The double didn’t increase the pressure. It didn’t need to. Hookhold was a total state.
Once the clockwork threshold of the perk engaged. The gripping force remained was locked at four hundred pounds without drawing upon the creature’s cardiovascular endurance. The double’s pulse, if it possessed one beneath its man-made skin, didn’t speed up by a single beat. It knelt on the iron mesh with the unmoving balance of a bollard on a stone pier, its eyes fixed on Len’s face with the flat, unblinking patience of a headsman waiting for a sand timer to empty.
Beneath the clamp, the articular joint padding between the radius and the scaphoid bone snapped under the turning force. Len heard the tiny, internal sound inside his own arm. A faint, wet sound like dry grass being crushed under a heavy boot heel.
The agony reached a plateau so intense that his brain ceased to register it as physical sensation. The world lost its color, bleached out into a pale, shaking wash of silver and charcoal gray. The sound of the wind through the upright hoist chimney pipe became a thin, high-pitched whistle that seemed to come from the center of his own skull.
