27. Wren
WREN
TIME TO FAKE A DEBUNKING
The buyout offer feels like it’s sucking the oxygen out of the room.
I stare at it, not quite seeing it. Two million dollars to sell out a man who doesn’t even have a social security number.
Two million to ensure Marge and Walt never have to worry about a failing roof again, and all I have to do is hand over the keys to the mountain and let a documentary crew turn a miracle into a commodity.
I hit pause on a frame where his face is partially visible—the same sharp cheekbones, the same heavy brow, but translated into something primordial.
The internet is already tearing this apart, pixel by pixel.
“Real,” they say. “Undeniable,” they claim.
They’re wrong. Not because it isn’t Rowan, but because they’re looking at it like a discovery.
I need them to look at it like a forgery.
My degree is usually the punchline of my own internal jokes, four years spent learning the provenance of Renaissance frescoes and how to spot a fake Vermeer.
But the logic of a forgery isn’t about the lie itself.
It’s about the context. You don’t convince people a painting is real by making it perfect; you convince them by making the story around it bulletproof.
I need to reverse the process. I need to take a masterpiece and convince the world it’s a clever piece of theater.
I can’t debunk the rescue. That’s the mistake most amateurs would make.
You can’t tell people a man wasn’t saved when there’s a medical report from the SAR team and a very grateful hiker named Jason who is currently being interviewed by local news.
The rescue happened. The mud was real. The impossible strength was witnessed.
If I try to say it was a hoax, I’ll look like a liar, and the footage will look even more authentic by comparison.
I tap a pen against my chin, the rhythm matching the hotline’s pulse. The rescue is the truth. The performer is the lie. Rowan was with Jax and Miller, but he went into the trees before he dropped the concealment. I saw that in some of the footage Jax had cut.
I need to give them a man in a suit. But not just any suit.
I need a suit that explains the scale, the texture, and why it was on that specific ridge at that specific moment.
I need a narrative that makes the documentary crew look like the victims of a very expensive, very elaborate marketing stunt that went accidentally, heroically right.
I pull up my contacts on my phone, scrolling past the local hardware store and the birdwatchers from Cabin Four until I hit a name I haven’t called in three years.
Toby Richter. We went to school together before he dropped out to follow a girl to Vancouver and ended up doing practical effects for B-list horror movies.
He’s the kind of guy who spends his weekends debating the density of silicone versus foam latex. He’s perfect.
I check the time. It’s nearly midnight, which means Toby is probably elbow-deep in a vat of fake blood or half-drunk in a workshop. I hit dial. It rings four times before a voice that sounds like it was filtered through gravel answers.
“Wren Cassidy? Is someone dead, or did you finally decide to sell me that haunted lodge?”
“Toby, I need a favor. A big one. And I need you to sign an NDA that would make a CIA agent sweat.”
There’s a pause on the other end, the sound of a torch hissing in the background. “You’re calling about the video, aren’t you? The big guy in the mud. Everyone’s talking about it, Wren. My Twitter feed is nothing but bark-skin theories and thermal signatures.”
“I need that big guy in the mud to be yours, Toby,” I say, my voice steady even as my heart does a slow, heavy roll in my chest. “I need construction photos. I need rig concepts. I need a paper trail that says Cassidy Lodge hired Richter Effects six months ago to build a hyper-realistic, nine-foot practical suit for a viral marketing campaign.”
Toby whistles, a long, low sound. “That’s a hell of a lie, Wren. That footage... the way he moves... I couldn’t build that. Not for real. The weight distribution alone is a nightmare.”
“I don’t need you to build the man, Toby.
I know how to make a fake artifact convincing.
I just don’t know how to build a nine-foot Bigfoot ass.
I need the evidence of the process. Sketches.
Mold-making photos. A few pieces of a ‘prototype’ suit I can ‘discover’ in the lodge basement when the press comes knocking.
I need the world to think Sarah Vance’s crew didn’t find a monster—they found a very dedicated actor who stayed in character even when the mountain started falling down. ”
“It’s a face-saving exit for the documentary people,” Toby muses. “They get to claim they were part of the greatest viral stunt in history instead of admitting they were fooled by a myth. People love a hoax. They love feeling smarter than the experts.”
“Exactly. Toby… I can’t pay you for this. Not yet. But if you do this for me, I’ll owe you for the rest of my life. I need the ‘truth’ to be more interesting than the mystery.”
“Don’t worry about it, Wren. I’ll start the sketches tonight,” Toby says, and I can hear the grin in his voice. “I’ve always wanted to be the man who faked Bigfoot.”
I hang up and lean back, the adrenaline finally starting to cool into something cold and analytical.
I have the forgery brain. I know how to layer the deception.
I need a paper trail—invoices with backdated stamps, email threads I can ‘accidentally’ leave open on the lobby computer, and a narrative that fits perfectly into the holes of the crew’s own story.
They saw a nine-foot figure. My story: the suit was built with mechanical limb-extenders and a pneumatic frame to simulate muscle mass.
They saw it move through mud. My story: the performer is a park ranger with a background in high-altitude endurance athletics we hired for the season.
The rescue? A happy accident. The performer, ‘Rowan’—I’ll have to give him a fake last name, something mundane like Smith—saw the hiker in trouble and didn’t have time to take the suit off. He just did what any hero would do.
The beauty of it is that it protects Rowan’s reality by validating the witnesses’ experiences. They aren’t crazy; they just didn’t see what they thought they saw. It’s the ultimate gaslight, wrapped in a bow of heroic marketing.
I spend the next three hours at the desk, drafting the brief for the marketing campaign that never existed.
I use the lodge’s old stationery, the stuff with the fading hemlock logo.
I write about engagement metrics and target demographics, using the corporate buzzwords I learned in that one elective I thought was a waste of time.
I create a world where Rowan is just a line item in a budget and clever engineering.
By midnight, the office is thick with the smell of old paper and the cold dregs of my coffee.
I have a folder full of “evidence.” I have Toby working on the physical “proof.” But as I look at the screen, at the paused image of Rowan’s eyes, the coldness in my chest slips.
This is the only way to save him, but it feels like another betrayal.
I’m turning him into a costume. I’m taking the most real thing I’ve ever known and making it a joke.
I get up and walk to the window. The storm has moved on, leaving the forest dripping and silent under a thin, watery moon.
Rowan is out there somewhere. He’s probably watching the lodge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, convinced that I’m the one holding the hammer.
He doesn’t know that I’m currently the lead architect of his erasure.
I think about the way he looked when he told me he viewed humans like weather—temporary, loud, and prone to passing. He was wrong about me. I’m not passing. I’m digging in. If I have to lie to the entire world to keep him safe in that forest, then I’ll be the best liar the Cascades have ever seen.
I walk back to the desk and pick up the phone. It’s time to call Sarah Vance. I don’t want to wait until I see her in the morning. It’s easier to lie over the phone. She wants a story. I’m going to give her a masterpiece.
My thumb traces the desk as I listen to the phone ring before Sarah Vance’s voice crackles through the line.
She sounds like a woman who hasn’t slept, but whose adrenaline is currently doing the work of three pots of coffee.
There’s a frantic clicking of a mouse in the background, the sound of someone refreshing a trend.
“Wren? It’s midnight. I hope you’re calling because you’ve looked at the analytics. We’re passing five million views on the raw clip alone. My inbox is full of network requests. Even the BBC is asking for high-res stills.”
“I’ve seen them, Sarah,” I say, pitching my voice to that specific frequency of exhausted resignation.
I need to sound like a woman whose secret just got dragged into the light, not a woman who’s currently building a cage for that light.
“That’s why I’m calling. We need to talk about the morning press release.
Specifically, the part where you take credit for the reveal. ”
The clicking stops. “Take credit? Wren, the footage speaks for itself. We were there. We caught the biological event of the century.”
“No,” I say, sharpening the edge of my tone just enough to make her hesitate.
“You caught the most successful practical-effects test in the history of viral marketing. And if you go on the Today Show tomorrow claiming you found a real species, you’re going to be the laughingstock of the industry.
I’m trying to save your career, Sarah. And mine. ”