The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau Page A

They finished their soup in silence. At the end of the meal, Martha dumped the food parcels on the table instead of handing them out. They each took one, but Doon’s father was the only person who said thank you. Later, when Doon opened his parcel, he found a wedge of cabbage leaves turning yellow at the edges and a hunk of some sort of bean cake. His stomach clenched. They’re tired of helping us, he thought. What are we going to do?

CHAPTER 10
                        
Restless Weeks
    Poppy was now almost well. She still slept more than usual, but when she wasn’t sleeping she tromped around the doctor’s house pulling spoons off the table and spilling cups of water and crumpling pages of books. That is, she was almost her old self. So Lina often asked Mrs. Murdo if it wasn’t time for them to go and live with the others at the Pioneer Hotel. Mrs. Murdo always said she wasn’t quite ready. They’d wait until the brother came, she said. Lina had a feeling the real reason was that she liked helping the doctor. She was always poring over the doctor’s big medicine books, and helping her pick her herbs and mix her remedies. So they stayed on.
    And Lina worked for the doctor. It wasn’t that she didn’t like working. But in Ember, she’d had an adventurous job, an important job. She’d run with her messages all over the city—running the way she loved to run, so fast she almost flew. It was hard for her to stay in one place all day. She felt restless and bored.
    She did a huge amount of cooking—well, not cooking exactly, since the doctor rarely wanted to bother making a fire in the stove, but chopping and peeling and slicing and mixing. She wiped up spilled medicines and herbal solutions from the counters, she swept dirt from the floor, she pulled down cobwebs from the ceiling. There were always rags to be torn into bandages. There were always herbs to be pounded into powder and bottles to be labeled and plants to be watered. While everyone else was out in the village, doing new, interesting things and meeting new people, Lina was stuck doing
housework.
    One day she asked the doctor if there was any extra paper she could use for drawing. There wasn’t, the doctor said, but if she could find blank pages at the backs of books, she could use those. So Lina tore out eight blank pages, the doctor gave her a pencil, and she began drawing whenever she had a few minutes of free time.
    Out of habit, she drew the city she had always drawn—she hardly knew how to draw anything else. But she thought that since she was here in the real world, she should be able to imagine the city much better than before. She remembered the first drawing she’d done with her colored pencils, back in Ember, when she’d made the sky blue instead of its normal black. She had thought it was just an imaginary thing, a little crazy, to draw a blue sky. But now look! The sky really was blue! She must have known it somehow, in some secret place in her mind. Something in her was a little bit magic, maybe—she could see beyond what was right in front of her eyes to things that used to be, or things that could be in the future.
    So she shut her eyes and tried to look deep into her imagination. But the old version of the city, the one she’d drawn so many times, seemed to be stamped inside her eyelids. She kept drawing the same thing—the tall buildings, the lighted windows. She added a few extras: some trees, a couple of trucks with their oxen, a chicken. But it didn’t look quite right. Would the buildings be taller than the trees? How much taller? Would there be chickens in the city? She felt discouraged. So she set aside her city drawings and tried to draw what she saw around her.
    She drew the lemon tree outside the doctor’s back door. She drew her bike. She drew the front of the doctor’s house, and the gate, and the grapevine over the door. Once a truck parked a little way up the road to unload some crates, and she