The testing room looked less like a laboratory and more like someone had taken a very large empty chamber and filled it with things designed to hurt people.
Nix stood at the entrance and took stock. The room was maybe thirty meters across, metal floors, high ceiling, the walls lined with impact plating that had seen enough use to show it. In the center sat a series of machines he didn't recognize, low and angular, with calibration displays facing outward. Along the far wall stood four people in Compact uniforms. Three of them were watching him with the careful professional attention of people doing a job. The fourth was the quiet man from yesterday, still not introduced, still watching everything like he was adding it up.
Avrel stood beside Nix. She had a datapad and the expression of someone who was more nervous than she was letting on.
"The process is straightforward," she said. "We measure your baseline. Then we introduce controlled frequency discharges at increasing levels and measure the response. We start low and work up." She glanced at him. "You can stop at any point."
"What happens if I don't stop."
"We learn more." She said it simply, without any attempt to dress it up, which Nix appreciated more than he would have if she'd tried to reassure him. "The people running the machines are trained for this. Nobody is going to let it get out of hand."
Nix looked at the impact plating on the walls. The scoring on it. "Has it gotten out of hand before."
A pause that was just long enough to be honest. "This is the first time we've tested someone with your potential classification. So technically no."
He walked in.
The baseline measurements took about twenty minutes. He stood inside one of the machines while it hummed around him and did whatever it did, and the technicians watched their displays and spoke to each other in low voices and wrote things down. Nix stood still and stared at the far wall and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he was voluntarily letting a Compact intelligence unit run experiments on him on the basis of one conversation and the fact that he didn't have anywhere else to go.
When they finished the baseline the lead technician, a compact woman with grey-streaked hair, looked up from her display with an expression Nix couldn't read.
"Confirmed null baseline," she said. "No measurable frequency generation. No resonance signature." She paused. "Clean zero."
Avrel nodded. "Begin level one discharge."
One of the other technicians moved to a different machine, made adjustments, and directed a low frequency pulse toward Nix. Rank one Ember level. The kind of thing that would feel like a mild shove to an ordinary person.
Nix felt it hit him and then felt it go somewhere. Not through him. Not around him. Into him, the same way the Voidborn's burst had, except small enough that it didn't hurt. Just a warmth, brief and then gone, settling in his chest for a second before it faded.
The technicians were very quiet.
"Level one absorbed," the lead technician said, her voice carefully even. "No visible response from the subject. No discharge. Frequency signature on impact registered and then." She stopped. "Disappeared."
"Level two," Avrel said.
Rank two, Flare level. This one had some weight behind it. It hit Nix in the chest and he took a half step back from the force of it, more from surprise than anything else. Same sensation. Warmth, a little more of it this time, sitting in his sternum for a few seconds before it dissipated. He straightened up.
The quiet man near the wall uncrossed his arms.
They went through three and four the same way. At rank three Radiant level Nix's teeth rattled and he tasted copper and the warmth in his chest was hot enough to be uncomfortable, but it faded. At rank four he went down on one knee and stayed there for a moment with his hand on the floor, breathing through it. His ribs, still bruised from the boarding, screamed at him. The heat this time took longer to fade and left something behind when it did, a residue he couldn't describe except that it felt like pressure behind his eyes and an odd tingling in his hands.
He got up.
The room was completely silent.
"Level four absorbed," the lead technician said, and her voice had changed. Not unprofessional, but something in it was different. Slower. "Subject is ambulatory. No external discharge detected." She looked up from her display. "Commander, I'm reading a frequency accumulation inside the subject. It's not dissipating fully between tests. It's." She stopped again. "It's building."
Avrel looked at Nix. "How do you feel."
"Pressure behind my eyes," he said. "Hands are tingling."
"Can you describe the tingling."
"Like when your foot falls asleep except in my hands and considerably more unpleasant."
The quiet man spoke for the first time. His voice was low and unhurried. "What does the accumulation read at."
The lead technician checked her display. "Equivalent to approximately rank two point four. And climbing slowly."
"He's storing it," the quiet man said.
"That's not supposed to be possible," one of the other technicians said, and then seemed to remember he was in a room with his superiors and went quiet.
"No," the quiet man agreed mildly. "It's not."
Avrel was still watching Nix. "We're going to pause here for a moment. The accumulation needs to come down before we continue. Can you try to release it, let it go, whatever feels natural."
"I have no idea how to do that."
"Try anyway."
Nix tried. He focused on the pressure behind his eyes and the heat in his chest and attempted to do something intentional with it, push it out or let it go or whatever the right verb was, and nothing happened for a long moment. Then something shifted, like a pressure valve finding its way open, and the heat moved up through his chest and into his arms and out through his palms all at once.
The floor in front of him scorched. A half meter circle of impact plating blackened and one of the machines nearest to him let out a sharp crack and its display went dark.
Everyone in the room took a step back.
Nix looked at his hands. No glow. No visible sign of anything. Just his hands, looking exactly the way they always had.
The tingling was gone. The pressure behind his eyes was gone. He felt, somehow, slightly lighter than he had when he woke up this morning.
He looked up.
Avrel was standing very still. The lead technician had her hand over her mouth. The quiet man was watching Nix with an expression that was impossible to interpret and impossible to look away from, the focused, unreadable attention of someone doing rapid calculations behind their eyes.
"Well," the quiet man said finally.
He looked at Avrel.
"We're going to need a bigger room."