I shake my head. “How is that possible?” People should have noticed if hundreds or thousands of people just vanished.

He raises an eyebrow. “Where do you think the homeless went after the City Pride Program started their work?”

“I just assumed—”

“They rounded them up and sent them away. Just like the ones that dared ask the wrong questions or learned the truth. One day they are here and then the next—gone.”

Gone. Like my mom. And maybe now his dad.

“They’ve created a world where no one realizes anyone should verify what they’ve been told. No one doubts a text saying a friend got a new job, or questions if a moving van just shows up on their block one day and starts hauling stuff away.”

I think about the moving van I saw just days ago on our block. How many moving vans have been on our block in the past few years?

He looks over at me. His dark eyes lock with mine. “And no one questions the police when they come to your door to tell you there’s been an accident.”

The knots in my stomach pull tight.

Car tires squeal inside my head. The screams from my nightmares scrape against my mind.

Black ice.

Out-of-control car.

Everything changed because of one driver’s mistake.

I was told it was an accident. I never once wondered if the police at the door were telling the truth. Why should I?

Atlas pauses for several heartbeats, waiting for the question he must guess his words have sparked.

Only I can’t bring myself to say the words. Too much has happened tonight. Too much is new. Fear of what is still waiting in the unknown stills my tongue and the question dies on my lips. I’m not ready to know the other secrets he has to tell. Not yet.

So I ask something else. “If all of this is true, why are you hiding down in the Lyceum with stacks of books instead of doing something about it? How can you just sit by and let it all happen?”

If my mother’s accident wasn’t an accident—how could the Stewards let me and my father go on with our lives thinking that it was?

Atlas’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “We have no choice.”

“I thought you said words give you choices.”

He takes a deep breath and stares out the window. “A lot of us want to do something—but we can’t. Not now. Not if we want to survive. We’re outnumbered.”

“Yeah, but—”

He grabs the bag from Dewey out of the back seat and shoves it at me. “Open it.”

I unzip the bag and find two books inside: a thick history textbook and a dictionary like the one Atlas had me use earlier.

“Read the book. Pay attention to World War Two. Read it. Then tell me how you think we can survive if we come out into the open. Trust me, I’ll be all ears.”