The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau Page B

dashed out with her paper and pencil and drew the truck and its oxen.
    But none of these gave her quite the same thrill as drawing the city. There was a feeling that went with drawing the city, a feeling of longing and excitement and mystery. It was as if her drawings of the city were a half-open window, a glimpse of something she couldn’t quite see clearly.
    Torren sometimes came up behind her when she was drawing and peered over her shoulder. Now and then he would point out some part of the picture that didn’t look right, but most of the time he didn’t comment at all. He was hopping with impatience these days, waiting for his brother to come home. “He’ll be bringing me something,” he said one day. “Every time he comes home, he brings me something.” He went to the window seat and took his bag of treasures from the cabinet underneath. “I’ll show you these,” he said to Lina, “if you promise not to touch them.”
    Lina wandered over. She didn’t want to appear too interested, since Torren was certainly never interested in anything
she
did, but she was curious about these prized possessions he’d been hiding.
    He reached into the bag and took out one thing at a time, placing it carefully on the window ledge. There were six things, all different. Lina could not identify a single one of them.
    “Caspar brought me these,” Torren said. He lined them up, making tiny adjustments to their positions until he got them just right. “They’re all extinct.”
    Lina took a step closer and bent down to look.
    “Don’t touch them!” Torren cried.
    “I’m not,” said Lina irritably. “Well, what are they?”
    Torren pointed to the first thing, which was shaped like a T and made of scratched silver metal. “An airplane,” Torren said. “It carried people through the air.”
    “Oh, come on,” said Lina. “It’s not even a foot long.”
    “Real airplanes did,” Torren said. “This is just a
model
of a real airplane.”
    He pointed to the next one. “A tank,” he said. “It runs over people and crushes them.”
    “What’s the point of that?” Lina asked.
    Torren sighed at Lina’s stupidity. “It’s for fighting enemies,” he said.
    The next thing looked like a short, chubby bike. “Motorcycle,” said Torren. “It goes really fast.” Then came a battered silver tube. “Flashlight. You push this button, and light comes out.”
    “Show me,” Lina said.
    “It doesn’t
work,
” said Torren. “I told you, all these are extinct.”
    The next thing was a black rectangle with rows of small colored buttons. “Remote,” said Torren.
    “What’s it for?”
    “It makes things happen when you press the buttons.”
    “What kind of things?”
    “Just things,” said Torren. “I don’t know. It’s very technical.”
    The last thing was different from all the rest. It seemed to be an animal, made of some stiff grayish material. It stood about ten inches high, on four thick feet. “Elephant,” said Torren. “As tall as a house.”
    “Tall as a
house
?” Lina tried to imagine it. “You mean if I stood next to one I’d only come up to here?” She pointed at the creature’s knee.
    Torren swatted her hand away. “It was the biggest animal on earth,” he said. “If it wrapped its nose around you, you would die.”
    “I’d love to see one,” Lina said.
    “You can’t. There aren’t any more.” Torren spread his arms out, hiding his treasures from view. “You have to go away now,” he said. “You only get one look.”
    So Lina went out into the courtyard and picked a few green grapes, which turned out to be much too hard and sour to eat. Through the window, she could see Torren moving the tank and the motorcycle toward each other, and she could hear him making growling and crashing noises. What must the ancient world have been like, she wondered, with all these strange things moving around in it? Was it wonderful or terrible?
     
    One afternoon, when Lina was in the village