Free Nobody by Jennifer Lynn Barnes Page A

feet pounded against the ground. Limbs reached out to scratch him. The summer air, heavy and hot, stung his lungs with every breath. He had to get away—from the girl, from what had just happened, from the feelings threatening to suck him into a black hole of
asking
and
wanting
and
doubt
.
    She’d thrown down his gun. People who trafficked in death didn’t do that. True killers anticipated death—their own. Others’. They saw it everywhere. An active Null, one who’d given in to the impulse to play God, might have bucked at Nix’s offer. She might have wanted to kill him with her own weapons, on her own time.
    But she wouldn’t have thrown the gun.
    Claire has never killed anyone
. Of that much, Nix was sure. And yet …
    The Sensors had identified Claire as a Null. Ione had designated her Code Omega—too dangerous to approach, even for Nix. The last Omega Nix had killed—number Nine—had the bodies of fourteen women buried in his backyard. In pieces.
    Nulls were evil. Those designated Do Not Approach were worse.
    Nix stopped running. He backed himself into a tree and forced himself to breathe. To think. Not about Claire
—what if—what if—what if
—but about the fact that The Society had misclassified her.
    Claire wasn’t dangerous. At least, not yet. So why had The Society told him she was? Why had Ione ordered him to kill her from afar?
    Why had she sent a backup team to finish the job?
    It was almost as if The Society knew that she’d have this effect on him. As if they doubted that he would kill her. As if they’d feared he would figure out—
No
.
    Nix couldn’t breathe. His chest tightened, and he felt the urge to cut himself to slow the panic that was creeping up his spine.
    Claire cried. She laughed. She got upset when he told her to kill him, and she was puzzled when there were things that she didn’t understand.
    Claire had never killed anyone.
    Now that he had started his mind down this path, there was no stopping it. The facts bombarded him, one by one. Claire hadn’t commanded her neighbor’s attention the first day they’d met. The police had come to her house, but they’d left and never come back, which meant that either Claire had intentionally thrown away the protection they might have provided, or else, she hadn’t had the power to make them stay.
    Claire had dreams. Claire had nightmares. Everything she felt went directly to her face, and she felt everything.
    She even felt him. His presence.
    What if it wasn’t an act?
    What if Claire really was what she appeared to be? What if she was just a sweet girl? A sweet, Normal girl who couldn’t even kill someone who’d come very, very close to killing her?
    No
. Nix was on his knees. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there. The rocks in the soil pressed into his kneecaps, and a roll of nausea spread through his body.
    “The Society protects Normals from the Nulls.”
    Without warning, Nix is nine years old again. His trainer’s name is Ryland
.
    Ryland has a knife
.
    “For thousands of years, men with the ability to sense evil in others have banded together to hunt the monsters in their midst.” Ryland twirls the knife around his fingertips, and Nix wonders what the lesson will be this time.A Nobody knows better than to hope that the knife is for show
.
    “You are the right hand of The Society. You are a weapon. You are a tool.” Ryland brings the knife to skid lightly over the surface of Nix’s skin. It takes the Sensor one try, two to figure out where Nix is standing—but he doesn’t cut him. Not this time. Instead, he spins the blade, offering Nix the hilt
.
    Then they bring in the corpse. For practice
.
    Nix came out of it on all fours on the forest floor. Eliminating Nulls was his purpose in life, the altar on which his blood and tears and sweat had been shed. On The Society’s orders, Nix had killed—One, Two, Three, Four. Nulls who valued the average human life no more than that of an ant. Five, Six, Seven—again