Author's Note: I never bought Joss' explanation that the beginning of the BDM was really a flashback from when Simon busted River out before he came to Serenity. I thought for sure as I watched the movie, that she had been capture again and Simon and the crew had gone after her.

Therefore, River's rescue in this chapter incorporates the rescue in the beginning of the BDM. The dialogue and set-up are all taken from The Official Visual Companion, which contains the shooting script.

***

“River? Do you know where you are?”

River blinked rapidly to bring the scene into focus. She was on a planet, somewhere bright and strange, somewhere unfamiliar. She turned her head in both directions, trying to find something to anchor herself to. But there was nothing, no one, just vast openness with cities gleaming in the distance on all sides.

“No,” she answered quietly, her voice jagged and harsh to her ears. It hurt to form words. It hurt to think them.

“Are you sure?”

She again surveyed the landscape and concentrated hard. Was this a place she should know? Blinking again, she tried to clear the veil that covered her eyes and when she opened them for a second time she was in a room she would have known anywhere. It was her room, on Osiris, where she had been just days – was it really days? – before.

Trembling, she whispered, “Yes. Tam estate, Osiris.”

“Your home,” the disembodied voice elaborated.

Shaking her head violently, the motion only elicited a sharp wave of pain and a fresh batch of nausea. Feeling as though she would vomit, River clamped her mouth shut against the bile and swallowed the acid back down her already burning throat. “Not home,” she bit out through still clenched teeth.

“Where is home?”

She wouldn’t tell. They couldn’t make her. Oh, they had tried. The drugs they had given her, some of them anyway, were meant to make her weak, make her think all the thoughts they wanted to steal. They had opened her brain to get to one dirty secret and in the