Ten had been an up-and-coming technology mogul who dabbled in human trafficking on the side.
“You mean you’ve never gone online yourself?” From the expression on Claire’s face, you would have thought he’d announced that he never bathed.
“I live in an eight by eight room with no windows and a door that’s padlocked for show. What do you think?” He didn’t realize until he’d said the words out loud that she wouldn’t have had any way of knowing that. He hadn’t told her.
“You don’t live there anymore.” The quiet vehemence in Claire’s voice knocked the breath from Nix’s chest. “And out here in the real world, when you need answers, we have this wonderful thing called Google.”
“And this Google lives in libraries?”
Nobodies don’t ask questions.
He hadn’t meant to. He’d trained himself—not to wonder. Not to think. To breathe in and out and let the entire world bleed out through his skin.
Nobodies don’t ask questions.
But Nix had, and Claire answered it.
“Google’s a search engine. Libraries have computers, and most of them have free internet. Sykes was a senator—there will be news articles.”
Nix didn’t reply. A Nobody’s education tended more toward Mach 7s and arsenic than computer how-to’s. They’d only taught him to read so that they wouldn’t have to bother giving him his orders in person.
So they could slip them under his door.
Name. Date. Place.
“Do you even know where the closest library is?” he asked sharply, pushing away that thought, the memories.
Claire paused. Flushed. And then pink lips tilted upward in a bewitching, beseeching grin.
“No?”
He didn’t either. The only thing he knew about this city was that Evan Sykes had died three streets over. Heart attack—or so they said.
“We’ll have to ask someone.” Claire scrunched her mouth into a skinny O. “I hate asking people.”
Nobodies don’t ask questions.
But Claire didn’t know that. She’d probably asked hundreds. Maybe she’d even gotten some answers. Probably not a lot. That was probably why she hated it. But she’d asked them anyway.
Nobodies don’t cry.
Nix wasn’t sure why he wanted to. For Claire—asking and asking, again and again—or for himself. Because he couldn’t. Couldn’t go up to a stranger, the way she was doing now. Couldn’t look them in the eye. Couldn’t be around Normals without feeling like he should have tried harder the day he’d tried to slit his own throat.
“Excuse me, ma’am? Errr … sir? I’m sorry to bother you, but—” On the fourth try, Claire finally got someone to stop. Her voice went up at least a decibel or two in the process.
“Oh, you don’t know? Okay, well … excuse me? Could you maybe …”
Five more tries. Six.
By the time she came stomping back toward him, Nix had gotten over his shock at watching her march up to total strangers. Ask them questions. Blush and bite her lips when they ignored her. Press on.
“I hate asking questions.”
But she did it. Knowing that they’d probably ignore her. Feeling smaller and smaller each time. For him.
Brave. Claire is brave.
The realization surprised Nix. Claire was innocent. Claire was sweet. Claire was stubborn and funny and irresistible and Claire.
Brave was a problem.
“The closest library’s a few miles away,” she said, reporting back. “If I tell you where it is, can you get us there in the fade?” Even talking about fading changed Claire, brought something otherworldly to her eyes. “I can’t think when I’m faded. I just … I lose it, you know?”
“I know,” Nix replied. To find something after you faded, your body had to want it. You had to be single-minded, because when the real world slipped away, conscious thoughts went with it. All that remained was the id: wants, needs, desires.
“We should just walk.” He could have found the library from the fade. They could have slipped out of the here and now, been there in a heartbeat, no worse for the wear. But it didn’t seem wise, because right now Nix’s id wanted nothing more than to touch Claire.
To be with Claire.
Beautiful, brave, irresistible Claire.
“It’ll be dark by the time we get there,” she objected.
“Good.” Nix glanced over his shoulder. Anonymity wasn’t an excuse for sloppiness. The Society had found Claire once. All odds to the contrary, they could do it again. “We probably shouldn’t have gone out during the day anyway.”
Nix knew nothing about libraries, or the internet, or what it felt like to talk to strangers, but he knew this much: nighttime was Nobody time. The real monsters came out with the sun.
By the time they got to the library, it was closed, and Claire felt a familiar pang of disappointment in the pit of her gut before she realized it didn’t matter. The ice cream truck always left just before she got there. Play auditions closed while she was sitting there, waiting for her turn. Absentminded teachers were always losing the field-trip permission forms she’d painstakingly forged. But what did it matter if the library was closed? If the doors were locked?
This time, she didn’t ask Nix if they should fade. He’d been quiet on the walk over, more so than usual, and Claire was getting tired of feeling his stare, not knowing what it meant.
I don’t matter. Middle of the middle. Left behind. Nuisance.
Once upon a time, those words would have hurt.
No one notices. No one cares. When I ask questions, I have to beg for the answers.
She felt the real world rolling off her body, like water. No, oil. Thick and greasy, numbing, it slipped from her veins and her skin and her brain until all that was left was the deepest kind of ache.
Nothing.
She didn’t wait to see if Nix would follow her. He might back away from her in the real world. He might look at her like she’d done something wrong, just because it had taken her ten minutes to get someone to point them toward the library. He might expect her to turn tail and run away when things got hard.
But down beneath skin and bones and the things they’d done and hadn’t, the two of them were the same. Fading stripped off all the other layers, and like a beacon, she called to him.
I’m like you.
Reality broke around his body, crumbled, as his face began to glow. Claire felt the earth give the moment he crossed over.
The moment he took her hand.
There were people on the street. Not many, this late at night, but some, and as Claire’s faded skin brushed Nix’s, the world shuddered. The street and the people and the flickering streetlamps froze like a photo, snapped an instant too soon.
“Time stops for us.” She said the words like they were music. “Let’s run.”
Nix shook his head. The movement hypnotized Claire, and it took her a moment to decode its meaning as something other than his dance to her song. He led. She followed—through locked doors, through walls, through shelves and shelves of books that another Claire would have loved to read.
I’m here for a reason.
Her brain was slow in catching up to her body, but somehow, that thought made its way to her like breath bubbling at the top of a pool.
Concentrate.
Thinking about the real world would have forced her to return to it. But thinking, in the abstract, about the kinds of things that she might have thought about if she were real—
Why? Why would I want to? Why are we here?
“Library,” Nix reminded her.
It was one of those words. The real words. The heavy ones. The ones that made her think about things on the other side of the veil. Books. And people. And asking over and over again to find out where the closest library was.
No. I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to let go. Can’t.
But she could and she did, and when Nix joined her a moment later, she recognized a glint in his ey
e as something akin to laughter.
“You did that on purpose.”
“If you want to stay faded, you can’t think about anything else,” he said. “And if you’re going to use this so-called internet, you can’t do it with hands that pass through solid objects.”
Claire nodded—but she had to ask. “Didn’t you want to stay there? Even just a little?”
Nix didn’t miss a beat. “Every time.”
One second, they were all-powerful, immaterial, and too good for the real world, and the next, they were two kids in the library after hours. Claire glanced out the window at the street below. People were moving. Lights were flickering.
“Internet?” Nix put the emphasis on the last syllable instead of the first, like it wasn’t a word he was used to saying. Trying not to think about the life he’d lived—eight by eight room, no windows, trained to kill—Claire sat down in front of one of the computers and tested her fingers out against the keys. Solid, she could type.
Senator Evan Sykes
Within five minutes of hitting search, Claire had added three more terms to her search list.
Iowa. The good senator’s home state.
Congressional Subcommittee on Domestic Defense. His most recent appointment.
Proposition 42. His claim to fame.
Nix read over her shoulder, looming like a shadow. But for once, Claire didn’t find her counterpart’s presence distracting. She was too entrenched in Evan Sykes’s story, which was becoming clearer and clearer, the more she read.
Lucked his way into a state senate seat at the age of twenty-five. Never brought a single motion to the floor. Tried and failed three times to make the House of Representatives.
And then, almost overnight, the senator’s luck had changed.
The previous junior senator from Iowa, dead of a heart attack.
The governor called upon to name a replacement.
Likelier candidates defamed. Scandals.
And suddenly, Evan Sykes was the golden boy. He’d inherited an almost full term. Claire couldn’t make any sense of his voting patterns, couldn’t see anything nefarious about his pet projects. He was bland. Uninteresting.
And on the Congressional Subcommittee on Domestic Defense, advising Homeland Security.
Exactly where someone wanted him.
“You’re going too fast.”
Claire barely heard Nix’s complaint. If he’d been anyone else, his words would have been consumed by the vortex of information bounding and rebounding around in her head. But since he was Nix, she heard him.
Barely.
“I’m what?”
“I. Can’t. Read. That. Fast.” The words cost him—enough that Claire thought to wonder how he’d learned to read at all, living in one room, raised by people who saw him only as a weapon.
“You know what? It doesn’t matter. Just go ahead. Do whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
Claire was smart enough to know that the only time anyone said something didn’t matter twice was when it really, really did. So she slowed down. Took a step back. And let him read.
Slowly.
Painstakingly.
And her mind kept going at thirty thousand miles an hour: making connections, drawing conclusions, and coming back to the same question, over and over again.
“He lost three elections.” Nix said the words slowly, like saying them fast would make them less true. “He lost three elections?”
The second time, it was a question, and she answered it.
“Yes. And then he got lucky. He couldn’t have engineered things better if he tried.”
“That’s because he didn’t engineer it.”
Claire took Nix’s words as confirmation that he had reached the same conclusion she had. Sykes didn’t engineer his appointment to the Senate. The Society did.
“Sykes didn’t make this happen. I did.”
It took Claire a moment to realize what Nix was really saying, to look for the name of the junior senator whose heart attack had opened up a seat in the Senate for Sykes.
Warren Wyler.
Number Three.
Claire thought of the folders, the pictures. Nix hunched, his body shuddering. Claire tentatively ran her hand up his back, letting it come to rest on the nape of his neck.
He didn’t tell her to stop.
She wasn’t even sure he felt it.
“I thought Wyler was a Null. Ione said, the Sensors said—”
Nix cut off, and Claire couldn’t think of a single thing that she could say that wouldn’t make things worse. What were the chances that two Nulls had filled the exact same Senate seat? Not nearly as good as the chances that The Society had put Evan Sykes in the Senate—and two years later, taken him out.
Somebody had discredited all of Sykes’s opponents. Somebody had seen to it that a seat had opened up in the Senate. Somebody was the special interest group that funded large portions of Sykes’s campaign.
“But Sykes—he was a Null. I know he was. I saw him. I saw him, with the girls. And I heard him. I watched tapes, and when he talked, you had to listen. That’s not natural. It’s—” Nix broke off, and for the first time, Claire wondered how old he was.
Right now he looked heartbroken and twelve.
“Why would The Society have me kill Wyler to put a Null in the Senate? It doesn’t make any sense. We protect the Normals from the Nulls. That’s what The Society does. It’s what I do.”
“You didn’t know.” Claire brought her free hand up to his good shoulder, running it down and over his arm even as she kept the other cool and steady on the back of his neck. “It’s okay, Nix.”
That should have felt like a lie, but it didn’t, because when Claire needed to, she could make herself believe anything. She could believe that things were going to get better. She could believe that if she just tried harder, people would notice. She could believe that Nix would be okay, because she wouldn’t let him not.
“You shouldn’t touch me.” His words were soft, quiet, defeated.
She brought her head to rest against his back. “Yes, I should.”
He said nothing in reply.
“You didn’t know,” she tried again.
Silence.
“They’re the ones who did this. Not you.”
“I’m the one who slipped the poison into his veins. Just like I slipped the poison into Sykes’s. Just like I almost put a bullet in your heart.” He shuddered, one more time, and then pulled away from her. “Get away from me. You need to get away from me, Claire.”
“Stop telling me what I need.”
“I’ll stop telling you what to do when you figure out life isn’t fairy tales and forever. Condition two, Claire. I say when this is over. You run and hide.”
She didn’t let him finish that thought. “It’s not over yet.”
“We wanted to find out who was corrupt. I think this is pretty good evidence for The Society as a whole—or at least, all of the people in charge.”
“You don’t kill people based on pretty good evidence.”
Nix snorted. “Apparently, I do. I killed Wyler because Ione told me to. I saw what my first two targets were like, I saw what they’d done, and so when they sent me after number Three, I assumed that he was a monster, too. They didn’t tell me that his crime was standing in the way of their plans. I didn’t even know they had plans. I did this. I killed him, and he wasn’t a Null.”
Claire balled her hand into a fist and smacked it into his side. “Senator Wyler wasn’t your fault. Sykes wasn’t your fault. You never even had a chance, Nix. But you have a chance now, and if you kill the people behind this—”
“Ione told me to kill you,” Nix said simply. “She tried to kill me. She gave the order to kill Wyler. She gave the order to kill Sykes.”
“Don’t you want to know why?” Claire asked, stalling for time. She couldn’t let him leave the library, not like this.
“I don’t need to know why.”
“The Society
put Evan Sykes in the Senate. Don’t you want to know what he was doing there?”
“No.”
Claire wracked her mind for a question that would spark his interest. Hold him here. Keep him from running off. Getting himself killed. Killing somebody else.
“Don’t you want to know …”
He opened his mouth to interrupt her, but she managed to squeeze the magic words out, just in time.
“Don’t you want to know why Sykes lost his first three elections?”
The words took a moment to register. Nix was already denying interest when they sank in. When he realized the implications.
When the plot thickened.
Claire stepped toward him. He stepped back. She laid her ace on the table. “You asked why The Society would put a Null in the Senate. The real question is, if Sykes were a Null, if he had the kind of energy that made him unnaturally good at manipulating other people—why couldn’t he get there himself?”
16
Nix tried to concentrate on Claire’s question. On Evan Sykes. But his brain went somewhere else.
Nix is standing in the corner of his target’s bedroom, an empty syringe in his hand. He was supposed to leave as soon as he made the injection, but he didn’t. He stayed. Now he’s watching from the fade. Waiting. Anticipating.
His target’s name is Warren Wyler. Looking at him, you’d never know he was a Null. As Nix watches, Wyler calls his wife on the phone. He tells her he loves her. Nix wonders what this Null keeps chained up in his basement. How many people he’s killed. What he does when he’s not alone in his D.C. residence, flipping channels on the TV.
Finally, without warning, Wyler gasps. Collapses. His head lolls to one side. His fingers twitch. Eyes roll back in his head. A sickly sour smell fills the room. From the shadows, Nix watches. He watches the man stop breathing, watches the fingers stop twitching, watches—and smiles.
The worst thing about the memory wasn’t the fact that Nix could recognize, in retrospect, that Wyler—like Claire—hadn’t been a Null. The worst part was the fact that he had stayed to watch. Nix had killed an innocent man, and he’d smiled.
Wyler wasn’t a Null. He was just a politician.
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