Teaser: Chapter 20, Learning to Dance

Full chapter tomorrow. <3

***

The man who once was Commander Up sat in a bath, looking at his hands.

The water was as hot as he could stand it, the skin on the left side of his body searing and reddening in protest, but it took his mind off the dull, constant ache throughout him where flesh met metal, a relentless reminder of what he had become. He held his hands in front of him, fingers spread, and turned them over. The right hand was still slower to respond. It had taken days of practice just to be able to twitch one of its alien fingers.

The hands looked the same, but they weren’t. One was muscle and bone, creased, timeworn skin, scars and memory, and the other -

With immense effort, he closed the robot hand into a fist. Silicone and nanotechnology, a clever facsimile - for a piece of human technology it was fucking unreal.

But it wasn’t his.

***