Nix tried to picture himself giving the Null drug to someone, telling them what it did. If they heard him, they wouldn’t particularly care. And if they cared—if he and Claire could send a letter or an email or find someone else to deliver the message and the proof—what would happen? Would the government shut The Society down …
Or would they take it over?
The Society had three purposes that Nix knew of now. Killing Nulls. Studying energy. Preserving and extending the power of The Society. Maybe there were other initiatives, and maybe there weren’t, but the government would almost certainly have plans of their own. They wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to use The Society’s means for their own ends.
Wasn’t Sykes proof of that?
“If we’re going to expose The Society for killing Sykes, we have to do damage control first.” Nix glanced at Claire. “No one can know about the Null drug. We can’t run the risk that someone else will take it. And no one can know about us.”
“We have to destroy the drug.” Claire spoke the truth that he had been dancing around. “Not just this vial. All of it.”
“All of it,” Nix agreed. They couldn’t risk The Society, or the government, or anyone else giving themselves the power to manipulate others—and becoming a psychopath in the process. They had to destroy the drug. The research that went with it. Any chance of making it again.
And that meant that they were going in.
A part of Claire had always known it would come to this. Nix had already returned to The Society once, and he’d come back bleeding. No matter how much evidence they gathered, no matter what they learned about The Society’s purpose and their plans and the lies they’d told Nix—at the end of the day, the enemy still had to be taken apart from the inside out.
Only this time, Nix wasn’t going in alone.
He’s going to tell me I can’t come. Claire knew that. She also knew that he was wrong. He’s going to say that it’s over and that I’m not a part of this, that it’s something he has to do alone. But I’m not going to let him leave me behind. Not again. Not now.
“I bet my parents haven’t even realized I’m gone.” That was the only thing Claire could think of that wouldn’t give him an excuse to run. “I disappeared, what, three, four days ago? They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone. What if I never go back? Will they just forget I existed at all?”
I’m never going back. Claire knew it was true the second the question left her mouth. Even if Nix says it’s over, even if he tries to send me away. Knowing what I know, knowing that they’ll never care—
There was no coming back from something like that.
From the moment Nix had realized that he was going back to the institute, he’d known that this would be good-bye. This was his fight. He was The Society’s executioner, its weapon.
He had to let Claire go. But as he looked at her, really looked at her, he realized the obvious: that Claire didn’t have anywhere to go.
“They won’t forget you right away,” he said, a lump rising in his throat. “They’ll realize you’re gone, but they won’t look for you. If you went back this week or next or six months from now, you could probably jog their memories.”
“But a year from now? Or two? Or ten?”
They’ll forget about you. Nix didn’t have the heart to say it out loud. The only reason The Society’s members would remember that Claire existed was that they had protocols in place to prevent them from forgetting. They had files. Reminder alarms set to go off to prompt them to read those files and recall what it was that they were after.
Claire’s parents didn’t have any of that.
“You ever heard of Roanoke?” Nix wasn’t sure why he decided to bring that up, other than the fact that the story didn’t involve talking about going back to the institute, and it didn’t involve telling Claire that the people she’d called Mom and Dad would probably forget they’d ever had a daughter.
“That’s the lost colony, right? The one that just sort of disappeared?”
“Sir Walter Raleigh—the guy who funded the expedition that landed at Roanoke—was Society. Most of the people on the ship were Nobodies. A few were Nulls who Raleigh wanted away from the Crown. A half dozen Sensors. I guess The Society wanted a claim on the New World, the power that would come with it.”
Claire snorted. “How’d that plan work out for them?”
“The Nobodies killed the Nulls. The Sensors forgot the Nobodies existed. Raleigh and the Queen neglected to send supplies for a few years.” Nix shrugged. “Didn’t go well.”
“So there were more of us back then?” Claire asked, and the idea was as strange to Nix as it was to her.
From dozens to two.
“There must have been.”
“And now there’s just you and me. You. And me.” The words burst out of her mouth with enough force that he realized she’d been holding them in the whole time. While they’d discussed the drug. While they’d been making plans.
“I never would have been normal, Nix. I never would have been Abigail with her Courtneys and Justins. I won’t ever have a normal life, no matter what I do, and I swear to God, I don’t know whether to be sorry for them or for me. Because I know—I know what’s going to change and what’s not going to change, and I know that you’re the only one who will ever see me. And that’s enough, because you’re the only one I want to see.”
He couldn’t quite process the words, but he read their meaning in the set of her body, the tilt of her chin.
You’re the only one I want to see.
She knew what he was. She understood. Maybe he should walk away, maybe he didn’t deserve her, but Nix knew—suddenly and irrevocably—that he couldn’t.
Wouldn’t.
You’re the only one I want to see.
She wouldn’t ever have a normal life. If she’d never met him, if he walked away and never darkened her door again—
She’d be alone. And it would kill her, the way that walking away from her would kill him.
“I’m not going to leave you, Claire.” He’d never made a promise before. The words had a taste to them—sweet like lavender, solid like steel.
“Ever?”
Nobodies didn’t think about the future. Nobodies didn’t have futures. All they had was an ability and a responsibility. To kill.
“Ever.”
Claire took a step forward then, a tiny, hesitant step that Nix found hard to match up with the way she’d wrapped her arms around him at the graveyard. The way she’d asked him—commanded him—to let it out. The way they’d kissed the rest of the universe away.
Now she was asking him, one tiny step at a time, to let that be real. To let it be lasting and solid. Nix didn’t pause. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t give a single moment to shoulds. He forgot about the vial on the coffee table. He closed what little space remained between them, and as his arms enwrapped her, his mouth descended, and condition one went the way of condition two.
What happened before can’t happen again.
When I say you’re done, you’re done.
His lips brushed hers. She closed her eyes. Pushed to her tiptoes. Locked her hands behind his neck. Trailed her thumbs down its sides.
This won’t ever be over.
He kissed her. The rest of the world didn’t fade away; power didn’t explode between them; but he couldn’t keep himself from crushing her body to his.
This is real.
In the fade or out of it, solid or immaterial, she was his.
Touch me, he whispered, from his mind to hers, and as she did, he lost himself to her. Together, they sank in and out of the fade. In and out of time. Physical. Transcendent. Nothing. Everything.
Nix-and-Claire.
21
Claire stared up at the ceiling, eyes wide open, Nix asleep beside her. If she closed her eyes, he might disappear. Not because he chose to—he’d said he wouldn’t leave, and she believed him—but because Happily Ever After didn’t hap
pen to girls like Claire.
Until now.
If you believe in something long enough. If you want it hard enough …
There was still The Society. The people who wanted her—and Nix, too, by now—dead. The Null drug sitting on the coffee table. The fact that, sooner or later, they had to venture into the belly of the beast. The fact that they were just kids …
But they weren’t. They weren’t kids. They were Nobodies, and Claire had been on her own for a very long time, Nix—so peaceful in his sleep, so quiet—for even longer. Claire thought of her parents. About the fact that she probably wouldn’t ever see them again, because seeing them and knowing they hadn’t missed her would make the times she’d missed them, missed everything that they could have been so much worse.
Claire wondered if she’d always feel this way. She wondered whether she and Nix would make it in and out of The Society’s stronghold alive. But mostly, despite the stakes and everything that had happened and was about to happen, Claire wondered what Nix was dreaming about. What had put the soft, boyish smile on a face that had never looked so soft. So vulnerable.
Claire thought of The Little Prince. Of a wild fox that had asked to be tamed. Claire knew the story. Knew it by heart and didn’t need to pick the book up off her shelf.
Nix’s shelf.
The most important things in life were the things you couldn’t see with your eyes. The things you saw with your heart. Claire closed her eyes, saw Nix’s image against the backdrop of her eyelids. Felt the heat from his body, lying next to hers. She curled into his torso, laying her head on his chest. He shifted in his sleep, enveloping her, curving to meet the curves of her body.
You understand the things you tame, she thought, reworking the fox’s words to the little prince, making them hers. When you tame something, it is wholly and uniquely yours.
Nix woke up to the feel of Claire’s breath on his face. She needed toothpaste. He smiled.
We can stay this way, he thought. Maybe not forever. Maybe not past noon. But for a few soothing seconds, as he felt her heartbeat. For a moment of exhilaration as his beat faster in return.
The vial on the coffee table stared back at Nix the moment he tore his eyes away from Claire’s face.
We’re going in.
To a place crawling with Sensors. To destroy files and hard drives and every trace of the Null drug they could find. But first, Nix had to figure out how they’d kept it hidden from him to begin with. He’d been inside their labs. He’d walked their hallways. He knew every inch of that building.
Unless they had other buildings. Other labs. Nix was beginning to suspect what he knew about The Society only scratched the surface. They’d taught him not to ask questions, to never expect answers. He’d known only what they wanted him to know.
We’ll have to find someone with inside access, make them talk.
Nix heard Claire stirring beside him, and he turned to watch her eyes open, to see the recognition in them the moment they locked on to his.
We need a plan—but not today.
The thought surprised Nix. Vacation wasn’t a word in his vocabulary. Nobodies sat and they waited and they bled and they killed. Over and over and over again, until they died. No variation. No vacation.
That’s not Claire’s life. It’s not mine—not anymore.
“Good morning.” She greeted him with a smile. So simple. So sweet.
It was perfect. So perfect that for a moment, he wished he could freeze it, the way the two of them could stop time from the fade.
“What are you thinking?” Claire asked.
Nix smiled back, banishing the drug to the back of his mind. “I’m thinking that we should go somewhere. Like … on a date.” The word felt inadequate and silly to the extent that Nix actually wondered for a split second if he’d mispronounced it. “We should go out,” he amended.
Before we play David and Goliath with The Society, we should have at least one day, just for us.
Claire glanced toward the coffee table, but he put his hand on the side of her cheek, brought her eyes back to face him. Claire tilted her head into his palm.
“Okay,” she said, with another smile—almost shy, twice as sweet. “Where do you want to go?”
Not the graveyard.
Not a dead senator’s midwestern mansion.
Nix’s lack of experience with the outside world was limiting when it came to brainstorming ideas for dates. “Once we fade, we can go anywhere,” he said, hedging to give himself more time to think.
Claire’s smile grew to almost blinding proportions. “Anywhere sounds nice.”
“Anywhere it is.”
Nix cleared his mind. He let everything but Claire trickle out—no drug on the table, no weapons under the porch. No Society. No Sensors.
Just Claire.
Shadow. Air. Nothing. Claire.
A new mantra. New words, pumping through his veins, forming a strange duet with the old one.
Less than—
Shadow—
Less than—
Air—
Nothing—
Claire.
Nix opened his eyes just in time to see Claire slip from reality, and he realized that it didn’t matter how many times he watched her do this. He’d always be completely absorbed in it, entranced by the way the light shined through her body, from the inside out. The expression on her face would always be new to him, precious.
Amazed. Awed. Ecstatic. Blissed.
“Let’s run.” Nix purposefully used her words from that first day, from the first time she’d crossed over.
They ran. And as the world bowed down at their feet, as Nix passed through the forest, as Claire blurred beside him, he accepted the fact that they’d never be Normal. Not even for a single date. Not even for just one afternoon.
They were more.
Anywhere ended up being a boardwalk in a small, touristy town—far enough away from their hideaway that they couldn’t have run there weighed down by solid limbs, but close enough to remind him of the town where he’d found her standing on the sidewalk in stolen clothes.
The two of them stopped running at the exact same moment, in the center of a modest crowd. Eventually, they’d cross back to the solid world. Do normal things. Eat lunch. Play games. Enjoy the view—but not yet.
Like a dancer moving through motions choreographed long before his time, Nix flowed toward Claire, closing the space between them. She met his eyes. Caught his hand, and the moment they touched, time stopped.
We shouldn’t be able to do this. The Society doesn’t know that Nobodies can do this. If they had, they never would have sent me after her, never would have risked—
Nix couldn’t finish the thought. He belonged to the fade and to Claire. There were no worries here. No thoughts. There was only light. And excitement. And the incredible rush that came with absolute power.
All around them on the boardwalk, there were people. Normal people on Normal dates, frozen in the middle of their Normal lives. A woman screamed at her child, her face contorted at an angle so unnatural that it looked like her skin was melting off the bones. A man was using his briefcase to part the crowd. An old man smelled a hot dog, his eyes closed. Nix wouldn’t have given the man a second glance, but for the almost imperceptible light around his face.
Around his nose.
Moving on instinct, Nix put himself between Claire and the man and scanned the perimeter of the boardwalk.
There—a woman walking with her hands held out slightly in front of her body. And there—a twenty-something with his left ear turned toward the crowd. Nix found the remaining two by looking for the energy their powers gave off, visible only from the fade.
Five of them. Seemingly harmless. Spread out across the area. But Nix knew. He knew. He’d seen lights like those before. In the halls of the institute.
Don’t think it. Don’t worry. Don’t. Lose. Your. Fade
Claire, sensing something was wrong, put her free hand on the b
ack of his neck, pulling him closer, forcing him to look at her and only her, as he’d done for her the night before.
“Claire.” He gave the word its due and let himself absorb their closeness, breathe it in and out until he could form the words he had to say. “There are Sensors here. I should have known. The Society never stopped looking for you. For us. I knew they were searching. I saw them—”
Any second, the two of them could lose their fade. Any second, these Sensors could make a move toward completing the job that Nix had left undone.
“We’re here, we’re together, we’re safe.” Claire’s words took on the rhythm of a song. “Just you and me.”
Nix couldn’t shake the fear, the crippling, solid, undeniable fear that Claire was in danger, that they might hurt her.
I can’t let them find her—hurt her—
“I’m going to lose my fade.” He spoke the words directly into her ear. “And when I do, you will, too, so you have to leave.”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
He struggled to hold on for just one more minute, just long enough to tell her what to do. “Sooner or later, we would have gone looking for a Sensor. We need information; they might have it, but five on two … the odds …”
Less than shadow. Less than air. Claire.
“Run. Get away from me so I don’t bring you back, too. Go to the cabin. Hide the serum. Bring me a gun.”
Nix held on. Closed his eyes. Concentrated on her smell. Remembered the way she tasted—and the whole time, he prayed she’d do what he said, because he couldn’t forget the limp body he’d carried onto that bus; the way a cleanup team had almost killed her once before.
“Okay.”
The word was the only warning Nix got before Claire pulled away from him and ran. The moment they broke contact, Nix could hear the sounds of time speeding up around them. He felt her absence and knew it was only a matter of seconds before he lost his fade. Weight began returning to his limbs, but he fought it, fought tooth and nail to keep his mind clear, his body immaterial, just long enough to give her a chance—
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