Seated at the far end of the waiting lounge, half hidden behind a large decorative vase, the girl hunched a little deeper into a contour chair that felt too large for her and watched as the last group of passengers gathered their things and walked over to join the line at the check-in counter. She brushed the freshly blonded hair carefully away from her face, feeling a familiar tightness squeezing her throat. In a minute she would have to get up and join them. And if Trilling Vail was watching from hiding, like she was...

She took a deep breath, an acid tightness swirling in her stomach. It was the same feeling she always got when she was getting ready to score a track and suddenly had the impression that the targ was onto her. The horrible demand of a crucial decision: whether to keep going, and hope her twitches were wrong, or to pop the cord, lose all the prep time, and look for a targ who would more easily part with his spare cash.

Should she pop the cord on this whole crazy idea? It still wasn't too late to do that, she knew. She could get up right now and walk out of the spaceport and try to bury herself somewhere on Uhuru instead of going off to a whole new world.

Only she couldn't. Trilling had friends everywhere on Uhuru. Sooner or later, he'd catch up with her.

On Lorelei... well, at least she'd have a head start.

Maybe. Reaching into her pocket, feeling the same tingling in her fingertips that she always got when handling merchandise that had cost her blood and sweat to get hold of, she slid out the precious piece of threaded plastic. Chandris Lalasha, the name at the top said, and for probably the hundredth time she wished she had had the time and money to have a new ID made up. She hadn't used the Lalasha surname since she was thirteen, a year before she met and moved in with Trilling.

But if he got into the spaceline data listings the Chandris part would be a dead giveaway.