The thought—the same one that had made it impossible for Nix to stay faded with her by his side—brought the predator inside him to the surface now. The Society had trained him to hunt. They’d trained him to kill. They’d made him the perfect assassin.

Time to even the odds.

Claire felt Nix’s absence the second he left the fade. If she’d been standing next to him, if she’d seen it happen, she wouldn’t have been able to resist following, but she was running, through people and shops and trees, and she refused to allow her limbs to slow down, refused to let her mind think about the half of her soul that was missing.

I’m nothing. I’m Nobody.

She was Nobody, and she was running.

Situation: What if he were here beside me? What if we were racing? Floating, blurring, blending—

The wind can’t touch her body, but his breath can. She can feel him behind her.

“Winner takes all,” he whispers into her neck. Claire laughs, pushing down the desire to turn around, to take everything she wants, to allow the power to explode out from her body and connect with his.

He streams past her, and she lets out a gasp, full of mock outrage.

Faster, farther, more—

They run, neck in neck, their steps in sync. His heart beating in unison with hers. Faster, farther—

There.

“End of Situation.” Claire whispered the words as she made it back to the cabin, and the moment she let go of it, her mind processed the reality she’d kept at bay: Nix was gone. She’d left him with the Sensors.

As far as triggers went, it was a good one.

Bones crunching, skin screaming, pores weighted down with cement.

It was all Claire could do to stay on her feet. Physicality had never been so brutal. It was like she didn’t fit in her own body anymore. She forced herself to straighten, to lift her eyes from the ground to the bookshelf in the corner.

“Hide the serum. Bring me a gun.” Claire repeated Nix’s orders like a prayer. “Hide the serum. Bring me a gun.”

She allowed herself the time it took to take one breath, then two, and then she moved, grabbing the Null drug off the coffee table. Her limbs became accustomed to movement again, and she walked out the front door and crawled under the porch, where she’d hidden Nix’s weapons. Digging her fingernails into the dirt, she made a small hole and dropped the onyx-colored drug in, before covering it again. Then she turned her attention to the weapons.

An eternity ago, Nix had laid his weapons out on the counter and told her to choose. He’d put a gun in her hand and told her to use it, and she’d refused.

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.”