“My dad isn’t . . . available right now. If you want to do this, you’re stuck with me.” The tension in his voice is less than reassuring. “Once you sit down we can get started.”

I place a hand on my stomach and take the seat across from Geeze, who still hasn’t told me his name. If he thinks I’m going to call him Conductor, he’s dead wrong.

Geeze flips his hat onto the table next to him. Then he places his hands on the chair’s armrests and says, “I thought you already knew a bunch of this because of your mom. However, since she followed the rules, I’m going to have to start at the beginning—the paper you were given and the word written on it.”

“Verify.” Clearly, by the quotes on the wall, the word has a meaning.

“Have you ever heard it before this week?”

I want to say yes, since my mother clearly knew the word, but I am honest and shake my head.

“Don’t feel bad,” he says, which irrationally makes me feel worse. “There’s a reason for that.”

“So what does it mean?”

He takes a deep breath and then carefully says words he has clearly taken the time to memorize. As if they are part of the Conductor instruction manual or something. “The word ‘verify’ means to establish the truth, accuracy, or reality of something. As far as my grandfather could tell, it was first used in the fourteenth century. It was one of the first words banned from use by certain government agencies back when they started ‘cleaning up’ the streets and making the country ‘safer.’ Little by little, they removed crime and poverty, but they also removed words. Ones that would encourage people to question what they were told. And by doing so, they changed this from a country that believed in facts to one built on lies.”

Seven

Removed words? “Words don’t just disappear,” I snap.

“That’s a reasonable assumption.” He leans forward. “But if you don’t know the words they removed, how would you know if they’ve vanished or not?” He lifts the lid of the wooden box next to him and pulls a tablet out. “What did you do when you were handed the word ‘VERIFY’?”

“I looked it up.”

“Did you find out what it meant?”

“No,” I huff. “I set off some kind of alarm on the school computer. The police think you and your friends are part of a dangerous gang threatening the city.”

“And what do you think would happen if you searched for another word—one that was removed and not flagged as dangerous?” He turns on the tablet, opens a browser to the dictionary website, and hands the screen to me. “Try searching for the word ‘corroborate.’”

He spells the word, and I punch in the letters, then turn the screen to show the message that appears.

NO SEARCH RESULTS FOUND.

“Try ‘vulnerable.’”

We go through the same process with him spelling out the strange word and me typing it into the tablet.