Nobody (24 page)

“That’s right, Claire. I’m right here. Stay with me.” He
pulled her closer, ignored the warning—
You are what you are. She’ll never love you
—as he brushed his lips lightly over hers.

She pressed herself into him, harder. He let her. Nothing mattered, except his lips and hers. His touch and hers. The warmth between them, the power of their fades doubling over and over until the vial in her hand seemed as unimportant as Nobodies did to Normals.

He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t touch her, shouldn’t kiss her—but it was too late for that. There was no room for
shouldn’t
in the fade. Nothing but Nix. Nothing but Claire.

Nothing but the two of them.

For now
.

Claire didn’t remember running back to the cabin. She didn’t remember flying. She didn’t remember anything other than the kiss: the way it stilled her mind and grounded her in the fade, the sensation of knowing with a deep and undying certainty that Nix was the only person in the world she wanted, the only person she would ever want, even if he jerked away from her the moment they crossed out of the fade.

No matter what he said or did or how he looked at her—she remembered his smell and his taste and what it
felt like, for one perfect moment, to be the thing against which the whole of the universe paled.

She set the drug they’d stolen from Abigail Sykes on the coffee table.

“Nix—”

“No.” He didn’t let her say any of the things she was thinking. He didn’t want to hear it. “I shouldn’t have. We shouldn’t have.”

“Yes, you should have.”

He closed his eyes, refusing to look at her. “Don’t, Claire.”

Condition one
, Claire thought. If she reached out to touch him, he’d jerk back. If she tried to talk, he wouldn’t listen.

Don’t. Can’t. Shouldn’t. No
. Claire’s eyes drifted over to the bookshelf.
Her
bookshelf. No matter how tired she was of being pushed away, no matter how much she wanted things he would never let her have—she couldn’t bring herself to hate him for it.

“The drug’s a different color now.” Claire gestured to the liquid inside the vial. If he didn’t want to talk about it, they wouldn’t talk about it. “Before, it was the color of tar. Now it’s like onyx. Still dark, but …”

She couldn’t make herself say the word
beautiful
.

“Do you think taking it to the fade changed it?” Claire focused on that question instead of asking him how he could think, even for a second, that kissing her had been a mistake.

Nix flicked his eyes toward the Null drug. “You’re right. It does look different. Nobodies and Nulls are polar opposites. I felt it when you brought the drug into the fade. Something happened.” He paused. “I don’t know exactly what’s in that drug, but whatever it is, it’s not compatible with the fade. They reacted to each other.”

“Like matter and antimatter?” Claire wasn’t even sure what the words meant, but at least she was talking, and at least she wasn’t saying what she was thinking.

Tell me you want to be with me the way I want to be with you. Tell me you felt it, too. Faded or solid, today, tomorrow—

“Yeah,” Nix replied, and for a moment, she pretended he was responding to the thing she hadn’t asked. “Something like that.”

Claire’s being quiet. Her knees are pulled up to her chest. Her hair is falling into her face
.

Nix didn’t want to think about what bringing the drug into the fade must have cost her. To bring something into the fade, you had to consider it an extension of yourself. The strength of will it must have taken to look at the drug, to know what it could do and absorb it into her sense of self was incredible.

“Claire?” He reached out and touched her shoulder. He’d kissed her to stop the pain—and it had worked. But that hadn’t been his only motivation. He’d wanted her, wanted so many things that he knew he would never have. “Are you okay?”

“What are we going to do with it?” She answered his question with a question. “The drug, the tapes, the fact that The Society killed a senator—will it be enough? If we gave it to the police, or the FBI, or the media—would it be enough?”

Nix tried to picture himself giving the Null drug to someone, telling them what it did. If they heard him, they wouldn’t particularly care. And if they cared—if he and Claire could send a letter or an email or find someone else to deliver the message and the proof—what would happen? Would the government shut The Society down …

Or would they take it over?

The Society had three purposes that Nix knew of now. Killing Nulls. Studying energy. Preserving and extending the power of The Society. Maybe there were other initiatives, and maybe there weren’t, but the government would almost certainly have plans of their own. They wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to use The Society’s means for their own ends.

Wasn’t Sykes proof of that?

“If we’re going to expose The Society for killing Sykes, we have to do damage control first.” Nix glanced at Claire. “No one can know about the Null drug. We can’t run the risk that someone else will take it. And no one can know about us.”

“We have to destroy the drug.” Claire spoke the truth
that he had been dancing around. “Not just this vial. All of it.”

“All of it,” Nix agreed. They couldn’t risk The Society, or the government, or anyone else giving themselves the power to manipulate others—and becoming a psychopath in the process. They had to destroy the drug. The research that went with it. Any chance of making it again.

And that meant that they were going in.

A part of Claire had always known it would come to this. Nix had already returned to The Society once, and he’d come back bleeding. No matter how much evidence they gathered, no matter what they learned about The Society’s purpose and their plans and the lies they’d told Nix—at the end of the day, the enemy still had to be taken apart from the inside out.

Only this time, Nix wasn’t going in alone.

He’s going to tell me I can’t come
. Claire knew that. She also knew that he was wrong.
He’s going to say that it’s over and that I’m not a part of this, that it’s something he has to do alone. But I’m not going to let him leave me behind. Not again. Not now
.

“I bet my parents haven’t even realized I’m gone.” That was the only thing Claire could think of that wouldn’t give him an excuse to run. “I disappeared, what, three,
four days ago? They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone. What if I never go back? Will they just forget I existed at all?”

I’m never going back
. Claire knew it was true the second the question left her mouth.
Even if Nix says it’s over, even if he tries to send me away. Knowing what I know, knowing that they’ll never care—

There was no coming back from something like that.

From the moment Nix had realized that he was going back to the institute, he’d known that this would be good-bye. This was
his
fight.
He
was The Society’s executioner, its weapon.

He had to let Claire go. But as he looked at her, really
looked
at her, he realized the obvious: that Claire didn’t have anywhere to go.

“They won’t forget you right away,” he said, a lump rising in his throat. “They’ll realize you’re gone, but they won’t look for you. If you went back this week or next or six months from now, you could probably jog their memories.”

“But a year from now? Or two? Or ten?”

They’ll forget about you
. Nix didn’t have the heart to say it out loud. The only reason The Society’s members would remember that Claire existed was that they had
protocols in place to prevent them from forgetting. They had files. Reminder alarms set to go off to prompt them to read those files and recall what it was that they were after.

Claire’s parents didn’t have any of that.

“You ever heard of Roanoke?” Nix wasn’t sure why he decided to bring that up, other than the fact that the story didn’t involve talking about going back to the institute, and it didn’t involve telling Claire that the people she’d called Mom and Dad would probably forget they’d ever had a daughter.

“That’s the lost colony, right? The one that just sort of disappeared?”

“Sir Walter Raleigh—the guy who funded the expedition that landed at Roanoke—was Society. Most of the people on the ship were Nobodies. A few were Nulls who Raleigh wanted away from the Crown. A half dozen Sensors. I guess The Society wanted a claim on the New World, the power that would come with it.”

Claire snorted. “How’d that plan work out for them?”

“The Nobodies killed the Nulls. The Sensors forgot the Nobodies existed. Raleigh and the Queen neglected to send supplies for a few years.” Nix shrugged. “Didn’t go well.”

“So there were more of us back then?” Claire asked, and the idea was as strange to Nix as it was to her.

From dozens to two
.

“There must have been.”

“And now there’s just you and me. You. And me.” The words burst out of her mouth with enough force that he realized she’d been holding them in the whole time. While they’d discussed the drug. While they’d been making plans.

“I never would have been normal, Nix. I never would have been Abigail with her Courtneys and Justins. I won’t ever have a normal life, no matter what I do, and I swear to God, I don’t know whether to be sorry for them or for me. Because I know—I
know
what’s going to change and what’s not going to change, and I know that you’re the only one who will ever see me. And that’s enough, because you’re the only one I want to see.”

He couldn’t quite process the words, but he read their meaning in the set of her body, the tilt of her chin.

You’re the only one I want to see
.

She knew what he was. She understood. Maybe he should walk away, maybe he didn’t deserve her, but Nix knew—suddenly and irrevocably—that he couldn’t.

Wouldn’t.

You’re the only one I want to see
.

She wouldn’t ever have a normal life. If she’d never met him, if he walked away and never darkened her door again—

She’d be alone. And it would kill her, the way that walking away from her would kill him.

“I’m not going to leave you, Claire.” He’d never made a promise before. The words had a taste to them—sweet like lavender, solid like steel.

“Ever?”

Nobodies didn’t think about the future. Nobodies didn’t have futures. All they had was an ability and a responsibility. To kill.

“Ever.”

Claire took a step forward then, a tiny, hesitant step that Nix found hard to match up with the way she’d wrapped her arms around him at the graveyard. The way she’d asked him—commanded him—to let it out. The way they’d kissed the rest of the universe away.

Now she was asking him, one tiny step at a time, to let that be real. To let it be lasting and solid. Nix didn’t pause. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t give a single moment to shoulds. He forgot about the vial on the coffee table. He closed what little space remained between them, and as his arms enwrapped her, his mouth descended, and condition one went the way of condition two.