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still, it would be a good habit to get into, keeping one on. She removed the right spetsdod, scrubbed and dried that hand, then reset the plastic flesh before tending to the left hand. There was no one to see, but Dirisha felt virtuous for her action.
    After the warm air jets dried her, she finished her toilet and headed for the bed.
    In three minutes, Dirisha was asleep.
    She was being chased by a giant beast, some kind of reptile; it screamed at her, its voice a high whine—
    Dirisha rolled from the bed, onto the floor, as she awoke. The dream-reptile's screech was that of the squeal she'd hung on her door: somebody was coming in.
    The double cough of a pair of spetsdods was almost drowned by the screaming alarm, and the small vibrations of the darts smacking into her bed could hardly be felt, as Dirisha kept rolling. The angle was bad, but she managed to swing her left arm around and point it in the general direction of the open door. It was too dark to see anyone, but Dirisha fired rapidly, four shots, and fanned her arm to spread the pattern. She heard the first two darts thunk into the wall to the left of the door—too high, dammit!—and knew the third and fourth shots had gone through the portal. Unless the attacker was a giant, those final two darts would have gone over his head. She dropped her arm slightly, to fire again, but the quick bite of a dart stung her on the inner thigh, just above her left knee.
    Damn! It was dark, she couldn't see, so therefore it was likely her attacker couldn't see either, he would be shooting at the sound of her weapon. She could blast him and say he'd missed, nobody would know the truth...
    She shook her head. She would know.
    She sighed. "Okay, Deuce, you got me. Tell Pen to add points to your tally and take some away from mine."
    The attacker must have found the squeal, for the racket died suddenly. In the dense quiet which followed, he spoke.
    "If you had been a hair better with your spetsdod, you would have tagged me; nobody else has ever gotten off four shots on the first night. One point, no more." The voice belonged to Pen. "You can sleep easy, now; I won't be back tonight."
    Suddenly, he was gone; Dirisha felt him leave. She got up from the floor and went to slide the door shut. Even so, she kept her right spetsdod at the ready; despite his promise, Dirisha also reset the squeal when she closed the door. Whatever else this place was going to be, she didn't think it would be dull.

CHAPTER FIVE
    IN THE MORNING, they gave Dirisha a disease.
    A medic in white orthoskins led the tall black woman to a form-chair in a private booth. "Lean back," he said, "I need to get at your right carotid. You'll feel a cold rush, but otherwise nothing. Takes about fifteen minutes for the program to run its course."
    Dirisha nodded. She knew about viral-inject learning, though she hadn't been able to afford it until years after it would have been really useful. On her homeworld, a planet her mother had named her for, Dirisha's first education had been real-time at Sawa Mji Primary. Flat Town's basic was limited, and as much as the daughter of a good-time woman could expect, for free. At fifteen, Dirisha had found a compliant ship's officer; for use of her body, he had traded her a secondary ed disk he'd stolen from his freighter, the Go Placid. Real-time, that disk was, and hard. Even with his help, it had taken two years to assimilate. After that, she had discovered the Arts, and so much of them was muscle memory that inject or hypnosia was of little use.
    You couldn't learn to punch from a tape, you had to do it—The pop of compressed gas startled Dirisha from her memories. In this case, the viral learning could be useful. She was a new student, there was a lot she needed to know, if she were to mesh with the classes already in progress. It wouldn't help her shoot straighter or walk the pattern, but it could fill in the academic gaps.
    The medic looked at his thumbnail chronometer. "See you