Nobody (16 page)

Like she was carving out his heart.

“I was fourteen the first time I killed.” He said those words to push her away. To punish himself for letting her get as close as she was now. “Before that, there was another Nobody. I never met him. Never saw him. Didn’t even know his name. So, no, Claire, The Society never told me that
this
would happen.”

“What did they tell you?”

He swallowed, hard. He thought of the folders back in the cabin. The things he’d promised to show her.

“Come with me,” he said. “And you’ll see.”

The folders felt heavy in Claire’s hands. Back in town, her demand had seemed so simple: if Nix was investigating
the people who wanted her dead, she had a right to help. But an afternoon of fading had dulled her anger—at him, at the situation, at the things she’d discovered about herself. What Nix had taught her how to do—it was beautiful. It filled the lonely, hollow places inside of her—and now she was holding Nix’s past, his secrets, his dark and twisted, empty places in her hand.

“Open it,” he told her.

She didn’t want to, but she did. She sat on the floor of the cabin and set the folders in front of her. She opened the file on the top, and dull eyes stared back at her: a man, in his early twenties. He was handsome enough, but there was something chilling about the way he stared at the camera. Claire fumbled with the pages in the folder and flipped to the next one.

Another picture of the same man. He was naked, lying in a bathtub. His skin was charred.

“One,” Nix said. “My first. Richard—one of the Sensors—he drove me there, dropped me off three blocks away. He told me that I was a killer, that no matter what I did, someone was going to die that night, and the only choice I had was whether it was the monster or the girl.”

Claire didn’t want to ask—but she did. “What girl?”

Nix closed his eyes. “The girl he had chained in the basement. She was wearing a metal collar, and she was so dirty, you couldn’t see her skin.” Nix’s eyes jumped
beneath their lids. Claire opened her mouth to tell him that he didn’t have to do this, but it was too late.

There was no stopping him now.

“I went upstairs, and the man who was keeping her in that filthy cage like some kind of animal—he was in the bathtub, listening to the radio. Classical music. He was clean, and he was smiling. He never heard me coming.” Nix opened his eyes. “I dropped the radio into the tub.”

Claire’s gaze was drawn back to the picture: the welts on the man’s skin, his empty eyes. After a long moment, she set the folder aside and opened the next one.

“Two,” Nix preempted. “Shot through the temple. I would have gone with poison, but she’d set up a cult of sorts, and her followers were worshipping her like she was a god. If she’d had any idea she was going to die, she would have taken them with her, children and all.”

Claire thought back to what he’d told her in the forest. He was fourteen when this started. Younger than she was now. She glanced up at him. His entire body was tense, like a rubber band stretched too tight.

“Tell me about the fade.” Claire knew instinctually that this was the one thing she could ask to diffuse the tension. Things were different in the fade.

“Fading isn’t magic, Claire. It’s not some fairy tale. It’s just a physical expression of a metaphysical deficiency.”

“No,” Claire said firmly. “It’s not. Whatever The Society told you, whatever they taught you—how would they
know? How could they ever understand what fading is like?”

For a second, Nix looked like he might agree with her—but he didn’t.

“The Society studies energy, Claire. Once upon a time, they called it alchemy. Now they just call it science. The Sensors, the scientists, the people who trained me—they never sat down and explained fading to me. They beat it into my head.” Nix paused. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

Without warning, he strode toward the far end of the cabin. He stopped near the wall and held his hand an inch from its surface. “I’m not touching the wall, and it’s not touching me,” he said, and then he moved his hand forward, pressing it gently to the wall. “Now I am touching the wall, and it’s touching me.”

Nix leaned against the wall, putting all of his weight behind the motion. The muscles in his arm tensed, and Claire could see him—dumping a radio into a monster’s tub, setting his sights on a cult leader and pulling the trigger.

“The harder I push, the harder the wall pushes back, but when I stop”—he righted his body—“the wall stops pushing back. The wall is static—it doesn’t move. Unless I push on it, it can’t push on me. When I push against it, it pushes back against me with exactly as much force as I applied. If I push lightly, it pushes lightly. If I push harder, it pushes harder.”

Claire thought suddenly that, in another lifetime, the two of them could have been having this exchange over a physics textbook while they studied for the big test. Normal girl. Normal boy. Happily ever after.

“When Nobodies fade, we can’t touch anything. We can’t affect it. We can’t push. And when we can’t push—”

“The wall can’t push back,” Claire finished for him. If she’d meant to distract him, she’d achieved her goal—but he didn’t stay distracted for long.

“There are nine more folders.”

Claire picked up the next folder. She’d forced him to deal her in. She’d said she could do this. And now she had to—for him.

“Number Three,” she said, opening the third file. This time, Nix didn’t say a word. He let her read the file for herself. The man’s name was Warren Wyler. He’d been poisoned in his own bedroom in Washington, D.C. The file didn’t enumerate Wyler’s sins, but it did tell her his occupation.

“You killed a U.S. senator?” she asked.

Nix glanced down at the file. “No,” he said. “I killed two U.S. senators. Three and Eleven. Nulls and the government are a bad mix. They can make people do things. Make them believe things. Give them genocide, call it ice cream.”

Claire thought of Hitler. Of Stalin and Napoleon and atrocities committed across the world. If The Society’s
goal was to keep monsters from power, it didn’t exactly have a history of doing a bang-up job.

Four. Five. Six.

Claire went through the next three files without comment. When she opened the seventh, she was completely unprepared. “Jacob Madsen,” she said, but that was as far as she got, because The Society had stocked this file with crime scene photos.

Unlike many of the others, there was no question that Madsen had been murdered. Sliced and stabbed and skinned like an animal.

At her silence, Nix came to stand behind her. He caught sight of the picture. And then he snapped.

Nix can’t see anything but the blood. Can’t smell anything but the blood. It’s on the walls and the floor and his hands
.

Oh, God
.

He has to get out of here. Has to fade. The part of his brain that’s screaming has to be cut off, silenced. He lets himself go numb. He stops caring, stops thinking, stops remembering—

The feel of the knife in his hand
.

The icy blue tones of Ione’s office
.

Make it messy, she’d said
.

Make it messy
.

So he had
.

Nix came out of it, his hand gripping the back of the futon so tightly that the wood had cracked. There were blisters on his fingertips. He sank to the floor. Within seconds, he remembered that he wasn’t alone. Claire was there, beside him. She didn’t reach for him, didn’t touch him.

He didn’t want her to.

He didn’t have the strength to fight her.

“Shhh. Shhh.” She shushed him like he was a baby, and Nix realized he was making a broken, mewling sound. “You’re okay. You’re okay, Nix. I’m here. I’m right here.”

She’d seen the pictures. Didn’t she understand? What he was? What he’d done?

“Finish it,” he whispered. Once she saw it all, once the truth sank in—Ione was right. For all that he and Claire had in common, there was a chasm between them filled with bodies and blood. She wouldn’t understand. She
couldn’t
.

“I don’t need to see the rest to see what this so-called Society did to you.”

“I want you to finish it,” he said.

Slowly, reluctantly, she left him. She read through the rest of the files. And then she started sorting them into piles on the floor.

“What are you doing?”

She looked up from the floor. “I’m looking for a pattern.
I was supposed to be your next kill. You said that The Society has two purposes: studying energy and killing Nulls. But I’m not a Null, and they didn’t try to study me.”

When he’d grabbed the folders, he’d hoped there might be a pattern, but it made no sense that after seeing what was in those folders, Claire wasn’t running for the door. He came closer to her, and she didn’t flinch.

She’ll never love you. You are what you are
.

“This stack’s political,” Claire said. “This stack has mob connections. This one is media—and miscellaneous.”

This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to show her the files, and she was supposed to run.

“This isn’t a story, Claire. This isn’t a game.”

Vulnerability flashed across her face, then disappeared under steely resolve. “I know that.”

“You’re not ready for this.” What he really meant was something along the lines of
I don’t want you to be ready for this
, ever—but the less she knew about what he wanted, the better.

“You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

Her words undid him, but he couldn’t crumble, couldn’t let her follow him any farther down this path.

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

Even after everything she’d seen, she didn’t believe that. It wasn’t real to her, the way it was to him. The people in these folders were just names on paper, pictures printed with ink.

“Stand up,” he said.

After a long moment, she obeyed. He had to do this. He had to show her. He had to make it real.

“Time to put what you learned about fading this afternoon into action,” he said. “We’re going on a little trip.”

“Where are we going?”

Nix prepared to fade. “We’re going to see number Eleven.”

Middle of the middle. Generic. Nothing
.

Sweet, sweet nothing
.

Claire concentrated on that feeling—not what Nix had said before they faded. The cabin and the forest were long gone. The real world, already gray and muted in her eyes, fell away beneath her feet, small and unimportant. There was no wind to brush against her face, but her skin felt cool. It was like every flying dream she’d ever had, only better.

She didn’t look down.

“Almost there.” Nix’s voice was strong, powerful, primal. Faded, Claire reveled in it, ignored the meaning behind his words. Beside her, Nix slowed, and though a
part of Claire—the wild part, the hungry one—wanted to blur past him, she didn’t. She let the real world, ugly and solid and unimportant as it was, come slowly into focus, enough to realize that they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

How many miles had they traveled? How far had they come? She shook off the questions. The real world was waiting to pull her back, back to memories and words exchanged. Back to the memory of those folders and the people Nix had killed.

“Your pupils are dilated.” Nix’s voice was all around her. She shivered with the sound of it. Suddenly, the two of them were standing very close together. Faded, Claire could do things, say things, take what she wanted.

No rejection.

No fear.

The moment they touched, the fade exploded outward from their bodies, the world around them going instantly and unnaturally still.

“Oh.” The sound Nix made as her skin met his was halfway between a hum and hallelujah. Gone was the darkness in his eyes. Gone was the way he kept pushing her—back, back, back. He brought his hands up, fanned his fingers out on either side of her face.

Nix and Claire and nothing
.

That was when Claire realized they were standing
in a cemetery. It shouldn’t have mattered. Nothing did, but the second she caught the name on the closest tombstone, Claire’s brain switched back on.