I clean off my feet and realize as I walk in Atlas’s wake that there is something different about this room compared with the hallways I just traveled. The smell of mildew and wet has disappeared, traded for the faint scents of citrus and bleach. The dirt and mud under my feet are also gone. Instead, they have been replaced by an array of tile.

Squares of blues and slate grays. Rectangles of various tans and rust and black. They stretch across the floor in a patchwork quilt of hundreds of different colors and textures. Artistically, they should be displeasing, yet somehow they aren’t. Each area of the room seems to be dominated by one or two particular colors, or a single shape. And winding through all the patches of various colors and sizes are ribbons of glistening white and silver. These tiles swirl around large wood support pillars and through the sections of the room that hold a tangle of tables and chairs.

“The Lyceum is the main station of the Stewards.” Atlas’s voice is low as he leads me down an aisle toward the center of the room, along a path of glacial white. Beside us on either side are shelves as high as my shoulders. “My grandfather and his father collected as many books as they could when they first realized what was happening. My great-grandfather was a historian. He warned my grandfather before he died about the danger of destroying books, because, no matter the justification, the action is always meant to eliminate the ideas and the history those books contain. History can only be rewritten if no one remembers the way it existed before. The Nazis did it in World War Two. The Spanish when they discovered the Mayans. The Mongols destroyed libraries in Baghdad. In ancient China, they not only destroyed the books, but killed the writers who penned them.”

“Wait . . .” I shake my head. “This is just stuff your grandfather told you about?”

“No,” he says, turning toward me. “These are things I’ve read about in books—these books—that my grandfather and some of his college friends worked to save.”

His eyes shine with an intense passion as he explains, “One by one, public libraries modernized to all-electronic collections and sent their books to be recycled. My grandfather intercepted them. When he and his friends ran out of room in their homes, they came up with the idea for this place. Between the five of them, it took them decades to create this.”

Decades. For my entire life this place has been under the city streets that I walk. And I had no idea.

I run my hand against the long, rough-textured spines of the books on the light oak shelf closest to me.

George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior . . . and Other Important Writings

The Federalist Papers

The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin

“None of the books are in alphabetical order,” I say. When I catch Atlas watching me, I jerk my hand away like I used to when I was little and my mother caught me putting my finger in one of her paints. “Sorry. I’m probably not supposed to touch these. They look pretty old.”