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.