Blue Door

She spent her life lying people back into existence. Now the truth is going to get her killed.

A year after the machine that certified every person on earth died in a single night, the drowned free port of Kesh is rebuilding the only way it can: by hand one register, one clerk, one vouching at a time. Quire has survived the collapse the way she survived everything before it: by being no one. The finest forger of provenance alive, she has spent a lifetime lying the erased back onto the rolls with flawless false paper, and she has never once signed her own name to anything.

Then she finds it. An unnamed deed she made years ago a blue door she painted to shelter a stranger the machine was hunting written into the dead authenticator's testament that the whole grieving city is now copying by hand. The page makes her visible. And in the reconstruction, to be visible is to be found.

Because the man rebuilding Kesh's register is the master who taught Quire the craft, and he has understood what she has not: whoever holds the new book holds the world the machine used to hold. He is already erasing people gently, for accuracy, for their safety. To stop him, Quire has to do the one thing forgery cannot fake: build a true book, held in too many hands to burn, out loud, as herself.

The forger has to become the witness before the man who made her becomes the thing they all just died to escape.

THE BLUE DOOR is Book One of RESTITUTION, a drowned-world dystopian thriller about identity and what makes a person real when the record is gone. Set in the same world as PROVENANCE, it reads entirely on its own. For readers of literary dystopia and slow-burn speculative thrillers.