I tell her about my meeting for tonight. She assures me again that her mother has everything under control and that I shouldn’t worry. But I can’t help it when I spot another Marshal watching Gloss’s front door from a café table across the street as I walk away.
My phone chimes. I stop midway up a sidewalk flanked by a line of blue and white flowers. The burgundy brick three-story house it leads to is now my home. Rose’s message is short: Goons gone. Mom’s good. Going to meet Dad.
I grab the railing and climb the steps up to the porch. A group of baseball fans walk by in their blue-and-white-striped jerseys. I mutter, “Go Cubs.” The excited group gives me a thumbs-up, as I pull out my house key and let myself inside.
The house I lived in with my parents wasn’t large, but it was filled with cheerful colors—each selected when I was little by my mother and me. Sunny yellows edged in white, brilliant blues, and dusty pinks. The fabrics were worn from use. The floors a bit scarred. I didn’t realize how much I loved that house until it was gone. This place couldn’t be more different.
The sand-colored tiles where I gratefully shed my shoes are cold despite the warmth of the sunlight streaming through the glass window above the door. The foyer walls are stark white. So are the ones in the adjoining living room with its impersonal brown leather chairs, steel and glass tables, and wrought-iron lamps. It may as well be the lobby of a midrange hotel. The pictures that fill the screens on the living room walls provide the only personality in the room.
There is a shot of the baseball field from just blocks away. An image of a man wearing a dented gray hat that is only slightly different from the one that I’ve actually seen him sporting playing a guitar in a pop band—as if he would ever do anything that fun. There is also a picture featuring me with my short red-and-white-streaked hair and heavily made-up eyes standing at the edge of Lake Michigan. The sky is impossibly blue. The water shimmers in the background and I am flanked by two smiling people that I have never met. But if asked I am to say those people are my parents and that the man in the hat rocking out on guitar is my uncle.
A fake photo history for “Uncle” Dewey and I that took almost no time to create.
Quickly, I walk by the pictures, through the dining room, which is furnished with an unused long black table and six high-backed black leather chairs.
Faint strains of classical music and the rich scent of coffee greets me as I step into the stainless steel and gray-ceramic-tiled kitchen. A mostly empty pot sits on the warmer. The bowl of sugar and a spoon rest on the linoleum counter. The coffee calls to me, but it’ll have to wait since I’m running late and there are things I have to do before tonight’s meeting.
The flowing orchestral music grows louder as I head up the stairs to the bedroom I’ve been using. The plush carpet is not quite dark enough to be called beige. The bed has a high oak headboard. The only real color in the room is the ruby-red comforter I found buried in the closet and the electronic map of the city displayed on the wall screen.
I shed my work clothes, and making sure I check for any tags I might have missed, change into workout gear and slip into my not-quite-broken-in pair of running shoes. Then, shoving my phone in my back pocket, I head for the bedroom door, open it, and yelp.
“When Lord Byron spoke of children that only scream in a quiet voice, he was not speaking of you.” Dewey shifts the battered brown hat on his head and sighs. Unlike mine, Dewey’s clothes aren’t new. His brown pants are faded and the plaid green-and-yellow button-down shirt is worn at the elbows. As a Steward, Dewey rarely left the underground Lyceum and its hundreds of thousands of books. But according to Dewey, just because he spent thirty years of his life underground didn’t mean he believed he would always be safe there. Which is why he bought this place years ago and had Atlas’s father maintain it.
It has been weeks since I returned to the building the Stewards used as an exit station—a location we could use as a safe house that would also covertly allow us to reach our underground headquarters—the Lyceum. I will never forget how my father reacted when I came through the entrance after making the decision to continue to fight for the truth. His hands were shaking, but his eyes were mostly clear when he gave me an ultimatum: “If you make the choice to stay, you’re on your own.”
I still can’t decide what hurt worse—those words or watching him walk out the door the next morning knowing that the dad I’d counted on most of my life had left long before that moment. My mother’s death and the drinking that he used to cope had changed him. Still, realizing he didn’t love me enough to stop drinking—or to stay and help me when I needed him the most—made me feel as if I were being pulled underwater.
The whispered click the door made as it shut behind my father on that day almost sent me to my knees. Then Dewey said, “It goes on.”
His matter-of-fact tone cut through the emptiness and had me turning to look at him. He was holding his hat in his hands, giving me an unshadowed view of the greenish-yellow outline of a fading bruise on his cheek. The last signs of the injuries he had received at the hands of the Marshals because of the plan I insisted would work.
“What goes on?” I asked him—wishing my father would come back through the door and say he made a mistake.
“Life,” he said simply. “No matter how dark the moment or deep the pain, life continues. The bravest are those who are willing to face the new day uncertain of what will come with the dawn.”
“Who said that?”
He placed his hat on his head and adjusted it before saying, “I did. And while you face the uncertain dawn, you will stay with me.”
“Where?” I asked, looking around the now-abandoned Steward exit station we had been using. “We didn’t go along with the lockdown. Do you think we should still stay here?” The exit station had been a refuge, but after everything that happened it no longer felt safe.
“I don’t think making camp in a Steward station is a good idea.” Dewey shook his head. “I doubt Scarlet would react well if she found us here.”
I doubted the current head of the Stewards would be happy to run into us anywhere. Not after we convinced dozens of her members to defy the lockdown she’d ordered. It was her anger with us that revealed how she betrayed Atlas’s father to the Marshals simply because they disagreed on the future of the Stewards. Scarlet was willing to sacrifice anyone—even friends who trusted her—when she believed she was right. Since I was most definitely not her friend, I could only imagine what she would do if we ever met again.
“Not to fret. I took the advice of Miguel de Cervantes to heart.” Dewey smiled at me. “‘Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.’ Which is why I arranged to have a station of my own.”
I shake off the memory and frown at Dewey, who now is standing in my bedroom doorway waiting for me to recover from my surprise. “Mrs. Webster decided to launch the new Gloss campaign today.”
“I know,” he says, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Between the two news channels and a variety of websites, I’ve seen the Gloss advertisement over a dozen times. Mrs. Webster already contacted me through my alternate email. Our cover is holding.”
“A Marshal was watching the building when I left.”