Forger Family

The Forger Family is a fabricated household in Ostania, assembled by the WISE agent Twilight so that Operation Strix could place a child inside Eden Academy and bring him near Donovan Desmond, the National Unity Party figure at the mission's center. Officially it consists of psychiatrist Loid Forger, his wife Yor, their daughter Anya, and the dog Bond, all living together in Berlint. In truth each member guards a secret from the others: a spy, an assassin, a telepath, and a precognitive dog all playing at being ordinary.

The surname itself cuts two ways. A forger fakes things, matching the counterfeit family they present to the world, while the verb forge also means to shape something real, which is exactly what happens to them over time.

Twilight begins with the child. Posing as psychiatrist Loid Forger in Berlint, he adopts Anya from a rundown orphanage after she aces a crossword, never suspecting the girl read his mind to win him over. Her chaotic behavior nearly convinces him to send her back once the job ends, but rescuing her from a kidnapping by an old enemy renews his conviction that children should never be casualties of his work. When she passes Eden's written exam, the school's next hurdle demands two parents.

Yor Briar solves that problem while solving her own. An office clerk who moonlights as a contract killer, she needs a respectable partner to quiet suspicion and her brother Yuri's worries, so she trades favors with Loid: he escorts her to a coworker's party, she plays Anya's mother at the school interview. After the two fight off pursuers from one of Loid's missions together, Yor suggests they simply wed for mutual convenience. Loid agrees, and the marriage happens that same night.

Bond arrives last. Promised a dog for earning her first Stella Star, Anya instead finds a hulking white stray whose glimpses of the future mirror her own gift. He helps her escape the student terrorists who own him and want her dead for overhearing their plot, then works with her to avert a future where Loid dies. WISE briefly holds the animal, Anya refuses any other pet, and the dog joins the household under a name borrowed from the cartoon hero Anya loves best, rounding out the family.

Four members make up the household. Loid Forger, the adoptive father, hides the identity of Westalis's ace spy Twilight behind his psychiatry practice at Berlint General Hospital. Yor Forger, the adoptive mother, files paperwork at Berlint City Hall by day and kills for the shadow organization Garden as the Thorn Princess; she still believes Anya is Loid's biological child. Anya Forger, their adopted daughter, escaped life as a test subject with telepathy she keeps hidden from both parents. Bond Forger, the family dog and a former Project Apple experiment, carries precognition that shows him flashes of what is coming.