JANE’S EYES STILL stung from the antiseptic. The baths always hurt. She had refused to take antiseptic baths at first, until she’d glimpsed the cratered scars on Joanne Lessard’s shoulders. Joanne was fair-skinned and dainty, and the staph boils that had hit the Troupe had come close to killing her. Bombay Staph IIb was wicked as hell; it just laughed aloud at broad-spectrum antibiotics. Modern strains of staphylococcus were splendidly adapted for survival on the earth’s broadest, widest, richest modern environment. The world’s vast acreage of living human skin.