‘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.