novelraw Chapter 213: The Load Test
Chapter 213: The Load Test
The chain lifted before Alexei’s wrists finished bleeding.
Steel links ground through the ceiling pulley, ratcheting him a handspan higher until his feet hovered just above the grated floor.
Sensors winked to life along the tendons of his forearms, each silver dime glued to places that shouldn’t have names. The harness across his chest tightened with a clean hydraulic cough. He flexed once against it, enough to feel the buckle answer back.
"Baseline complete," a voice announced over the speaker’s grain. "Commence progressive loading."
The room smelled like disinfectant hammered into metal. There were no windows. No shadows, either—just even, surgical light that refused to let anything hide... even the shadows.
A slab of weight slid along a track and bumped into his shins. Cold through the fabric. Heavy enough to make a human groan.
But Alexei didn’t say a word.
Another motor woke up. Cables at his ankles tightened until his knees locked. The chain above his wrists lifted a fraction more. The machine wanted him in the exact middle of himself.
They think you’re a lever, Psycho purred from the quiet place behind his teeth. Let them pull.
The first run began.
Numbers blinked on the wall—torque, Newtons, oxygen saturation, lactic acid.
A digital heart traced a slow, winter-steady line. The weight pressed forward. Ankles strained against the cuffs, tibias took it, quads caught it and rolled the force up and through.
A human hamstring would have screamed.
But Alexei just breathed like he was stretched out on a beach somewhere.
"Unit response minimal," someone behind the glass observed. Clips clicked. Pens moved. "Increase five percent."
The slab pressed again, now with more impatience. Hydraulic arms at either side of his thighs joined in, a cruel parody of an embrace, squeezing adductors, trying to force him to fail inward.
Is this the part where we weep? Psycho murmured, and Alexei could feel it almost cocking its head to the side.
He adjusted his hips a degree, let the load bleed through the strongest lines of architecture. The harness at his chest tried to keep him honest. He let it.
"Increase by ten."
The motors obeyed.
The slab kissed bone harder.
The cuffs at his ankles bit and found nothing to chew. Something distant in the wall thumped to life and the chain above took two more ratchet clicks, dragging his shoulders tight in their sockets.
He exhaled once through his nose. Not because of pain. Because of memory.
With winter winds of State S back in the old country had teeth.
It ate the inside of your nostrils first and only later asked for lungs.
At twelve years old, he was dropped from a truck with a name and a direction and the cold for company.
He had walked. He had run. He had slept inside a dead thing and woke with his face crusted to its ribs.
He’d learned heat wasn’t a promise; it was a trick to make you believe in something you only knew because of the cold.
But if you believed in it too much, you died.
"HR unchanged," the glass-voice recorded. "VO2 plateau. Lactate... low. Increase fifteen."
The slab pushed. The arms squeezed. The chain climbed. He let it all happen, cataloging routes for the force, measuring what the machine thought bones were worth.
When the system reached seventy percent of its projected maximum, the floor plates under his feet vibrated.
A second rig came online—two twin pistons rising at his sides, topped with padded hammers.
They struck in alternating beats, left rib, right rib, left again, a drumline engineered to bruise organs without breaking skin.
They’re flirting, Psycho crooned. Don’t be rude.
He kept his breath steady.
Not because breath mattered—the creature inside of him didn’t bargain with air—but because the men behind the glass expected something in exchange for their effort.
Respiration rate stayed a quiet twelve. The heart on the screen continued its lazy winter walk.
"Impact tolerance within predicted variance," the voice concluded. "Escalate to crush threshold."
The pistons withdrew. The slab retreated an inch and then surged, faster this time, like a tide with spite. The hydraulic arms at his thighs flexed in sympathy. Metal around him sighed, then hardened.
He relaxed deeper, past muscle, into the old place no one watched. Bones responded like good soldiers: they aligned, they shared, they endured.
In the corner, a centrifuge spun up. A tech in a hood approached with a tube rack and a needle like a small spear.
He didn’t bother to look.
They tied off a vein in the crook of his right elbow, stabbed, filled a tube, swapped, filled another, another—pale red brightening to a rich burgundy with each pull.
"Two liters is the target," someone noted, and Alexei could hear a pen scratching against paper.
They wanted to bleed him and watch him not mind.
Fine.
But he would watch, too.
The machine increased load again, trying to find the breaking point to a man who had grown up without one.
Something in the left piston shifted pitch and the blow that landed under his sixth rib came a shade off-centre.
A human liver would have protested with a tear. His body absorbed it like a thrown snowball: there, cold, gone.
More than likely healed.
The tech with the tubes worked efficiently, his eyes studiously not on the rest of him.
The rack filled.
The centrifuge hummed.
An IV bag lifted and dripped clear back into him, not to help—only to contaminate data less.
"Begin hypoxia protocol."
A mask lowered toward his face, and Alexei did not fight it.
The seal caught over his cheekbones, plasticky and snug.
The air around his mouth and nose thinned.
The numbers that the scientists were playing with wanted to see him soften.
But Alexei wasn’t a man to soften for anyone other than Sera.
He let the breath go.
He did not bother to pull in the next one.
The heart rate on the screen didn’t notice.
The little pulse-ox on his index finger tried to throw a tantrum and then lost interest.
You remember drowning on purpose, Psycho reminded, amused. That lake with the holes in it. Stupid sport for boys with fathers.