“He sounds like a Null,” Nix corrected, but this time, the single word took on new meaning. Because Evan Sykes wasn’t a Null—not when he lost those elections early in his career. Not when he paid attention to his wife and daughter. Before he became—how had Abigail put it?—a pod person.
Before he became persuasive.
Before The Society had made him into the perfect plant.
“The drug.” He said the words out loud and waited for Claire to catch up, but she didn’t know enough about Nulls to see the pattern. Didn’t realize how incredibly impossible this was.
“The Society gave him a drug that made him a Null. Or like a Null. Didn’t you hear what his daughter said—once she shoots up with it, she can’t feel anything. And Nulls don’t—they don’t feel anything, and they’re persuasive, and they have no conscience.”
Claire crinkled her forehead, her nose. “They gave him the drug so that he could talk Congress into their corner. Sykes turning into an egotistical maniac who thought he could blackmail them—”
“Side effect.”
Nix couldn’t believe they were actually talking about this. Like it was actually possible. Like a drug could take a human and turn them into a monster. How long did it last? Abigail seemed human enough, and she’d used the drug before.
A quick survey of the safe revealed that there were no more vials. No more needles.
“He was almost out of the drug when he died.”
“And he just assumed someone would find the tapes. His own daughter didn’t even try to listen to them.…”
“She must have cared about him when he was alive. She was probably crazy about him. Not even angry that he didn’t care about her. But once he died, his hold on her disappeared—”
“And now she hates him.”
Nix nodded.
“Abigail Andrea, don’t you leave this house! You can’t talk to me like that! You can’t!”
“Oh, go make yourself a Long Island iced tea, Mother. I can do whatever I want.”
The sound of a slamming door, reverberating through the large house, broke Nix out of his stupor. “Grab the tapes.”
That would give them something on The Society.
But not enough.
“The daughter has the drug. We can’t let her take it. Normals aren’t meant to be Nulls. Look what it did to her father. And now she’s going to give it to some boy?” Nix tightened his fingers into fists.
“We’re going after her.” Claire beat him to the punch, and he nodded.
“Give me the tapes. We’ll have to hurry to catch up with her.…”
“We don’t need to hurry,” Claire corrected, touching his arm softly. “Just fade.”
Nix stuffed the tapes into his pocket, hung his future on them, made them an extension of himself.
Five, four, three, two …
Nothing.
19
The world can’t touch me. The world can’t hurt me. The world can’t hold me down.
Claire was the same Claire every time she crossed over. No boundaries. No worries. No inhibitions.
The solid girl she and Nix were following would never understand that. They were flaming comets; Abigail Sykes was a firefly with a broken bulb. And as the aforementioned firefly scurried across her little mortal plane, her eyes tearing up and her too-short skirt bouncing as she ran, Claire flew.
Power.
Abigail stopped running. Claire forced her body to still, forced her feet to return to the earth.
“We’re back at the cemetery.” Nix’s voice broke through the hum of nothingness in Claire’s mind. “Why would she come here?”
She as in Abigail. A sound clawed through the fog in Claire’s brain.
Someone’s crying.
Claire grappled with the thought, knowing that it didn’t belong in the fade and that if she let herself think it for too long, she wouldn’t belong there either. She wanted to stay here. With Nix. Wanted to touch him.
Abigail Sykes is crying.
Claire heard a sound—halfway between the ripping of Velcro and the slamming of a door—as Abigail’s tears—and her empathy for them—tore her from the fade. She settled into her physical body, missing the fade so much it hurt.
“Hey, baby. You feeling dangerous?”
“I’m feeling like I could do you right here.”
Claire tried not to blush. She really did, but Abigail Sykes had chosen that moment to stop crying, and her boyfriend—Dustin? Austin? Justin?—had arrived. They were practically undressing each other with their eyes.
And … ummm … their hands.
“Did you bring me something?”
Abigail slowly lifted up her shirt, revealing the syringe tucked into the band of her miniskirt. Claire glanced sideways. Beside her, Nix had eyes only for the drug.
“How are we going to get it away from her?” Claire asked, keeping her voice to a whisper, even though Abigail and her special friend seemed to be paying absolutely zero attention to the fact that they weren’t alone in this cemetery—if they noticed it at all.
“We get the drug by walking up to her and taking it,” Nix said.
“Oh. Simple as that.”
“Simple as that,” he confirmed, but something held him back, kept him from moving. It wasn’t until Claire fully absorbed their surroundings that she realized exactly what it was.
Abigail Sykes was standing in front of her father’s grave. She leaned back against his tombstone, tempting Dustin/Austin/Justin with her flat, tanned stomach, and the needle lying nearly flat against her flesh. “Some for me and some for you.”
Claire felt wrong for watching this. No matter what Sykes had done once he’d gotten in bed with The Society, the man buried under Abigail’s feet had been her father. Heavy mascara coated the girl’s eyelashes. Instead of tear tracks, black streaks marred her artificially tanned face. And the boy she was with—muscular, leering, clean-cut—didn’t bat an eye.
Didn’t ask her why she was crying.
Didn’t bring her a single thing.
“I’ll play first,” the boy said instead, reaching for the needle. Abigail ducked away.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?” she teased.
The boy shrugged. “Is it good?”
Abigail shot a hateful, happy, hurting look at her father’s grave. “It’s the best.”
The boy sank down to his knees. “That’s all I need to know.” He reached for the vial, and even from a distance, Claire could see something dark and serpentine sleeping in the wry curve of his lips.
Claire couldn’t take it anymore. She moved, forgetting how much she’d once wanted the Abigails and Justins of her own high school to remember her name. She stalked toward them. And she beat Justin to the vial.
“This is mine,” she said, latching her hand around it and removing it from Abigail’s possession.
The dead senator’s daughter didn’t jump at Claire’s touch. She glanced at Claire, and then shrugged her off. The boy seemed to grasp the reality of the situation a little more.
“Where’d it go?”
Clearly, the absence of the drug was bothering him, and he managed to connect it to Claire’s presence. “You … you took it.”
Claire turned and walked away. The boy wouldn’t follow. He wouldn’t fight her for it. He’d be pissed that it was gone, but he wouldn’t direct that anger at her.
He couldn’t.
Claire couldn’t make people angry. She couldn’t make them happy or sad, she couldn’t scare them, she couldn’t make them feel even a whiff of emotion toward her at all.
Power.
Stealing clothes paled next to this. She’d walked up to two strung-out strangers, taken a top secret serum from their possession, and walked away without a scratch—and she hadn’t even had to fade to do it, because Normals didn’t care!
The image of Justin—his hands on Abigail, her face streaked black—came into Claire’s mind, and she was glad. Glad they didn’t care about
her. Glad that she wasn’t spending her summer trying to make other people take notice, if being noticed meant being …
That.
Once the Normal boy figured out that the Normal girl had managed to lose the drug she’d promised him, he came to the conclusion that hooking up on her dead father’s tombstone was sick. Abigail started crying again, and a heavy knowing settled in Claire’s stomach, uncomfortable and disconcerting.
The Society had to be stopped. Not just for Nix and the things they’d made him do or for Senator Wyler or any other innocents they’d ordered dead. Not for Claire, who might have been buried six feet under had she not glanced out her window at exactly the right time.
The Society had to be stopped for Abigail, too. It had to be stopped because of Proposition 42 and whatever was going on in the basement of the institute. For X-17—whatever that was—which Sykes had considered the perfect weapon.
“I’m sorry, Claire.” By the time Nix said those words, Abigail and the boy were gone, and Claire tried to remember what Nix—built me a bookshelf; saved my life—had to be sorry for.
“You shouldn’t have had to do that,” he said, nodding his head toward the vial in her hand.
“I shouldn’t have had to do what?” she asked quietly.
“Deal with the drug. Take it from them. I should have done that.”
“Why?”
Nix’s fingers began curling into a fist. “Because if it wasn’t for me, that girl’s father would still be alive, and she never would have had the opportunity to steal a vial of instant Null in the first place.”
Claire brought her hands to his and slowly worked to uncurl his fist, drawing tiny circles on his palm the way she sometimes did on her own.
Nix shuddered, and she sensed something threatening to give inside him. “Sykes wasn’t a Null. He wasn’t a good person. He willingly turned himself into a monster. But he wasn’t a Null. He could have gotten better.”
First Wyler. Now Sykes. Claire wondered if Nix would go, one by one, through the contents of all of the folders. All of his kills. She knew, deep down, that he would. And even deeper, in the core of Claire, she knew that she wanted to be there while he did.
She wanted to be the one to put him back together. To rest her hands gently on the sides of his face and say, “Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Cry. And when you can’t hold it anymore—the breath, the tears—let go.”
Fade.
Nix did as he was told. He felt it—the burn of knowing that he’d been a blade when The Society needed one, the executioner who carried out every death sentence Ione had laid down, except for Claire’s. He accepted that the things he’d done would always be there, under his skin. In his skin. Waiting behind every door in every dream.
You are what you are.
He pulled back from Claire’s grasp.
“Nix.”
His eyeballs stung, and he let the tears fall. Then he let everything else fall away, too. Claire followed him into the fade, and he struggled to remember why he’d pulled away from her touch.
Faded, she didn’t seem so very far away.
“It hurts.” Claire’s voice was high-pitched, frantic.
Nix started forward. “What hurts?” Nothing was supposed to hurt in the fade. You had to let go of the pain to cross.
Claire looked down at her hand. “It’s making me dizzy. It doesn’t want to be here.”
The drug, Nix realized. She brought it with her. In the solid world, the vial and its contents were ugly, but in the fade, they turned his stomach. There were two kinds of wrong, and they weren’t supposed to mix. This had made Evan Sykes into a temporary Null. God knew what was in it, but every ounce of loathing Nix had ever felt for Nulls was directed at the dark liquid, and the only reason it didn’t pull him out of the fade was that—impossibly—it was faded, too.
Claire brought it with her. She was better at this than she should have been. Crossing in and out of the fade. Taking objects with her. She’d picked it up effortlessly—and now she was paying the price.
She shouldn’t have brought it here. She shouldn’t have even tried.
“It’s like a black hole. It’s like they liquefied a black hole.” Claire wheezed, her features twisted in pain. Standing two feet away from her, Nix could feel it: the drug, the fade’s reaction to it, the fact that none of this should have been happening at all.
“Let go of the fade, Claire.”
They’d stop fading, and it would be fine. The drug would just be a drug.
Claire shook her head. “It has to come with us.” Claire trembled, her hand clenching the serum. Nix reached for it, but she pulled it back. “We have to take it back to the cabin, and we’ll travel faster in the fade. I can do this. I should be able to do this. I’m nothing. This vial is nothing. We’re nothing.”
“It doesn’t belong here,” Nix said, thinking back to that day on the bus, when he’d covered Claire with his fade. If she’d been a Null, really been a Null—
“It’s a part of me. We’re nothing. I can do this. I can.”
Nix heard the words she didn’t speak. It hurts.
If she wouldn’t leave the fade, and she wouldn’t let him take the drug, there was only one thing Nix could think of to do to take that pain away. He put his hands on either side of her face. He forced her eyes to look away from the serum and straight into his.
“Stay with me, Claire.”
Her body relaxed under his touch, but he could still see the strain in her eyes. He could still feel the drug’s unsettling presence in the fade.
“Nix, Nix, Nix,” she said his name, over and over again. Nix traced his thumb along the edge of her cheekbone. He’d hate himself for touching her later, remember why he couldn’t later, but right now she needed him.
To take away the pain.
“That’s right, Claire. I’m right here. Stay with me.” He pulled her closer, ignored the warning—You are what you are. She’ll never love you—as he brushed his lips lightly over hers.
She pressed herself into him, harder. He let her. Nothing mattered, except his lips and hers. His touch and hers. The warmth between them, the power of their fades doubling over and over until the vial in her hand seemed as unimportant as Nobodies did to Normals.
He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t touch her, shouldn’t kiss her—but it was too late for that. There was no room for shouldn’t in the fade. Nothing but Nix. Nothing but Claire.
Nothing but the two of them.
For now.
Claire didn’t remember running back to the cabin. She didn’t remember flying. She didn’t remember anything other than the kiss: the way it stilled her mind and grounded her in the fade, the sensation of knowing with a deep and undying certainty that Nix was the only person in the world she wanted, the only person she would ever want, even if he jerked away from her the moment they crossed out of the fade.
No matter what he said or did or how he looked at her—she remembered his smell and his taste and what it felt like, for one perfect moment, to be the thing against which the whole of the universe paled.
She set the drug they’d stolen from Abigail Sykes on the coffee table.
“Nix—”
“No.” He didn’t let her say any of the things she was thinking. He didn’t want to hear it. “I shouldn’t have. We shouldn’t have.”
“Yes, you should have.”
He closed his eyes, refusing to look at her. “Don’t, Claire.”
Condition one, Claire thought. If she reached out to touch him, he’d jerk back. If she tried to talk, he wouldn’t listen.
Don’t. Can’t. Shouldn’t. No. Claire’s eyes drifted over to the bookshelf. Her bookshelf. No matter how tired she was of being pushed away, no matter how much she wanted things he would never let her have—she couldn’t bring herself to hate him for it.
“The drug’s a different color now.” Claire gestured to the liquid inside the vial. If he didn’t want to talk about it, they wouldn’t talk a
bout it. “Before, it was the color of tar. Now it’s like onyx. Still dark, but …”
She couldn’t make herself say the word beautiful.
“Do you think taking it to the fade changed it?” Claire focused on that question instead of asking him how he could think, even for a second, that kissing her had been a mistake.
Nix flicked his eyes toward the Null drug. “You’re right. It does look different. Nobodies and Nulls are polar opposites. I felt it when you brought the drug into the fade. Something happened.” He paused. “I don’t know exactly what’s in that drug, but whatever it is, it’s not compatible with the fade. They reacted to each other.”
“Like matter and antimatter?” Claire wasn’t even sure what the words meant, but at least she was talking, and at least she wasn’t saying what she was thinking.
Tell me you want to be with me the way I want to be with you. Tell me you felt it, too. Faded or solid, today, tomorrow—
“Yeah,” Nix replied, and for a moment, she pretended he was responding to the thing she hadn’t asked. “Something like that.”
20
Claire’s being quiet. Her knees are pulled up to her chest. Her hair is falling into her face.
Nix didn’t want to think about what bringing the drug into the fade must have cost her. To bring something into the fade, you had to consider it an extension of yourself. The strength of will it must have taken to look at the drug, to know what it could do and absorb it into her sense of self was incredible.
“Claire?” He reached out and touched her shoulder. He’d kissed her to stop the pain—and it had worked. But that hadn’t been his only motivation. He’d wanted her, wanted so many things that he knew he would never have. “Are you okay?”
“What are we going to do with it?” She answered his question with a question. “The drug, the tapes, the fact that The Society killed a senator—will it be enough? If we gave it to the police, or the FBI, or the media—would it be enough?”
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