Nix tightened his hold on her frame, and without realizing it, he began rocking back and forth. His arm curved around her neck and he supported her head. Like she was a child. Like she was human. Like he’d have the right to care for her if she was.
Don’t be hurt, Claire. Don’t die.
The rocking motion seemed to calm her, and the awful sound emanating from her dreams subsided. Her cheeks flushed. She folded herself into him, and he felt her fever through his clothes.
I’m the one who kills you.
Nix glanced out the bus window: the trees were getting thicker, the grass wild. He couldn’t say for sure how long they’d been on this bus, how much time he’d spent absorbed in the tiny details of his charge’s body. If he wanted to hide her from the Sensors, they should get off the bus, trek deep into the forest to a place as forgotten as any Nobody.
Nix prepared himself to fade, closing his mind to their surroundings: to the mother and son to his left, who couldn’t stop rolling their eyes at each other; to a sea of strangers sitting side by side, each ignoring the other without a thought.
Normals, Nix thought, the word bittersweet in his mind. Normals could love. They could be loved. They couldn’t fathom what it would be like to be missing either half of the equation. And yet they walked through life with their heads down, not even bothering to look at each other, not knowing how precious each interaction, each glance, each dialogue was.
At least the unconscious girl in his arms had an excuse for her heartlessness. She couldn’t feel, couldn’t be touched by the plights of others. She was defective, fractured, incomplete—just like him.
Less than shadow, less than air—
Nix felt the change coming on, felt himself losing material form, and he pulled Claire close with every thought in his brain, every breath in his lungs, willing her to cross with him.
Nothing.
Immaterial, Nix and his quarry fell through the seat that had been holding them, through the back of the bus, and onto the pavement. Slipping out of his fade the moment they hit the ground, Nix landed in a crouch, protecting Claire’s body with his own.
Mine.
She cried out. The sound ripped through Nix’s flesh. It wasn’t fair that she could do this to him. It wasn’t right, what he was doing—helping her. Saving her when he knew that for the greater good, she had to die.
And she will, Nix promised himself, as he began to walk into the woods, his inner navigational system set toward absolute isolation. Just not today.
If he walked far enough, looked hard enough, he’d eventually find a cabin that had been abandoned for the off-season. He’d tend to her wounds.
Inflict his own.
You can’t die, he told the Null silently. Not yet.
If she did, her death would never be his.
As he walked, feeling her chest rise and fall with each hard-won breath, he thought of the long, thin scar that ringed his own neck and the fact that if he failed to kill Claire, technically speaking, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d fallen short.
She’d be the second to escape him. And he’d hate her for it.
Almost as much as he hated himself.
The blue-eyed boy had been aiming a gun at her for hours. For hours and hours and days and days, and every time the fog cleared enough for her to see the rest of the road, Claire tried to remember that she should run.
But she didn’t.
He shot her, and he shot her, and he shot her, but she couldn’t run. She had no body. No chest, no legs. Only a black, gaping hole where her body should have been.
His blue eyes never left her. They never glazed over. They never wandered far from her face.
Even when she averted her eyes, even when the pain and the fear and the certainty that she was going to die overwhelmed her—he didn’t disappear. He shot her, and he shot her, and he shot her, but he was there. And for the first time in a long time, it didn’t hurt.
Nothing hurt.
Claire could feel her body relaxing, could feel her mind losing its grip on this dreamlike place. As she began to drift into the kind of peaceful, inky darkness untouched by dreams, Claire saw the boy lean toward her, his face so close to hers that their lips very nearly touched.
“Maybe I won’t die,” Claire whispered. Her breath bounced off his lips and came back to touch hers.
She felt his response before she heard it. The words caressed her skin. “I’m the one who kills you.”
Darkness washed over Claire. And just like that, she was gone.
6
Claire is smiling.
Nix leaned forward, his eyes locked on to his captive’s face. Pink lips parted. Wrinkles—three, two, one—fell from her brow. It had been hours since he’d found this abandoned cabin and laid her gently on the couch. And still, he couldn’t get enough of watching her, drinking in the tiny details of her Claireness. He memorized her features and catalogued her expression, running exploratory fingers over the edges of his own lips.
She was having good dreams, his Null. In the time he’d been watching her, that hadn’t always been the case.
He’d already memorized the look, feel, and sound of her nightmares.
“For a girl whose days are numbered, you sleep a lot.” Nix’s voice was rough from lack of use, but he wanted to say something. To talk to her. “You have light brown hair. I think your eyes are green. Your veins are blue.” He paused. “My hair is black. I’m not sure about my eyes. When I bleed, I bleed red.”
Claire sighed, and he closed his eyes, savoring the sound, the look of her face, the haphazard spread of her hair. Her fingernails were uneven. Her wrists were small. She had six freckles on one shoulder and four on the other.
She smiled in her sleep.
Strapped to an exam table. Eyes closed. The memory came on suddenly, without mercy. Nix is cold, but he doesn’t want to wake up. He wants to stay in the dream, wants to—
The table lurches. He’s plunged downward into the tank. His eyes fly open. Water fills his nose, his mouth. If he was cold before, he’s freezing now, but it doesn’t matter—he can’t breathe—can’t move. He fights against the straps that hold him immobile, but it’s no use. His lungs are tight. He’s choking.
Drowning.
He can see familiar forms leaning over the dunk tank, their faces blurred, their expressions impassive. Ione. Ryland. They’re not going to help him. They’re going to watch him die, unless—
Less than shadow. Less than air. He forces himself to stop fighting. Stop thinking. Stop existing—and he fades.
Nix came out of the flashback to see Claire’s lips still curved up in a gentle smile. Like she hadn’t a care in the world. Like it wasn’t her fault he’d been raised the way he had. So he could protect the rest of the world from Nulls.
Still gasping for breath, Nix slammed a door on the memory and concentrated on the present. “I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he told the sleeping girl in front of him. “I should have let you die.”
But he hadn’t. He’d propped her up and forced her to drink water. He’d taped her ribs. He’d covered her with blankets and put them back when she kicked them off.
“If you think I’m weak, you’re wrong. If you think I care, you’re wrong.” Nobodies weren’t allowed to care. They weren’t allowed to ask questions. All they were allowed to do was kill.
Kill. Claire.
Beautiful, sleeping, breathing, dreaming Claire.
She’s shifting onto her other side. Her hair is falling into her eyes. Her legs are stretching out. The muscles in her throat are moving.
As he documented Claire’s movements, Nix felt his own throat clench. This was the most she’d moved since they’d been here, and there were sounds in her mouth, trying to get out. Not cries. Not whimpers.
Words.
“Where am I?”
It figured that one of the first words out of her mouth was I. Nulls existed at the centers of their own universes, puppeteers to hundreds of others. No
one else mattered to them.
“I wish you’d stayed asleep,” Nix said, each word as sharp as broken glass. While she’d slept, he’d crooned to her. Soothed her. Said things he shouldn’t have even thought. But now she’d ruined it. Ruined everything.
“Asleep? How long have I been asleep?” Claire scrambled to a sitting position.
Claire is scared. I am scaring Claire.
Nix’s target looked frantically down at her own body. Like she’d never seen it before. Like she didn’t know how perfect it was.
Liar.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
“You’re defective. You’re a monster. You got hit by a van.”
Her face went through a flurry of changes, so quickly that he could not keep up with them all: she sucked a breath in, and her entire face—eyes, cheekbones, lips—threatened to cave in on itself. Crumble.
This Null didn’t like being told she was defective.
Eventually, her lips stopped trembling and settled into a thin and desperate line, and Nix wondered how many facial expressions a single person could have. He had never wanted to touch another person’s face more.
She’s doing this to you. She’s making you think about her. She’s making you want—
“Do. Not. Move.” Nix’s voice strained against his vocal cords, like an animal caged. “Don’t try anything. Don’t think you can use your abilities to escape. I’m immune.”
If only that were true.
“My abilities? What abilities?” Her lips and eyes rearranged themselves once more, this time into an expression of pure bafflement—a testament to her abilities as an actress, the ultimate master of the art of deception. “I don’t have abilities. I’m not good at anything.”
Simple words, but they seemed hard-won. Like it hurt her to lower herself and pretend that she was nothing special.
“I’m not who you think I am,” she said. “I’m really not.” Only a Null could use that voice. Make herself sound as if part of her wished that she was the one he was looking for.
His.
Strapped to an exam table. Eyes closed. Nix forced the memory to the surface of his mind, like a man jamming his fingers down his throat to hurl.
“You can drop the act,” he said, loathing and longing battling for supremacy in his tone. “No one will ever find you here, and there’s no one within range for you to use.”
“Use? What are you talking about? Use how?”
Don’t, he told her silently. Don’t pretend you don’t know. Don’t act the innocent, unaware of the effect you have on everyone and everything.
Don’t pretend you don’t know what you’re doing to me.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Her voice was a whisper—tentative, scared—but the expression on her face didn’t match. Her nose was scrunched, her head tilted.
Claire is … Claire is … puzzled, Nix realized, giving name to the expression, which he hadn’t seen on the canvas of her face before. Claire finds me puzzling. I am puzzling Claire.
He rolled the thought over in his mind, letting her question go unanswered until the ugly, sordid truth—I am nothing—she’s pretending—so stupid to think that—clawed its way back into his brain, digging in deep and holding on.
His whole life had been a nightmare, and she was playing with his emotions like a cat batting at a piece of string.
“Stop. Talking.”
If she didn’t talk, she couldn’t lie—not with her mouth. Just with her body and her eyes—
“I won’t stop talking.”
There were question marks in her voice, and hesitations, and she didn’t have a right to either of them. He wanted to rip the mask off her lying face.
He wanted to touch it.
“I … I … won’t stop talking until you … until you tell me what’s going on. Who are you?”
“Stop. Talking.”
She matched his emphasis with her own. “Who. Are. You.”
Tell me, tell me, tell me, her eyes seemed to say.
He cursed. He cursed her, and he cursed himself, and she pretended to flinch at the profanity that streamed from his mouth.
Nulls don’t flinch.
To flinch, you had to feel fear. To be afraid of someone, your energy had to be marked by theirs. This Null was playing him. Again.
He needed weapons.
He needed her dead.
He’d left his knives and needles and poisons in the kitchen, out of sight. He had to stop her, before she pretended to flinch again.
Hands. Just my hands.
That was the way to kill this Null. His hands had bathed her temple. His hands had fed her. And in doing so, he’d committed a great evil—risked all the good he’d ever done, just because a Null had deigned to look him in the eye. To ask him for his name. To react to his presence—puzzled, flinching—as if he was the kind of person who could have an impact on anyone, ever.
Like he could affect a girl like her.
“I. Am. Nobody.” The words came, not in answer to her question, but in answer to the ones he was asking himself
Who do you think you are, to look at her that way? You’re nothing. She’s everything. Kill her. Now.
“You’re … you’re … someone,” Claire said. “You’re the one who brought me here. You’re the boy from my dream.” She went very pale, the blue of her veins standing out like a pattern on porcelain. “You’re the one who kills me.”
He took one step toward her and then another. She sucked in a breath and watched him move. And then, without warning, the girl he’d held and helped and saved dove back under the covers.
Like she could hide from him.
Like she could escape him.
Lies.
I’m hiding under a blanket. Claire’s heart beat viciously against her rib cage. I’m who knows where with who knows who, I just reminded the boy who brought me here that he intends to kill me, and now he’s coming toward me, murder in his eyes, and I AM HIDING UNDER A STUPID BLANKET.
I am a deficient human being in every way that matters.
Claire wished that she could blame it on the fact that she’d been hit by a van, but in reality, she deeply suspected that she had always been deficient. Never said the right thing. Never made friends. Couldn’t even get someone to hand her a towel.
Really, given the sum total of her life as evidence, it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise that she sucked at being kidnapped, too.
He’s looking at me. He’s going to kill me. I’m going to die.
Claire couldn’t move. She couldn’t run. She couldn’t think of anything but the boy stalking toward her. Claire didn’t want to think about him. Didn’t want to anticipate the killer’s touch, her own last breath, but there was a tiny part of her—the Romeo and Juliet part, the Heathcliff and Catherine—that thought for the briefest second that maybe this moment was what she’d always been meant for.
Maybe she’d been born to die by this boy’s hands.
Situation: What would it be like to have an out-of-body experience? To watch someone kill you? When she was dead, would he put flowers on her grave? Would she haunt him, now and always?
“The game ends now.”
The words brought Claire back to the present. To the terror. To the chilling understanding that death was never romantic; there was a difference between being stalked and being wooed.
Do something.
He was closer now, close enough that she could feel the heat of his body on the other side of the blanket. Her heart beat faster. Her side ached like someone was splitting the bones with an ice pick.
You need a weapon. A way out. Something. Anything.
Slowly, her killer peeled the blanket away from her face. His features—each severe in its own right—came together to form an expression that was somehow gentle, full of longing. It made him look like someone who wanted something, wanted it as badly as Claire had wanted just one person to scrawl a private joke on the pages of
her yearbook.
Me. He wants me.
Claire had read about this kind of knowledge—the kind you felt in your bones, from the tips of your toes to the top of your skull.
She’d read about it, and she’d believed in it, and she’d imagined it. But she hadn’t spent even a second wanting it herself, because she’d been too busy trying not to long for simpler things—smiles from strangers, someone to eat lunch with, parents who took her picture on the first day of school.
He’s going to hurt me. I’m going to die.
Claire couldn’t hear herself think over the sound of her body’s terror—the certainty that be it kiss or kill, there would be no escaping the predator stalking her now.
I can’t stop it. Nothing I do will stop it. Can’t think. Can’t speak. Can’t move.
Claire could feel hysteria bubbling up in her stomach and traveling like an air bubble through her throat. When it burst out of her mouth, she thought for a moment that she might have thrown up, but then she realized that she was giggling.
Like a lunatic.
And God must have had an awfully twisted sense of humor, because a second later, so was the boy.
Nix could not remember laughing. Ever. He’d tried once. Practiced. But with no one to listen, it was a horrible sound, and it hadn’t brought him half the feeling of a single cut—long and thin—in one palm.
But now he was doing it. He was laughing. At Claire, clutching that blanket, giggling like a fiend. For a second, he thought that it would be enough, that this one moment would be enough to keep him and hold him and warm him for an eternity. He could kill her now.
Cut himself off, before this addiction went too far.
He dropped silently to his knees beside the sofa, bringing himself to her level. He cleared his mind, pushing away all thoughts of her—her expressions, the sound of her laughter, the feel of her skin—and concentrating on a single word.
Null.
She deserved this. For the life he’d been forced to live, for making him wonder and long for things best left unwondered and unlonged for, she deserved it.
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