Nix wasn’t dying.
He wasn’t going to die.
He just wasn’t.
Claire cradled his head in her lap, arranging his body on the ground. “You’re going to be fine,” she said. “Miracles happen. They do. And we won. We did everything right. We got the kids. We got out, and the institute is gone.” Her voice got louder and higher. “We won, Nix.” Her tone sank back to a whisper that got caught in the back of her throat. “You’re going to be okay.”
As if he’d heard her, as if she’d believed him into existence, Nix’s eyelids fluttered.
Claire sobbed—a strangled, broken noise that told her that despite her best efforts to the contrary, she hadn’t really believed she’d ever see him awake again.
“You’re okay,” she said.
He couldn’t talk. Not really. But he could look at her. His eyes—those beautiful, Nix-blue eyes—were miraculously intact. He could see her.
And she could feel him in that gaze. Everything she loved about him. Everything she would miss.
“No,” she whispered. “No. You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be fine.”
Nix struggled to open his mouth, his eyes going vacant with pain as he did.
“Don’t talk,” Claire whispered, her own voice breaking.
“Don’t talk. Just get better.”
She didn’t want him to talk. She didn’t want him to say it. She didn’t want him to leave.
“Love you,” Nix managed, the words as mangled as his body. “Always love you.”
It wasn’t clear if he meant that he always had or that he always would, but Claire didn’t want to hear it either way, because she knew what he was saying. She knew what came next.
Good-bye.
“No,” Claire said vehemently, the tears dripping from her eyes onto his face. “You’re not going to leave me. You’re not allowed to leave me. Not ever.”
Good-bye.
“You’re the only one, Nix. The only one who matters. The only person I’ve ever mattered to. You’re everything. You’re mine. You can’t die. You just can’t.”
“Love you.”
He loved her, and he was leaving.
“Stay,” she whispered, hating herself for holding him in such agony, unable to let him go. “You just have to believe you can. You have to believe you’ll get better, and you will, Nix. You have to.” The words came out faster and faster, picking up momentum as they came. “Situation: what if the person you loved most in the world, what if the only person who ever loved you was dying? What if you were dying, and you loved someone on earth enough to stay? What if love is magic? It feels like magic, what if it was? What if all it took to heal someone was a kiss?”
What if?
What if?
What if?
“What if we could make it? What if we could have a house and a lawn and a life together, forever? What if happily ever after is real? Say it, Nix. Say it’s real.”
Love you.
He couldn’t even say it anymore. Not with words. Only with his eyes, over and over and over again, as he slipped away from her.
Forever.
I’ll fade. I’ll fade and take him with me, and then he can’t die. He can’t die in the fade. I can do it—I can.
Claire broke down, hunching over, her body no longer her own, her grief a beast of its own accord.
No.
She thought about kissing him. Kissing him and making it all better. Kissing him and stopping time, but she couldn’t.
Couldn’t save him.
Couldn’t let him go.
Couldn’t say good-bye.
But she had to, because she couldn’t let him die without hearing it from her lips, one last time. “I love you, too.”
Feeling like she’d signed his death warrant, Claire broke. She shattered. And she barely noticed as Natalie knelt beside her, leaned forward, and put her hands on Nix.
“I don’t like this,” Natalie said, her face blank as she looked at Nix’s. “I don’t like you like this.”
Claire felt the compulsion to make the world exactly as Natalie wanted it to be, but, no.
Nix, Nix, Nix, Nix.
All that mattered was Nix.
Not Natalie, standing up and turning, with an oddly neutral expression on her face, toward Nix’s little brother and sister. Not the knife Claire couldn’t remember dropping on the ground, not the way Natalie picked it up.
Nix, Nix, Nix, Nix.
Not the knife, which cut into the little boy Nobody’s skin. Not the almost imperceptible flicker of energy that flared out from his blood as it began to flow freely down his arm.
Claire knew she ought to say something. To stop her. Natalie. But she couldn’t move. Couldn’t care. Couldn’t drag her eyes away from Nix’s, or the single speck of light still there.
Her expression just as blank, Natalie turned the knife on her own arm and sliced it, too. And then she came to stand beside Nix, perfectly confident that the boy she’d just knifed without asking would follow.
He did.
Claire wanted to yell at them. To tell them to leave Nix alone. He was hers, and this was good-bye. They didn’t have a right to …
Bleed on him?
Powerful stuff, Nobody blood.
Claire watched as the blood flowed from Natalie’s arm and the little Nix’s.
Nulls and Nobodies … I’m not sure what you’d get if you mixed them. The results would be unpredictable. Anything could happen, really.
The steady streams of blood intertwined midair, and Claire watched as the lights, pearl white and black-hole dark—which could normally only be seen from the fade—broke their way into the real world.
Light. Pure light. Dark. Whole.
Like matter and antimatter.
Expanding.
Moving.
Growing.
And there, in the middle of it, was Natalie, her eyes alight with pure force of will, as if the power of her stare could send the physical world to its knees.
The light grew brighter. More intense, until it actually had a sound: a high-pitched humming and a low rumbling and everything in between. The opposite of white noise.
“Do it,” Natalie whispered. Through the light, Claire saw Nix’s skin shuddering, saw the flesh bubbling and flowing, like water boiling over the edge of the pot. Spreading, morphing, and then—
Silence.
The light around Nix pulsed and then imploded. It was like watching the death of a star. And there, in place of that star, that conglomerate of power and beauty and the will of an eight-year-old girl—was Nix.
He’s okay.
He was better than okay, Claire realized with a start. He was alive, and there wasn’t a mark on his body: no ink, no scars, no wounds.
Impossible.
What if magic were real? What if love could heal? What if there really was such a thing as happily ever after?
These thoughts, clearly, weren’t Nix’s. Happily ever after had never been an option for Nix. He’d never wanted it. He’d never thought about it. He’d certainly never deserved it.
And yet.
“You’re okay.”
He’d heard Claire saying those words before, through a haze of pain. Pain that was gone now.
Wrong.
Pain didn’t just go away. You felt it. You owned it. You let it go in order to fade, but it was always there, waiting, when you got back. Pain was an old friend. Pain was real.
And now it was gone.
“You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
The fourth time Claire said it, Nix realized she was crying. The fifth and sixth times she said it, he sat up and pulled her to him. The seventh time, they kissed. And the eighth and the ninth and again and again, until an imperious little voice broke into their two-person world.
“Stop that. I’m hungry. You should feed me.”
Nix found himself strangely compelled to feed the person speaking. She was important. She needed food. She was so s
weet and he wanted to feed her—and that’s when Nix remembered—
The Null.
The eight-year-old Null who’d saved Claire’s life by shooting Ione. The one who’d saved him, by cutting into her own flesh and that of his little brother.
She was still holding the knife.
She looks comfortable with it. She’s not bothered by the blood. She likes it.
“You saved him,” Claire said, her voice reverent, her eyes shining in a way that told Nix that even if Natalie hadn’t been a Null, Claire would have been defenseless against her, from this moment on. “The blood, and the energy, and … what did you do?”
Natalie scuffed her foot into the ground. “I thought. I thought real hard. I wanted it to go away, and it did.” She smiled, the expression curving slowly over her cherubic features. “I always get what I want.”
Nix stifled a shudder. Nulls were dangerous because they were incapable of forming emotional attachments to other people, of caring about anyone other than themselves, and they were dangerous because it was all too easy for them to manipulate others. But they couldn’t manipulate the physical world. It wasn’t possible.
The same way that walking through walls wasn’t possible.
Nobodies and Nulls are opposites. Oh, God.
“Can you make things do what you want them to, Natalie?” Nix forced himself to say her name, to not recoil at the idea of Nulls, even small ones, even one who’d just saved his life, having that kind of power.
“Things that aren’t people, or things that are?” Natalie asked.
People aren’t things. Nix didn’t try telling her that, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. “Things that aren’t,” he said instead.
“Things that aren’t people are hard,” Natalie said plaintively. “I couldn’t used to do it. The bad doctor taught me. He taught me lots.”
Claire swallowed, hard, and Nix’s eyes were drawn to her lips as they parted to ask the question on the tip of his own tongue. “And the blood?”
Natalie’s blood, his little brother’s. Nix could remember, barely, seeing the little girl pick up the knife, but the haze of pain had been so thick, and all he’d wanted was to look at Claire, at Claire’s eyes. To let the last thing he saw be her.
“Energy,” Nix’s sister answered the question, and he wondered where exactly she’d learned that there was energy in her blood.
Where else? The Society had raised her. It had used her as a lab rat. They’d taught her.
Natalie, sensing that she was losing attention, cleared her throat. “The mean doctor talked a lot. He did things I didn’t like. I didn’t like him. I’m glad he’s dead. I wish they were all dead. Maybe I’ll kill them. I’m hungry. You will feed me. I like hamburgers.”
“Hamburgers?” Claire repeated. “You can have all the hamburgers you want. Do you understand what you just did?”
Nix watched as Natalie’s eyes flicked back toward him, and then she shrugged. “It looked bad. I didn’t like it. His skin was ugly. His voice sounded funny. You were crying too hard to get me food. I didn’t like it, so I made it go away.”
Saved by a Null. An eight-year-old Null, in search of a hamburger.
“Natalie!”
It took Nix a moment to recognize the voice, and then he realized that somehow, between his losing consciousness, almost dying, regaining consciousness, and almost dying again, Claire had managed to get the five of them to the rendezvous point.
The Sensor—the one who’d handed them the key to the institute’s destruction—was beaming, like he hadn’t just initiated the complete demolition of everything he’d ever believed in. “Natalie, sweetheart, I’m so glad you’re okay. I told you I’d get you out. I told you. I did just like you asked.”
Nix forced his brain to actually function, and then he climbed his way to his feet. “You did just as she asked, and we did just as you asked.” Nix nodded toward Natalie and then looked back at the man. “Our files, please.”
The man’s eyes lost their focus for a moment, and Nix felt a pang in his stomach, tinny-tasting fear that the Sensor might not have held up his end of the bargain. But after a long moment, and several more beaming smiles directed at Natalie, the man fished through his pockets and pulled out a flash drive.
Small.
Black.
Freedom.
Nix took it from the man’s hand. The man didn’t even notice. He had eyes for Natalie. Only for Natalie. Nix wondered what he’d do with the little girl now.
“We’re going home, Natalie. I bought a house, just for you. It has everything you like. You’ll love it there.”
Natalie smiled, but then, after a long moment, she turned. “Can I bring my stuff?” she asked.
“Of course, sweetheart.”
Nix watched as Natalie gestured to his younger brother and sister. “They’re mine. They have to come, too.”
“No.” Four people said the word at once, and Nix was struck by the way their voices played off one another’s—the little ones’ whispers, Claire’s high and loud, and his own, a rumbling growl.
“I don’t like no,” Natalie said. For a moment, Nix felt something—a pull to let Natalie have exactly what she wanted. And then his eyes were drawn, again and again, to the knife.
Make her happy. Have to make her happy. Give her what she—
No.
The pull from Claire and from the dark-haired pair was stronger. Nulls might have an increased ability to affect people, but nothing was as strong as the pull of like to like.
“Take her and leave,” Nix told the Sensor. The man wrinkled his brow, confused, trying to reconcile himself to the fact that Nix didn’t want to give Natalie exactly what she’d asked for.
“But I want them,” Natalie said, pointing to the other children.
“You can’t always have what you want,” Claire said softly, not looking at the little girl. Looking at Nix.
“I can,” Natalie said. “I do. I wanted the mean people dead, and now they are. I wanted that boy’s uglies to go away and they did. The mean doctor was right. Sometimes, with enough energy, things that aren’t people are almost as easy as things that are.”
Things, like his body. Energy, like the result of mixing a Nobody’s blood with a Null’s.
She saved my life. A Null saved my life.
And we saved hers. Nix felt the second half of that revelation with foreboding and guilt—and the tiniest sliver of hope that maybe Natalie was different. That she’d somehow come to care about his little brother and sister. That she’d saved his life and Claire’s because deep down, she wasn’t a monster. Nix even entertained the idea that being in the fade had changed the little girl, the way it had changed the sheen of Sykes’s Null drug.
“What will I play with if they don’t come?” Natalie demanded.
What. Not who. And yet there was a tone in her voice when she looked at his siblings.…
“I’ll get you new toys. Lots of them.”
Natalie considered the Sensor’s proposition, and her eyes glowed. “Are you rich?”
“No, but Natalie, I love you. You could be my little girl. I’d do everything—”
“Fine,” Natalie said, sounding bored. “I want a hamburger.” She smiled, looking too innocent, too sweet. “And then we can talk about the rest.”
And just like that, Natalie and the Sensor left, leaving behind them four Nobodies.
“She saved your life,” Claire murmured.
“She saved yours,” Nix murmured back.
“She’s just a little girl.”
“She’ll be fine.”
Beside them, Nix’s brother and sister whimpered, like puppies torn away from their litter.
“Natalie,” the little boy said.
Nix knelt in front of them. “Natalie had to go away,” he said. “But you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be perfect.”
His brother.
His sister.
His.
All other worries, all othe
r thoughts, paled in comparison.
“No one will ever hurt you again,” Nix promised. “You’re mine now. Ours. And we will live happily ever after.”
Nix picked them up and settled one on each hip. Claire wrapped her arms around him, around the children. He leaned down to press his lips to hers, heat and power and overwhelming knowledge spreading from the kiss through his veins, to every inch of his being.
Warm.
Safe.
Home.
It wouldn’t be easy. He had no idea where they’d go. What they’d do. How they’d survive, four Nobodies against the world. But at that exact moment, with his lips pressed against Claire’s, with his flesh and blood in his arms and in hers, Nix didn’t care.
They’d find a way to make it work. They would live happily ever after.
Nix believed it, and he put every ounce of that belief into the kiss he gave Claire. Fireworks exploded. Rivers roared. And one by one, the four Nobodies faded, a surge of light against an infinite expanse of darkness.
Forever.
Epilogue
Six months later …
Once upon a time, the little girl’s name had been Nix, and she had lived in a small, small, small room with another Nix and the nicest, sweetest, most wonderful girl in the whole wide world. But now she wasn’t Nix anymore, and the little room was gone. Now she lived in a big room, in a big old house that had been onthemarket for years and never ever sold until everybody forgot about it just like that. She and her brother and her other brother and Claire called it home, and the little girl who wasn’t Nix anymore loved rounding her lips into that long O sound.
The other place, the bad place, got smaller and smaller in her mind each day, as new things pushed the old memories out.
New things like a big brother, who carried her around on his back.
And a Claire to read her stories.
And food and games and everything that a little girl could want and that four Nobodies could sneak out of a store.
Once upon a time, when she was Nix, the little girl couldn’t breathe. Now she could. Now her name was Olivia because she loved the Olivia books, but Claire called her Livvie. And Livvie’s brother’s new name was Max, because he was a Wild Thing, and every night, Claire and the big Nix, the only Nix now, read to Max and Livvie, and they fell asleep and woke up in their very own beds in their very own home, where their very own family loved them best of all.
Nobody Page 26