“This came from a print shop in Lapa,” she told Marcos. “Batch printed on a Tuesday at 3:47 AM. The printer was a Kyocera ECOSYS—the shop has three of them, but the drum wear pattern suggests the one near the window.”

Celeste replied with a crying-laughing emoji and a photo of her nephew—the other nephew, the seven-year-old—holding a toucan note and grinning.

Marcos raised an eyebrow. “Can you track it?”

“You’re the designer?” a man’s voice whispered. “The fake money PDF?”

“Someone printed your PDF on high-quality paper,” Marcos said, stirring his coffee. “Cut the bills perfectly. And they’ve been passing them as real currency in three different neighborhoods. Not big stores—small bodegas, street vendors, elderly kiosk owners who don’t check carefully in bad light.”

And she always, always leaves her little dots in the blue.