Claire.

Claire Ryan.

The girl he was going to kill. Number Twelve. Today.

Nix picked up the gun and then set it back down. He was an excellent shot. He could hit targets. He could shoot marks. He could put bullets into hearts and keep them from pumping, and into skulls, just between the eyes.

But killing that way wasn’t what he’d been trained for.

It wasn’t what she deserved.

No, Claire deserved something a little more personal. She’d used her powers to make him feel like something, to make him feel worthy and noticeable, and then she’d taken it all away the moment he had realized that she was pretending. That if her life hadn’t been at stake, she wouldn’t have feigned noticing him at all. She’d used her unnatural aptitude for manipulation on him.

So he was going to use his abilities—all of them—on her.

She wouldn’t see him coming. She wouldn’t know what hit her, but when his needle pierced her arm, when she felt that tiny little prick and then nothing—then she’d know who and what he was.

She’d know that Nobody had killed her, and he’d leave her body on the sidewalk, for the police to puzzle over—natural causes, they’d say—and her parents to sob over with equal measures anguish and relief.

“Today, Claire,” Nix said softly. He talked to himself so seldom that the sound of his voice had him looking over his shoulder to make sure that no one else had heard.

Not that anyone would pay it much attention if they had.

For the past three days, he’d stayed close, biding his time. He’d watched her. He’d waited. But now he couldn’t wait anymore. The day before, he’d seen people near Claire’s house. He wasn’t close enough to get an ID on any of them, but he could tell from the way they moved, from the unmarked van they drove, that The Society had sent a cleanup team. Nix’s superiors only had one Nobody, but they had many soldiers.

Sight. Smell. Taste. Sound. Feel.

When Sensors were too old or too young for active duty, they worked on their own, scouting for The Society in zones, looking for aberrations in the world’s pattern. But when they were in their prime, Sensors worked in groups of five, one for each of the senses. Together, they were perceptive to the point of being prescient. They identified Nulls. They safeguarded The Society and its institute. They unraveled the mysteries of the universe, one data point at a time.

The Sensors were the ones who’d trained him.

The world has an energy to it. Everyone and everything—people, objects, animals, plants … even rocks and dirt and molecules of air—they’re all made up of energy. And when they interact with each other, they leave their marks on the world, and it is through that exchange of energy that all happenings happen. That love blossoms. That connections are made.

Do you know why we call you Nix, child?

He hadn’t. Not at the age of three. But by four, he’d learned.

It’s because you’re nothing. You have no energy. You leave no trail. As far as the world is concerned, you don’t exist. And you never will.

The Society had raised him.

The Society had trained him.

The Society had given him a purpose—or as much of one as a Nobody could have. When they told him to kill, he killed, and in the days, weeks, months in between, he molded himself into a better killer: quicker, faster, more untouchable. He let Society scientists poke and prod him so that his deficiencies might be fully understood, so that those working for the greater good might squeeze every last drop of data out of his flesh, his bones, the abilities he had that real people didn’t.

And even though it did Nix no good, even though his emotions had and could have no effect on Ione or the Sensors or the many scientists who’d used him as a lab rat, he hated them for it.

Empty hatred, because he didn’t count.

Claire is mine.

The thought was savage, feral in a way that usually had him tearing at his own flesh, desperate to feel something that mattered. Something he could count on. Something that wouldn’t cease to exist, just because no one cared that it was there.

Claire was his.

These Sensors were out of their league. They thought that because they knew about energy, because they could sense it, that made them less vulnerable to the kind of monsters The Society was created to combat. They thought that knowing what this girl was gave them the advantage.

But they were wrong.

If Claire had seen a Nobody coming, she’d catch the Sensors before any of them could lay so much as a finger on her. They could try to pick her off from a nearby roof, but unlike Nix, Sensors could be tracked, noticed, seen. If they killed her, they’d be caught. The Society was as ancient as the Knights Templar and twice as secretive. They didn’t take the risk of exposure lightly.

Less than shadow. Less than air. That’s what you have to be to kill my Claire.

Nix smiled at the rhyme in his mind. The Sensors couldn’t kill this Null.

She was his.

So he’d take care of her.

Claire watched the yolk slide out of the egg, broken and dripping. Trying not to burn herself, she bent over the skillet and began to pluck the bits of shell out of the sizzling mess on the stove.

This is why I don’t normally cook.

That and the fact that normally she didn’t have anyone to cook for. In the three days since the police had called her parents home, Claire had made breakfast every morning.

Eventually, they’d eat it. Sit down at the table across from her, say her name, and eat her eggs. Eventually, Claire and her mother and her father would have a real family breakfast, like countless TV families before them.

But not today.

Absentmindedly, Claire’s mother brushed past her. Reached into the cabinet directly over Claire’s head. Pulled out a box of cereal.

“I … ummm … I made eggs?” Claire didn’t mean for the words to come out as a question, but they did.

“Hmmm?” Her mother’s response wasn’t a word so much as a sound, but it was something.

“I made eggs. For you. And Dad.”

And me, Claire added silently, but she didn’t get that far out loud.

“Oh.” Her mother didn’t put down the cereal box. “That’s nice of you, but really, cereal is fine. And you should be out, doing things.”

Out.

As in elsewhere. Bothering someone else. Claire’s hand slipped and she burned its edge but didn’t bother running it under cold water. Instead, she just sucked a breath in around clenched teeth and turned off the stove. The eggs were only half cooked, but she wasn’t really hungry anymore.

“Maybe I don’t want to go out.”

Claire’s mother wrinkled her forehead in the manner of someone mulling over a crossword or trying to remember her exact relation to a second cousin twice removed.

“Claire?”

Claire perked up—slightly. Mouths were opening, words were being exchanged, and if she could think of the right thing to say, the absolute right thing, then maybe—

“Remember what the police officers said?”

The question stopped Claire’s maybe dead in its tracks. Losing her developing smile, she poured the remainder of the egg mess down the drain and hit the garbage disposal, drowning out all other sounds.

Remember what the police officers said?

Claire remembered exactly what the police officers had said.

There was no one there. There was a witness on your street during this so-called attack, and she saw and heard nothing.

Are you sure you screamed?

Are you sure you’re not just making this up?

And then later, to her parents, Does your daughter have an overactive imagination?

And that was all it had taken for her parents and the police to collectively decide that Claire spent too much time reading and not enough time around kids her own age. They’d patted her on the head and spoken to each other and generally ignored everything she’d told them until it became perfectly clear that of all the people involved in this case, she mattered the least.

Her parents weren’t pleased that they’d cut their vacation short, but they weren’t angry with her. They didn’t scold. They just held her hand and said “uh-huh” when she talked and then looked at their watches, as if time passed more slowly when Claire was involved.