“What is this?” she asked, showing me a picture on her tablet.

“You took that long to draw a purple square?”

“Is that all it is? Are you actively looking?”

“It’s a square. It’s dark purple. It’s . . .”

She flicked the screen and it rotated just a hair—enough for me to see that there was a whole picture beyond the one she first showed me and the purple square was just one part of the image that lay beyond.

“A good artist always looks at all the angles if she wants to really understand what she sees.”

I heard her words. I understood them, but I never applied them to more than art. If I did, then one type of news meant my view of the square was preventing me from seeing the entire picture. If words have been altered, then I can no longer be sure if all I’m seeing is the purple square.

I think about the new version of the dream that haunted me last night.

The car’s lights barreling through the fog.

The pill my mother placed on her lips. The deadman’s switch Atlas described to me as the men from the car lunged toward her.

Everything inside me screams that her death was a terrible accident, but I can’t ignore the missing or changed words in the electronic version of the history book in front of me or forget my mother’s mural on the wall of the train station.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

My mother chose those words. Her hands drew each line and curve. They were the first ones my eyes focused on when I looked at her mural, and I cannot stop thinking of them now.

Atlas told me words were missing from the books I have read. That history is different from what I have always believed. And he insinuated that my mother’s death might not have been an accident.

Trust, but verify.

Those words that I hadn’t known before meeting the Stewards ring like a chorus of brass bells in my head, as if they are instructions that my mother insists I follow. There has to be a way for me to find out the truth.

I go back to the kitchen, dump my dishes in the sink, then grab the books and my tablet and head upstairs. My tablet has barely any charge left. I check my phone, still in my bag at the foot of the bed, and find that it is dead. I plug both in, and as I am pulling up a search window on the tablet screen, the phone buzzes to tell me I have a message. Rose saying she has to work at Gloss today, but she hopes to hear from me soon.

Rose, a friend I’ve trusted all my life. The one I always can count on even when I shove her away. If anyone would understand my confusion and want to help me get to the truth about my mother, it would be Rose. But as much as I want to ask her opinion, the truth is something I have to figure out for myself.