CHAPTER 11

                    
Tick’s Projects

By the month of Burning, it was so hot that the people of Ember felt as if they were trapped in a huge oven. The sun blazed down, the grasses dried to a brownish yellow, the roads were deep in dust. People gasped and sneezed and wilted. All they wanted was to lie down in the shade, or wade deep into the cool water of the river. But the work went on as always—in the ferocious heat, they hauled garbage, cleaned out the goat pens, pulled weeds in the fields, shoveled manure. When they flopped down on the ground to rest or stopped every few minutes for a drink of water, the workers of Sparks glared at them and grumbled. They suspected them of being lazy, and that made the people of Ember angry. Resentment increased on both sides, until any little accident could flare up into a fight.

At the Pioneer Hotel, the mood grew more and more grim. At first, it had been rather fun to live there, especially for the smaller children, who explored the hidden corners of the huge old building, held races in the long corridors, and played colossal games of hide-and-seek. Lizzie Bisco liked going into the Ladies’ Room on the ground floor, where there was still a large fragment of mirror attached to the wall. She could see almost her entire self in it, which pleased her on the days when she had just washed her hair in the river or found a bit of colored cloth to use as a ribbon.

But for the older people, the Pioneer Hotel quickly stopped feeling like a fine adventure. They didn’t like sleeping on piles of pine needles and dry grasses wrapped in bedspreads. It annoyed them to have to go to the river for water, and to have no indoor bathrooms, only outhouses full of bad smells and spiders. They worried that the candles might set things on fire, and they wanted real windows, with glass, to keep the bugs out. Almost two months had passed since they’d arrived in Sparks. In about four months, they would have to leave. If they didn’t like living in the hotel, they knew they’d like even less to start from nothing somewhere out in the wilderness. They imagined sleeping with no roof over their heads, having no protection at all from the sun or the bugs, and scratching through the grass for something to eat. No one liked the prospect. In the dim hallways, in the roofless, ruined lobby, and in the dusty ballroom, people gathered in little clusters and spoke to each other in worried tones, and sometimes their worry turned to anger and fear.

One person, however, did not stand around talking: that was Tick Hassler. When he saw a problem, he did something about it. He’d become a sort of leader around the Pioneer Hotel, just by the force of his personality. He started what he called the Pioneer Hotel Rehabilitation Project. He explained his ideas to anyone who would listen, and the way he explained them made them seem instantly exciting and fun.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said, the night he announced the first project. It was late evening of a very hot day, nearly dark, and a few people were still sitting out on the steps of the hotel, hoping for a cool breeze. Tick never seemed much affected by the heat. Everyone else was disheveled and sweaty by the end of the day, but Tick always managed to look neat, his hair combed so flat it looked almost polished, his bare arms and legs smooth and brown, his clothes—a plain black T-shirt and black shorts—never torn or stained. He wore his sunglasses almost all the time, and they gave him a commanding and slightly mysterious look.

Doon was there the night Tick announced his first project. It was a relief, after a hard day, to be part of a group of people who were easy with each other, a group with a common purpose. Several of Doon’s classmates from the Ember school were part of it, and some boys who had been cart pullers with Tick, and quite a few others. There were some girls, too. Lizzie was always somewhere around Tick, listening eagerly as he talked, or trotting off on an errand of some sort for him. She had stopped wearing the black scarf that signified her mourning for Looper. “I’ve been sad long enough,” she told Doon. “Besides, Tick doesn’t think black looks good on me.” Now she wore her sunglasses all the time.

“What we’re going to do,” said Tick, sitting on the low wall that bordered the steps, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and speaking in a way that made you feel his words were meant just for you, “is get ourselves organized. There’s a lot that needs to be done around here.” People nodded. “The first thing we need,” Tick went on, “is a gathering place, like the Gathering Hall back in Ember. And what’s the perfect spot for it?” He held out his hands, palms facing the sky, waiting for an answer.

No one spoke.

“This field, of course!” He swept an arm out, taking in the whole of the big field in front of the hotel, with its rough, weedy ground, scrawny trees, and chunks of concrete and other rubble. “We’re going to clear it out. We’re going to make it into a grand plaza, better than the one in the village. We can have meetings here, with our leader speaking to us from these steps.”

“We don’t have a leader,” someone said.

“But we will someday, once we decide who’s best for the job,” Tick said. “I’m going to start on it tomorrow—who wants to work with me?”

And although they had already worked a full day, nearly all of them flung their hands up and volunteered. Doon did, too. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to clear the field and make a plaza; he wasn’t sure they really needed such a thing. After all, they’d be leaving here before long. But he wanted to be part of this; he didn’t want to be left out.

The project got off to a great start: twenty or thirty people were out there every evening, pulling up weeds, digging out rubble, and hacking down trees. Tick was always there, working twice as fast and hard as anyone else and telling them all what terrific progress they were making. It was hard work, but somehow it was fun, too.

Then one night Tick called everyone together and announced that he had a new idea. “We won’t stop working on the field,” he said, “but I’m going to take a team out to start on another project. We need to build a platform out over the river. It’ll get us out toward the deeper part, where we can swim and catch fish and maybe even launch a boat someday. There might be lots of places to explore besides this one. Who wants to work with me?”

Of course everyone wanted to switch over to this new project. It sounded much more interesting than clearing the field. And besides, people wanted to be on the project Tick was working on.

So a great many of them started helping with the new platform—the dock, Tick said it was called. They ripped boards off the old storage sheds behind the hotel, they piled up rocks in the river to make supports. The field project slowed way down. Hardly anyone was working on it anymore.

And as the weeks went on, Doon began to see that this was how Tick’s projects went. He would have an idea and get everyone excited about it. They’d start in to work. Then after a while Tick would have an idea for a new project, and everyone would follow him to that one, while the old project withered away. What Tick seemed to like was the thrill of something new, and the power of being a leader. This slightly dimmed Doon’s admiration for Tick. But no one was perfect, after all. Tick had far more energy than most people, and far more ideas, even though they weren’t all good ones.

In addition to helping with Tick’s projects, Doon had plenty of his own projects to keep him busy. In the early mornings, he helped Clary with the garden she’d put in near the river. He was working on a way to make watering easier for her. He’d seen a pump the villagers had constructed, which used the river’s current to push water out into the channels that watered the fields. This pump was fairly simple—a deep hole in the riverbank, with an arrangement of pipes and valves at the bottom. He thought he could figure out how to make one.

In the evenings, by the last of the daylight, Doon read. He was choosing books from the room in back of the Ark every few days now. His choices at first were pretty random—he just grabbed whatever he could reach. But then he’d had a great idea for bringing some sort of order to this vast collection. One day, when he got back to room 215 after work, he’d found Edward Pocket standing by the window, frowning at the sky. Edward looked unhappy. His gnarled hands were tightened into fists, and his mouth was bunched up into a twisted knot.

“Are you all right?” said Doon.

“Oh, I’m fine,” said Edward. “I just love sitting around all day doing nothing.”

“You’re bored,” said Doon.

“Yes!” Edward cried. “Yes, yes, yes!” He raised both hands and grabbed wads of his frizzled gray hair and stretched his mouth into a mad grin. “They say I’m too old to work, but I’m not ready to freeze up and die. I don’t want to spend my days chatting. Or sleeping.” He said the words with contempt. “What am I supposed to do with myself?”

And of course Doon had the answer. It was so obvious he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. “I know exactly what you can do,” he said, and he told Edward Pocket about the books.

Now Edward spent all the daylight hours in the book room, sorting and organizing and arranging the books. He often picked out ones he thought Doon would like and brought them back to the hotel. In this way, Doon learned about bird migrations, cowboys, basketball, whales, mountain climbing, Egyptian history, dog training, French cooking, car repair, and dinosaurs, among other things. Edward even found a book called Science Projects, in which there was a chapter that explained how to do an experiment that made electricity. The experiment required things Doon didn’t have, but he kept the book anyway, in case he ever got them. You never knew what was going to turn up in the loads the roamers brought to town.

In the meantime, Tick carried on tirelessly with his projects. The dock never did get built. It kept getting torn apart by the river’s current. But other projects succeeded. One of Tick’s ideas was to hoist the flag of Ember over the Pioneer Hotel. Lottie Hoover, who had worked in one of Ember’s city offices, had rolled the flag up and tucked it into her bag just before she rushed down into the Pipeworks to leave. Doon didn’t really see the point of flying Ember’s flag over the hotel—everyone knew that it was the people of Ember who lived there—but he helped with the project, sawing the limbs off a tall, thin tree to make a flagpole. Soon the flag of the city of Ember, deep blue with a yellow grid, flapped above the Pioneer.

“Beautiful,” said Tick, gazing up at it. He turned to the people gathered around him. “We have to show them,” he said, “that we’re proud of being the people of Ember. They have all the advantages right now. They control the food. They control the work teams. They’re taller than we are, and stronger. But we can’t let any of that matter. If we want them to respect us, we have to respect ourselves.”

Several days later, as Doon was walking through the plaza, he noticed that a flag was also flying from the tower of the town hall. It was black with a spray of orange dots rising from the corner—sparks, Doon thought. He wondered if they’d had this flag all along, or if someone had made it and put it up after seeing the one at the Pioneer Hotel.