Hermione sat in the deep armchair in the yellow drawing room, Caleb asleep in her arms, his blanket wrapped securely around him. She kept touching his face, just gently. “He’s so small,” she said, a mantra she’d been repeating ever since River let her hold him. “So small.”

“You wouldn’t have thought that if you’d had to give birth to him,” his mother said.

Noni blushed.

“Hell, moonbrain, she ain't gotta be thinking about things like that,” Jayne complained. “Not at her age.”

“When is the right age to be thinking about things like that?” River asked, quite seriously, her dark eyes on him. “There doesn’t seem to be an agreed birthday throughout the ‘verse from which sex is allowed, and where there are rules they seem entirely arbitrary.”

“Huh?”

“I’d like to know,” she explained. “Particularly as it’s not something I had experience of, as I was …” She shuddered slightly and didn’t continue with that thought. “Anyway, so far everyone I’ve met seems to be different. Mal was fourteen, yet Freya was much older. Kaylee was very young, but Simon …” Her nose wrinkled at the thought of her brother having sex. “And you -”

“We ain’t talking about me,” Jayne put in quickly.

“Was she nice to you?”

“Huh?”

“The whore they took you to. Was she nice? Did she make it pleasant for you?”

“You really wanna be going into that?”

“I’m curious.”

“And I think you’re doin’ this on purpose.”

River flashed him a grin. “Perhaps.”

“Well, I’m figuring that kinda conversation’s best left ‘til bedtime, and Noni’s too young to be hearing it in the first place.”

Hermione’s head dropped and the blush on her cheeks deepened.

River understood. “I think we might be too late.”

Jayne mock-bristled. “That so? You getting up to something you shouldn’t?”

“No, no!” Noni protested. Then a smile lifted her lips. “I just … there’s this boy I met. On Beaumonde. He … we’ve been waving each other.”

Jayne stood up. “What’s his name? And his Cortex address. ‘Cause I think maybe I should