Last spark from the ashes

She grabs his arm with business-like briskness, finding the catches and the circuit overrides from memory. Lucky her armor isn't too fancy and secure yet, because this way she's able to detach the gauntlet and slide it off, giving Hughes his first look at his new hand.

For the heavy gauntlet and the weight behind it - for the steel-crushing strength it still bears - the Exo hand seems oddly slender, almost skeletal in its white plating. The sleeve of his innermost bodysuit extends over the wrist, black and soft, but Blaze rolls that back a bit so he can see the joint. There's a minimum of visible moving parts: his body looks armored even beneath the armor.

"All right. Mind the shift in weight," she warns, setting the gauntlet aside. The caution is reinforced by the heavy thunk: there's quite a bit of mass layered into the armor along with fancier ways of making her punches hit harder.

Blaze turns his palm over, and then runs her fingertips lightly over his hand. And it turns out that whatever the stereotypes about robots, an Exo's sense of touch is thousands of times more sensitive than a human's. Hughes will be able to feel his own fingerprints, the tiny scars on his skin, the precise friction and flex as human skin brushes against its machine counterpart.