have thought from looking at her that she was a gruff, unfriendly person—but her nature was just the opposite. She was more comfortable with plants than with people, Lina’s father had always said. She was strong but shy, a person of much knowledge but few words. Lina had always liked her. Even when she was little, Clary did not treat her like a baby but gave her jobs to do—pulling up carrots, picking bugs off cabbages. Since her parents had died, Lina had come many times to talk to Clary, or just to work silently beside her. Clary was always kind to her, and working with the plants took Lina’s mind off her grief.

“Well,” said Clary. She smiled at Lina, wiped her hands on her already grimy pants, and smiled some more. Finally she said, “You’re a messenger.”

“Yes,” said Lina, “and I have a message for you. It’s from Arbin Swinn. ‘Please add four extra crates to my order, two of potatoes and two of cabbages.’”

Clary frowned. “I can’t do that,” she said. “At least, I can send him the cabbages, but only one small crate of potatoes.”

“Why?” asked Lina.

“Well, we have a sort of problem with the potatoes.”

“What is it?” asked Lina. Clary had a habit of answering questions in the briefest possible way. You had to keep asking and asking before she would believe you really wanted to know and weren’t just being polite. Then she would explain, and you could see how much she knew, and how much she loved her work.

“I’ll show you,” she said. She led the way to a bed where the green leaves were spotted with black. “A new disease. I haven’t seen it before. When you dig up the potatoes, they’re runny inside instead of hard, and they stink. I’m going to have to throw out all the ones in this bed. There are only a few beds left that aren’t infected.”

Most people in Ember had potatoes at every meal—mashed, boiled, stewed, roasted. They’d had fried potatoes, too, in the days before the cooking oil ran out.

“I’d hate it if we couldn’t have potatoes anymore,” Lina said.

“I would, too,” said Clary.

They sat on the edge of the potato bed and talked for a while, about Lina’s grandmother and the baby, about the trouble Clary was having with the beehives, and about the greenhouse sprinkler system. “It hasn’t worked right since . . .” Clary hesitated and glanced sideways at Lina. “For a long time,” she said. She didn’t want to say “since your father died.” Lina understood that.

She stood up. “I should go,” she said. “I have to take Arbin Swinn the answer to his message.”

“I hope you’ll come again,” said Clary. “You can come whenever . . . you can come any time.” Lina said thank you and turned to go.

But just outside the greenhouse door, she heard running footsteps and a strange, high, sobbing sound. Or rather, she heard sobs and then a wail, sobs and then a shout, and then more sobs, getting louder. She looked back toward the rear of the greenhouses, toward the trash heaps. “Clary,” she called. “There’s something . . .”

Clary came out and listened, too.

“Do you hear it?”

“Yes,” said Clary. She frowned. “I’m afraid it’s . . . it’s someone who . . .” She peered toward the crying noise. “Yes . . . here he comes.” Her strong hand gripped Lina’s shoulder for a moment. “You’d better go,” she said. “I’ll take care of this.”

“But what is it?”

“Never mind. Just go on.”

But Lina wanted to see. Once Clary had walked away, she ducked behind the toolshed. From there she watched.

The noise came closer. Out beyond the trash heaps, a figure appeared. It was a man, running and stumbling, his arms flopping. He looked as if he was about to fall over, as if he could hardly pick up his feet. In fact, as he came closer he
did
fall. He tripped over a hose and crumpled to the ground as if his bones had dissolved.

Clary stooped down and said something to him in a voice too low for Lina to hear.

The man was panting. When he turned over and sat up, Lina saw that his face was scratched and his eyes wide open in fright. His sobs had turned into hiccups. She recognized him. It was Sadge Merrall, one of the clerks in the Supply Depot. He was a quiet, long-faced man who always looked worried.

Clary helped him to his feet. The two of them came slowly toward the greenhouse, and as they got closer Lina could hear what the man was saying. He spoke very fast in a weak, trembly voice, hardly stopping for breath. “. . . was sure I could do it. I said to myself, Just one step after another, that’s all, one step after another. I knew it would be dark. Who doesn’t know that? But I thought, Well, dark can’t hurt you. I’ll just keep going, I thought. . . .”

He stumbled and sagged against Clary. “Careful,” Clary said. They reached the door of the greenhouse, and Clary struggled to open it. Without thinking, Lina darted out from behind the toolshed and opened it for her. Clary shot her a quick frown but said nothing.

Sadge didn’t stop talking. “. . . But then the farther I went the darker it was, and you can’t just keep walking into black dark, can you? It’s like a wall in front of you. I kept turning around to look at the lights of the city, because that’s all there was to see, and then I’d say to myself, Don’t look back, keep moving. But I kept tripping and falling. . . . The ground is rough out there, I scraped my hands.” He held up one hand and stared at the red scratches on it, which oozed drops of blood.

They got him into Clary’s office and sat him down in her chair. He rambled on.

“Be brave, I said to myself. I kept going and going, but then all of a sudden I thought, Anything could be out here! There could be a pit a thousand feet deep right in front of me. There could be . . . something that bites. I’ve heard stories . . . rats as big as garbage bins . . . And I had to get out of there. So I turned around and I ran.”

“Never mind,” said Clary. “You’re all right now. Lina, get him some water.”

Lina found a cup and filled it from the sink in the corner. Sadge took it with a shaking hand and drank it down.

“What were you looking for?” Lina asked. She knew what
she
would have been looking for if she’d gone out there. She’d thought about it countless times.

Sadge stared at her. He seemed to have to puzzle over her question. Finally he said, “I was looking for something that could help us.”

“What would it be?”

“I don’t know. Like a stairway that leads somewhere, maybe. Or a building full of . . . I don’t know, useful things.”

“But you didn’t find anything? Or see anything?” Lina asked, disappointed.

“Nothing! Nothing! There is nothing out there!” His voice became a shout and his eyes looked wild again. “Or if there is, we can never get to it. Never! Not without a light.” He took a long, shaky breath. For a while he stared at the floor. Then he stood up. “I think I’m all right now. I’ll be going.”

With uncertain steps, he went down the path and out the door.