‘They have determined that you are heading for the dock, rather than Incer. Squads are being mobilised to this area. But if we could locate a sealed room, a chamber with metal walls . . .’
‘They’d still have a good idea that I’m in the area, and then it wouldn’t take the constables long to turn the place over. Anyway, I want to get to the dock, not hide in Neural Alley.’
‘Some kind of gauntlet or shroud, with signal-blocking capabilities.’
‘You find a shop that sells something like that, I’ll be right behind you.’
‘A better locksmith.’
‘If you know one, Paladin, shout now.’ I was at the Limb Broker’s window, suppressing an inner shudder as I contemplated the wares and services on display. It had been one thing to share a giggle of horror with my sister, neither of us thinking we’d ever have cause to enter the Limb Broker.
But here I was, a prospective customer.
There were two kinds of limb in the window. In bubbling green tubes were living limbs and appendages, kept alive by artificial means. These had been surgically removed from donors, either sold to the shop or pawned in exchange for a loan. Even through the green glass it was clear that all varieties of age, skin tone and size were catered for. The other kinds of limb were mechanical, supported on glass stands or velvet plinths, and some of them made to show off their range of function, so that a disembodied hand opened and closed in slow motion. Some of the hands were very lifelike, and some were about as crudely functional as Paladin’s claw-hands.
‘I have some news . . .’ Paladin began. ‘It is not welcome news. Do you wish to hear it?’
‘Tell me.’
‘The squawks continue. But I have heard mention of some critical information being conveyed to the authorities just before the source of that information passed away. I am very sorry, Arafura. But I cannot avoid drawing the obvious inference.’
Nor could I, but thinking it and putting it out there in words were two different things. It felt as if there were a door still slightly open, and I wasn’t going to be the one to slam it shut by admitting what I already knew deep down.
Instead, I took my feelings and hammered them into something hard and sharp and definite.
‘Then there’s even less reason to go home.’
‘If you are minded to go through with this,’ Paladin said after a moment, like he was worried for me, ‘then the locksmith was correct. You do not need to consider more than the removal of your hand.’
But my eye had been drawn to a mechanical hand and forearm on one of the velvet plinths. It was beautiful, with a slender design and an elegance to the articulations around the finger joints and wrist. The limb was fashioned from a silvery alloy, intertwined with jade inlay, and there were fretted windows in the wrist and forearm to show the complex, glittering mechanisms inside.
I pushed open the door. My body screamed at me to turn around, to surrender to the constables, to go back and lay a kiss on Father’s cheek, anything but what I was about to contemplate.
The shop had a central counter, build around a display cabinet full of more bubbling tubes and slowly opening and closing hands. It was all very clean and calm, like the lobby of a bank, with seats around the walls where people could wait. No one was waiting now, but even as I walked in a man came out of a back room with a bandaged sleeve, and what looked like a new living hand grafted onto his forearm. He stared down at it, fascinated, as he made his own fingers curl and elongate.
‘I want you to cut this off,’ I told the gowned woman behind the counter, holding up my hand. ‘I know you can do that quickly. But I want it done quicker.’
She gave me a sympathetic look. ‘I’m sorry, dear, but you can’t just stroll in and decide . . .’
‘A ten-bar quoin says I can.’ I jammed it down on the counter. ‘That hand and arm in the window – the one with the twenty-mark price tag. That’s what I want put on. Let’s say – forty bars for the whole job, fifty if you do it inside the next ten minutes.’
The woman glanced over me at the robot, as if there were some test she was about to fail. But Paladin said nothing.
‘You don’t need that pretty one, dear. If you just want that bracelet off, you don’t even need a mechanical one. We can do it quick and clean, preserve the nerve endings, get a clean reattachment . . . putting it back on’ll take longer, of course, but you’ll get to keep your own, and that’s what most folk would want . . .’
‘I’m not most folk. Get the bracelet off me, and cut where you need to fix that metal one on. The one with the green inlay.’
‘You’re sure about this, dear?’ The woman was fetching keys. She went to the front of the shop, opened the glass panel at the back of the window display, fished out the arm I had selected. She pushed back my sleeve and offered it up as a comparison. ‘It’s a good match,’ she said. ‘Lucky for you it wasn’t the right arm.’
‘Yes, I’m all luck, me. Tell me what’s involved.’
She showed me the scooped-in end of the false arm. It was a concave surface, finely perforated. ‘This fixes itself onto you. Takes a few days to complete the bond, and it’ll hurt some while it’s doing it. Then it couples itself onto your nervous system. That won’t be the nicest, either. Once it’s done, though, you’ll have full use of the hand.’ She ran an approving finger over the jade inlay. ‘Very good work, this. Eleventh Occupation. They knew a thing or two about prosthetic surgery, in the Empire of the Ever Breaking Wave. Durable, too. This arm’s been on a few bodies in its time.’
‘You can skip the potted history. I want it. Do it now.’
‘You said fifty marks.’ A shrewd look came over the woman. ‘Anyone in that much of a hurry can probably go up a little more. Shall we say seventy?’
‘Sixty, or I’m walking out of here.’
The woman appraised me. There was a grudging respect in her eyes. ‘Sixty it is. But we haven’t discussed what you want doing with the hand, once it’s off.’
‘I don’t care about it. Put it in your shop window, for all I care. But I want the bracelet.’
‘If you’re decided.’
‘I am.’
‘Then you’d best come with me.’
I looked back at Paladin. ‘I’ll be all right. This is nothing.’
The woman showed me into a windowless room with a heavy green chair fixed to the floor. She made me sit in the chair, her eyes lingering over my clothes and feet, but obviously deciding for herself that my money was what mattered, not the state of my deportment.
‘No going back,’ she said, making the chair tilt backward.
‘I wouldn’t want to. Get this over with.’
Instead of armrests, the chair had two cylindrical green tubes, each thick and long enough to take an arm up to the elbow. I rested my right arm on the padded top of the rightmost tube, and inserted my left arm into the open end of the other. There was a seal around the end, like an iris, and it tightened itself automatically.
‘Some folks prefer to watch,’ the woman said. ‘Others don’t.’
‘Will it hurt?’
‘No. So I’m told.’ The woman stood behind me, working a control panel set into the back of the chair. ‘But you’ll sure as anything know something’s happening. You ready?’
‘Do it.’
I felt two sharp spikes of cold, and then my arm became a numb weight hanging off my elbow. Something whirred inside the green cylinder, and I felt distant cold scratches, like icy fingernails, circumscribing my arm about halfway between the wrist and the elbow. Then a sequence of quick snipping sensations, what the roots of a plant must feel as its upper parts are pruned back, and then a grinding buzz and a vibration that reached me all the way through the seal and back to my elbow.
The woman bent around from her control panel. ‘How’s that working out for you?’
‘There’s no
pain.’
‘You’re nearly done. It’ll be very clean, and the way the nerve endings are capped off, there shouldn’t be too much postoperative discomfort. They knew what they were doing, when they made these machines.’
‘What about the false arm?’
‘First things first.’ She came around to my left and opened a hinged plate at the other end of the tube. She reached into it like someone collecting mail, and drew out a perfectly intact hand, wrist, bracelet and half a forearm. The cut was bloodless, like a slice through a plastic anatomy model.
I suppose I ought to have been distressed, but for the moment I couldn’t relate that hand to any part of me.
‘It’s a good limb,’ she said, weighing it in her hands. ‘Could’ve got a fair price for it, too, if it wasn’t for that lightvine crawling through it. We’ll flush it out, but it’ll still need to be mentioned on the warranty. Folks are particular, see. You didn’t pick up that habit on Mazarile, did you?’
‘Habit?’ I asked, still with my upper arm stuck in the tube.
‘That’s what it tends to become, you don’t get it flushed out sooner or later. But it’s your choice – like this.’
She removed the bracelet, sliding it back along the arm, forcing it hard over the last bit, then lowered the entire severed limb into a green receptacle, similar to the flasks in the window.
Then she slid the false hand in through the end of the tube, before closing the hinged plate.
Somewhere between elbow and wrist – except there was no wrist – I felt a cold contact. I flinched, but only once.
‘Arm’s sucking itself on. It’ll hold itself pretty good until the connections have grown across the gap, but don’t go whacking anything for a few days.’
‘I wasn’t planning to.’
The seal released. I took that as a cue to withdraw my arm, taking in the point where it seemed to vanish into the jewelled hem of a silver and green gauntlet. It didn’t feel part of me yet. But neither did it feel like some grafted monstrosity. I stared, instead, with a quiet bewildered fascination, like a child seeing its fingers for the first time. I tried to make the hand close itself, but it stayed stiff and unresponsive, like it was made from a single piece of metal.
‘Like I said.’ The woman leaned in. ‘Too late for second thoughts.’
‘I’m not having any. You say it will bed itself in on its own?’
‘The more you try to use it, the quicker it’ll pick up the nerve impulses and start learning from them. After that, it’ll go pretty smoothly. Some itchiness, some pins and needles, that’s normal. But keep it dry and watch out for fungal infections under the sleeve. Any problems, you know where to find us.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to be an issue,’ I said.
Wobbly on my legs – from shock, more than anything else – I took the bracelet in my right hand and walked back into the main part of the shop. Paladin was still waiting there. I wasn’t sorry that he didn’t have a face, or any other means of registering distaste or disgust or astonishment.
‘We have to destroy this,’ I said, holding up the bracelet. ‘Leaving it here’s too risky, if the constables get a good description of me.’
‘We may not have much time,’ Paladin said. ‘And there may be a better solution.’
I stroked my alloy hand with the other, struck by the false arm’s supremely elegant design and manufacture, the product of a better, more refined time than our own. It would be strong as well, I decided. Nothing frail could have endured two Occupations, and still be useful.
‘What’s your suggestion?’
‘It would be better to move the bracelet elsewhere than destroy it. I could do so, but I would not be able to move as quickly as a person, and I would also much rather remain at your side. Are you strong enough to walk?’
‘Yes, I’m all right.’
‘Then we will continue.’ Paladin shot out a claw. ‘Give me a low denomination quoin. The least valuable you have.’
‘You should rest,’ the Limb Broker said. ‘Rushing out straight after a procedure like that . . . you’ll do yourself an injury.’
I cradled the quoin bag in my stiff arm and used my good hand to dig out a one-bar quoin, the last I had. I gave it to Paladin, and slipped the bracelet into the robot’s other claw.
In Neural Alley we found a girl who was willing to run with the bracelet in return for the quoin. She was about my height and build, although that was the extent of the similarities.
‘You won’t get in any trouble,’ I told her. ‘The constables will be coming for me, not you, and it’s not the bracelet they’re after. Throw it away if they get close.’
‘Which way would you like me to go?’
‘Back to the Dragon Gate. If you get that far, hop on a tram towards Incer Station. Ride it as far as you can. Watch out for the constables, and a thin man in a tall hat, with a scar down his face.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a constable.’
‘He isn’t. But you’ll be faster, I know.’ I gave her an encouraging pat from my good hand, keeping the alloy one tucked close to me for the moment.
‘You’re a strange one,’ the girl said. ‘Wouldn’t hurt to know your name, either.’
‘Fura Ness,’ I said.
She was smart, that cove, and she didn’t take the easy way back to the Dragon Gate. There were a hundred little side-alleys branching off the main one, and they all led to a tight, festering warren of ginnels and squeezeways, things you could hardly call an alley, let alone a street, but it was all part of Neural Alley and I guessed that she knew it better than most. I watched her vanish out of sight, the bracelet dipped into a pocket.
‘Maybe it stopped working,’ I said.
‘No,’ Paladin said. ‘The homing trace was still active. And you are still very much at risk of recapture. We should make haste for the station, before the constables throw a noose over this whole area. Do you still have funds?’
I rattled the bag. ‘Lighter than when we started. But we’ll manage.’
Paladin and I set off down the winding course of Neural Alley, trying not to walk any faster than the other customers. I felt shivery, my legs wobbling under me, and knew that the Limb Broker had been right when she said I ought to rest. But I had business to be about, and now I wanted to make it look as if that false arm had been a part of me for years. I tried to let it hang down naturally, swinging with each stride, squaring my shoulders and lifting my chin, as if I owned the place. Never seen a girl with no shoes on, have you? Get your lamps off me, cove, or I’ll put this fist where the photons don’t reach.
‘I must confess,’ Paladin said, ‘that I did not think you had the fortitude.’
‘It was what needed to be done. I’m sorry if it turned you all knotty, but I’ve got the spur in me now.’ Then I grinned back at him. ‘Chaff, Paladin, but I can hardly help myself sounding like one of them. Maybe it’s for the best. I’ve got to sound as if I’ve already crewed, haven’t I?’
‘You have.’
‘Just once, and it wasn’t exactly a righteous end to it all. I don’t know how well I’ll be able to bluff them if they start digging in with questions about other ships, other captains.’
‘One look at you, they might decide not to bother with questions.’
‘You think I look fierce?’
‘Unquestionably.’
‘Good.’ I smiled to myself, and tried to send a clench signal to my new fingers. ‘If this is what it takes, Paladin.’
‘I will say this,’ the robot answered. ‘In so far as a machine with my cognitive ceiling is capable of experiencing anything you might describe as admiration . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘Perhaps that state of mind is not too far from my present opinion of you. Your sister would have been proud.’
‘Will be proud, Paladin. Will
be.’
‘I misspoke.’
Neural Alley was a hangover headache of warrens and short-cuts, but it was walled-in at its extremities and the only easy points of entry were the Dragon and Cat Gates, and we were nearly at the latter. From the Cat Gate – the most southerly and easterly end of the alley – it was only a short walk to Hadramaw Station. There’d been no sign of constables or Vidin Quindar, and I was starting to think that perhaps, just perhaps, we’d been quick and clever enough with the bracelet. But then Paladin and I rounded the last corner before the Cat Gate and there they were, the constables with their flashing blue epaulettes, maybe six of them, and Quindar bringing up the rear.
I started. My instinct was to turn back, to freeze, to dive into the sanctuary of a shop or boutique.
But they hadn’t seen me yet.
‘Continue,’ Paladin said.
So I continued. I didn’t look them in the eye, and the direction of their gaze passed over me, not through me. They were sweeping their attention further up Neural Alley, back in the direction of the Dragon Gate.
‘Pull back a little,’ I said. ‘Let’s not look like we belong together. We’ll join up after the Cat Gate.’
Even Vidin Quindar hadn’t spotted me. I could tell from the way he was standing, using the steps outside a shop to raise himself above the heads of the passers-by, levelling a hand under the brim of his hat as his weaselly eyes swept the distance. I kept walking, even though each step brought me closer to the cove I most wanted to avoid. Clearly Quindar and the constables were concerned that I might use Cat Gate, but they’d no idea I was already so close to it.
Quindar was three shops away on my right, his jaw lolling open in a grin of idiot expectation, but his eyes were flinty. Two more constables came in through Cat Gate. Quindar nodded to them, moved his gob, and the constables broke into a jog, sweeping through people and passing me on my left. I raised my left arm, hoping its presence would cause Quindar to subconsciously drop me from any further consideration. There’d be lots of things he was keeping his eye out for, but a girl with a tin hand wouldn’t be one of them.
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