Not Here for Love, Too Busy Making Money

Liana Ingleby worked out early that money is not everything and that without it a person can do nothing at all. She used what she had, her own ability and what she had learned, and took every opening that moved her up a step. At school and later in the market she was the one who saw the single opening worth taking and got to it first. Then the campus took in students on sponsorship, and the settled life she had built there stopped being settled. The people she had filed as allies of convenience, useful to her while she was useful to them, turned out to be running something among themselves. It took her a while to work out what it was. They were playing a raising game, the sort where a player takes charge of a character and brings her up, and the character being brought up was Liana herself.