Mister Impossible

game over for all of them. As dreams, they’d fall into permanent sleep without their dreamer. Until then, they all shared the same life—Hennessy’s life—living as her and as each other. The girls shared this uncertainty every day. Would the dreaming kill Hennessy today? Would the drugs, the cars, the self-hatred? Would today be the day they fell asleep in the middle of the sidewalk?
It hung over them every day.
It was hard enough to put one’s life in another’s hands; it was even harder when those hands were as reckless as Hennessy’s.
Jordan tried to live life to the fullest. What else could she do? Not just wait.
But in the end, the girls hadn’t fallen asleep unexpectedly.
They were killed. Violently. Unnecessarily. The Moderators hadn’t bothered to find out if any of them was the dreamer before taking them all out. They’d lived like Hennessy and they died like she was supposed to.
Outside, Jordan hugged her too-thin jacket around her and put some speed to her feet. The party was in Back Bay, a ten- or fifteen-minute journey if she hoofed it. As she walked, she looked not at the glowing businesses on the ground floor but rather up at the apartments and lofts above. No one in Boston seemed to care that you could see them in their offices and homes; they went about their business and expected you to go about yours. It became like a screensaver of activity. Jordan, like all the girls, was a city person, and Boston was a good city for Jordan’s kind of art. And it felt good to be in a new place after being stranded for so long in DC trying to solve the escalating problem of Hennessy’s dreaming.
The other girls would have loved it, too. Poor June, Trinity, Brooklyn, Madox. Poor Octavia, Jay, Alba, Farrah. Poor girls who never got futures.
Jordan owed it to them to live a life, since they never got a chance. She couldn’t control Hennessy’s recklessness or the Moderators’ ruthlessness. But she could control her own fearlessness. She was going to live as big a life as she could, for as long as she could.
She arrived at the party.
Parties were like people—they came in lots of different shapes and sizes. They had different hopes and dreams and fears. Some of them were needy. Others were self-contained and only needed you to have a good time. Some were warm, garrulous. Others were chilly, exclusionary.
Jordan could see at once that this party was a very grown-up party, a party that took itself seriously. See and be seen. Et cetera. The venue was small: an after-hours Back Bay art gallery. Age knuckling the burnished floors. Abstract paintings brightening the walls. Provocative sculpture complicating the corners. It was all very nice. One felt smarter to see it. Cultured. The partygoers were beautiful: women, all of them. Lovely dark skin, beautiful blond curls, freckles pebbled across cheekbones, big rounded hips, pale midriffs, golden shoulder blades, dresses and heels of every color and length and height. Jordan didn’t recognize all of them, but she recognized enough to get the gist. CEOs. Diplomats. The daughters of presidents and the mothers of drug barons. Actresses. Musicians. Corn cereal heiresses and influencers made good. Celebrities, too, but, you know, proper celebrities; they didn’t point at each other and say, Look, there’s so and so. They acted cool. Peerish.
Boudicca.
“What can I get you?” asked the bartender. She had outrageously red hair, ridiculously red hair, poured from a bottle or a volcano.
Immediately Jordan’s mind began to consider the challenge of how she would paint it. There were plenty of interesting red pigments, but she didn’t think they’d do the trick on their own. Probably to achieve that eye-popping red, she’d surround it with a green background. Green added to red dulled it. Green painted beside red made both colors look more like themselves. Red and green were complementary colors, on either side of the color wheel. Funny how opposites made each color look brighter.
“What do you have that’s cheap?” Jordan asked.
The bartender looked up through her eyelashes. Her eyes were green. “Open bar, for you.”
Jordan flashed a huge smile. “What do you have that’s orange?”
“Do you want sweet or sour?”
“Oh, I’m not going to drink it. It’s to match my top.”
The bartender did her best and Jordan tipped her with some of her precious forgery money and then took her orange top and orange drink to mingle. Fake-mingle. Really, she just wanted to information-gather. Jordan had crashed enough parties to be good at this, but she was thrown by all the famous faces here. Were these members or clients or both?
This felt higher stakes than it had in DC.
Higher stakes, she reminded herself, but same game. She knew how to play it. It was just forgery, after all. Forgery of people rather than art. The key was to remember to be better than a mere copy or mimic. If one painted exactly what one saw as accurately as possible, the result might be technically correct but was also stilted. Brittle. If one ran into a technical snag in its re-creation, the whole process ground to a halt. One had to stick to the script. But with forgery, the surface details were less important than the rules that proved them. Every work of art had rules: Paint was allowed to pool in the corners, lines were feathery at their ends as the brush was lifted, mouths were exaggerated for drama, blacks were unsaturated, so on, so forth. And if one learned enough of them, one could create endless new works based upon those rules and pass them off as creations by the original artist.
Humans were the same. They had rules that proved their behavior. Discover the thesis and you had them.
Jordan used this principle to forge a partygoer who had been mingling. Her lips carried a holdover laugh from a funny conversation she’d just left. She let out an audible breath as she stole a quick look