Ground Truth

Every lie the machine tells points away from one place. One hand. One absence at the top that has never been seen and never had to be.For eight years Mara Vance has fought the standard from the outside, exposing its forgeries one at a time. Now, for the first time, she holds a thread that runs all the way up: a road to the architect, the person who authored the whole apparatus and then erased himself from it so completely that the world doesn't know there is anyone left to blame. She bought that road at a price she cannot undo. She means to walk it to the end.But the road runs through a person. To reach the top, Mara has to get close to a woman who carries its worst secrets the last inch of the way - and she swore, after the last time, that she would never use a person again. She uses this one. And then, to her horror, she means it. The nearer she comes to the truth, the more it costs the people who love her, and the machine has learned exactly which of them to threaten to pull her off the road.The apparatus can author any record, any face, any version of events. But there is a ground truth beneath all of it - one real thing it cannot manufacture - and Mara is walking straight toward the man who tried to bury it.GROUND TRUTH is Book Eight of PROVENANCE, the series about identity, trust, and the death of proof. For readers of literary dystopia and slow-burn surveillance thrillers.