Nix looked away. “They used to be Sensors. Now they’re not.”

Faded, Claire wasn’t horrified. Her eyes didn’t linger on the broken bones, the blood. She was a step removed—and all she could think, over and over again, was that Nix hadn’t killed them. He could have—but he hadn’t.

The fox asked the little prince to tame him.

“Stay where you are, Elena. We’re about three minutes out. We’ll be there soon.”

Claire forced her faded brain to process the words coming from the Sensor’s communicator. Three minutes. The other Sensors would be here in three minutes. Moving on instinct, she grabbed Nix’s hand, her palm brushing lightly against his, their fingers interlocking.

“They’re close,” Claire said. “They’re on their way here, and now”—she glanced meaningfully at his hand, at hers—“they’re frozen.”

“Two left,” Nix said again. “We’ll need to talk to at least one of them.”

Claire brushed her lips against his, grounding her thoughts—and his—in the fade. Here, now, them—that was what mattered.

“Two left,” Claire repeated. She lifted the gun and rested it against his chest between them. “I like our odds.”

Pulling away from Claire was hard.

The smell of her hair. The curve of her lips. The way her hand held the SIG P226. Claire was more than the sum of her parts, but even the tiniest details of her body drew Nix like a planet toward the sun.

Forget the Sensors. Forget what they’d come here to do. Forget everything. Why go back? Ever? What had the real world ever done for them?

But Nix knew he couldn’t do it. They had to disable the last two Sensors. Had to leave one of them in shape to talk.

Nix took a step away from Claire, putting space in between them, but keeping a tight hold on her hand. Together, they walked through the walls of the store, through the dozen or so wind chimes out front, frozen where the wind had left them.

The boulevard was silent, motionless. The remaining Sensors had taken to one of the side streets, but they weren’t hard to find. The older man had a nondescript nose and a pockmarked face, and he carried himself in a way that reminded Nix of a bloodhound—snout first.

Beside him, the younger man, the one Nix had recognized as the kind of person who liked playing the role of predator, had one ear tilted toward the ground and the other turned toward his partner.

The two men must have been talking—to each other, to the frantic, blinded Sensor via their comms—at the moment that Nix and Claire had stopped time.

“Lights,” Claire said, nodding toward their faces, her voice dreamy and rough, as if the owners of those faces did not want them dead.

“I see them.” The lights. The Sensors. The enemy.

“You see the lights,” Claire murmured, and Nix heard something in her voice that told him that concentrating on the sheen of energy that marked these men as Sensors kept her from thinking about them as people, thinking about what he—they—were about to do.

Nothing. No fear. No emotions. No hate.

It wasn’t a bad strategy, and Nix wondered if it was that simple. See the lights. Put them out.

Nix stepped forward, hand still in Claire’s. He couldn’t touch the Sensors from the fade, but there was some chance he might be able to touch the light.

To Normals, a Sensor’s power is invisible. It’s nothing. So am I.

Nix reached out his free hand and for a moment, he expected to be able to catch the light in his hand and pull the powers out of the Sensors’ bodies—no muss, no fuss, no blood. But the moment he made contact, a violent jolt traveled up his arm, from hand to shoulder.

Fuzziness.

Confusion.

Pain.

Is this what Claire felt when she brought the Null drug into the fade?

Nix barely had time to finish the thought before he realized that he’d dropped Claire’s hand. They were still faded, still invisible to the outside world—but the second they parted, time sped up.

“—rash and inadvisable.” The old man’s words picked up midsentence. Nix kept himself from reaching for Claire.

“Nix, what happened?” Claire asked. “Why—”

Nix held his index finger up to his lips, in part because he didn’t know the answer to Claire’s question, but also because he found himself wanting to hear what these Sensors had to say.

“Elena is out of commission. So are Margaret and Ryland. Either we find these Nobodies and we neutralize them, or they neutralize us.” The younger man was adamant—not because he was angry or scared.

Because he was titillated.

Because he wanted blood.

Nix concentrated on maintaining his fade. It was his fault they’d fallen back into the time line. He’d dropped Claire’s hand, and now that the Sensors were talking, he couldn’t bring himself to stop time again, not when eavesdropping might reveal something useful.

“If Ryland, Margaret, and Elena couldn’t neutralize the Nobodies, what makes you think you can?” The old man’s words were mild, as if his partner didn’t provoke any more emotion in him than their targets did.

“This!” The younger withdrew a small vial. At first, Nix thought it might be the poison The Society favored for inconspicuous kills, but one look at his adversary’s eyes corrected that assumption. A killer might romance their weapons, but they didn’t hunger for them, and the look in the younger Sensor’s eyes was akin to starvation.

Looks like tar. Feels like heaven. Nix thought of the drug Sykes had used. But this one looked different—lighter in color.

Almost transparent.

Back at the institute. Nix recalled what he’d seen in the laboratory the day he went back, his insides going ice-cold. Ione asking for a status update on Claire—and then demanding one on their “defense mechanism.” The needle tracks he’d seen on one of the Sensor’s arms.

“We’ve already taken the maximum dose of this particular drug, young man.” In the present, the older Sensor’s voice boomed. “Enough to partially inoculate us to our prey’s powers. Enough to tell me that our targets could be close, listening to every word we say.”

A breeze blew directly through Claire and Nix, and even though it didn’t affect them, when it reached the old man’s nose, he tilted his head back, just a bit.

“If they were listening to us, we’d be dead.” The young man, cocky, took a needle out of the inside pocket of his jacket, inserted it into the vial in his hand, and pulled back, filling the needle with a strange, nearly clear serum that glowed a light rose pink in the sunlight.

Not a poison.

A drug. And not the one Sykes had been taking. Not a Null drug.

Nix thought of the first Sensor he’d taken out. Ryland. His old trainer. The one he’d left, gasping for air on the pavement.

A man who never should have been able to get a lock on him, faded or not.

Maybe The Society’s current head of research wasn’t a complete waste of space. Maybe the Null drug wasn’t his only achievement.

“Erikson, don’t do this.” The older man stepped forward to grab the younger man’s arm, just before needle met skin. “You’re not approved for another dose for twenty-four hours. The side effects—you’re messing with forces you don’t understand. The drug doesn’t just protect you from their powers. It affects your own energy, alters the metaphysical building blocks of your entire—”

The old man’s words were lost as his partner shook him off. Needle slid into vein, and the younger man—Erikson—squeezed his eyes shut, the edges of his mouth pulling tight and tilting upward.

Pain.

Ecstasy.

And then he opened his eyes, and they were red. Not the light, translucent pink of the serum. Dark and bloodshot.

I wonder what Sykes looked like when he took the Null drug. Nix shook off the thought. He had to stay faded. With Claire.

“They’re here,” Erikson whispered, his pupils pulsing with some kind of artificial high. “I can’t see them. I can’t hear them. But they’re near.”

“Yes, yes, they are, faded most likely, and I would wager to guess that if they wanted us dead, we’d be so already.” The older man looked upward—probably because he didn’t know where exactly they stood. “They didn’t kill Ryland or Margaret. Elena either.”