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else.”
    “We’ll have to watch them carefully if we let them stay,” said Ben. “They’re strange. We don’t know what they might do.”
    “They seem fairly ordinary to me,” said Mary. “Except for the business about living in a cave.”
    “You believed that?” said Ben.
    Mary shrugged. “The question is, shall we let them stay?”
    “How long would we have to keep them,” asked Wilmer, “before they were ready to go?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe six months? Let’s see. It’s near the end of Flowering now.” Mary counted out the months on her fingers. “Shining, Burning, Browning, Cooling, Falling, Chilling. They could stay through the summer and fall seasons and leave at the end of Chilling.”
    “That would mean they’d be on their own for the winter,” Wilmer pointed out.
    “That’s right,” said Ben. “Are you suggesting we should keep them even longer? We’ll be stretching ourselves to keep them at all.”
    They fell silent again, considering this.
    Finally Mary spoke. “Shall we let them stay for six months, then?” she said. “And teach them as much as we can?”
    No one really liked this idea. They thought of the food the refugees would need, which would mean less for their own people, and the bother of teaching them all the skills they’d need to survive on their own. Each one—Mary, Wilmer, and especially Ben—wished the unfortunate cave people would simply vanish.
    But they weren’t going to vanish, and the leaders of Sparks knew that they must for the sake of their consciences do the right thing. They wanted to be wise, good leaders, unlike the leaders of the past, whose terrible mistakes had led to the Disaster. So they would be open-minded. They would be generous.
    With this in mind, the three leaders voted:
    Mary voted yes, the cave people should stay.
    Ben voted yes, reluctantly.
    Wilmer voted yes.
    So it was agreed: They would give them a place to stay. They would help them for six months. After that, the strangers would have to take care of themselves.
    Mary, Ben, and Wilmer shook hands on this agreement, but none of them said out loud what they were thinking: that even after six months, the people of Ember would be hard-pressed to start a town. The founders of Sparks had known carpentry and farming, and even so it had taken them two years just to build rough shelters and get the rocks out of the fields. They had known how to manage animals and build good soil, but still their animals sometimes died of disease and hunger in the many years when the crops failed. They had known to expect harsh weather, wolves, and bandits, and still they suffered losses from all three.
    The town leaders knew in their hearts that in this vast, empty country, where there were a thousand dangers the people of Ember did not understand, they would
never
be able to take care of themselves.

CHAPTER 5
                        
The Pioneer
    In the village the next morning, criers ran through the streets calling to the people of Sparks. They told them to bring out all their old blankets, pillows, towels, and rags, and any clothes they no longer needed. They were to heap these on the street in front of their houses. From the storehouse, people collected food—things that didn’t need to be cooked, like apples from the prior fall, and dried apricots, and bread, and big hunks of cheese. Doon, who had gotten up at the first sign of light in the sky, watched these preparations with rising excitement.
    By midday a caravan was moving southward out of the village. It was composed of strange vehicles that the villagers called “truck-wagons,” or just “trucks.” They were made of rusty metal and had four fat black wheels. At the front was a boxy part, like a metal chest with a rounded top, and behind that was a higher box with two seats in it where the drivers sat. The back of the truck was flat; this was where the crates of supplies were loaded. Attached to each of these trucks by