Nobody (17 page)

Evan Sykes.

Eleven.

Even though Claire didn’t care about the real world, even though she wasn’t a part of it, even though the fade was her world now—

She couldn’t help reading the words on the tombstone.

BELOVED HUSBAND. LOVING FATHER. CIVIL SERVANT
.

Water park for dogs
.

Ultimately, that was the thought that did it, because faded Claire didn’t care about the gravestone or the words, but real Claire remembered seeing the news. She remembered thinking that the world moved on so fast, and then she thought of her parents, moving on without her. She wondered if they’d get her a tombstone if she never came back.

Wondered if they’d even noticed she was gone.

Reality was a crushing weight against Claire’s chest. For a moment, when she lost her fade, she couldn’t breathe.

“Claire?” Nix lost his fade on the heels of hers. Realizing that his hands were still on her face, he made a choking sound in the back of his throat and pried them away. His eyes went to the tombstone. Claire’s stomach sank.

This was why Nix had brought her here.

Monster
, an unnatural
knowing
said from the pit of her bowels. Nix wanted her to think he was a monster. Because by some definitions—most of them, probably—he was.

“Evan Sykes.” Claire said the name out loud, like that would make the man less dead. Like it would change the fact that even if The Society had pulled the trigger, Nix had willingly played gun.

“Senator Evan Sykes,” Nix echoed. “A man with an underage girlfriend, a serious drug problem, and the most melodic voice on the Senate floor.” Nix paused, but Claire couldn’t bring herself to say a word. “I saw her. The girl he was dating. She was younger than you. Completely in love with him, as was his wife. His own daughter spent most of her nights sleeping over at other people’s houses. I try not to wonder why.”

“He was a Null.” Claire finally found her voice. Before she’d looked at Nix’s files, the word hadn’t meant anything to her. She’d never thought a person could be evil, really evil, deep down inside. But now she’d seen firsthand evidence of what some of Nix’s targets had done. If Nulls really were soulless, if they didn’t care about other people, if they were just born like that and couldn’t help it—

“This is real, Claire.” Nix said the words gently, but Claire felt her temper flare up. She was sick of him acting like she didn’t know that.

“Maybe we should go someplace private to talk?” she suggested tersely. Nix arched an eyebrow at her, and she realized the obvious: even without fading, she and Nix were so very unnoticeable that they didn’t have to worry about things like eavesdroppers, even when Nix was practically confessing to murder at a public figure’s tombstone.

“It can’t be a coincidence.”

Nix eyed her warily. “What can’t be a coincidence?”

“The fact that he’s a senator.” Claire had divided Nix’s kills into piles—and Sykes hadn’t been the only senator.

“I told you. Plenty of Nulls go into politics. They’re good at it. Too good.” Nix looked down, his dark hair falling to obscure his eyes from her view.

“But Evan Sykes was—” Claire checked the tombstone. “He was almost fifty. How long had he been in politics? And why did The Society decide he had to die now?”

“He must have slipped past our earlier screening measures.”

Claire realized with a start that Nix had said
our
. This was the boy who The Society had raised. This was the killer who had bathed in Seven’s blood—but he was also the boy who had saved her. Kissed her. Taught her to fade.

She couldn’t just give up on him. She couldn’t walk away.

“This is what I am, Claire. This is what I do. This is why when I say it’s over, you run. You run, you hide, and you get the hell away from me.”

Claire walked toward him and then past him. “Come on.”

Nix hesitated, and for a moment, she thought he’d let her walk away without batting an eye. Like fingernails on a chalkboard, the rejection grated. But then, in an instant, he was beside her, his long stride easily overtaking hers.

“Where are we going?”

Claire met his gaze and stuck to short answers. “The library.”

The library? He’d taken her to the good senator’s grave to scare some sense into her, to force her to see what he and The Society were capable of doing, and now she wanted to go to the
library
?

For a few seconds there, Nix had actually thought that he’d succeeded. He’d seen it in the rings of her hazel eyes, the way her gaze lingered on the grave of the man he’d put down like a rabid dog.

And now they were going to the library.

“We’re going to find out more about the senator. You see, there’s this thing called the internet.”

Sarcasm. Claire is being sarcastic
.

“I know what the internet is,” Nix replied tautly. “I’ve killed people who use it.”

Ten had been an up-and-coming technology mogul who dabbled in human trafficking on the side.

“You mean you’ve never gone online yourself?” From the expression on Claire’s face, you would have thought he’d announced that he never bathed.

“I live in an eight by eight room with no windows and a door that’s padlocked for show. What do you think?” He didn’t realize until he’d said the words out loud that she wouldn’t have had any way of knowing that. He hadn’t told her.

“You don’t live there anymore.” The quiet vehemence in Claire’s voice knocked the breath from Nix’s chest. “And out here in the real world, when you need answers, we have this wonderful thing called Google.”

“And this Google lives in libraries?”

Nobodies don’t ask questions
.

He hadn’t meant to. He’d trained himself—not to wonder. Not to think. To breathe in and out and let the entire world bleed out through his skin.

Nobodies don’t ask questions
.

But Nix had, and Claire answered it.

“Google’s a search engine. Libraries have computers, and most of them have free internet. Sykes was a senator—there will be news articles.”

Nix didn’t reply. A Nobody’s education tended more toward Mach 7s and arsenic than computer how-to’s. They’d only taught him to read so that they wouldn’t have to bother giving him his orders in person.

So they could slip them under his door.

Name. Date. Place.

“Do you even know where the closest library is?” he asked sharply, pushing away that thought, the memories.

Claire paused. Flushed. And then pink lips tilted upward in a bewitching, beseeching grin.

“No?”

He didn’t either. The only thing he knew about this city was that Evan Sykes had died three streets over. Heart attack—or so they said.

“We’ll have to ask someone.” Claire scrunched her mouth into a skinny O. “I
hate
asking people.”

Nobodies don’t ask questions
.

But Claire didn’t know that. She’d probably asked hundreds. Maybe she’d even gotten some answers. Probably not a lot. That was probably why she hated it. But she’d asked them anyway.

Nobodies don’t cry
.

Nix wasn’t sure why he wanted to. For Claire—asking and asking, again and again—or for himself. Because he couldn’t. Couldn’t go up to a stranger, the way she was doing now. Couldn’t look them in the eye. Couldn’t be around Normals without feeling like he should have tried harder the day he’d tried to slit his own throat.

“Excuse me, ma’am? Errr … sir? I’m sorry to bother you, but—” On the fourth try, Claire finally got someone to stop. Her voice went up at least a decibel or two in the process.

“Oh, you don’t know? Okay, well … excuse me? Could you maybe …”

Five more tries. Six.

By the time she came stomping back toward him, Nix had gotten over his shock at watching her march up to total strangers. Ask them questions. Blush and bite her lips when they ignored her. Press on.

“I
hate
asking questions.”

But she did it. Knowing that they’d probably ignore her. Feeling smaller and smaller each time. For him.

Brave. Claire is brave
.

The realization surprised Nix. Claire was innocent. Claire was sweet. Claire was stubborn and funny and irresistible and Claire.

Brave was a problem.

“The closest library’s a few miles away,” she said, reporting back. “If I tell you where it is, can you get us there in the fade?” Even talking about fading changed Claire, brought something otherworldly to her eyes. “I can’t think when I’m faded. I just … I lose it, you know?”

“I know,” Nix replied. To find something after you faded, your body had to want it. You had to be single-minded, because when the real world slipped away, conscious thoughts went with it. All that remained was the id: wants, needs,
desires
.

“We should just walk.” He could have found the library from the fade. They could have slipped out of the here
and now, been there in a heartbeat, no worse for the wear. But it didn’t seem wise, because right now Nix’s id wanted nothing more than to touch Claire.

To be with Claire.

Beautiful, brave, irresistible Claire
.

“It’ll be dark by the time we get there,” she objected.

“Good.” Nix glanced over his shoulder. Anonymity wasn’t an excuse for sloppiness. The Society had found Claire once. All odds to the contrary, they could do it again. “We probably shouldn’t have gone out during the day anyway.”

Nix knew nothing about libraries, or the internet, or what it felt like to talk to strangers, but he knew this much: nighttime was Nobody time. The real monsters came out with the sun.

By the time they got to the library, it was closed, and Claire felt a familiar pang of disappointment in the pit of her gut before she realized it didn’t matter. The ice cream truck always left just before she got there. Play auditions closed while she was sitting there, waiting for her turn. Absentminded teachers were always losing the field-trip permission forms she’d painstakingly forged. But what did it matter if the library was closed? If the doors were locked?

This time, she didn’t ask Nix if they should fade. He’d been quiet on the walk over, more so than usual, and Claire was getting tired of feeling his stare, not knowing what it meant.

I don’t matter. Middle of the middle. Left behind. Nuisance
.

Once upon a time, those words would have hurt.

No one notices. No one cares. When I ask questions, I have to beg for the answers
.

She felt the real world rolling off her body, like water. No, oil. Thick and greasy, numbing, it slipped from her veins and her skin and her brain until all that was left was the deepest kind of ache.

Nothing
.

She didn’t wait to see if Nix would follow her. He might back away from her in the real world. He might look at her like she’d done something wrong, just because it had taken her ten minutes to get someone to point them toward the library. He might expect her to turn tail and run away when things got hard.

But down beneath skin and bones and the things they’d done and hadn’t, the two of them were the same. Fading stripped off all the other layers, and like a beacon, she called to him.

I’m like you
.

Reality broke around his body, crumbled, as his face began to glow. Claire felt the earth give the moment he crossed over.

The moment he took her hand.

There were people on the street. Not many, this late at night, but some, and as Claire’s faded skin brushed Nix’s, the world shuddered. The street and the people and the flickering streetlamps froze like a photo, snapped an instant too soon.

“Time stops for us.” She said the words like they were music. “Let’s run.”

Nix shook his head. The movement hypnotized Claire, and it took her a moment to decode its meaning as something other than his dance to her song. He led. She followed—through locked doors, through walls, through shelves and shelves of books that another Claire would have loved to read.

I’m here for a reason
.

Her brain was slow in catching up to her body, but somehow, that thought made its way to her like breath bubbling at the top of a pool.