For a long moment, the Sensor was silent, and then he reached slowly into his pocket. Nix’s pulse jumped in his throat, but Claire held him back, staying his trigger finger and allowing the man to withdraw a file.
A file, Nix thought. Someone from The Society was giving him a file. That could only mean one thing.
“You want us to kill someone?” he asked dully.
“No, I don’t want you to kill someone.” The man swallowed, his Adam’s apple bouncing like a buoy on water. “God help me, I want you to save her.”
Claire took the file gingerly from the Sensor’s hand. There was a part of her that wanted to forget how little she mattered to the outside world, and that part wanted to hurt this man for reminding her, but the moment his face began to crumble, Claire knew that she wouldn’t be able to do it.
It wasn’t the Sensor’s fault that he didn’t care about Nobodies. That was just the way things were. And this man, this dear old man who the granny inside of Claire was already sizing for a scarf—cared. Not about her and not about Nix, but about someone. About a her. And he cared about this her enough to risk everything for her safety.
“You knew your partner would overdose on the Nobody serum.” The conclusion was one that Claire spoke a millisecond before she actually reached it. “You wanted to talk to us. You planned this.”
“I warned him not to do it,” the old man said. “And I may have also been the one who left the extra serum unguarded in his presence.”
With shaking hands, Claire opened the file. There was a picture clipped to the front. A little girl, about seven or eight, with bright red hair and a scattering of missing teeth.
“Your daughter?” Claire guessed. “Or granddaughter?” She revised her guess for the man’s age.
“No,” the man said. “Subject N-632. Natalie.”
Claire flipped through the papers attached to the file. More pictures of the same child. She had wide green eyes and appeared openly fascinated with the world around her. The last picture gave Claire pause.
There were two other small children in the picture: dark-haired, blue-eyed children, being held underwater by gloved hands. Adult hands.
And the little red-haired girl was just watching, the same bright smile on her face.
Nix glanced down at the page and blanched. Claire felt him leaving her, going deep into his own memories, and she scooted closer to him in protest. She ran her hand up and down his arm, and slowly, he came back to her.
“They’re Nobodies,” Nix said.
“Natalie?” Claire asked.
“No. The other two.”
They couldn’t have been older than five, maybe six. One boy. One girl. Their resemblance to each other was obvious.
Their resemblance to Nix was a bullet straight to Claire’s heart.
“This must have been what you looked like,” Claire said softly, leaning into his body, forgetting that Nix still had a gun drawn on the Sensor. “The black curls. The eyes.” Claire swallowed, hard. “They look so scared.”
“Can’t fade when they’re scared,” Nix said, his throat closing in around the words and forcing them out as a grunt. The sound—anguished and gruff—turned Claire’s heart inside out. “Their trainers are holding them under, forcing them to fade, and they can’t, because they’re scared.”
Claire wished that she could melt into Nix. Physically become a part of his body and take away even a single layer of his pain.
“Who are they?” Nix asked. Claire felt his body tense with each labored word.
The Sensor shrugged. “Natalie is—”
“I don’t care who Natalie is. Tell me who they are.” Nix jabbed a finger at the dark-haired pair.
“Subjects X-17 and X-18,” the Sensor replied, pointing first to the little girl and then to the boy.
“X-17,” Claire repeated. That was what Sykes had demanded for his continued cooperation. What he’d wanted The Society to give him.
A weapon. A Nobody. For “reconnaissance” and “threat removal.” An assassin, a spy—
A child.
The Sensor cleared his throat. “I believe their trainers call them Nix.”
This time, Claire was the one who had to be restrained. She threw herself at the man, tearing into him—scraping her nails down his face, digging her teeth into his shoulder, kicking him, screaming.
Nix dragged her away.
“I thought you said Nobodies were incredibly rare.”
“Well, naturally, yes, they are. And rarely identified before the kill point, as you can imagine. But about Natalie—”
The man’s eyes were desperate.
“No,” Claire said, struggling against Nix’s hold. “Not about Natalie.”
It was one thing for this man to be cold toward her, and to Nix. But to children? Kids who’d never get to be forgotten at Walmart or left out of a school play or abandoned on a field trip to the zoo, because their caretakers were too busy attempting to drown them?
Claire knew suddenly what it was like to really, truly want to hurt another person. The instinct was overpoweringly strong, and if she hadn’t given Nix the gun, Claire might have done it.
“Please,” the man said, unaware of the reaction he’d provoked. “You have to listen to me. Natalie—”
Natalie, Natalie, Natalie. It was every other word out of the man’s mouth, and Claire wondered how he could justify it to himself—betraying everything for one little girl, and not being bothered in the least by the systematic torture of another.
“Tell us about these children, and we’ll listen about Natalie.” Nix’s voice was dull, and Claire wondered how he could be so calm. She curled up against his body, and he settled his free arm around her stomach.
“They’re Nobodies. Still quite young. Haven’t made their first kill. When The Society acquired Natalie, Dr. Milano insisted all three be housed together.” The man’s voice took on a reverent note every time he mentioned the little girl’s name. “They’ve been serving as donors, for the serum.”
“Donors?”
“To inoculate a Sensor against a Nobody’s powers, you need Nobody blood, among other ingredients. Powerful stuff, Nobody blood.”
Claire pictured these little ones. Crying. Bleeding. Not crying, once they’d learned their tears were worthless. Claire bent her lips inward, holding them in place with her teeth and trying desperately to hold everything together.
For Nix.
“Why do they look like me?”
The question laid Nix out bare. Claire could see all of his hurts, all of the things he’d never let himself want. She could see him as a little, little boy.
This boy.
“As I said before, Nobodies are notoriously hard to locate in the first few years of their lives. We haven’t managed to harvest one before the kill point from the general population since the mid-fifties. But they do have their uses, so in the past two decades, certain members of The Society have provided us with Nobody infants in exchange for positions of wealth and power within the organization.”
“And how exactly do they do that?” Claire asked, knowing from the rhythm of Nix’s heartbeat that he was suddenly terrified of the answer and incapable of asking it himself.
“Nobodies suffer from a rare birth defect. It has been found over the years that certain mothers—although Normal themselves—are more likely than others to produce defective children. The Society has been known to recruit these women. To offer them incentives.”
Claire couldn’t take listening to this. Not because it meant that her own mother might have had a genetic part in making her the kind of child a mother couldn’t love, but because every word the Sensor was saying indicated that Nix’s mother had willingly given him to The Society.
She’d sold him.
And based on the family resemblance between Nix and the children in the picture, Claire was willing to bet that she’d sold his siblings, too.
Nix hadn’t realized that it was possible to hate a nameless, faceless
woman. But he found, in retrospect, that it was actually quite easy.
Hating his mother—I had a mother and she gave me away—was easier than anything except for loving Claire. Just as natural. Just as inevitable. Just as sure.
I hate my mother. And it doesn’t matter, because my hatred doesn’t count.
The thought reminded Nix of the other people he’d hated, the other emotions he’d wasted on recipients who never looked at him with anything other than vague indifference.
His mentors.
His marks.
And Ione.
Ione, who was Normal, but had somehow climbed to the top of the corporate ladder to head The Society—or at least, the North American branch. Ione, who had never spared him more than a passing second. Ione, who had dyed her dark hair blond, to better match her light blue eyes.
Dark hair. Light eyes. Certain members of The Society have provided us with Nobody infants in exchange for positions of wealth and power.
“Ione is my mother.” Nix tried to process the idea. Mother was an abstract term to him. He’d never had one. He’d only seen one, or two, only allowed himself a few stolen moments watching and listening to their lullabies, from the shadows. “And these two.” He laid first his index finger and then the pinkie of his free hand on the picture Claire held. “Ione is their mother, too.”
“If you’d like to kill her, I have no objections. It will be necessary, if you want to truly free yourselves—”
“And the children,” Claire added. “We have to free them, too.” Nix marveled at her ability to think ahead. To plan. To believe that there was a better life for this Nix and that Nix than there had been for him.
Do you know why we call you Nix, child?
Because that was what they called all Nobodies. It wasn’t even a name. Not really. And these little ones, they deserved names. They deserved naps and stories and hugs. And Claire.
They deserved to be loved.
“Yes! Yes! The children. Once the North American institute is destroyed, and the serums and formulas along with it, you can take them. Hide them. Give them a fresh start.”
“I know the institute. I lived there. If there were other Nobodies on the premises”—brother, sister—Nix’s voice caught as he tried not to think the words—“I would have known.”
“The way you knew about the serums?” the Sensor asked. “The North American institute has two parts: one is aboveground, one is below. They have separate entrances, separate staffs, separate mandates. It’s a typical safeguard against Nobodies—you walk through walls, you rise through ceilings, but you don’t, as a general rule, attempt to sink down to the center of the earth and stumble across things buried four stories underground.”
The words began pouring out of the man’s mouth faster, his eyes glowing with an almost feverish insistence. “I’m giving you information you didn’t have, information you need. You want to destroy the drugs, the research, to weaken The Society and fall off its radar. I can help you, and all you have to do is save the children.”
At first, Nix wondered why the Sensor seemed so desperate to save “the children,” and then he remembered the desperate repetition of the red-haired girl’s name—Natalie, Natalie, Natalie—and Nix recognized, finally, the manic glint in the Sensor’s eyes and the root of his willingness to throw everything away for Subject N-632.
“She’s a Null.”
The Sensor’s lips trembled. “She’s eight years old. She’s beautiful and she’s bright, and it’s not her fault she’s different. She could be good. She could be different. You have to save her. You have to.”
Eight years old, and already capable of manipulating a full-grown Sensor into crippling The Society’s reach in North America.
Nix stared at “Natalie.” In the picture, she looked on, vaguely interested, as his little brother and sister struggled against the hands that held them in the baby-size dunk tanks.
Her indifference wasn’t because they were Nobodies.
It was because she was a Null. Discovering that some of his victims had been Normals hadn’t changed Nix’s feelings toward those he’d killed who weren’t. Murderers. Serial killers. Psychopaths.
I’ve killed, but I can stop. They can’t. They can’t ever stop.
“You realize she’s a monster,” Nix said evenly, trying not to let his thoughts show on his face. “That she’s doing this to you.”
“She’s not. She’s a child! And she’s sweet. She is …” The man—who didn’t seem like a Sensor any longer—was equal parts adamant and broken. “If you want them, you have to take her. I can give you the North American institute. I can give you weaknesses, blueprints, anything you want or need. Just promise to make her safe.”
Nix could do that. He could lie. And The Society could come apart at the seams, just like that.
“We promise.” Claire beat him to it, and Nix cursed himself. He knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t lie. Not about this. She’d made the promise with every intention of keeping it, and she would never understand that a little, little girl could be dangerous.
So dangerous that The Society should have known better than to think it could keep her caged.
“If she’s as sweet as you say,” Nix said slowly, “then why don’t the other Sensors see it? Why don’t the scientists?”
Claire arrived at the answer before their captive actually articulated it. “If there’s a Null-2, there must be a Null-1, right? A serum that protects people from a Null’s powers? Are you taking it?”
The man shook his head.
“Were you?”
He nodded. Nix felt something, akin to pity, in the pit of his stomach.
“And when I stopped taking Null-1, that’s when I met Natalie. The real Natalie, not Subject N-632.”
Nix looked back at the little girl. She was small. And powerful. And sooner or later, she’d be dangerous.
But that wasn’t his problem, and it wasn’t Claire’s. It wasn’t the little boy Nix’s or the little girl, Nix’s—and if this Nix had his say, it never would be. They’d never feel a large hand in the small of their backs, pushing them toward that first kill.
Terrifying. Horrifying. Addictive.
Nix ground his teeth. The Nulls of the world weren’t his problem anymore. They weren’t his responsibility, and if this Sensor wanted little Natalie, the ticking time bomb, he could have her. It took Nix less than a second to come to the decision that for Claire and the little ones, he’d gladly sell his soul. Go against everything he’d believed in once.
Not. My. Problem.
“Fine. The Null lives. The Society—this portion, at least—dies. Now tell us everything we need to know and get the hell out of here.”
25
Claire let out a breath that she hadn’t realized she was holding. She’d promised to save the Sensor’s Natalie before it had occurred to her that Nix might not agree to do it, and that realization had cut her nearly in two. Because Null or not, manipulative or not, born wrong or not, Natalie was just a little girl.
A little, little girl who couldn’t help what she was any more than little Claire had been able to help being left and forgotten and ignored.
Null drug. Black hole. Hurts. Wrong.
Claire thought of Evan Sykes’s miracle drug. Null-2—made with little Natalie’s blood—had turned Abigail’s father into a pod person. Uncaring. Manipulative. Cruel. For a moment, Claire was overcome with a still-frame daydream, chilling in its simplicity: Natalie smiling.
She’s just a little girl.
“The institute is extremely secure. You’re familiar with the upper level; it’s nearly identical to the sublevels. For both, Sensors are scanned by an entire team before being allowed into or out of the building, and only a handful of Normals have the kind of access necessary to travel past the first floor. Besides Ione and Dr. Milano, no Normals have access to the sublevel entrance at all. You’ll have to fade to get in unannounced, and with a subset of the security team on the serum,
there is an increased chance that your presence will be detected.”
Claire focused on what their informant was saying. He sounded as if he’d practiced these words many times, as if he’d whispered them to Natalie as a bedtime story when he’d promised, again and again, to get her out.
“You weren’t able to see through our fades,” Nix cut in. “You didn’t stop taking the Nobody serum, correct? Just the Null one?”
Claire knew what Nix was really asking. They needed to know just how potent the serum was. Their informant hadn’t been able to see them in the fade. His partner had only been able to do so after his third dose. If this was the serum’s normal efficacy, it wasn’t much of a threat.
Yet.
The Sensor cleared his throat, a gargling sound that reminded Claire that he was human. And old. “I’m still on the Nobody serum. It’s probably the only reason that I was able to integrate the information I’ve been able to gather about the two of you. I have a horrible attention span, and my senses and memory aren’t what they used to be—”
“What are the chances of someone at the institute pulling an Erikson?” Nix asked, cutting the man off and moving on to his next question without segue.
The Sensor was nonplussed. “Erikson was remarkably stupid. One does not obtain a position on the institute’s security force with that kind of stupidity. No one else will double up doses—not without Dr. Milano’s approval, and he won’t give it until the full effects of a single dose are documented. No one will be able to see through your fade, but they might be slightly more aware of your presence on an instinctual level, and once you stop fading, they will be more likely to explicitly register your existence and less likely to ignore you than they otherwise would be.”
For what seemed like the hundredth time, the Sensor shrugged. Claire felt Nix seething beside her, and she leaned into him, trying to intuit why.
He wants answers. He wants to be alone.
Nix couldn’t stand to feel emotions around other people. He’d been taught that he didn’t deserve them. Sensors were the ones who’d imparted that lesson. And right now Claire could see, in the lines of Nix’s body and the set of his jaw, that he was trying very hard not to feel anything.
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