Training started at five in the morning because of course it did.
Nix had been given quarters the previous night, a small room with a cot and a locker and a viewport that looked out at nothing in particular, which at least was honest about where they were. Deep space, somewhere between the outer rim and the core systems, on a ship whose name and registration he still hadn't been told. He'd slept badly and woken up twice and was on his third cup of something that was pretending to be coffee when Sera appeared in the doorway of the small mess at four fifty and looked at him like his existence was a mild inconvenience she was managing professionally.
"You're already up," she said.
"Couldn't sleep."
She looked at the cup in his hand. "That stuff is terrible."
"I know." He drank it anyway.
She poured herself one, which he hadn't expected, and stood at the counter and drank it in the same grim determined way he was. They didn't talk. It wasn't a comfortable silence exactly but it wasn't hostile either. Just two people in a small room at five in the morning doing the same unpleasant thing for the same unpleasant reason.
Then she put the cup down and said "follow me" and he did.
The training room was different from the testing room. Larger, for one thing, with higher ceilings and walls that had been reinforced beyond what the testing room had. The impact plating went floor to ceiling and there were dampening emitters at intervals that Nix didn't recognize but suspected were designed to contain a discharge that went sideways. Someone had thought carefully about this room. Someone had spent money on it.
Osk was already there, doing something with his hands that looked casual and was clearly not, a slow precise movement through what Nix gradually recognized as a combat form, each position flowing into the next with the unhurried ease of something practiced ten thousand times. He stopped when they came in and rolled his shoulders and looked at Nix with the same mild curiosity as yesterday.
"He slept," Sera said.
"Badly," Nix said.
"Same thing your first week," Osk said to Sera.
"I don't remember that," she said.
"I know," Osk said pleasantly.
Sera ignored that with the practiced ease of someone who had been ignoring Osk for a long time and moved to the center of the room. "We're starting with baseline physical assessment. Not frequency work, just you. Strength, speed, endurance, reaction time." She looked at him. "We need to know what we're working with."
"I'm a cargo hauler," Nix said. "You're working with that."
"I can see that," she said, looking at him in a way that was clinical rather than unkind but landed roughly the same. "That's why we're assessing."
The baseline assessment took two hours and was one of the more humbling experiences of Nix's life, which was saying something given the week he'd had. He wasn't unfit exactly, cargo work kept you functional, but functional and combat ready were different countries with a significant ocean between them. Sera ran him through everything with the brisk efficiency of someone who had done this before and made notes on her datapad without commenting, which was somehow worse than if she'd said something.
Osk watched from the side with an expression of mild encouragement that Nix found almost more difficult to deal with.
By the time they finished Nix was breathing hard and aware of approximately every muscle in his body. He stood with his hands on his knees and looked at the floor and waited.
"Okay," Sera said, looking at her datapad. "You're not starting from zero."
"High praise," he said.
"It wasn't praise. It was an assessment." She put the datapad down. "You're starting from significantly below where you need to be, but you're not starting from zero. That matters because the physical development matters. Frequency work puts strain on the body. The stronger the body going in, the more it can handle." She paused. "Carro Denn's physical conditioning was poor when they started working with him. We think that contributed to the organ damage."
Nix filed that away. "So the physical training isn't separate from the frequency training."
"Nothing here is separate from anything else," she said. "That's the first thing to understand."
She moved to a cabinet on the far wall and came back with two things. A small handheld device that looked like a calibrated emitter, compact and adjustable, and a padded vest that she handed to Nix.
"Put that on," she said.
He put it on. It was heavier than it looked, with rigid panels at the chest and back and something in the lining that hummed faintly when he fastened it closed.
"The vest monitors accumulation in real time," she said. "It reads the frequency building inside you and transmits to my datapad. When it hits a threshold I've set it will vibrate." She held up the emitter. "I'm going to discharge at you. Low level, rank one Ember output. Same as the first test." She looked at him. "This time I want you to try to feel it when it comes in. Not just absorb passively. Actually pay attention to the sensation and try to hold it in a specific place."
"What place."
"Wherever feels natural. We're not directing it yet, we're just trying to establish whether you have any conscious awareness of the process at all." She raised the emitter. "Ready."
It wasn't a question. She fired before he finished registering that she'd asked.
The discharge hit him in the chest, rank one warmth, familiar now in the way that things that had happened twice before could be familiar. He felt it come in and tried to do what she said, pay attention to it, follow it somewhere with his focus. It was harder than it sounded. The absorption happened fast and automatically, like breathing, something his body did without consulting him.
"Again," she said, and hit him again before he was ready.
And again. And again. Small bursts, one after another, quick enough that he couldn't settle between them. He kept trying to catch the sensation, to put his attention on it before it disappeared, and kept arriving half a second too late.
After the twelfth repetition she stopped and looked at her datapad.
"Accumulation is building normally," she said. "You're not releasing between discharges, which is good, it means you can hold. But you're not catching the intake consciously either." She looked up. "You're doing it the way you breathe. Automatically, without awareness."
"Is that a problem."
"It's a starting point," she said. "The goal is to make it something you do the way you throw a punch. Consciously, with intention, with control over the direction and the force." She lowered the emitter. "Right now you're a door that opens when something pushes it. We need you to be the one deciding when the door opens."
Nix thought about that. "How long did it take Carro Denn to get there."
A pause.
"He never fully got there," she said. "That was part of the problem."
She said it without cruelty, just straight, and somehow that was worse.
Osk pushed off from the wall. "Take five minutes," he said to Nix. "Water's by the door."
Nix went and got water and stood by the door and drank it and thought about doors that opened when things pushed them. About a kid in a crater on a world called Heth, surrounded by what he'd done, still alive because even that hadn't been enough to finish him. About the organ damage. About six years in custody after that and then nothing.
He thought about the Reapers out past the Boundary, enormous and frequency-dense and completely silent, swallowing worlds while the Compact buried the reports and sent Eternals who didn't come back.
He thought about being invisible to something that hunted by frequency. About what that was worth and what it might cost.
He finished the water and went back to the center of the room.
"Again," he said.
Sera looked at him for a moment. Something shifted in her expression, brief and almost imperceptible, gone before he could identify it.
She raised the emitter.
They went for another three hours.
By the end Nix could catch the intake consciously about one time in six, a faint awareness of the moment of absorption, there and then gone, like trying to catch smoke with your hands. Not good. But more than nothing. Sera marked it on her datapad without comment. Osk told him it was a solid first session in the tone of someone who meant it, which helped marginally.
His ribs, still bruised from the boarding, had developed strong opinions about the day by the time they finished. He ate in the mess alone, slowly, and went back to his quarters and sat on the cot and looked at the viewport.
Outside, deep space. Stars doing nothing. The same view from every ship he'd ever been on, the long dark between things, familiar in a way that almost felt like comfort.
His datapad had a message on it. Mura's ID tag on the sender line. Short, the way Mura did everything.
Heard you're doing something stupid. Sounds about right. Don't die.
He read it twice. Then put the datapad down and lay back on the cot and stared at the ceiling.
Tomorrow would be worse than today. He was fairly sure about that.
He closed his eyes anyway.