Forged(44)

“It’s all true, but I didn’t do it alone. I had help, and when I didn’t, I had luck. I’m just a guy trying to get by. I’m nothing miraculous.”

“People need to believe in miracles.”

“But not lies.”

He crumples the paper in his fist. “You repeat any of that to Bea and I’ll punch your damn teeth in. People need this. She needs this. And so long as one person is still hopeful, nothing she prints is a lie.”

He pushes the balled article into my chest as he leaves.


Upstairs, it’s obvious September is treating her floor of the house as a temporary home. Bare walls. Mismatched chairs around a kitchen table. Little to no furniture beyond the mattresses in the bedrooms, and two sagging couches in the sitting area. Aiden’s camped out there now, playing a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors with Emma as Rusty dozes at his feet.

“Again!” Aiden bobs a fist up and down, waiting for her to join in another round. He greeted her like a puppy when we arrived, bounding to her, hugging her around the legs. And she let him. Before I could even make eye contact with her, shake my head in a small cringe as if to say, Don’t tell him the truth, she had already decided as much.

As I watch them sit on the couch together, her flattening her palm only to have Aiden snip it with his scissor fingers, I feel like I’m watching him play with her Forgery. Some pieces of Emma were in that thing. So many pieces. Especially her way with others, her temperament and caring nature, her desire to set everyone at ease. It’s both amazing and profoundly terrifying.

“All right already. You’ve lost the last five rounds. It’s my turn.” Sammy grabs Emma around the middle, hauling her backward on the couch. She laughs. Aiden grins. The game continues. It continues like it never ended. I get a rush in my chest as I realize that it never has to. That if things go right—if we figure out a way to fix everything—moments like this might never have a reason to end.

September steps up behind me. “Stubborn as a cockroach, huh?” For a minute, I think she’s talking about people, how they never give up, not even when every last odd seems stacked against them, but then she shakes a thumb at Harvey. He’s digging through his bag, Clipper at his side.

“I told him he should eat first, get something in his stomach, but he insisted on heading right to work.”

“You know Harvey. Setting goals and refusing to let up until they’re accomplished.”

“Passionate,” she says, bobbing her head.

“Plus a touch of crazy.”

September pulls her disheveled hair loose, smooths it back, and resecures it.

“Hey, thanks for everything earlier—the boat and inspection crew. What did you have to do to distract Garrett’s boss?”

“He thinks I have a thing for married men. And he’s, well, married.”

My eyes widen.

“No, geez, Gray. I kissed the guy, but I didn’t sleep with him. I’ve got my limits. I’m gonna have to wash my mouth out with soap later, though. I swear I can still taste the cigar he’d been smoking.” She waves a thumb at the kitchen. “You hungry? I could go for dinner.”

I feel like I’m always underestimating the women on our team.


After shoveling down some food, I take a shower. I am coated with days-old sweat, salt from my swim in the Gulf yesterday, and grime from the tunnel beneath the bookshop. To wash it all away feels like shedding a layer of skin.

Aiden and Rusty are asleep on the couch when I come out of the bathroom, but otherwise, the top floor is empty. I pull on my hooded shirt and head downstairs, where I find the team huddled in the sitting room with Garrett and his siblings. September is running some sort of debriefing meeting, but Harvey and Clipper are not in attendance. Downstairs, Bree mouths when she catches my eye.

I make my way to the basement. They look like father and son at the computers, both staring intently at the screens.

“Gray!” Clipper says, waving me over. “You won’t believe this. It’s amazing. It’s—” He waves more frantically, and then grabs my wrist and tugs me toward the computer. The screen is filled with line after line of code. A forefinger against the screen, he says, “See?”

“Clip, you know I have no clue what I’m looking at.”

“This is the core program that runs in all Forgeries,” he explains. “It was on the stolen hard drives.” Harvey gives me a queasy sort of smile, like he’s moments away from being sick. “He’s not feeling too well,” Clipper adds in a hushed voice. “I think showing me all this is conflicting with his . . . internal orders.”

“What’s so special about having this code?” I ask.

“It’s the building blocks of the Forgery,” Clipper says. “It’s what makes them loyal to Frank, what gives them purpose.”

“And we can change it somehow?”

“Sure, we can rewrite this however we want but that doesn’t do us any good. It’s not like what we do here is tied to all the Forgeries already in existence. This is just a backup.”

“What’s important is this function,” Harvey says, motioning to a section of the code. “I wrote it—well, the original me wrote it—ages ago, when I was working on the earliest versions of the Forgeries. This function is buried within a bunch of other functions, all of which make a Forgery loyal. It’s been used in every model since the first.