We Don't Copy

The first fake showed up on a Tuesday, which offended Bones almost as much as the fake itself. Drops happen at midnight. Everyone knows that. Whoever was bootlegging Snotty's couldn't even counterfeit the schedule.

It was a hoodie — technically. The smiley had two O's instead of two X's, which made it look apologetic. The drip on the letters ran upward, defying both gravity and self-respect. And the tag inside read 100% AUTHENTIC in a font so honest it had to be lying.

Grimm found it on a market stall three blocks from the factory. The vendor, to his credit, tried to charge him for it. Grimm is four feet of scarred plush wearing a spiked collar, and he stood there in silence, holding the counterfeit at arm's length like a dead fish, for a full ninety seconds. The vendor gave him the hoodie for free. Then the vendor gave him the whole box. Then the vendor gave him an address.

The address was a print shop in the tunnels — Bones's tunnels, which was the second insult. The sewers under the city belong to the distribution crew the way the midnight schedule belongs to the drops: not legally, but completely. Bones led the way down, cap backwards, narrating the whole route like a tour guide who hates the tour. "That pipe? Mine. That junction? Mine. That echo? Technically the echo is city property, but it learned everything it knows from me."

The counterfeiters had set up twelve knockoff screen printers in a maintenance vault, pumping out sad, upward-dripping hoodies by the hundred. Grimm wanted to break the machines. Bones had a better idea, because Bones always thinks he has a better idea, and this time — this one time — he actually did.

They didn't break anything. They recalibrated.

Every machine got a new ink feed, hand-mixed from the factory's own vats — the real stuff, the unstable stuff, the stuff that glows faintly under streetlight and never fully dries. Every fake hoodie printed that night came out with the drip running the right way, the X's back in the eyes, and one small addition across the back, in letters that only appear once the ink meets open air:

"WE DON'T COPY. WE CONTAMINATE THE GAME."

The counterfeiters shipped their whole run before they noticed. Three hundred walking billboards, distributed citywide, free of charge, by their own bootleg network. The print shop shut down by Friday. The vendor from the market stall applied for a job at the factory; Grimm said no, and then Grimm said yes, because Grimm is soft and everyone knows it, and guarding the door gets lonely.

As for Snotty — no memo, no meeting, as always. But the next official drop included one limited crewneck, unannounced, stitched with a tiny upward drip on the inside cuff. Collectors call it the Apology. It sold out in four minutes.

Rule three, added to the boiler room wall that month, forty feet tall, still wet:

"If they steal it, make it better. Then make it theirs."