Nothing with a gun. Nothing that could step out of the fade and shoot that gun, if she had to.
Nix chose that moment to cross into her peripheral vision, and Claire had to force herself to look away. She knew that he could see straight through her fade, the same way she’d always been able to lock her eyes on to him, but she couldn’t let their gazes meet. She had to stay invisible to the Sensors. She had to be the one with the gun.
Nothing. I’m nothing. Stay nothing.
Claire eased herself back, away from the Sensors, into the wall. Now she was part of this place—unnoticed, unwashed, unloved. Back in reality, the boy she couldn’t think about was moving, silently and smoothly. He had a wind chime in one hand, a lobster plate in the other.
I can’t let him kill them.
The urgency of that thought undermined the even calm of Claire’s mind, but she fought against solidifying, a deeper instinct telling her that it wasn’t time yet. That before she could save him, she had to give him a chance to save himself.
Claire’s here.
She’d brought him the gun, the way he’d asked her to. He could fade and take it from her, shoot the Sensors. Once the bullets left the faded gun, they’d solidify. Two shots, two fewer Sensors.
I am what I choose.
Nix knew, in that instant, that if he let himself fade, he’d take the gun from Claire, and he’d shoot them. He’d kill them without a second thought. If he wanted to stay in control, whatever he did—or didn’t do—had to happen on this side of reality. He couldn’t fade.
Nix tightened his grip on the items he’d liberated from the front of this shop.
The Sensors meticulously scanned the piles of boxes and excess inventory all around them, looking for some sign that a Nobody had been there, unaware that if they’d turned a little to their left, they would have seen him, plain as day.
And these are the people who decided my life. Who gave Ione her information, so she could tell me who to kill.
Sensors weren’t all knowing. They weren’t all-powerful. These two had no idea that Claire was faded, just out of reach, and they had no idea that he was now standing directly behind them.
“Looking for me?” Nix wasn’t sure why he said the words. Maybe to get them to turn away from Claire. Maybe because he wanted to see their discomfort when they realized that they were his prey, and not the other way around.
The one whose ability rested in her hands went immediately for her gun, but to Nix, the pace of her motion was laughable. Adrenaline gave Nobodies an edge. The Sensors’ presence threw Nix’s body into fight mode, while his did nothing to theirs.
Emotions? Useless in a fight. The biochemical jolt that came with them? Gold.
Lightning quick, Nix feinted to the left and turned to block the woman’s movement toward her gun. He caught her wrist in the strings of the wind chime, and twisted viciously—first to trap her hand and then to break it. Meanwhile, the woman’s partner managed to get her gun unholstered, but Nix spun and lashed out with his left leg, knocking it out of her hands.
“Some of us have spent every day of our lives being molded into the perfect weapon,” Nix said, his voice high and light. “And some of us haven’t.”
He backed up his words with action, pinning the first Sensor’s good hand to the ground with his right foot and sending the commemorative plate he held in his left hand crashing into the second woman’s face.
Kill.
The impulse was strong, and it would have been so easy. He dropped the remains of the plate, except for a single shard.
I could slit their throats.
One motion, two dead Sensors, two fewer problems down the road. Nix wanted to do it. He needed to do it. Wanted desperately not to. He couldn’t think straight. But Claire was there, in his mind and in the wall. Watching.
I can’t.
So he didn’t kill them. Instead, he shifted all of his weight to his back foot and felt the crunch of the first Sensor’s bones under his heel.
No more hands. No more sensing.
The logic was elegant, the reality ugly, and Nix found the two sides of justice satisfying and nauseating both. Course set, he turned to the second woman, the one who’d scanned the room’s energy with her eyes instead of her hands.
Her face was already bleeding. And, having seen what he’d done to her partner, she knew what to expect. But still, the Sensor’s face was blank. Neutral. Her pupils weren’t dilated with fear.
She didn’t even seem to have a desire to run.
“You would have killed me,” Nix said, considering the shard in his hands as he mentally replaced the me with us. “But I’m not going to kill you.”
“Why not?” The woman’s interest seemed entirely academic, even as Nix brought the shard to her throat.
Nix looked over his shoulder, to the wall, to Claire standing there, visible to his eyes only.
Because I don’t want to, he thought, but out loud, all he said was, “Because.” And then he slashed the shard across the woman’s face.
No more eyes. No more sensing.
Done.
23
Claire couldn’t dwell on the liquid ease with which Nix moved, the way his eyes narrowed in an almost snakelike fashion as his limbs fell into a blur of motion. So instead, out of the corner of her faded eye, she watched the Sensors. Not their bodies, but the light around one’s hands and the other’s eyes. It was a glint, a glare, a flickering aura—the kind of thing that couldn’t be seen from outside the fade.
Power.
Claire held the gun, loose and ready at her side, but she didn’t take aim, didn’t pull the trigger. She watched the lights—the power—that had marked her view of the Sensors go out, like a firefly’s bulb pinched between two fingers, as Nix attacked them.
He didn’t kill them.
Claire stepped out of the wall, pulled by a force she couldn’t deny.
Nix could have killed them, but he didn’t.
He threw the shard in his right hand roughly to the ground. Walking toward her, he faded, and an instant later, they were beside each other, standing eye to eye with only a fraction of space between them.
“How many of them are there left?” Claire asked. Nix brushed his hand lightly over her cheek. The world froze around them.
“Two.” Nix moved his hand from her hair to the back of her neck, keeping contact. “We need to find them before they find us.”
Claire let her eye travel away from Nix’s to the Sensors on the floor, broken and bloody. Powerless. One of them was unconscious, but the other lay frozen mid-action, her mouth open, as if she were about to speak.
“What do you think she’s saying?” Claire asked.
Nix rubbed his thumb over her neck. “One way to find out.”
Claire nodded and took a step away from Nix’s touch. The moment they broke contact, the world around them fell back into motion.
“Target is gone. The Nobody just disappeared. I’m hurt. My eyes. God, my eyes …”
Claire glanced at Nix and lifted one invisible hand to the woman’s eyes. “Here,” she said and then she turned to the unconscious woman. “And here,” she indicated the woman’s broken hands. “There used to be light. There isn’t anymore.”
Nix looked away. “They used to be Sensors. Now they’re not.”
Faded, Claire wasn’t horrified. Her eyes didn’t linger on the broken bones, the blood. She was a step removed—and all she could think, over and over again, was that Nix hadn’t killed them. He could have—but he hadn’t.
The fox asked the little prince to tame him.
“Stay where you are, Elena. We’re about three minutes out. We’ll be there soon.”
Claire forced her faded brain to process the words coming from the Sensor’s communicator. Three minutes. The other Sensors would be here in three minutes. Moving on instinct, she grabbed Nix’s hand, her palm brushing lightly against his, their fingers interlocking.
“They’re close,” Claire said. “T
hey’re on their way here, and now”—she glanced meaningfully at his hand, at hers—“they’re frozen.”
“Two left,” Nix said again. “We’ll need to talk to at least one of them.”
Claire brushed her lips against his, grounding her thoughts—and his—in the fade. Here, now, them—that was what mattered.
“Two left,” Claire repeated. She lifted the gun and rested it against his chest between them. “I like our odds.”
Pulling away from Claire was hard.
The smell of her hair. The curve of her lips. The way her hand held the SIG P226. Claire was more than the sum of her parts, but even the tiniest details of her body drew Nix like a planet toward the sun.
Forget the Sensors. Forget what they’d come here to do. Forget everything. Why go back? Ever? What had the real world ever done for them?
But Nix knew he couldn’t do it. They had to disable the last two Sensors. Had to leave one of them in shape to talk.
Nix took a step away from Claire, putting space in between them, but keeping a tight hold on her hand. Together, they walked through the walls of the store, through the dozen or so wind chimes out front, frozen where the wind had left them.
The boulevard was silent, motionless. The remaining Sensors had taken to one of the side streets, but they weren’t hard to find. The older man had a nondescript nose and a pockmarked face, and he carried himself in a way that reminded Nix of a bloodhound—snout first.
Beside him, the younger man, the one Nix had recognized as the kind of person who liked playing the role of predator, had one ear tilted toward the ground and the other turned toward his partner.
The two men must have been talking—to each other, to the frantic, blinded Sensor via their comms—at the moment that Nix and Claire had stopped time.
“Lights,” Claire said, nodding toward their faces, her voice dreamy and rough, as if the owners of those faces did not want them dead.
“I see them.” The lights. The Sensors. The enemy.
“You see the lights,” Claire murmured, and Nix heard something in her voice that told him that concentrating on the sheen of energy that marked these men as Sensors kept her from thinking about them as people, thinking about what he—they—were about to do.
Nothing. No fear. No emotions. No hate.
It wasn’t a bad strategy, and Nix wondered if it was that simple. See the lights. Put them out.
Nix stepped forward, hand still in Claire’s. He couldn’t touch the Sensors from the fade, but there was some chance he might be able to touch the light.
To Normals, a Sensor’s power is invisible. It’s nothing. So am I.
Nix reached out his free hand and for a moment, he expected to be able to catch the light in his hand and pull the powers out of the Sensors’ bodies—no muss, no fuss, no blood. But the moment he made contact, a violent jolt traveled up his arm, from hand to shoulder.
Fuzziness.
Confusion.
Pain.
Is this what Claire felt when she brought the Null drug into the fade?
Nix barely had time to finish the thought before he realized that he’d dropped Claire’s hand. They were still faded, still invisible to the outside world—but the second they parted, time sped up.
“—rash and inadvisable.” The old man’s words picked up midsentence. Nix kept himself from reaching for Claire.
“Nix, what happened?” Claire asked. “Why—”
Nix held his index finger up to his lips, in part because he didn’t know the answer to Claire’s question, but also because he found himself wanting to hear what these Sensors had to say.
“Elena is out of commission. So are Margaret and Ryland. Either we find these Nobodies and we neutralize them, or they neutralize us.” The younger man was adamant—not because he was angry or scared.
Because he was titillated.
Because he wanted blood.
Nix concentrated on maintaining his fade. It was his fault they’d fallen back into the time line. He’d dropped Claire’s hand, and now that the Sensors were talking, he couldn’t bring himself to stop time again, not when eavesdropping might reveal something useful.
“If Ryland, Margaret, and Elena couldn’t neutralize the Nobodies, what makes you think you can?” The old man’s words were mild, as if his partner didn’t provoke any more emotion in him than their targets did.
“This!” The younger withdrew a small vial. At first, Nix thought it might be the poison The Society favored for inconspicuous kills, but one look at his adversary’s eyes corrected that assumption. A killer might romance their weapons, but they didn’t hunger for them, and the look in the younger Sensor’s eyes was akin to starvation.
Looks like tar. Feels like heaven. Nix thought of the drug Sykes had used. But this one looked different—lighter in color.
Almost transparent.
Back at the institute. Nix recalled what he’d seen in the laboratory the day he went back, his insides going ice-cold. Ione asking for a status update on Claire—and then demanding one on their “defense mechanism.” The needle tracks he’d seen on one of the Sensor’s arms.
“We’ve already taken the maximum dose of this particular drug, young man.” In the present, the older Sensor’s voice boomed. “Enough to partially inoculate us to our prey’s powers. Enough to tell me that our targets could be close, listening to every word we say.”
A breeze blew directly through Claire and Nix, and even though it didn’t affect them, when it reached the old man’s nose, he tilted his head back, just a bit.
“If they were listening to us, we’d be dead.” The young man, cocky, took a needle out of the inside pocket of his jacket, inserted it into the vial in his hand, and pulled back, filling the needle with a strange, nearly clear serum that glowed a light rose pink in the sunlight.
Not a poison.
A drug. And not the one Sykes had been taking. Not a Null drug.
Nix thought of the first Sensor he’d taken out. Ryland. His old trainer. The one he’d left, gasping for air on the pavement.
A man who never should have been able to get a lock on him, faded or not.
Maybe The Society’s current head of research wasn’t a complete waste of space. Maybe the Null drug wasn’t his only achievement.
“Erikson, don’t do this.” The older man stepped forward to grab the younger man’s arm, just before needle met skin. “You’re not approved for another dose for twenty-four hours. The side effects—you’re messing with forces you don’t understand. The drug doesn’t just protect you from their powers. It affects your own energy, alters the metaphysical building blocks of your entire—”
The old man’s words were lost as his partner shook him off. Needle slid into vein, and the younger man—Erikson—squeezed his eyes shut, the edges of his mouth pulling tight and tilting upward.
Pain.
Ecstasy.
And then he opened his eyes, and they were red. Not the light, translucent pink of the serum. Dark and bloodshot.
I wonder what Sykes looked like when he took the Null drug. Nix shook off the thought. He had to stay faded. With Claire.
“They’re here,” Erikson whispered, his pupils pulsing with some kind of artificial high. “I can’t see them. I can’t hear them. But they’re near.”
“Yes, yes, they are, faded most likely, and I would wager to guess that if they wanted us dead, we’d be so already.” The older man looked upward—probably because he didn’t know where exactly they stood. “They didn’t kill Ryland or Margaret. Elena either.”
The blood-eyed Sensor was too far gone to listen to reason. “I think I’ll kill the girl first. Make it watch.”
It as in Nix.
The words had their expected effect on him, and Nix felt a rush of unwanted emotion.
—Protect Claire, save her, even if I have to kill him, it’s my choice, mine—
“I hear you,” the object of Nix’s hatred sing-songed. “You’re here. You’re close. You’re h
iding.”
Nix reached for Claire, counting on her presence in the fade to ground his. She glanced at him, but stepped back from his touch, and Nix realized that she didn’t want to stop time. He wondered why.
Claire wrapped her left hand over the base of the gun she held in her right.
“Stop baiting them, Erikson.” The old man’s nose crinkled of its own volition as he spoke.
“Isn’t that what The Society teaches you?” Erikson sneered. “The best way to deal with a Nobody is to taunt them. Lure them. Pretend to care, and they’ll step right out into the open.” His hand went back into his jacket pocket, producing another vial of translucent liquid. “Ione and her ilk need to get with the times.”
Nix’s heart thudded in his ears. With another dose of the drug, would this Sensor be able to see through the fade? Would he become a Nobody, the way Senator Sykes had taken on the characteristics of a Null?
No.
It was impossible, and it was wrong. But not as wrong or as impossible as the idea of Claire, her eyes locked on their target, lifting her arms. Lifting the gun. Steadying her aim.
Ready to fire, just in case.
From the moment the smirking, sneering man started talking, Claire felt herself losing it—not the fade, but the ability to think and see things clearly. Whenever Nix got upset, he started flickering between the real world and the fade, but in that moment, with Nix at her side, Claire’s grip on nothingness was so perfect, so complete that she faced the opposite danger.
She felt like she might never go back. Like the rules and morals that governed the real world didn’t apply here.
Power. We have it. They don’t.
The more ugly, meaningless word-sounds poured out of the young Sensor’s smirking, sneering mouth, the less Claire felt like Claire, and the more she felt like something else. A girl with a gun.
Nobody.
Smirk-Sneer was holding another little pink-tinted vial, but Claire couldn’t talk her eyes into looking at it. She couldn’t parse the man’s voice into words. All she could do was watch the flecks of light around his ears.
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