***

"Jayne ain't a girl," River said.

All was quiet in the outskirts of Blue Landing. It was hot and dusty on the road into town, but shady in the grove where Serenity sat. Jayne didn't really know why he was sittin' out under this tree in this grove when he could be in town drinkin', and perhaps locatin' some fine professional ladies for nighttime hijinks. He had some sort of money; he'd sent a good chunk of cash home to Berta and Make, but he'd actually made out on this last run. He could've bought himself the prettiest piece of girlflesh that was up for sale in Blue Landing, he thought, watching the light through the trees dapple River in shadow and color, shadow and color, over and over again.

She was sitting in front of him, cross-legged, playing one of those string games where you wrap the string around your fingers to make patterns out of other patterns. River, being River, had some sort of intertwined dodecahedron-star going on; she flicked her wrists and ended up with four straight parallel lines. He wondered how much she knew of what he was thinking. He wondered what in particular he was thinking.

"Coulda gotten me a pretty little redhead," he said, and spat.

River looked at him with that crazy wisdom in her big brown gaze. He sometimes wondered who she'd been when she'd been normal...well, recently, anyway, he'd been wondering that sort of thing. Wondering how bad Simon missed the sister he'd known--wondering how bad River missed herself. Wondering how it felt...how it felt to be hurt, and unable to hurt back.

"Pain," she said, "is unanticipatable."

"Hmm?" he said.

"Can't account for it because can't remember it," River said. "Unrecreatable. The one thing. Patternless." And her wrists made another flick: diamonds appeared between her fingers. "New every time."

Jayne thought of Sadie, but sort of dully, like he didn't know how. She'd always been the good one--he thought it again, as he'd thought it before, like a list. She'd been the good twin. She'd been in class when he'd be