Normals probably couldn’t tell the difference, but Sensors could. And that meant they’d sent him after Wyler knowing he wasn’t a Null. So that Sykes could inherit his seat in the Senate.
“Sykes was a Null. I could practically smell it on him.” Nix paused. Why would The Society want a Null in the Senate? And more importantly, why would a Null need The Society’s help?
Nulls were charismatic, magnetic, easy to like, and hard to forget. They were very good at getting what they wanted.
“Maybe he was a Null,” Claire said slowly, “but he just wasn’t very good at it.”
Nix had to remind himself that she was new at this. That twenty-four hours earlier, she’d known nothing about energy or Nobodies or Nulls.
“Being a Null isn’t the kind of thing you have to practice, Claire. People just care about you. They’re the puppets. You’re the puppeteer.”
“You’re teaching me how to be a good Nobody. If fading takes practice and concentration, why doesn’t being a Null?”
Nix didn’t want to think about Nulls. He couldn’t think of anything but Senator Wyler lying dead on his bed. “So, what?” he asked tersely. “The Society taught Evan Sykes how to use his powers? Why would they do something like that?”
Claire’s eyes flitted back to the computer screen. “I don’t know, but I’m guessing it might have something to do with Proposition 42.”
Proposition 42? Nix didn’t want to ask her what that was. She’d read about it, obviously, and if he hadn’t been so slow, he probably would have, too.
If he’d been quicker on the uptake, it wouldn’t have taken meeting Claire to realize that something was very wrong inside the institute’s walls. There were so many things he didn’t know about The Society. So much they hadn’t bothered to teach him. So much he hadn’t asked.
He watches Senator Wyler stop breathing, watches his fingers stop twitching, watches—
“You know what? I’ve got this, Claire. I don’t need your help. I don’t need you. What I need is for you to get out of the way and let me read all of that garbage you pulled up on the computer.”
She jerked away from him and stumbled backward, doing a good impression of someone who’d taken a knife to the gut.
Claire asking and asking and hoping for answers, trying not to care when people walk right by.
He hadn’t meant to make her look like that.
“Sorry.” It wasn’t a word he’d said before. Ever. But Claire had said it plenty, and Nix knew, in an abstract way, that it was supposed to make things better.
Didn’t, though.
“Don’t be.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” She wrapped her arms around her waist, nursing her wounds. “You can use the mouse to click from one window to another. If you want to know more about Proposition 42, type those words into that little box there.” She nodded with her head, but since he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes, he didn’t follow.
“I’ll just go … books.”
And then she was gone, disappearing into the nearby stacks like a rabbit taking to its hole, and he was left with a computer he didn’t know how to use, words he could barely read, and the knowledge that he wasn’t just a killer.
Most of the time, he was a pretty poor excuse for a person, too.
Situation: What if you’d been raised from the crib to be an assassin? What if the people who’d trained you had brainwashed you into believing that everyone you killed deserved to die?
What if you found out they lied?
Claire knew, logically, that was the kind of thing that would mess with a person’s head.
They told him he was killing monsters, and then they made him kill people. He thought it was just me who was different, and he didn’t go through with killing me. He thought there was a chance that it wasn’t too late. That everyone he’d killed really had been a dangerous Null. That he really was a hero, working in the shadows to make the world a better place for people who’d never even looked his way. That he wasn’t just an unimportant little boy raised like an animal and let out of the cage only when The Society wanted someone dead.
He wanted to believe that, and he just found out he was wrong.
Claire could see this from Nix’s perspective. Her heart broke for him, but no matter how deeply she imagined herself in his position, no matter how much she understood rationally that her imagination wasn’t doing his torment justice, she couldn’t shake the tiny voice in the back of her own brain.
He doesn’t want me. He told me to go away.
Claire hated herself for thinking like that—like everything was about her. Like the fact that she felt crappy and small and like he’d thrown her away held even the tiniest candle to what he was going through. She knew rationally that he’d weathered a big blow, that he needed some time to himself.
She just wanted him to need her.
And that was stupid and selfish and idiotically idealistic. Almost as bad as the fact that when she’d seen him breaking, sensed the fault line running straight through his psyche shift with each revelation—part of her was relieved.
Because that meant Nix wasn’t a monster.
He was scared. And lost. And lonely. And he hated himself.
Without meaning to, Claire headed straight for the children’s section of the library. The building was dark. She could barely see without the light from the computer’s screen, and she kept bumping into stuff, but kids’ sections had a vibe about them, and she found it before the first tear splashed out of her eye and onto her cheek.
Then she went a little nuts.
It started with Up a Road Slowly. Then The Westing Game. Number the Stars. Rilla of Ingleside and Rainbow Valley. She picked up Shiloh, then put it back, because she couldn’t take a book about a dead dog right now. And Black Beauty and Beauty—she couldn’t read those either.
She should have outgrown these books.
She should have been in the adult section, or at least up in teen.
But she wasn’t.
Little Women. The Secret Garden. And, oh—The Little Prince.
Feeling like she really was just seven or eight, Claire sat down on the floor, books all around her, and she opened the last one she’d picked up. Even though it was dark, and even though her eyes couldn’t see the words, she knew them.
Knew the little prince’s story as well as her own.
She closed her eyes. She leaned her head forward against the book. And she sobbed.
Proposition 42 was wordy and long and Nix was sure that Claire would have been able to find a shorter explanation of it. With the mouse. And the box she’d told him to type into. And Google, which sent chills of terror down his spine.
I’m out of my element. I’m not good at this.
Of course, thinking that led him to thinking about the things he was good at. His perfect aim. His ability to move quickly, quietly. To follow directions. To do whatever it was that had to be done, no matter the cost.
Murderer.
The real irony was that he’d hated Claire when he thought she was a Null, because he’d assumed that she didn’t have a conscience. That she killed other people like they didn’t even matter. And all along, he was the monster, no better than a dirty, rotten Null. Worse, maybe, because he hadn’t been born without empathy.
He’d just taught himself not to feel it for the people The Society said had to die.
“Proposition 42.” Nix tried to force himself to focus. He willed the letters to stop blending together. He sounded out the words. Slowly, painstakingly, he worked his way through the vast amounts of information on the screen. He tried to make sense of it.
And the entire time, all he could think about was the look on Claire’s face. She knew he’d killed Wyler. She’d held him. Told him it wasn’t his fault. Looked at him like they were the same, as if she were trying to think of a way to leach away some of his pain and feel it herself.
And he’d sent her away. Not for her own good. Not to pro
tect her.
Because he couldn’t take feeling evil and stupid, too.
Proposition 42. Nix concentrated and, bit by bit, he read. An hour later, he had answers. Questions, too.
“Proposition 42 was pitched as the common man’s protection from the Patriot Act.” Nix summarized what he’d read, hoping it would make more sense out loud. “It gave a designated congressional subcommittee oversight of a variety of shadow organizations that would otherwise report only to higher-ups within the FBI and CIA. Sykes, not surprisingly, positioned himself as the head of that committee, and if he hadn’t pushed to delay voting on the proposition, it probably would have passed.”
After Sykes died, Proposition 42 had never even made it out of committee. Nix took that to mean that The Society must have really wanted Sykes dead, because they’d been willing to make sacrifices to see it done. Nix may have been ignorant. He may have been gullible and stupid and slow, but even he could see that Proposition 42 had never been about protecting the common man.
It had been about protecting The Society.
With its pet senator positioned at the head of the oversight subcommittee, The Society would have been in perfect position to derail any potential investigations into its activities. Maybe the higher-ups had a bigger plan—government funding for their research? World domination?—who knew?
Nix had never thought about it—the fact that The Society might have to work to stay secret, the fact that the people who called the shots might have something more to hide than killing Nulls. A week ago, Nix would have sworn that he knew every inch of the institute, every purpose The Society worked toward, every tragedy they hoped to avoid. But now Nix had to admit that he’d missed things. That Ione and her little foot soldiers had managed to keep their secrets, even when they hadn’t known he was standing in the shadows, listening to them speak.
“Did you find out what you needed to know?” Claire’s voice was tentative and hoarse. Nix wanted to go to her. He wanted to tell her that he’d never meant to take any of this out on her. He wanted to apologize again, but knew it wouldn’t help.
“I found what I needed to know. You could have found it faster.” The words were an admission that she wasn’t just nicer than he was, or more moral, or right. She was smarter, too.
“You ready to go?” She didn’t acknowledge his words. He didn’t expect her to, but the puffiness around her eyes told him that they weren’t enough.
He needed to make it up to her. Even if there were things he’d done that could never be made up. That meant he had to make up for the little things more.
So he told her everything he’d learned about Proposition 42. About the fact that when he’d died, Sykes had been in the process of stalling the vote—which still didn’t explain why The Society wanted him dead, other than the fact that he wasn’t getting the job done fast enough.
Nix watched Claire take in the information, waited for a spark of interest, and was rewarded when it flickered to life in the creases of her face. And then his eyes trailed downward, and he noticed the small mountain of books she held in her arms.
She followed his gaze, bit her bottom lip, and shrugged. “It’s a library.” She paused. “Books.”
He moved forward to ease her load a little, but she just hugged her bounty harder. “I’ve got it,” she said.
“You might not be ready to take objects with you to the fade,” he said.
“I take my clothes with me.”
That was a point he’d never considered. “We fade when we stop trying to be someone and embrace being nothing. You can take a physical object, like a shirt”—Or a gun. Or a needle. Or knives—“with you, if you consider that object an extension of yourself. It’s easier with clothes.”
He waited to see if she would surrender the books, but she didn’t.
“I can imagine these books are part of my body. I can imagine anything. I’m good at that.”
Nix heard the things she wasn’t saying—about how she’d gotten so good at playing games in her mind, pretending the world was the way she wanted it to be instead of the way it was.
“We should go,” he said, wishing she would let him help her, knowing she wouldn’t. “It’ll be dawn soon.”
And if The Society wanted you dead before, he added silently, I’m betting we’re both pretty high on its hit list now.
“Okay. Let’s go.” Claire closed her eyes. Nix listened as her breathing slowed. And then he followed her—and her fourteen pilfered library books—into the fade.
17
Faded, Claire flew. She didn’t think. She didn’t cast a single glance over her shoulder. She just let go and flew, back the way they’d came. Down streets. Past the cemetery. Over forest, over fields.
I am silence. I am power. I am more.
All she wanted was to go home and go to sleep.
Claire kept a muzzle on the thought, refusing to give it meaning and hanging tight to her fade.
I WANT TO GO—
She arrived back at the cabin just in time, and gave in to the rush of unspoken words in her head, letting the thought suck her body back into the physical world. The books in her arms—weightless a moment before—grew suddenly heavy, and Claire almost fell over sideways as their weight threw hers off center.
It wasn’t until she’d regained her balance and crossed the threshold of the cabin door that she realized: even though her mind had been thinking home, her body had been thinking here. This cabin, the forest.
She’d lived in the same house her entire life, and after two days, this isolated cabin and the woods surrounding it felt like home. If Claire had let herself think about it, that probably would have been depressing. So she didn’t think about it. Instead, she took her books and walked over to the far side of the cabin. Lined them up, just under the window. Tried to get them to stand up straight, but failed and ended up stacking them, one on top of another instead.
It wasn’t the same as having a shelf, but it was better than letting them fling themselves out on the dusty cabin floor. Not wanting to turn and face Nix, she ran her fingers across the spines of the books.
Earlier that week, she’d done almost the exact same thing with other books. Except at that point, she hadn’t known what she was or what it meant or why she never seemed to be good enough for anyone else. And now she knew.
Lot of good that does me.
This was why she needed to go to sleep. She wasn’t doing anyone any good this way. Nix needed her. He was probably the only person in the entire world who really needed her, and she couldn’t shake the sting of his sending her away.
Or maybe she just couldn’t shake off the horrible feeling of helplessness that reared its head every time she looked at him.
I want to make this better for him, and he won’t let me. I want to help and he doesn’t want it.
She wanted to kiss him. To be with him. To take some measure of his pain into her own body. But some hurts were too big, and next to Nix’s, she was nothing.
I’ll sleep on it. I’ll go to bed, and I’ll wake up, and I’ll be better.
Tomorrow, she’d know what to do. She’d come up with a plan. She’d figure out a way to convince him—
Convince him what? That it doesn’t matter that The Society made him kill innocent people?
Of course it mattered. How could something like that not matter? How could anyone make something like that better?
And even if somebody could, in the abstract, how could Claire?
“I’m going to go to sleep.” She forced herself to turn around and meet his eyes. “Tomorrow, we’ll figure out a plan.”
“A plan?”
She nodded and held his gaze. You will let me be strong for you. She tried her hand at psychic persuasion, but couldn’t even manage to convince herself.
Bed.
She needed to go to bed. But first, she had to say something.
“The Society wanted Proposition 42 passed. Sykes kept delaying the voting, but after they killed h
im, the bill went down in flames. So it stands to reason that they didn’t kill him to make the bill pass.”
“They killed him because he went against orders.” The certainty in Nix’s voice was chilling and absolute.
“They do that?”
Nix didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“Maybe that’s why they wanted you to kill me.”
“To test my loyalty?” Nix spat out the last word.
“I was thinking more along the lines of the fact that I couldn’t take the kinds of orders they gave you.”
It figured that Nix thought this was his fault and she thought it was hers. Claire guessed that maybe that was a Nobody’s lot in life. She barely even noticed the tremor that passed through Nix’s hands until it was too late.
He was upset about having killed people, and she’d just rubbed it in his face that when he’d told her to kill, she’d said no.
Go to bed. You’ll feel better tomorrow. You’ll do better tomorrow.
“I’m going to go to bed.” Claire’s voice was so tiny that she could hardly hear it, but Nix didn’t seem to have any trouble sorting out her words.
“I’m sorry.”
He was still apologizing. For sending her away. For making her cry.
“It’s okay,” Claire said, willing him to believe it—and willing herself to believe it, too. “You … there was a lot going on today. You didn’t mean it. Or maybe you did. It’s okay. I’ll be …”
I swear to God, if you say it one more time …
“… okay.”
He nodded, but Claire saw the indecision flicker across his face. Like he was thinking about saying something else.
“You can have the couch,” she offered. The look he gave her in return was nothing short of incredulous—with a side of disgust.
“Or I could take the couch,” she amended her previous statement. He nodded.
The last time they’d slept in close proximity to each other had been in the woods. On a bed of grass. Limbs so tangled that she almost couldn’t tell where her body ended and his began.
“Good night, Claire.”
She sighed and tried to manage a smile for him. “Good night, Nix.”
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