The first thing she hears is the quiet. She’s lying there, eyes closed, and it’s silent. For the first time in what feels like forever, there are no other voices, no other shouts. And then, as she adjusts and gets used to the quiet, a small cry whispers on the wind. Whispering her name.

“River.”

She opens her eyes and finds herself nowhere. There’s a slab she’s lying on, but as soon as she stands up it vanishes. As far as the eye can see, it’s light. Bright, but not blinding. Just everywhere. Until she notices the mansion in the distance. As she peers at it, eyes squinting, she realises she knows the building.

She doesn’t run toward it. It doesn’t feel like home, no matter how much it resembles her parents’ house on Osiris. But as River moves closer and closer to the Tam manse, it appears to shrink. By the time River gets to it, it’s the size of a dollhouse. Intrigued, River listens, and sure enough, she can hear her name being called again.

“River, the shuttle is leaving in ten minutes!”

River recognises the voice as her mother’s. She peers through a tiny window in the house and sees her younger self packing. This is the day, River realises. This is the day she left for the Academy.

Suddenly, the house is now a transport platform, her parents standing there, Simon wishing her goodbye.

“I’m going to miss you,” she had told him.

“I’m gonna miss you too. Now, scram, dummy.”

And then she was on the transport. Off into adventure. She was so excited at that moment, almost giddy from the top of her head to the tip of her toes.

The transport leaves the platform, chugging across the white void, and River follows it. It arrives at its destination and River leaves the transport. She watches as her younger self, case in hand, walks toward the imposing school, but sees another girl picking flowers in a field. River, ever friendly, watches her younger self stop and say hello to the stranger — only for the stranger to turn around, clearly dead, clearly lobotomised.

Then River looks down and the building is gone. It’s now the inside, and she’s staring into her own dead eyes. Being picked apart and monitored by doctors, all twisting her brain and her thoughts the way they want them. She watches with detached curiosity, until something behind her in the white void gets her attention. She turns and looks outward. She sees two apertures in the white, filled with black, and River knows.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“Does that seem right to you?” the black asks back.

Then she’s surrounded by the dead, all nipping at her heels, trying to grab her. She doesn’t try to stop them. Suddenly she feels tired and weary. But it doesn’t stop her from reaching out to Simon’s hand when he appears before her, same as the day she escaped. No — not the day she escaped.

The day he saved her.

He watches as her past self reaches the platform and Simon raises it, himself and her into deliverance. But there’s something about the dead, calling her back. She screams, reaches for them and then—

River wakes up screaming. In an instant, Simon is at her side, but she’s still half‑unconscious, murmuring quietly. He feels the presence behind him before he sees anything, and he’s out for the count before he can blink.

From outside the infirmary, horror on her face, fear in her eyes, Kaylee watches Jubal Early strike Simon with a sickening thud and watches the doctor hit the deck with a crack. A tear falls down Kaylee’s cheek.

In their bunk, Inara asks Mal if he’s okay as she nurses the baby. He tells her not to worry.

“What if that’s not what I want?” she smiles at him. He asks her, therefore, what she wants.

“You,” she says, without any hesitation. “All of you. We got two more mouths with Jayne and that girl. Plus Emma here seems to be a bottomless pit. I’m hungry, Mal. So are you. You don’t have to be Captain Reynolds with me. I don’t want you to be. You can tell me if you think we’re in trouble.”

He smiles at her. “I got emergency rations stashed in your old shuttle. Time comes we need to, we can dip into those.”

“Mal, everybody’s running on fumes. The time has come.”

He looks at her and silently agrees.

Not long after, Mal is going through crates in Inara’s shuttle. He finds the ones he’s looking for and, with a smile and a grunt, pulls them to one side. And then he hears a gun click behind him. And a voice, one he recognises immediately.

“Malcolm Reynolds. You put me in space. I’ll have to tell you how that was for me.”

Before Mal can react, Early hits him with the butt of his gun. He’s not taking chances this time.

In the kitchen, Bea is still quiet. She doesn’t know what to do next. Jayne is fiddling about on the counter.

“Lots of time, money and lives to get me here. For nothing. Shouldn’t believed the legends,” she complains aloud.

“Don’t underestimate him,” Jayne tells her. “I seen many make that mistake. Don’t usually end well. Mal don’t mind putting a person in the ground.”

“What the Hell am I supposed to do now?” Bea yells at him, aiming for the question to be rhetorical, but Jayne answers her anyway.

“Well, the poor bastard’s got principles. I don’t know, prey on those you maybe got a shot. Plus, also you got me on your side. I’m sure you met smarter but I know you never met no one can shoot like me. That ain’t nothing.”

When he doesn’t get a response, he realises Bea is too busy grieving, and he offers his sympathies on her crew.

“Seemed like nice folk.”

“Thanks,” Bea says, but she doesn’t look up at him.

He leaves her to her feelings and heads toward his bunk, complaining to himself that he doesn’t know how to start a conversation with her. As he heads down the ladder, he closes the bunk behind him with a slam.

As he waits, Early comes out of hiding. He goes to check Jayne’s bunk is locked, but is startled by Bea calling him over from the kitchen.

“You want some tea? I made some.”

Early, unsure who this person is, tells Bea no. Then she introduces herself, and he surprises himself by calling himself “Jubal.”

“What’s it you do here?” she asks him, and Early realises she doesn’t know who he is.

“What’s it I do?”

“Your job. Do you have a job?”

He considers her question thoughtfully and then finally answers her.

“I do. Though I guess you could say it is also a passion.”

“So what is it?” Bea asks.

“I’ll show you,” Early tells her…

Less than twenty minutes later, Mal finds himself tied up next to Bea and Simon as the bounty hunter in front of him paces back and forth.

“Thank you for trussing up River in there. It’s like you know I was coming. Did you knew I was coming? How could you?”

Mal demands to know where Inara is.

“Locked in your room,” Early smiles. “That’s an interesting development. The shooter’s in his room.”

He turns to Mal now.

“Where’s that Shepherd that ain’t a Shepherd?”

“He’s dead.”

“The pilot?”

“We lost him too.”

“And his woman, the lady soldier?”

“Alliance took her.”

Early almost looks sympathetic. “It’s been a couple of years for you guys, hasn’t it?”

“It’s had its ups and downs,” Mal says.

He’s greeted by roaring laughter from Early, who seems to think that sentence is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. He soon stops though as he looks into the shadows of the cargo bay.

“I’m forgetting someone. There was one more. Crowded ship, hard to keep track. But no, there was one more.”

He looks back at Mal, confused, but certain he’s right.

“The mechanic,” a voice says.

Jubal Early doesn’t have time to say anything else. He’s smacked on the upside of the head, hard, drawing blood, courtesy of Kaylee, swinging a large wrench with conviction and anger plain on her face.

When Early wakes up, he finds himself tied to a chair, unable to move. He opens his eyes in a haze, his brain swimming, trying to remember the last thing he did. But then he hears her voice — that of little Kaylee — and he knows he’s in trouble.

“What’s the worst you ever been hurt, Jubal?” she asks him, her voice cold and steady.

She pulls a covering off her tool bench, which clatters to the floor in front of her. She admires them all, but her face is calm.

“I ain’t special like River, but I am good with tools.”

Jubal watches her cautiously. She picks up some pliers, snaps them together in her hand.

Then she comes closer to him with the tools in her hands. Her voice is deep now, almost like a dry whisper close to his ear.

“You mess with us, your body is forfeit. It’s just a body to me, Jubal. And I can find all unseemly manner of use for it.”

She snaps the blades together, right in front of his eyes. He starts to shake.

Kaylee stops and leans back. Laughs loudly. She walks out of the dark room with a grin on her face.

“Hope you brought a change of shorts, big guy,” she says, leaving him alone.

In the kitchen, Simon is asking a now‑alert River if she can remember anything.

“Did you retrieve anything while you were under?”

“There are more,” she says calmly. “Like me. Kids, cutting their brains like they cut mine. I can feel them hurting. We need to rescue them, Simon. Like you rescued me.”

Mal interrupts.

“Our concern is rescuing Zoë. Don’t reckon much on getting sidetracked on a suicide mission.”

River looks at him. “Wouldn’t it be easier to rescue Zoë if you had ten of me?”

“Which you?” Jayne asks, but is admonished by Inara.

“Cause I seen two versions and one of ’em’s only useful if we’re entering a haiku contest.”

River throws him a look that makes Jayne instantly uncomfortable.

“No offence,” he whispers, nervously.

On the bridge, Inara reminds Mal how many times River has been right before. There would also be supplies so they could restock. They could even find something they could take and re‑sell.

But Mal is not convinced.

“Top‑secret Alliance‑run facility. Finding it ain’t gonna be easy, gettin’ in is gonna be even harder. Once we’re in we gotta rescue who knows how many and seize their valuables as well.”

“We got Jayne. River’s unreliable but when she gets it in her head to do something it gets done. Bea looks like she can handle herself.”

Mal shakes his head.

“Need more than that. If we try at this and it don’t come out right, Zoë’s in a place she won’t never return from. Need someone can do their thinking.”

“Have anyone in mind?” Inara asks, not expecting an answer at all.

“I surely do,” Mal tells her.

She looks at him. She begins to open her mouth, aghast.

“I don’t like the idea any more than you,” Mal tells her. “But it’s Zoë. I reckon that justifies a lot.”

Somewhere else, somewhere distant, a transport lands down on an arid, dry and dusty moon with nothing but sun and sand for miles. As the transport drops to a stop, the guards get out and open the main door, escorting the prisoners inside out onto the desert ground. Then, Zoë is unceremoniously thrown into a hut with a tiny window and sealed in the dark.

She’s not alone. She feels that instantly. A plain woman in a jumpsuit, missing an eye, comes out from the shadows, her hands raised in peace.

“Hey there. What ya in for?”

“Treason,” Zoë spits. “You?”

“This and that.”

“When are you getting out?” Zoë asks her, looking through the slit of a window in the concrete wall.

“No one’s getting out of here,” the woman tells her.

Zoë looks back out onto the desert, checks what she can see, her vantage points and the position of the sensors.

“I’m getting out,” she tells her new cellmate. “Promise you that.”

He’s been climbing for hours now and he can barely feel his limbs anymore. His legs have gone numb, his fingers ain’t better, and he has a slight inclination to get off the snow‑capped mountainside while he can still have children. He sees what he’s looking for — a wooden hut at the top of a steep incline — and sighs, continuing his climb.

When he reaches the top, he goes in through the front door and removes his hood. There’s a figure sitting with their back to him, warming by the fire.

“Hello, Malcolm,” says the man by the fire. “Have you come to kill me?”

Mal unwinds his protective clothing and sighs. He takes a deep breath and then says the words he’s rehearsed to himself the whole climb up here.

“No. I came because I need your help.”

The figure pulls his own hood down and turns to Mal.

“I’m so glad,” says the Operative.