I keep my eyes on Atlas as he struggles with what he was taught to believe by the Stewards—by his father and grandfather—and the plan we have embarked upon.
Mrs. Webster and Rose won’t be able to hold off the Marshals forever. They have sacrificed everything to give us this chance. We can’t squander it.
Atlas’s hand tightens on mine. A weight I barely recognized on my heart lifts. This is a decision I do not make alone. We are in this together.
“Merriam is right,” Atlas says. His sigh tells me everything I need to know about how much he hates that phrase. “The government changed all our futures when they took away the pieces of our history they found inconvenient. They stole our choices. I would never try to do the same thing to you. You have a choice.”
The others in the room exchange looks. A few of the younger boys leaning against the wall roll their eyes. I smile, remembering that I wasn’t exactly impressed by Atlas when we first met, either.
“Can we get on with it?” A tanned boy in ripped jeans and a Voices of Freedom tour shirt shatters the moment from his place on the floor. “If I’m not home in twenty minutes, my ass is going to get grounded.”
“I guess your parents know that’s the only part that needs to be grounded since it’s where your brain is located,” a blond girl about my age giggles.
He crosses his arms defiantly over his chest. “You only wish you had my skills.”
“Enough!” Stef calls and the room goes silent. “Shep has a point.” She looks at the smug boy in the ripped jeans. “Although not about your skills. If you had been more careful, Shep, Merriam and Atlas wouldn’t have had to rescue me from the Marshals in the first place, and they wouldn’t be here now.”
“But we are here,” I say. “And we’re going to uncover and expose the truth about what happened to the people the Marshals have taken away.”
“We know what happened to them.” Ari pushes away from the wall. “They’re dead.”
“No,” I say as Atlas stiffens beside me. “At least, not all of them.” Aware time is slipping away, I quickly run down how I broke into the City Pride Department archives and the Unity Center plans I discovered there.
“We were right! We knew they had to be using paper!” the blond girl from before exclaims. “That’s why we haven’t been able to find anything useful when we wormed our way through a crack in their firewalls.”
“Being right also means we’re screwed.” A guy with buzzed hair and two gold hoop earrings shoves himself out of the sunken, faded blue couch. “We can’t hack information if it’s not sitting on servers waiting to be hacked. And everything about the truth we’ve put online gets taken down by their software in minutes.”
The room explodes with frustration and angry words.
“Even if you had found information to share and managed to put it online long enough for people to read it, it wouldn’t have changed anything!” I shout.
“How the hell would you know?” the guy shoots back.
“Because we tried.” I swallow my own anger at the loss and my naiveté. “We put information right into people’s hands that explained everything to them, and most of them refused to see it. The news told them it was all a Hollywood stunt so that’s what they believed. I thought if we gave people access to the truth they would embrace it. I was wrong.”
People died because I was wrong.
“So, we’re screwed,” the guy in the back reiterates. “We can’t get the information we need, and even if we did no one would believe it is real.”
“Not if the source of the information makes them uncomfortable,” I say.
“The truth is uncomfortable.”
“You’re right,” I agree. “Which is why we have to present it in a way they seek out and automatically trust. We’re going to use Gloss and we started today.”
“We recognized the Steward symbol in the logo,” Stef says, stepping forward. “The Marshals will, too. They’ll shut it down.”
“We have that covered,” Atlas says with more confidence than I feel.
“So what? You created a logo for a magazine that is all about fashion. Congratulations.” Joy scoffs. “You’ll now have the ability to change the world one smokey eye at a time.”
“Gloss is popular,” I say, deliberately not looking at Joy. I will not take the bait and get into an argument with her and waste what little time we have left. “People pay attention to things that are popular and no one wants to feel like they’re missing out—especially when it’s the thing everyone is talking about. We’re going to get people talking about Gloss so that even people who don’t read it feel as if they have to pay attention. We’re going to make it so talked about that the government can’t risk shutting it down without drawing notice. Then we’re going to start including some of the government-erased words inside the pages.”
“And the software programs the government has designed will find the content in their scans and shut the whole thing down,” Ari says with a sigh. “Bubble busted.”
“Their software scans articles.” I smile. “Not artwork.” Mrs. Webster had me add a word into one of the ads two weeks ago as a test to see if the programs would flag the magazine’s image files. No alarms. No Marshals. And a softening of the ground under the readers for the information that, if we do this right, will change everything.
The two who were fighting about hacking exchange a look.
Stef glances down at them. “Are they right?”
“Maybe,” the blond girl says. “The software might be able to recognize block letters, but stylized ones would be hard, if not impossible, for it to detect when the magazine is scanned, especially if it’s uploaded at the same time as the rest of the content. The most aggressive programs are reserved for external additions to known sites and web searches.”
Something I know all too well from my online search of the word “verify.” Had my query not come back with error messages and alarms, I might have simply recycled the “ticket” the Steward gave me and never thought about it again.
“So putting stylized words in artwork could actually work,” Ari confirms.
The blond girl and the boy in ripped jeans nod.
“Eventually, someone in the government will notice,” Stef says. “And Gloss’s popularity will only stop them from shutting it down for so long.”
“We know. Gloss will publish the truth long before that happens,” I say. “But we have to move fast. The quicker we get everyone paying attention to Gloss, the better chance we have of getting out the facts we need them to hear. In a way they can accept hearing it.”
I will uncover more of those facts once the next phase of the plan is in motion.
“Gloss is the e-zine they trust—that everyone they know loves. When we give them the truth, they’ll pay attention.”
“But none of that will work if we don’t draw new attention and readers to Gloss,” Atlas adds. “That’s where we need your help.”
Stef looks around the room, then says, “Most of our team has to leave, but I want them to hear one answer for themselves before Ari, Joy, and I make any decisions about partnering with you. The Stewards have been rumored to have been working in secret for dozens of years—while many other people, including those who we have known and loved—have been captured and killed for trying to make people relearn how to question what our government is doing. In all that time no one from the Stewards has made an attempt to be a part of that effort. You’ve given us a lot to think about today, but the Stewards have never aided us. So why should we put ourselves on the line to help with your plan now?”