Mal sat on his bunk, glowering in the direction of the broadwave console.

He had to call the client.

The Alliance's Operative had done them a lot of damage, when he'd murdered so many of Mal's old network -- all their truest friends, all the people they could really trust, who really trusted them -- to try to smoke Serenity out. Mal had been rebuilding that network from scratch ever since, one contact at a time, hiding his identity from those who knew the name Mal Reynolds and considered him too hot to touch. It had been a slow process. This latest client, though, had actually sought him out, citing his name and reputation as factors that recommended him. He'd thought that was a good sign; a hopeful one. Maybe things were getting back to normal, and people were starting to forget that Mal Reynolds had once been the most notorious criminal in the 'verse, leaving only the vague memory that he was a small-time shipper with a rep for getting the job done.

This job could have cemented that perception. Now it looked like it was going to destroy a year's worth of painstaking effort at rebuilding his business.

The mere thought exhausted him. He felt like a man who had aged thirty years in a day.

The broadwave console stared blandly at him. It'll wait forever, Mal admonished. Ain't gonna call the gorram client for you. Ain't nobody, man or machine, gonna help you out that much, Mal Reynolds, and ain't like you to expect it might..

But he was just so tired.

Maybe he dozed. Maybe he just sat there in an unthinking fog, losing track of the time. However it happened, he was surprised to suddenly feel as though he had awakened, and to find that the blank broadwave console had come to life, and he was staring at Wash's extraordinarily pale face. Did the pilot always look that bad, he wondered, or was it just that his red eyes and the slight bluish tinge to his lips made the rest of his skin look like untinted wax?

"Mal," Wash said, and