Nobody (13 page)

She wanted out of this forest.

She wanted to live.

And she wanted to forget that last night—
painfully, impossibly perfect
—had ever happened.

Less than shadow. Less than air
.

Nix slipped past the security checkpoints. Past the metal detectors and the Sensors and every safeguard The Society had put in place to make the institute impenetrable to anyone who mattered.

Unfortunately for The Society, Nix
didn’t
matter—and faded, nothing was
impenetrable
to him.

As Nix made his way farther and farther through the labyrinthine corridors, he was overcome with a sickening sense of déjà vu. How many times had he walked these hallways? How many times had he overheard the Sensors’ conversations, used their words to figure out what it would be like to be Normal? To hear what they said when they were talking to each other and not to him.

The only way you can make a difference in this world is to kill
.

Nix had told himself that he was coming back here to protect Claire, to find out why The Society wanted her dead. But now that he was here, the memories were too close to the surface: the training, the lessons, the
experiments
—and all he could think, over and over again, was a number.

Eleven
.

The fissure of doubt that had started that morning—with number Three—spread through Nix’s body, through the rest of his memories, the men and women he’d killed. He’d thought they were Nulls. He’d seen what true Nulls could do: seen the teenage girl that One kept chained in
his basement; seen the cigarette burns on Six’s child’s arms. Nix had seen the bodies and the horrors, and he’d known that Nulls were monsters—but what if his targets hadn’t all been Nulls?

Nix’s grip on the fade wavered. After a split second, he came crashing back to the solid world. His body felt heavy—as heavy as he’d felt after killing Seven and making it messy. He took a deep breath and assessed his current situation. Even when Nix wasn’t faded, the people who worked here rarely bothered to take note of his presence—but that wasn’t a chance worth taking now that he’d gone rogue.

Nix stopped questioning, stopped thinking—and he shed his solid form like a snake wriggling out of its skin. He faded, and this time, he didn’t let himself remember. He didn’t think about why he was here or what he was doing. He just stepped through wall after wall, working his way to the center of the sprawling building.

To the lab.

The scientists and Sensors scurried around, from computer to computer, screen to screen. Nix didn’t know what they were doing. Faded, he didn’t care. He watched them like a child examining an ant farm. The man closest to him was young: a decade older than Nix, maybe less. There was sweat on his brow and scars on his arms: tiny, round pinpricks, up and down the flesh, from elbow to wrist.

“What’s our status?”

Nix recognized Ione’s voice. She rarely spoke to him directly, but her voice had always been the one in his head when he read a target’s name.
She
made the decisions.
She
was in charge.
She
was the one who’d sent him after—

No
. Nix couldn’t let himself go there, couldn’t let himself think about anything the real world had to offer, least of all the girl he’d left behind on the forest floor.

“We’ve got facial recognition programs running on all sectors within a two-hundred-mile radius of the Nobody’s house,” one of the ants replied, scurrying to do his queen’s bidding. “Alarms are set to go off every three minutes, per protocol, to remind us what we’re looking for.”

What
they were looking for. Not who. Never who.

“And our defense mechanism?”

At this, the ant bristled. Said something about
testing
and
phases
but all Nix could think was that Ione was looking for the
Nobody
. She was looking for
Claire
.

Nix felt his stomach turning itself inside out, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep hold of his fade for long. Thinking about Claire: the way he’d left her; the things they had done; the feel of her skin; the taste of cherries on her lips—

In his last instant of nothingness, Nix crossed the room. He stepped through the wall and came out on the other side.

In Ione’s office.

Flip-flops were not conducive to trekking one’s way through the wilderness, but Claire didn’t let that stop her. Her ankles and calves were splattered with mud. Welts rose on her arms, courtesy of branches and trees. She watched the sun travel across the sky. She marked her progress, notching trees in case she got turned around.

Her muscles were sore. Her feet were screaming, but Claire didn’t listen. She couldn’t listen, because she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t pause. She couldn’t let herself think about anything but making it out of this forest alive.

She wasn’t going to be the victim this time.

She wasn’t going to cry.

She wasn’t going to sit and wait. She was
done
waiting, because you could spend your whole life waiting for something to happen. Something big. You could wait and wait, and even if something big happened, even if it
finally happened
—it didn’t change anything.

Even if it changed everything.

The sound of traffic broke Claire out of her thoughts.
Northwest, about a hundred yards out
. She ran, ran with the knife in one hand, her feet bleeding, her heart pumping faster and faster. She broke through the edge of the woods. She stepped out onto the road. Wind whipped through her hair. A car whizzed by, close enough that she felt its motion.

The driver didn’t see her.

Claire stood there for five minutes, ten, watching the world pass her by. She was covered in mud, bleeding, holding a
knife
—and nobody noticed.

Claire felt something give inside of her.
No matter what you do, you will never matter. No one will ever see you. No one but—

Claire walked across the highway. She walked and walked until she came to a town. She stepped onto a sidewalk, in front of a store. Someone bumped into her from behind. She dropped the knife, scrambled to pick it up, and from her spot on the ground, she realized something.

It didn’t matter what she did—and that meant that she could do
anything
. This was a brave new world, because even if she was alone, even if she would
always
be alone, the world had given her permission to stop trying.

Trying to be sweet.

To be nice.

To be good.

As Claire stared at the shops and the people and the thrum of life all around her, she realized that for once in her life, it might be nice to be bad.

The décor in Ione’s office was all metal and sharp corners, glass tabletops and see-through chairs. There was art on the walls, a splash of cool color: blue and silver against a palette of black and white.

Make it messy
.

Ione had said those words to him here. He could still feel the knife in his palm, still hear the man’s screams—

Not a man. He was a Null
.

But standing in Ione’s office, Claire’s face still fresh in his mind, Nix wasn’t so uncompromisingly sure. Everything he’d thought, everything he’d believed in—

He moved swiftly toward a filing cabinet behind Ione’s desk. Locked—but not so hard to open, given proper
motivation. He bypassed file after file, searching for something he recognized
—someone
. And then he found it.

One file after another after another. Eleven of them in total. Neatly labeled with serial numbers that didn’t match up with the numbers in his mind.

One, Two, Three …

He slipped open the third file. Warren Wyler’s lifeless face stared back at him, swollen and puffy, eyes clouded with milky white death. Autopsy reports, biographical details, pictures—

Nix stopped. He closed the file and took another. And another.

Four. Five. Six. Seven.

“Make it messy,” Nix murmured. His fingers lingered on the file. He ran the tip of one gently along the edge, daring himself to open it.

The door to the office opened instead. Nix looked up from the file.

“Oh,” a familiar voice said. “It’s you.”

Ione. She looked exactly as he remembered: blue eyes, blond hair, eyebrows dark enough to call that color into question. The director of the institute wasn’t upset to see him. She wasn’t glad. Objectively, she probably knew that she’d been looking for him, knew that he was an asset she didn’t want to lose, but subjectively—

“You don’t care.” Nix wasn’t sure why he was saying the words. Clearly, neither was she.

“No, I suppose I don’t. It’s for the best, really, that you’ve returned—”

Nix stood, and she saw the file in his hands. Saw the others spread out on the floor.
He
couldn’t provoke emotion in her, but they could.

“And what, pray tell, do you hope to do with those?” Her tone—icy and controlled—matched the colors of the room exactly.

Make it messy
.

Until that moment, Nix hadn’t planned on doing anything with the files. Wordlessly, he gathered them from the floor. Ione took a step forward, but seemed to remember—belatedly—that even if she wasn’t scared, she should be.

These were her files, after all. She’d seen what he could do.

Her hand slid slowly into her pocket—

“Stop.” Nix’s voice was low and cold, a match for hers. “I don’t know what you’re reaching for. I don’t care. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

I’ve killed. I’m a killer. I will kill again
.

Ione couldn’t hear the tone of warning in his voice. She wouldn’t register the lethal set of his eyes. He didn’t frighten her—but she couldn’t afford to ignore him, no matter how hard it was not to. She stopped, freezing in place.

“Why?” Nix asked simply.

Nobodies didn’t ask questions. Nix knew that—but the
knowledge was shallow, replaced by the time he’d spent watching and observing and
touching
Claire.

“Why did you send me to kill her?”

Ione shrugged, her eyes failing to find his, her demeanor poised—like he wasn’t
this far
from snapping her neck just to hear the sound. “You’ve never asked why before.”

Those words hit Nix hard. The files in his hand, his
kills
—he hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t said no. He’d done what they’d said, always.

“I should kill you.” He said the words calmly. She didn’t flinch. Her hand moved, ever so slightly, toward her pocket. He was on her in an instant, his free hand closing around her throat. He didn’t slam her against the wall. He didn’t make a single noise.

“Why?”

Why had she sent him to kill Claire? Why had the sight of the files triggered a response in her that he could not?

Ione opened her mouth. Nix loosened his grip on her throat, just enough so that she could speak, in a harsh whisper that cut through the room. “If you kill me, I’ll only be replaced. Cut off one head, come up against seven more. You can’t stop The Society. You can’t hurt us. You’re
nothing
, and we’re more powerful than you’ve ever imagined.”

Her hand disappeared into her pocket. He tightened his grip, cutting off all air.

“Don’t,”
he said.

She stilled. He looked at her. She looked through him. He was killing her, and she wasn’t even watching.

“Wait.” She mouthed the word. For the second time, he relaxed his grip on her throat. If she had last words, he needed to know them.

“There’s a panic button in my pocket. I’ve already pushed it. This room will be crawling with Sensors in an instant. You can’t kill us all.”

He thought of everything The Society had made him do. He thought of staring down the length of his gun at Claire. He thought of Claire’s nightmares, Claire’s pain—
their
fault.

“I can try.”

Ione shrugged. “And while you’re here, trying to kill us, we’ll be out there, taking care of a problem.”

It took him a moment to grasp her meaning.
We
as in The Society.
Problem
as in Claire. The computer program running in the other room, the scientists—what if they’d found her?