“I don’t like this,” Natalie said, her face blank as she looked at Nix’s. “I don’t like you like this.”

Claire felt the compulsion to make the world exactly as Natalie wanted it to be, but, no.

Nix, Nix, Nix, Nix.

All that mattered was Nix.

Not Natalie, standing up and turning, with an oddly neutral expression on her face, toward Nix’s little brother and sister. Not the knife Claire couldn’t remember dropping on the ground, not the way Natalie picked it up.

Nix, Nix, Nix, Nix.

Not the knife, which cut into the little boy Nobody’s skin. Not the almost imperceptible flicker of energy that flared out from his blood as it began to flow freely down his arm.

Claire knew she ought to say something. To stop her. Natalie. But she couldn’t move. Couldn’t care. Couldn’t drag her eyes away from Nix’s, or the single speck of light still there.

Her expression just as blank, Natalie turned the knife on her own arm and sliced it, too. And then she came to stand beside Nix, perfectly confident that the boy she’d just knifed without asking would follow.

He did.

Claire wanted to yell at them. To tell them to leave Nix alone. He was hers, and this was good-bye. They didn’t have a right to …

Bleed on him?

Powerful stuff, Nobody blood.

Claire watched as the blood flowed from Natalie’s arm and the little Nix’s.

Nulls and Nobodies … I’m not sure what you’d get if you mixed them. The results would be unpredictable. Anything could happen, really.

The steady streams of blood intertwined midair, and Claire watched as the lights, pearl white and black-hole dark—which could normally only be seen from the fade—broke their way into the real world.

Light. Pure light. Dark. Whole.

Like matter and antimatter.

Expanding.

Moving.

Growing.

And there, in the middle of it, was Natalie, her eyes alight with pure force of will, as if the power of her stare could send the physical world to its knees.

The light grew brighter. More intense, until it actually had a sound: a high-pitched humming and a low rumbling and everything in between. The opposite of white noise.

“Do it,” Natalie whispered. Through the light, Claire saw Nix’s skin shuddering, saw the flesh bubbling and flowing, like water boiling over the edge of the pot. Spreading, morphing, and then—

Silence.

The light around Nix pulsed and then imploded. It was like watching the death of a star. And there, in place of that star, that conglomerate of power and beauty and the will of an eight-year-old girl—was Nix.

He’s okay.

He was better than okay, Claire realized with a start. He was alive, and there wasn’t a mark on his body: no ink, no scars, no wounds.

Impossible.

What if magic were real? What if love could heal? What if there really was such a thing as happily ever after?

These thoughts, clearly, weren’t Nix’s. Happily ever after had never been an option for Nix. He’d never wanted it. He’d never thought about it. He’d certainly never deserved it.

And yet.

“You’re okay.”

He’d heard Claire saying those words before, through a haze of pain. Pain that was gone now.

Wrong.

Pain didn’t just go away. You felt it. You owned it. You let it go in order to fade, but it was always there, waiting, when you got back. Pain was an old friend. Pain was real.

And now it was gone.

“You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

The fourth time Claire said it, Nix realized she was crying. The fifth and sixth times she said it, he sat up and pulled her to him. The seventh time, they kissed. And the eighth and the ninth and again and again, until an imperious little voice broke into their two-person world.

“Stop that. I’m hungry. You should feed me.”

Nix found himself strangely compelled to feed the person speaking. She was important. She needed food. She was so sweet and he wanted to feed her—and that’s when Nix remembered—

The Null.

The eight-year-old Null who’d saved Claire’s life by shooting Ione. The one who’d saved him, by cutting into her own flesh and that of his little brother.

She was still holding the knife.

She looks comfortable with it. She’s not bothered by the blood. She likes it.

“You saved him,” Claire said, her voice reverent, her eyes shining in a way that told Nix that even if Natalie hadn’t been a Null, Claire would have been defenseless against her, from this moment on. “The blood, and the energy, and … what did you do?”

Natalie scuffed her foot into the ground. “I thought. I thought real hard. I wanted it to go away, and it did.” She smiled, the expression curving slowly over her cherubic features. “I always get what I want.”

Nix stifled a shudder. Nulls were dangerous because they were incapable of forming emotional attachments to other people, of caring about anyone other than themselves, and they were dangerous because it was all too easy for them to manipulate others. But they couldn’t manipulate the physical world. It wasn’t possible.

The same way that walking through walls wasn’t possible.

Nobodies and Nulls are opposites. Oh, God.

“Can you make things do what you want them to, Natalie?” Nix forced himself to say her name, to not recoil at the idea of Nulls, even small ones, even one who’d just saved his life, having that kind of power.

“Things that aren’t people, or things that are?” Natalie asked.

People aren’t things. Nix didn’t try telling her that, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. “Things that aren’t,” he said instead.

“Things that aren’t people are hard,” Natalie said plaintively. “I couldn’t used to do it. The bad doctor taught me. He taught me lots.”

Claire swallowed, hard, and Nix’s eyes were drawn to her lips as they parted to ask the question on the tip of his own tongue. “And the blood?”

Natalie’s blood, his little brother’s. Nix could remember, barely, seeing the little girl pick up the knife, but the haze of pain had been so thick, and all he’d wanted was to look at Claire, at Claire’s eyes. To let the last thing he saw be her.

“Energy,” Nix’s sister answered the question, and he wondered where exactly she’d learned that there was energy in her blood.

Where else? The Society had raised her. It had used her as a lab rat. They’d taught her.

Natalie, sensing that she was losing attention, cleared her throat. “The mean doctor talked a lot. He did things I didn’t like. I didn’t like him. I’m glad he’s dead. I wish they were all dead. Maybe I’ll kill them. I’m hungry. You will feed me. I like hamburgers.”

“Hamburgers?” Claire repeated. “You can have all the hamburgers you want. Do you understand what you just did?”

Nix watched as Natalie’s eyes flicked back toward him, and then she shrugged. “It looked bad. I didn’t like it. His skin was ugly. His voice sounded funny. You were crying too hard to get me food. I didn’t like it, so I made it go away.”

Saved by a Null. An eight-year-old Null, in search of a hamburger.

“Natalie!”

It took Nix a moment to recognize the voice, and then he realized that somehow, between his losing consciousness, almost dying, regaining consciousness, and almost dying again, Claire had managed to get the five of them to the rendezvous point.

The Sensor—the one who’d handed them the key to the institute’s destruction—was beaming, like he hadn’t just initiated the complete demolition of everything he’d ever believed in. “Natalie, sweetheart, I’m so glad you’re okay. I told you I’d get you out. I told you. I did just like you asked.”

Nix forced his brain to actually function, and then he climbed his way to his feet. “You did just as she asked, and we did just as you asked.” Nix nodded toward Natalie and then looked back at the man. “Our files, please.”

The man’s eyes lost their focus for a moment, and Nix felt a pang in his stomach, tinny-tasting fear that the Sensor might not have held up his end of the bargain. But after a long moment, and several more beaming smiles directed at Natalie, the man fished through his pockets and pulled out a flash drive.