Someone’s crying.

Claire grappled with the thought, knowing that it didn’t belong in the fade and that if she let herself think it for too long, she wouldn’t belong there either. She wanted to stay here. With Nix. Wanted to touch him.

Abigail Sykes is crying.

Claire heard a sound—halfway between the ripping of Velcro and the slamming of a door—as Abigail’s tears—and her empathy for them—tore her from the fade. She settled into her physical body, missing the fade so much it hurt.

“Hey, baby. You feeling dangerous?”

“I’m feeling like I could do you right here.”

Claire tried not to blush. She really did, but Abigail Sykes had chosen that moment to stop crying, and her boyfriend—Dustin? Austin? Justin?—had arrived. They were practically undressing each other with their eyes.

And … ummm … their hands.

“Did you bring me something?”

Abigail slowly lifted up her shirt, revealing the syringe tucked into the band of her miniskirt. Claire glanced sideways. Beside her, Nix had eyes only for the drug.

“How are we going to get it away from her?” Claire asked, keeping her voice to a whisper, even though Abigail and her special friend seemed to be paying absolutely zero attention to the fact that they weren’t alone in this cemetery—if they noticed it at all.

“We get the drug by walking up to her and taking it,” Nix said.

“Oh. Simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” he confirmed, but something held him back, kept him from moving. It wasn’t until Claire fully absorbed their surroundings that she realized exactly what it was.

Abigail Sykes was standing in front of her father’s grave. She leaned back against his tombstone, tempting Dustin/Austin/Justin with her flat, tanned stomach, and the needle lying nearly flat against her flesh. “Some for me and some for you.”

Claire felt wrong for watching this. No matter what Sykes had done once he’d gotten in bed with The Society, the man buried under Abigail’s feet had been her father. Heavy mascara coated the girl’s eyelashes. Instead of tear tracks, black streaks marred her artificially tanned face. And the boy she was with—muscular, leering, clean-cut—didn’t bat an eye.

Didn’t ask her why she was crying.

Didn’t bring her a single thing.

“I’ll play first,” the boy said instead, reaching for the needle. Abigail ducked away.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?” she teased.

The boy shrugged. “Is it good?”

Abigail shot a hateful, happy, hurting look at her father’s grave. “It’s the best.”

The boy sank down to his knees. “That’s all I need to know.” He reached for the vial, and even from a distance, Claire could see something dark and serpentine sleeping in the wry curve of his lips.

Claire couldn’t take it anymore. She moved, forgetting how much she’d once wanted the Abigails and Justins of her own high school to remember her name. She stalked toward them. And she beat Justin to the vial.

“This is mine,” she said, latching her hand around it and removing it from Abigail’s possession.

The dead senator’s daughter didn’t jump at Claire’s touch. She glanced at Claire, and then shrugged her off. The boy seemed to grasp the reality of the situation a little more.

“Where’d it go?”

Clearly, the absence of the drug was bothering him, and he managed to connect it to Claire’s presence. “You … you took it.”

Claire turned and walked away. The boy wouldn’t follow. He wouldn’t fight her for it. He’d be pissed that it was gone, but he wouldn’t direct that anger at her.

He couldn’t.

Claire couldn’t make people angry. She couldn’t make them happy or sad, she couldn’t scare them, she couldn’t make them feel even a whiff of emotion toward her at all.

Power.

Stealing clothes paled next to this. She’d walked up to two strung-out strangers, taken a top secret serum from their possession, and walked away without a scratch—and she hadn’t even had to fade to do it, because Normals didn’t care!

The image of Justin—his hands on Abigail, her face streaked black—came into Claire’s mind, and she was glad. Glad they didn’t care about her. Glad that she wasn’t spending her summer trying to make other people take notice, if being noticed meant being …

That.

Once the Normal boy figured out that the Normal girl had managed to lose the drug she’d promised him, he came to the conclusion that hooking up on her dead father’s tombstone was sick. Abigail started crying again, and a heavy knowing settled in Claire’s stomach, uncomfortable and disconcerting.

The Society had to be stopped. Not just for Nix and the things they’d made him do or for Senator Wyler or any other innocents they’d ordered dead. Not for Claire, who might have been buried six feet under had she not glanced out her window at exactly the right time.

The Society had to be stopped for Abigail, too. It had to be stopped because of Proposition 42 and whatever was going on in the basement of the institute. For X-17—whatever that was—which Sykes had considered the perfect weapon.

“I’m sorry, Claire.” By the time Nix said those words, Abigail and the boy were gone, and Claire tried to remember what Nix—built me a bookshelf; saved my life—had to be sorry for.

“You shouldn’t have had to do that,” he said, nodding his head toward the vial in her hand.

“I shouldn’t have had to do what?” she asked quietly.

“Deal with the drug. Take it from them. I should have done that.”

“Why?”

Nix’s fingers began curling into a fist. “Because if it wasn’t for me, that girl’s father would still be alive, and she never would have had the opportunity to steal a vial of instant Null in the first place.”

Claire brought her hands to his and slowly worked to uncurl his fist, drawing tiny circles on his palm the way she sometimes did on her own.

Nix shuddered, and she sensed something threatening to give inside him. “Sykes wasn’t a Null. He wasn’t a good person. He willingly turned himself into a monster. But he wasn’t a Null. He could have gotten better.”

First Wyler. Now Sykes. Claire wondered if Nix would go, one by one, through the contents of all of the folders. All of his kills. She knew, deep down, that he would. And even deeper, in the core of Claire, she knew that she wanted to be there while he did.

She wanted to be the one to put him back together. To rest her hands gently on the sides of his face and say, “Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Cry. And when you can’t hold it anymore—the breath, the tears—let go.”

Fade.

Nix did as he was told. He felt it—the burn of knowing that he’d been a blade when The Society needed one, the executioner who carried out every death sentence Ione had laid down, except for Claire’s. He accepted that the things he’d done would always be there, under his skin. In his skin. Waiting behind every door in every dream.

You are what you are.

He pulled back from Claire’s grasp.

“Nix.”

His eyeballs stung, and he let the tears fall. Then he let everything else fall away, too. Claire followed him into the fade, and he struggled to remember why he’d pulled away from her touch.

Faded, she didn’t seem so very far away.

“It hurts.” Claire’s voice was high-pitched, frantic.

Nix started forward. “What hurts?” Nothing was supposed to hurt in the fade. You had to let go of the pain to cross.

Claire looked down at her hand. “It’s making me dizzy. It doesn’t want to be here.”

The drug, Nix realized. She brought it with her. In the solid world, the vial and its contents were ugly, but in the fade, they turned his stomach. There were two kinds of wrong, and they weren’t supposed to mix. This had made Evan Sykes into a temporary Null. God knew what was in it, but every ounce of loathing Nix had ever felt for Nulls was directed at the dark liquid, and the only reason it didn’t pull him out of the fade was that—impossibly—it was faded, too.