“Natalie is ours,” she told them. No room for doubt in her voice. No room for doubt—about what Natalie was and what she might be capable of—in the fade. “We belong to each other, and she belongs to us. She’s like an arm or a leg or the clothes on your body. She’s a piece of your heart.”

And with those words, Claire pushed everything she had, every ounce of absolute power toward Natalie.

Slippery, supersolid Natalie.

Claire’s brain rebelled the moment her fade touched Natalie’s body, revolted, and a shock went through her body—

Just like touching the drug, only worse, reversed, turned inside out—

But Claire clung tight to the power, the joy, the limitlessness of being nothing. She held on to her Nix and to his siblings and to everything that mattered more than the real world, with its bullets and Sensors and cages inside cages inside cages.

The whole world is a cage. Everything that’s not this, not now—

Claire took that thought, that feeling, and she wrapped it around Natalie, coating the little girl in it, like a servant mummifying a pharaoh, one strip of cloth at a time.

“Our Natalie,” she said.

Just a kid. Can’t help the way she was born. Can’t help it.

“Our Natalie,” the twins replied.

And then the impossible happened. Natalie the solid, Natalie the Null, Natalie who mattered—

Joined them in the fade.

Nix had seen the fail-safe chamber before, but hadn’t realized what it was. He’d never noticed the security lock on the door or the fact that a solid person would have had to scan some kind of identification card to enter. The ceiling, floor, and walls were lined with vents, and in the very middle of the room, there was a small activation pad.

Faded, Nix walked toward the center of the room, Sergei’s key in his battered right hand and the key Claire had given him in his left.

Two keys. One activation pad. No margin for error.

Nix went still, less than an arm’s length away from the console that held the means to destroying this building and everything in it. Transferring both keys to his right hand, he took a shallow breath and set his left on the console’s cover, poised to pry it open the moment he allowed it to regain solid form.

Nix forced himself not to think about the poison that would be released into the air the second the cover was removed. He didn’t think about anything other than the fact that his right hand had killed people. Had made it messy.

Not my choice. That wasn’t me.

He squashed down the part of him that would never fully believe that the blood on his hands was anyone’s responsibility other than his own, and instead concentrated on the appendage itself. The fingers. The nails. The palm.

Not mine. None of it’s mine.

Solidity oozed over his fingertips and Nix watched as they gripped the plastic, threw it back.

Touching Claire’s face, her hair, laying that palm against hers.

Nix reclaimed his hand just as a thick white fog began to creep out of the vents in the ceiling, the floor, the walls.

The poison.

Nix took a deep breath. As his lungs filled with air, he could feel Claire slipping out of the fade. The sensation reminded him of pulling back from a kiss, but he couldn’t think of that or of Claire. He cleared his mind of her influence. Of her current objective. Of everything but the two keys in his right hand and the uncovered activation pad with two identically shaped holes.

Nix raised his hands outward, his right hand—battered and broken—loosely gripping Sergei’s key, his left liberating Ione’s from its partner’s grasp.

Can’t let the keys fall.

Nix coaxed the muscles and the bones in his broken hand into holding tighter to the key. Looking at the mangled appendage was disconcerting, but Nix felt nothing. Pain didn’t exist here, and he had no time for it. No time for the fog growing thicker and thicker in the solid world around him.

With careful precision and a mind as blank as an unused chalkboard, Nix maneuvered the keys into place. In the fade, they couldn’t touch anything, but once they crossed over, they’d activate the meltdown sequence. Hands steady, keys in position, Nix began the process of disassociation. The only way he could turn the keys once they’d solidified was with hands that had done the same. Once he’d completed the action, he’d have to bring his hands back. Before, when he’d triggered the poison, he’d a second to think, to concentrate, but now a single second was a luxury he couldn’t afford, assuming he wanted to walk out of this with hands and not just useless scraps of skin on bones. The poisonous gas would eat through his hands, burn them, devour them whole.

Nix didn’t think that. He wouldn’t. Blank slate. No emotions. No hopes. No fears.

Nothing. Nix breathed in, and then he let go. These keys belong to those hands. Those hands are not mine. Those hands kill people. Those hands tried to kill me.

They. Are. Not. Mine.

Activation was instant. So was the pain. Though Nix couldn’t feel it, it was hard not to imagine. Skin bubbling. Acid ravaging. Sirens roaring.

Meltdown initiated.

Those are my hands. They took care of Claire. They’ve brushed her lips. They’ve spared people who deserved to die.

Nix welcomed his hands back into the fade and cradled them against his body, even though he couldn’t feel the searing agony they were owed.

Time to get out.

Nix turned and walked toward the far wall. The sooner he left this room, the safer he’d be. The room was airtight, the gas contained. Once he made his way into the east hallway, he’d be fine. He’d meet Claire, and they’d escape before the building self-destructed.

Claire.

Down in the sublevels, she was faded. He could feel her, the way he always had. Her presence pulled at him, propelled him through fog that couldn’t touch him, through poison that wanted nothing more than to strike him dead.

Claire.

He felt her power. Bathed in it. Drank it. Made it his own. With liquid fluidity, Nix strode toward the east hallway, closer and closer to the chamber’s edges. All around him, the air grew more opaque as the poison snaked out of the vents at steady speed, but Nix didn’t think about the airborne acid or what a much lower concentration of it had done to his hands. There was no pain in the fade, and Nix’s grip on it, his mind’s connection with Claire’s, was rock solid.

Null.

The wave of nausea was instantaneous. It was a thousand times worse than the sensation of watching Claire bring the Null drug into the fade. Not just a drug this time. A Null. Nix stumbled, and the word—snide and ugly and permanent—permeated every cell in his immaterial body. One foot shy of the chamber wall, he forced himself forward, tried not to dwell on what his senses were telling him.

Claire had succeeded. She’d brought the little Null into the fade, and the girl’s presence was every bit as toxic as the poisonous gas. Like a stone tossed into a lake, her energy rippled through the fade. Nix felt it—in every pore, in the air he was breathing, in the pit of his stomach.

Null. In the fade.

Nix couldn’t move. He couldn’t take that last step to the wall, through it, and in the moment he realized he’d lost his fade, the thick haze of acid in the air became—like his own body—all too solid, all too real.

Less than shadow. Less than air.

Nix had to think the words, had to fade before the poison ate clear through him like termites through wood.

Less than shadow—

Agony. Hands burning. Clothes dissolving. Can’t take a breath. Not a single breath. Skin melting. A thousand knives. A thousand knives for every square inch of skin.

LESS THAN SHADOW. LESS THAN AIR.

It hurt. And then the next second, it didn’t, and Nix, welcoming the relief like an old lover, stumbled through the wall of the fail-safe chamber, out into the east hallway, where it was safe. No more poison to eat its way through his skin. Still, Nix didn’t let himself think about the Null in the fade, or the angry, gaping redness of his wounds.

Fade. Fade. Fade.

Claire. Claire. Claire.

It was nice here. Peaceful.

ClaireClaireClaire.

And then he saw her, waiting for him in the east hallway. Not Claire.

Ione. She was standing there, waiting for him, like she somehow knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the one responsible for the sirens now echoing through the hallways, the mechanical voice advising evacuation.