Disclaimer: Yadda, yadda, Joss, yadda, yadda, Fox.

Comments: 1)To avoid confusion, I'll clear it up now: River's dream is written in the present tense, but it is a memory, not happening in the timeline of the fic itself.

2) Imagine my delight when an interview with Joss regarding the upcoming movie had him stating that, even if it wasn't delved into specifically, fans could now accept as canon the fact that Book once took orders from evil, evil men. Hence the advancement of his role in this story.

Feedback: Don't make me beg... please? wily_one24@yahoo.com.au .

***

Zoe paced the ship, unable to sleep. She kept telling herself it wasn't because of the stories River had almost been telling. The pictures that the disembodied words had bought forth. She wondered if Mal or Simon or Kaylee had gotten the same images or had processed the words into their own meanings.

She clutched her elbows tighter, shivering. It had gotten noticeably colder too fast to make any form of sense. Her memory flashed at her, not too quickly, she saw all the small indications that they had ignored the day before. A shiver here, River's breath on the window there.

A moon, she remembered, is drained of all heat the minute the sunlight disappears, unable to retain any of it. Not that the sun had given them much heat at all, merely a relief from cold. It still didn't explain why the ship had lost heat.

***

Book had tried to sleep, but hadn't come anywhere near an approximation of it. He decided to see if anyone else was awake. It was when he tried to sit up, for the first time in a matter of hours, that he noticed the stiffness of his joints, the reluctance of his body to move.

The fact that he had not noticed the cold did not surprise him. It reminded him of a parable from Earth that Was. That if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump right out, but if you place it in a pot of warm water it will stay still, content to remain while the water is slowly heated until the