Most of the women she'd seen while hunting for clothes had been pretty free with the frostsprays, fancy holdings, and jeweled clips, none of which Chandris had available even if she'd known how to fasten them in. Fortunately, she'd also spotted a few who had simply put their hair into elaborate braidings, and she'd passed close enough to one of them to get a good look at the pattern. Actually recreating it was trickier than she'd expected, but with persistence and several false starts she finally got it more or less right.

And now came the easy part. Giving herself a careful examination in the long foyer mirror, she keyed off the lights and left the stateroom. With the outer woman transformed from lower-class scorer to upper-class leech, it was time to do the same for the inner woman.

Earlier, she'd given herself a leisurely half hour to learn how to play a newly middle-class college student. Now, wandering between the various upper-class lounges, she had her new role down in half that time. Part of that was sheer necessity—she hadn't eaten since late morning, and was starting to feel the familiar pangs of hunger—but mostly it was that the mannerisms of these people were genuinely less complicated. Perhaps, she thought once, their money and power did their talking for them.

A fresh rumble ran through her stomach; but fortunately the solution was already close at hand. He was hovering not quite obviously at the edge of her vision, and had been there since the second of the lounges she had visited. Around fifty years old, he was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and jeweled neck clasp and the look of a man on the hunt.

Under other circumstances she would probably have let him make the first move. With her stomach starting to hurt, she wasn't in the mood to be patient. Drifting toward him, her eyes turned elsewhere, she shifted direction with smooth suddenness and bumped gently into him. "Oh!—excuse me," she said, looking up into his eyes. "That wasn't very graceful of me, was it?"