River sat at the dining room table looking at the coded message that had been sent to Mal, and couldn’t work it out. She had been studying it for hours now and just couldn’t work out what the code was supposed to be. When she had been 7 years old she had cracked the 5 forms of the earth-that-was Enigma code. She had been feeling a lot better since Miranda, but this message was frustrating for her, and it reminded of the sense of loss that she had felt strongly for so long. Jayne came into the dining room. He was eating some fried rice out with chopsticks out of a box. He sat down opposite her, putting his feet up the table. He didn’t speak for a moment, just looking at her and eating.

“You should chew your food more, otherwise you’ll get indigestion.” She told him. Jayne just smiled at her and said,

“I would of thought that you would of solved that by now, being a genius and all.” River didn’t reply, and Jayne continued to eat and stare at her. “You know that it’s probably something stupidly simple like it’s upside down or something.”

As he was saying this River turned the message 90 degrees to the left and her head 90 degrees to right. She looked and smiled. It was still well hidden, but she could see it . She took a piece of paper and started to write. Jayne looked over surprised.

“You mean I was right.” River turned her head and gave him a smile. Yes, he had been right. Jayne went back to his food “Shiny.”

***

The former Operative of the Alliance sat in his room abroad the commercial freighter St. Elpis, and thought about the last few months. After the Miranda broadcast had come out, after everything he had believed had coming crashing down, there had been a near lockdown on information within the Alliance government and Military. Parliament was worried that their other secrets would suddenly emerge. When the operative had discovered that this was coming into effect, he knew didn’t have long. He knew that he couldn’t stay in the Alliance, and he knew that once he left that there would be a price o