Nix solidified on the boardwalk. Life went on all around him. The Sensors continued searching, and Nix took a step back. To think. To plan.
He and Claire needed information. The Sensors might have it. But they also might sense him, and they undoubtedly had orders to kill him—or Claire, when she returned—on sight. Five on one, five on two—either way, Nix didn’t like the odds.
They want to hurt Claire.
The thought—the same one that had made it impossible for Nix to stay faded with her by his side—brought the predator inside him to the surface now. The Society had trained him to hunt. They’d trained him to kill. They’d made him the perfect assassin.
Time to even the odds.
Claire felt Nix’s absence the second he left the fade. If she’d been standing next to him, if she’d seen it happen, she wouldn’t have been able to resist following, but she was running, through people and shops and trees, and she refused to allow her limbs to slow down, refused to let her mind think about the half of her soul that was missing.
I’m nothing. I’m Nobody.
She was Nobody, and she was running.
Situation: What if he were here beside me? What if we were racing? Floating, blurring, blending—
The wind can’t touch her body, but his breath can. She can feel him behind her.
“Winner takes all,” he whispers into her neck. Claire laughs, pushing down the desire to turn around, to take everything she wants, to allow the power to explode out from her body and connect with his.
He streams past her, and she lets out a gasp, full of mock outrage.
Faster, farther, more—
They run, neck in neck, their steps in sync. His heart beating in unison with hers. Faster, farther—
There.
“End of Situation.” Claire whispered the words as she made it back to the cabin, and the moment she let go of it, her mind processed the reality she’d kept at bay: Nix was gone. She’d left him with the Sensors.
As far as triggers went, it was a good one.
Bones crunching, skin screaming, pores weighted down with cement.
It was all Claire could do to stay on her feet. Physicality had never been so brutal. It was like she didn’t fit in her own body anymore. She forced herself to straighten, to lift her eyes from the ground to the bookshelf in the corner.
“Hide the serum. Bring me a gun.” Claire repeated Nix’s orders like a prayer. “Hide the serum. Bring me a gun.”
She allowed herself the time it took to take one breath, then two, and then she moved, grabbing the Null drug off the coffee table. Her limbs became accustomed to movement again, and she walked out the front door and crawled under the porch, where she’d hidden Nix’s weapons. Digging her fingernails into the dirt, she made a small hole and dropped the onyx-colored drug in, before covering it again. Then she turned her attention to the weapons.
An eternity ago, Nix had laid his weapons out on the counter and told her to choose. He’d put a gun in her hand and told her to use it, and she’d refused.
That Claire was a different Claire.
She picked up the gun, the one Nix had aimed at her chest the day they met. The weapon was heavy in her palm and it made her hands feel tiny, but she kept a grip on it. To bring an object into the fade, you had to consider it an extension of yourself. After bringing the Null drug into the fade, imagining this gun—Nix’s gun—as an extension of her hand, her arm, her body, was nothing.
And an instant later, so was she.
22
Nix wove his way in and out of the crowd, putting distance between himself and the Sensors, choosing his vantage point carefully. If one of his targets managed to approximate his location, fine. Nix would see them coming. Otherwise, he’d wait for them to split up and then he’d deal with them, one by one.
Individually, Sensors walked past him in the hallways of the institute every day, barely registering his existence. As a team, they were far more dangerous, and yet they didn’t have the good sense to stay together, which told Nix that though they were prepared to find their targets, they had no reason to believe that he and Claire were actually in this town, on this boardwalk. This team was one of many. Ione’s protocols and her threats and her team of scientists could only do so much.
They don’t know I’m here.
The thought—and the fact that Claire was out of immediate danger—made it easier for Nix to concentrate, to regain the certainty that if he had to fade, he probably could. For now he watched as the five Sensors transitioned from scanning the streets to canvassing the tiny boardwalk stores, split off into smaller units.
These people want Claire to die.
Nix registered their movements and memorized their faces.
One male, late sixties, large body, beady eyes.
Two females, middle-aged. Most remarkable thing about them? The guns holstered under their shirts.
One male, young. Twenties, maybe. Smiling. Excited. This one, Nix recognized innately as a killer. This one liked killing. He wanted Nobody blood.
Claire’s blood.
Nix ground his fingernails into his palms, leaving bloody half-moons in their wake, but he forced himself to concentrate, to track the last Sensor as he stepped out of a store and began walking in the direction of Nix’s perch at the edge of the crowd.
I should probably kill him. He can’t kill Claire if he’s dead, and we only need one of the Sensors alive to talk.
The thought wasn’t as natural as it once would have been for Nix, but it still formed far too easily in his mind, as the Sensor in question came within fifteen feet of Nix, and then ten.
“Nobody.”
The Sensor’s voice was familiar, but Nix couldn’t quite place it.
“I know you’re here, Nix.”
Nix didn’t move. He wasn’t armed; the Sensor probably was.
I could kill him.
“I know you’re here,” the Sensor said again. “I can taste you. Or rather, the lack of you.” The Sensor in question was looking near him. Not directly at him, but near him. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
Nix placed the voice. One of his trainers. The one who’d had him from age six to ten. The one who’d watched him drowning and never moved to loosen the straps. The one who’d pressed a knife into his palms and shown him how to cut up a corpse.
Ryland.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” the ghost from Nix’s past said. Older. Grayer. Lying.
“You’re confused. I know this is confusing,” the man said, velvet voiced and oozing sincerity. “You have to trust that we’re doing the right thing. For everybody.”
Nix took stock of his situation:
No weapons.
Five feet away from one of the people who’d taught him to kill—made him kill.
Unable to move without risking full exposure.
Nix smiled. They thought they could talk to him. They thought they could bring him back. They thought he’d latch on to any sliver of false hope that he was wanted. Needed.
They were wrong.
“Less than shadow. Less than air.”
The Sensor probably thought Nix was throwing the words he’d been taught back in his teacher’s face, but he wasn’t. Nix didn’t care about this man. Or The Society. Or Nulls.
Or anything.
Claire was there, at the periphery of his consciousness. She’d always be there, but right now there was something bigger in his mind than even her. This man wasn’t his teacher anymore. Nix wasn’t his student. He wasn’t nine years old.
This was graduation.
Slipping into the shadow world was as easy as it would have been if Claire had been standing beside him, and Nix was greeted by the awareness that somewhere, she was faded, too.
She’s safe.
And she was about to get safer.
Sidling forward, Nix approached the man who’d placed weapon after weapon in his small, pudgy hands. Who’d drugged him and buried him, six feet under, in the name of
science. In the name of the greater good.
Lies.
It didn’t matter.
There was no room in Nix’s head for memories. He was Nobody. Nothing. Immaterial.
And Nobodies never got caught.
Nix’s old mentor straightened the moment Nix slipped into the fade. Disconcerted, but not afraid, the man took a step backward, and he moved his head slightly, to speak into his wrist. Nix sprang forward. He thrust his hand into Ryland’s body, and it went straight through his neck. Unaware that Nix was inside him, the Sensor continued giving even-keeled orders into a communication device on his watch. From his tone of voice, he might as well have been talking about the weather. “The boy is here, but he slipped away. The girl will follow. Use him to trap her, and then terminate both.”
That was what The Society did to those who stood in their way. Wyler. Sykes. Nix.
That should have made Nix angry, but Claire wasn’t in immediate danger, and Nix managed to wall off his emotions, the way he had before they’d met. Instead, he concentrated on cold, hard facts.
Fact: Ryland had taste buds that allowed him to taste energy—or the lack thereof—a skill that was useful for locating Nobodies in the real world, but not in the fade.
Fact: Ryland was heavily armed: two knives, two guns, possibly a grenade. None of which could touch Nix until and unless he became physical again.
Fact: Nix had no weapons. No physical body. No weaknesses, and no strengths.
Faded, Nix couldn’t push Ryland, and Ryland couldn’t push back. Nix tilted his head to the side and looked into the man’s eyes, dragging his ghost of a hand over his target’s chest in the shape of an X.
Until he’d met Claire, Nix had never thought much about the way that energy worked, the ins and outs of a Nobody’s powers. For her, he’d put everything he’d learned into words.
He’d told her that you could take a physical object with you into the fade if you considered that object an extension of yourself. Dragging his immaterial hand over the Sensor’s chest once more, Nix considered the reverse. Stands to reason that if you don’t consider something part of you, it stays behind.
Nix pushed his hand into Ryland’s body and moved it down, down, down—his wrist in between the man’s rib cage, his fingers behind it. Nix knew human anatomy. He knew how to put bullets into hearts to stop them from beating, and into skulls, directly between the eyes.
They taught me that.
Nix knew where to find the Sensor’s heart.
And based on what he’d taught Claire, he knew how to grab it. How to squeeze it. How to stop its beat, without any weapons at all.
This hand isn’t mine. I have no hands.
Claire had always been able to imagine anything, to convince herself of anything. That was how he suspected she’d survived on her own, before he’d told her what they were. She’d had imaginary friends, imaginary interactions. That was why she’d picked up fading so quickly. All she had to do was imagine something, and it became real to her.
When Nix thought of Claire, it was easy enough for him to do the same.
This hand tried to kill Claire. It isn’t mine.
Nothingness slipped away from the appendage, one finger at a time, and though Nix couldn’t feel his own hand, though it was as gone to him as it would have been if he’d spontaneously transformed into an amputee, he could see it.
He could see it, solid and wrapped around the Sensor’s heart.
Ryland, blind to what was happening, stopped speaking into his watch. He stumbled. He gasped. He clutched at his chest.
Squeeze. Squeeze. Squeeze.
Nix cheered on the hand that wasn’t his.
Nobodies don’t need weapons. We are weapons.
At the word—Nobodies, plural—Claire’s face came unbidden into Nix’s mind. Her eyes, bright, inquisitive, tearing up. Her eyelashes—long and not quite black. Her heart-shaped face. The way her bangs never fell in quite the same way from one day to the next.
This hand brushed Claire’s hair out of Claire’s face. This hand has held hers. This hand is hers, and so am I.
Nix felt his fingers, one by one, slipping back into the fade as he reclaimed them. Wholly immaterial once more, the Nobody pulled his hand out of Ryland’s chest. The man fell to his knees. Nearby, a woman screamed, and a ripple effect spread through the crowd.
“Somebody, quick! Call nine-one-one! I think this guy’s having a heart attack!” Pedestrians rushed to the Sensor’s side. Nix took a step back.
I didn’t kill him. I could have killed him, and I didn’t.
In Nix’s mind, the words were tinged with equal amounts accusation and awe. Killing Ryland might have made Claire safer. It would have weakened The Society by one one-hundredth, or one one-thousandth or some margin, trivial or not.
If I’d held on a little bit longer, I’d have killed him. He’d be dead.
“He’s still breathing. That’s right, buddy, just breathe. The ambulance is on the way. Can you talk? Are you okay?”
The pedestrian leaning over Ryland had no idea who or what he was talking to. Maybe, if he’d heard the casual manner in which his “buddy” had ordered Claire’s death, Mr. Good Deed wouldn’t have been so keen to save his life.
The life Nix hadn’t snuffed out, because he’d thought of Claire. Because he had a choice.
I am what I am. I am what I want to be.
The Sensor’s face sagged on one side, and as Nix watched, the man’s tongue crept out of his mouth, limp and useless.
He’s trying to taste for me, and he can’t.
“Oh, man. I think he’s having a stroke!”
“Don’t worry,” Nix whispered to the Good Samaritan, backing away and into the crowd as the paramedics swarmed the sidewalk. “He’ll live.” The words were battery acid on his tongue, even as his insides warred. “He’ll live, and he’ll recover—mostly anyway.”
But he wouldn’t be tasting for Nobodies anytime soon.
Nix slipped back through the crowd unnoticed.
One down, four to go.
Claire knew the second Nix stepped into the fade. And she knew the second he left it. The sensation was a cousin, twice removed, from the one she’d had the first time he looked at her. A faint chill, a subtle shattering of things that were.
Her feet touched down on the boardwalk, but she kept her fade. The gun in her hand felt lighter than it had in the solid world, and she found herself drawn to the weapon. She held it up in front of her face, staring.
She knew, in the back of her faded brain, that she’d brought this weapon for someone else to use, but there was another not-quite thought that was just as insistent—protect Nix, always tries to protect me, can’t let him use it—that made faded Claire think that maybe she’d brought the gun for herself. Her hand warmed the metal until they were the same temperature, and Claire concentrated on the sleek angles of the gun, the muted power of the bullets that bided their time in the belly of the beast. She’d brought the gun to the fade.
It was hers.
Claire kept her eyes trained on the gun as she walked through the crowd, barely conscious of the fact that she was passing through people in a way that would have thrilled her the day before.
Nix.
She couldn’t let her mind fully form the word, couldn’t think about the fact that he was close and solid without feeling the pull of reality at the edge of her consciousness. She could, however, give in to the magnetic pull of Nix’s presence. Claire had always had a horrible sense of direction, but faded Claire had a perfect sense of Nix.
Her feet—touching the ground in only the most cursory manner—propelled Claire toward a tiny tourist shop, the kind that sold plates with cartoon lobsters painted on them, and wind chimes made of fake seashells, and shirts emblazoned with statements of various levels of cheese and impropriety. The sign on the door—BACK IN TEN—was crooked, and there was a smiley face at the bottom. This was the kind of place that would have made her smile when she was jus
t plain Claire, but now she was Nix’s.
“Come on,” she whispered to the gun. Light on her feet and giddy with anticipation, Claire flowed through the walls of the shop and into the back room.
Nix was there, but she refused to look for him. She closed her mind against the beacon of his presence, refused the rush of blood to her heart.
If she crossed over, he’d want the gun, and if he had the gun, he might use it. If she stayed in the fade, she could cover him. Protect him—from the Sensors, from himself.
Claire listened—not for Nix’s silent footsteps, but for the reason he’d come to this shop. The Sensors. With steely effort, she managed to focus her eyes and mind on the material world and was overcome with a vague sense that this particular duo, two women, midforties, were not what she had imagined they would be.
“Which one’s which?” Claire whispered, unsure whether she was talking to herself or the gun. “What do these Sensors do?”
Claire watched and she listened the way that only someone who had spent a very large amount of time people watching could. The woman on the left scanned the room in a gridlike pattern. The one on the right walked with her hands held out in front of her body.
Extrasensory sight, extrasensory tactile sensations—and neither one of the Sensors had any idea that there was a boy lurking behind them, or that Claire was standing in the fade, a hair’s breadth away from their paltry, solid bodies.
“Ryland has gone out of contact,” the woman holding out her hands said.
“Do you think they got him?” her companion asked, after a single beat.
“Who?” The first woman wrinkled her brow and then touched her forehead, and the touch seemed to anchor her thoughts. “The Nobodies?”
The women did not seem bothered by the prospect that one of their colleagues might have been “got.” They weren’t scared. They weren’t agitated. They were neutral.
Claire hated neutral. Neutral was being ignored and stepped over and having the same thing written in your yearbook every summer.
Triggers.
Claire stayed away from those hated thoughts and re-centered herself in the fade. She closed her eyes and breathed in the not-quite air. She was powerful. Wispy. Nothing.
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