His name was Director Solen Varek.
Nix found this out not from Varek himself but from a junior technician who made the mistake of addressing him by title while Nix was within earshot, and then immediately looked like she wished she hadn't. Varek didn't react to it. He just continued looking at the scorched circle on the floor with his hands behind his back, the same way he'd been looking at everything since the test ended. Like it was data.
Director of what, Nix didn't know yet. But in his experience people with single word titles and no insignia on their collar were not directors of anything small.
They had moved him to a different room after the test. Larger, still no windows, with actual furniture this time. A table, chairs, a water unit in the corner. Either a step up from the medical room or a very comfortable interrogation setup depending on how you looked at it. Nix sat at the table and drank water and waited because there wasn't much else to do.
Avrel came in first. She sat across from him and put her datapad on the table and looked at him for a moment before she said anything.
"How are your hands," she said.
"Fine." He turned them over. Nothing to see. "Normal."
"The discharge you produced scorched impact plating rated for rank three Radiant output," she said. "You had absorbed four separate discharges at that point, the highest being rank four Ascendant level. The accumulation of those combined is what came out." She paused. "You're seventeen with no training, no combat background, and no prior knowledge of what you are. That output level at this stage is." She seemed to pick the next word carefully. "Significant."
"I didn't mean to do it."
"I know. That's actually the part that concerns me less right now." She set the datapad down. "What concerns me more is the accumulation. Most of the theoretical literature on Void classification, and there isn't much of it, suggests that a Void who absorbs more than they can hold at a given point doesn't discharge cleanly. The energy doesn't come out through the palms. It comes out in all directions at once." She let that sit. "You held four discharges and released in a controlled direction without training or intent. That shouldn't be possible at this stage."
Nix thought about the scorched floor. Controlled felt generous. He hadn't aimed at anything. He'd just opened a door and whatever was behind it had picked its own way out.
"You said there isn't much literature," he said. "How much is not much."
"Three documented case studies over two centuries. All of them classified at the highest level. All of them ended badly." She met his eyes. "The last confirmed Void, the one I mentioned yesterday, his name was Carro Denn. He absorbed a rank five Celestial's full discharge in open combat and released it back without meaning to. Leveled a city block. Killed four hundred and eleven people." A beat. "He was nineteen at the time. He'd been in Compact custody for eight months."
The room was very quiet.
"They locked him up," Nix said.
"They tried to train him. It went wrong." She folded her hands on the table. "I'm telling you this because I think you deserve to know what the precedent looks like. Not to frighten you."
"It's frightening anyway."
"Yes," she said simply. "It is."
The door opened and Varek came in. He sat down at the head of the table without preamble, the way people sat in rooms they owned, and looked at Nix with that same unreadable, calculating attention he'd had since the beginning.
"You have questions," Varek said. Also not a question.
"Several," Nix said.
"Go ahead."
Nix looked at him. "Who are you actually. Not the title. What do you do."
Something in Varek's expression shifted slightly. Not quite a smile. The shadow of one. "I run a unit within Compact intelligence. We handle threats that don't fit cleanly into the standard military structure. Things that require discretion, adaptability, and a tolerance for operating outside normal procedure." He paused. "We've been looking for a Void for eleven years."
"Looking for one. You mean you knew they existed."
"We knew it was possible. There are gaps in the Compact's genetic records going back several generations, deliberate gaps, places where someone went through a great deal of trouble to make sure certain bloodlines couldn't be traced. We had a theory about why." His eyes didn't move from Nix. "Your mother's family name before she married your father."
It wasn't a question either but Nix answered it. "Sero."
Varek nodded like that confirmed something.
"What does that mean," Nix said.
"It means the gaps we found lead back to a family line that was officially dissolved by the High Council two hundred and thirteen years ago. After Carro Denn." Varek leaned back in his chair. "The Council's solution to the Void problem was to find every living relative of the last known Void and ensure they never appeared in the official record again. Scattered across the outer systems, names changed, histories rewritten. The idea was that if the bloodline couldn't be tracked it couldn't produce another Void, and if it did, nobody would know where to look."
Nix sat with that for a moment. "My mother never said anything."
"She likely didn't know. By your generation the original cover story would have been two hundred years old. It would have just been family history." Varek tilted his head slightly. "Or she knew and chose not to tell you. That's also possible."
Nix didn't have anything to say to that so he didn't say anything.
"You're going to want to know what we want from you," Varek said.
"I was getting there."
"We want to train you." He said it plainly, no softening around it. "Properly and carefully, with people who have studied the available literature and spent eleven years preparing for this specific situation. We want to understand what you can do and we want to make sure you can control it." He paused. "And we want to point you at a problem that the Compact's current assets are not equipped to handle."
"The Reapers," Nix said.
A silence. Brief but real.
Avrel looked at Varek. Varek looked at Nix.
"Where did you hear that word," Varek said, and his voice had changed. Still controlled, still level, but something underneath it had sharpened.
"I work a cargo freighter on the outer rim," Nix said. "People talk. Ships go quiet past the Ashveil Boundary and don't come back and people notice even if the Compact isn't announcing it." He watched Varek's face. "I didn't know the word until just now. I was guessing."
Another silence.
"That's a very good guess," Avrel said quietly.
Varek studied Nix for a long moment. Then he made a decision, visibly, the kind that moved through a person's expression before they speak it.
"The Reapers," he said, "are what we've been calling them internally for lack of a better term. They appear to be non-human entities of unknown origin from beyond the Ashveil Boundary. They've been crossing into Compact space in increasing numbers over the past eighteen months. We've lost contact with four outer rim worlds in that time." He paused. "The Compact High Council is aware. The public is not."
"Four worlds," Nix said.
"Four worlds. Approximately six hundred thousand people combined, across those systems." Varek's voice didn't change. "No wreckage. No distress signals. No survivors that we've found."
Nix thought about the dead space between patrol routes. The long quiet stretches of nothing he crossed on every cargo run. He thought about those stretches differently now.
"The Eternals," he said. "The rank sixes."
"We've sent three," Varek said. "None have reported back."
The weight of that settled over the room like something physical.
Rank six Eternals were the highest tier of human combat ability the Compact had ever produced. Living weapons so far above ordinary soldiers that the comparison barely made sense. Three of them sent in and three of them gone without a word.
"You think a Void can do something they couldn't," Nix said.
"I think the Reapers operate on frequency in a way we don't fully understand yet," Varek said. "Every ranked fighter we send generates resonance energy. The higher the rank, the stronger the signal. We have a working theory that we've been sending beacons." He looked at Nix steadily. "A Void generates nothing. No signal. No frequency. To whatever detection system the Reapers are using, you would be effectively invisible."
Nix thought about seventeen years of being nothing. Of rooms that looked past him, doors that stayed closed, a whole civilization built around a measurement he didn't have.
Zero. Null. Nothing.
"You want to use what makes me worthless," he said.
"I want to use what makes you unique," Varek said. "Those are different things, even if they look the same from where you're standing right now."
Nix looked at the table. Then at Avrel, who was watching him with an expression that was careful and genuine and not entirely without apology. Then at Varek, who was watching him with no expression at all, just that steady patient attention.
"I want to contact my crew," Nix said. "I want to know they're actually okay and I want to talk to them."
"That can be arranged."
"And I want to know everything. Not a version of everything. Everything." He looked at Varek. "If you want me to walk toward whatever killed three Eternals I want to know exactly what I'm walking toward."
Varek held his gaze for a moment.
"Agreed," he said.
It wasn't trust. Not even close. But it was something to stand on, which was more than Nix had walked in with.
He supposed that would have to do for now.