She jerked away from him and stumbled backward, doing a good impression of someone who’d taken a knife to the gut.
Claire asking and asking and hoping for answers, trying not to care when people walk right by.
He hadn’t meant to make her look like that.
“Sorry.” It wasn’t a word he’d said before. Ever. But Claire had said it plenty, and Nix knew, in an abstract way, that it was supposed to make things better.
Didn’t, though.
“Don’t be.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” She wrapped her arms around her waist, nursing her wounds. “You can use the mouse to click from one window to another. If you want to know more about Proposition 42, type those words into that little box there.” She nodded with her head, but since he couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes, he didn’t follow.
“I’ll just go … books.”
And then she was gone, disappearing into the nearby stacks like a rabbit taking to its hole, and he was left with a computer he didn’t know how to use, words he could barely read, and the knowledge that he wasn’t just a killer.
Most of the time, he was a pretty poor excuse for a person, too.
Situation: What if you’d been raised from the crib to be an assassin? What if the people who’d trained you had brainwashed you into believing that everyone you killed deserved to die?
What if you found out they lied?
Claire knew, logically, that was the kind of thing that would mess with a person’s head.
They told him he was killing monsters, and then they made him kill people. He thought it was just me who was different, and he didn’t go through with killing me. He thought there was a chance that it wasn’t too late. That everyone he’d killed really had been a dangerous Null. That he really was a hero, working in the shadows to make the world a better place for people who’d never even looked his way. That he wasn’t just an unimportant little boy raised like an animal and let out of the cage only when The Society wanted someone dead.
He wanted to believe that, and he just found out he was wrong.
Claire could see this from Nix’s perspective. Her heart broke for him, but no matter how deeply she imagined herself in his position, no matter how much she understood rationally that her imagination wasn’t doing his torment justice, she couldn’t shake the tiny voice in the back of her own brain.
He doesn’t want me. He told me to go away.
Claire hated herself for thinking like that—like everything was about her. Like the fact that she felt crappy and small and like he’d thrown her away held even the tiniest candle to what he was going through. She knew rationally that he’d weathered a big blow, that he needed some time to himself.
She just wanted him to need her.
And that was stupid and selfish and idiotically idealistic. Almost as bad as the fact that when she’d seen him breaking, sensed the fault line running straight through his psyche shift with each revelation—part of her was relieved.
Because that meant Nix wasn’t a monster.
He was scared. And lost. And lonely. And he hated himself.
Without meaning to, Claire headed straight for the children’s section of the library. The building was dark. She could barely see without the light from the computer’s screen, and she kept bumping into stuff, but kids’ sections had a vibe about them, and she found it before the first tear splashed out of her eye and onto her cheek.
Then she went a little nuts.
It started with Up a Road Slowly. Then The Westing Game. Number the Stars. Rilla of Ingleside and Rainbow Valley. She picked up Shiloh, then put it back, because she couldn’t take a book about a dead dog right now. And Black Beauty and Beauty—she couldn’t read those either.
She should have outgrown these books.
She should have been in the adult section, or at least up in teen.
But she wasn’t.
Little Women. The Secret Garden. And, oh—The Little Prince.
Feeling like she really was just seven or eight, Claire sat down on the floor, books all around her, and she opened the last one she’d picked up. Even though it was dark, and even though her eyes couldn’t see the words, she knew them.
Knew the little prince’s story as well as her own.
She closed her eyes. She leaned her head forward against the book. And she sobbed.
Proposition 42 was wordy and long and Nix was sure that Claire would have been able to find a shorter explanation of it. With the mouse. And the box she’d told him to type into. And Google, which sent chills of terror down his spine.
I’m out of my element. I’m not good at this.
Of course, thinking that led him to thinking about the things he was good at. His perfect aim. His ability to move quickly, quietly. To follow directions. To do whatever it was that had to be done, no matter the cost.
Murderer.
The real irony was that he’d hated Claire when he thought she was a Null, because he’d assumed that she didn’t have a conscience. That she killed other people like they didn’t even matter. And all along, he was the monster, no better than a dirty, rotten Null. Worse, maybe, because he hadn’t been born without empathy.
He’d just taught himself not to feel it for the people The Society said had to die.
“Proposition 42.” Nix tried to force himself to focus. He willed the letters to stop blending together. He sounded out the words. Slowly, painstakingly, he worked his way through the vast amounts of information on the screen. He tried to make sense of it.
And the entire time, all he could think about was the look on Claire’s face. She knew he’d killed Wyler. She’d held him. Told him it wasn’t his fault. Looked at him like they were the same, as if she were trying to think of a way to leach away some of his pain and feel it herself.
And he’d sent her away. Not for her own good. Not to protect her.
Because he couldn’t take feeling evil and stupid, too.
Proposition 42. Nix concentrated and, bit by bit, he read. An hour later, he had answers. Questions, too.
“Proposition 42 was pitched as the common man’s protection from the Patriot Act.” Nix summarized what he’d read, hoping it would make more sense out loud. “It gave a designated congressional subcommittee oversight of a variety of shadow organizations that would otherwise report only to higher-ups within the FBI and CIA. Sykes, not surprisingly, positioned himself as the head of that committee, and if he hadn’t pushed to delay voting on the proposition, it probably would have passed.”