Nobody (27 page)

Claire knew the second Nix stepped into the fade. And she knew the second he left it. The sensation was a cousin, twice removed, from the one she’d had the first time he looked at her. A faint chill, a subtle shattering of things that were.

Her feet touched down on the boardwalk, but she kept her fade. The gun in her hand felt lighter than it had in the solid world, and she found herself drawn to the weapon. She held it up in front of her face, staring.

She knew, in the back of her faded brain, that she’d brought this weapon for someone else to use, but there was another not-quite thought that was just as insistent—
protect Nix, always tries to protect me, can’t let him use it
—that made faded Claire think that maybe she’d brought the gun for herself. Her hand warmed the metal until they were the same temperature, and Claire concentrated on the sleek angles of the gun, the muted power of the bullets that bided their time in the belly of the beast. She’d brought the gun to the fade.

It was hers.

Claire kept her eyes trained on the gun as she walked through the crowd, barely conscious of the fact that she was passing through people in a way that would have thrilled her the day before.

Nix
.

She couldn’t let her mind fully form the word, couldn’t think about the fact that he was close and solid without feeling the pull of reality at the edge of her consciousness. She could, however, give in to the magnetic pull of Nix’s presence. Claire had always had a horrible sense of direction, but faded Claire had a perfect sense of Nix.

Her feet—touching the ground in only the most cursory
manner—propelled Claire toward a tiny tourist shop, the kind that sold plates with cartoon lobsters painted on them, and wind chimes made of fake seashells, and shirts emblazoned with statements of various levels of cheese and impropriety. The sign on the door—
BACK IN TEN
—was crooked, and there was a smiley face at the bottom. This was the kind of place that would have made her smile when she was just plain Claire, but now she was Nix’s.

“Come on,” she whispered to the gun. Light on her feet and giddy with anticipation, Claire flowed through the walls of the shop and into the back room.

Nix was there, but she refused to look for him. She closed her mind against the beacon of his presence, refused the rush of blood to her heart.

If she crossed over, he’d want the gun, and if he had the gun, he might use it. If she stayed in the fade, she could cover him. Protect him—from the Sensors, from himself.

Claire listened—not for Nix’s silent footsteps, but for the reason he’d come to this shop. The Sensors. With steely effort, she managed to focus her eyes and mind on the material world and was overcome with a vague sense that this particular duo, two women, midforties, were not what she had imagined they would be.

“Which one’s which?” Claire whispered, unsure whether she was talking to herself or the gun. “What do these Sensors do?”

Claire watched and she listened the way that only
someone who had spent a very large amount of time people watching could. The woman on the left scanned the room in a gridlike pattern. The one on the right walked with her hands held out in front of her body.

Extrasensory sight, extrasensory tactile sensations—and neither one of the Sensors had any idea that there was a boy lurking behind them, or that Claire was standing in the fade, a hair’s breadth away from their paltry, solid bodies.

“Ryland has gone out of contact,” the woman holding out her hands said.

“Do you think they got him?” her companion asked, after a single beat.

“Who?” The first woman wrinkled her brow and then touched her forehead, and the touch seemed to anchor her thoughts. “The Nobodies?”

The women did not seem bothered by the prospect that one of their colleagues might have been “got.” They weren’t scared. They weren’t agitated. They were neutral.

Claire hated neutral. Neutral was being ignored and stepped over and having the same thing written in your yearbook every summer.

Triggers
.

Claire stayed away from those hated thoughts and re-centered herself in the fade. She closed her eyes and breathed in the not-quite air. She was powerful. Wispy. Nothing.

Nothing with a gun. Nothing that could step out of the fade and shoot that gun, if she had to.

Nix chose that moment to cross into her peripheral vision, and Claire had to force herself to look away. She knew that he could see straight through her fade, the same way she’d always been able to lock her eyes on to him, but she couldn’t let their gazes meet. She had to stay invisible to the Sensors. She had to be the one with the gun.

Nothing. I’m nothing. Stay nothing
.

Claire eased herself back, away from the Sensors, into the wall. Now she was part of this place—unnoticed, unwashed, unloved. Back in reality, the boy she couldn’t think about was moving, silently and smoothly. He had a wind chime in one hand, a lobster plate in the other.

I can’t let him kill them
.

The urgency of that thought undermined the even calm of Claire’s mind, but she fought against solidifying, a deeper instinct telling her that it wasn’t time yet. That before she could save him, she had to give him a chance to save himself.

Claire’s here
.

She’d brought him the gun, the way he’d asked her to. He could fade and take it from her, shoot the Sensors.
Once the bullets left the faded gun, they’d solidify. Two shots, two fewer Sensors.

I am what I choose
.

Nix knew, in that instant, that if he let himself fade, he’d take the gun from Claire, and he’d shoot them. He’d kill them without a second thought. If he wanted to stay in control, whatever he did—or didn’t do—had to happen on this side of reality. He couldn’t fade.

Nix tightened his grip on the items he’d liberated from the front of this shop.

The Sensors meticulously scanned the piles of boxes and excess inventory all around them, looking for some sign that a Nobody had been there, unaware that if they’d turned a little to their left, they would have seen him, plain as day.

And these are the people who decided my life. Who gave Ione her information, so she could tell me who to kill
.

Sensors weren’t all knowing. They weren’t all-powerful. These two had no idea that Claire was faded, just out of reach, and they had no idea that he was now standing directly behind them.

“Looking for me?” Nix wasn’t sure why he said the words. Maybe to get them to turn away from Claire. Maybe because he wanted to see their discomfort when they realized that they were his prey, and not the other way around.

The one whose ability rested in her hands went immediately for her gun, but to Nix, the pace of her motion
was laughable. Adrenaline gave Nobodies an edge. The Sensors’ presence threw Nix’s body into fight mode, while his did nothing to theirs.

Emotions? Useless in a fight. The biochemical jolt that came with them? Gold.

Lightning quick, Nix feinted to the left and turned to block the woman’s movement toward her gun. He caught her wrist in the strings of the wind chime, and twisted viciously—first to trap her hand and then to break it. Meanwhile, the woman’s partner managed to get her gun unholstered, but Nix spun and lashed out with his left leg, knocking it out of her hands.

“Some of us have spent every day of our lives being molded into the perfect weapon,” Nix said, his voice high and light. “And some of us haven’t.”

He backed up his words with action, pinning the first Sensor’s good hand to the ground with his right foot and sending the commemorative plate he held in his left hand crashing into the second woman’s face.

Kill
.

The impulse was strong, and it would have been so easy. He dropped the remains of the plate, except for a single shard.

I could slit their throats
.

One motion, two dead Sensors, two fewer problems down the road. Nix wanted to do it. He needed to do it. Wanted desperately not to. He couldn’t think straight.
But Claire was there, in his mind and in the wall. Watching.

I can’t
.

So he didn’t kill them. Instead, he shifted all of his weight to his back foot and felt the crunch of the first Sensor’s bones under his heel.

No more hands. No more sensing
.

The logic was elegant, the reality ugly, and Nix found the two sides of justice satisfying and nauseating both. Course set, he turned to the second woman, the one who’d scanned the room’s energy with her eyes instead of her hands.

Her face was already bleeding. And, having seen what he’d done to her partner, she knew what to expect. But still, the Sensor’s face was blank. Neutral. Her pupils weren’t dilated with fear.

She didn’t even seem to have a desire to run.

“You would have killed me,” Nix said, considering the shard in his hands as he mentally replaced the
me
with
us
. “But I’m not going to kill you.”

“Why not?” The woman’s interest seemed entirely academic, even as Nix brought the shard to her throat.

Nix looked over his shoulder, to the wall, to Claire standing there, visible to his eyes only.

Because I don’t want to
, he thought, but out loud, all he said was, “Because.” And then he slashed the shard across the woman’s face.

No more eyes. No more sensing
.

Done.

Claire couldn’t dwell on the liquid ease with which Nix moved, the way his eyes narrowed in an almost snakelike fashion as his limbs fell into a blur of motion. So instead, out of the corner of her faded eye, she watched the Sensors. Not their bodies, but the light around one’s hands and the other’s eyes. It was a glint, a glare, a flickering aura—the kind of thing that couldn’t be seen from outside the fade.

Power
.

Claire held the gun, loose and ready at her side, but she didn’t take aim, didn’t pull the trigger. She watched the lights—the
power
—that had marked her view of the Sensors go out, like a firefly’s bulb pinched between two fingers, as Nix attacked them.

He didn’t kill them
.

Claire stepped out of the wall, pulled by a force she couldn’t deny.

Nix could have killed them, but he didn’t
.

He threw the shard in his right hand roughly to the ground. Walking toward her, he faded, and an instant later, they were beside each other, standing eye to eye with only a fraction of space between them.

“How many of them are there left?” Claire asked. Nix brushed his hand lightly over her cheek. The world froze around them.

“Two.” Nix moved his hand from her hair to the back of her neck, keeping contact. “We need to find them before they find us.”

Claire let her eye travel away from Nix’s to the Sensors on the floor, broken and bloody. Powerless. One of them was unconscious, but the other lay frozen mid-action, her mouth open, as if she were about to speak.

“What do you think she’s saying?” Claire asked.

Nix rubbed his thumb over her neck. “One way to find out.”

Claire nodded and took a step away from Nix’s touch. The moment they broke contact, the world around them fell back into motion.

“Target is gone. The Nobody just disappeared. I’m hurt. My eyes. God, my eyes …”

Claire glanced at Nix and lifted one invisible hand to
the woman’s eyes. “Here,” she said and then she turned to the unconscious woman. “And here,” she indicated the woman’s broken hands. “There used to be light. There isn’t anymore.”

Nix looked away. “They used to be Sensors. Now they’re not.”

Faded, Claire wasn’t horrified. Her eyes didn’t linger on the broken bones, the blood. She was a step removed—and all she could think, over and over again, was that Nix hadn’t killed them. He could have—but he hadn’t.

The fox asked the little prince to tame him
.

“Stay where you are, Elena. We’re about three minutes out. We’ll be there soon.”

Claire forced her faded brain to process the words coming from the Sensor’s communicator.
Three minutes
. The other Sensors would be here in three minutes. Moving on instinct, she grabbed Nix’s hand, her palm brushing lightly against his, their fingers interlocking.

“They’re close,” Claire said. “They’re on their way here, and now”—she glanced meaningfully at his hand, at hers—“they’re frozen.”

“Two left,” Nix said again. “We’ll need to talk to at least one of them.”

Claire brushed her lips against his, grounding her thoughts—and his—in the fade.
Here, now, them
—that was what mattered.

“Two left,” Claire repeated. She lifted the gun and
rested it against his chest between them. “I like our odds.”