The Diamond of Darkhold - 4 Read Online Free PDF Page A

jewels.”
    “No, I don’t think so,” Doon said. “I think it’s some kind of machine.” He seemed full of pent-up energy. He paced back and forth beside the clothesline, batting the windblown clothes out of his way. “I just know that book is important, Lina,” he said. “And it was meant for us! For the people from Ember.”
    Lina was trying to pin the shirt to the line, but the wind kept snatching it away from her. “Would you help me with this shirt? I can’t make it stay up.”
    Doon grabbed one sleeve of the shirt and wrapped it around the clothesline. “I’ve been thinking so much about all this, Lina. About this book and what it might mean and about what happened to the Ark and how I’d like to . . .” He trailed off. The shirt came loose from the line and fell into the dirt before Lina could catch it. “I don’t know for sure,” Doon went on, not noticing. “But I feel . . .” He looked away, and his eyebrows drew together as if he were figuring out a puzzle written in the sky. “I feel the way we did about the Instructions that Poppy chewed up. It was our mystery to figure out. It came to us. This feels the same.”
    Lina, picking up the shirt and shaking the dirt off it, thought of the tattered book with dismay. “You mean we have to figure out what it says? What all those missing pages are about?”
    “No, no, we can’t do that. Too much is gone. But we have to do something. We can’t just ignore it.” The wind blew his hair into his eyes, and he swiped it away impatiently. “There are so many troubles here, Lina. It’s cold and dark, and there isn’t enough food, and people are sick. . . . Maybe the book is about something that would make things better.”
    “Did you show it to your father?”
    “No,” Doon said. “I haven’t shown it to anyone.”
    “Why not?”
    Doon went on as if he hadn’t heard this question. “I think there’s something up near Ember that we were meant to find. Look at the title of the book: ‘Directions for Use.’ It’s so much like ‘Instructions for Egress’!”
    “It is,” Lina admitted.
    “I think we should go and look for it,” Doon said.
    Lina gave a short laugh of disbelief. “No one would let us,” she said.
    “I know. That’s why I haven’t told anyone. We’d be forbidden to go.”
    “But how can we go?” asked Lina. “We don’t even know what we’d be looking for.” An uneasy feeling twisted in her stomach. She wasn’t sure if it was excitement or fear.
    “I’ve been thinking and thinking about it,” Doon said. “I know it’s risky. We might not find anything at all. But I want to go back to Ember, Lina. And I want you to come with me.”

    But of course that was impossible. Lina had tried to laugh when Doon said it, but she couldn’t quite laugh, because she saw that he was serious. She could tell that he would have explained all his plans to her right there, in the cold yard with the laundry flying, if Mrs. Murdo hadn’t called out the kitchen window for Lina to come in and peel potatoes. “Meet me tomorrow,” Doon said. “At the Ark, at sunrise. Can you? I’ll tell you more then.”
    She agreed. That afternoon, as she peeled potatoes, fetched wood for the fire, dug a hole in the garden for the garbage, and scraped up wax drippings to melt down for more candles, she was too busy to do much thinking. But in the evening, she finally had time to be still. Dinner was over. It hadn’t been much of a dinner—just a thin carrot soup, dry bread, and some bits of cheese with the mold cut off. Lina had gotten used to having a half-empty stomach most of the time.
    She settled herself in a chair by the fire. Torren was sitting on the floor nearby, poking the logs with a long fork and watching the sparks fly up. Poppy was asleep upstairs. On the table beside Lina was an unfinished drawing she’d been working on for weeks in her brief spare moments. She’d always loved to draw. When she’d lived in Ember, she had