Read Online The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau - Free Book Online

and looked at her in that infuriating way, lifting his thin eyebrows.
    “Just tell me,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
    “You don’t know about the Four Wars?”
    “No. War—what’s that?”
    “A war is when one bunch of people fights with another bunch, when both of them want the same thing. Like for instance if there’s some good land, and two groups of people want to live there.”
    “Why can’t they both live there?”
    “They don’t
want
to live there
together,
” he said, as if this were a stupid question. “Also you could have a war because of revenge. Say one group of people does something bad to another group, like steal their chickens. Then the first group does something bad back in revenge. That could start a war. The two groups would try to kill each other, and the ones who killed the most would win.”
    “They’d kill each other over chickens?”
    “That’s just an example. In the Four Wars, they were fighting over bigger things. Like who should get some big chunk of land. Or whether you should believe in this god or that god. Or who got to have the gold and the oil.”
    All of this was enormously confusing to Lina. She didn’t know the meaning of “god” or “gold,” and she wasn’t sure what he meant by “oil.” “You mean,” she said, thinking of the jars that had once been stocked in the storerooms of Ember, “the kind of oil you cook with?”
    Torren rolled his eyes. “You
really
don’t know anything,” he said. He flung the rest of the pits he was holding at three little red-headed birds pecking at the weeds between the bricks, and the birds scattered, cheeping. “This was really beautiful, valuable oil. Everyone wanted it, and there wasn’t enough of it to go around, so they fought over it.”
    “They hit each other?”
    “Much worse than that,” said Torren. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and in a low, husky voice told Lina about the weapons they had had in those days, the guns that let you kill people without even getting near them, and the bombs that could flatten and burn whole cities at once. “They set the cities on fire all over the world,” Torren said. His small eyes glittered. “And afterward came the plagues.”
    “I don’t know what a plague is,” Lina said.
    “A sickness,” said Torren. “The kind where one person catches it from another person, and it spreads around fast before you can stop it.”
    “We had one of those,” Lina said. “The coughing sickness—it would come sometimes and kill a lot of people and then go away again.”
    “We had three,” said Torren, as if three plagues were better than one. “There was the one where you wither away, like you’re starving to death; the one where you feel like you’re on fire and you die of heat; and the one where you suddenly can’t breathe. No one knew where they came from, they just rose up and swept over the whole world like a wind.”
    Lina shuddered. She was tired, all at once, of listening to Torren, who took such pleasure in describing horrors and saying words she didn’t understand.
    “So,” Torren said. “The Four Wars and the Three Plagues—those together were the Disaster. When it finally got over with, hardly any people were left. That’s why we had to start all over again.” He stood up and brushed away a twig that was clinging to his shorts. “We don’t have war anymore,” he said. “Our leaders say we must never have war again. And besides, there’s no one to fight against. But if we ever
do
have to have one, we’ll win, because we have the Terrible Weapon.”
    “The Terrible Weapon?” said Lina. “What’s that?”
    But just then Mrs. Murdo came out the door with Poppy in her arms. Lina jumped up and ran over to her. “Is she better?”
    “She’s a little better.” Poppy lay against Mrs. Murdo’s shoulder, her head turned sideways, her eyes dull. “Wy-na,” she said in a small voice. Lina ruffled her fine brown hair.
    Torren