There were many things he didn’t understand. Quite a lot of them had to do with how a woman like Freya could love a curmudgeonly old bao jun like him, but he conjured he wasn’t alone in that. Jayne, Hank and Simon probably felt the same way. Not that Freya was too good for him – that was a given whichever way he looked at it – but how their own wives could have fallen for them. Especially Jayne.

“ Jia yan .”

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be peekin’.”

“I have to, in case I’m needed.”

“It’s just … I’d swear the clocks’ve slowed down.”

“Time cannot go faster or slower,” River said, letting the soil in one of her garden containers filter through her fingers. “It is a constant.”

“You sure about that?” Mal, unable to bear the waiting yet feeling guilty for doing so, had run away to – well, sidled in a manly fashion – the room the crew called Eden, where large lights simulated day and River grew vegetables and fruits that supplemented their often bland diet.

“Any change is merely a perception. Albert Einstein called it a form of relativity. Even for those travelling near the event horizon of a black hole, or near the speed of light, time travels at a uniform rate, even if it appears to have slowed for observers. In reality, of course, it …” She stopped. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not. And it’s okay, xiao nu ,” Mal said, smiling. “You’re worried about Inara.”

“Yes.”

“You always do seem to get more … Rivery when you’re worried.” He shook his head. “So, if I run really fast it’ll make the future come quicker?”

“No. But your perception may lead you to believe so.”

It had been nearly forty hours since Simon had given Inara the serum. Hank and Jayne’s thrilling ‘liberation’ of an incubator from a hospital the other side of the planet would become the stuff of legends, if only because they’d walked in and out without anybody getting shot, stabbed, challenged or otherwise inconvenienced, but right now the tension on board Serenity wa