“I have two conditions. One: what happened before can’t happen again.”

Lips on lips, bodies melding together. His hands—soaked with blood—touching her. His mouth—killer’s mouth—kissing hers.

“Last night can’t happen again, Claire,” he repeated. “Ever.”

She stopped breathing. He paused, waiting for her to start again, missing the sound.

“And two: when I say you’re done, you’re done. You want to know why The Society wants you dead. You want to protect yourself. Fine. But when it comes down to it, I’m the one who’s going in, and you’re going to hide.”

“Fine,” she said, matching him tone for tone. “I have a condition, too.”

Nix raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“You have to teach me to …” He could see her searching for the right word, one she’d heard him speak once before. “… fade.”

The word made him want to close the space between them. Run his hands through her hair. Teach her the only thing in the world that had ever been really, truly, exclusively his.

He met her eyes. “It’s a deal.”

13

“Less than shadow. Less than air.”

Claire let Nix’s voice wash over her body, ignoring the way the grass stuck to her legs in the summer heat and concentrating on the sound and shape of each individual word.

Nicer words than don’t touch me. Nicer than anything he’d said to her since they’d returned to the cabin. Since she’d dressed his wound. Since she’d realized what was inside those folders—and why he’d left.

“Less than shadow. Less than air,” she repeated. She expected her voice to sound older, lower—but it didn’t. She sounded like herself. Like a little kid, playing make-believe.

Like someone who couldn’t handle what those folders held.

“You have to concentrate.” Nix sounded peaceful, fluid, almost drunk. Completely unlike the boy draped in darkness, who’d come for her in town. “Let everything leak out. Every thought, every desire, every hope. You have no future, and no past. You have no name. You are nothing.”

Claire realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to himself. Telling himself that he was nothing. Believing it. A jolt of electricity ran up her spine. She could still see Nix, but she wondered what someone else would see, observing them from the edge of the woods.

Was Nix invisible?

In answer to her silent question, he stood. His feet barely touched the forest floor, like gravity was having difficulty getting a firm grasp on his long, lean frame. He reached out, and his hand passed straight through the closest tree.

Claire shivered. “Less than shadow,” she whispered. “Less than air.”

“Worthless. Empty. Nothing.”

Nix’s words came at her from every side, as if spoken by the forest itself. Becoming nothing, becoming everything—it was all the same.

It was beautiful.

His face looked almost incandescent, like the film of a bubble floating on the surface of water. He had no worries. No hopes. He wasn’t the Nix who’d left her. The one who’d come back bleeding.

He wasn’t anything, and Claire desperately wanted to be nothing, too.

“Why isn’t it working?” she asked. “What’s wrong with me?”

It figured that she’d be a bad Nobody. It took a special kind of lame to fail as much at being unimportant as the reverse.

“It’s starting,” Nix’s voice said from all sides of her body. “Whatever you’re thinking, keep thinking it.”

Less than shadow. Less than air. That wasn’t her mantra. That was his. She had her own ghosts, her own doubts.

I’m jealous of farts. As far as mantras went, it didn’t have a very enticing rhythm. It didn’t sound dangerous. It didn’t make her feel powerful. It made her feel like less. But maybe, to be more, you had to give up trying to be anything at all.

I’m not Claire.

I’m nothing.

I’m nobody.

I’m the pages in my yearbook. Meaningless. Forgettable. Generic. I’m the girl who’s never invited. Never noticed. When I’m drowning, no one saves me. When I speak, nobody listens.

I’m a Post-it note on my parents’ back door.

I’m the messages I leave on their cells.

I’m the middle of the middle. I’m Nobody.

The thoughts in her mind stilled until she wasn’t Claire. She didn’t have a name. She didn’t have a family. She had nothing.

And, God, it felt good.

Claire stood, surprised by how little effort it took. She walked on the balls of her feet, barely contacting the ground.

This was what it felt like to let go. To stop trying. Stop wanting.

Claire strode forward. Toward the trees. They were firm, solid, old. They’d been here for hundreds of years and would be here for years to come.

They couldn’t touch her.

Nothing could.

So she walked straight through them, and a song began to hum through her body. She belonged here.

“Claire? Can you hear me?”

That wasn’t her name. She wasn’t Claire. Not anymore. She was nothing. But still, she turned toward Nix. He was the one who had brought her here, to this wonderful alternate world where she could walk through trees and dance and never hurt again.

“Let’s stay this way,” she said, forgetting about The Society. About the body she was supposed to have and the people who wanted it dead. About Nix’s conditions and his secrets. “Let’s stay this way forever.”

Nix had never seen anything quite like Claire faded. If anything, she became brighter. More noticeable—to him, at least. The physical world seemed to disagree. She danced through the trees like some kind of pixie, a sprite taking impossible joy in a world that mere humans couldn’t see.

Everything Nix had been taught told him that to fade, you had to let go of emotion. You had to feel nothing. The second he met Claire’s eyes, he should have lost his grip on nothingness. The moment he heard her voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, he should have started gritting his teeth, trying not to care.

Seeing her should have stripped him of his powers. But it didn’t, because right now she was nothing, too. He was faded. She was faded. It was easy to think of nothing but Claire, to let her presence in the fade ground his.

In the real world, he resisted touching her, didn’t deserve to touch her, but here, now he didn’t have to hold back.

No such thing.

Faded, Nix should have been able to pass straight through her.

Faded, their fingertips shouldn’t have been able to touch.

Faded, he shouldn’t have been able to feel that touch all the way to the ends of his toes.

But he could, and the second they connected, everything changed. The rest of the world faded to gray, its sounds to silence. The wind stopped blowing; the leaves froze at the angles to which they’d been pushed. A bee paused just above a flower. Nix looked farther, harder at the rest of the world. Ants on logs. Birds midflight.

They were frozen.

Fading meant leaving the physical world behind. It meant being weightless and transparent, insubstantial, empty. But this—his fingers interwoven with hers, her fade connecting with his—they hadn’t just slipped out of the physical world.

They’d fallen out of time.

Claire noticed the world slowing down around her, but she shrugged it off. That world didn’t matter. She’d lived there long enough. It didn’t understand her—or Nix.

They were more. He was touching her, and she couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t. Couldn’t quite grasp the fact that back in town, he hadn’t wanted to. Couldn’t get a grip on anything that had happened in the fifteen years leading up to this moment.

“Let’s run.” Claire had always hated running, but she couldn’t just stand there, not when every barrier between her and things that lay just out of reach had been removed. She dropped her counterpart’s hand, knowing instinctively that this Nix would touch her again, that he would touch her, follow her, chase her.

The moment their fingers parted, the world shifted, a phantom wind blowing through Claire’s body as time sped up around them. She broke into a sprint, amazed at how easy it was to run when the world didn’t fight to slow you down. There were no obstacles. Her feet barely touched the ground before they left it again, and her lungs breathed a different kind of air.