“I assume you’re Nix. One of them anyway. You lived here. Tried to kill yourself once. Typical.” Sergei’s words were hard-won. Even for the most powerful Sensor in North America, it took a great deal of effort to remember specific facts about someone who didn’t matter in the least. Those four sentences were probably all Sergei had on Nix—
And they were enough.
Enough to make him think about things he didn’t want to think about—
Make it messy, they’d told him—and he had. And then he’d come back to the institute and turned the knife on himself.
“Claire.” Nix said her name out loud. If he could think about her, he could stay faded. Out of Sergei’s reach. Invincible, but for his solidified hand. “Claire.”
The second time he said her name, she appeared, rising up through the floor like an angel, or a ghost. She was on him in an instant, wrapping her arms around his waist, burying her head in his chest, giving him every reason in the world to stay exactly where he was.
“You’re mine,” she said, banishing Sergei’s venomous words as time froze around them. “You belong here. You belong to me.” Claire grabbed his arm, his solid arm, and then she met his eyes.
“I love this arm.” She trailed her eyes down the length of the limb. “I love that hand.”
This hand has touched Claire. This hand is mine, the way that I am hers.
Nix’s hand faded, and so did the key. Because that key was their future. His and Claire’s. It was a part of them. A part of the only us he’d ever have. Claire locked her hands around his elbow and pulled, and together, they stumbled backward, Nix whole once more.
His hand should have hurt. It was doubtlessly bruised, possibly broken, but there was no place for pain in the fade.
“Key.” Nix stated the obvious, staring down at his hand.
“Key,” Claire replied, removing her hand from his arm and holding up the key she’d retrieved.
In reality, Sergei, frozen one second and moving the next, sensed that he’d lost his grip on Nix’s psyche and roared, an enraged bull seconds away from storming through the china shop.
Nix’s first impulse was to reach for Claire and stop time again, to buy himself precious seconds to think, but any way you sliced it, eventually, the two of them would have to split up again, and Sergei’s motion would pick up right where it left off, alerting the rest of the institute to their presence. There was no way of stopping him. No way of keeping him contained.
The Society can’t know we’re here. The first thing they’ll do is hide the children. Or eliminate them.
Nix moved quickly. In one fluid motion, he withdrew a gun from his side. He took aim. And he fired.
My choice this time. Mine.
Nix didn’t dwell on it. He didn’t look to Claire for her reaction. They’d set this thing in motion together, and he knew without asking that they were going to see it through.
The feel of cool metal in his hand brought Nix fully into the present.
“Here,” Claire said, pressing her key into his palm and using her fingers to close his around it. “Now you have both of them.”
That was all she said. She didn’t say the other things, the obvious ones. Nothing about what he had to do next: initiate the meltdown; nothing about where she was headed: to the sublevels hidden deep underground and the little ones Nix couldn’t allow himself to think about.
Nothing about the dead man on the floor.
Because at this point, there was nothing left to do but finish it.
27
Claire pulled herself away from Nix. Without a word—no good-byes—she willed herself downward—down through floors and ceiling, ceilings and floors and layers and layers of earth to the sublevel basement that had existed under Nix’s feet for years.
Maze.
Labyrinth.
Claire knew a dozen words that would have been appropriate for the sublevels of the institute. Natalie’s Sensor had given Claire a good idea of where the children were housed, but faded, Claire couldn’t concentrate on words or paces or north northwests.
This way.
Claire didn’t need directions. She didn’t need a plan. The same thing that had always allowed her to feel Nix set her on an unmistakable path.
Toward them.
Three steel doors, locked from the outside. Five armed men, standing guard. Two-way mirrors. White noise, layered with a sound that Claire couldn’t pinpoint, blared from speakers. If she’d been solid, she might have found it distracting, but the fade had its own kind of music.
This way.
Layer after layer, door after door, Claire made her way toward those Like Her. The institute had its treasure buried so deep that trying to get to it in solid form would have been like getting to the innermost layer of a set of Russian stacking dolls.
Cage inside a cage inside a cage.
For Claire, it was nothing. And for the first time, it occurred to her that if they could fade, all of these safeguards should have been nothing for Nix’s siblings, too.
Unless there was something—someone—they weren’t willing to leave behind.
Unable to fully entertain the thought, Claire walked through a final steel door and into a large room with four white walls. In one corner, there were three white beds; the opposite wall was lined with mirrors; and in the very center of the room, three silent children sat in a triangle formation, their backs to one another. Natalie was facing the door.
The little Null’s eyes didn’t register Claire’s presence, but as Claire came forward, the other two occupants of the room whirled around.
They can hear me through the fade, Claire thought. They can see me. Just like Nix.
Natalie, unaware of what had caused the other children’s reaction, noted her objection to such behavior. “Don’t move. That’s the rule. If you break the rule, you’ll get punished. If you get punished, they might break you. We can’t play when you’re broken, and I don’t want to turn the jump rope myself.” Natalie’s voice was high and clear, and even from the fade, Claire realized that it had a sweetness to it, a quality that would have been compelling if Claire had been solid.
We can’t play when you’re broken.
Claire found herself wondering what exactly broken meant. And why exactly Natalie’s biggest concern with her playmates’ potential for breaking was that they might be too battered to turn her rope. For the moment, though, Claire couldn’t think about Natalie, couldn’t ponder her words. All she could do was look at the little boy and little girl who flanked her side. And the moment she met their eyes, Claire knew that she was going to lose her fade.
She said a brief prayer that up on the main floor of the institute, Nix didn’t lose his.
If he does, he’s dead.
That was the thought that greeted Claire the moment she became solid. It was terrifying, paralyzing, and all consuming, and she didn’t have time for it. The guards watching this room might not register her presence immediately, but if they were taking the Nobody serum, if they’d been partially inoculated to her powers, they’d notice her eventually, and all hell would break loose. She had to get the twins and Natalie back to the fade before that happened.
And the sooner she got back to the fade, the safer Nix would be.
“Who are you?” Natalie demanded, not bothering to look Claire in the eye.
Claire smiled at her. “I’m Claire,” she whispered. “I’m here to take you all away.” And then, to Natalie’s absolute shock, Claire turned her back on the little girl and brought one hand up to gently touch Nix’s siblings—shoulder, arm.
Brush the hair out of their faces.
Look them in the eyes.
“I’m Claire,” she said again. “I’m here for you.”
“You’re here for me,” Natalie said helpfully. “I told him to get you. I don’t want to play this game anymore. I want to leave.”
“We’re all going to leave,” Claire said. “All three of us. And to do that, we have to work tog
ether.”
“They have to leave, too,” Natalie agreed. “They have to leave because they’re mine. I don’t like it when they’re gone.”
The two little Nobodies—Claire couldn’t bear to think of them as Nix and Nix—moved closer to Natalie, their little bodies nearly touching hers.
They love her.
To Claire’s surprise, Natalie closed the gap, grabbing each of the other little ones by their arms, a little too hard.
“They have to come, too. They’re mine.”
Like they were toys. Or dogs.
It didn’t seem to have occurred to the little girl that Claire might want to get her companions out of her own accord. Then again, chances were good that the children had never met a grown-up—or almost grown-up—Nobody. Natalie had never seen anyone who would have given either of the Nixes the time of day.
“I would never leave them behind,” Claire told Natalie solemnly, and then she made eye contact with first the little girl and then the little boy. “Never, ever, ever.”
The distinct sound of rattling—locks churning, doors opening, yelling—interrupted Claire’s promise.
“We’re going to go away now,” Claire told Nix’s little siblings. “We’re going to go somewhere no one can ever hurt you, and Natalie’s going to go, too.”
“We tried,” the little boy said. “We tried and tried, and Dr. Milano got mad, because we couldn’t do it. But if we do it, they’ll take Natalie away.”
“Nobody’s taking Natalie away,” Claire said, and then she was struck by the double meaning of the sentence she’d just uttered.
Nobody is taking Natalie away.
“I can fade, too,” Claire told the children. “And if all three of us fade, and if we make Natalie a part of us, the very most important part—”
Natalie smiled, and the expression, though aesthetically adorable, was chilling to Claire. Natalie was used to being the most important part. She couldn’t fathom being anything less.
Doesn’t care about anyone else. This could end badly. This could end very—
“Let’s close our eyes,” Claire said, her tone making her feel like either a preschool teacher or a drill sergeant, and unsure of which. “Less than shadow. Less than air.”
It wasn’t her motto, but she was betting it was theirs, same as it was Nix’s. The Society would have taught it to them, made them believe it, the same way they’d taught it to him.
“Less than shadow, less than air.” The children’s reaction was instantaneous. Nix’s brother and sister joined hands and closed their eyes, and Claire willed them to succeed at shutting out the rest of the world.
“You’re nothing,” she said, hating herself for telling them a thing they’d already heard said too matter-of-factly, too often. “You’re Nobody.”
From outside the children’s chamber, Claire could hear the muffled sound of yelling.
“They watch me,” Natalie said blithely. “All the time, every day, they watch me. They know I’m talking to you. They know my Nobodies moved, and now they’re going to break them again!”
She stamped one foot, and Claire could feel the compulsion to make Natalie happy worming its way into her blood. She blocked it, thinking of her Nix and these little Nixes. Claire forced her own mind to still and spoke words designed to make the little ones do the same.
You can do this, she told them silently, unable to praise them out loud. You’re strong. You can do this.
“Be nothing,” she told them out loud, but even as the words exited her mouth, she accepted that she couldn’t heed her own advice. The voices outside their chamber were getting louder, closer, and the locks she’d walked through, the precautions that had to be more for Natalie’s benefit than the twins’ were being quickly undone.
Click. Click. Click.
The sound of the innermost door’s lock, more suited to a bank safe than a bedroom, told Claire that she didn’t have much time, and in a single motion, she thrust the children—all three of them—behind her. Her right hand went for her gun, and her left managed to grasp the knife Nix had strapped to her side, just as the guards burst into the room.
“Keep going,” she told the children, her eyes flashing, weapons at the ready.
“Less than shadow, less than air,” the tiny, childish voices chanted behind her. “Less than shadow, less than—”
“I’m scared!” one of the children—Claire couldn’t see which, though she knew immediately that it wasn’t Natalie—said.
“Don’t be. Don’t be scared,” Natalie instructed. “I just said not to.” Clearly, to Natalie, that settled things. Claire found herself hoping that the little Null was right.
They aren’t faded yet, Claire thought. The guards will kill them before they let me take them.
And that was the last conscious thought Claire had, because the second she heard the first gunshot, instinct took over. Claire threw her arms out to the side, gun in one hand, knife to the other, and within a breath—less than—she fell into the fade and pushed it outward from her body.
This space is mine. The bullet is in this space. It’s mine.
She couldn’t let the guards shoot Nix’s siblings, and the only way to protect them was to—
Fade.
She felt the power burst out of her body, covering the space around her. You could take an object into the fade with you if you considered it a part of yourself. A gun in your hands. The clothes on your back.
A bullet.
Claire didn’t have time to marvel at the fact that she’d done it—taken the bullet with her into the fade—because now there was an immaterial bullet barreling straight for her immaterial head. Frantically, Claire pictured her mother—ignoring her, talking through her, forgetting her. A trigger. The half-completed thought that jerked Claire out of the fade—
But somehow—impossibly, improbably, miraculously—she left the bullet behind.
Harmless. Immaterial.
The guards continued their onslaught. More bullets, more fading and unfading. Claire moved side to side, twisting and turning, disappearing from one spot and reappearing in another, pushing her fade outward, creating a shield for the children.
Nothing gets past me.
That realization occurred in the curves of Claire’s lips as she smiled, darkly. This was a Nobody’s true power. This was why The Society couldn’t risk a Nobody coming into their powers unless they were Society trained. This was why they’d sent Nix to kill her. This was what made Nobodies more dangerous than Nulls.
She faded again and focused on her adversaries’ weapons. She urged her fade outward. My guns. My tasers. Within seconds, she’d disarmed the guards, bringing their weapons into the fade. And then she solidified again.
As more guards poured into the room, the rush in Claire’s blood, the excitement, the thrill of absolute power had her greeting them with a single raised arm, holding a gun.
“How much you want to bet I can get mine to fire almost as quickly as I can make yours disappear?”
Behind her, Claire felt the exact moment that Nix’s younger sibling slipped into the fade. She felt them, pulling at her, pulling at Natalie, and as the guards eyed her weapon and slowly lowered theirs, Claire faded again, joining the little ones who already held her heart.
“Natalie is ours,” she told them. No room for doubt in her voice. No room for doubt—about what Natalie was and what she might be capable of—in the fade. “We belong to each other, and she belongs to us. She’s like an arm or a leg or the clothes on your body. She’s a piece of your heart.”
And with those words, Claire pushed everything she had, every ounce of absolute power toward Natalie.
Slippery, supersolid Natalie.
Claire’s brain rebelled the moment her fade touched Natalie’s body, revolted, and a shock went through her body—
Just like touching the drug, only worse, reversed, turned inside out—
But Claire clung tight to the power, the joy, the limitlessness of being noth
ing. She held on to her Nix and to his siblings and to everything that mattered more than the real world, with its bullets and Sensors and cages inside cages inside cages.
The whole world is a cage. Everything that’s not this, not now—
Claire took that thought, that feeling, and she wrapped it around Natalie, coating the little girl in it, like a servant mummifying a pharaoh, one strip of cloth at a time.
“Our Natalie,” she said.
Just a kid. Can’t help the way she was born. Can’t help it.
“Our Natalie,” the twins replied.
And then the impossible happened. Natalie the solid, Natalie the Null, Natalie who mattered—
Joined them in the fade.
Nix had seen the fail-safe chamber before, but hadn’t realized what it was. He’d never noticed the security lock on the door or the fact that a solid person would have had to scan some kind of identification card to enter. The ceiling, floor, and walls were lined with vents, and in the very middle of the room, there was a small activation pad.
Faded, Nix walked toward the center of the room, Sergei’s key in his battered right hand and the key Claire had given him in his left.
Two keys. One activation pad. No margin for error.
Nix went still, less than an arm’s length away from the console that held the means to destroying this building and everything in it. Transferring both keys to his right hand, he took a shallow breath and set his left on the console’s cover, poised to pry it open the moment he allowed it to regain solid form.
Nix forced himself not to think about the poison that would be released into the air the second the cover was removed. He didn’t think about anything other than the fact that his right hand had killed people. Had made it messy.
Not my choice. That wasn’t me.
He squashed down the part of him that would never fully believe that the blood on his hands was anyone’s responsibility other than his own, and instead concentrated on the appendage itself. The fingers. The nails. The palm.
Not mine. None of it’s mine.
Solidity oozed over his fingertips and Nix watched as they gripped the plastic, threw it back.
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