City of Ember!

Contents Title Page Map The Instructions 1. Assignment Day 2. A Message to the Mayor 3. Under Ember 4. Something Lost, Nothing Found 5. On Night Street 6. The Box in the Closet 7. A Message Full of Holes 8. Explorations 9. The Door in the Roped-Off Tunnel 10. Blue Sky and Goodbye 11. Lizzie’s Groceries 12. A Dreadful Discovery 13. Deciphering the Message 14. The Way Out 15. A Desperate Run 16. The Singing 17. Away 18. Where the River Goes 19. A World of Light 20. The Last Message Journey Through The Books Of Ember Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Jeanne DuPrau Copyright Page

The Instructions When the city of Ember was just built and not yet inhabited, the chief builder and the assistant builder, both of them weary, sat down to speak of the future. “They must not leave the city for at least two hundred years,” said the chief builder. “Or perhaps two hundred and twenty.” “Is that long enough?” asked his assistant. “It should be. We can’t know for sure.” “And when the time comes,” said the assistant, “how will they know what to do?” “We’ll provide them with instructions, of course,” the chief builder replied. “But who will keep the instructions? Who can we trust to keep them safe and secret all that time?” “The mayor of the city will keep the instructions,” said the chief builder. “We’ll put them in a box with a timed lock, set to open on the proper date.” “And will we tell the mayor what’s in the box?” the assistant asked. “No, just that it’s information they won’t need and must not see until the box opens of its own accord.” “So the first mayor will pass the box to the next mayor, and that one to the next, and so on down through the years, all of them keeping it secret, all that time?” “What else can we do?” asked the chief builder. “Nothing about this endeavor is certain. There may be no one left in the city by then or no safe place for them to come back to.” So the first mayor of Ember was given the box, told to guard it carefully, and solemnly sworn to secrecy. When she

grew old, and her time as mayor was up, she explained about the box to her successor, who also kept the secret carefully, as did the next mayor. Things went as planned for many years. But the seventh mayor of Ember was less honorable than the ones who’d come before him, and more desperate. He was ill—he had the coughing sickness that was common in the city then—and he thought the box might hold a secret that would save his life. He took it from its hiding place in the basement of the Gathering Hall and brought it home with him, where he attacked it with a hammer. But his strength was failing by then. All he managed to do was dent the lid a little. And before he could return the box to its official hiding place or tell his successor about it, he died. The box ended up at the back of a closet, shoved behind some old bags and bundles. There it sat, unnoticed, year after year, until its time arrived, and the lock quietly clicked open.

CHAPTER 1 Assignment Day In the city of Ember, the sky was always dark. The only light came from great flood lamps mounted on the buildings and at the tops of poles in the middle of the larger squares. When the lights were on, they cast a yellowish glow over the streets; people walking by threw long shadows that shortened and then stretched out again. When the lights were off, as they were between nine at night and six in the morning, the city was so dark that people might as well have been wearing blindfolds. Sometimes darkness fell in the middle of the day. The city of Ember was old, and everything in it, including the power lines, was in need of repair. So now and then the lights would flicker and go out. These were terrible moments for the people of Ember. As they came to a halt in the middle of the street or stood stock-still in their houses, afraid to move in the utter blackness, they were reminded of something they preferred not to think about: that someday the lights of the city might go out and never come back on. But most of the time life proceeded as it always had. Grown people did their work, and younger people, until they reached the age of twelve, went to school. On the last day of their final year, which was called Assignment Day, they were given jobs to do. The graduating students occupied Room 8 of the Ember School. On Assignment Day of the year 241, this classroom, usually noisy first thing in the morning, was completely

silent. All twenty-four students sat upright and still at the desks they had grown too big for. They were waiting. The desks were arranged in four rows of six, one behind the other. In the last row sat a slender girl named Lina Mayfleet. She was winding a strand of her long, dark hair around her finger, winding and unwinding it again and again. Sometimes she plucked at a thread on her ragged cape or bent over to pull on her socks, which were loose and tended to slide down around her ankles. One of her feet tapped the floor softly. In the second row was a boy named Doon Harrow. He sat with his shoulders hunched, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration, and his hands clasped tightly together. His hair looked rumpled, as if he hadn’t combed it for a while. He had dark, thick eyebrows, which made him look serious at the best of times and, when he was anxious or angry, came together to form a straight line across his forehead. His brown corduroy jacket was so old that its ridges had flattened out. Both the girl and the boy were making urgent wishes. Doon’s wish was very specific. He repeated it over and over again, his lips moving slightly, as if he could make it come true by saying it a thousand times. Lina was making her wish in pictures rather than in words. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself running through the streets of the city in a red jacket. She made this picture as bright and real as she could. Lina looked up and gazed around the schoolroom. She said a silent goodbye to everything that had been familiar for so long. Goodbye to the map of the city of Ember in its scarred wooden frame and the cabinet whose shelves held The Book of Numbers, The Book of Letters, and The Book of the City of Ember. Goodbye to the cabinet drawers labeled “New Paper” and “Old Paper.” Goodbye to the three electric lights in the ceiling that seemed always, no matter where you sat, to cast the shadow of your head over the page you

were writing on. And goodbye to their teacher, Miss Thorn, who had finished her Last Day of School speech, wishing them luck in the lives they were about to begin. Now, having run out of things to say, she was standing at her desk with her frayed shawl clasped around her shoulders. And still the mayor, the guest of honor, had not arrived. Someone’s foot scraped back and forth on the floor. Miss Thorn sighed. Then the door rattled open, and the mayor walked in. He looked annoyed, as though they were the ones who were late. “Welcome, Mayor Cole,” said Miss Thorn. She held out her hand to him. The mayor made his mouth into a smile. “Miss Thorn,” he said, enfolding her hand. “Greetings. Another year.” The mayor was a vast, heavy man, so big in the middle that his arms looked small and dangling. In one hand he held a little cloth bag. He lumbered to the front of the room and faced the students. His gray, drooping face appeared to be made of something stiffer than ordinary skin; it rarely moved except for making the smile that was on it now. “Young people of the Highest Class,” the mayor began. He stopped and scanned the room for several moments; his eyes seemed to look out from far back inside his head. He nodded slowly. “Assignment Day now, isn’t it? Yes. First we get our education. Then we serve our city.” Again his eyes moved back and forth along the rows of students, and again he nodded, as if someone had confirmed what he’d said. He put the little bag on Miss Thorn’s desk and rested his hand on it. “What will that service be, eh? Perhaps you’re wondering.” He did his smile again, and his heavy cheeks folded like drapes. Lina’s hands were cold. She wrapped her cape around her and pressed her hands between her knees. Please hurry, Mr. Mayor, she said silently. Please just let us choose and get it

over with. Doon, in his mind, was saying the same thing, only he didn’t say please. “Something to remember,” the mayor said, holding up one finger. “Job you draw today is for three years. Then, Evaluation. Are you good at your job? Fine. You may keep it. Are you unsatisfactory? Is there a greater need elsewhere? You will be re-assigned. It is extremely important,” he said, jabbing his finger at the class, “for all . . . work . . . of Ember . . . to be done. To be properly done.” He picked up the bag and pulled open the drawstring. “So. Let us begin. Simple procedure. Come up one at a time. Reach into this bag. Take one slip of paper. Read it out loud.” He smiled and nodded. The flesh under his chin bulged in and out. “Who cares to be first?” No one moved. Lina stared down at the top of her desk. There was a long silence. Then Lizzie Bisco, one of Lina’s best friends, sprang to her feet. “I would like to be first,” she said in her breathless high voice. “Good. Walk forward.” Lizzie went to stand before the mayor. Because of her orange hair, she looked like a bright spark next to him. “Now choose.” The mayor held out the bag with one hand and put the other behind his back, as if to show he would not interfere. Lizzie reached into the bag and withdrew a tightly folded square of paper. She unfolded it carefully. Lina couldn’t see the look on Lizzie’s face, but she could hear the disappointment in her voice as she read out loud: “Supply Depot clerk.” “Very good,” said the mayor. “A vital job.” Lizzie trudged back to her desk. Lina smiled at her, but Lizzie made a sour face. Supply Depot clerk wasn’t a bad job, but it was a dull one. The Supply Depot clerks sat behind a long counter, took orders from the storekeepers of Ember, and sent the carriers down to bring up what was wanted from the vast network of storerooms beneath

Ember’s streets. The storerooms held supplies of every kind —canned food, clothes, furniture, blankets, light bulbs, medicine, pots and pans, reams of paper, soap, more light bulbs—everything the people of Ember could possibly need. The clerks sat at their ledger books all day, recording the orders that came in and the goods that went out. Lizzie didn’t like to sit still; she would have been better suited to something else, Lina thought—messenger, maybe, the job Lina wanted for herself. Messengers ran through the city all day, going everywhere, seeing everything. “Next,” said the mayor. This time two people stood up at once, Orly Gordon and Chet Noam. Orly quickly sat down again, and Chet approached the mayor. “Choose, young man,” the mayor said. Chet chose. He unfolded his scrap of paper. “Electrician’s helper,” he read, and his wide face broke into a smile. Lina heard someone take a quick breath. She looked over to see Doon pressing a hand against his mouth. You never knew, each year, exactly which jobs would be offered. Some years there were several good jobs, like greenhouse helper, timekeeper’s assistant, or messenger, and no bad jobs at all. Other years, jobs like Pipeworks laborer, trash sifter, and mold scraper were mixed in. But there would always be at least one or two jobs for electrician’s helper. Fixing the electricity was the most important job in Ember, and more people worked at it than at anything else. Orly Gordon was next. She got the job of building repair assistant, which was a good job for Orly. She was a strong girl and liked hard work. Vindie Chance was made a greenhouse helper. She gave Lina a big grin as she went back to her seat. She’ll get to work with Clary, Lina thought. Lucky. So far no one had picked a really bad job. Perhaps this time there would be no bad jobs at all.

The idea gave her courage. Besides, she had reached the point where the suspense was giving her a stomach ache. So as Vindie sat down—even before the mayor could say “Next”—she stood up and stepped forward. The little bag was made of faded green material, gathered at the top with a black string. Lina hesitated a moment, then put her hand inside and fingered the bits of paper. Feeling as if she were stepping off a high building, she picked one. She unfolded it. The words were written in black ink, in small careful printing. PIPEWORKS LABORER, they said. She stared at them. “Out loud, please,” the mayor said. “Pipeworks laborer,” Lina said in a choked whisper. “Louder,” said the mayor. “Pipeworks laborer,” Lina said again, her voice loud and cracked. There was a sigh of sympathy from the class. Keeping her eyes on the floor, Lina went back to her desk and sat down. Pipeworks laborers worked below the storerooms in the deep labyrinth of tunnels that contained Ember’s water and sewer pipes. They spent their days stopping up leaks and replacing pipe joints. It was wet, cold work; it could even be dangerous. A swift underground river ran through the Pipeworks, and every now and then someone fell into it and was lost. People were lost occasionally in the tunnels, too, if they strayed too far. Lina stared miserably down at a letter B someone had scratched into her desktop long ago. Almost anything would have been better than Pipeworks laborer. Greenhouse helper had been her second choice. She imagined with longing the warm air and earthy smell of the greenhouse, where she could have worked with Clary, the greenhouse manager, someone she’d known all her life. She would have been content as a doctor’s assistant, too, binding up cuts and bones. Even street-sweeper or cart-puller would have

been better. At least then she could have stayed above ground, with space and people around her. She thought going down into the Pipeworks must be like being buried alive. One by one, the other students chose their jobs. None of them got such a wretched job as hers. Finally the last person rose from his chair and walked forward. It was Doon. His dark eyebrows were drawn together in a frown of concentration. His hands, Lina saw, were clenched into fists at his sides. Doon reached into the bag and took out the last scrap of paper. He paused a minute, pressing it tightly in his hand. “Go on,” said the mayor. “Read.” Unfolding the paper, Doon read: “Messenger.” He scowled, crumpled the paper, and dashed it to the floor. Lina gasped; the whole class rustled in surprise. Why would anyone be angry to get the job of messenger? “Bad behavior!” cried the mayor. His eyes bulged and his face darkened. “Go to your seat immediately.” Doon kicked the crumpled paper into a corner. Then he stalked back to his desk and flung himself down. The mayor took a short breath and blinked furiously. “Disgraceful,” he said, glaring at Doon. “A childish display of temper! Students should be glad to work for their city. Ember will prosper if all . . . citizens . . . do . . . their . . . best.” He held up a stern finger as he said this and moved his eyes slowly from one face to the next. Suddenly Doon spoke up. “But Ember is not prospering!” he cried. “Everything is getting worse and worse!” “Silence!” cried the mayor. “The blackouts!” cried Doon. He jumped from his seat. “The lights go out all the time now! And the shortages, there’s shortages of everything! If no one does anything about it, something terrible is going to happen!” Lina listened with a pounding heart. What was wrong with Doon? Why was he so upset? He was taking things too

seriously, as he always did. Miss Thorn strode to Doon and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sit down now,” she said quietly. But Doon remained standing. The mayor glared. For a few moments he said nothing. Then he smiled, showing a neat row of gray teeth. “Miss Thorn,” he said. “Who might this young man be?” “I am Doon Harrow,” said Doon. “I will remember you,” said the mayor. He gave Doon a long look, then turned to the class and smiled his smile again. “Congratulations to all,” he said. “Welcome to Ember’s work force. Miss Thorn. Class. Thank you.” The mayor shook hands with Miss Thorn and departed. The students gathered their coats and caps and filed out of the classroom. Lina walked down the Wide Hallway with Lizzie, who said, “Poor you! I thought I picked a bad one, but you got the worst. I feel lucky compared to you.” Once they were out the door, Lizzie said goodbye and scurried away, as if Lina’s bad luck were a disease she might catch. Lina stood on the steps for a moment and gazed across Harken Square, where people walked briskly, bundled up cozily in their coats and scarves, or talked to one another in the pools of light beneath the great streetlamps. A boy in a red messenger’s jacket ran toward the Gathering Hall. On Otterwill Street, a man pulled a cart filled with sacks of potatoes. And in the buildings all around the square, rows of lighted windows shone bright yellow and deep gold. Lina sighed. This was where she wanted to be, up here where everything happened, not down underground. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Startled, she turned and saw Doon behind her. His thin face looked pale. “Will you trade with me?” he asked. “Trade?” “Trade jobs. I don’t want to waste my time being a messenger. I want to help save the city, not run around

carrying gossip.” Lina gaped at him. “You’d rather be in the Pipeworks?” “Electrician’s helper is what I wanted,” Doon said. “But Chet won’t trade, of course. Pipeworks is second best.” “But why?” “Because the generator is in the Pipeworks,” said Doon. Lina knew about the generator, of course. In some mysterious way, it turned the running of the river into power for the city. You could feel its deep rumble when you stood in Plummer Square. “I need to see the generator,” Doon said. “I have . . . I have ideas about it.” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “So,” he said, “will you trade?” “Yes!” cried Lina. “Messenger is the job I want most!” And not a useless job at all, in her opinion. People couldn’t be expected to trudge halfway across the city every time they wanted to communicate with someone. Messengers connected everyone to everyone else. Anyway, whether it was important or not, the job of messenger just happened to be perfect for Lina. She loved to run. She could run forever. And she loved exploring every nook and cranny of the city, which was what a messenger got to do. “All right then,” said Doon. He handed her his crumpled piece of paper, which he must have retrieved from the floor. Lina reached into her pocket, pulled out her slip of paper, and handed it to him. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re welcome,” said Lina. Happiness sprang up in her, and happiness always made her want to run. She took the steps three at a time and sped down Broad Street toward home.

CHAPTER 2 A Message to the Mayor Lina often took different routes between school and home. Sometimes, just for variety, she’d go all the way around Sparkswallow Square, or way up by the shoe repair shops on Liverie Street. But today she took the shortest route because she was eager to get home and tell her news. She ran fast and easily through the streets of Ember. Every corner, every alley, every building was familiar to her. She always knew where she was, though most streets looked more or less the same. All of them were lined with old two-story stone buildings, the wood of their window frames and doors long unpainted. On the street level were shops; above the shops were the apartments where people lived. Every building, at the place where the wall met the roof, was equipped with a row of floodlights—big cone- shaped lamps that cast a strong yellow glare. Stone walls, lighted windows, lumpy, muffled shapes of people—Lina flew by them. Her slender legs felt immensely strong, like the wood of a bow that flexes and springs. She darted around obstacles—broken furniture left for the trash heaps or for scavengers, stoves and refrigerators that were past repair, peddlers sitting on the pavement with their wares spread out around them. She leapt over cracks and potholes. When she came to Hafter Street, she slowed a little. This street was deep in shadow. Four of its streetlamps were out and had not been fixed. For a second, Lina thought of the

rumor she’d heard about light bulbs: that some kinds were completely gone. She was used to shortages of things— everyone was—but not of light bulbs! If the bulbs for the streetlamps ran out, the only lights would be inside the buildings. What would happen then? How could people find their way through the streets in the dark? Somewhere inside her, a black worm of dread stirred. She thought about Doon’s outburst in class. Could things really be as bad as he said? She didn’t want to believe it. She pushed the thought away. As she turned onto Budloe Street, she sped up again. She passed a line of customers waiting to get into the vegetable market, their shopping bags draped over their arms. At the corner of Oliver Street, she dodged a group of washers trudging along with bags of laundry, and some movers carrying away a broken table. She passed a street-sweeper shoving dust around with his broom. I am so lucky, she thought, to have the job I want. And because of Doon Harrow, of all people. When they were younger, Lina and Doon had been friends. Together they had explored the back alleys and dimly lit edges of the city. But in their fourth year of school, they had begun to grow apart. It started one day during the hour of free time, when the children in their class were playing on the front steps of the school. “I can go down three steps at a time,” someone would boast. “I can hop down on one foot!” someone else would say. The others would chime in. “I can do a handstand against the pillar!” “I can leapfrog over the trash can!” As soon as one child did something, all the rest would do it, too, to prove they could. Lina could do it all, even when the dares got wilder. She yelled out the wildest one of all: “I can climb the light pole!” For a second everyone just stared at her. But Lina dashed across the street, took off her shoes and socks, and wrapped herself around the cold metal of the pole. Pushing with her bare feet, she inched upward. She didn’t get very

far before she lost her grip and fell back down. The children laughed, and so did she. “I didn’t say I’d climb to the top,” she explained. “I just said I’d climb it.” The others swarmed forward to try. Lizzie wouldn’t take off her socks—her feet were too cold, she said—so she kept sliding back. Fordy Penn wasn’t strong enough to get more than a foot off the ground. Next came Doon. He took his shoes and socks off and placed them neatly at the foot of the pole. Then he announced, in his serious way, “I’m going to the top.” He clasped the pole and started upward, pushing with his feet, his knees sticking out to the sides. He pulled himself upward, pushed again—he was higher now than Lina had been—but suddenly his hands slid and he came plummeting down. He landed on his bottom with his legs poking up in the air. Lina laughed. She shouldn’t have; he might have been hurt. But he looked so funny that she couldn’t help it. He wasn’t hurt. He could have jumped up, grinned, and walked away. But Doon didn’t take things lightly. When he heard Lina and the others laughing, his face darkened. His temper rose in him like hot water. “Don’t you dare laugh at me,” he said to Lina. “I did better than you did! That was a stupid idea anyway, a stupid, stupid idea to climb that pole. . . .” And as he was shouting, red in the face, their teacher, Mrs. Polster, came out onto the steps and saw him. She took him by the shirt collar to the school director’s office, where he got a scolding he didn’t think he deserved. After that day, Lina and Doon barely looked at each other when they passed in the hallway. At first it was because they were fuming about what had happened. Doon didn’t like being laughed at; Lina didn’t like being shouted at. After a while the memory of the light-pole incident faded, but by then they had got out of the habit of friendship. By the time they were twelve, they knew each other only as classmates. Lina was friends with Vindie Chance, Orly Gordon, and most

of all, red-haired Lizzie Bisco, who could run almost as fast as Lina and could talk three times faster. Now, as Lina sped toward home, she felt immensely grateful to Doon and hoped he’d come to no harm in the Pipeworks. Maybe they’d be friends again. She’d like to ask him about the Pipeworks. She was curious about it. When she got to Greystone Street, she passed Clary Laine, who was probably on her way to the greenhouses. Clary waved to her and called out, “What job?” and Lina called back, “Messenger!” and ran on. Lina lived in Quillium Square, over the yarn shop run by her grandmother. When she got to the shop, she burst in the door and cried, “Granny! I’m a messenger!” Granny’s shop had once been a tidy place, where each ball of yarn and spool of thread had its spot in the cubbyholes that lined the walls. All the yarn and thread came from old clothes that had gotten too shabby to be worn. Granny unraveled sweaters and picked apart dresses and jackets and pants; she wound the yarn into balls and the thread onto spools, and people bought them to use in making new clothes. These days, the shop was a mess. Long loops and strands of yarn dangled out of the cubbyholes, and the browns and grays and purples were mixed in with the ochres and olive greens and dark blues. Granny’s customers often had to spend half an hour unsnarling the rust-red yarn from the mud-brown, or trying to fish out the end of a thread from a tangled wad. Granny wasn’t much help. Most days she just dozed behind the counter in her rocking chair. That’s where she was when Lina burst in with her news. Lina saw that Granny had forgotten to knot up her hair that morning—it was standing out from her head in a wild white frizz.

Granny stood up, looking puzzled. “You aren’t a messenger, dear, you’re a schoolgirl,” she said. “But Granny, today was Assignment Day. I got my job. And I’m a messenger!” Granny’s eyes lit up, and she slapped her hand down on the counter. “I remember!” she cried. “Messenger, that’s a grand job! You’ll be good at it.” Lina’s little sister toddled out from behind the counter on unsteady legs. She had a round face and round brown eyes. At the top of her head was a sprig of brown hair tied up with a scrap of red yarn. She grabbed on to Lina’s knees. “Wy-na, Wy-na!” she said. Lina bent over and took the child’s hands. “Poppy! Your big sister got a good job! Are you happy, Poppy? Are you proud of me?” Poppy said something that sounded like, “Hoppyhoppyhoppy!” Lina laughed, hoisted her up, and danced with her around the shop. Lina loved her little sister so much that it was like an ache under her ribs. The baby and Granny were all the family she had now. Two years ago, when the coughing sickness was raging through the city again, her father had died. Some months later, her mother, giving birth to Poppy, had died, too. Lina missed her parents with an ache that was as strong as what she felt for Poppy, only it was a hollow feeling instead of a full one. “When do you start?” asked Granny. “Tomorrow,” said Lina. “I report to the messengers’ station at eight o’clock.” “You’ll be a famous messenger,” said Granny. “Fast and famous.” Taking Poppy with her, Lina went out of the shop and climbed the stairs to their apartment. It was a small apartment, only four rooms, but there was enough stuff in it to fill twenty. There were things that had belonged to Lina’s parents, her grandparents, and even their grandparents—

old, broken, cracked, threadbare things that had been patched and repaired dozens or hundreds of times. People in Ember rarely threw anything away. They made the best possible use of what they had. In Lina’s apartment, layers of worn rugs and carpets covered the floor, making it soft but uneven underfoot. Against one wall squatted a sagging couch with round wooden balls for legs, and on the couch were blankets and pillows, so many that you had to toss some on the floor before you could sit down. Against the opposite wall stood two wobbly tables that held a clutter of plates and bottles, cups and bowls, unmatching forks and spoons, little piles of scrap paper, bits of string wound up in untidy wads, and a few stubby pencils. There were four lamps, two tall ones that stood on the floor and two short ones that stood on tables. And in uneven lines up near the ceiling were hooks that held coats and shawls and nightgowns and sweaters, shelves that held pots and pans, jars with unreadable labels, and boxes of buttons and pins and tacks. Where there were no shelves, the walls had been decorated with things of beauty—a label from a can of peaches, a few dried yellow squash flowers, a strip of faded but still pretty purple cloth. There were drawings, too. Lina had done the drawings out of her imagination. They showed a city that looked somewhat like Ember, except that its buildings were lighter and taller and had more windows. One of the drawings had fallen to the floor. Lina retrieved it and pinned it back up. She stood for a minute and looked at the pictures. Over and over, she’d drawn the same city. Sometimes she drew it as seen from afar, sometimes she chose one of its buildings and drew it in detail. She put in stairways and streetlamps and carts. Sometimes she tried to draw the people who lived in the city, though she wasn’t good at drawing people—their heads always came out too small, and their hands looked like spiders. One picture showed a scene in which the people of the city greeted her

when she arrived—the first person they had ever seen to come from elsewhere. They argued with each other about who should be the first to invite her home. Lina could see this city so clearly in her mind she almost believed it was real. She knew it couldn’t be, though. The Book of the City of Ember, which all children studied in school, taught otherwise. “The city of Ember was made for us long ago by the Builders,” the book said. “It is the only light in the dark world. Beyond Ember, the darkness goes on forever in all directions.” Lina had been to the outer border of Ember. She had stood at the edge of the trash heaps and gazed into the darkness beyond the city—the Unknown Regions. No one had ever gone far into the Unknown Regions—or at least no one had gone far and returned. And no one had ever arrived in Ember from the Unknown Regions, either. As far as anyone knew, the darkness did go on forever. Still, Lina wanted the other city to exist. In her imagination, it was so beautiful, and it seemed so real. Sometimes she longed to go there and take everyone in Ember with her. But she wasn’t thinking about the other city now. Today she was happy to be right where she was. She set Poppy on the couch. “Wait there,” she said. She went into the kitchen, where there was an electric stove and a refrigerator that no longer worked and was used to store glasses and dishes so Poppy couldn’t get at them. Above the refrigerator were shelves holding more pots and jars, more spoons and knives, a wind-up clock that Granny always forgot to wind, and a long row of cans. Lina tried to keep the cans in alphabetical order so she could find what she wanted quickly, but Granny always messed them up. Now, she saw, there were beans at the end of the row and tomatoes at the beginning. She picked out a can labeled Baby Drink and a jar of boiled carrots, opened them, poured the liquid into a cup and the carrots into a little dish, and took these back to the baby on the couch.

Poppy dribbled Baby Drink down her chin. She ate some of her carrots and poked others between the couch cushions. For the moment, Lina felt almost perfectly happy. There was no need to think about the fate of the city right now. Tomorrow, she’d be a messenger! She wiped the orange goop off Poppy’s chin. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be all right.” The messengers’ headquarters was on Cloving Street, not far from the back of the Gathering Hall. When Lina arrived the next morning, she was greeted by Messenger Captain Allis Fleery, a bony woman with pale eyes and hair the color of dust. “Our new girl,” said Captain Fleery to the other messengers, a cluster of nine people who smiled and nodded at Lina. “I have your jacket right here,” said the captain. She handed Lina a red jacket like the one all messengers wore. It was only a little too large. From the clock tower of the Gathering Hall came a deep reverberating bong. “Eight o’clock!” cried Captain Fleery. She waved a long arm. “Take your stations!” As the clock sounded seven more times, the messengers scattered in all directions. The captain turned to Lina. “Your station,” she said, “is Garn Square.” Lina nodded and started off, but the captain caught her by the collar. “I haven’t told you the rules,” she said. She held up a knobby finger. “One: When a customer gives you a message, repeat it back to make sure you have it right. Two: Always wear your red jacket so people can identify you. Three: Go as fast as possible. Your customers pay twenty cents for every message, no matter how far you have to take it.” Lina nodded. “I always go fast,” she said. “Four,” the captain went on. “Deliver a message only to the person it’s meant for, no one else.”

Lina nodded again. She bounced a little on her toes, eager to get going. Captain Fleery smiled. “Go,” she said, and Lina was off. She felt strong and speedy and surefooted. She glanced at her reflection as she ran past the window of a furniture repair shop. She liked the look of her long dark hair flying out behind her, her long legs in their black socks, and her flapping red jacket. Her face, which had never seemed especially remarkable, looked almost beautiful, because she looked so happy. As soon as she came into Garn Square, a voice cried, “Messenger!” Her first customer! It was old Natty Prine, calling to her from the bench where he always sat. “This goes to Ravenet Parsons, 18 Selverton Square,” he said. “Bend down.” She bent down so that her ear was close to his whiskery mouth. The old man said in a slow, hoarse voice, “My stove is broke, don’t come for dinner. Repeat.” Lina repeated the message. “Good,” said Natty Prine. He gave Lina twenty cents, and she ran across the city to Selverton Square. There she found Ravenet Parsons also sitting on a bench. She recited the message to him. “Old turniphead,” he growled. “Lazy old fleaface. He just doesn’t feel like cooking. No reply.” Lina ran back to Garn Square, passing a group of Believers on the way. They were standing in a circle, holding hands, singing one of their cheerful songs. It seemed to Lina there were more Believers than ever these days. What they believed in she didn’t know, but it must make them happy— they were always smiling. Her next customer turned out to be Mrs. Polster, the teacher of the fourth-year class. In Mrs. Polster’s class, they memorized passages from The Book of the City of Ember every week. Mrs. Polster had charts on the walls for

everything, with everyone’s name listed. If you did something right, she made a green dot by your name. If you did something wrong, she made a red dot. “What you need to learn, children,” she always said, in her resonant, precise voice, “is the difference between right and wrong in every area of life. And once you learn the difference—” Here she would stop and point to the class, and the class would finish the sentence: “You must always choose the right.” In every situation, Mrs. Polster knew what the right choice was. Now here was Mrs. Polster again, looming over Lina and pronouncing her message. “To Annisette Lafrond, 39 Humm Street, as follows,” she said. “My confidence in you has been seriously diminished since I heard about the disreputable activities in which you engaged on Thursday last. Please repeat.” It took Lina three tries to get this right. “Uh-oh, a red dot for me,” she said. Mrs. Polster did not seem to find this amusing. Lina had nineteen customers that first morning. Some of them had ordinary messages: “I can’t come on Tuesday.” “Buy a pound of potatoes on your way home.” “Please come and fix my front door.” Others had messages that made no sense to her at all, like Mrs. Polster’s. But it didn’t matter. The wonderful part about being a messenger was not the messages but the places she got to go. She could go into the houses of people she didn’t know and hidden alleyways and little rooms in the backs of stores. In just a few hours, she discovered all kinds of strange and interesting things. For instance: Mrs. Sample, the mender, had to sleep on her couch because her entire bedroom, almost up to the ceiling, was crammed with clothes to be mended. Dr. Felinia Tower had the skeleton of a person hanging against her living room wall, its bones all held in place with black strings. “I study it,” she said when she saw Lina staring. “I have to know how people are put together.” At a house on Calloo Street, Lina delivered a message to a worried-looking

man whose living room was completely dark. “I’m saving on light bulbs,” the man said. And when Lina took a message to the Can Café, she learned that on certain days the back room was used as a meeting place for people who liked to converse about Great Subjects. “Do you think an Invisible Being is watching over us all the time?” she heard someone ask. “Perhaps,” answered someone else. There was a long silence. “And then again, perhaps not.” All of it was interesting. She loved finding things out, and she loved running. And even by the end of the day, she wasn’t tired. Running made her feel strong and big-hearted, it made her love the places she ran through and the people whose messages she delivered. She wished she could bring all of them the good news they so desperately wanted to hear. Late in the afternoon, a young man came up to her, walking with a sort of sideways lurch. He was an odd-looking person—he had a very long neck with a bump in the middle and teeth so big they looked as if they were trying to escape from his mouth. His black, bushy hair stuck out from his head in untidy tufts. “I have a message for the mayor, at the Gathering Hall,” he said. He paused to let the importance of this be understood. “The mayor,” he said. “Did you get that?” “I got it,” said Lina. “All right. Listen carefully. Tell him: Delivery at eight. From Looper. Repeat it back.” “Delivery at eight. From Looper,” Lina repeated. It was an easy message. “All right. No answer required.” He handed her twenty cents, and she sprinted away. The Gathering Hall occupied one entire side of Harken Square, which was the city’s central plaza. The square was paved with stone. It had a few benches bolted to the ground here and there, as well as a couple of kiosks for notices. Wide steps led up to the Gathering Hall, and fat columns

framed its big door. The mayor’s office was in the Gathering Hall. So were the offices of the clerks who kept track of which buildings had broken windows, what streetlamps needed repair, and the number of people in the city. There was the office of the timekeeper, who was in charge of the town clock. And there were offices for the guards who enforced the laws of Ember, now and then putting pickpockets or people who got in fights into the Prison Room, a small one-story structure with a sloping roof that jutted out from one side of the building. Lina ran up the steps and through the door into a broad hallway. On the left was a desk, and at the desk sat a guard: “Barton Snode, Assistant Guard,” said a badge on his chest. He was a big man, with wide shoulders, brawny arms, and a thick neck. But his head looked as if it didn’t belong to his body—it was small and round and topped with a fuzz of extremely short hair. His lower jaw jutted out and moved a little from side to side, as if he were chewing on something. When he saw Lina, his jaw stopped moving for a moment and his lips curled upward in a very small smile. “Good day,” he said. “What business brings you here today?” “I have a message for the mayor.” “Very good, very good.” Barton Snode heaved himself to his feet. “Step this way.” He led Lina down the corridor and opened a door marked “Reception Room.” “Wait here, please,” he said. “The mayor is in his basement office on private business, but he will be up shortly.” Lina went inside. “I’ll notify the mayor,” said Barton Snode. “Please have a seat. The mayor will be right with you. Or pretty soon.” He left, closing the door behind him. A second later, the door opened again, and the guard’s small fuzzy head re- appeared. “What is the message?” he asked. “I have to give it to the mayor in person,” said Lina.

“Of course, of course,” said the guard. The door closed again. He doesn’t seem very sure about things, Lina thought. Maybe he’s new at his job. The Reception Room was shabby, but Lina could tell that it had once been impressive. The walls were dark red, with brownish patches where the paint was peeling away. In the right-hand wall was a closed door. An ugly brown carpet lay on the floor, and on it stood a large armchair covered in itchy-looking red material, and several smaller chairs. A small table held a teapot and some cups, and a larger table in the middle of the room displayed a copy of The Book of the City of Ember, lying open as if someone were going to read from it. Portraits of all the mayors of the city since the beginning of time hung on the walls, staring solemnly from behind pieces of old window glass. Lina sat in the big armchair and waited. No one came. She got up and wandered around the room. She bent over The Book of the City of Ember and read a few sentences: “The citizens of Ember may not have luxuries, but the foresight of the Builders, who filled the storerooms at the beginning of time, has ensured that they will always have enough, and enough is all that a person of wisdom needs.” She flipped a few pages. “The Gathering Hall clock,” she read, “measures the hours of night and day. It must never be allowed to run down. Without it, how would we know when to go to work and when to go to school? How would the light director know when to turn the lights on and when to turn them off again? It is the job of the timekeeper to wind the clock every week and to place the date sign in Harken Square every day. The timekeeper must perform these duties faithfully.” Lina knew that not all timekeepers were as faithful as they should be. She’d heard of one, some years ago, who often forgot to change the date sign, so that it might say, “Wednesday, Week 38, Year 227” for several days in a row. There had even been timekeepers who forgot to wind the

clock, so that it might stand at noon or at midnight for hours at a time, causing a very long day or a very long night. The result was that no one really knew anymore exactly what day of the week it was, or exactly how many years it had been since the building of the city—they called this the year 241, but it might have been 245 or 239 or 250. As long as the clock’s deep boom rang out every hour, and the lights went on and off more or less regularly, it didn’t seem to matter. Lina left the book and examined the pictures of the mayors. The seventh mayor, Podd Morethwart, was her great-great—she didn’t know how many greats— grandfather. He looked quite dreary, Lina thought. His cheeks were long and hollow, his mouth turned down at the corners, and there was a lost look in his eyes. The picture she liked best was of the fourth mayor, Jane Larket, who had a serene smile and fuzzy black hair. Still no one came. She heard no sounds from the hallway. Maybe they’d forgotten her. Lina went over to the closed door in the right-hand wall. She pulled it open and saw stairs going up. Maybe, while she waited, she’d just see where they went. She started upward. At the top of the first flight was a closed door. Carefully, she opened it. She saw another hallway and more closed doors. She shut the door and kept going. Her footsteps sounded loud on the wood, and she was afraid someone would hear her and come and scold her. No doubt she was not supposed to be here. But no one came, and she climbed on, passing another closed door. The Gathering Hall was the only building in Ember with three stories. She had always wanted to stand on its roof and look out at the city. Maybe from there it would be possible to see beyond the city, into the Unknown Regions. If the bright city of her drawings really did exist, it would be out there somewhere.

At the top of the stairs, she came to a door marked “Roof,” and she pushed it open. Chilly air brushed against her skin. She was outside. Ahead of her was a flat gravel surface, and about ten paces away she could see the high wall of the clock tower. She went to the edge of the roof. From there she could see the whole of Ember. Directly below was Harken Square, where people were moving this way and that, all of them appearing, from this top-down view, more round than tall. Beyond Harken Square, the lighted windows of the buildings made checkered lines, yellow and black, row after row, in all directions. She tried to see farther, across the Unknown Regions, but she couldn’t. At the edges of the city, the lights were so far away that they made a kind of haze. She could see nothing beyond them but blackness. She heard a shout from the square below. “Look!” came a small but piercing voice. “Someone on the roof!” She saw a few people stop and look up. “Who is it? What’s she doing up there?” someone cried. More people gathered, until a crowd was standing on the steps of the Gathering Hall. They see me! Lina thought, and it made her laugh. She waved at the crowd and did a few steps from the Bugfoot Scurry Dance, which she’d learned on Cloving Square Dance Day, and they laughed and shouted some more. Then the door behind her burst open, and a huge guard with a bushy black beard was suddenly running toward her. “Halt!” he shouted, though she wasn’t going anywhere. He grabbed her by the arm. “What are you doing here?” “I was just curious,” said Lina, in her most innocent voice. “I wanted to see the city from the roof.” She read the guard’s name badge. It said, “Redge Stabmark, Chief Guard.” “Curiosity leads to trouble,” said Redge Stabmark. He peered down at the crowd. “You have caused a commotion.” He pulled her toward the door and hustled her down all three flights of stairs. When they came out into the waiting

room, Barton Snode was standing there looking flustered, his jaw twitching from side to side. Next to him was the mayor. “A child causing trouble, Mayor Cole,” said the chief guard. The mayor glared at her. “I recall your face. From Assignment Day. Shame! Disgracing yourself in your new job.” “I didn’t mean to cause trouble,” said Lina. “I was looking for you so I could deliver a message.” “Shall we put her in the Prison Room for a day or two?” asked the chief guard. The mayor frowned. He pondered a moment. “What is the message?” he said. He bent down so that Lina could speak into his ear. She noticed that he smelled a little like overcooked turnips. “Delivery at eight,” Lina whispered. “From Looper.” The mayor smiled a tight little smile. He turned to the guard. “Just a child’s antics,” he said. “We will let it go this time. From now on,” he said to Lina, “behave yourself.” “Yes, Mr. Mayor,” said Lina. “And you,” said the mayor, turning to the assistant guard and shaking a thick finger at him, “watch visitors much . . . more . . . carefully.” Barton Snode blinked and nodded. Lina ran for the door. Outside, the small crowd was still standing by the steps. A few of them cheered as Lina came out. Others frowned at her and muttered words like “mischief” and “silliness” and “show-off.” Lina felt embarrassed suddenly. She hadn’t meant to show off. She hurried past, out into Otterwill Street, and started to run. She didn’t see Doon, who was among those watching her. He had been on his way home from his first day in the Pipeworks when he’d come across the cluster of people gazing up at the roof of the Gathering Hall and laughing. He was tired and chilly. The bottoms of his pants legs were wet, and mud clung to his shoes and smeared his hands. When

he raised his eyes and saw the small figure next to the clock tower, he realized right away that it was Lina. He saw her raise her arm and wave and hop about, and for a second he wondered what it would be like to be up there, looking out over the whole city, laughing and waving. When Lina came down, he wanted to speak to her. But he knew he was filthy- looking and that she would ask him questions he didn’t want to answer. So he turned away. Walking fast, he headed for home.

CHAPTER 3 Under Ember That morning, Doon had arrived at the Pipeworks full of anticipation. This was the world of serious work at last, where he would get a chance to do something useful. What he’d learned in school, and from his father, and from his own investigations—he could put it all to good purpose now. He pushed open the heavy Pipeworks door and stepped inside. The air smelled strongly of dampness and moldy rubber, which seemed to him a pleasant, interesting smell. He strode up a hallway where yellow slickers hung from pegs on the walls. At the end of the hallway was a room full of people, some of them sitting on benches and pulling on knee-high rubber boots, some struggling into their slickers, some buckling on tool belts. A raucous clamor filled the room. Doon watched from the doorway, eager to join in but not sure what to do. After a moment a man emerged from the throng. He thrust out a hand. “Lister Munk, Pipeworks director,” he said. “You’re the new boy, right? What size feet do you have —large, medium, or small?” “Medium,” said Doon, and Lister found him a slicker and a pair of boots. The boots were so ancient that their green rubber was cracked all over, as if covered with spiderwebs. He gave Doon a tool belt, too, in which were wrenches and hammers, spools of wire and tape, and tubes of some sort of black goop.

“You’ll be in Tunnel 97 today,” Lister said. “Arlin Froll will go down with you and show you what to do.” He pointed at a short, delicate-looking girl with a white-blond braid down her back. “She may not look like an expert, but she is.” Doon buckled his tool belt around his waist and put on his slicker, which, for some reason, smelled like sweaty feet. “This way,” said Arlin, without saying hello or smiling. She wove through the crowd of workers to a door marked “Stairway” and opened it. Stone steps led so far down that Doon couldn’t see the end of them. On either side was a sheer wall of dark reddish stone, glistening with dampness. There was no railing. Along the ceiling ran a single wire from which a light bulb hung every few yards. Water stood in shallow pools on each stair, in the hollow worn into the stones by years of footsteps. They started down. Doon concentrated on his feet—the clumsy boots made it hard not to stumble. As they went deeper, he began to hear a low roar, so low he seemed to hear it more with his stomach than his ears. It grew louder and louder—was it a machine of some kind? Maybe the generator? The stairway came to an end at a door marked “Main Tunnel.” Arlin opened it, and as they stepped through, Doon realized that the sound he had been hearing wasn’t a machine. It was the river. He stood still, staring. Like most people, he had never been really sure what a river was—just that it was water that somehow flowed on its own. He’d imagined it would be like the clear, narrow stream that came out of the kitchen faucet, only bigger, and horizontal instead of vertical. But this was something entirely different—not a stream of water, but endless tons of it pouring by. Wide as the widest street in Ember, churning and dipping and swirling, the river roared past, its turbulent surface like black, liquid glass scattered with flecks of light. Doon had never seen anything

that moved so fast, and he had never heard such a thunderous, heart-stopping roar. The path they stood on was about six feet wide and ran parallel to the river for farther than Doon could see in both directions. In the wall along the path were openings that must lead, Doon thought, to the tunnels that branched everywhere below the city. A string of lights like the one in the stairway hung high up against the arched ceiling. Doon knew he was standing beneath the north edge of Ember. In school, you were taught to remember the directions this way: north was the direction of the river; south was the direction of the greenhouses; east was the direction of the school; and west was the direction left over, having nothing in particular to mark it. All the Pipeworks tunnels branched off from the main tunnel to the south, toward the city. Arlin leaned toward Doon and shouted into his ear. “First we’ll go to the beginning of the river,” she said. She led him up the main tunnel for a long way. They passed other people in yellow slickers, who greeted Arlin with a nod and glanced curiously at Doon. After fifteen minutes or so, they came to the east edge of the Pipeworks, where the river surged up from a deep chasm in the ground, churning so violently that its dark water turned white and filled the air with a spray that wet Doon’s face. In the wall to their right was a wide double door. “See that door right there?” Arlin shouted, pointing. “Yes,” Doon shouted back. “That’s the generator room.” “Can we go in?” “Of course not!” said Arlin. “You have to have special permission.” She pointed back down the main tunnel. “Now we’ll go to the end of the river,” she said. She led him back, past the stairway door, all the way to the west edge of the Pipeworks. There the river flowed into a huge opening in the wall and vanished into darkness.

“Where does it go?” Doon asked. Arlin just shrugged. “Back into the ground, I guess. Now let’s find Tunnel 97 and get to work.” She pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket. “This is the map,” she said. “You have one in your pocket, too. You have to use the map to find your way around in here.” The map looked to Doon like an immense centipede—the river arched across the top of the page like the centipede’s body, and the tunnels dangled down from it like hundreds of long, long legs all tangled up with each other. To get to Tunnel 97, they followed a complicated route through passageways lined with crusty, rusted pipes that carried water to all the buildings of Ember. Puddles stood on the floor of the tunnel, and water dripped in brown rivulets down the walls. Just as in the main tunnel, there was a string of bulbs along the ceiling that provided dim light. Doon occupied his mind by calculating how far underground he was. From the river to the ceiling of the main tunnel must be thirty feet or so, he thought. Above that were the storerooms, which occupied a layer at least twenty feet high. So that meant he was fifty feet underground, with tons of earth and rock and buildings above him. The thought made him tense up his shoulders. He cast a quick glance upward, as if all that weight might collapse onto his head. “Here we are,” said Arlin. She was standing next to a leak that spurted a stream of water straight out from the wall. “We have to turn the shut-off valve, take the pipe apart, put on a new connector, and stick it back together again.” With wrenches, hammers, washers, and black goop, they did this, getting soaked in the process. It took them most of the morning and proved to Doon that the city was in even worse shape than he’d suspected. Not only were the lights about to fail and the supplies about to run out, but the water system was breaking down. The whole city was crumbling, and what was anyone doing about it?

When the lunch break came, Arlin took her lunch sack from a pocket in her tool belt and went off to meet some friends a few tunnels away. “You stay right here and wait until I get back,” she said as she left. “If you wander around, you’ll get lost.” But Doon set out as soon as she disappeared. Using his map, he found his way back to the main tunnel, then hurried to the east end. He wasn’t going to wait for special permission to see the generator. He was pretty sure he could find a way to get in on his own, and he did. He simply stood by the door and waited for someone to come out. Quite soon, a stout woman carrying a lunch sack pushed open the door and walked away. She didn’t notice him. Before the door could close again, Doon slipped inside. Such a horrendous noise met him that he staggered backward a few steps. It was an earsplitting, growling, grinding, screaming noise, shot through with a hoarse rackety-rackety sound and underscored with a deep chugga- chugga-chugga. Doon clapped his hands over his ears and stepped forward. In front of him was a gigantic black machine, two stories high. It was vibrating so hard it looked as if it might explode any second. Several people wearing earmuffs were busy around it. None of them noticed him come in. He tapped one of them on the shoulder, and the person jumped and whirled around. He was an old man, Doon saw, with a deeply lined brown face. “I want to learn about the generator!” Doon screamed, but he might as well have saved his breath. No one could be heard in the uproar. The old man glared at him, made a shooing motion with his hand, and turned back to work. Doon stood and watched for a while. Beside the huge machine were ladders on wheels that the workers pushed back and forth and climbed up on to reach the high parts. All over the room, greasy-looking cans and tools littered the floor. Against the walls stood big bins holding every kind of

bolt and screw and gear and lever and rod and tube, all of them black with age and jumbled together. The workers scurried between the bins and the generator or simply stood and watched the thing shake. After a few minutes, Doon left. He was horrified. All his life he had studied how things worked—it was one of his favorite things to do. He could take apart an old watch and put it back together exactly as it had been. He understood how the faucets in the sink worked. He’d fixed the toilet many times. He’d made a wheeled cart out of the parts of an old armchair. He even had a hazy idea of what was going on in the refrigerator. He was proud of his mechanical talent. There was only one thing he didn’t understand at all, and that was electricity. What was the power that ran through the wires and into the light bulbs? Where did it come from? He had thought that if he could just get a look at the generator, he would have the clue he needed. From there, he could begin to work on a solution that would keep the lights of Ember burning. But one glimpse of the generator showed him how foolish he was. He’d expected to see something whose workings he could understand—a wheel turning, a spark being struck, some wires that led from one point to another. But this monstrous roaring thing—he wondered if anyone understood how it worked. It looked as if all they were doing was trying to keep it from flying apart. As it turned out, he was right. When the day was over and he was upstairs taking off his boots and slicker, he saw the old man from the generator room and went to talk to him. “Can you explain to me about the generator?” he asked. “Can you tell me how it works?” The old man just sighed. “All I know is, the river makes it go.” “But how?” The man shrugged. “Who knows? Our job is just to keep it from breaking down. If a part breaks, we got to put on a new

one. If a part freezes up, we got to oil it.” He wiped his hand wearily across his forehead, leaving a streak of black grease. “I been working on the generator for twenty years. It’s always managed to chug along, but this year . . . I don’t know. The thing seems to break down every couple minutes.” He cracked a wry smile. “Of course, I hear we might run out of light bulbs before that, and then it won’t matter if the generator works or not.” Running out of light bulbs, running out of power, running out of time—disaster was right around the corner. That’s what Doon was thinking about when he stopped outside the Gathering Hall on his way home and saw Lina on the roof. She looked so free and happy up there. He didn’t know why she was on the roof, but he wasn’t surprised. It was the kind of thing she did, turning up in unexpected places, and now that she was a messenger, she could go just about anywhere. But how could she be so lighthearted when everything was falling apart? He headed for home. He lived with his father in a two- bedroom apartment over his father’s shop in Greengate Square—the Small Items shop, which sold things like nails, pins, tacks, clips, springs, jar lids, doorknobs, bits of wire, shards of glass, chunks of wood, and other small things that might be useful in some way. The Small Items shop had overflowed somewhat into their apartment above. In their front room, where other people might display a nice teapot on a tabletop or a few attractive squashes or tomatoes on a shelf, they had buckets and boxes and baskets full of spare items for the shop, things Doon’s father had collected but not yet organized for selling. Often these items spilled over onto the floor. It was easy to trip over things in this apartment, and not a good idea to go barefoot. Today Doon didn’t stop in at the shop to see his father before going upstairs. He wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He removed two buckets of stuff from the couch—it looked like mostly shoe heels—and flopped down

on the cushions. He’d been stupid to think he could understand the generator just by looking at it, when other people had been working on it their entire lives. The thing was, he had to admit, he’d always thought he was smarter than other people. He’d been sure he could learn about electricity and help save the city. He wanted to be the one to do it. He had imagined many times a ceremony in Harken Square, organized to thank him for saving Ember, with the entire population in attendance and his father beaming from the front row. All Doon’s life, his father had been saying to him, “You’re a good boy and a smart boy. You’ll do grand things someday, I know you will.” But Doon hadn’t done much that was grand so far. He ached to do something truly important, like finding the secret of electricity, and, as his father watched, be rewarded for his achievement. The size of the reward didn’t matter. A small certificate would do, or maybe a badge to sew on his jacket. Now he was stuck in the muck of the Pipeworks, patching up pipes that would leak and break again in a matter of days. It was even more useless and boring than being a messenger. The thought made him suddenly furious. He sat up, grabbed a shoe heel out of the bucket at this feet, and hurled it with all his might. It arrived at the front door just as the door opened. Doon heard a hard thwack and a loud “Ouch!” at the same moment. Then he saw the long, lean, tired-looking face of his father in the doorway. Doon’s anger drained away. “Oh, I hit you, Father. I’m sorry.” Doon’s father rubbed the side of his head. He was a tall man, bald as a peeled potato, with a high forehead and a long chin. He had kind, slightly puzzled gray eyes. “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