"Well, we're off," Ornina said, tucking the flat angel holding box solidly under her arm as she made yet another adjustment to her floppy-brimmed hat. A horrendous hat, to Chandris's way of thinking, but Ornina obviously liked it. "We should be back within four hours at the latest."

"Sooner than that if the couplers at Glazrene's are down to their usual standard of quality," Hanan added, twirling his credit-line card around in his fingers with obviously strained patience as he waited for his sister to finish her primping. "Still, hope springs eternal, or some such thing."

Chandris nodded silently, her eyes on the spinning card. It was a strangely fascinating routine, very much like the palm-and-switch techniques of the three card monte scorers she'd known in the Barrio.

Someday she would have to ask Hanan where he'd learned how to do that.

"Well, come on, Hanan," Ornina said briskly. "Let's get this show on the road. Good-bye, Chandris; we'll see you later. Enjoy the silence."

They headed outside and down the outer stairway. Chandris stood there, listening... and a minute later heard the sound of the TransTruck driving off down the street.

And she was alone. Alone with the Gazelle. Alone with several million ruya worth of equipment.

Alone with the angel.

For several minutes she just wandered the aft part of the ship, listening as her footsteps punctuated the now familiar sounds of the Gazelle at rest. But only the quieter sounds: engines and pumps, generators and fans. There was none of the music Ornina always played while she worked; none of Hanan's alleged singing and distinctive, slightly clumping walk.

She was alone. In the silence.

With the angel.

The samovar in the galley was, as usual, simmering gently with one of Ornina's long repertoire of tea blends. Peppermint, this one, a drink Chandris had developed a particular taste for over the past four weeks. She helped herself to a cup, throwing in an extra stick of peppermint, and carried it carefully up to the control cabin. There, amid the quietly glowing displays and flickering status boards, she pulled the restraint straps away from her chair and sat down.

She hadn't promised them anything. Not a single solitary nurking thing. For that matter, they'd never promised her anything, either. Not even full employment. As far as anyone had said, she was still here only on a temporary basis.

Not that she really wanted the job, of course. It wasn't her kind of life. Too dull, too honest.

Too permanent.

Four weeks. She'd been with the Gazelle for four weeks now. Probably the longest she'd stayed in one place for years. Certainly longer than she and Trilling had ever stayed anywhere while they'd been together.

Trilling.

She sipped at her tea, but the peppermint had gone flat in her mouth. No, she couldn't stay here, not even if she wanted to. Right now, somewhere out there, Trilling was looking for her. The longer she stayed in one place, the sooner he'd find her.

She didn't owe the Daviees anything. Not a single solitary nurking thing. The four weeks of room and board she'd more than paid for with all the work she'd done aboard the ship. And it would be doing them a favor, really: a painful but solid lesson in how the real world operated.

Painful, maybe, for everyone. But that was life, wasn't it?

There were only a few places the angel could be hidden, she knew, assuming that the Daviees had wanted her to be near it for as long as possible during that first trip out to Angelmass. The obvious place to start was her cabin; and it was barely two minutes' work to discover that the Daviees were as unsubtle in this as they were in everything else. The flat angel holding box was underneath the head of her bed, fastened snugly against the mattress by a wire mesh frame.

It took another minute to cut the mesh away, and three more to find an innocuous grocery bag in the galley to carry the box in. Then, changing back to the white makeshift dress she'd worn when she first arrived on Seraph, she left the ship.

For the last time.

Pedestrian traffic was light as she walked past the service yards and the rows of dusty ships behind their wire fences. That was normal, she knew—huntership crewers, when they left their yards at all, were usually in too big a hurry to walk anywhere that a line car or TransTruck would take them. It made Chandris more than a little conspicuous, but there wasn't much she could do about it.

Witnesses' memories were vague; line car records weren't.

Still, she breathed a sigh of relief when she finally cleared the edge of the yards and headed into Shikari City proper. It was still a good couple of kilometers to the Gabriel receiving office, but she was young and healthy and the exercise would do her good.

Besides which, she still had to figure out what the hell she was going to do once she got there.

It wasn't a trivial problem. She'd gone with Hanan on the last angel dropoff and knew the usual routine. But the usual routine wasn't going to do her a lot of good. Assuming that the Daviees hadn't been lying when they said angels couldn't be traded for cash—and she'd seen no evidence that they had lied about that—she was going to have to somehow get the angel dumped into a credit line that she could then convert to cash. That wasn't particularly difficult, but in the past she'd always had more prep time to work with. Now, she was going to have to make a chop and hop of it.

She felt her lip twist, a stab of self-recrimination twisting her stomach. No, she'd had the time, all right. Four weeks' worth of it. She just hadn't used it.

Which just made it that much clearer how much she needed to get away from this place. Sitting around being comfortable instead of watching for opportunities was a sure way to lose that hard edge.

And if there was one thing for sure, it was that Trilling hadn't lost his hard edge.

She forced her mind off depressing thoughts like Trilling and back to the problem at hand. What she really needed was a contact, someone here on Seraph who could help her get off the planet once she got the angel sold. Hopefully for a price she could afford; it was for sure she wasn't going to have time to charm or score anyone into doing it for free. No one but soft-touches like the Daviees did anything for free, at least not on purpose. But making contact with Seraph's criminal underground would take time.

And half a block later, like a gift from the god of thieves, the opportunity dropped straight into her lap.

It was a score in progress; the body language of the two participants showed that as clearly as if there'd been a sign hanging over them. One, dressed in shabby lower-class clothing, held something cupped in his hand as the other, upper-middle-class at the least, spoke into a phone. His face was still undecided, but Chandris could see from the way he stared into the other's cupped hand that he was already more than halfway gone. A little extra nudge on her part, and she would have her contact.

The targ hung up as she approached, slipping the phone back inside his coat with obvious uncertainty. The scorer said something Chandris didn't catch, pushing his cupped hand toward the other with just the right blend of reluctance and resolve. "But I really don't know if I should," the targ said, reaching a hesitant finger into the cupped hand.

"Look, like I told you before—" The scorer broke off, startled, as Chandris stepped up to them.

"Hey, go away," he growled, snatching his hand back from her. "This is a private discussion."

But Chandris had already seen the glint of metal. "What have you got there, coins?" she asked, ignoring the order. "Let me see, huh?"

"I said go away—"

"Oh, let her see them," the targ interrupted. "He found them right over there in an envelope," he continued as the scorer reluctantly opened his hand again. "With a phone number on it. I just called, and the woman there said she'd lost them. She'll pay five hundred ruya to get them back."