Nobody (21 page)

And he fell asleep.

White floors. White room. White bed
.

Nix woke up calm for the first time in his life, and he wasn’t sure why until he realized that he wasn’t in his quarters at the institute. The bed beneath him was soft, colored, and technically a futon. Sitting on the floor beside it was a girl, curled up like a cat, reading a book.

Claire. Claire’s voice
. The Little Prince.

She’d read to him. The realization was sweet—so sweet that Nix couldn’t berate himself for having let her.

She’d read to him.

He’d listened.

And he’d fallen asleep. No dreams. No terror. No
waking up underwater. Just … nothing. A different kind of nothing than the fade, peaceful to its exhilaration.

“You’re awake.” Claire said the words shyly, ducking her head. Nix nodded. His eyes flittered toward the shelf he’d built her. She smiled.

It was funny. He’d always thought that the best thing about being a Normal would be talking to other people, having them talk back. But not talking, that had its charms, too.

More of them, maybe, because then you didn’t have to find the words. Without making a sound, Claire dog-eared the page she was reading, shut the book, and then put it back in its place, right next to the one she’d read him the night before. Then she went into the kitchen, and when she came back, she offered him a steaming mug.

Coffee.

He took it, their fingers brushing as she transferred it from her hands to his. Then she went back into the kitchen and poured herself a cup.

He drank.

She drank.

It wasn’t until the dark liquid in their mugs sank well past the halfway mark that she spoke. “I don’t have a plan.”

That was the exact opposite of what he’d expected her to say. After the previous night, he would have followed her off the edge of a cliff if she’d asked it.

“But I do have a place.”

“A place?” Nix asked, his voice—like the coffee—warm in his throat.

She nodded.

“What kind of place?”

“Sykes’s place.” She waited, and he realized that she was waiting for him to tell her no. He didn’t, and finally, she continued. “His house. Or maybe his office. Everything else The Society has done makes sense, but killing him doesn’t.”

Nix narrowed his eyes, but she didn’t give him a chance to interrupt.

“Everything else The Society did—it’s not good and it’s not moral and I’d like to take them down for it, one by one, but their motivation makes sense. If The Society wants something and there’s someone standing in their way, they take care of the problem. But why would they kill their own plant in the Senate? Even if he was being difficult, even if he was having second thoughts …”

Nix was still stuck on the fact that Claire had said she wanted to take The Society
down
. And sounded like she meant it.

“If Sykes was just postponing the vote on Prop 42,” she continued, “they wouldn’t have killed him, not unless they had a backup plan. So there must have been another reason. Either he had something that they wanted, or he was going to do something that they didn’t want him to do.”

For a brief moment, Nix entertained a fantasy in which he and Claire really did take The Society down. All of it. In its entirety. The part he’d seen and the parts he was beginning to suspect that he hadn’t.

But Claire couldn’t kill, and he wouldn’t ask her to. Wouldn’t let her. If Sykes had something that The Society wanted, and if they could get it first …

Nix wondered if Ione would bargain for his freedom. For Claire’s.

“If Sykes knew something that The Society didn’t want him to know, or if he had something worth killing over—maybe we can use it.”

It was like she was reading his mind.

“For The Society to kill their own inside man, it would have to be something huge. Something that could threaten the whole operation with exposure, something that could bring the whole thing to its knees.”

Understanding washed over Nix. Claire wanted to bring The Society down, but not by killing its leaders. By
exposing
them.

“It would have to be something big to make a difference,” Nix said, his mind whirring with the implications. “We’re Nobodies. No one’s going to listen to us. No one’s going to care. Unless it’s something huge, they won’t look twice at anything we give them either.”

“But if it
is
something big …”

Nix got a taste of the thing she was offering him, and
it warmed him more than the coffee. Hope. Revenge. A future that didn’t involve doing that little four-lettered thing he did best.

Maybe, once it was over—

Maybe, if he could—

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe
. The possibilities were seductive.

“Going to Sykes’s house could be dangerous. The Society has to be looking for us, Claire.” Nix tried not to give in to the siren’s call of things he could never have. He tried to remember that no matter what he did now, there were some things he could never change.

You are what you are
.

“Would the people in The Society ever guess you’d go to Sykes’s house?” Claire asked.

Nix rolled the question over in his mind. That was his advantage—and Claire’s—in this lethal game: The Society wouldn’t know what to expect. They wouldn’t be able to guess at his motivations. He’d lived under their rule his entire life, and they would have had better luck profiling a complete stranger.

“Maybe I should go alone.” Nix said the words carefully. He didn’t want to hurt her again, didn’t want her to think that he was pushing her away.

Claire’s expression stayed steady, her hands wrapped around her coffee mug. “You can go alone if you want to. I won’t make you take me. But I’d rather go with you. We’re
stronger together, and you won’t let anything happen to me.” She paused. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

It was easy to believe her, easier than it should have been to want her at his back.

She liked my bookcase
.

That thought hit him in place of the things he should have been thinking, about who deserved what and, more to the point, who didn’t.

“We’ll go together,” he said.

She smiled, brighter than sunlight ricocheting off a sharpened blade. “Do you know where Senator Sykes lived?”

Nix knew everything about Evan Sykes. Not his hopes or dreams or childhood aspirations, but his date of birth. His last known address. The location of his office in D.C. The office space he rented in Iowa. The places he went for lunch. The streets he walked or drove down to get there.

His allergies.

“I know where he lived.” There were some things you didn’t forget. Files. Marks. Time of death.

“Okay, then,” Claire said, setting down her coffee. “Let’s go.”

The dead senator’s home was immaculate. Enormous. But more than anything, it felt empty.

She and Nix entered on the second floor. Walked straight through the Georgian-style windows and the handcrafted moldings on the walls. Landed in a hallway with wood floors and Oriental rugs.

Claire held tight to the fade as Nix led them to Sykes’s personal office. She sensed something the moment they stepped into the room. It wasn’t a smell or a taste or a sound, but it was something, in the wisps of solidity that made up the furniture: the muted brown desk, the faraway filing cabinets.

Faded Claire wasn’t sure why these objects were important. Why she should be looking at them, when her body and Nix’s were glowing, iridescent, everywhere. But they’d come here for a reason, and Claire, even though she couldn’t exactly remember why, knew it was important.

She closed her eyes. She reached through her brain with both hands and grabbed on to a fleeting image, guaranteed to bring her crashing back to earth.

A towel.

How many times had she had to ask that darn towel boy for one? How many times had she mopped pool water off her face with the back of her own hand?

Crashing. Mayday, Mayday—

Back.

“Triggers,” Nix said, as he crossed back over to join her.

“What?”

“You found a trigger. To fade, you have to stop trying to matter. You make yourself feel like nothing and you revel in it. But once you’re faded, you can’t think about reality. You can’t pay too much attention to the solid world, and you can’t let yourself remember
wanting
to matter. Triggers are things that make that impossible. They snap you out of the fade. Not exactly pleasant, but they can be useful.”

Claire wondered what Nix’s triggers were and decided it was probably better not to ask. They needed to move quickly. Two Nobodies. In a dead senator’s house. With aforementioned senator’s daughter and wife right downstairs.

“They won’t hear us,” Nix said, picking up on her thoughts. “And if they do, they’ll tell themselves it’s nothing. But we should be quick.”

Even Nobodies could be seen if the situation was compromising enough. Claire
had
talked to people before. She could make them take notice, if only for a few seconds, and something told her that even being maximally inconspicuous might not be enough to camouflage breaking and entering to this degree.

At the very least, she didn’t really want to put it to the test.

“You take the computer. I’ll case the rest of the room.” Nix’s words helped Claire focus, and she nodded, heading for the desktop.

What are the chances that Sykes kept incriminating, top secret files on his home computer?

Claire had a feeling that the answer was slim to none, and she wasn’t anything approximating a hacker, but all they needed was a lead. A teeny, tiny something to point them toward the next clue. The next step in dismantling The Society.

Claire wanted the people who’d raised and trained Nix to suffer.

She wanted The Society to disappear.

Claire slid into the leather armchair behind the antique mahogany desk and turned on the computer. She wasn’t at all surprised when it asked her for a password, and she was even less surprised when “Proposition42” didn’t work.

A Nobody could fool a security system.

Walk straight through walls.

Slip in and out of the most secured buildings unnoticed.

But those abilities didn’t extend to firewalls or computer security. The senator’s PC had no way of knowing that Claire didn’t matter.

Maybe if I faded …

But, no, if she faded, she wouldn’t be able to touch the keys.

On the other side of the room, Nix narrowed his eyes at a random strip of wall. Claire looked up just in time
to see him fade and walk straight through the barrier in front of him.

A second later, he was back.

“Wall safe,” he explained, under his breath. “Nothing there but money and guns.”

Wanting some results of her own to report back, Claire made another stab at the password.

Caroline
. The senator’s wife’s name.

Abigail
. His daughter.

Caroabby. Abbiline. Frozenlemonade
.

The last—Claire’s own password of choice—didn’t work any better than the first two.

“Abi
gail
!”

The voice that chirped that name was high and sultry—and decidedly not Nix’s.

“Oh, like you’ve never gone there, Courtney. You know
there
better than I know bases one through three, and that’s saying something.”

Abigail Sykes—the senator’s daughter. And another girl—Courtney, apparently. They were close enough to the office that Claire could make out every word of their conversation.

“And you told him you’d bring it? The party stuff?”

“Trust me, Court. It won’t be a problem. This juice is way more potent than your mom’s zombie pills.”

“Those are for migraines!”

“Yeah. Right. And my dad’s stash was for his blood sugar.”

Claire didn’t let herself get caught up in the content of what the girls were saying, even though a part of her brain had registered the fact that Sykes’s drug habit was no mystery to his daughter. Right now she and Nix had much bigger problems.

“Abiga
il
!”

“Courtney!”

The voices were right outside the door. The knob was beginning to turn.

Claire ducked down behind the desk. Nix followed suit.

“Have you been in here?” The voice—Courtney’s, Claire guessed—was subdued. Less overly dramatic than it had been a moment before. “You know, since your dad—”

“Shuffled off this mortal coil?” Abigail snorted, but her next words got caught in her throat. “No. But it’s not like things are that different now.”

“He was your dad, Abs.”

“No. He was the pod person who replaced my father the moment he became the junior senator from Iowa.”

“He wasn’t that bad.”

Claire wondered, absentmindedly, if Courtney was the underage girlfriend that had convinced Nix that Sykes was a monster.

“He didn’t care, Court. Not about me. Not about my mom. One day, he did. The next, he didn’t. She got drunk, I got pretty, he got dead.”

Claire knew what trying not to cry sounded like. Abigail was a textbook case.

“So where did your dad keep his stuff?” Apparently, Courtney had expended her complete capacity for sympathy.