River glided up the stairs to her new bunk in the crew quarters, where she had been moved after proving to the captain that she could effectively pilot the ship. Granted, she couldn’t do it with the style and verve that Hoban Washburn had, but her technical precision was spot on. Piloting a space vessel had been to Wash what dancing was to her, a physical expression of the soul. The combination of her enhanced psychic abilities and knowledge came close, but she was still trying to get a sense of the “Love” that Mal had spoken of. In a way, she did love the ship. She understood the ship. They were alike, she and Serenity. They were both machines, of a sort. They had both been “tinkered” with, although Kaylees’ repairs of Serenity had been done with love, at times being the only thing to keep the majestic, yet quirky ship in the sky.

The so called improvements on River had been done with a clinical eye to enhance her beyond humanity. Her emotional filters had been ripped away to sharpen her natural psychic abilities. Her mind had been broken so that they could fit the pieces back together in a different configuration, rearranging the data to be more efficient for their purposes. There were moments in time when she hated Simon for rescuing her when he did, before they could complete the rebuild, before they could return some form of order to her mind. Those flashes passed in microseconds because, even as fractured as she still was, she understood that any order, any control that she would have had was someone else’s.

With a sigh, she thought, “Another cycle passed.” She no longer thought in days, as planetary rotation around a solar body was no longer an accurate way to express the passing of time. Serenity’s cycle was just over 24 hours long, 1456 minutes. None of her shipmates had noticed the sixteen minutes she had added to the time spent during their sleep cycle. The change had gone unnoticed because they had to adjust to the current local time on every plant or moon that they landed on, but