SIX DAYS TO BOROS

Kaylee had partly done what Zoë had told her to do. Following their conversation in the cargo bay she'd gone to the galley and put the shepherd's pin on the eating table, close to his favorite seat. Sometime during the night it had disappeared, so she assumed he'd found it.

The part about pretending she'd never even seen it, on the other hand, proved a little more difficult. Kaylee wasn't usually the person to hide or neglect her feelings, and that included curiosity. And so the thought of Adelaide was there in the back of her mind all day while she was tinkered around in the engine room, and it was more than a little possible that it showed on her face during meals and any other time she and Book happened to be in the same room.

She'd looked in on Jayne after dinner and found him a little groggy but awake and looking a whole lot better than the last time she'd seen him. He'd complained about his cast itching and she'd spent the next twenty minutes poking inside it with a steel wire trying to relieve some of that itch, while she told him everything that had happened on the ship the last few days. Which wasn't much when you excluded the mystery of the pin, and she somehow managed not to mention that.

When Simon came by to check on his patient, she left them and hung around the common area next to the dorms, hoping to catch a few words with the doctor when he was done. But when he reemerged he wasn't very talkative; he seemed stressed and tense (more so than usual), and it was during their very short conversation that she finally gave in and asked to borrow his encyclopedia.

He was more than happy to and she brought it to her bunk to look at it in private, feeling just a little guilty for probing into this matter.

She entered the search word Adelaide and started reading, her heart beating rapidly in her chest.

'Adelaide,' it said. 'May refer to: Common name, feminine, meaning 'nobility'. Mainly used in the Hi