Nobody (18 page)

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 eye 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?”

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
.

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.