Nobody Read Online Free PDF

perceptive to the point of being prescient. They identified Nulls. They safeguarded The Society and its institute. They unraveled the mysteries of the universe, one data point at a time.
    The Sensors were the ones who’d trained him.
    The world has an energy to it. Everyone and everything—people, objects, animals, plants … even rocks and dirt and molecules of air—they’re all made up of energy. And when they interact with each other, they leave their marks on the world, and it is through that exchange of energy that all happenings happen. That love blossoms. That connections are made
.
    Do you know why we call you Nix, child?
    He hadn’t. Not at the age of three. But by four, he’d learned.
    It’s because you’re nothing. You have no energy. You leave no trail. As far as the world is concerned, you don’t exist. And you never will
.
    The Society had raised him.
    The Society had trained him.
    The Society had given him a purpose—or as much of one as a Nobody could have. When they told him to kill, he killed, and in the days, weeks, months in between, he molded himself into a better killer: quicker, faster, more untouchable. He let Society scientists poke and prod him so that his deficiencies might be fully understood, so that those working for the greater good might squeeze every last drop of data out of his flesh, his bones, the abilities he had that real people didn’t.
    And even though it did Nix no good, even though his emotions had and could have no effect on Ione or the Sensors or the many scientists who’d used him as a lab rat, he hated them for it.
    Empty hatred, because he didn’t count.
    Claire is mine
.
    The thought was savage, feral in a way that usually had him tearing at his own flesh, desperate to feel something that mattered. Something he could count on. Something that wouldn’t cease to exist, just because no one cared that it was there.
    Claire was his.
    These Sensors were out of their league. They thoughtthat because they knew about energy, because they could sense it, that made them less vulnerable to the kind of monsters The Society was created to combat. They thought that knowing
what
this girl was gave them the advantage.
    But they were wrong.
    If Claire had seen a Nobody coming, she’d catch the Sensors before any of them could lay so much as a finger on her. They could try to pick her off from a nearby roof, but unlike Nix, Sensors could be tracked, noticed,
seen
. If they killed her, they’d be caught. The Society was as ancient as the Knights Templar and twice as secretive. They didn’t take the risk of exposure lightly.
    Less than shadow. Less than air. That’s what you have to be to kill my Claire
.
    Nix smiled at the rhyme in his mind. The Sensors couldn’t kill this Null.
    She was
his
.
    So he’d take care of her.

    Claire watched the yolk slide out of the egg, broken and dripping. Trying not to burn herself, she bent over the skillet and began to pluck the bits of shell out of the sizzling mess on the stove.
    This is why I don’t normally cook
.
    That and the fact that normally she didn’t have anyone to cook for. In the three days since the police had called her parents home, Claire had made breakfast every morning.
    Eventually, they’d eat it. Sit down at the table across from her, say her name, and eat her eggs. Eventually, Claire and her mother and her father would have a real family breakfast, like countless TV families before them.
    But not today.
    Absentmindedly, Claire’s mother brushed past her. Reached into the cabinet directly over Claire’s head. Pulled out a box of cereal.
    “I … ummm … I made eggs?” Claire didn’t mean for the words to come out as a question, but they did.
    “Hmmm?” Her mother’s response wasn’t a word so much as a sound, but it was something.
    “I made eggs. For you. And Dad.”
    And me
, Claire added silently, but she didn’t get that far out loud.
    “Oh.” Her mother didn’t put down the cereal box.