“Don’t touch me. I’m fine. And if I want to get up, I’ll—”

“You got hit by a car. You wandered into the street and got hit by a car. An ambulance is on its way.”

“I don’t want an ambulance.”

He leans down closer toward her, his eyes narrowing, and for a second, she thinks he will kiss her. “Well, princess, that’s too damn bad.”

Princess? Princess?! Claire rears back, ready to tell him what she thinks of his machismo BS, but he grips her shoulders, holding her in place more by the power of his touch than by force.

“Get your hands off me!”

“Be still.” For a moment, the boy’s voice is awful, but then he softens. “You could be hurt. Humor me.”

And then the ambulance came. End of Situation. Claire opened her eyes and rolled back over, just in time for a tsunami of water to body slam her like a professional wrestler.

Curse you, cannonballs.

Claire sputtered and snorted and tried desperately not to drown in her own chair. She blinked violently, and that was the exact moment she heard the voice.

“You look like you’re thinking deep thoughts, young lady.”

It took her a few seconds to locate the speaker: an elderly man with a face creased like a worn leather sofa and brown eyes so dark that she couldn’t make out the pupils. For a moment, Claire assumed that the man was talking to someone else, in part because people, as a general rule, didn’t come up to Claire and start making conversation, and in part because she was positive that she looked more like a drowned rat than someone caught in the throes of thought.

Say something. Respond. Be witty.

As Claire tried desperately to come up with the proper response, the man leaned forward, the intensity of the gaze behind his centimeter-thick glasses swelling, his eyes fixated on a point directly over her left shoulder. Those pupil-less irises flicked left to right, then up and down with a concerted effort that reminded Claire of a squadron of soldiers searching a field in a grid.

“I was just sitting here,” Claire said finally, but the words came out in a whisper.

“Have a way of going unnoticed, do you?” the man asked, his voice not unkind.

Claire nodded, but before she’d even finished the motion, the man glanced away, and something deep inside of Claire told her that he wasn’t going to speak to her again. He’d seen what he needed to see, and now he was going to leave.

As Claire watched him disappear into the parking lot, she couldn’t help but wonder what he’d been looking for, and she couldn’t shake the single word her memory whispered over and over again in the red-haired girl’s voice.

Nothing.

White walls. White floor. White bed. Nothing to look at. Nothing to do.

Tired of the pretense that the door, locked from the outside, could keep him caged, Nix made the decision to fade. With expert precision and unnatural ease, he let go of his grip on the physical world.

He let go of his thoughts, his emotions, his body, his name.

He let go of the hard-earned whispers of pain from his newest cuts.

Less than shadow. Less than air. Nix let go of everything that mattered to him and became nothing—the kind of nothing that didn’t have a right to anything in this world, because it was incapable of giving back.

The world was made of energy. Most people didn’t even realize it was there—inside them, outside of them, everywhere. Except in Nix.

The world could touch him, but he had nothing to give in return.

At his worst, he wasn’t even good enough for gravity.

Less than shadow. Less than air.

Nix faded. He was there, but the world couldn’t see him. Couldn’t feel him. Couldn’t smell him.

Couldn’t hold him down.

For all intents and purposes, he was invisible. Immaterial. Unimportant.

And as only someone completely nonexistent could, he walked straight through the thick wooden door and came out the other side. Keeping his thoughts still, Nix flowed through the halls and safeguards of one of the country’s most secure buildings. This was his domain, the only home he’d ever known. From the outside, the institute looked like nothing so much as a sprawling country manor, but inside, it was state-of-the-art, immaculate, secure: a perfect match for The Society itself—ancient, secretive, a thing of legend, but on the cusp of modern science all the same.

Nix slipped into the shadows. He waited and watched. The Society was a machine with many moving parts, many members. Even those who came within a hair’s breadth of him remained blissfully ignorant of his presence. They were Normal, and he was nothing.

Invisible.

Faded, Nix could see the way the light played off one man’s eyes, a woman’s fingertips, the odd nose.

Sensors.

To the average person, they would have looked just like anyone else, but faded, Nix got a visual reminder that Sensors were different, that of all of the Normals in the world, they were the only ones who stood a chance of recognizing him for what he was. Most people had no idea that there was an energy to life, an underlying, immaterial something that made them who and what they were. But Sensors were different: sensitive to the presence or absence of energy. They could smell it, taste it, feel it—the particular sense varied from person to person, but one constant remained. Sensors knew energy, recognized aberrations. And still, they walked by Nix, unaware of how easily he could have reached out and punched his immaterial hand through their bodies. They couldn’t see him. Couldn’t feel his presence in the pads of their fingertips or the buds of their tongues. Unless he was solid and they were looking for him—and why would they? Why would anyone?—his lack, his deficiency, his presence went unnoticed.

It was just as well that Nix was faded. Sensors and Nobodies didn’t mix well.

“The old man is certain?”

From the conference room behind him, Ione’s voice broke into Nix’s thoughts, and he read in her tone and words that she’d found his next mark: another name to be slipped under his door, another life for his hands to snuff out.

Nine months. Six months. Two.

The time in between his assignments was shrinking.

Not weeks now, not months. Days.

“Cyrus confirmed the diagnosis that his sixteen-year-old apprentice made this morning. He’s quite satisfied with this demonstration of Mariah’s progress as a Sensor, but obviously upset with his own performance. To find this girl there, in his zone, lazing about a swimming pool, right under his nose—Cyrus was embarrassed to have missed something like this up until now.”

“Well, these things do happen.”

Nix processed Ione’s words. The Sensors must have found another Null.

Nix’s grip on absolute nothingness began to waver. He still blended. He was still unimportant. He was still deadly. But in mere moments, he’d lose his fade and be solid again. Real.

They always brought out this reaction in him. Not Ione, who’d been the director of the institute for as long as Nix could remember, or the Sensors, who’d been the backbone of The Society for thousands of years, but their topic of conversation. Nulls. Psychopaths. The ultimate somebodies. The terms were as meaningless as the scientists’ theories as to how and why it happened that some people were born with an enhanced ability to leave their marks on others—and immune from being marked in return.

Nix didn’t need to know why. He hated Nulls, hated that as little as he could affect anyone else, he could affect them less.

Soulless, broken monsters.

Master manipulators, devoid of human compassion.

Animals that had to be put down.

That was what Nulls were. That was why Nobodies existed—to hunt them. To protect the rest of the world. The Normals.

With his last moments at full power, Nix slipped into the conference room. Rematerializing fully, he walked forward. If he’d been a normal person, Ione and Richard, one of the oldest Sensors, would have felt his stare as a physical thing.

They didn’t.

Instead, Nix was able to sidle up to them undetected. Standing eerily close, he leaned forward and whispered a single word into the backs of their necks. “Mine?” he asked, something like and unlike anticipation in his voice.

If he’d been anything or anyone else, his sudden appearance would have made them jump, but Nobodies couldn’t inspire fear. Or hate.