Starting with fighting her way out of these woods. Slipping back into the Situation, she imagined stalking back to the cabin. To the weapons stash under the porch. Her hand closes around the hilt of a knife. She would have preferred a bow and arrow, but beggars can’t be choosers, and she only has until nightfall.
Claire mimicked the actions in reality. Gone was the horror she’d felt at Nix’s weapons the day before. This was survival. This was taking care of herself, because no one else was ever going to do it for her. This was Claire making life happen instead of waiting for it to come to her.
She wanted out of this forest.
She wanted to live.
And she wanted to forget that last night—painfully, impossibly perfect—had ever happened.
Less than shadow. Less than air.
Nix slipped past the security checkpoints. Past the metal detectors and the Sensors and every safeguard The Society had put in place to make the institute impenetrable to anyone who mattered.
Unfortunately for The Society, Nix didn’t matter—and faded, nothing was impenetrable to him.
As Nix made his way farther and farther through the labyrinthine corridors, he was overcome with a sickening sense of déjà vu. How many times had he walked these hallways? How many times had he overheard the Sensors’ conversations, used their words to figure out what it would be like to be Normal? To hear what they said when they were talking to each other and not to him.
The only way you can make a difference in this world is to kill.
Nix had told himself that he was coming back here to protect Claire, to find out why The Society wanted her dead. But now that he was here, the memories were too close to the surface: the training, the lessons, the experiments—and all he could think, over and over again, was a number.
Eleven.
The fissure of doubt that had started that morning—with number Three—spread through Nix’s body, through the rest of his memories, the men and women he’d killed. He’d thought they were Nulls. He’d seen what true Nulls could do: seen the teenage girl that One kept chained in his basement; seen the cigarette burns on Six’s child’s arms. Nix had seen the bodies and the horrors, and he’d known that Nulls were monsters—but what if his targets hadn’t all been Nulls?
Nix’s grip on the fade wavered. After a split second, he came crashing back to the solid world. His body felt heavy—as heavy as he’d felt after killing Seven and making it messy. He took a deep breath and assessed his current situation. Even when Nix wasn’t faded, the people who worked here rarely bothered to take note of his presence—but that wasn’t a chance worth taking now that he’d gone rogue.
Nix stopped questioning, stopped thinking—and he shed his solid form like a snake wriggling out of its skin. He faded, and this time, he didn’t let himself remember. He didn’t think about why he was here or what he was doing. He just stepped through wall after wall, working his way to the center of the sprawling building.
To the lab.
The scientists and Sensors scurried around, from computer to computer, screen to screen. Nix didn’t know what they were doing. Faded, he didn’t care. He watched them like a child examining an ant farm. The man closest to him was young: a decade older than Nix, maybe less. There was sweat on his brow and scars on his arms: tiny, round pinpricks, up and down the flesh, from elbow to wrist.
“What’s our status?”
Nix recognized Ione’s voice. She rarely spoke to him directly, but her voice had always been the one in his head when he read a target’s name. She made the decisions. She was in charge. She was the one who’d sent him after—
No. Nix couldn’t let himself go there, couldn’t let himself think about anything the real world had to offer, least of all the girl he’d left behind on the forest floor.
“We’ve got facial recognition programs running on all sectors within a two-hundred-mile radius of the Nobody’s house,” one of the ants replied, scurrying to do his queen’s bidding. “Alarms are set to go off every three minutes, per protocol, to remind us what we’re looking for.”
What they were looking for. Not who. Never who.
“And our defense mechanism?”
At this, the ant bristled. Said something about testing and phases but all Nix could think was that Ione was looking for the Nobody. She was looking for Claire.
Nix felt his stomach turning itself inside out, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep hold of his fade for long. Thinking about Claire: the way he’d left her; the things they had done; the feel of her skin; the taste of cherries on her lips—
In his last instant of nothingness, Nix crossed the room. He stepped through the wall and came out on the other side.
In Ione’s office.
Flip-flops were not conducive to trekking one’s way through the wilderness, but Claire didn’t let that stop her. Her ankles and calves were splattered with mud. Welts rose on her arms, courtesy of branches and trees. She watched the sun travel across the sky. She marked her progress, notching trees in case she got turned around.
Her muscles were sore. Her feet were screaming, but Claire didn’t listen. She couldn’t listen, because she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t pause. She couldn’t let herself think about anything but making it out of this forest alive.
She wasn’t going to be the victim this time.
She wasn’t going to cry.
She wasn’t going to sit and wait. She was done waiting, because you could spend your whole life waiting for something to happen. Something big. You could wait and wait, and even if something big happened, even if it finally happened—it didn’t change anything.
Even if it changed everything.
The sound of traffic broke Claire out of her thoughts. Northwest, about a hundred yards out. She ran, ran with the knife in one hand, her feet bleeding, her heart pumping faster and faster. She broke through the edge of the woods. She stepped out onto the road. Wind whipped through her hair. A car whizzed by, close enough that she felt its motion.
The driver didn’t see her.
Claire stood there for five minutes, ten, watching the world pass her by. She was covered in mud, bleeding, holding a knife—and nobody noticed.
Claire felt something give inside of her. No matter what you do, you will never matter. No one will ever see you. No one but—
Claire walked across the highway. She walked and walked until she came to a town. She stepped onto a sidewalk, in front of a store. Someone bumped into her from behind. She dropped the knife, scrambled to pick it up, and from her spot on the ground, she realized something.
It didn’t matter what she did—and that meant that she could do anything. This was a brave new world, because even if she was alone, even if she would always be alone, the world had given her permission to stop trying.
Trying to be sweet.
To be nice.
To be good.
As Claire stared at the shops and the people and the thrum of life all around her, she realized that for once in her life, it might be nice to be bad.
12
The décor in Ione’s office was all metal and sharp corners, glass tabletops and see-through chairs. There was art on the walls, a splash of cool color: blue and silver against a palette of black and white.
Make it messy.
Ione had said those words to him here. He could still feel the knife in his palm, still hear the man’s screams—
Not a man. He was a Null.
But standing in Ione’s office, Claire’s face still fresh in his mind, Nix wasn’t so uncompromisingly sure. Everything he’d thought, everything he’d believed in—
He moved swiftly toward a filing cabinet behind Ione’s desk. Locked—but not so hard to open, given proper motivation. He bypassed file after file, searching for something he recognized—someone. And then he found it.
One file after another after another. Eleven of them in total. Neatly labeled with serial numbers that didn’t match up with the numbers in his mind.
&n
bsp; One, Two, Three …
He slipped open the third file. Warren Wyler’s lifeless face stared back at him, swollen and puffy, eyes clouded with milky white death. Autopsy reports, biographical details, pictures—
Nix stopped. He closed the file and took another. And another.
Four. Five. Six. Seven.
“Make it messy,” Nix murmured. His fingers lingered on the file. He ran the tip of one gently along the edge, daring himself to open it.
The door to the office opened instead. Nix looked up from the file.
“Oh,” a familiar voice said. “It’s you.”
Ione. She looked exactly as he remembered: blue eyes, blond hair, eyebrows dark enough to call that color into question. The director of the institute wasn’t upset to see him. She wasn’t glad. Objectively, she probably knew that she’d been looking for him, knew that he was an asset she didn’t want to lose, but subjectively—
“You don’t care.” Nix wasn’t sure why he was saying the words. Clearly, neither was she.
“No, I suppose I don’t. It’s for the best, really, that you’ve returned—”
Nix stood, and she saw the file in his hands. Saw the others spread out on the floor. He couldn’t provoke emotion in her, but they could.
“And what, pray tell, do you hope to do with those?” Her tone—icy and controlled—matched the colors of the room exactly.
Make it messy.
Until that moment, Nix hadn’t planned on doing anything with the files. Wordlessly, he gathered them from the floor. Ione took a step forward, but seemed to remember—belatedly—that even if she wasn’t scared, she should be.
These were her files, after all. She’d seen what he could do.
Her hand slid slowly into her pocket—
“Stop.” Nix’s voice was low and cold, a match for hers. “I don’t know what you’re reaching for. I don’t care. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
I’ve killed. I’m a killer. I will kill again.
Ione couldn’t hear the tone of warning in his voice. She wouldn’t register the lethal set of his eyes. He didn’t frighten her—but she couldn’t afford to ignore him, no matter how hard it was not to. She stopped, freezing in place.
“Why?” Nix asked simply.
Nobodies didn’t ask questions. Nix knew that—but the knowledge was shallow, replaced by the time he’d spent watching and observing and touching Claire.
“Why did you send me to kill her?”
Ione shrugged, her eyes failing to find his, her demeanor poised—like he wasn’t this far from snapping her neck just to hear the sound. “You’ve never asked why before.”
Those words hit Nix hard. The files in his hand, his kills—he hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t said no. He’d done what they’d said, always.
“I should kill you.” He said the words calmly. She didn’t flinch. Her hand moved, ever so slightly, toward her pocket. He was on her in an instant, his free hand closing around her throat. He didn’t slam her against the wall. He didn’t make a single noise.
“Why?”
Why had she sent him to kill Claire? Why had the sight of the files triggered a response in her that he could not?
Ione opened her mouth. Nix loosened his grip on her throat, just enough so that she could speak, in a harsh whisper that cut through the room. “If you kill me, I’ll only be replaced. Cut off one head, come up against seven more. You can’t stop The Society. You can’t hurt us. You’re nothing, and we’re more powerful than you’ve ever imagined.”
Her hand disappeared into her pocket. He tightened his grip, cutting off all air.
“Don’t,” he said.
She stilled. He looked at her. She looked through him. He was killing her, and she wasn’t even watching.
“Wait.” She mouthed the word. For the second time, he relaxed his grip on her throat. If she had last words, he needed to know them.
“There’s a panic button in my pocket. I’ve already pushed it. This room will be crawling with Sensors in an instant. You can’t kill us all.”
He thought of everything The Society had made him do. He thought of staring down the length of his gun at Claire. He thought of Claire’s nightmares, Claire’s pain—their fault.
“I can try.”
Ione shrugged. “And while you’re here, trying to kill us, we’ll be out there, taking care of a problem.”
It took him a moment to grasp her meaning. We as in The Society. Problem as in Claire. The computer program running in the other room, the scientists—what if they’d found her?
The door to Ione’s study burst open. Shots were fired. One of them grazed Nix’s shoulder. He didn’t have time to think. He reacted.
He faded: instantaneously, a matter of reflex, the hard-won fruit of his trainer’s methods—drowning him, burying him, cutting him. They’d made fading a survival skill—and he was a survivor.
Ione gasped for breath, her hands flying to her throat. Nix had brought the files into the fade with him, but the second he’d faded, he lost the ability to choke the life out of her.
She’d lost her ability to see him, to feel him, to hurt him. Unless she could make him lose his fade, he was untouchable.
“Do you think this changes things? Do you really believe that the fact that there are two of you changes anything?” Ione spoke loudly, unaware of how close to her he was standing. “She’ll never love you, you know. Never care for you. You are what you are. A killer. She’ll never understand that. How could she?”
Nix closed himself off to Ione’s words. She was trying to hurt him, to weigh down his mind, to bring him out of the fade. She was trying to stop him from leaving with the files—and saving Claire.
Claire walked out of the store, clothed in pilfered goods. A security alarm sounded, but no one stopped her. The salesclerks didn’t notice that she’d helped herself to a pair of barely-there jean shorts and a sinfully soft cotton tee. Just like they didn’t notice that she was mud splattered, scratched, and bloody.
There was a power to being able to walk through the world unnoticed.
After everything she’d lost in the past twenty-four hours—the hopes and the dreams and the maybes—Claire figured that fresh clothing was the least of what she was owed. She pushed down the familiar stab of guilt and kept walking. Her fingers tightened around the hilt of her knife.
She’d spent years berating herself for every little thing. Every imagined faux pas, every failure to matter. But none of that had been her fault. In the past twenty-four hours, she’d been kidnapped, abandoned, forced to fight her way out of the woods—she wasn’t going to feel guilty about stealing clothes.
Anger was easier than guilt. Still, Claire looked back over her shoulder, half expecting to be caught. As she turned, something flashed in the corner of her eye. The hairs rose up on the back of her neck, and she remembered—suddenly and with an eerie sense of premonition—that Nix wasn’t the only one who’d wanted her dead.
She whirled back around. Nothing. Nothing but her own imagination. And still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming, that the knife in her hand wasn’t enough.
“Claire.”
She heard her name and whirled again. Nix. Her body recognized him before her mind did. Reflexively, she took a step backward, even as her hand reached out to him.
No.
She wasn’t doing this. He didn’t get to leave her and then show up. He didn’t get to look at her and stop her heart. He didn’t get to make it beat harder, faster—
“Are you okay?” The whispered words exited his mouth with the power of a gunshot.
“I’m fine,” she spat, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, something more than just the fact that he was here.
“I thought they found you.” His words were low. He reached forward to take her arm, but caught himself and aborted the motion halfway through. “We need to go.”
Claire didn’t move.
“Now,” Nix
said, his voice rough, every muscle in his body tensed as his eyes scanned the crowd.
Claire wanted to fight him, to keep herself from getting sucked back under the force of this thing between them. He was a Nobody. She was a Nobody. That didn’t have to mean anything. It didn’t mean anything—but for the first time, she took in his appearance, the look in his eyes.
If there was one thing Claire knew like the back of her own hand, it was the edge of the abyss, and Nix was wearing darkness like sunscreen. SPF 70, slathered thick. He held a stack of folders in one hand, his knuckles white with the force of his grip.
He was bleeding.
She lifted her left hand to his shoulder. Unlike him, she didn’t pull back. And once her skin touched his—she didn’t want to.
Either Ione had been bluffing and The Society didn’t know where Claire was, or Nix had beat them here. Her fingertips grazed the wound on his shoulder. He sucked in a breath.
“You’re hurt,” Claire said.
“So are you.”
There were scratches on her arms and legs, and she held a knife in a death grip in her right hand.
“We need to get out of here,” Nix said. He turned to leave, walking away from her touch. She didn’t follow.
Ione’s words echoed in his mind. She’ll never love you. You are what you are.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” Claire’s voice shook, but she may as well have carved the words into his chest with her knife.
“They’re looking for you,” he said, lowly. “They’ll hurt you.”
“They won’t find me,” Claire countered. “Isn’t that what you said? We’re unnoticeable? Two Nobodies can have a fight on a street in a strange town, and people will just brush on by.”
Nix had forgotten that they weren’t alone, that there was anyone else on this sidewalk but her. His gaze darted from one person to the next: assessing them, looking for a tell that any of them were more than what they seemed.
“Claire—”
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