Page 101 of Violent Possession

He opens his hand. Closes it. Opens it again. The fluidity of the movement is hypnotic. A marvel of engineering attached to the end of a man who is the personification of chaos.

“The neural feedback is at least twenty percent faster than your old arm,” I explain. “The old model left fingerprints in the clinic’s database, so it was easy to recover the measurements. But brute force is useless without control. We need to calibrate the pressure.”

I take a small block of high-density silicone from the toolkit. It’s the size of an ice cube, used to test the resistance of materials.

“Hold this.”

I place the cube in his metal palm. I feel the cold of the carbon radiating, rising through my fingers, recalibrating my own sense of temperature.

“Use... let’s say, twenty percent force,” I say. He gives me a half-smile, that kind of low laugh that’s less about humor and more about despising the order.

“How am I supposed to know what percentage of force I’m using, boss?”

“Instinct.”

I gesture for him to begin.

He hesitates just long enough to show that he’s thinking of ways to defy me.

The carbon fingers close around the cube with a slow, ceremonial movement. The implanted sensors notice every micro-adjustment in the torque; a digital graph on the tablet next to the table begins to trace a blue line, rising in real-time. He squeezes the cube, the line jumps.

“Less,” I say, and Griffin immediately relaxes his fist, but only as far as his ego allows. The line trembles and drops, stabilizing. “Good. Fifty percent.”

He glances at me sideways, about to say something, but gives up. He returns his focus to the cube. He squeezes. The silicone begins to deform, discreetly at first, then deepens the imprint of the fingers until it almost folds in on itself.

“Eighty.”

The cube is now visibly crushed. As he maintains the pressure, I lean in closer. I pull his shirt collar to the side, exposing the warm skin of his shoulder, and adjust it with one of the micro-wrenches. My fingers, by accident or intention, touch the beginning of his trapezius. I feel the warmth of his skin, the tension of the muscle, and I know he notices.

His body stiffens under the touch. He holds his breath long enough for me to see the vein in his neck pop.

On the display, the graph shoots up, hitting the maximum.

The silicone cube breaks in two. The halves roll across the table and fall to the floor.

His face is too close to mine. The tension, previously only physical, converts intosomething else. He looks at me as if he wants to devour or destroy, maybe at the same time.

I feel my own pulse race, a biological weakness I despise, and yet it fails to bother me.

I force myself to pull away. Before things get too out of control.

“You like this, don’t you?” he says. “Controlling everything with a touch.”

I stare back at him, without smiling. “I like knowing the tool works.”

“Is that all I am to you?” He gives me a half-smile. The tone is a provocation, not a question. His gaze burns, but it never yields. “Or are you talking about the prosthesis?”

He moves closer to me, without my answering. Now it’s he who invades my space.

The new, gleaming hand rests on my thigh, weighing exactly three hundred and twenty grams of fiber, titanium, and intention. I feel the fingers tighten slowly, testing the resistance of flesh or the fragility of my pose. I don’t react. I can’t.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

“You never ask for permission.”

“Why did you choose me, Alex? Why not someone else?”

I think about telling him the truth—that no one has ever challenged me like him, that few men can stand to look their own abyss in the face without blinking, and even fewer can laugh about it. That maybe I see in him what I wanted to see in myself, if I dared to be that way.