There can’t be a lot of those places left. Not with all the work the City Pride Department has done. Everyone says the reason the program is so successful is that it focuses on places that had been neglected by the government for so long.
Clearly, the City Pride designers had never stepped foot into this place, I think as we wind through two more hallways. Atlas leads me into a large room filled with what can only be called old junk. From the reach of the light, I can see a couple of old saws, a rusted claw-foot bathtub, a bunch of ratty paintbrushes, and dozens of old wooden crates and rolls of plastic.
Well, I can certainly understand why someone forgot about this room. “Are you sure we didn’t go the wrong way?” We had taken so many twists and turns I would struggle to find my way back to the staircase.
Atlas’s grin is bright even in the low light. “Follow me.”
I stick close behind him as we snake around the tub and weave a path to the back corner. Atlas squats and reaches for a thick loop of rope. Something skitters on the other side of the room. I spin toward the sound as Atlas laughs. “Don’t mind the rats, and they won’t mind you.”
“Rats?”
Atlas yanks open a trapdoor. A ghostly glow comes from somewhere below.
“We’ll have to be quiet from here on out. Unless of course you want to stay with the rats.”
Someday, I vow, I’ll get even with him for the amusement in his voice. But that’ll have to wait. I scurry down uneven steps—these made of weathered gray stone—and spot the source of dim light. A narrow doorway waiting for us at the bottom of the steps.
I lean my forehead against the cold concrete wall as the lack of sleep pulls harder. Atlas closes the trapdoor behind us, then he takes the lead again. We duck through the glowing narrow doorway and Atlas turns out his lamp.
“Are we there yet?” I ask.
“Almost,” he whispers. “We take a right here.”
He picks up the pace as we walk down a hallway with soft dirt floors that is wider than it is tall. How Atlas walks without stooping is beyond me. There can’t be more than a couple of inches between him and the ceiling in some places. I am about to ask again when I see the glow from ahead that shines so bright it seems like the sun after you look at it too long. I hear the low hum of voices. The tones of someone singing. A tapping sound like insects beating their wings against the cool glass of my bedroom window on a hot summer night.
The floor slants downward. My gym shoes make a sucking sound as I pull them out of a patch of mud, and I’m about to tell Atlas what I think of this hallway when he stops next to a set of stairs at the edge of the brightly lit opening.
My breath catches as Atlas leans toward me and whispers in my ear, “Welcome to Lyceum Station—home of the Stewards.”
Eight
Lyceum Station.
I’d assumed from the name it would be another room like the one my mother painted. Part of me had even hoped that it would resemble the unfinished painting in her studio. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
If I stood here for days with my tablet and stylus—or a canvas and easel and every color imaginable—I would never be able to capture what I see in front of me now.
Lights.
Those are the first things I focus on when I blink and my eyes adjust from being out of the darkness of the corridor. Hanging from the soaring ceiling are dozens, maybe hundreds, of mismatched lights. Single, illuminated, naked bulbs dangle next to stained-glass domes. Elaborate chandeliers gleaming with thousands of crystals sending prisms of color across the dark ceiling and onto the ground far below. The fixtures all sway slightly, as if pulled by a gentle current of air, making the shimmering glow appear as if it’s alive—like dozens of luminous moths circling overhead. The effect lends a magical quality to the space, which is already hard to accept as reality. The sight is accompanied by the faint clicking I heard before—only the sound is slightly louder now and interspersed with a soft bell-like chime. This whole room makes me feel like a character stepping into a fairy tale. Despite recognizing the objects in my sight, I see nothing familiar.
I pull my eyes downward and try to take in the rest. Low wooden walls fill much of the space, lined up like oak and ash and mahogany dominoes throughout much of the front and center of the room. There are freestanding walls that edge the large area and stretch at least two stories, maybe more, into the air, as well as another dozen or so on the side opposite where Atlas and I now stand.
The taller walls have stairs and ladders and platforms to make sure people can reach the top, because each and every single one of the walls and dividers in the room is stuffed full with books. Thousands and thousands of them. All colors. All sizes. I never dreamed there could be so many books left in the world, let alone in the city of Chicago. They are in every crevice and even stacked atop some of the shorter walls. I blink, but they are still there. The books—all of this is real.
Someone in a dark sweatshirt and a baseball cap takes one of the books off a low shelf and then disappears through an exit far to the left. Someone else races through an aisle in the center of the shelves to our right carrying a large blue duffel bag. He places the bag on a counter, rolls out his shoulder, and hurries off again into the maze. Counting the doorway I now stand in, I see four exits from this cavernous space.
“Mind-bending, right?” Atlas’s tone and smile are smug. “Wipe off whatever mud you got on your shoes and follow me.”
He swipes his feet on a tan grass mat to the right of us. Next to the rug are two small racks—one contains dirty boots and running shoes. The other has a stack of beige towels and a number of slippers in various sizes and styles.
I clean off my feet and realize as I walk in Atlas’s wake that there is something different about this room compared with the hallways I just traveled. The smell of mildew and wet has disappeared, traded for the faint scents of citrus and bleach. The dirt and mud under my feet are also gone. Instead, they have been replaced by an array of tile.
Squares of blues and slate grays. Rectangles of various tans and rust and black. They stretch across the floor in a patchwork quilt of hundreds of different colors and textures. Artistically, they should be displeasing, yet somehow they aren’t. Each area of the room seems to be dominated by one or two particular colors, or a single shape. And winding through all the patches of various colors and sizes are ribbons of glistening white and silver. These tiles swirl around large wood support pillars and through the sections of the room that hold a tangle of tables and chairs.
“The Lyceum is the main station of the Stewards.” Atlas’s voice is low as he leads me down an aisle toward the center of the room, along a path of glacial white. Beside us on either side are shelves as high as my shoulders. “My grandfather and his father collected as many books as they could when they first realized what was happening. My great-grandfather was a historian. He warned my grandfather before he died about the danger of destroying books, because, no matter the justification, the action is always meant to eliminate the ideas and the history those books contain. History can only be rewritten if no one remembers the way it existed before. The Nazis did it in World War Two. The Spanish when they discovered the Mayans. The Mongols destroyed libraries in Baghdad. In ancient China, they not only destroyed the books, but killed the writers who penned them.”
“Wait . . .” I shake my head. “This is just stuff your grandfather told you about?”
“No,” he says, turning toward me. “These are things I’ve read about in books—these books—that my grandfather and some of his college friends worked to save.”
His eyes shine with an intense passion as he explains, “One by one, public libraries modernized to all-electronic collections and sent their books to be recycled. My grandfather intercepted them. When he and his friends ran out of room in their homes, they came up with the idea for this place. Between the five of them, it took them decades to create this.”
Decades. For my entire life this place has been under th
e city streets that I walk. And I had no idea.
I run my hand against the long, rough-textured spines of the books on the light oak shelf closest to me.
George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior . . . and Other Important Writings
The Federalist Papers
The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin
“None of the books are in alphabetical order,” I say. When I catch Atlas watching me, I jerk my hand away like I used to when I was little and my mother caught me putting my finger in one of her paints. “Sorry. I’m probably not supposed to touch these. They look pretty old.”
“Old or new, books are for reading. At least that’s what my grandfather has always said. There’s a group of Stewards whose job it is to repair or reinforce bindings or record the contents of damaged parts just in case any of the pages go missing, and a bunch of others whose job it is to collect the supplies to do it.”
“What was this place?” I ask. “Before your grandfather found it, I mean.”
“A network of forgotten streetcar tunnels.”
“Chicago never had streetcars.”
“Sure about that?” He smirks but must see my annoyance because his expression turns sympathetic. “Don’t feel bad. Even before the government started taking books away most people didn’t know the tunnels were here. And from what I’ve read, the city could never really use them. In a lot of places the builders made the inclines too steep and the ceilings too low for them to be useful. The whole project was scrapped. Bad for trolleys, but good for us, since my grandfather and his friends not only knew they existed, they were able to swipe all copies of the plans. Most of the entrances have been walled up with concrete over the years, but they found a few that weren’t and that discovery led them here.”
Atlas starts walking again, and I hurry to keep pace.
I shake my head, trying to clear the haze of disbelief and wonder. “I can’t believe this room was just waiting here all these years.”
“Actually, it wasn’t,” he admitted. “According to old newspaper articles the tunnels were created around the 1900s, but this room is a whole lot newer. As best as my grandfather and his friends can guess, this space wasn’t made intentionally. Walls caved in during a major flood back in the 1990s. The force of the floodwaters carved out this area and it was just waiting for the Stewards. Although it took a lot of work for them to get it ready to move in. My grandfather is lucky he had friends who understood architecture, construction, and drainage or were able to learn what they needed from the books they saved. Moisture is seriously bad for paper.”
“I guess that explains why the floor is tiled,” I say.
He nods. “They picked up scraps of tile where they could and laid the floor. They added pumps and dehumidifiers and a ton of other stuff that’s been updated and expanded over the years. There’s also a gigantic mechanism attached to thick steel-and-stone doors that can be triggered to lock down the tunnels that lead to the Lyceum. The Stewards thought of everything. They made what you see today.”
My mind races as I try to reconcile where I am with everything I’ve ever been taught. It’s—
I yelp as something brushes against my leg, certain it’s a rat like the one I saw in the basement room earlier. Atlas starts to laugh. Really laugh. A full, rich, contagious sound that makes me want to join in. But I am not going to give him the satisfaction as he squats and holds his hand out near a gap in the books on the bottom shelf.
“I think you scared him,” he says quietly.
“You’re worried I scared a rat?”
Atlas’s laugh warms the silence again as a furry red-brown face and curious hazel eyes emerge from the bookshelf crevice. “Now you’ve offended George—a very valuable, albeit slightly hairier, member of our team. He and Margaret make sure there aren’t any rats in the Lyceum. Right, boy?”
The long-haired, fluffy cat gracefully hops down from the shelf and winds like a ribbon in between Atlas’s legs. He lets out a plaintive meow that melts my heart.
Atlas scratches the cat’s ears and gives him a pat on the head. “Lucky for you, George isn’t the type to hold a grudge as long as you pet him and put up with his longing stares while you’re eating. One hard-and-fast Lyceum rule is that no one is allowed to feed George and Margaret no matter how much they beg. And they will beg. Especially George here.” George lets out another loud meow as if to verify Atlas’s claim, and I can’t resist stooping down to let George inspect my hand. He gives several curious sniffs before head-butting my palm—a surefire signal he wants the strokes I give him.
“Why can’t anyone feed the cats?” I ask.
“Everyone on this train has a job, even George and Margaret. If they want to eat, they have to hunt. Keeping the Lyceum vermin-free is imperative.”
George arches his back in a long stretch and gives us one last meow before sauntering off. “What exactly are the Stewards? How many of them are there and what are you trying to do with—” I look up at the lights high above me. “With all of this? What do you think you can possibly change by hiding books?”
I’m tired, and the tiny clicking noises mixed with bells are beginning to sound like Irish step dancers inside my head, making it hard to focus.
“Hiding books? That’s all you think this is?” Atlas shakes his head as if I am deliberately missing the point. He unfastens his tie, shoves it in his pocket, and starts unbuttoning his black dress shirt. “This is everything. It’s our history. Our lives. Our futures. The only way anyone will ever know these things existed is if we safeguard them.”
“I get that part.” At least, I think I do. “But what good is it doing if it is all just down here and no one knows about it?”
“Eventually, everyone will know. But we have to wait for the right moment. Until then, we protect it.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly before speaking again. “The government shrank our world and the lives we live bit by bit and we let them because it was easier for people to believe what they said than to fight. Our government taught people not to question what they were doing. There used to be a dozen places to find news. Now there are two. They took away the words first. Then the people who voiced doubts and the people who resisted vanished. Most people never objected because their lives seemed just fine. It’s easy to just keep putting one foot in front of another. It’s harder to stand up and fight, especially for something that doesn’t seem to affect you. Right now people still don’t see how affected they are. They don’t know it’s hurting them. The Stewards have vowed to be here waiting when they do.”
Atlas peels off his dress shirt, revealing the off-white T-shirt underneath. I catch a glimpse of a design on his upper arm as he wads the dress shirt into a ball. But I can’t make out what it is before he turns and starts walking.
“I still don’t understand,” I say, and trail after Atlas as he weaves around several taller bookshelves. Finally, we enter an area that is filled with a large silver-and-black metal machine. It has massive rollers that appear to be made of rubber. Situated around it are a dozen or so desks. A few desks have computers sitting on top of them, but most have old-fashioned typewriters colored black and gray or dusty blue. Two of the desks are currently occupied—one by an older man and another by a younger woman with a swath of dark hair. Warped bound books are stacked on one side of their desk. Sheets of white pages are balanced on the other side, while metallic clickity-clacks and dull chimes strike the air. “What do you think is going to change if people realize they are missing the information from these books?”
“Maybe fair elections where anyone can run for office instead of those who are approved. Open travel to other countries. A free exchange of ideas where people get to decide what to believe instead of being told to agree.”
“Yeah, but it’s just . . . words.”
“Words have power. They change minds. They inspire and create fear. Words shape ideas—they shape our world—and the words down here will someday be
the ammunition we need to change it all back.”
“Back to what?” I ask. “Back to when there was crime on every corner of Chicago and no one cared about the people who lived in the city with them? That’s what happened when people who weren’t qualified were elected into office in your ‘fair elections.’” The words come out in a rush, and I keep going before Atlas can tell me I’m wrong. “Look at how beautiful the city is now. How safe the country is. Almost no one has guns anymore. No one needs them. Is it any wonder that everyone in the world wants to be like us? The ideas we’ve been using are working. People are happy. Why would we want to change any of that?”
“Some people are happy,” says Atlas. “The people who aren’t have a habit of disappearing. And other people just don’t know any better. In other countries, anyone can be an artist. Did you know that? You don’t need to work for the government, or create designs that they have to approve. And despite what you’ve been told, other countries don’t want to be like us. We’ve fallen behind—in art, technology, science, and medicine. Competing ideas can be messy and chaotic, but better ideas—and huge leaps forward—come out of them. The safety and prosperity government leaders tout now is their way of convincing everyone they should be grateful for what they have and scared of anything that is different. Fear of change is a powerful force.”
I want to understand. I try to imagine what it would be like to not need to get a government degree—or how things would look if any images could be used in news reports or on murals around the city. The city wouldn’t be as beautiful as it is now. Some things we look at would be unsettling or upsetting. People might complain or feel unsafe.
And yet . . . the idea of expressing any idea through art is—
“Atlas!”
He spins toward a woman with thick black hair piled high on top of her head. She’s standing behind a typewriter desk not far from us.
“This is Renu,” he says, closing the distance between them. “Renu joined the Stewards six years ago.”
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