Nix couldn’t sleep. They’d gotten back to the cabin late. It was almost dawn now, and he still couldn’t sleep.
Couldn’t close his eyes without seeing a slideshow of everything he’d ever done. Every life he’d taken. Every syringe he’d emptied. Every hole he’d put in a stranger’s chest.
Eleven. From the psychopath in the bathtub to Sykes, there’d been eleven.
And interspersed with every one of those images was one of Claire. Smiling in her sleep. Laughing. Crying because of things he’d said to her.
I made her cry.
In his mind, that sin bled into all of his others. She slept, and he kept watch. The way he had when he’d thought she was a Null.
Claire is curled into a ball. Claire is shifting onto one side. Claire is breathing out of her mouth.
She was sad. He’d made her sad. And maybe that was easier to think about than the other thing. The thing he’d almost done to her.
The thing he’d done to others.
Wyler.
Nix stood up. He had to move, to get away, but he couldn’t leave Claire. He had to watch her. He had to keep her safe, because she was right. The Society probably hadn’t put her life on the line in some kind of elaborate test of his loyalty. If they’d never sent him after her, he never would have questioned that each name they slipped under his door belonged to someone who deserved to die.
By giving him her name, they’d taken a risk. Why?
Maybe they weren’t lying when they designated Code Omega. Maybe they do think she’s dangerous.
Nix smiled wryly, and the motion hurt him, like his lips were going to slice straight through his face. Claire was dangerous, because she made him want things he wasn’t supposed to want.
Because after fewer than twenty-four hours’ practice, she could fade on cue and take a plethora of objects with her.
Because when the two of them touched in the fade, time literally stopped.
Because she’d never believed him about Nulls. Because even if someone was a Null, even if they were the worst kind of monster, Claire wouldn’t want them dead. She wouldn’t kill them without proof.
She’d ask questions, and she was good at asking the right ones.
Claire was powerful. Claire was smart. She was beautiful, and to The Society, she was a threat.
They only want the ones who don’t ask questions. The ones who will kill and kill and kill and feel good about it.
Nix couldn’t make himself forget the rush. The adrenaline. The pride and the nausea and the fierce, indescribable, godlike feeling of watching life flicker and fade into nothing.
I liked it.
I hated it, and I liked it, and I did it. I did.
Nix saw his targets’ ghosts like they were standing there in front of him. Wyler and Sykes and God knows how many of the others. And then there were the bodies, the ones he’d found when he’d entered some of his marks’ homes. His marks’ victims, still alive and screaming for help from the basement.
And, God, he couldn’t regret killing the people who’d put them there.
If they’d only ever sent me after Nulls, I’d be okay.
But they hadn’t. And he wasn’t. And he couldn’t stop seeing Claire’s face everywhere, even though the real Claire was only a few feet away. Even though he could have reached out and touched her, if he’d wanted to.
I have to do something. I have to.
Since he couldn’t breathe life back into a decomposing body, Nix concentrated on the things that could be fixed.
I hurt Claire’s feelings. I made her sad.
He couldn’t bear to let himself touch her. Couldn’t hold her. Couldn’t wipe away her tears. But he could do something to make her smile, to show that sorry wasn’t just a word.
Nix walked slowly over to the far side of the cabin. To the books she’d placed, just so on the floor. The ones she’d tried to line up and had settled for stacking.
It wasn’t much.
It wasn’t enough.
But he could do it for her.
Claire woke to the sound of quiet, muted cursing. Rolling over onto her side, she peeked out from under her blanket and saw Nix … speaking very vehemently to a piece of lumber. He had a knife in one hand and he was digging it into the wood, notching it, carving out a … what?
Claire had no idea what he was doing. As silently as she could, she propped herself up on one arm, to get a better view. This time, she saw more wood; he must have gotten it from the pile outside.
The pile under the porch, where she’d stashed his weapons two days earlier. Claire’s throat tightened. Her heart jumped into it.
I guess he found the weapons.
That explained where Nix had gotten the knife, but it didn’t explain what he was doing. He’d carved one end of the plank down to a cube shape, a thick tab that stuck out from the end of the board. A second, identical board sat to his left, and Nix turned his attention to a third, digging his knife in, carving a square-shaped hole.
Claire’s heartbeat slowed, and the rush of adrenaline she’d felt the moment she’d seen the knife in Nix’s hand began to fade. He wasn’t hunting anything. He wasn’t hurting anything. He was building … something. She wasn’t sure what.
Careful not to draw his attention to herself, she lay back down, resting her head on her arms. He’d be upset if he knew that he’d woken her up, and even though she had no idea what time it was—her days and nights were completely turned around—Claire got the distinct feeling that whatever he was doing, Nix had hoped to finish it before she woke up.
I’m not supposed to be watching him.
It seemed right that she was, though. Like turnaround was fair play, because he was always watching her. And in the little motions—the turn of a knife, the appraisal of the boards’ positions, the way he fit them together, sliding the tabs into the holes—Claire saw a beautiful, soothing rhythm. Like this was the closest Nix could come to dancing outside the fade.
Time passed. Nix kept working. Claire kept watching. And then he finished. He stepped back, and Claire saw a shelf. A very uneven, unsteady, three-board shelf that sat on the floor, its purpose unclear until Nix crouched back down next to it, and one by one, moved the books she’d stolen from the library into place.
A bookshelf.
He hadn’t slept all night, all day. Instead, he’d stayed up and with a hunting knife and rotting old wood, he’d built her a bookshelf.
As he put the last book in place with careful, tender hands, Claire sat up on her knees, the blanket balled in her fist.
He built me a bookshelf.
She forgot to breathe. So by the time he turned around, in addition to being frozen in place, she was a little bit dizzy.
“You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said, putting his hands into his pockets, averting his gaze.
Claire finally remembered how to inhale. “You built me a bookshelf,” she said, because those were the only words—the sum total of words that she had.
“You like books,” Nix said, still not looking directly at her. “They shouldn’t have to sit on the floor.”
“You built me a bookshelf.”
“It’s not a very good one.”
“But you built me a bookshelf—and what do you mean it’s not a very good one?” Claire felt rather like someone had insulted her firstborn child. “It’s perfect.”
It was crooked, and the wood was rough, and the books weren’t really much higher off the floor than they’d been before, and it was perfect.
“I didn’t mean to make you cry. At the library.” He brought his eyes back to meet hers, slowly, as if he was reserving the right at any point to jerk his gaze away.
“I love it.”
“The crying?” Nix asked, his brow wrinkling.
“No. The bookshelf.”
He knows I like books. He saw me try to stand them up. He wanted to make me happy. So he built me a bookshelf.
Now remembering to breathe wasn’t as much of a challen
ge as forcing her tightening chest to let her do so.
In.
And out.
In.
And out.
“Thank you, Nix. No one’s ever made me anything before.” She should have just stuck with you made me a bookshelf, because no other words really seemed to do it justice.
“You’re welcome. Claire.”
There was something in the way he spaced the words that told her he’d debated whether or not he should say her name.
Whether or not he deserved to say it.
Beautiful, broken boy. He built me a bookshelf. He can barely bring himself to say my name.
“You look tired,” she said. “You didn’t sleep at all.”
It wasn’t a question, and he shrugged in response.
“You need to sleep.” Claire couldn’t chase away his ghosts. She couldn’t change his past. She couldn’t do any of the things she’d hoped that, after a good night’s sleep, would magically just come. But she could take care of him.
Make him sleep.
Do a little something that counted big.
She slid over on the couch and gestured that he should join her. He took a step backward, and for the first time, she didn’t, even subconsciously, take it as an insult. Instead, she slipped off the couch, so that he could sit down without worrying about touching her.
“I slept. Your turn.”
After three seconds, or four, he acceded. Walked over to the couch. Sat down. “I don’t sleep,” he said, talking to himself as much as to her. “Not anymore.”
Claire wondered what—or who—he saw when he closed his eyes. “You don’t have to close your eyes. Just lie back.”
Nix did as he was told, and Claire, still feeling like there was a land mine in her stomach, like she might explode with bookshelf joy and awe at any moment, walked over to her present. Knelt down next to it. And picked a book up off the shelf. And then she sat down across the room from Nix, a mountain of space between them, and she read.
About the little prince and a rose with thorns and a wild fox that explained to the little prince what it meant to be tamed. She kept reading, the familiar words the closest thing she could manage to a lullaby.
Nix’s eyes opened wide as he realized what she was doing, and he listened raptly, as if no one had ever read him a story, as she expected no one had. And slowly, Nix’s body relaxed. His eyes closed.
And he fell asleep.
18
White floors. White room. White bed.
Nix woke up calm for the first time in his life, and he wasn’t sure why until he realized that he wasn’t in his quarters at the institute. The bed beneath him was soft, colored, and technically a futon. Sitting on the floor beside it was a girl, curled up like a cat, reading a book.
Claire. Claire’s voice. The Little Prince.
She’d read to him. The realization was sweet—so sweet that Nix couldn’t berate himself for having let her.
She’d read to him.
He’d listened.
And he’d fallen asleep. No dreams. No terror. No waking up underwater. Just … nothing. A different kind of nothing than the fade, peaceful to its exhilaration.
“You’re awake.” Claire said the words shyly, ducking her head. Nix nodded. His eyes flittered toward the shelf he’d built her. She smiled.
It was funny. He’d always thought that the best thing about being a Normal would be talking to other people, having them talk back. But not talking, that had its charms, too.
More of them, maybe, because then you didn’t have to find the words. Without making a sound, Claire dog-eared the page she was reading, shut the book, and then put it back in its place, right next to the one she’d read him the night before. Then she went into the kitchen, and when she came back, she offered him a steaming mug.
Coffee.
He took it, their fingers brushing as she transferred it from her hands to his. Then she went back into the kitchen and poured herself a cup.
He drank.
She drank.
It wasn’t until the dark liquid in their mugs sank well past the halfway mark that she spoke. “I don’t have a plan.”
That was the exact opposite of what he’d expected her to say. After the previous night, he would have followed her off the edge of a cliff if she’d asked it.
“But I do have a place.”
“A place?” Nix asked, his voice—like the coffee—warm in his throat.
She nodded.
“What kind of place?”
“Sykes’s place.” She waited, and he realized that she was waiting for him to tell her no. He didn’t, and finally, she continued. “His house. Or maybe his office. Everything else The Society has done makes sense, but killing him doesn’t.”
Nix narrowed his eyes, but she didn’t give him a chance to interrupt.
“Everything else The Society did—it’s not good and it’s not moral and I’d like to take them down for it, one by one, but their motivation makes sense. If The Society wants something and there’s someone standing in their way, they take care of the problem. But why would they kill their own plant in the Senate? Even if he was being difficult, even if he was having second thoughts …”
Nix was still stuck on the fact that Claire had said she wanted to take The Society down. And sounded like she meant it.
“If Sykes was just postponing the vote on Prop 42,” she continued, “they wouldn’t have killed him, not unless they had a backup plan. So there must have been another reason. Either he had something that they wanted, or he was going to do something that they didn’t want him to do.”
For a brief moment, Nix entertained a fantasy in which he and Claire really did take The Society down. All of it. In its entirety. The part he’d seen and the parts he was beginning to suspect that he hadn’t.
But Claire couldn’t kill, and he wouldn’t ask her to. Wouldn’t let her. If Sykes had something that The Society wanted, and if they could get it first …
Nix wondered if Ione would bargain for his freedom. For Claire’s.
“If Sykes knew something that The Society didn’t want him to know, or if he had something worth killing over—maybe we can use it.”
It was like she was reading his mind.
“For The Society to kill their own inside man, it would have to be something huge. Something that could threaten the whole operation with exposure, something that could bring the whole thing to its knees.”
Understanding washed over Nix. Claire wanted to bring The Society down, but not by killing its leaders. By exposing them.
“It would have to be something big to make a difference,” Nix said, his mind whirring with the implications. “We’re Nobodies. No one’s going to listen to us. No one’s going to care. Unless it’s something huge, they won’t look twice at anything we give them either.”
“But if it is something big …”
Nix got a taste of the thing she was offering him, and it warmed him more than the coffee. Hope. Revenge. A future that didn’t involve doing that little four-lettered thing he did best.
Maybe, once it was over—
Maybe, if he could—
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. The possibilities were seductive.
“Going to Sykes’s house could be dangerous. The Society has to be looking for us, Claire.” Nix tried not to give in to the siren’s call of things he could never have. He tried to remember that no matter what he did now, there were some things he could never change.
You are what you are.
“Would the people in The Society ever guess you’d go to Sykes’s house?” Claire asked.
Nix rolled the question over in his mind. That was his advantage—and Claire’s—in this lethal game: The Society wouldn’t know what to expect. They wouldn’t be able to guess at his motivations. He’d lived under their rule his entire life, and they would have had better luck profiling a complete stranger.
“Maybe I should go alone.” Nix said the words carefully. He didn’t want to
hurt her again, didn’t want her to think that he was pushing her away.
Claire’s expression stayed steady, her hands wrapped around her coffee mug. “You can go alone if you want to. I won’t make you take me. But I’d rather go with you. We’re stronger together, and you won’t let anything happen to me.” She paused. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
It was easy to believe her, easier than it should have been to want her at his back.
She liked my bookcase.
That thought hit him in place of the things he should have been thinking, about who deserved what and, more to the point, who didn’t.
“We’ll go together,” he said.
She smiled, brighter than sunlight ricocheting off a sharpened blade. “Do you know where Senator Sykes lived?”
Nix knew everything about Evan Sykes. Not his hopes or dreams or childhood aspirations, but his date of birth. His last known address. The location of his office in D.C. The office space he rented in Iowa. The places he went for lunch. The streets he walked or drove down to get there.
His allergies.
“I know where he lived.” There were some things you didn’t forget. Files. Marks. Time of death.
“Okay, then,” Claire said, setting down her coffee. “Let’s go.”
The dead senator’s home was immaculate. Enormous. But more than anything, it felt empty.
She and Nix entered on the second floor. Walked straight through the Georgian-style windows and the handcrafted moldings on the walls. Landed in a hallway with wood floors and Oriental rugs.
Claire held tight to the fade as Nix led them to Sykes’s personal office. She sensed something the moment they stepped into the room. It wasn’t a smell or a taste or a sound, but it was something, in the wisps of solidity that made up the furniture: the muted brown desk, the faraway filing cabinets.
Faded Claire wasn’t sure why these objects were important. Why she should be looking at them, when her body and Nix’s were glowing, iridescent, everywhere. But they’d come here for a reason, and Claire, even though she couldn’t exactly remember why, knew it was important.
She closed her eyes. She reached through her brain with both hands and grabbed on to a fleeting image, guaranteed to bring her crashing back to earth.
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