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Inara always felt like she was smothering in the fencing uniform, and here she was entombed in it again, struggling to dissect her sparring partner’s defenses through the mask’s grids, her figure engulfed in the traditional head-to-toe protective garb, her arms and legs taut and heavy from endless parry, thrust, feint, thrust and parry.

The smell of sweat and talcum powder made Inara a little dizzy, but she was too busy battling her faceless opponent to ask why she was back in the academy, in the athletics hall, learning again the swift dance of blades. The sweat soaked her hair, making it stick to the sides of her face, and dripped down the back of her knees, but she was too focused to notice. She had to impress the fencing master with the precision of her technique, her feet in the right place always, her back in the proper angle, her blade flicking out rapidly like the tongue of a snake but a controlled movement as if the blade were part of her arm instead of this foreign metal she gripped with aching fingers. Her arms became snakes, and she danced, smiling a smile that was skin-deep.

Mallory Stanton sat on the edge of the bed, sighing, watching Inara’s eyes move frantically under their closed lids. He had given her more of the serum, pushing her to the edge of insanity to pump out more information in the hopes of salvaging this wreck of a job. Billy Evisse, the cro-magnon who planned this hunt for a fugitive woman-child, was shot dead by the Firefly captain’s enforcer. The men who stormed the Firefly, gracelessly he thought, did not report back, and the group who wanted the fugitives didn’t really care if the truth serum fried the brain of this woman, registered companion or not. Mallory freed a few locks of her hair from the stickiness of her flushed, sweaty face and pushed them back above her temple, noticing the tension in her jaw, her cheeks, her lips, wishing he could stop the pain that marred her features.

Mallory always had the cleanest fingernails of anyone he knew, and he noticed de