(no subject)

The grating of the floor is cold under her cheek. River's eyes are closed, lashes dark against her wan face.

She's dreaming.

The outdoor classroom, again. White tented roof, floor and desks of pale wood. The public gardens surrounding the tent are green and lush; couples walk the paths, murmuring together. Water ripples sofly over lilypads in the nearby pond, and everything is drenched in light.

It should be peaceful.

"Why don't we all lie down?" suggests the smiling teacher. "A little peace and quiet will make everything better."

"No," River's younger self is protesting. "No."

"River?"

The other students are obediently curling up, closing their eyes, relaxing into the wooden floor.

"No!"

The teacher is lying down, too, still smiling, showing them how to behave. But her voice is sharp. "River, do as you're told."

High and desperate, "No!" and the scene shifts, perspective shatters, the world is made of light and then River is barefoot on the wooden floor, standing among her younger self's sleeping classmates.

She's wearing the electrode-studded bodysuit and slit-sided tunic that were burned long ago, when she was free of the Academy and could wear her own clothes again, and a rivulet of blood trickles down her forehead from the tidy hole of their mind-probe's entrance wound.

(no subject)

The dream, again.

The classroom is empty, this time; no teacher lecturing at the front, no students kneeling at their desks. Only clean pale wood and white cloth, and the garden beyond, and everywhere sunlight.

(no subject)

Miranda looks normal, from space.

Serenity hits atmo in a flickering blaze of reentry, and passes into thick shrouding clouds. Sensors still work, of course, but only thick fog is visible through the front windows.

That, and a few smears of red paint. Everyone tries not to look at those.

Zoe frowns in some perplexity, hits a few buttons, and keeps frowning. "Every reading I'm getting says normal," she reports. "Oceans, landmasses... no tectonic instability or radiation.

"Yeah, but no power either," Wash points out.

Mal is leaning one arm on the back of Wash's chair. Captain's perogative. "Nothing at all?"

Wash starts to shake his head, and then pauses. "Wait. Something." He flicks a switch, filtering and focusing the sensors' scan. "Might be a beacon, but it's awful weak."

Mal straightens up. "Find it."


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They land in a deserted dock in a deserted city, one of a dozen they've flown over. No power in the landing receptors, no people in sight -- it's like touching down in the empty badlands of a border moon. Except that they're surrounded by gleaming buildings worthy of any Core city. Mal, Zoe, and Jayne emerge from the ship first, in full pressure suits with guns at the ready. They're on edge, prepared for almost anything.

What they get is... nothing.

Gravity, oxygen, air pressure... everything's Earth-normal, say the scanners. No detectable toxins. When Mal pulls off his helmet the other two stand wary and poised, but nothing happens. The terraforming is fine, and as for disease or poison... Everything's perfectly normal.

Except that nothing's alive but weeds.


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They make their way through the dust-scoured streets cautiously. The whole crew, now. Everyone sticks together; no need for pressure suits, not with the air fresh and clean as a Sunday morning, but somehow no one's reassured. The silence is eerie.

It's after a tunnel -- Zoe goes first, shotgun leading the way, and calls the all-clear in a soldier's low grunt -- that they find the first corpse.

The body is patchy skin stretched over bones, sun-bleached rags of clothing puddling about it. Zoe crouches. "No entry wound, fractures..." she says, as Mal trots up, waving the others to stay back.

"Poison?" he suggests.

The two trade a glance, and then Zoe rises. No answers here. Keep moving.

They turn corners, follow a stairway off the main road. The only sound is their footsteps.

"Got another one!" Jayne's peering into the dirt-fogged window of a parked hovercraft. Two withered bodies, one a young child. "They's just sittin' here." He steps back, scanning the craft and the air beyond. His voice is troubled. "Didn't crash."

They find more, and more. On corners, in vehicles, propped in chairs and curled under desks. An entire office building, hermetically sealed by automated processes when the planetary power went out -- every body in the place is preserved.

"There's no discoloration," Simon says, frowning at the room full of skinny corpses. They're all grouped around the huge front windows of an office, staring at its occupants. All except River; she's back a few yards in the middle of the street, flinching at shadows. "Nobody's doubled over or showing signs of pain..."

"There's gases that kill painless, right?" But doubt creeps into Mal's voice.

"But they didn't fall down." Inara says it, but they've all noticed. "None of them. They just..." She shakes her head. "Lay down."

"More than anything, it looks like starvation." It's a clinical puzzle, for Simon. Or he's trying to make it one, anyway. Puzzles don't creepify, as Jayne might say. They have distance.

Simon's not entirely succeeding, from the tightness in his face.

Inara muses again, "They just lay down..."

River's wail startles them all. Kaylee jumps; Simon whirls; Mal and Jayne's hands tighten on their guns before they realize what the sound is.

River crumples to her knees in the middle of the street. Her face is knotted with agony, tears tracking unnoticed down her cheeks. "Réncí de Shangdi, qĭng dài wŏ zŏu," she pleads in a broken tumble of words. "Make it stop. They're everywhere -- every city, every house, every room, they're all inside me, I can hear them all and they're saying..." Her face twists as she sobs for breath, and chokes out, "Nothing."

She spins on her heels, staring fixedly at nothing. "Get up!" she begs, half-screaming. Simon is on his knees beside her, shushing her softly, reaching for her shoulder, but she doesn't seem to notice. "Please, get them up! I can't carry it, wŏ shàng méi ĕr, méi xīn, bĭan shítou, please God make me a stone..." She breaks off on a sob.

Jayne stalks towards them, hand tight on a gun. "She's starting to damage my calm," he grits.

"Jayne--" Zoe warns.

He spins. "She's right!" The shout reverberates off empty buildings, silent streets. Dust puffs lightly over his boots. "Everybody's dead! This whole world is dead for no reason!"

"Let's get to the beacon," Wash says into the silence that follows. His voice is almost steady.

(no subject)

The ship is deserted. Ransacked, doors hanging from their hinges, bits torn from consoles, but it's old violence. No bodies.

Everything is still.

Serenity's crew picks their way through the sparse debris. Those that carry guns are holding them at the ready, but it's halfhearted now. There's nothing to kill here. Everybody's already dead.

It's a research vessel, and its tables and counters are scattered with the detritus of that work. Papers and wires, the blinking lights of sensors and the beacon they followed, a hologram disc lying crooked in its player.

River's hand settles on the disc. Turns it. It clicks into place, and the player's data-clips rise around it.

A flickering in the air, and then the hologram begins.

Screens, with still pictures of corpses. The ones from outside -- dessicated, mummified, untouched by any poison or violence. In streets, in houses, in shuttlecraft and offices. More, and more.

"These are just a few of the images we've recorded," says the doctor standing behind them. She's calm, tidy, competant, but weary horror lines her face, reddens her eyes. "And you can see it isn't... it isn't what we thought."

"There's been no war here, and no terraforming event. The environment is stable."

"It's the Pax." The words fall like stones into the silent room. "The G-32 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It's..." The researcher is tearing up, now, her voice trembling as she tries unsuccessfully for control. "Well, it works."

"It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Make a peaceful... it worked. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, stopped breeding... talking... eating... There's thirty million people here and they all just let themselves die. They didn't even kill themselves. They just..." She swallows. "Most starved. When they stopped working the power grids, there were overloads, fires -- people burned to death sitting in their chairs. Just sitting."

There's a loud bang, and everyone jumps -- but the researcher jumps, too, and gathers her focus. It's part of the hologram, part of this recording from no one knows how many years ago, and whatever it is it terrifies her.

"I have to be quick."

"There was no one working the receptors when we landed, so we hit pretty hard. We can't leave. We can't take any of the local transports, because--"

Another bang, louder.

"There are people... They're not people. About a tenth of a percent of the population had the oposite reaction to the Pax. Their aggressor response increased... beyond madness. They've become..." She's fighting back tears again, trying not to shake. "They've killed most of us. Not just killed. They've done... things..."

"Reavers," Wash whispers, as the holographic doctor falters. "They made them."

"I won't live to report this," the doctor tells her recording device. She's trying to be businesslike, and almost managing. Almost. "And we haven't got power to... People have to know." The noises from outside her ship are louder, now, and her control is fraying away to nothing.

"We meant it for the best," she pleads with no one, brokenly. "To make people safer." More banging, and inhuman snarling. "To -- God!" She whirls, fires a gun at something behind her, and raises the gun to her own temple, crying and laughing and shaking so hard the gun barrel trembles. She never gets off the shot -- a Reaver is on her, knocking the gun away, biting and tearing as she screams and they fall from the projector's view, and she's still screaming, and the mad snarling howls--

"Turn it off," Jayne rasps.

Wash twists the hologram disc to the off position with a hand that shakes almost as much as the nameless researcher's.

The abrupt silence is deafening.