The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau

slightly torn, from a can of peas. The copy was as accurate as she could make it, with the missing bits between the letters carefully indicated as dashes. She had tucked it under the mattress of her bed for safekeeping.
    Now she finally had a whole free evening. Poppy and Granny were both asleep, and the apartment was tidy. Lina sat down at her table and uncovered the patched-together document. She tied back her hair so it wouldn’t keep falling in her face, and she put a piece of paper next to her—blank except for a little bit of Poppy’s scribbling—to write down what she decoded.
    She started with the title. The first word she’d already figured out. It had to be “Instructions.” The next word could be “for.” Then came “Egres”—she wasn’t sure about that. Maybe it was someone’s name. Egresman. Egreston. “Instructions for Egreston.” She decided to call it “The Instructions” for short.
    She went on to the first line. “This offic doc” probably meant “This official document.” Maybe “secur” meant “secure.” Or “security.” Then there were the words “period” and “ears” and “city.” But after that, so much was missing.
    She studied the line next to the number 1.
Exp.
That could be
Expect
or
Expert
or so many things. She moved on to
riv.
That might be part of a word like “drive” or “strive.” What could
ip
and
ork
possibly be? They were so close together, maybe they were part of one word. What ended with
-ip
?
Whip,
Lina thought.
Trip. Slip.
What ended with
-ork
?
Fork
came to mind immediately.
Tripfork. Slipfork.
Nothing she could think of made sense.
    Maybe it wasn’t
fork.
What else ended in
-ork
? Starting at the beginning of the alphabet, Lina went through all the words that rhymed with
fork.
Most of them were nonsense:
bork, dork, gork, hork, jork. . . .
This isn’t going to work, she thought miserably. Oh . . .
work
! The word could be
work.
    Then what would the first part be?
Tripwork? Flipwork?
But maybe there was a letter between the p and the w.
Dipswork? Pipswork?
    Suddenly it came to her. Pipeworks. Pipeworks! That had to be it. Something in this message was about the Pipeworks!
    Lina looked back at
Exp
and
riv. Riv!
That could be
river
! Rapidly she ran her eyes down the page. In line 3, she saw
iverb nk
—that looked like
riverbank.
The word
door
jumped out at her from line 4, whole on its scrap of paper. Lina took a quick breath. A door! What if it was the one she’d wished for, the one that led to the other city? Maybe her city was real after all, and these were instructions for finding it!
    She wanted to leap from her chair and shout. The message had something to do with the river, a door, and the Pipeworks. And who did she know who knew about the Pipeworks? Doon, of course.
    She pictured his thin, serious face, and his eyes looking out searchingly from beneath his dark eyebrows. She pictured how he used to bend over his work at school, holding his pencil in a hard grip, and how, during free time, he was usually off by himself in a corner studying a moth or a worm or a taken-apart clock. That was one thing, at least, that she liked about Doon: he was curious. He paid attention to things.
    And he cared about things, too. She remembered how he’d been on Assignment Day, so furious at the mayor, so eager to trade his good job for her bad one so he could help save the city. And he’d taken Poppy inside his father’s shop on the day of the blackout, so she wouldn’t be afraid.
    Why had she stopped being friends with Doon? She vaguely recalled the incident of the light pole. It seemed silly now, and long ago. The more she thought about Doon, the more it seemed he was the very person—the
only
person—who might be interested in what she had found.
    She placed the plain sheet of paper over the Instructions and put the box on top. I’ll go and find Doon, she thought. Tomorrow was Thursday—their day off. She would find him tomorrow and ask for