She took the dresses back to her borrowed room, added a third towel to her pile, and returned to the hunt. Her newly changed luck held: the very next stateroom she tried contained not only too many dresses, but too many shoes as well. Neither set was exactly her size, but close enough. Again selecting a layer-style dress, she hid it and a pair of shoes inside her stack of towels and went back to her room.

There, using her knife and the compact sewing kit she'd brought from her luggage, she set to work stripping the various layers of the dresses apart. There'd been a girl from the Barrio once who'd swiped a fancy outfit during a score and gotten cracked two days later when the original owner spotted her wearing it on the street, and Chandris had no intention of doing something that puffheaded herself. The alterations took her nearly two hours; but when she was finished she had combined parts from the three dresses to form three entirely new and—hopefully—unrecognizable ones.

Altering herself was next. First step was to get the damn blonding out of her hair, returning it to its natural shiny black. She cleaned her face and hands next, getting rid of both the cosmetic stuff and the underbase that had lightened her skin into line with the blonded hair. Redoing the makeup was easy enough—from what she'd seen, the upper-class women aboard the Xirrus used far less makeup than was common among middle-class or even Barrio women. Possibly because they didn't need to try and make themselves attractive; more likely because they could afford to go with cosmetic surgery instead. Still, as Trilling used to say, vanity had its uses, provided it was in other people.

Redoing her hair was a little harder.