Rose tightens her grip on her brother’s ID card. “You really think that my dad is . . . part of all of this? That he knows about Verify and about your mom’s murder?”
“He has to.”
“That means he’s part of the reason Isaac is gone.”
“No,” I say. “That’s on me.”
“It’s on them,” she says, taking my hand and squeezing it. “They lied. You uncovered the truth. Together we’ll fix it.”
I hope so. “I’ll let you know what the plan is as soon as we figure it out,” I promise. “Can you stay here until then? Please?”
Tears sparkle in her eyes, then harden like diamonds. “I’m counting on you. And don’t do anything stupid.”
“Now you sound like Atlas.”
Rose gives me a small smile. “Maybe he’s not so bad after all.”
Atlas is waiting in the shadow of a tree at the corner. “Is she going to be okay on her own?” he asks. “I know what it’s like to feel helpless.” The concern I see in his eyes tugs hard at my heart.
“Rose is the strongest person I know. You can trust her,” I tell him. “She won’t say anything that will jeopardize us or our chances of finding her brother.”
“And how about you?” He steps toward me. “How are you holding up?”
I start to say I’m fine, but I can’t choke out the words. And when Atlas opens his arms, I don’t shrink back. I walk into them. He pulls me tight against him and I bury my face in his T-shirt while fear and anger and regret fight to burst free. I take several deep breaths to tamp down everything I’m feeling and concentrate on the sound of Atlas’s heartbeat. Strong. Steady. Just like I need to be now.
As I slowly step away from Atlas, he gently says, “None of this is your fault, Meri. You know that, right?”
A reluctant smile tugs at my lips. “Rose said the same thing.”
He shakes his head, but I can see the answering smile in his eyes when he says, “Maybe she isn’t so bad after all.”
“She said that, too.” I take another steadying breath, shift the cap on my head, and say, “Are you ready?”
“Do you still have the CTA card I gave you?” When I pull it out of my pocket, he nods. “Then let’s go.”
My knee is stiff and aches as we head to the nearest L stop. The train is packed with people headed to work or for a day downtown. The sidewalks are just as full as Atlas leads me to a small brick building wedged in between taller ones constructed of glass and steel just a block or two away from the La Salle Street Bridge—where Atlas and I first met.
“This station will be the last one to close.” Atlas steps into the building’s doorway, then explains, “After the lockdown, any Steward who didn’t make it to the Lyceum or is worried about exposure will come here to be routed to stations out of the city. The last relocation run will be a week after lockdown and this station will officially shut down then. If anything goes wrong—if we get separated or anything—this is the place you should come to get out of Chicago.” He presses a square button twice on the occupant panel, which lists only one name—a business called Substantiate. He waits a beat. Then he presses it three more times.
The intercom crackles to life. “Who is it?”
“Atlas Steward.”
“What do you need?”
“I was hoping to verify something with you.”
There is a pause before a buzzer sounds. Atlas yanks the door open, looks up and down the sidewalk one last time, then enters. I follow him into the narrow but brightly lit foyer, around the corner to where an older woman with salt-and-pepper hair, a pink tank top, and a long, colorful patchwork skirt stands waiting in an open doorway.
“This is Index,” Atlas introduces the woman. “She’s the Master for Station One.”
“At least until they shut me down.” The woman nods. “The Engineers look like they’re planning for this lockdown to last a good, long time.”
“If you’re in charge of shutting down the last station, doesn’t that mean you’ll be locked out of the Lyceum?” I ask.
Index smiles. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be driving the last train of stragglers out of the city myself. I’ve been through enough lockdowns to know I’d rather be on the run than trapped.” She turns to Atlas. “I’m sorry about Atticus.”
Atlas nods and we head down a narrow hall and around the corner. He punches the code 1773 into an elevator with dented silver doors, and the doors slide open. He looks over at me and says, “That’s the year of the Boston Tea Party—in case you read that part of the book.”
“A protest event that ultimately led to the . . .” What did the book call it? “The Revolutionary War.”
Atlas’s eyes widen.
“I told you, I read the book.”
“I keep underestimating you. I should probably stop doing that.”
The metal doors slide open, revealing a long hallway covered completely—the floor, the ceiling, and the walls—with large squares of dingy white and yellow ceramic tile. Long tubes of fluorescent lights shine down from above. We follow the hallway as it slants downward and to the left.
“Where are we?” I ask. “This isn’t anything like the entrance we went through before.”
“It’s an old pedestrian walkway. There are a bunch of them that connect buildings around the city. My grandfather and his friends removed some of the pedways from the city’s maps and then created new walls to separate them from the ones they didn’t take off the grid.”
“And no one noticed?”
“The City Pride Program was making so many changes it was hard for everyone to keep them straight. If anyone asked them what they were doing, grandfather’s friends created official-looking memos that said there were structural damages, which required certain pedways to be sealed. Then they swiped the paper files—like you did. People didn’t know how to verify what they were told.” He shrugged. “Sometimes, that’s useful.”
That’s what we are going to change.
The wide, tiled path slants downward a bit more. There is a large concrete wall in the distance, probably one of the walls that Atlas was just referring to, but we turn right before we get that far.
“We used to have a longer path to get to the tunnels, but my father thought it took too long and created his own here.”
A shadow passes over his eyes. Then he shakes his head and opens a door set back in an alcove. We slip inside to a concrete closet that has no light source. I kick a metal bucket and almost trip over an old mop as Atlas shoves a piece of plywood to the side, revealing a jagged hole in the concrete. When I duck my head I am able to fit through without any problem.
He grabs a lantern from the floor, turns it on, and heads right down the low, dirt-packed tunnel.
Since I’ve already been to the Lyceum, I assumed I knew what to expect. But when we step through a doorway built in the middle of a towering bookshelf, I find the place more magical than before. The lights from above are brighter. Or maybe it is the energy of the people—dozens of them hurrying with papers or boxes and some with suitcases or overnight bags—that makes it feel different.
Or maybe I am different, because when I step through the doorway I don’t see only books of all sizes and scarred wood shelves and paper—I see the potential to change the world. We just have to figure out how to do it.
“Well, we’re here,” Atlas says as we start walking through the shelves. “Now what?”
Good question. I wish I had a good answer, and time is ticking away.
“Do you have any idea who your father and my mother might have been working with?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t have made contact with you.”
Fair point.
“Once, I overheard them talking. Dad said they should meet when your mom was painting the station. Your mom said something like ‘He’s going to hate that.’ Before they said who he was, Dad noticed I was there. That was a month or so before your mom died.”
“How long was my mother in the St
ewards?” I ask.
“Eighteen months. She was eased into her ride, so it took a few months before she was brought here and officially made a Steward,” he offers.
A year and a half or a little less sounds about right. That would coincide with the time Mom suddenly stopped wanting me to pursue my art and started spending more time alone.
“Did she have a lot of good friends down here?”
“She wasn’t in the Lyceum all that often that I can remember,” Atlas says. “She spent most of her time aboveground on the station design.”
“So she wouldn’t have gotten close to very many people,” I reason. So far, I had met just a handful of Stewards. Only one of them said he liked my mom.
“This way,” I say as I pull Atlas along through the rows of shelves.
“Where are we going?”
“To find him,” I say. After a few twists and turns, I spot Dewey sitting at the same desk Atlas and I found him at before, his beaten-up brown hat pulled low on his head. Around him people are scurrying through the tall stacks with lists—yelling about books to pull or supplies to get, but he just turns pages of the volume in front of him as if nothing is happening. He stops reading to make a note and notices us standing in front of him.
“More people. It’s like roaches. You deal with one, and more turn up. Lists for editions to pull and send to the vaults are back there.” He waves his hand over his shoulder and hunches over his book. “Data will deal with you. Better hurry.”
“We’re not here to pack books,” I say. “I’m trying to find people who were friends with my mom.”
“There will be plenty of time to bother me about that after the lockdown starts.” He pulls his hat farther down on his head.
“We’re not going to be here when the lockdown starts,” I say.
Dewey pauses turning his page and peers up at me. “Really?”
I nod.
“Well, two less people to worry about.” He yawns, then blinks as if surprised to see that we are still standing in front of him. “If you’re not here to help, at the very least you can let me get back to my work.”
“Dewey,” Atlas says, far more calmly than I feel, “we just need you to answer a few questions. We’re trying to do what my father and Folio would have wanted.”
Dewey lets out a high-pitched, mocking laugh and swivels in his chair. “My dear Atlas, any one of the people running around here will say that Atticus and Folio would want you to do what is best for the Stewards. Which from my point of view is to go somewhere else.” He leans back, stretches so that his hands brush that shelf of red books next to his desk, and then pulls his hat back down over his eyes, dismissing us.
“Come on,” Atlas says. “We can ask someone else.”
I start to turn, then stop dead in my tracks. “Wait a second.”
I take a step toward the shelf of books.
“I told you to go. Or I’ll let Scarlett and Holden know—”
“I know those books,” I cut him off, and start digging in my bag for my tablet. My hands fumble with the On switch as I look at the line of red books again. I saw them the last time I was here, but I didn’t see them. Not really. But I see them now and they have gold lines and a small stamped symbol on each that makes my heart race.
Yes. I call up the image of my mother’s work and my heart jumps. The squat lines of red rectangles depict only the middle section, making them look more like bricks than books. But the gold-winged tree symbol on each of those rectangles is unmistakable.
I turn the tablet to show Dewey the picture and smile because I am still on the path my mother left for me. She left me a trail to the truth. And now I am going to follow it all the way to the end.
Fifteen
Dewey squints at me. “Why are you still here? Do you need me to speak slower so you can understand? It is time for you to go.”
I smile. He frowns.
“You said, if we asked anyone running around the Lyceum, they would say my mom and Atlas’s dad would want us to do what is best for the Stewards.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your hearing.”
“But you aren’t running around the Lyceum. What do you think they’d say to us?”
He leans back again and studies me. “Maybe you’re more like your mom than you look. She was good with details.”
“An artist has to see the little things.” I say the words I recall from years ago. “Because that’s what makes up the bigger things.”
Just like her paintings captured a smaller piece of a larger picture.
Something an artist would notice. Something she trusted me to see.
“There’s something my mother started that I plan on finishing. And you can help me do it.”
Dewey removes his hat, flips it onto the desk, and leans toward me. “And how do you suppose I can do that?”
“By showing me . . .” I ignore Atlas’s confused look and punch up the image of my mother’s final, incomplete painting. Then I turn the tablet to face Dewey. “Where to find this.”
“That painting’s not finished,” he says.
“No. My mother never had the chance to complete it. That’s what I intend to do.”
Atlas shifts to study the image on the screen while Dewey stares at me. He clicks his tongue three times. Then he takes his hat off the desk, turns it over in his hand, and jams it on with a sigh. “It’s too noisy for me to read with all these people underfoot.” He jumps to his feet and disappears around the corner of the bookshelf next to his desk. A moment later, he appears again. “I’m assuming your feet work. Or did you plan on me carrying you?”
“I still have no idea what’s happening,” Atlas admits as we scurry after Dewey, who darts around Stewards preparing for lockdown and weaves through shelves. “Why didn’t you tell me about your mother’s paintings?”
“I’ll explain everything later,” I say as I rush to keep up. Finally, Dewey leads us into a small area in a dimly lit back corner of the Lyceum tucked away under scaffolding used to reach the upper bookshelves.
Dewey glances around the edge of shelves to make sure no one is nearby. Then he asks, “Do you recognize anything?”
I’m about to say no, when something catches my eye. A book shelved near the bottom, placed so that the image on the front is facing out. The cover is torn and faded, but even in the dim light I recognize the red stars at the edge of a black background and the faded pale lines that point to an image in the center. An image my mother never got the chance to paint. Not a door, as I drew so many times while trying to re-create my mother’s vision, but an eye—wide-open—determined to see.
“What are you waiting for?” Dewey asks. “Take it.”
I lean down, pull the book off the shelf, and brush my hand over the front.
I found it, Mom, I think. I know what you wanted me to see now. And I’m here.
Dewey’s voice pulls me back. “There’s a switch. You might have to feel around a bit. No good having a secret room if anyone who pulls a book off a shelf can find it.”
My fingers find a cool metal inset in the wood and I pull. Something clicks, and a section of the shelves shifts.
“Now stand back.” Dewey helps haul me to my feet, and I scramble out of the way as he carefully pivots the shelf.
“Atlas’s grandfather created this when he and his friends built the Lyceum.” He waves us inside the darkness. I reach for Atlas’s hand and step over the threshold. Dewey follows. “Atticus decided it should be used for this.” Dewey hangs a battery-operated lantern on the wall and pulls the door shut behind us as I blink at the contents of the small, hidden space.
In a movie a room like this would contain treasure or some kind of alien device that could destroy the world. Instead, there are stacks of red books and neat piles of paper and dozens and dozens of bags on slightly rusted metal industrial shelves.
“Not what you expected?” Dewey asks as I take a page from the top of the stack.
Do you know this w
ord?
VERIFY—(v.) To ascertain or prove the truth or correctness of.
You don’t know it because the government does not want you to. They took this word away from you. Do you wonder what else they might have taken?
The paper goes on to list other words—many are ones Atlas made me look up when he told me about the Stewards. The final word, however, is one I discovered myself in the history book.
REVOLUTION—(n.) An overthrow or repudiation and the replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.
“I’m not sure what I expected,” I admit. Weapons, maybe? Or the names of soldiers in a secret army they had amassed?
Atlas picks up one of the red books. It’s a copy of the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary. And there are stacks and stacks of them. “What did you plan to do with all of this?”
“What do you think we planned to do?” Dewey asks, leaning against the edge of the door.
“You were going to spread the truth,” I say, unzipping one of the bags. Inside are more papers. More books. “But how? Are there others helping you?”
He dashes my hopes with the shake of his head. “It was just the three of us. The other Engineers made it clear they valued safety above the truth. So the three of us decided to create a method of spreading the truth on our own. I was in charge of siphoning off inventory and printing those sheets. Atticus and your mom were going to get the materials out onto the streets. We hoped to have more damning information to add as we waged our campaign.”
Which is what my mother was attempting to do when she was killed.
Atlas shakes his head. “How did you plan to change anything when there were only three of you?”
Dewey adjusts his hat and straightens his shoulders. “Ovid and his industrious medieval collaborators gave us the idea that ‘dripping water hollows out stone, not through force, but through persistence.’ We decided to put that theory to the test.”
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