That Claire was a different Claire.
She picked up the gun, the one Nix had aimed at her chest the day they met. The weapon was heavy in her palm and it made her hands feel tiny, but she kept a grip on it. To bring an object into the fade, you had to consider it an extension of yourself. After bringing the Null drug into the fade, imagining this gun—Nix’s gun—as an extension of her hand, her arm, her body, was nothing.
And an instant later, so was she.
22
Nix wove his way in and out of the crowd, putting distance between himself and the Sensors, choosing his vantage point carefully. If one of his targets managed to approximate his location, fine. Nix would see them coming. Otherwise, he’d wait for them to split up and then he’d deal with them, one by one.
Individually, Sensors walked past him in the hallways of the institute every day, barely registering his existence. As a team, they were far more dangerous, and yet they didn’t have the good sense to stay together, which told Nix that though they were prepared to find their targets, they had no reason to believe that he and Claire were actually in this town, on this boardwalk. This team was one of many. Ione’s protocols and her threats and her team of scientists could only do so much.
They don’t know I’m here.
The thought—and the fact that Claire was out of immediate danger—made it easier for Nix to concentrate, to regain the certainty that if he had to fade, he probably could. For now he watched as the five Sensors transitioned from scanning the streets to canvassing the tiny boardwalk stores, split off into smaller units.
These people want Claire to die.
Nix registered their movements and memorized their faces.
One male, late sixties, large body, beady eyes.
Two females, middle-aged. Most remarkable thing about them? The guns holstered under their shirts.
One male, young. Twenties, maybe. Smiling. Excited. This one, Nix recognized innately as a killer. This one liked killing. He wanted Nobody blood.
Claire’s blood.
Nix ground his fingernails into his palms, leaving bloody half-moons in their wake, but he forced himself to concentrate, to track the last Sensor as he stepped out of a store and began walking in the direction of Nix’s perch at the edge of the crowd.
I should probably kill him. He can’t kill Claire if he’s dead, and we only need one of the Sensors alive to talk.
The thought wasn’t as natural as it once would have been for Nix, but it still formed far too easily in his mind, as the Sensor in question came within fifteen feet of Nix, and then ten.
“Nobody.”
The Sensor’s voice was familiar, but Nix couldn’t quite place it.
“I know you’re here, Nix.”
Nix didn’t move. He wasn’t armed; the Sensor probably was.
I could kill him.
“I know you’re here,” the Sensor said again. “I can taste you. Or rather, the lack of you.” The Sensor in question was looking near him. Not directly at him, but near him. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
Nix placed the voice. One of his trainers. The one who’d had him from age six to ten. The one who’d watched him drowning and never moved to loosen the straps. The one who’d pressed a knife into his palms and shown him how to cut up a corpse.
Ryland.
“We don’t want to hurt you,” the ghost from Nix’s past said. Older. Grayer. Lying.
“You’re confused. I know this is confusing,” the man said, velvet voiced and oozing sincerity. “You have to trust that we’re doing the right thing. For everybody.”
Nix took stock of his situation:
No weapons.
Five feet away from one of the people who’d taught him to kill—made him kill.
Unable to move without risking full exposure.
Nix smiled. They thought they could talk to him. They thought they could bring him back. They thought he’d latch on to any sliver of false hope that he was wanted. Needed.
They were wrong.
“Less than shadow. Less than air.”
The Sensor probably thought Nix was throwing the words he’d been taught back in his teacher’s face, but he wasn’t. Nix didn’t care about this man. Or The Society. Or Nulls.
Or anything.
Claire was there, at the periphery of his consciousness. She’d always be there, but right now there was something bigger in his mind than even her. This man wasn’t his teacher anymore. Nix wasn’t his student. He wasn’t nine years old.
This was graduation.
Slipping into the shadow world was as easy as it would have been if Claire had been standing beside him, and Nix was greeted by the awareness that somewhere, she was faded, too.
She’s safe.
And she was about to get safer.
Sidling forward, Nix approached the man who’d placed weapon after weapon in his small, pudgy hands. Who’d drugged him and buried him, six feet under, in the name of science. In the name of the greater good.
Lies.
It didn’t matter.
There was no room in Nix’s head for memories. He was Nobody. Nothing. Immaterial.
And Nobodies never got caught.
Nix’s old mentor straightened the moment Nix slipped into the fade. Disconcerted, but not afraid, the man took a step backward, and he moved his head slightly, to speak into his wrist. Nix sprang forward. He thrust his hand into Ryland’s body, and it went straight through his neck. Unaware that Nix was inside him, the Sensor continued giving even-keeled orders into a communication device on his watch. From his tone of voice, he might as well have been talking about the weather. “The boy is here, but he slipped away. The girl will follow. Use him to trap her, and then terminate both.”
That was what The Society did to those who stood in their way. Wyler. Sykes. Nix.
That should have made Nix angry, but Claire wasn’t in immediate danger, and Nix managed to wall off his emotions, the way he had before they’d met. Instead, he concentrated on cold, hard facts.
Fact: Ryland had taste buds that allowed him to taste energy—or the lack thereof—a skill that was useful for locating Nobodies in the real world, but not in the fade.
Fact: Ryland was heavily armed: two knives, two guns, possibly a grenade. None of which could touch Nix until and unless he became physical again.
Fact: Nix had no weapons. No physical body. No weaknesses, and no strengths.
Faded, Nix couldn’t push Ryland, and Ryland couldn’t push back. Nix tilted his head to the side and looked into the man’s eyes, dragging his ghost of a hand over his target’s chest in the shape of an X.