Finn found himself staring at Florence’s hands. To Finn they were a picture in shape and movement, and he couldn’t suppress the feeling that Florence’s hands gave away her inner-most self; but only if she wanted them to. She was too careful to let her guard down, but in the quiet details it seemed to Finn that her hands told stories even when her mouth didn’t. Long fingers, fine-boned, with a scholar’s precision and a mechanic’s practical bluntness. Her nails were short, not bitten, just trimmed to be useful. Not painted either, unless you counted the faint smudges of graphite, machine grease, or whatever mineral trace she’d last been excavating from some long-dead artefact. The skin along her knuckles bore the pale ghosts of past abrasions, old nicks healed without complaint, the kind that came from prying open stubborn access panels or handling ancient devices that didn’t want to be handled.

She wore no jewellery, nor rings. No smartbands, nothing to catch or snag, nothing to break circuit. The veins on the back of her hands lay like lightly sketched cartography: rivers across paper, a map drawn on purpose. When she moved them, tapping out calculations, reconfiguring a bind-latch, lifting a cup of bitter coffee. They were unhurried, precise, but never too delicate. There was strength in those hands, the kind born of doing rather than displaying. Finn could imagine her dismantling a time-sealed, machine-module-device-thingy with only a burnt-out multitool and a half-smile. Her hands never trembled, even when the rest of the universe did.

If you ever needed to understand Florence, the real Florence, you only had to watch her hands: never idle, never unsure, always two steps ahead of whatever the rest of her chose to say aloud. Finn was more than a little in love with the expressive persona behind those wonderful hands.