Red Jade by Henry Chang

cards to amateurs who would get caught and call attention to their operation, he’d decided to use selected Chinese people in order to impose control and improve communication. The idea of using storage locations and closed warehouses was his way of adding mobility and volume for the operators. They would fence the scam’s products through the triad’s legitimate businesses.
    Gee Sin, the senior adviser, had taken advantage of the Americans’ holiday preoccupation with gift-giving, the annual buying frenzy that overwhelmed what was originally a religious holiday. Paper Fan had quickly realized how important these several weeks were to merchants hoping to rake in sales, which, in the crazed crush of business, made them careless and blind to credit-card fraud.
    They’d focused on high-end electronics that the Red Circle could sell easily through its network of merchants, expensive items like video camcorders, digital cameras, and laptop computers. Diamond jewelry and expensive watches. They’d expected to steal tens of millions of dollars’ worth of merchan-dise over the holidays. The legitimate cardholder and the card-issuing company wouldn’t detect anything amiss until weeks after the holidays, when the monthly statements arrived in the mail. By then, Paper Fan and his operatives would be long gone, leaving only a trail of smoke and shadows.
    His thoughts changed again as he felt a slow throbbing at his left wrist. Occasionally, he’d feel sharp pain there, but this occurred mostly in cold climates like Vancouver or Toronto.
    Time to take it off, he thought.
    The psychiatric member of the rehabilitation and physical therapy team at Kowloon had suggested to him the idea of residual pain, the severed nerves remembering the moment of the chop. “It’s all in the brain,” she’d said. “You think you feel pain so you do feel pain.” Mostly it was chafing, or too much pressure at the new joint, where scar-sealed bone and muscle bumped against the silicone-padded socket of the prosthesis.
    He could remove the prosthesis to relieve the discomfort. Painkiller medication was prescribed if necessary.
    Dew keuih , fuck, he cursed quietly. He knew it wasn’t the hand. After all, it fit well and he’d trained with it, had willed it to work well. It wasn’t the hand.
    It was the attack that he remembered, hazy now but still horrific even after twenty-five years; the pain of a young man revived in the stump arm of an old man. The glint of light from his left. Raising his bow arm reflexively. It wasn’t the hand, marvelously sculpted and engineered. He’d been knocked down. When he braced to get up, he saw that he had no left hand. It was the memory.
    And he had survived the attack. The chop had been intended for his neck.
    Gee Sin detached the elastic and Velcro band that wrapped around his elbow and slipped the hand off. He imagined it as a weapon, nestled in the sling, its holster. He set it down on the black glass coffee table.
    The throbbing in the stump ebbed.

Touch
    Already five years old, the bionic hand was an ultralite model, a myoelectric prosthesis with articulate fingers, an opposable thumb, a rotating wrist. It was powered by batteries inside the fake limb. Sensors there detected when the arm muscles contracted, then converted the body’s electrical signal into electric power. This engaged the motor controlling the hand and wrist, its skeletal frame made of thermoplastics and titanium for extreme flexibility. The frame was covered by a skin of silicone that was resistant to heat and flame, and custom-colored with pigmentation to match the patient’s skin. The hand and fingers were sculpted with fingernails, knuckles, and creases. At a glance, it was indistinguishable from a real hand. The hand cost eighty thousand dollars in Hong Kong and the triad had paid without question.
    Removing it from his forearm reminded him of the rehabilitation course at the Kowloon Clinic, where he’d trained to use his new