Done with hoping things would get better.

Done with being sad that they weren’t.

Now Claire was angry. She’d spent so long trying to be so sweet, trying not to make trouble, waiting for something to happen—but something was never going to happen. Anything she wanted out of life, she’d have to take.

Starting with fighting her way out of these woods. Slipping back into the Situation, she imagined stalking back to the cabin. To the weapons stash under the porch. Her hand closes around the hilt of a knife. She would have preferred a bow and arrow, but beggars can’t be choosers, and she only has until nightfall.

Claire mimicked the actions in reality. Gone was the horror she’d felt at Nix’s weapons the day before. This was survival. This was taking care of herself, because no one else was ever going to do it for her. This was Claire making life happen instead of waiting for it to come to her.

She wanted out of this forest.

She wanted to live.

And she wanted to forget that last night—painfully, impossibly perfect—had ever happened.

Less than shadow. Less than air.

Nix slipped past the security checkpoints. Past the metal detectors and the Sensors and every safeguard The Society had put in place to make the institute impenetrable to anyone who mattered.

Unfortunately for The Society, Nix didn’t matter—and faded, nothing was impenetrable to him.

As Nix made his way farther and farther through the labyrinthine corridors, he was overcome with a sickening sense of déjà vu. How many times had he walked these hallways? How many times had he overheard the Sensors’ conversations, used their words to figure out what it would be like to be Normal? To hear what they said when they were talking to each other and not to him.

The only way you can make a difference in this world is to kill.

Nix had told himself that he was coming back here to protect Claire, to find out why The Society wanted her dead. But now that he was here, the memories were too close to the surface: the training, the lessons, the experiments—and all he could think, over and over again, was a number.

Eleven.

The fissure of doubt that had started that morning—with number Three—spread through Nix’s body, through the rest of his memories, the men and women he’d killed. He’d thought they were Nulls. He’d seen what true Nulls could do: seen the teenage girl that One kept chained in his basement; seen the cigarette burns on Six’s child’s arms. Nix had seen the bodies and the horrors, and he’d known that Nulls were monsters—but what if his targets hadn’t all been Nulls?

Nix’s grip on the fade wavered. After a split second, he came crashing back to the solid world. His body felt heavy—as heavy as he’d felt after killing Seven and making it messy. He took a deep breath and assessed his current situation. Even when Nix wasn’t faded, the people who worked here rarely bothered to take note of his presence—but that wasn’t a chance worth taking now that he’d gone rogue.

Nix stopped questioning, stopped thinking—and he shed his solid form like a snake wriggling out of its skin. He faded, and this time, he didn’t let himself remember. He didn’t think about why he was here or what he was doing. He just stepped through wall after wall, working his way to the center of the sprawling building.

To the lab.

The scientists and Sensors scurried around, from computer to computer, screen to screen. Nix didn’t know what they were doing. Faded, he didn’t care. He watched them like a child examining an ant farm. The man closest to him was young: a decade older than Nix, maybe less. There was sweat on his brow and scars on his arms: tiny, round pinpricks, up and down the flesh, from elbow to wrist.

“What’s our status?”

Nix recognized Ione’s voice. She rarely spoke to him directly, but her voice had always been the one in his head when he read a target’s name. She made the decisions. She was in charge. She was the one who’d sent him after—

No. Nix couldn’t let himself go there, couldn’t let himself think about anything the real world had to offer, least of all the girl he’d left behind on the forest floor.

“We’ve got facial recognition programs running on all sectors within a two-hundred-mile radius of the Nobody’s house,” one of the ants replied, scurrying to do his queen’s bidding. “Alarms are set to go off every three minutes, per protocol, to remind us what we’re looking for.”

What they were looking for. Not who. Never who.

“And our defense mechanism?”

At this, the ant bristled. Said something about testing and phases but all Nix could think was that Ione was looking for the Nobody. She was looking for Claire.

Nix felt his stomach turning itself inside out, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep hold of his fade for long. Thinking about Claire: the way he’d left her; the things they had done; the feel of her skin; the taste of cherries on her lips—

In his last instant of nothingness, Nix crossed the room. He stepped through the wall and came out on the other side.

In Ione’s office.

Flip-flops were not conducive to trekking one’s way through the wilderness, but Claire didn’t let that stop her. Her ankles and calves were splattered with mud. Welts rose on her arms, courtesy of branches and trees. She watched the sun travel across the sky. She marked her progress, notching trees in case she got turned around.

Her muscles were sore. Her feet were screaming, but Claire didn’t listen. She couldn’t listen, because she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t pause. She couldn’t let herself think about anything but making it out of this forest alive.

She wasn’t going to be the victim this time.

She wasn’t going to cry.

She wasn’t going to sit and wait. She was done waiting, because you could spend your whole life waiting for something to happen. Something big. You could wait and wait, and even if something big happened, even if it finally happened—it didn’t change anything.

Even if it changed everything.

The sound of traffic broke Claire out of her thoughts. Northwest, about a hundred yards out. She ran, ran with the knife in one hand, her feet bleeding, her heart pumping faster and faster. She broke through the edge of the woods. She stepped out onto the road. Wind whipped through her hair. A car whizzed by, close enough that she felt its motion.

The driver didn’t see her.

Claire stood there for five minutes, ten, watching the world pass her by. She was covered in mud, bleeding, holding a knife—and nobody noticed.

Claire felt something give inside of her. No matter what you do, you will never matter. No one will ever see you. No one but—

Claire walked across the highway. She walked and walked until she came to a town. She stepped onto a sidewalk, in front of a store. Someone bumped into her from behind. She dropped the knife, scrambled to pick it up, and from her spot on the ground, she realized something.

It didn’t matter what she did—and that meant that she could do anything. This was a brave new world, because even if she was alone, even if she would always be alone, the world had given her permission to stop trying.

Trying to be sweet.

To be nice.

To be good.

As Claire stared at the shops and the people and the thrum of life all around her, she realized that for once in her life, it might be nice to be bad.

12

The décor in Ione’s office was all metal and sharp corners, glass tabletops and see-through chairs. There was art on the walls, a splash of cool color: blue and silver against a palette of black and white.

Make it messy.

Ione had said those words to him here. He could still feel the knife in his palm, still hear the man’s screams—

Not a man. He was a Null.

But standing in Ione’s office, Claire’s face still fresh in his mind, Nix wasn’t so uncompromisingly sure. Everything he’d thought, everything he’d believed in—

He moved swiftly toward a filing cabinet behind Ione’s desk. Locked—but not so hard to open, given proper motivation. He bypassed file after file, searching for something he recognized—someone. And then he found it.

One file after another after another. Eleven of them in total. Neatly labeled with serial numbers that didn’t match up with the numbers in his mind.