The People of Sparks

by Jeanne DuPrau

  “We’ll see if we have any eggs this morning,” said Dr. Hester. “That would be a start.”

  Torren appeared suddenly from the other room. “Eggs!” he cried. “I want one!”

  Eggs? Lina didn’t know what that meant. She followed the doctor and Torren through a door that led outside. Beyond the door was a place like an open-air version of the Ember greenhouses, only the plants growing here were far bigger and wilder, curling and twining and shooting upward with tremendous energy. Lina recognized some of them: bean vines climbed up frames of netting, tomato vines grew on wooden towers, chard and kale plants spurted up like big green fountains.

  In among the rows of plants, some fat, fluffed-up, two-legged creatures of the kind she’d seen on her way into town yesterday waddled along, poking at the ground with a sharp thing like a tooth that stuck out from their faces.

  “What are those?” asked Lina.

  “Chickens,” said the doctor. “We’ll check their nests and see if they’ve left us anything.” She bent down and went through the door of a wooden hut in the back of the garden, and when she came out she had spiderwebs in her hair and a white ball in her hand—not a round ball, but one that looked as if it had been stretched sideways. “Just one today,” she said.

  “I want it!” cried Torren.

  “No,” said the doctor. “You’ve had plenty of eggs. This one is for our guest.” She handed the egg to Lina, who took it gingerly. It was smooth and warm. She had no idea what it was. It felt more like a stone than food. Was it some sort of large bean? Or a fruit with a hard white peel?

  “Thank you,” she said doubtfully.

  “See, she doesn’t even want it!” Torren said. “She doesn’t even know what it is!” He gave her a hard shove, making her stagger sideways.

  “Quit that!” cried Lina. “You almost pushed me over!”

  “Torren—” said the doctor, stretching out a hand. But Torren ignored her.

  “I’ll push you again,” he said, and he did, harder.

  Lina stumbled backward and caught herself just in time to keep from falling into the cabbage bed. She felt a flash of fury. She raised her arm and threw the egg at Torren, and it hit him on the shoulder. But instead of bouncing off, it broke open, and a slimy yellow mess dripped down his shirt.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Torren screamed. “It’s ruined!” He put his head down as if to run at Lina and butt her, but the doctor grabbed his arm.

  “Stop this,” she said.

  Lina was horrified. Disgusted, too. That yellow goop was something people ate? She was glad she didn’t have to. But she felt stupid for what she’d done. “I’m sorry I wrecked the egg,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was.”

  “You wrecked my shirt, too!” shouted Torren, wriggling in the doctor’s grasp.

  “But you pushed me,” Lina said.

  “Well, yes,” said the doctor in a weary voice. “That’s how it goes, doesn’t it? Someone pushes, someone pushes back. Pretty soon everything’s ruined.”

  “Everything?” said Lina. “But can’t his shirt be washed?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” the doctor said. “I didn’t mean that. Never mind.” She let go of Torren. “I guess we’ll have bread and apricots for breakfast.”

  Mrs. Murdo had come downstairs now, leaving the still-sleeping Poppy in bed. They all had breakfast together. Lina ate five apricots. She loved them for their taste and for the feel of them, too—their rosy-orange skins were velvety, like a baby’s cheek. She also liked the bread, which was toasted and crunchy, and the jam, which was dark purple and sweet. Mrs. Murdo kept saying, “My, this is tasty,” and asking questions about what bread was made of, and what a blackberry looked like, and why apricots had a sort of wooden rock in the middle. Dr. Hester seemed a bit flummoxed by these questions, but she did her best to explain. She was nice, Lina decided, but distracted. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere. She didn’t notice that Torren was putting all his apricot pits into his pocket, for instance—or maybe she didn’t care.

  When breakfast was over, Torren went up to the loft and came back down carrying a bulging bag. “These are my things,” he said loudly. “I don’t want anyone touching them.” He knelt down and opened the doors of the cabinet under the window seat and thrust the bag inside. “Caspar gave them to me, and anyone who touches them gets in big trouble.” He closed the cabinet doors and glared at Lina. What an awful boy, Lina thought. How could nice Dr. Hester have such a horrid son?

  Lina had thought she’d go back to the plaza and find Doon right after breakfast. But she changed her mind when she went upstairs to waken her little sister. Poppy seemed so sick that Lina was frightened. She didn’t want to leave her. She brought her downstairs, and all that morning, Poppy lay on the couch, sometimes sleeping, sometimes wailing, sometimes just lying much too still with her mouth open and her breath coming in short gasps. Lina and Mrs. Murdo sat on either side of her, putting cool cloths on her forehead and trying to get her to drink the water and the medicine the doctor provided. “I don’t know what’s causing this child’s fever,” the doctor said. “All I can do is try to bring it down.”

  After all the walking of the days before, Lina was glad to sit still. She settled into a corner of the couch, her legs tucked under her, and watched the doctor dither about. She seemed to have a hundred things to do and a hundred things on her mind. She’d stand for a second staring into the air, murmuring to herself, “Now. All right. First I must look up . . . ,” and then dart over to her enormous book and shuffle through its pages. After a second or two, she’d suddenly set the book down and hurry off to the kitchen, where she would take a bottle of liquid or jar of powder down from a shelf and measure some of it into a pot. Or she’d dash out to the garden and come back with an armload of onions. Or she’d vanish out the back door and appear again with a sheaf of dried stems or leaves. It was hard to tell what she was doing, or if she was really accomplishing anything at all. Every now and then she would come back to Poppy and spoon some medicine into her mouth or put a cold, damp cloth on her forehead.

  “What is that enormous book?” Lina asked her.

  “Oh!” said the doctor. She always seemed a little startled to be spoken to. “Well, it’s about medicine. A lot of it is useless, though.” She picked up the book from the floor and riffled its pages. “You look up ‘infection’ and it says, ‘Prescribe antibiotics.’ What are antibiotics? Or you look up ‘fever’ and it says, ‘Give aspirin.’ Aspirin is some kind of painkiller, I think, but we don’t have it.”

  “We had aspirin in Ember,” said Mrs. Murdo, rather proudly. “Although I believe it had nearly run out by the end.”

  “Is that so,” said the doctor. “Well, what we have is plants. Herbs, roots, funguses, that sort of thing. I have a couple of old books that tell about which ones to use. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.” She ran a hand through her short, wiry hair, making it poke out on one side. “So much to know,” she said, “and so much to do . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “I suppose your son is a help to you,” said Mrs. Murdo.

  “My son?”

  “The boy, Torren.”

  “Oh,” said Dr. Hester. “He’s not my son.”

  “He’s not?” said Lina.

  “No, no,” the doctor said. “Torren and his brother, Caspar—they’re my sister’s boys. They live with me because their parents were killed in an avalanche years ago. They were in the mountains, on an ice-gathering trip.”

  “And the boy has no other relatives?” asked Mrs. Murdo.

  “He has an uncle,” said the doctor. “But the uncle didn’t want the trouble of bringing up the boys. He offered to have this house built for me if I’d take them on.” The doctor shrugged. “So I did.”

  “What is an avalanche?” Lina asked. “What are mountains?”

  “Lina,” said Mrs. Murdo. “It’s not polite to ask too many questions.”

  “I don’t mind,” the doctor said. “I f
orgot that you wouldn’t know these things. You really lived underground?”

  “Yes,” said Lina.

  Dr. Hester scrunched her gray eyebrows together. “But why would there be a city underground?”

  Lina said she didn’t know. All she knew was what was in the notebook she and Doon had found on their way out. It was a journal kept by one of the first inhabitants of Ember, who told of the fifty couples brought in from the outside world, each with two babies to raise in the underground city. “They thought there was some danger,” Lina said. “They made Ember as a place to keep people safe.”

  “It was that long ago, then,” said the doctor. “Before the Disaster.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lina. “I guess so. What disaster?”

  “The Disaster that just about wiped out the human race,” said Dr. Hester. “I’ll tell you about it sometime, but not right now. I have to go and see to Burt Webb’s infected finger.”

  “Can I ask one more question?” said Lina.

  The doctor nodded.

  “Why is this place called Sparks?”

  “Oh,” said the doctor, smiling a little. “It was the People of the Last Truck who gave it that name—our twenty-two founders. They were among the very few people who survived the Disaster. For a while they found food by driving around from one place to another in the old towns, using cars and trucks that still had a sort of energy-making stuff called gasleen—‘gas’ for short.”

  Cars and trucks? thought Lina. Gasleen? But she didn’t want to interrupt, so she didn’t ask.

  “When food and gas began to run out,” the doctor went on, “they decided it was time to start a new life somewhere else. They found one last truck that still had gas, and they loaded it up with supplies—food in cans and boxes, tools, clothes and blankets, seeds, everything useful they could find. Then they drove east, out across the Empty Lands, staying close to the river. Right here, the truck broke down. When they opened the hood, a great spray of sparks shot up out of the engine. So they decided to settle in this spot, and they named it Sparks.” The doctor stood up and looked around for her medicine bag. “It turned out to be a fitting name in another way,” she said. “Sparks are a beginning. We are the beginning of something here, or trying to be, the way a spark is the beginning of a fire.”

  “But fires are terrible,” said Lina.

  “Terrible or wonderful,” said the doctor, who had found her bag behind a chair and was heading out the door. “They can go either way.”

  Lina never did go down to the plaza that day. She didn’t think Doon would worry—he knew Poppy was sick, and he’d figure out that Lina had stayed with her. She would go and look for him tomorrow, she decided, and find out then what was happening to the people of Ember.

  Late in the afternoon, Lina went outside and sat on a rickety bench in the courtyard of the doctor’s house, waiting to see if anyone was going to make dinner. It seemed unlikely. The doctor was off treating someone’s toothache, and Mrs. Murdo was up in the loft with Poppy, who had started crying an hour ago and still had not stopped.

  A door opened, and Torren came outside. He sauntered over to Lina and stood in front of her.

  “Your sister is probably going to die,” he said.

  Lina jerked back. “She is not.”

  Torren shrugged. “Looks like it to me,” he said. “Looks to me like she has the plague.” He sat down on a wooden chair, where he could stare straight into Lina’s face. He was wearing a sort of undershirt—it was white and looked like a sack with holes for neck and arms—and his thin legs stuck out from baggy shorts of the same material. He had combed his hair so that it stood up like a tuft of grass at the top of his forehead, making his long, narrow face look even longer.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lina said.

  “You don’t know about the Three Plagues?” said Torren in a tone of exaggerated surprise. “Or the Four Wars? You’ve never heard of the Disaster?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Lina. “But I don’t know what it is. I don’t know about anything here.”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you,” he said. “You can’t go around being so ignorant.”

  She said nothing. She didn’t like this boy’s superior attitude, but she wanted to know everything there was to know. She would let him tell her, but she wasn’t going to ask him to.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said. He spoke in a precise, teacherly voice. “There were millions of people in the world then. They were all geniuses. They could make their voices travel around the world, and they could see people who were miles away. They could fly.” He paused, waiting, no doubt, for Lina to be amazed.

  She was amazed, but she wasn’t going to show it. Besides, he was probably lying. She just nodded.

  “They could make music come down out of the air. They had thousands of smooth roads and could go anywhere they wanted, really fast. They had pictures that moved.” He waited again. He took a few apricot pits from his pocket and rattled them idly in the palm of his hand.

  All right, she would ask. “What do you mean, pictures that moved?”

  “Didn’t think you’d know that one,” Torren said with a tight little smile. “They were huge pictures, taller than a house. They were called movies. You’d look at a wall and see a story happening on it, with voices and other sounds.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Lina. She thought he might easily be making it up.

  “We learn it in school,” said Torren. “They teach us a lot about the old times, so we won’t forget.”

  “Have you seen a moving picture, then?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “You have to have electricity. There hasn’t been any for a long time.” He chucked one of the pits at a bird that was about to drink from the water dish. The splash scared it away.

  “We had electricity,” Lina said, glad to score a point over him. “We had it in Ember, until it ran out. We had street lights, and lamps in our houses, and electric stoves in the kitchen.”

  For a moment Torren looked dismayed. “But did you have movies?” he said.

  Lina shook her head. “Anyway,” she said, “what does all this have to do with my sister?”

  “I’m about to tell you, if you’d just let me.” The important tone came back into his voice. “So there were all these billions of people, but there got to be too many of them. They messed up the world. That was why the Three Plagues came. But before the Three Plagues, they had the Four Wars.” Once again he paused and looked at her in that infuriating way, lifting his thin eyebrows.

  “Just tell me,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “You don’t know about the Four Wars?”

  “No. War—what’s that?”

  “A war is when one bunch of people fights with another bunch, when both of them want the same thing. Like for instance if there’s some good land, and two groups of people want to live there.”

  “Why can’t they both live there?”

  “They don’t want to live there together,” he said, as if this were a stupid question. “Also you could have a war because of revenge. Say one group of people does something bad to another group, like steal their chickens. Then the first group does something bad back in revenge. That could start a war. The two groups would try to kill each other, and the ones who killed the most would win.”

  “They’d kill each other over chickens?”

  “That’s just an example. In the Four Wars, they were fighting over bigger things. Like who should get some big chunk of land. Or whether you should believe in this god or that god. Or who got to have the gold and the oil.”

  All of this was enormously confusing to Lina. She didn’t know the meaning of “god” or “gold,” and she wasn’t sure what he meant by “oil.” “You mean,” she said, thinking of the jars that had once been stocked in the storerooms of Ember, “the kind of oil you cook with?”

  Torren rolled his eyes. “You really don’t know anything,”
he said. He flung the rest of the pits he was holding at three little red-headed birds pecking at the weeds between the bricks, and the birds scattered, cheeping. “This was really beautiful, valuable oil. Everyone wanted it, and there wasn’t enough of it to go around, so they fought over it.”

  “They hit each other?”

  “Much worse than that,” said Torren. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and in a low, husky voice told Lina about the weapons they had had in those days, the guns that let you kill people without even getting near them, and the bombs that could flatten and burn whole cities at once. “They set the cities on fire all over the world,” Torren said. His small eyes glittered. “And afterward came the plagues.”

  “I don’t know what a plague is,” Lina said.

  “A sickness,” said Torren. “The kind where one person catches it from another person, and it spreads around fast before you can stop it.”

  “We had one of those,” Lina said. “The coughing sickness—it would come sometimes and kill a lot of people and then go away again.”

  “We had three,” said Torren, as if three plagues were better than one. “There was the one where you wither away, like you’re starving to death; the one where you feel like you’re on fire and you die of heat; and the one where you suddenly can’t breathe. No one knew where they came from, they just rose up and swept over the whole world like a wind.”

  Lina shuddered. She was tired, all at once, of listening to Torren, who took such pleasure in describing horrors and saying words she didn’t understand.