“Aren’t you clever!” said her mother. “And isn’t it wonderful—California!”
“Yes!” Nickie threw an arm around her mother’s waist and hugged her. She knew what California meant to her mother, who’d grown up there and whose family had lived there for generations. For her mother, going to California would be going home.
They spent the next week packing, and as they packed Nickie told her mother everything about what had happened in Yonwood—about Otis and Amanda, about the Prophet, about Grover and his snakes, and about the three goals she’d set for herself.
“What happened with those goals?” her mother asked. “Did you reach them?”
“No,” said Nickie. “Not really, except for falling in love with Otis. I didn’t reach a single one.”
But she was wrong about that. Sometimes it takes much longer than you think it will to reach the goals you set for yourself. And sometimes—as it happened with Nickie—you reach your goals in strange and unpredictable ways.
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What Happened Afterward
The house in California was on a farm that spread out at the foot of low green hills. There were acres of land for Nickie and Otis to wander in. Nickie loved living there. Snow fell in the winter, and in the summer the fields were full of butterflies.
Crystal went back to New Jersey. Len came to visit her there, and she went to Yonwood sometimes to visit him, and it didn’t take long for them to decide they were meant for each other and should get married. Luckily, the Hardestys decided to withdraw their offer on Greenhaven, giving Crystal the chance to make the decision that had been slowly growing in her mind. She took Greenhaven off the market, and she and Len moved into it themselves, filling its rooms with the kind of plushy pale furniture Crystal liked. Four children followed, a girl and three boys, who used the third-floor nursery room for games, puppy training, movie watching, and bouncing on a small trampoline. Two parakeets lived there, and one hamster. For the next five summers, Nickie flew across the country and spent a month at Greenhaven with her small cousins, and in this way she fulfilled, more or less, her first goal.
The summer Nickie was twelve and Grover was fourteen, the two of them paid a visit to Hoyt McCoy, and he showed them the universe that shimmered on the walls of all his downstairs rooms. Then he took them upstairs and showed them his telescope and whole rooms full of astronomical equipment. “I search for signs of extraterrestrial life,” he told them. “It’s difficult to search in this universe because everything is so far away. Fifty years for light to get here even from the nearest star—ridiculous! But other universes—which might be right next to ours, closer than that chair there—that’s something else again.” His eyes gleamed. “Imagine a rift, a crack in our universe that gives us access to another one. Only for an instant, just long enough to see that it can be done. Would you believe such a thing possible?”
They said they didn’t know.
“I know,” said Hoyt. “Not that I can begin to explain it to you. But that winter you were here, Nicole—well, I will just say that certain people in Washington were astounded by what I told them.”
“Washington?” said Grover. “Astounded?”
“Quite. Astounded enough, at a crucial moment, to put aside certain dire plans. Astounded enough to think that perhaps it was better to explore the world than destroy it. But I am saying too much. Never mind, never mind.”
They pestered him with questions, but he would say no more.
Nickie always wondered, after that, if Hoyt McCoy had had something to do with preventing the war. People had waited for over a week after the president’s deadline, with nothing but rumors in the news. Finally there came an announcement: an agreement had been reached with the Phalanx Nations after all; war had been averted. No country set off its arsenal of bombs, and the terrorists seemed to fade back into whatever dark corners they had come from. For a while, there were wild rumors that the government had received messages from an alien starship that taught the leaders how to solve their problems. But that was never proven, and hardly anyone believed it. Most people thought that they’d come through all right because God was on their side.
Brenda Beeson was extremely upset to discover that the Prophet’s blurry words had not been orders from God. In fact, she couldn’t quite believe it. She warned people not to lose faith, and to keep up their battle against evil. She pointed out that although war hadn’t come, the terrorist was still up there in the woods. Then one day that spring a young photographer named Annie Everard took her camera up the trail to take pictures of wildflowers and came back instead with a fairly clear shot of a white bear. Everyone was relieved. Now that the danger was past, they decided to go back to following regular laws made by people rather than commands that might or might not come from God.
Mrs. Beeson found this extraordinarily frustrating. She ran for mayor the next year, but when she lost, she took up a life of study instead. She set up an office in her house, equipped with a powerful computer that had a lightning-fast Internet connection and all kinds of software for finding and reading and organizing information, and there she pored over holy writings from every place and time, trying to figure out, once and for all, what God was really saying.
Althea Tower asked everyone please not to call her the Prophet. She was sorry for all the things that had been done in her name, especially the episode of the dogs, even though it wasn’t her fault. So she set up a place in her backyard where people could bring their dogs when they went away on trips. She also led bird-watching walks around town for anyone who wanted to come, and she kept her birdbaths and bird feeders full both winter and summer. She tended to have nightmares, though, and she never completely recovered her health.
Grover was in Yonwood only occasionally in those years. After the Arrowhead Wilderness Reptile Expedition, he spent the next year living with his father’s sister in Arizona so he could work with the Young Herpetologists program there on the weekends, and when he was seventeen and had graduated from high school, he went to study in Thailand. His life turned out to be the very one he’d wanted: adventurous, interesting, and useful. He traveled through the swamps of Malaysia, the forests of Kashmir, and the deserts of northern Africa; no one knew more than he did about the strange, endangered creatures of those lands.
Years later, Crystal sent Nickie two newspaper articles from the Yonwood Daily. One was about Grover. He had become, the article said, a world-renowned expert on a previously unknown Amazonian snake called the flame-tongued boa. He’d discovered that a gland in its throat produced a chemical that could be used to make a powerful painkiller, and the painkiller was now used by doctors all over the world. When Nickie heard this, she smiled to herself, remembering her Goal #3. On that first trip to Yonwood, she had done something to help the world after all: she had started Grover on the road to his discovery.
The other article was about Althea Tower. It was simply a brief notice of her death. She had caught a bad flu that developed into pneumonia, and she’d died at the age of sixty-four.
And so the Prophet wasn’t around when it began to look as if her terrible vision might be coming true after all.
The problem was, the conflicts that threatened the world when Nickie was eleven had never really been resolved. For a while, leaders turned to the quest for knowledge, putting their efforts into finding out what secrets the universe might hold, and the world changed in many ways. But time passed, the leaders of one era were succeeded by the leaders of the next, and the old fears and differences arose again, fiercer than ever.
And so, long after Nickie had grown up and married and had children, after her children were grown and gone, after her husband (who’d fulfilled her Goal #2) had died—that was when the world once again plummeted down toward darkness. Perhaps, Nickie thought, the Prophet really had seen a glimpse of the future—just a more distant future than anyone had thought. What was happening certainly matched the horrors that had frightened h
er so badly.
All over the world, people who believed in one truth fought against people who believed in a different truth, all of them believing theirs was the only real truth, and all of them willing to do anything—absolutely anything—to defend it. Nations readied and aimed their missiles. They sent their soldiers to take over cities and fight for land, and as the fighting swarmed across deserts and jungles and seas, new diseases broke out, and warring troops and fleeing refugees carried them to one country after another; hundreds of thousands died. Fear ran like a pack of wolves across the planet, and people were afraid for the survival of the human race.
That was when the enormous project that Nickie’s father had worked on fifty years before was at last put to use. It was an entire city, built beneath the ground, stocked with supplies and sealed off from the surface so that its inhabitants could live there as long as necessary, safe from whatever was going to happen above. When the human race seemed truly threatened, the government contacted a few carefully selected people and asked if they might be willing to volunteer for this enterprise. Nickie, being the daughter of one of the Builders, was among them.
She was torn. She hesitated a long time before making up her mind. She loved the world and didn’t like the prospect of going down into a dark place and remaining there, probably, for the rest of her life. But because she loved the world, she finally decided to go. She was sixty years old, after all; she’d had many good years of life. But she wanted to make sure people were still around after she was gone to keep on loving the world. Who would appreciate its beauty and wonders and strangeness if people were gone? So she volunteered. And as she sent off her letter of acceptance, she remembered again her long-ago Goal #3: to do something good for the world. She’d tried her best to help the world during her life, doing the small things that came along. Maybe this was a big thing for her to do—the biggest, and the last.
Besides, she was curious. What would it be like to live in an underground city?
When the day came, she was both sad and excited. On the train, she began keeping a journal, but when the travelers got to the cave entrance and had gone down a long tunnel to the river that would take them to the city, she was afraid the leader would catch her writing (it was against the rules), so she wrapped her journal in a green plastic rain hat, wound a narrow belt around it a couple of times to hold the plastic on, and stashed it behind a rock. Maybe someone will find it someday, she thought. It will be a sort of letter to the future.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to all those who helped and encouraged me through the many drafts of this book, including Susie Mader, Pat Carr, Charlotte Muse, Patrick Daly, Sara Jenkins, Molly Tyson, and Christine Baker. Special thanks to my editor, Jim Thomas, for pushing me relentlessly when I most needed pushing, and also to Jordan Benjamin, for sharing his expert knowledge of snakes (including a live demonstration of snake dinnertime).
JEANNE DUPRAU is the bestselling author of The City of Ember, The People of Sparks, and The Prophet of Yonwood. She lives in Menlo Park, California, where she keeps a big garden and a small dog.
To learn more about Jeannie, visit her Web site at www.jeanneduprau.com.
The BOOKS of EMBER
THE CITY OF EMBER
THE PEOPLE OF SPARKS
THE PROPHET OF YONWOOD
The Prophet of Yonwood Page 19
