“Not what you expected?” Dewey asks as I take a page from the top of the stack.

Do you know this word?

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.”

“I don’t understand,” Atlas says.

Maybe he doesn’t, but I do. Drip by drip. Little by little. A painting doesn’t just happen. It comes to life stroke by stroke—seemingly without shape or purpose at first until suddenly it bursts into view. “You were going to do what the government did. Change things a little at a time. If a dozen people do searches on those words, they’ll set off alarms. Then a dozen more. The more alarms that go off, the more people will notice and ask questions.” Which will lead to more questions and demands for answers. “Every question they ask will teach them, by degrees, that the life they have been living is a lie. And once they know this, they won’t be able to go back. They’ll question everything and tell others to do the same.”