Deepwater

The machine decides who is real. No one has ever asked what it's made of.In a near-future built on a single private standard - the invisible authority that certifies every face, every payment, every person as genuine or fake - Mara Vance is the last human who can still tell the difference by eye. Four times she has out-read the machine, and every win has cost her more than it returned. Now she turns her gift on the one thing it was never meant to touch: the standard itself. The ruler nobody measures. The authenticator nobody authenticates.Her questions carry her offshore, past the reach of the law and the network both, to the place where the standard was born and strip her of the only thing that has ever kept her alive. Blind abroad, unvouched, unable to read a street sign or reason her way out of a locked room, the finest reader in the world is worth nothing. And the people who built the cage from her own genius are counting on exactly that.What waits beneath the water is not another forgery. It is the foundation of the real, made from the erased and sealed with her own name. Some truths drown the innocent first, so that only the guilty are free to speak them. Mara is about to find out which one she is.DEEPWATER is Book Five of PROVENANCE, the series about the quiet death of the appeal and the machine that decides what counts as a person. For readers of Gattaca*, * The Circle*, and John le Carré.