35
REMY
I stared at my phone,hardly believing the notification displayed on its screen. “It’s done.”
“What’s done?” Bram said without looking up from his laptop at the dining room table.
“Todd’s been added to the Apex debate roster.”
Now Bram looked up. “Are you fucking with me?”
I shook my head. “Just got the notification from Apex.”
I’d registered for the conference under a fake name to gain access to the conference notifications. It had also been an act of hope: if Ethan showed up for the debate, we’d need to get into the conference anyway.
Bram typed something into his laptop and stared at the screen. “I’ll be damned.”
We’d all been skeptical that baiting Todd online would work, but no one had been more skeptical than Bram.
Ray looked up from his bed as I stood. “I’m going to get Poe.”
I headed downstairs to the studio and found Poe wielding fire over a hunk of metal that looked like, well, a hunk of metal. It was slowly taking some kind of shape, but right now Poe was the only one who could see what it would become.
He shut off the torch in his hands — not a blow torch but an oxygen-acetylene torch, something I only knew because I’d asked Poe about it once and had gotten an hour-long Ted Talk on how it worked and why it was better for “bends” than a traditional blowtorch.
He pulled his goggles off and let them rest on the top of his head. “What’s up?”
“Todd was just added to the debate roster.”
His mouth dropped open. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Fuck… We have to tell Maeve.”
She was at her parents’ house helping Olivia paint her room.
Poe set aside the blowtorch and we headed for the stairs.
“Not gonna lie, I wasn’t convinced it would work,” Poe said.
“You and me both.”
Poe pulled his phone out of his pocket at the top of the stairs, then shook his head in disbelief. “Damn.”
“Yeah, so now we have to figure out what’s next,” I said.
“What’s next is we go to Apex and slit Ethan Todd’s throat,” Bram growled.
“Sounds good,” I said. “But how are we going to do that with thousands of people around?”
Bram sat back in his chair as reality sunk in. Ethan Todd would be back in the States. Now we had to figure out how to get him.
“We could take him before the conference,” Poe suggested. “Or after. At the airport or something.”
“If he has even one brain cell he’s going to have insane security,” I said. “That’ll be true at the conference too, but he’ll be more vulnerable there where his fanboys will be pushing for selfies and autographs.”
Bram rubbed at his jaw. “The fanboys mean problems for us though.”
