Page 43 of Property of Scar

His shoulders turn first. Not naturally, not the way a person turns when they hear somebody behind them. The body rotates toward us while his head stays facing the wall, frozen there at an angle no living thing should hold that long without blinking.

Then, slowly… the neck follows.

The sound it makes is soft, wet, a faint dragging series of clicks like the bones are settling into place one at a time beneath stretched skin.

My stomach twists because the movement is too smooth.

Too controlled.

Like something studied how humans move and got close enough to imitate it, but missed one tiny important piece somewhere along the line.

It doesn’t feel like a man turning around.

It feels like a body being repositioned.

And when his face finally lines up with the rest of him, his eyes find us immediately.

Blank.

Unblinking.

It feels like he was already looking at us long before he turned around.

The proportions are right. The features sit where they should. The skin holds the correct color, the correct tension, and the right level of slack across the jaw.

But it’s all surface.

There’s no depth to it.

No sense of anything sitting behind the eyes, no pressure of awareness looking out through them, just a flat, empty stillness that doesn’t shift when it meets mine.

My body reacts, something tightening low and instinctive, a warning that lands deeper than thought.

It’s close enough to pass.

Until it isn’t.

The mouth moves next, not quickly, not sharply, but with the same careful precision as everything else, lips pulling back, shaping into something that resembles a smile, something that hits every mark it’s supposed to hit and still manages to miss the only one that matters.

At first, it almost passes.

A twitch at the corners, the faint lift across the cheeks, the beginning of an expression a human face knows how to make without thinking.

But it keeps going.

The corners of his mouth pull wider, stretching past where they should naturally stop, skin tightening as the movement continues without resistance, without the small checks and limits that would normally cut it off. The line of his lips thins, then thins further, the shape distorting as it forces itself broader, higher, until it begins to look less like a smile and more like something pulled into place.

There’s a point where a person would feel it, where the muscle would strain, where instinct would interrupt.

This doesn’t.

It just… holds.

Too wide.

Too even.

Teeth show now, more than they should, gums pulled taut in a way that exposes more of the mouth than any expression ever would, the whole thing balanced on the edge of something that almost reads as human until you look at it for more than a second.