“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.

Concentrate.

Thinking about the real world would have forced her to return to it. But thinking, in the abstract, about the kinds of things that she might have thought about if she were real—

Why? Why would I want to? Why are we here?

“Library,” Nix reminded her.

It was one of those words. The real words. The heavy ones. The ones that made her think about things on the other side of the veil. Books. And people. And asking over and over again to find out where the closest library was.

No. I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to let go. Can’t.

But she could and she did, and when Nix joined her a moment later, she recognized a glint in his eye as something akin to laughter.

“You did that on purpose.”

“If you want to stay faded, you can’t think about anything else,” he said. “And if you’re going to use this so-called internet, you can’t do it with hands that pass through solid objects.”

Claire nodded—but she had to ask. “Didn’t you want to stay there? Even just a little?”

Nix didn’t miss a beat. “Every time.”

One second, they were all-powerful, immaterial, and too good for the real world, and the next, they were two kids in the library after hours. Claire glanced out the window at the street below. People were moving. Lights were flickering.

“Internet?” Nix put the emphasis on the last syllable instead of the first, like it wasn’t a word he was used to saying. Trying not to think about the life he’d lived—eight by eight room, no windows, trained to kill—Claire sat down in front of one of the computers and tested her fingers out against the keys. Solid, she could type.

Senator Evan Sykes

Within five minutes of hitting search, Claire had added three more terms to her search list.

Iowa. The good senator’s home state.

Congressional Subcommittee on Domestic Defense. His most recent appointment.

Proposition 42. His claim to fame.

Nix read over her shoulder, looming like a shadow. But for once, Claire didn’t find her counterpart’s presence distracting. She was too entrenched in Evan Sykes’s story, which was becoming clearer and clearer, the more she read.

Lucked his way into a state senate seat at the age of twenty-five. Never brought a single motion to the floor. Tried and failed three times to make the House of Representatives.

And then, almost overnight, the senator’s luck had changed.

The previous junior senator from Iowa, dead of a heart attack.

The governor called upon to name a replacement.

Likelier candidates defamed. Scandals.

And suddenly, Evan Sykes was the golden boy. He’d inherited an almost full term. Claire couldn’t make any sense of his voting patterns, couldn’t see anything nefarious about his pet projects. He was bland. Uninteresting.

And on the Congressional Subcommittee on Domestic Defense, advising Homeland Security.

Exactly where someone wanted him.

“You’re going too fast.”

Claire barely heard Nix’s complaint. If he’d been anyone else, his words would have been consumed by the vortex of information bounding and rebounding around in her head. But since he was Nix, she heard him.

Barely.

“I’m what?”

“I. Can’t. Read. That. Fast.” The words cost him—enough that Claire thought to wonder how he’d learned to read at all, living in one room, raised by people who saw him only as a weapon.

“You know what? It doesn’t matter. Just go ahead. Do whatever. It doesn’t matter.”