“Someone must have known what you threw away,” Ethan says. He presses the back of his head against the wall, looking up at the popcorn ceiling, but his brown eyes have a distant look. He’s thinking. “And that same person must have known you had it to begin with—maybe the hotel clerk?”

The peppy girl who had looked utterly disgusted by my impromptu Dumpster dive comes to mind. I shake my head. “I think she’s the same one from earlier,” I tell him, “so she couldn’t have taken that photo.”

“Crap,” he grouses.

Stay calm, I want to yell at myself. Jessica Stone doesn’t panic. She’s cool and controlled and—and—

Everything I am not at this moment. I clench my fists and force myself to suck in a lungful of air and breathe it out slowly.

Get my mind back on track. Think of what to do. First things first.

“I have to find that script,” I say aloud, trying to keep my voice level. “Whoever took it is still here somewhere. I just have to remember who was in that lobby and…find them? Scour the con floor? When they post the next leak, try to figure out where they are and get there in time?”

“You’re seriously going to do that?”

“I have to. The execs already think I leaked the script, and if they find out I threw it away? I’ll be blacklisted for life. No one’ll work with me after this.”

Ethan pushes his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. “Jess, you can’t be in two places at once. You can’t be snooping out the culprit and be on panels and at signings and photo ops and….”

His voice trails off as he looks down at his coffee-stained T-shirt, and then back up at me, and the idea strikes us at the exact same time. It already worked once, hadn’t it? And no one noticed. No one even batted an eye.

“What if,” I say, “I could be in two places at once?”

He groans. “Jess, no.”

“Oh, Jess, yes.”

Imogen

SOMEONE POUNDS ON MY hotel room door.

I barely glance up from my phone. I’m in the Marriott—the con’s official hotel—so it’s probably some drunk Spider-Man or Goku or Overwatch cosplayer mistaking my room for someone else’s. During the day, ExcelsiCon is pretty amazing, but at night, when the showroom floor closes, it gets wild. Already I’ve heard a conga-line dance party, led by Beetlejuice, sashay down the hallway to the Banana Boat Song and the last echoes of a flash-dance down in the lobby of the hotel almost a dozen floors below me.