Disclaimer: During a misspent week in September 2012 I mainlined the Avengers and Doctor Who until my brain managed to superimpose River Song and Natasha Romanoff and fuse them into one character. Then she started dictating. Before I knew it, Clint Barton and Phil Coulson had elbowed their way in. That's how this AU 'verse came to be. It's involved some tweaked timelines, altered plot points, a ton of original back story for River, and a lot of fun on my part. I'm having a ball playing in Marvel's and Moffat's sandboxes (and making no money).

Spoiler Note: This series contains spoilers of a vague, AU sort for A Good Man Goes To War and Let's Kill Hitler.

Author's Note: I cannot give enough kudos to like-a-raven-14 who not only did not laugh at me for having this idea, but who is an incredible beta and is largely the reason why this fic (and those that follow it) are in readable shape.

Part 1: The Marvelous Tale of an Agent, an Archer, and an Assassin

Chapter 1

September 2005

Sometimes River Song felt as if she'd been running her whole life.

On a deep, poetic, metaphorical level, that might very well be true. On a more concrete one, it had definitely been true of the last six months, ever since her working relationship with Julian Monroe, an up-and-coming crime boss operating out of Venice, had gone south. He had hired her to kill his main rival, and once the job was done, he'd promptly gotten an over-inflated sense of his own importance and influence. He'd thought she should come to work on his payroll permanently.

And like most men of his stripe, he didn't take rejection well. In fact, he seemed determined to take it as a personal insult.

River was making her way through a maze of narrow back streets and alleys. The city of Sofia had some beautiful spots. This part of town was not one of them. It might even, River conceded, be one of the ugliest locales in all of Bulgaria. Rows upon rows of middling-sized buildings made of weathered cinderblock and wood that had long since shed most of its paint. Lamps with covers so old and dirty that what light they gave off was dull and orange.

Off to her right, River could hear the thump of music from the clubs that lined the main thoroughfare. Her meeting point was just another few blocks ahead. The jump drive that she was delivering to her client was zipped securely into an inner pocket of her jacket.

Her gun was holstered within easy reach, just in case she ran into trouble again.

River frowned. She was going to have to swing back by Italy and kill Monroe. His people had shown up on her trail four times now, not counting the other two times she'd only left town a step ahead of them. She was looking over her shoulder a lot more than she cared to these days. She had been moving with increasing frequency, catching sleep in snatches and meals on the fly. River could physically feel the strain of keeping her guard up wearing on her.

Correction: First she was going to beat the shit out of Monroe and make him tell her how he had been tracking her down. The man was not exactly a criminal mastermind. There had to be some trick to what he was doing.

Then she'd kill him.

Monroe should have known better than to try to push her into being his flunky. River's modus operandi wasn't exactly a secret in the circles in which they ran. She worked alone, owing no fealty and accepting no protection. Monroe had assumed that that gave him an advantage over her. River knew what Monroe—and everyone else, for that matter—saw when they looked at her: a very young, very pretty, physically unimposing woman. River was more than capable of using that image to her advantage, but it could get irksome when people tried to turn it around on her.

Those people tended to find out, fairly quickly, that appearances could be deceiving. If River Song could be summed up in a word, it was deadly. The Reaper, they called her. She'd picked that nickname up two years ago after a particularly bloody day in Belfast.

There really was nothing like being good at your job, now was there?

River found herself coming out into a wider, square area where two alleys intersected, a crossroads of sorts between the corners of four buildings. Her feet slowed almost of their own accord, and River drifted to a stop for a moment, leaning her left shoulder heavily against a wall. Hunched over slightly, lips compressed in a tight line, her hand came up to press against her right side. The throbbing was getting worse, and she imagined she could feel heat radiating through her shirt.

The last merry band that Monroe had sent after her had caught up with her two nights ago. Four men, three of whom she'd left dead in an alley much like this one. But they'd gotten a few hits in. River hadn't even registered the worst one until she'd been halfway back to her bolt hole.

A knife had opened up a long cut along her side, just under her ribs. It had gouged fairly deep toward the back, needing stitches, which she had awkwardly done herself. She'd never reached dangerous levels of blood loss, but even though she'd thought she'd disinfected it well enough, after a day the wound had started to turn red and angry and swollen. Fatigue and chills had settled into her bones, and the increasing ache in her joints and behind her eyes told her that she was working up a nasty infection. What over-the-counter meds she'd been able to lay her hands on weren't touching the low grade fever she'd been running. River didn't want to think about what sort of toxic crap might have been on that blade.

She really didn't have time to think about it right now, either.

River took a deep breath and straightened up again. She just had to finish this job, deliver the jump drive, and then she could leave town. She would never have stayed here so long except that her client had had to delay the pickup date. There was a doctor three hours away who was trustworthy and who owed her a favor. She could get patched up there.

River started across the dingy square, eyes and ears alert for any potential danger that might be lurking in the alleys off to either side. She'd been taking extreme care to make sure more of Monroe's men weren't following her tonight.

That was her mistake, she'd tell herself later. She'd only been watching out for known threats on the ground. It never occurred to her that a new player might be following her from above.

At least not until she was almost on the other side of the square and an arrow flew across her path and buried itself in the side of the building, right in front of her.

Xxxxxxxxxxx

Hawkeye was shadowing his target from the rooftops.

In six years with SHIELD, Barton had eliminated any number of dangerous people. Ordinarily, it was a simple enough matter. Not necessarily easy, but simple. Acquire the target. Shadow the target to learn his—or her—routine. Pick the most effective position. Triangulate. Account for wind and weather.

Then build his nest and wait for the target to wander into his sights.

Of course, it wasn't always quite so straightforward. With SHIELD missions, there was always a certain level of the unexpected and unforeseen that he had to brace for, but the basic structure was always the same.

This one, though? She'd been keeping him on his toes.

He'd gotten eyes on the Reaper several times since arriving in Sofia. She seemed to be working the cover of a college girl doing the Starving Student European Tour. Jeans and t-shirts, hair pulled back in a ponytail, carrying a backpack wherever she went. Completely harmless and unassuming.

He knew better, of course. He'd read the file.

Though River Song had been sticking to the same general area of the city, in almost a week he hadn't been able to identify a specific safe house. Her routine was decidedly not routine, and she had to be operating on the bare minimum of sleep.

She was unpredictable.

He'd be lying if he claimed that he didn't find that interesting.

xxxxxxxxxxx

One week ago…

Clint Barton had been called on missions on short notice before. That was just a part of working for SHIELD, being able to mobilize at any given moment. But this was the first time that he hadn't seen the mission brief until he boarded the jet.

Acting on short notice was one thing. Going into a dangerous situation potentially unprepared was something else. There were pre-mission protocols to be followed, especially with Phil Coulson as a handler.

At the beginning of his SHIELD career, Clint had chaffed at those protocols and Coulson's generally strict adherence to them. But it hadn't taken him too long to realize that Coulson's fondness for going by the book had nothing to do with a rules-and-regs fetish. He stuck to them because he felt it gave him improved odds of bringing his agents home in one piece.

And given that, ever since Clint had been brought into the SHIELD fold at the age of nineteen, Coulson had progressed from being his recruiter to his handler to his friend to the closest thing he had to a brother these days, bringing each other home in one piece was something they took pretty damn seriously.

So, when Clint's cell phone had gone off at one o'clock in the morning, and he had answered it to be greeted by a uncharacteristically harried-sounding Coulson saying, "Clint, pack your gear and meet me at Hanger 2. We're in the air in half an hour," there had been no question but that something big was going down.

He grabbed his go bag from the closet and threw in a sidearm and a favorite knife. He packed his bow and quiver in one case and his sniper rifle in another and taken off for the hanger at a jog before he'd even really processed that he had no idea where they were going.

When Clint reached the jet, Coulson had been overseeing the ground crew and making sure all the gear was properly stowed. Clint, staying out of the way, had packed his own stuff away and taken his usual seat on the jet. The crew was efficient, and in a span of minutes, Coulson was dropping into the seat across from him and strapping in while the pilot and copilot finished up their pre-flight checks.

"So, whatever it is, I take it it's bad?" Clint asked, buckling himself in.

Coulson gave him a rueful smile.

"Aren't you the one who always advocates for shorter briefings?"

Clint returned the smile, but it was not without a hint of trepidation that only his handler would be able to read.

"Seriously, Phil."

Coulson reached down into the briefcase by his seat and pulled out a pair of files.

"The Council has a lead on the Reaper."

Clint's "Holy shit" was lost in the roar of the jet's engines as they took off.

The Reaper had been on SHIELD's radar for about two years now, ever since she had walked into the headquarters of an arms dealer in Northern Ireland and walked out again leaving two dozen dead men and a flaming building in her wake. Clint had never seen the file, but word got around in the intelligence community. He always kept his ears out for an interesting rumor, and the rumor on this woman was that she was deadly, inventive, and could vanish like a ghost.

She might have remained just another name on SHIELD's watch list of potential threats. But then, eight months ago, Nairobi had happened.

If there was one thing that was sure to bump you up onto the kill list, Clint thought cynically, it was making the World Security Council look stupid. Like allowing one of your most wanted threats to waltz right into a facility protected by SHIELD and sabotage a massive research project, eliminating the lead scientist and destroying all the data.

While killing two SHIELD agents and putting five more in the hospital.

Nairobi had turned out to be not only the upping of the ante, but the break that SHIELD had needed. One of the casualties, Agent Kessler, had gotten an up close and personal look at the Reaper, finally giving them a face to put with the name.

But while, admittedly, the Reaper wasn't the biggest fish to ever cross onto SHIELD's radar, she was one of the most elusive. Trying to pin her down had apparently had the analysts pulling their hair out for months now.

"Where did she turn up?" Clint asked as he started to thumb his way through his copy of the file.

"We have it on good authority that she arrived in Sofia yesterday," Coulson replied.

"We're taking her out?"

"With extreme prejudice," Coulson confirmed. "The Council wants a message sent, apparently."

Bow, then. Clint nodded, even as his eyes scanned the information in the file. For all the resources that had been put into it, it was pretty thin.

"The Reaper. AKA…River Song?" Clint rolled his eyes up to look at Coulson.

"More than likely just another alias," Coulson said. "But it's the best they've got."

Clint read on. River Song. Age, unknown. Affiliations, unknown. Nationality, unknown, though best intelligence seemed to be that she was English. Covert operative. Killer for hire. Skilled in hand-to-hand combat, gifted with languages. Highly intelligent and highly dangerous. All indications were that she was a strict loner, and a psychologist in Oslo who had made a hobby of studying her was apparently convinced that she met the definition of a psychopath. He was of the opinion that she was, and likely had been, a danger to the general population beyond the targets she killed.

"Not a lot of specifics," Clint commented. Coulson grunted in reply, reading his own file.

There was a list of incidents that she was known or suspected to have had a hand in, going back to early 2003. At the very back of the file were the newest and most important additions.

Pictures.

The first had been taken from the security feed from the Nairobi facility and had been positively identified by Agent Kessler. With that picture to go on, it looked as if the analysts had been working overtime trying to find matches. They'd scared up another one from Nairobi, taken a few days before her attack on the base. This one was also from a security feed, from the local train station. It was much sharper than the one from the base footage, but clearly showed the same woman.

They'd found others, as well. There was a picture from a state ball in Vienna, in which she was wearing a flowing gown and was on the arm of a state official who had to be three times her age. There another of a woman in a business suit in the lobby of an office building in San Francisco. She looked older in both of these pictures than she did in the one from the train station, but Clint eventually decided that this was a product of dress, make-up, and carriage more than anything else. There was a blurry picture from Belfast, two years ago of a disheveled young woman standing with other shell-shocked onlookers outside of the building she'd destroyed.

The final picture was the oldest, and clearly showed a considerably younger River Song in a school uniform in a crowd of other kids. It looked as if they were milling around in some sort of museum. The accompanying notation said that it had been taken in Edinburgh. It was over four years old, taken in April of 2001. Clint wondered how the hell SHIELD had managed to lay hands on it.

Clint flipped back to the photo from the train station and studied it, memorizing the face. He was going to be hunting her in a matter of hours.

The woman in the picture couldn't have been more than twenty or twenty-one. She had a soft oval face, delicately drawn features and finely arched eyebrows. Her eyes were brown, and even in a flat photograph looked alert and watchful. She had light brown hair, the sort that tended to darken in the winter and streak with gold in the summer. She was the sort of woman who could either fade into the background or stand out among hundreds depending on what suited her in the moment.

Idly, he flipped back to the one from London. Here, she just looked like a kid among other kids. She was even smiling at something the girl next to her was saying. Clint held the photo up.

"How old would you say she is, here?" he asked. "Fourteen? Fifteen?"

"Hard to say," Coulson replied. "If not that young, then definitely young enough to pass."

Clint shook his head.

"She has to be working for someone, right?"

Even if she was older than she looked, she wasn't that old, and she'd been in the business for at least a couple of years. There were definitely agencies and organizations out there that used kids, but kids didn't work on their own.

"You'd think so, but no. Not that we're aware of," Coulson said. "Even if she did at one point, general consensus is that she's now completely freelance. The Council doesn't really consider it relevant either way. They just want her neutralized. And given how dangerous she's proven to be up close, it calls for a distance kill."

Clint nodded. That was where he came in.

"She's been sighted in the Lion's Bridge area?"

"Yes," Coulson confirmed. "The safe house is being set up in the northeastern corner of the sector. It'll be ready by the time we land."

"Perfect." That location would make it easy to scout out the area from the rooftops.

New York to Bulgaria was a long trip. That was more than enough time to start roughing out a plan.

xxxxxxxxxxx

Five nights later, he saw the Reaper in action.

Clint actually had her lined up in his sights, clear to take a shot, when the men appeared, giving him pause. He could take her out in a crowd, of course, and be away back over the roofs to the safe house before anyone on the ground had processed what happened.

But instead he waited. They weren't pressed for time, the Reaper showed no immediate indications of leaving town, and it was always best to have as few loose ends as possible.

The men might as well have had "organized crime thugs" tattooed on their faces. He watched them close in on River Song with predatory grins that, for some reason, made his hand clench around his bow. He watched her take down three of the four with nothing but her bare hands, and couldn't help a low whistle at the sight.

"What is it, Hawkeye?" Coulson asked through the comm.

"Reaper's hand-to-hand skills confirmed," he replied.

"Not on you, I hope," Coulson said dryly.

"Nope. Looks like some old friends caught up with her here."

"Did she kill them?"

"Without breaking a sweat."

"Well, pull back," Coulson said. "We want this as clean as possible. You can pick her up again tomorrow."

"Copy, Aerie. See you back at base."

Clint didn't withdraw immediately, though. There was still one man left, even if calling him a man was something of an exaggeration. Clearly a new recruit, the gangly teen had acne-scarred cheeks and his eyes were wide and fearful as he took in what the Reaper had done to his cohorts. The gun he had trained on her trembled violently in his hands.

She snatched it away from him with no resistance whatsoever.

Clint expected her to turn it on the boy and make a clean sweep of it. Instead, she stepped closer, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and gave him a rough shake. She said something to him, but Clint was too far away to hear what it was. Then she shoved him away so hard that he fell over. The boy scrambled to his feet, turned and fled. The Reaper watched him go, then tucked the gun into the back of her jeans and disappeared into the shadows.

Huh, Clint thought. How about that?

Now? Two days later? Now she wasn't looking so good.

Clint had been keeping pace with the Reaper as she navigated through the alleys three stories below him. She started to slow down as they came to a place where a pair of alleys converged, crossing each other. Clint took the opportunity to pick up speed and jump across the alley ahead of him, landing lightly on the roof of the next building. From here he could get a better head-on shot.

He watched her stop, coming to rest against a wall, one hand pressed to her side.

He knew he should go ahead and take the shot. He'd never have a better opening. She was right in his sights. There was no one else around. And besides, he'd scouted out the area ahead of time.

He knew what was waiting up ahead for her.

A second gang, cronies of the ones she'd killed two nights ago, he'd bet, had set up a kill box. Ms. Song was very popular this week, it seemed.

Clint supposed the smart thing to do, strategically speaking, would be to let her just walk into the trap. The Reaper would die, and SHIELD would have no exposure at all. The Council would probably be pissed at being cheated out of their opportunity to send a message, though. Besides, the kill that the thugs would deal out was likely to be a lot less clean than his would be.

Coulson had once remarked that, for a highly skilled professional assassin, Clint could be very soft-hearted. It hadn't been meant as a criticism—more as an affirmation that Clint had landed on the right side, fighting with the good guys.

Clint knew that it wasn't soft-heartedness that made him do what he did. He knew that evil and danger came in many packages, including pretty young women, and sometimes that danger had to be eliminated. Sometimes he had been the one who had been called upon to do it, and he'd carried out his orders.

He couldn't say what it was, exactly, that made him hesitate when it came to the Reaper. Too many unanswered questions, maybe. There were some uncomfortably wide gaps between the sketch of the mercenary-for-hire he'd read up on and the woman he'd been watching for the last week. Or it could be the fact that no one ended up in this life entirely by choice.

Clint watched the Reaper straighten up, clench her jaw, and start walking again, across the open square below. If he had to boil it down to one word, the best that he could come up with was "recognition." Seeing something familiar in a person that he'd never met before.

He took careful aim and fired. The arrow cut downward, flew two feet in front of her, and buried itself near the base of the wall of the building next door, stopping her before she could head up that alley to what was sure to be a very ugly death.

xxxxxxxxxxx

River stood, frozen, staring at the arrow.

It was one of life's funny truths that the world of covert operations, shadowy assassins, and underground organizations could be an incredibly gossipy place. River had heard stories about "Hawkeye," an assassin who favored a bow and arrow, who struck from above, was never seen and who cut down his targets with unerring accuracy.

She had scoffed at the stories at first, mostly because of the man's choice of weapon. But when she had really stopped to think about it, her derision had dried up. An arrow might appear antiquated, but it had certain tactical advantages. Arrows were quick and they were quiet. Plus, an arrow was memorable in the way that a bullet wasn't. It was the kind of kill that would inspire fear.

That was half of what this job was. Inspiring fear.

River sure as hell felt afraid now.

There was no other movement or sound in the square that she could detect. No follow-up shot. River knew she could try to run, but how far could she really expect to get before being hit? Instead, very deliberately, River let her backpack slide down her arms and tossed it off to the side. She drew her gun, walked back to the center of the dingy square, and started scanning the dark rooftops.

By all accounts she'd heard, Hawkeye was from the other side of the pond, either American or Canadian. So she addressed the shadows above her in English.

"I know you're there," she said, raising her voice. "And I'm in no mood for games. Show yourself."

She was met with silence. River felt a coil of anger rise up into her throat.

"Did you hear me? Either take your shot, come out and fight, or leave!"

This time she heard boots land lightly on the ground off to her right. River turned her gun on the figure that stepped out into the dull light.

"Option B, then," she said.

The man had a quiver of arrows on his back, but beyond that, Hawkeye looking nothing like what she'd expected. She would have guessed him to be in his mid-twenties, but his was a rather hard face to judge. There were already some lines weathered into it, but he had the snubbed sort of features that would make him seem younger than his actual age for decades to come, probably. He looked strong, but was not overly tall. His hair was short, and a nondescript brown. His only remarkable feature was a pair of green eyes.

They were a little too keen and observant for comfort, River thought. It didn't help that he was looking at her as if he might be capable of seeing parts of her that she kept carefully hidden away.

She told herself not to be so damned fanciful, but what he did next did nothing to help her equilibrium.

"River Song?" He walked toward her, empty hands raised slightly. "I just want to talk to you."

xxxxxxxxxxx

Coulson was going to kill him for this. Good and slow, and probably in a very inventive way.

People who didn't know Coulson well took the man for a mild-mannered government paper-pusher. Those people were idiots. One of the first things Clint had learned about his handler was that the senior agent could kick the ass of anyone in SHIELD, up to and including Clint's own.

Which was exactly what he was going to do when he found out about what Clint was doing.

Okay, so Coulson probably wouldn't kill him, but he really wasn't going to be happy about this. He had sounded agitated enough when Clint had told him he was going comm dark, right before he had quickly collapsed and packed away his bow and climbed down off the roof. He was probably back at the safe house right now, having a very controlled freak out.

But Clint knew, gut deep, as sure as he had ever known anything, that killing River Song was the wrong call.

She wasn't shooting yet. That was something. Clint walked forward cautiously. His own sidearm was in easy reach in case he needed it, but he was trying to be optimistic.

Now that he was seeing her up close, he automatically began to catalog his observations, mentally comparing them to what he had gleaned from her file. She was shorter than he'd been expecting. Her accent, as far as he could tell, wasn't strictly English; it sounded more Scottish to his ear. Not that it meant anything—accents were easily faked. But he filed it away nonetheless. She was also incredibly good at covering up weakness. There was little sign at all that a second ago she'd been letting a wall hold her up.

There were signs that she couldn't hide with sheer force of will, though. She was thinner than she ought to be, Clint noted. That would seem to suggest that whatever difficulties she was having, they extended further back than the last two days. Her eyes were darkly shadowed, and her face was pale save for an unhealthy red flush in her cheeks.

Still, her grip on her gun was rock steady.

"You know," she said, "I've heard about you. Hawkeye, isn't it? They say you never miss." She tilted her head slightly toward the arrow in the wall, but she never took her eyes off of him. "They also say that you don't play with your kills. Clearly people are wrong about one of those things."

"I didn't miss," Clint said, taking another step closer. "I hit just what I was aiming for." One more step. "Your friends from two nights ago? They have partners, and they're waiting for you up ahead."

That actually seemed to take her aback for a moment. "And what?" she said finally. "You didn't want them poaching your kill?"

Clint shook his head. "I'm not here to kill you."

The Reaper's mouth quirked up a bit at the corner.

"Please. I know what you do. Why else would you be here?"

"I know what you do, too," he said. One more step. "And like I said, I saw you the night before last. You let the kid go. You could have just killed him."

He went to take another step, but stopped when she took one back away from him.

"And you could have taken a shot at me any time now. You haven't," he added. "So, maybe we don't really know that much about each other, huh?" He grinned.

He'd been hoping to diffuse some of the tension. The Reaper was having none of it. If anything she looked even more guarded than she had before.

"You know," he went on, "I half expected you to run by now."

For some reason, that made her grin.

"Never run when you're scared," she said, sounding almost as if she were reciting a lesson.

Clint raised his eyebrows.

"Are you scared?" he asked.

"I'm marked for death. A few times over, apparently. Only an idiot wouldn't be scared under those circumstances, don't you think?"

Clint didn't get a chance to answer. A new voice cut into their conversation.

"You should be scared, little girl," it said. "And you really should have left town while you had the chance."

It looked like the hit squad had gotten impatient and had come looking for their quarry.

The leader stood in the mouth of the south alley, flanked by five other men.

"Kill her," he said idly. "Her friend, too. For good measure."

The men drew weapons and began to advance. The Reaper turned her gun away from Clint and onto this new threat. Clint stepped up beside her, drawing his own gun. She saw the Reaper glance sidelong at him.

"Oh, this should be interesting," he heard her mutter.

xxxxxxxxxxx

Three minutes, forty-two seconds.

As River caught her breath, looking around at the six bodies scattered on the cracked asphalt, she couldn't help but wonder if Monroe's employment requirements boiled down to "big and stupid." It would explain a lot.

She shot a glance over at her accidentally acquired comrade-in-arms. He was kneeling on the ground, retrieving his knife from the chest of one of the thugs, wiping it off on the man's shirt. Without thinking, her eyes still scanning the other dark alleyways for any more surprises that might be waiting in the wings, River stepped closer and held out her hand to help him up.

Not that she trusted him, but if there was yet another wave waiting out there, she wanted the closest thing she had to an ally at this particular moment to be on his feet.

"Well, I suppose it's good to know that you can fight with something besides a bow," she said.

It was not a thank-you.

She was still keeping an eye out for more potential threats when she felt his hand clasp hers and heard him say, "I'm really sorry about this."

It took a second for the comment to register, and by then it was far too late. River frowned and was just about to ask him what the hell he was apologizing for when his grip on her hand suddenly tightened and something sharp bit against the inside of her wrist.

She jerked her hand away, staring in horror at the small dart that had been pressed under the skin. She hastily scraped it away, stumbling back, but she knew she was already in serious trouble. Whatever was in that dart was working incredibly fast. River cursed herself roundly and in multiple languages for stupidly letting her guard down. She could feel a pleasant warmth quickly working its way through her bloodstream, danger disguised as soothing comfort. Her steps were heavy and uncoordinated as she tried to put some distance between herself and Hawkeye.

"You son of a bitch," she said to the blurring image of the archer, who was back on his feet and now somehow standing right in front of her. River dully listened to the panicked part of her brain telling her to shoot him, but she couldn't quite remember where her gun had gone. Instead, she launched a sloppy punch at him.

It didn't even come close to connecting, and only served to scatter what little was left of her balance. There was an unsettling sensation, as if she were flying and falling at the same time, and River felt herself get caught against something that was warm and solid.

Then the world upended and all the lights went out.