The freighter Kessa's Wrath smelled like burnt coolant and old arguments.
Nix had been on board for two years and he still couldn't tell if the smell came from the engine room or just seeped out of the walls at this point. Probably both. Captain Mura ran a tight ship in the sense that nothing had actually exploded yet, but beyond that the bar was pretty low.
He was in the cargo hold doing what he usually did between runs. Inventory. Not because anyone asked him to, just because it gave his hands something to do while his brain wandered somewhere he'd rather it didn't.
Forty units of medical polymer. Check. Twelve containers of processed grain. Check. Six sealed black boxes he wasn't paid to ask questions about. Check.
He marked them off on his datapad and tried not to think about the fact that he was seventeen years old and this was his life.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Well, it was, actually. Once you understood how things worked, it made complete sense that Nix Dross had ended up hauling cargo at the edge of inhabited space with nowhere better to be. But there was a difference between something making sense and being okay with it, and Nix was still working on closing that gap.
Everyone in the Compact was born with something called a Resonance Frequency. A natural energy signature in the body that, when developed, translated into real physical ability. Enhanced strength, speed, endurance beyond what a normal human frame should allow. The higher your frequency, the more of that power you could access, and the further you could go. It determined your rank, and your rank determined just about everything else. Your career. Your housing. The way people looked at you when you walked into a room.
Nix had tested at zero. Null. Not low, not developing, not a late bloomer the way some kids hoped they were after a disappointing result. Just nothing. The technician at his testing center had checked the machine twice, called in a second opinion, then a third. All three of them wearing that careful expression adults put on when they have bad news and aren't sure where to put their hands.
He was six years old at the time. He still remembered the ride home.
The military wouldn't touch him. Most security firms required a minimum rank one rating just to apply. The options left for a Null were exactly as narrow as they sounded, which was how he'd ended up here. A cargo run from Barrow Station to the Grevian outpost, two days through dead space, same as the last run and the one before that.
He had made his peace with it.
He told himself that a lot.
"Dross."
Yeva's voice came from the ladder above him. She was the ship's only ranked fighter, a rank one Ember who had come off a border militia posting and ended up on a cargo freighter for reasons she'd never fully explained. Rank one wasn't much by Compact standards, the lowest rung of measurable frequency, but it was enough to make her noticeably harder to hurt than everyone else on board. Around her hands she carried the faint orange warmth that Embers always had, subtle enough that most people wouldn't notice it unless the lights were low.
Nix always noticed it.
Not out of jealousy. He was past jealousy. At least that's what he told himself.
"Captain wants a headcount before we hit the corridor," Yeva said.
"I'm one person."
"I'll tell her the math checks out." She disappeared back up the ladder.
Nix finished the inventory and headed up.
The crew deck was quiet in the way it always was mid-run. Mura sat in the cockpit running navigation checks, two of the younger hands were playing cards at the back table, and the low hum of the engines filled in the rest. Nix poured himself something hot from the galley unit and stood at the small viewport for a while, watching the stars do nothing.
Two days to Grevian. Collect the credits. Come back. Do it again.
The ship lurched.
Not turbulence. Not an engine hiccup. Something hit them, hard enough that Nix had to grab the galley counter to stay upright. The lights dropped to emergency red. A second impact came in worse than the first, and somewhere in the upper hull something made a sound like tearing.
Mura's voice cut through the ship. "All hands."
That was it. Just those two words. On a ship this small, that was enough.
Nix moved toward the crew deck where everyone was already converging. Mura was in the cockpit doorway with a look on her face that Nix had never seen before and didn't like. Pol, one of the younger hands, was at the weapons locker with shaking fingers, failing at the keypad. Yeva stood in the middle of the room with both fists up, the orange glow around her hands burning brighter than usual.
That last part told Nix more than anything else. Yeva only burned bright when she was scared.
"Talk to me," Nix said.
"Voidborn," Mura said. "Three ships sitting in the debris field. We flew right past them."
The card game at the back table had stopped. Nobody said anything.
The Voidborn had a reputation that travelled faster than most news. They weren't a faction exactly, more of a consequence. Ranked fighters who had decided the natural limits of the system weren't good enough and had found a way around them, a brutal and irreversible process that shattered your own frequency and rebuilt it from scratch using pieces taken from others. It gave them more power. It also made them unstable in ways that went beyond the physical, and it had been outlawed by the Compact long before Nix was born. The ones who'd done it anyway had nothing left to lose and a fairly straightforward relationship with violence.
Out here, two hours from the nearest patrol route, there was nobody to call.
Pol finally got the weapons locker open. The ship took another hit and he stumbled sideways, scattering the contents across the floor. Two pulse rifles and a charge pistol that looked older than the ship.
Mura looked at Yeva.
She didn't have to say it. Everyone in the room already understood the problem. Yeva was rank one. A single Ember against a Voidborn boarding crew was not a fight. It was barely a distraction.
"I'll go," Yeva said anyway, because that was the kind of person she was.
"No." Nix crouched down and picked up one of the pulse rifles. "Show me how to use this."
Yeva stared at him. "You're a Null."
"I know." He looked at her. "Show me anyway."
She held his gaze for a moment, then showed him. Safety, charge indicator, don't lock your shoulder. Fifteen seconds. He gripped it the way she demonstrated and was fully aware that he looked like someone who had never held a weapon in his life.
He went to the boarding hatch anyway. Because somebody had to and Yeva couldn't do it alone and standing in the crew deck waiting wasn't something his body was willing to do.
He heard them cutting through before he saw them. That high-pitched whine of a frequency-charged blade eating through hull plating. He pressed himself against the wall beside the hatch, controlled his breathing as best he could, and waited.
The hatch blew in.
Three of them came through. Nix had never seen a Voidborn up close before. He'd heard the descriptions but descriptions didn't cover it. There was something visually wrong about them, a distortion in the air around their bodies like heat haze, except cold. The one in front was big and calm in the way that dangerous things often were, a resonance blade at his side glowing deep cracked purple, the color of a frequency that had been broken and put back together badly.
He looked at Nix the way you look at something small that has made a noise.
Nix fired. The shot caught the Voidborn in the shoulder and did nothing. Not glanced off, not staggered him. Nothing. The man didn't even shift his weight.
Then he raised his hand and hit Nix with a frequency burst.
For a ranked fighter, taking a hit like that was survivable depending on your level. For a Null it was supposed to be a different conversation entirely. No frequency meant no buffer, nothing in the body to absorb even a fraction of the impact. It should have ended things very quickly.
Nix hit the wall hard enough to crack something, then the floor. Pain arrived everywhere at once, the total overwhelming kind that doesn't bother picking a location. His vision went white. He couldn't tell what was broken. He couldn't tell much of anything.
But he was still conscious. Barely, and getting less so by the second, but still there.
That wasn't right.
Through the narrowing tunnel of his vision he could see the Voidborn standing over him. Not finishing it. Just standing there, looking down at him with an expression Nix couldn't read and didn't have the capacity to think about right now.
Something was wrong in his chest. Not the pain, the pain was everywhere. Something else. A heat that didn't belong to him, sitting behind his sternum like a swallowed ember. He had no idea what it was. He'd never felt anything like it before.
He didn't have the chance to figure it out.
The darkness finished closing in and took him with it.