Chapter 16 Dissecting Me
DISSECTING ME
Chills (Dark Version) - Mickey Valen & Joey Myron
Hatchet
They don’t gag me. A gag would be for someone who screams. Someone who begs. Someone whose voice is a problem that needs solving.
Mine isn’t.
I wake suspended. Not metaphorically. Literally.
My arms are raised above my head, wrists locked into cuffs that bite just enough to be noticeable without cutting circulation. My feet don’t quite touch the floor – just the barest brush of my toes against something solid, enough to keep my legs from fully hanging, not enough to give me leverage.
Clever.
I’m pissed off. Not because of my situation but because I was dragged from a compelling dream where I was chasing a flash of red hair through a forest.
No idea who it belonged to, but I felt more alive than I have in years.
And now…nothing.
The room is grey. Grey walls, grey floor, grey light. Industrial but clean. Functional. Honest, in its own way.
I test my weight carefully.
The restraints don’t budge.
I rotate my shoulders a fraction, mapping the angles, the tension points, the exact tolerance of the cuffs. They’ve positioned me so any real force will dislocate something long before it breaks the hardware.
They want me intact. They want me contained.
I exhale slowly through my nose and still myself.
This is not my first cage. Just the quietest one.
There are no voices at first. No instructions. No countdown. That’s deliberate too. Silence forces impatience. Impatience leads to mistakes.
I won’t give them that.
I let my head drop forward slightly, chin to chest, conserving energy, listening.
There’s a faint hum beneath everything, low and steady. Power. Systems online. Somewhere nearby, machines are waiting for input.
Time passes. Or maybe it doesn’t. The light never changes.
Then the floor moves.
Not much. A subtle shift, like a breath beneath my feet. My toes lose contact and my full weight drops into the cuffs.
Pain lances up my arms, sharp and immediate. My jaw tightens automatically, teeth grinding.
I don’t make a sound.
The floor lowers another inch.
Muscles scream as they take the strain. My shoulders burn, ligaments protesting the angle. I adjust my core, distributing weight as efficiently as I can. This is endurance, not panic.
Still manageable.
A door opens somewhere out of sight. Footsteps approach, measured, unhurried. Someone stops just outside my line of vision.
A voice speaks.
“Subject Hatchet is awake.”
Male. Calm. Neutral. Not trying to provoke me.
Good. Provocation would be a waste.
“We will begin motor function assessment shortly,” the voice continues. “You are advised to remain still.”
I almost smile.
Remaining still is not the problem. Remaining useful is.
Something shifts behind me. I catch movement in my peripheral vision – a mechanical arm sliding out from a panel in the wall I think. It moves with precision, stopping just short of my right hand.
Attached to it is a blade.
Not a crude one. Clean. Balanced. Familiar in shape, if not in weight.
They’ve chosen it carefully. Close enough to something I’ve used to trigger muscle memory. Different enough to throw me off if I get sloppy.
The blade stops six inches from my fingers.
Six inches might as well be a mile.
My pulse remains steady.
The machine hums, adjusting position by millimetres, watching how my eyes track it, how my fingers twitch without conscious permission.
They are mapping my instincts.
Another arm slides out on my left, this one holding nothing. It hovers near my forearm, the tip ending in a small injector.
I focus on breathing.
The injector strikes.
Cold floods my arm, then heat, then a crawling sensation under the skin like ants moving through muscle. My fingers spasm involuntarily. The blade wobbles as the machine compensates.
A tremor ripples through my hand.
My jaw locks harder.
I recognise the compound by feel alone. Neuromuscular disruptor. Not paralytic. Not sedative.
Precision killer.
They aren’t trying to stop gross movement. They’re attacking fine control.
The thing I rely on.
The tremor worsens, spreading from my fingers to my wrist. I flex experimentally, slow and careful.
The movement is there. Strength intact.
Accuracy is gone.
The voice speaks again, closer now. “We are assessing the degradation threshold of motor precision under chemical interference.”
I stare straight ahead, refusing to look at the blade.
If I look, they win twice. Data and satisfaction.
The tremor increases. My hand shakes visibly now, a betrayal I can’t hide.
Another injector hits my left arm.
My fingers curl reflexively, nails biting into my palms. I force them open again, slow and deliberate, refusing to clench into useless fists.
The blade inches closer.
Four inches.
My breathing remains even, but something ugly coils low in my gut. Not fear.
Fury.
They know exactly what they’re doing.
They’re not hurting me because they want pain. They’re hurting me because they want frustration. They want to watch the moment rage realises it has nowhere to go.
The blade stops two inches from my fingers.
A screen flickers to life on the wall in front of me. I hadn’t noticed it before. Grey on grey. Easy to miss.
Now it lights up with a live feed.
Me.
My hands, magnified. The tremor, visible in humiliating detail. Data scrolls beside the image – angles, velocity, deviation.
They’re not just restraining me.
They’re dissecting me.
“Attempt to grasp the object,” the voice says calmly.
I don’t move.
Silence stretches.
“Subject Hatchet,” the voice continues, unperturbed. “This is not a test of compliance. It is a test of capability.”
I meet my own eyes on the screen.
I know what they want. They want to see how hard I push. How much damage I’ll do to myself trying to reach what I can’t hold.
They want to see me fail.
I move my hand.
Slowly. Carefully. Every fraction of an inch is a negotiation between muscle and nerve. The tremor fights me the whole way, my fingers jittering like they belong to someone else.
I get close enough that the blade’s cold radiates against my skin.
Closer.
My fingers brush the hilt.
The tremor spikes violently.
The blade slips.
It clatters to the floor, loud in the quiet room.
I still don’t make a sound.
But something inside me snaps anyway.
Not explosively. Precisely.
The machine retracts. The blade is gone. The opportunity is removed.
“Noted,” the voice says. “Precision failure at current dosage.”
I bare my teeth without smiling.
They think this is about the blade.
It isn’t.
It’s about taking away the one thing I trust - my ability to act decisively. To end things cleanly. To rely on my hands.
They want me helpless without needing to break me.
The restraints tighten.
Just a fraction. Enough to remind me they can.
Another injector hits.
This one burns.
The tremor becomes a shudder, running up my arms into my shoulders, down my spine. My muscles fight each other, conflicting signals turning strength into chaos.
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw aches.
Still no sound.
A second screen lights up beside the first. This one shows my brain activity, glowing patterns mapping stress, rage, restraint.
“Emotional escalation detected,” the voice observes. “Absence of vocalisation noted. Interesting.”
I don’t look at the screen.
I close my eyes.
I go somewhere else.
I count. Not numbers. Breaths. Heartbeats. The spaces between pulses. I break my body down into systems, isolate the ones misfiring, wall them off.
They want a spectacle.
I give them nothing.
The tremor stabilises – not gone, but predictable. I adapt to it, letting it exist without fighting every movement. Fighting wastes energy.
The voice pauses.
They don’t like adaptation.
“Introduce restraint variation,” it says.
The cuffs shift.
Not loosening. Never that.
They rotate.
My shoulders scream as the angle changes, muscles stretched into new, unfamiliar alignments. Pain flares, bright and sharp, stealing breath despite my control.
This time my throat tightens hard enough that a sound almost escapes.
Almost.
I swallow it.
Sweat beads at my temples, trickling down my neck. My vision blurs for a moment, then clears as adrenaline compensates.
The voice is closer now. I can feel presence behind me, though I still can’t see whoever’s speaking.
“You are accustomed to using force,” it says. “You are accustomed to control. What happens when both are removed?”
My lips curl back from my teeth.
What happens is this: I learn.
The restraints creak softly as I shift my weight down, not up. I stop fighting the suspension and let my body hang more fully, redistributing strain away from my shoulders, into my core, my legs.
It hurts differently.
But it hurts better.
The tremor lessens as my arms take less active load.
The screens flicker as my metrics change.
There’s a pause.
I imagine the person behind the glass frowning.
“Subject exhibits compensatory adaptation,” the voice says. Not pleased.
Good.
Another injector hits, this one directly into my shoulder.
Fire.
My arm jerks violently, muscles seizing. The restraint holds. Something in my shoulder pops – not dislocation, but close enough that stars burst behind my eyes.
I snarl silently, breath tearing in and out through my nose.
They’re escalating.
Fine.
I focus inward again, deeper this time. I catalogue pain the way I catalogue weapons. Sharp. Dull. Radiating. Structural. Temporary.
The important thing is this: I am still here.
Still thinking. Still choosing.
They haven’t taken that.
Yet.
The voice speaks again, and now there’s a note beneath the calm. Interest sharpened into intent.
“You do not vocalise,” it says. “You do not plead. You do not respond as predicted.”
I open my eyes and stare at my own reflection on the screen.
My face is a mess – sweat, strain, jaw locked so tight the muscles stand out. But my eyes are clear.
Focused.
“Introduce fine-motor denial protocol,” the voice orders.
Something clicks in the walls.
I feel it before I understand it: a spreading numbness in my fingers, creeping inward from the tips. Not full numbness, but selective. They’re cutting signal resolution, not power.
My hands feel thick. Blunt. Like gloves I can’t take off.
This is worse than the tremor.
This makes everything imprecise.
I flex experimentally.
The movement lags.
Rage surges hot and fast, slamming into the inside of my skull. This time it takes real effort to contain it.
They’ve found the nerve.
I let my head fall back against the restraint, staring up at the grey ceiling, chest heaving.
They want me to break.
They want to see the moment I become useless.
But I won’t give them that either.
I go still.
Completely still.
I stop testing. Stop reacting. Stop giving them movement to measure. My body hangs slack in the restraints, breath shallow but controlled, eyes half-lidded.
The screens spike with confusion as data flatlines.
Silence stretches.
Longer this time.
The numbness remains. The pain remains. The restraint remains.
But the interaction stops.
Finally, the voice speaks again, sharper now. “Subject?”
I don’t move.
I don’t respond.
I don’t give them rage or resistance or data.
I become dead weight.
The room hums, systems adjusting, searching for something to grab hold of.
They wanted violence.
I give them absence.
Minutes pass. Maybe more.
Eventually, I feel it – the smallest shift in pressure, the cuffs easing just enough to test whether I’ll seize the opportunity.
I don’t.
Inside, something cold and steady settles into place.
They can drug me. Restrain me. Strip away my tools.
But they still don’t know how I choose to fight.
And I don’t need my hands to learn.
I keep my eyes open, my body still, and let them sit with the problem they can’t solve yet.
Me.