River Tam

In one sense: River is curled up in her bunk's narrow bed, a tidy lump under blankets with dark hair fanning all around her head. She's sound asleep.



In another sense: River is in a maze, old-fashioned, planetside -- a hedge of high green bushes with white flowers, with a floor of incongruously dead dry grass. It crackles under her ballet slippers. The blossoming walls are too dense to see through, rearing twice as tall as River, and the corridors are green and cool and silent. It's a labyrinth.

She doesn't know her way through. But in the dream, she hasn't really stopped to notice that. She just has to keep moving, and she'll get... somewhere.

She hasn't really thought about that one, either.

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.

River's dreaming again. The same dream she has nearly every time she closes her eyes these days, in infinite variation and infinite repetition.

A roof of white canvas, over a wooden-floored classroom; there are no walls, and the public gardens surrounding the class are lush and green. Students kneel at low desks, often, before a gently smiling teacher. Not this time; this time it's empty. Just River.

Everything is white sunlight, peace, quiet. Saturated with it.

She's wearing one of the Academy uniforms. Her forehead bleeds from a long-healed wound -- a tiny dot of blood, puncture wound from one of the Academy's mind-probes.

There's a screen, at the front. The picture shifts as she focuses on it. Silent steps on the sunlight wood, nearer and nearer, and it grows as she does -- and then there's only the picture for a moment, no classroom and no sun, but only the sudden flash of almost-comprehension as the world becomes a planet viewed from space, a perfect Earth-like world spinning slowly in the black.

And then a flash that is

(rooms of dessicated corpses)

no, that is

(the planet in silent peaceful rotation around the sun)

no, that is

(men and women lying down to skeletal sleep)

and no, it's just the classroom, sunlit and beautiful and calm, but there's something underneath, something--

She's breathing faster and faster, eyes flickering here and there, to nothing and to waving fronds of bushes and to mummified corpses that aren't there when she looks back--

An animal growl and there's a Reaver next to her, hand locked around her throat and the other on her jaw, rank with sweat and blood, rage pulsing in the air and hot breath on her cheek, gashes gaping on his face, he's baring sharpened teeth to bite, taste the flesh and fear--

She's awake. Disoriented--

(Hissed words, just below hearing)

She's awake.

Her eyes narrow with focus.


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The bridge is empty. Wash is with Zoe; the ship's on autopilot. They're a few hours from Haven yet.

The bridge isn't empty any more. River is perched in the copilot's chair, feverishly tapping keys and touchscreens, searching through a maze of maps on the Cortex.

She's looking for a planet that doesn't exist.

And she's found it.


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"How can it be there's a whole planet called Miranda and none of us knowed that?" Kaylee asks.

"Because there isn't one." Mal leans against the wall, arms crossed. "It's a black-rock. Uninhabitable. Terraforming didn't hold, or some such. Few settlers died."

Simon's hand rests on River's shoulder; she's curled in the chair still, watching the screen, moving in tiny restless twitches.

"Wait a tick..." Kaylee frowns down at nothing, dredging up faint memory. "Yeah! Some years back, before the war. There was a call for workers to settle on Miranda. My daddy talked about going. I should've recalled."

Wash tilts the yoke a few degrees, and flicks a switch. They're in atmo now, working their way towards Haven and Shepherd Book. "But there's nothing about it on the Cortex," he protests. "History, Astronomy -- it's not in there."

"Half of writing history is hiding the truth." The victors write it; everyone knows what Mal thinks of that. "There's something on this rock the Alliance doesn't want known."

Inara studies the copilot's screen, where Miranda still floats in her orbit-grid. "That's right at the edge of the Burnham Quadrant, right? Furthest planet out." Mal nods. "It's not that far from here," she points out.

Wash is already shaking his head. "Whoa, no, no--"

"That's a bad notion." Zoe's voice is clipped, overlaying her husband's, as she slips past River and Simon to touch the screen.

"Honey, show them the bad."

"I got it, baby," she tells Wash. A few taps, and the view of Miranda pulls back to show a wider view of the quadrant. "This is us, see?" One finger indicates a spot in the corner. "And here's Miranda. All along here, this dead space in between --" She sketches a curve between the two points. "That's Reaver territory."

Into the utter silence, Wash says, "They just float out there, sending out raiding parties..."

"Maybe a hundred ships," adds Zoe. "And more every year. You go through that, you're signing up to be a banquet."

"I'm on board with the run-and-hide scenario," Wash states, to general expressions of silent agreement. He glances back at the monitors, and to the sloping side of the mountain rising ahead of them. On the other side is Haven, Shepherd Book's sanctuary. "And we are just about..."

He squints, as they round a spur of rock. "Wait..."