Nobody (28 page)

Pulling away from Claire was hard.

The smell of her hair. The curve of her lips. The way her hand held the SIG P226. Claire was more than the sum of her parts, but even the tiniest details of her body drew Nix like a planet toward the sun.

Forget the Sensors. Forget what they’d come here to do. Forget everything. Why go back? Ever? What had the real world ever done for them?

But Nix knew he couldn’t do it. They had to disable the last two Sensors. Had to leave one of them in shape to talk.

Nix took a step away from Claire, putting space in between them, but keeping a tight hold on her hand. Together, they walked through the walls of the store, through the dozen or so wind chimes out front, frozen where the wind had left them.

The boulevard was silent, motionless. The remaining Sensors had taken to one of the side streets, but they weren’t hard to find. The older man had a nondescript nose and a pockmarked face, and he carried himself in a way that reminded Nix of a bloodhound—snout first.

Beside him, the younger man, the one Nix had
recognized as the kind of person who
liked
playing the role of predator, had one ear tilted toward the ground and the other turned toward his partner.

The two men must have been talking—to each other, to the frantic, blinded Sensor via their comms—at the moment that Nix and Claire had stopped time.

“Lights,” Claire said, nodding toward their faces, her voice dreamy and rough, as if the owners of those faces did not want them dead.

“I see them.” The lights. The Sensors. The enemy.

“You see the lights,” Claire murmured, and Nix heard something in her voice that told him that concentrating on the sheen of energy that marked these men as Sensors kept her from thinking about them as people, thinking about what he
—they
—were about to do.

Nothing. No fear. No emotions. No hate
.

It wasn’t a bad strategy, and Nix wondered if it was that simple. See the lights. Put them out.

Nix stepped forward, hand still in Claire’s. He couldn’t touch the Sensors from the fade, but there was some chance he might be able to touch the light.

To Normals, a Sensor’s power is invisible. It’s nothing. So am I
.

Nix reached out his free hand and for a moment, he expected to be able to catch the light in his hand and pull the powers out of the Sensors’ bodies—no muss, no fuss, no blood. But the moment he made contact, a
violent jolt traveled up his arm, from hand to shoulder.

Fuzziness.

Confusion.

Pain.

Is this what Claire felt when she brought the Null drug into the fade?

Nix barely had time to finish the thought before he realized that he’d dropped Claire’s hand. They were still faded, still invisible to the outside world—but the second they parted, time sped up.

“—rash and inadvisable.” The old man’s words picked up midsentence. Nix kept himself from reaching for Claire.

“Nix, what happened?” Claire asked. “Why—”

Nix held his index finger up to his lips, in part because he didn’t know the answer to Claire’s question, but also because he found himself wanting to hear what these Sensors had to say.

“Elena is out of commission. So are Margaret and Ryland. Either we find these Nobodies and we neutralize them, or they neutralize us.” The younger man was adamant—not because he was angry or scared.

Because he was titillated.

Because he wanted blood.

Nix concentrated on maintaining his fade. It was his fault they’d fallen back into the time line. He’d dropped Claire’s hand, and now that the Sensors were talking,
he couldn’t bring himself to stop time again, not when eavesdropping might reveal something useful.

“If Ryland, Margaret, and Elena couldn’t neutralize the Nobodies, what makes you think you can?” The old man’s words were mild, as if his partner didn’t provoke any more emotion in him than their targets did.

“This!” The younger withdrew a small vial. At first, Nix thought it might be the poison The Society favored for inconspicuous kills, but one look at his adversary’s eyes corrected that assumption. A killer might romance their weapons, but they didn’t hunger for them, and the look in the younger Sensor’s eyes was akin to starvation.

Looks like tar. Feels like heaven
. Nix thought of the drug Sykes had used. But this one looked different—lighter in color.

Almost transparent.

Back at the institute
. Nix recalled what he’d seen in the laboratory the day he went back, his insides going ice-cold. Ione asking for a status update on Claire—and then demanding one on their “defense mechanism.” The needle tracks he’d seen on one of the Sensor’s arms.

“We’ve already taken the maximum dose of this particular drug, young man.” In the present, the older Sensor’s voice boomed. “Enough to partially inoculate us to our prey’s powers. Enough to tell me that our targets could be close, listening to every word we say.”

A breeze blew directly through Claire and Nix, and
even though it didn’t affect them, when it reached the old man’s nose, he tilted his head back, just a bit.

“If they were listening to us, we’d be dead.” The young man, cocky, took a needle out of the inside pocket of his jacket, inserted it into the vial in his hand, and pulled back, filling the needle with a strange, nearly clear serum that glowed a light rose pink in the sunlight.

Not a poison.

A drug. And not the one Sykes had been taking. Not a Null drug.

Nix thought of the first Sensor he’d taken out. Ryland. His old trainer. The one he’d left, gasping for air on the pavement.

A man who never should have been able to get a lock on him, faded or not.

Maybe The Society’s current head of research
wasn’t
a complete waste of space. Maybe the Null drug wasn’t his only achievement.

“Erikson, don’t do this.” The older man stepped forward to grab the younger man’s arm, just before needle met skin. “You’re not approved for another dose for twenty-four hours. The side effects—you’re messing with forces you don’t understand. The drug doesn’t just protect you from their powers. It affects your own energy, alters the metaphysical building blocks of your entire—”

The old man’s words were lost as his partner shook him off. Needle slid into vein, and the younger man—
Erikson—squeezed his eyes shut, the edges of his mouth pulling tight and tilting upward.

Pain.

Ecstasy.

And then he opened his eyes, and they were red. Not the light, translucent pink of the serum. Dark and bloodshot.

I wonder what Sykes looked like when he took the Null drug
. Nix shook off the thought. He had to stay faded. With Claire.

“They’re here,” Erikson whispered, his pupils pulsing with some kind of artificial high. “I can’t see them. I can’t hear them. But they’re near.”

“Yes, yes, they are, faded most likely, and I would wager to guess that if they wanted us dead, we’d be so already.” The older man looked upward—probably because he didn’t know where exactly they stood. “They didn’t kill Ryland or Margaret. Elena either.”

The blood-eyed Sensor was too far gone to listen to reason. “I think I’ll kill the girl first. Make it watch.”

It
as in Nix.

The words had their expected effect on him, and Nix felt a rush of unwanted emotion.

—Protect Claire, save her, even if I have to kill him, it’s my choice, mine—

“I hear you,” the object of Nix’s hatred sing-songed. “You’re here. You’re close. You’re hiding.”

Nix reached for Claire, counting on her presence in
the fade to ground his. She glanced at him, but stepped back from his touch, and Nix realized that she didn’t want to stop time. He wondered why.

Claire wrapped her left hand over the base of the gun she held in her right.

“Stop baiting them, Erikson.” The old man’s nose crinkled of its own volition as he spoke.

“Isn’t that what The Society teaches you?” Erikson sneered. “The best way to deal with a Nobody is to taunt them. Lure them. Pretend to care, and they’ll step right out into the open.” His hand went back into his jacket pocket, producing another vial of translucent liquid. “Ione and her ilk need to get with the times.”

Nix’s heart thudded in his ears. With another dose of the drug, would this Sensor be able to see through the fade? Would he become a Nobody, the way Senator Sykes had taken on the characteristics of a Null?

No
.

It was impossible, and it was wrong. But not as wrong or as impossible as the idea of Claire, her eyes locked on their target, lifting her arms. Lifting the gun. Steadying her aim.

Ready to fire, just in case.

From the moment the smirking, sneering man started talking, Claire felt herself losing it—not the fade, but the
ability to think and see things clearly. Whenever Nix got upset, he started flickering between the real world and the fade, but in that moment, with Nix at her side, Claire’s grip on nothingness was so perfect, so complete that she faced the opposite danger.

She felt like she might never go back. Like the rules and morals that governed the real world didn’t apply here.

Power. We have it. They don’t
.

The more ugly, meaningless word-sounds poured out of the young Sensor’s smirking, sneering mouth, the less Claire felt like Claire, and the more she felt like something else. A girl with a gun.

Nobody
.

Smirk-Sneer was holding another little pink-tinted vial, but Claire couldn’t talk her eyes into looking at it. She couldn’t parse the man’s voice into words. All she could do was watch the flecks of light around his ears.

Moving faster.

Growing.

Claire barely felt her arms floating upward. She barely registered taking aim.

“Claire. No.” Nix’s voice cut into her thoughts, but only slightly.

What Smirk-Sneer was doing to his body and the flicker surrounding it—his energy, his aura, his power—was wrong.

It affects your own energy, alters the metaphysical
building blocks of your entire being
. Claire remembered the older man’s warning and finished it for him.
There’s no telling what might happen
.

The lights surrounding Smirk-Sneer’s ears grew brighter. They bubbled up on themselves, like blisters rising on the surface of burned skin.

“Give me the gun, Claire,” Nix said softly. For a moment, Claire considered his request, but then the younger Sensor—
bad man, ugly-solid
man—stuck another needle in his skin and the flicker of light around his face exploded outward, doubling, tripling, quadrupling in size. Light. Swarming the bad man’s body. Not just his ears.

Eyes.

Nose.

Mouth.

It spread down his body with the speed of a lit fuse. Each tiny fleck of light split in two and then in two again, and the whole time, they were growing, growing, growing.…

Claire’s arms stiffened. Her finger slipped easily around the trigger of the gun. She was faded, and the bad man was looking directly at her. He was
talking
to her. “I see you,” he said, his lips twisting maniacally as he went for his own gun.

“Claire!” Nix yelled.

Claire didn’t care. She didn’t hear it. All she could think about, all she had room in her mind for, was the light.

Claire could stop this. Stop the man who wanted to hurt them.

“Hide-and-seek is over,” her target said, ignoring Claire and her gun and speaking directly to Nix. “How much do you want to bet I can make her lose her fade? A few well-placed words and a little pull of the trigger—she dies.”

Claire didn’t look away, and she didn’t fire her gun. She watched as the bulging flecks of light wound themselves around and around the Sensor’s body. Attacking his skin. Pushing their way in, and then back out. So many of them, in and out.

Everything in this world has an energy
.

Maybe our energy is different. Maybe it’s weaker. Maybe it’s just set to a different frequency
.

Nobody and Null. Nobody and Sensor and Null. Different kinds of wrong aren’t supposed to mix
.

With sudden clarity, Claire knew what was going to happen. She dove for the ground. The Sensor, mistaking her reasoning, adjusted his aim, training his gun on her. Nix threw himself at Claire. And then, before Nix’s body could collide with hers, before the two of them could stop time, the Sensor who’d injected himself with three times the limit of The Society’s experimental Nobody drug smirked and sneered, one last time. He went to pull the trigger, and his entire body exploded in a ball of light, the forces he’d been playing with devouring him whole.

The explosion, and the shock at what had happened,
knocked Claire back into the physical world, and she and Nix fell the last inch to the ground, their limbs tangled together in a mass of arms and legs. Outside of the fade, there was no trace of the explosion: no light, no energy, no corpse.

It took Claire a moment to realize that the gun was still in her hand. That it hadn’t gone off, and that, with instincts she’d never been aware of possessing, she was aiming it at the remaining Sensor.