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.