Chapter 4

Zoë gasps, stepping forward to take her husband’s hand. “Reavers? What are they doin’ this far in? Are you sure it’s them?”

Mal’s hands tighten on the railing. “How far out are they?”

“They shouldn’t have picked us up yet, but they’re pretty near to doing just tha-”

There is the sound of running feet on the grating outside and Juliet bursts into the bridge. “Shut it all down! Everything but the air!” she gasps. “Quickly!”

“Mal?” Wash asks, eyes on Juliet.

He hardly needs to think. The terror on Juliet’s face for some reason makes him trust her explicitly. “Do it now!”

Wash grabs the intercom. “Kaylee! Go to blackout!”

“Goin’ dark,” she replies, and they are plunged into semi darkness.

Mal takes the com from him. “Nobody move.”

Then suddenly his head is filled with voices, screaming voices, shouting voices, hungry, starving, scratching, wanting, needing, smelling prey.

Emptiness. Nothingness. Wanting to fill it up. Spreading it out to lessen it.

He screams.

There’s something else though. Two more melodies, running through the madness, different to it, yet somehow the same. They’re familiar to him. Juliet and River, obscuring the voices of the crew, letting the emptiness cover the ship. Simply not being there. The screaming gets louder, the pain of a thousand deaths piling in on them all. Mal lies on the floor, hands over his head, screaming out, trying to block it all out. And somehow he can hear, all over the ship, the crew doing the exact same thing, crying out in pain. Except Juliet and River.

They stand, still as statues, Juliet on the bridge, River in the cargo bay, eyes unblinking, following the source of the pain as it passes them by, the trails of pain pulling memories to the surface, painful memories.

He can feel the grating below him as though it were the ground of his own home, the place he thought he could protect, but never did. It feels like the dirt on countless planets as he loses men and women that he couldn’t get to in time. Now he can feel Zoë and Washs’ love for each