“I imagine that you’re coming to realize your predicament, much as I’ve come to realize mine.” The Sensor’s tone was completely conversational.

“You shouldn’t be able to imagine anything about us,” Nix replied evenly. “My words should fall deaf on your ears. You shouldn’t care enough to wonder what we’re thinking.”

“Oh, I don’t. Not concretely. But abstractly? Well, I’ve always found the idea of Nobodies fascinating.”

Nix rolled his eyes. It was just his luck that their hostage was one of those.

“So, no. I don’t care what you, personally, are thinking. I can’t bring myself to really pay much attention to you at all. But if I take a step back from the situation and think about an abstract, pretend Nobody who is in an abstract, pretend situation very much like yours, then with some mental wrestling, I can come to conclusions.” The man paused. After a long moment, he continued, “I imagine that most people in your situation would have certain questions.”

“You think we’re people?”

Nix felt his heart clench at Claire’s question. Her tone of voice told him that she was all too ready to believe that of all the members of The Society, they’d somehow found the one who thought Nobodies were human, same as anyone else. Nix angled his body, wanting to shield her from the inevitable response.

“Do I think you’re people?” The Sensor repeated the question and shrugged. Clearly, his ability to put himself in others’ shoes didn’t extend quite that far.

“The Society considers us monsters,” Nix said, willing Claire not to take the man’s apathy personally. “They use Nobodies to kill Nulls, but if there weren’t any Nulls, they’d be using the Sensors to kill us.”

On some level, Nix had always realized this. It was just that before, he hadn’t cared.

“Frightfully hard to kill, Nobodies. Not much cleanup work, which is nice, and the police never seem to follow up on leads, but your kind is damn hard to get a lock on. Makes extermination difficult.”

Nix closed his eyes, unsure whether he should take advantage of the Sensor’s chattiness, or put him out of his misery now. “That’s why The Society sent me to kill Claire. The best chance they have of killing a Nobody is using another Nobody to do it.”

“I can’t say that I was involved with that decision, but the logic seems sound.…” The Sensor trailed off. Clearly, the gun wedged into his back wasn’t quite incentive enough to keep his attention from wandering.

“What happened back there?” Claire asked him tentatively. “With the—”

Nix knew she was going to say with the lights, but he didn’t want Claire to tell this Sensor that they could see the source of his powers. Maybe The Society knew about the flicker that indicated a Sensor’s power in the fade and maybe it didn’t, but Nix wasn’t going to be the one to let that information slip.

And neither was Claire.

“What happened with your partner?” Nix said, finishing her question without giving anything away.

The question wandered in and out of the Sensor’s mind, until he seemed to come to it on his own. He obliged Nix, intentionally or otherwise, by speaking his thoughts out loud. “Erikson was young and stupid. This generation—they have no respect for the old ways. The principles on which The Society was founded. Protection. Invention. Discretion.”

Nix snorted. At one point, he’d believed in The Society and its principles. Now the only thing he believed in was standing beside him, her nose crinkled and her hazel eyes opened wide.

“The Nobody serum was designed to make Sensors more sensitive to Nobodies. In small doses, it allows us to catch a whiff, so to speak, of things that might otherwise escape our notice.”

“Us,” Claire said, caught halfway between bluntness and blatant curiosity.

“Nobodies are—in the abstract, mind you—quite terrifying. The Society of Sensors has been around for thousands of years, and this serum is the first step we’ve successfully made toward immunizing ourselves against your powers.”

Immunization? That was what they were calling it?

“This serum,” Claire said slowly. “With it, people can … see us?”

Nix heard the hope in her voice, and his own chest tightened in response.

“See you? Yes. Remember you? For the duration of the dose, yes. Care about you? No.”

For someone who was dealing only in abstracts, the Sensor was remarkably astute. And cruel.

Nix dug the gun farther into the man’s back, leaving marks, bruises. Physical effects to match the wounds of Claire’s the carelessly uttered words had picked open.

The Sensor gave no visual indication that he felt the barrel digging into his back. “In answer to your earlier question, I suppose that I don’t believe that Nobodies are monsters. Or animals. I believe your lot in life is incredibly sad and that in most cases, termination in childhood is a mercy.”

Termination in childhood?

“There were others?” Claire asked. “Like us? And you killed them?”

“Me, personally? No. I’ve been off active duty for a decade and the only reason I’ve been recalled is that Ione and her people deduced that my academic fascination with Nobodies might make me more willing than the average Sensor to pilot the serum.”

Which serum? Nix wanted to ask, but he held his tongue. All in due time.

“But there were others, like Nix and me, and The Society killed them?” Claire’s tongue moved freely.

The Sensor looked vaguely uncomfortable. “The Society has existed, in one form or another, for most of recorded history. The majority of our mandates were written in a harsher time.”

Nix ground his teeth together and bit back the urge to smash the butt of the gun into the back of the man’s head.

“And you can’t change the mandates?” Claire asked softly. Nix could tell by the look on her face that she was picturing little Nixes, little Claires.

Terminated in childhood.

“Nobodies are quite rare. Relatively speaking, our discovery of their existence was quite recent. The things we could have accomplished with that information during the Crusades! But, alas, it wasn’t to be, and when the Roanoke experiment went south, your numbers dwindled. As far as The Society has been able to tell, there haven’t been more than a handful of Nobodies per generation since. Not enough to merit a large-scale revision of well-established precedent.”

“You kill us because you’re too lazy to revise the rules? Because the effort just isn’t worth it, for just a few lives?”

Nix wove his free hand through Claire’s. In the fade, the gesture would have stopped time; outside of it, the physical contact served no purpose but comfort. Nix had been given a lifetime to get used to The Society’s attitude. It wouldn’t have mattered how common Nobodies were. No one at The Society would have cared enough to change procedure.

“We don’t kill all of you,” the Sensor said, quite cheerful. “Consignment is an option for Nobodies located before the age of five.”

Consignment.

White walls. White bed. White floor.

Life in a lab.

Trained to kill as soon as they could walk.

“Traditionally, once they reach a certain age, Nobodies become more recalcitrant. Hardly worth training …”

“Stop.” Nix couldn’t take watching Claire’s face as she heard the Sensor’s careless words.

This was the big mystery they’d set out to solve. The reason Nix had begun looking into his previous kills. Because he couldn’t imagine why The Society wanted Claire dead. And even though they’d considered this answer on their own, even though they’d considered it likely—

Hearing it out loud was different. Especially for Claire.

“You must be thinking about killing me,” the Sensor said, turning around, so that Nix’s gun was pressed into his stomach instead of his back. “I would imagine that, in the abstract, someone in your position might want to kill someone in mine. But you’re not likely to meet a more knowledgeable source on The Society’s infrastructure, or one more sympathetic to your cause.”