Disclaimer: This segment contains a transcript of "The River Tam Sessions", written by Joss Whedon.

Skeletons in the Family Closet

Hours later, the Serenity was entering the atmosphere around Persephone, on its way to the capital city. It was a cloudy day in the city, and Alan imagined that the city must have looked amazing when it was in its prime, full of sleek silver towers that extended far into the sky. Now the towers looked deserted, sad reminders of what once was. Adding to this melancholy sight were the miles of slums that stretched from all sides of the towers. In all, Alan felt that Persephone, as it now stood, was a very sorry sight.

Bishop had the idea of first exploring any medical facilities in the city, still chasing his theory about the Alliance's experiments. Alan didn't have a good feeling about this mission, but he saw no good reason to disbelieve Bishop's word. He knew Rachel wanted answers, but he had the horrible feeling that she was going to end up wishing she hadn't found them; a feeling which he was all-too-familiar with.

The Serenity set down on the landing pad halfway up one of the towers; Bishop had deduced that this was the largest facility on the planet, so the crew thought it best to start their search there. As the ramp to the cargo bay lowered, Alan, José and Rachel all stepped off. Alistair was staying behind on the ship, after a heated argument with Rachel; she was adamant on seeing the facility with her own eyes, and the mission didn't necessitate more than three people in the ground team. The atmosphere was exactly identical to Earth's so there was no need for respirators; there was not even any need for the airlock. As the Serenity departed for the sky, Rachel looked out across the great city with a forlorn expression.

"It looks so dead..." she said quietly. "There must have been millions of people here once upon a time, but now there's no life here at all."

"The war drove them all off, amiga," José muttered darkly. "I wonder if any of our supposed allies were here at any point, glassing planets left and right."

"Why don't you try asking Mitsu when we get back?" Alan asked, secretly wishing that he would purely to see the results. Either José had missed the sarcasm in Alan's tone, or he had decided not to risk getting into unnecessary trouble for once, for he remained silent while pointing towards the walkway leading off from the landing pad. It led to a small iron door nestled in the side of the towering grey monolith which continued above them. The trio walked up to the door and managed to wrench it open.

"Bishop was telling me," Alan said, "that the Central Planets in the cluster were the most advanced ones. The Outer Planets were more like the old frontier cultures; six-guns, horses, the works. Wish I could have seen it for myself."

"The UNSC never got very far either," José shrugged. "The war put all thoughts of explorin' outta everyone's heads."

"To think people once thought we'd have colonies on the Moon a few short years after Armstrong and his lot stepped on it," Alan sighed. "It took us long enough to get beyond our own atmosphere; I hate to think how long it'll be before we have colonies all over the galaxy."

"That's not even considering the aliens out there," Rachel chimed in. "I bet they're not all as friendly as the Elites have been." At this statement José let out a derisive snort, but on noticing the reproachful looks he was getting from his crew-mates he decided not to pursue the matter further.

"Well, friendlier now that the war's over, anyway," Rachel added, sounding embarrassed.

Inside the building it was dark and eerie. José and Rachel pulled out flashlights while Alan let his eyes get used to the gloom. From what they could tell they had stepped into an emergency exit, as they were in a metal stairwell that stretched a long way up and down. Alan looked down at his commlink, and brought up a set of diagrams of the building.

"I just hope the blueprints Bishop gave us are good," he muttered. "We'd be best off looking for the generator rooms first, try and get some things working again. We'll have to go all the way down the basement, I'm afraid."

"Never mind, Captain," Rachel said brightly. "Look on the bright side; we can work off a few extra calories."

The group made their way down the staircase. The sounds of their footsteps on the metal should have echoed all around them, but they were muffled by a thick layer of dust on the stairs. It lay there undisturbed except by the group's own feet. After an hour of this tedious descent, they reached the first sub-level, where the controls for the generator were supposed to be located. Working their way through narrow corridors lined with many steel pipes, the reached the control overlooking the gigantic generators. The building ran on a geothermal power supply, and looking out of the viewing glass Alan could see the huge pipes stretching for miles below the surface.

"These generators supposedly power the whole district," Alan said, looking at his commlink. "We only need the power for this building restored though." He looked carefully at the commlink's screen, trying to decipher a series of technical schematics. After a minute he pointed to one of the large control panels. "Try that one," he said.

Rachel set to work on the controls, deciphering their use a lot more quickly than Alan would have. He never failed to be impressed by this natural aptitude she had with machinery; he could not have asked for a better engineer. Within minutes, after she had turned several valve handles and pulled large levers, there was a loud humming noise and the lights in the control room sprang into life. Rachel beamed at the others.

"Where to next then, Captain?" she asked pleasantly, as if this was just a very interesting day out.

"Uh..." Alan stammered, glancing back down at the blueprints. "There are three lifts in the main lobby," he said. "One leads down here and to the other sub-levels; I guess that's for the maintenance crews. Another heads to all the other floors, but the last one..." His eyes widened, surprised by what he was seeing. "This one only goes as far as the 52nd floor. I wonder if it's an express elevator of some kind." He started to move out of the control room, the others following him.

They eventually found the service elevator and rode up to the lobby. It was a very plain-looking area, with no clear sign of who owned the building or what its exact purpose was. Bishop had said that it was a facility for medical research at one time, though it was never used as a hospital. They moved around the lobby searching for the correct elevator. When they found it they stepped inside, the command button responding to their touch. There was only one button inside the elevator, and upon pressing it the doors closed and the elevator sped up the shaft; it was so quick that the group felt as if lead weights had suddenly placed themselves on their shoulders.

Upon reaching their destination, they stepped out into a small antechamber with plain white walls. Opposite them was another door, with what looked like a keypad and a retinal scanner. Beside them was a sign saying 'Please Have Identification Ready'.

"Balls," Alan muttered. "There's no way we'll be able to trick that." He turned to look at Rachel.

"You think this might be the place?" he asked.

"I really don't know, boss," Rachel said. "I've just remembered something though. I couldn't sleep one night and I came down for a glass of water, and I overheard an argument between my parents. My dad let slip something about an 'Academy', and my mum kept saying something about 'just telling her'. Then I remember Auntie River screaming from the spare room, and my dad came out into the hall and saw me. He looked like he had seen a ghost."

"Well, there's no way we're passing that lock," Alan said. "We'll have to find another way in. Who knows; maybe it's this Academy your dad mentioned."

They stepped back into the elevator and began to ride down, but almost as soon as it started to move Alan jabbed his finger on the emergency stop switch. The elevator shuddered to a halt, and Alan stood under the large vent grating in the ceiling.

"Rachel," he said, "get yourself up there and have a look around. I'll give you a boost."

Rachel nodded and balanced herself on Alan's shoulders. Wobbling precariously, Alan was able to push her up to the vent. She pushed the grating open and climbed out onto the roof.

"We've stopped right under the 52nd floor!" she called down. "There's a vent right under it!" There was a moment's pause as Rachel had a closer look. "It'll be a tight fit, but I think we can all get in!"

"Right, get yourself in there!" Alan called. "We're coming up!" He heard Rachel move the vent cover aside, and there was a sudden crashing sound; she must have knocked it down the elevator shaft. Alan pushed José up to the elevator's roof, and then was pulled up himself by José. All three of them squashed themselves, one after another, into a narrow air duct right below the elevator doors, though Alan hesitated somewhat before squeezing himself inside.

"This sure brings back memories..." Alan groaned.

"Waddaya mean, boss?" José asked.

"I used to be a Shadowrunner a long time ago," Alan replied. "I ended up spending more time in vents than I care to remember. I hated those moments." He was slightly claustrophobic, and crawling through vents once again caused him to start shaking slightly.

"There's a light up ahead!" Rachel crawled after a few minutes of crawling. Alan almost hit his head on José's boots as everyone stopped. He heard a rattling noise up ahead, and a rustling sound. As José moved forward he was soon pulling himself out of a square hole in the floor of the 52nd floor. Alan quickly joined them, relieved to be out of the vent. They had surfaced at a crossroads in a plain-looking corridor. One path led right back to the security door.

"Everybody split up," Alan said, looking down the eastern corridor. "Give a shout on the commlink if you find anything." The three of them took separate corridors, with Alan heading down the corridor on his left. For a while there didn't seem to be anything of great importance; it looked like he had found the living area, which had various bedrooms and common rooms. The rooms looked very plain and empty, though he assumed the inhabitants had packed in a hurry when the planet was being evacuated.

Soon he reached a corner, leading back to his left. He noticed that, if he had his bearings right, then these main corridors were running parallel to the outside walls. This struck him as odd, since there still seemed to be a good distance between the outer rooms and the outside wall. He also noticed that none of the rooms he had seen so far had windows. It was almost as if somebody really didn't want any potential outsiders to see what was going on here, though windows had been quite visible on the outside. He had the insane idea that the outer rooms were in fact decoys, something he saw as unnecessary considering that they were more than fifty floors up. Somebody was going to a lot of trouble to keep up appearances. It also occurred to him just how few living quarters there were; if this was an academy of some kind, they didn't get a lot of clients. The place in general looked very unwelcoming; even with the lights on the corridors were still dimly-lit. It felt to him like a military bunker.

"Rachel, José," he said into his commlink. "It's all dead here. You guys found anything?"

"Not a red cent, boss," José drawled. "I've found what looks like a maintenance hatch. I think it leads to that cooling tower we saw next to this building on our way here. From the looks of things, I'd say there were interrogation rooms here. Not exactly a friendly academy, by the looks of it."

"Rachel?" Alan asked. As Alan was about to try and hail her again, he thought he heard muffled sounds coming from the speaker. There was a sniffing noise, and a faint whimpering. Suddenly the communication line closed, and Alan's attempts to hail her went unheeded.

"José," Alan said firmly, "Forget that corridor and meet me at Rachel's position." He began to run down the corridor back to the intersection, and headed down the central corridor where Rachel had gone. He met José outside one of the rooms, which disconcertingly was a heavy door made out of metal, and both ran inside. What they saw made their jaws drop.

They were inside a circular chamber, dimly-lit and with monitoring equipment stretching around every wall. In the centre of the chamber was what looked like a dentist's chair, only with metallic restraints on the arms and the back. Above the chair the central light was surrounded by metal arms, each of which had a painful-looking implement on the end. It was as if the room was a diseased parody of an operating theatre, like something out of every child's apprehensive nightmare about hospitals. Rachel was in the room, on her knees near one of the terminals, and was sobbing openly. Noticing this, José quickly ran up to her and placed a comforting arm around her.

"Rachel?" he asked, in a surprisingly gentle voice. "What's the matter, mi amiga?"

Rachel didn't answer, but instead continued to sob, her face buried in her hands. She trembled as José put his arm around her, but didn't try to throw him off. Alan only stood, aghast. He had never seen Rachel so upset before, not even during an incident a week ago when Alistair had almost killed her. She had seen something in this room to make her incredibly upset, and he doubted that just the sight of the apparent torture chair alone would have done this to her on its own. While José continued to try and comfort her, Alan approached the monitor that they were in front of. He noticed a card sticking out of a slot on the front of the machine. He looked at the label, noticing the words 'R. Tam. Interviewer Dr. J. Whedon' scrawled on them. It seemed rather careless that somebody would leave something like this lying about; Alan assumed that they had been looking at it prior to the evacuation and had forgotten to remove it.

With some anxiety, he pushed the card into the slot. Immediately a title card appeared on the screen with the words 'R. Tam: Session 1'. The card was soon replaced by a black-and-white image from what he assumed to be one of the interrogation rooms José had mentioned earlier. There were two people in the room; one man and one woman. The man had his back to the camera; only his arm and the left side of his head were visible. The focus was on the woman, who looked to be in her late teens at the youngest. She smiled at the man, wearing a neat dress and with well-maintained, long black hair.

"And you like school?" the man was asking.

"I do," the woman replied. Looking back at Rachel, still sobbing, he began to realise that he was seeing what her Auntie River looked like. He assumed that the man was Doctor Whedon.

"It's..." River was saying, "Sometimes things move a little slowly for me."

"I imagine they do," the doctor replied. "What's your favourite subject?"

"I'm finding physics a challenge," River replied, looking slightly embarrassed.

"You're in the graduate program already," Whedon said, sounding slightly impressed.

"They call me Little Mouse," River replied.

"Do you think they're jealous, because you're so young?" Whedon asked.

"Wulger is a little..." River said, taking a moment to gather her words. "He plans to be somebody very important."

"Did he tell you he was jealous?" Whedon asked.

"Oh, no!" River replied, chuckling. "I just..."

"You feel it," Whedon offered. River paused for a moment, looking thoughtful.

"People tell you things all the time without talking," she said. "The way they move... the way they aren't talking."

"You're very intuitive," Whedon said.

"Simon says I was born with the third eye," River said, smiling. "He hates it when I can tell which girls he likes."

"Your brother..." Whedon continued. "He's a doctor, right?"

"He's a trauma surgeon in Capital City," River replied.

"Quite a family," Whedon said.

"Simon's a genius," River said proudly. "I can never do what he does."

"I think you could do anything you put your mind to," Whedon said in the tone of a guidance counsellor. "That's what the Alliance needs. That's what this institute is about... Your mind, letting it do everything it could. Does that sound like something you'd be interested in?" There was a prolonged pause, as River seemed to contemplate her answer. Finally she allowed herself a smile.

"Will I still be allowed to dance?" she asked sweetly.

The scene flashed off, and then the next segment, Session 22, began. When Alan saw River's face on the screen he almost didn't recognise her. The cheerfulness present in the first entry was gone; in fact, she now looked very ill, her expression nauseous and her hair noticeably more lank. She was also now wearing medical scrubs.

"But you understand why these treatments are important?" Whedon asked.

"I don't think..." River mumbled. "I'm sorry... I think there's been an error... I don't think... I think I may not be the right subject for these... for this program." Alan noticed that she had now developed the habit of rubbing her hand along her hair every so often, as if trying to hold her thoughts in her head.

"It's perfectly natural to feel a little nervous..." Whedon began, but River interrupted him.

"I just..." she said. "If it was possible to be transferred, I would make... I would like to request a transfer."

"You want to be back in Gen-Ed?" Whedon asked, surprised.

"Please..." River said. She looked pleadingly at Whedon.

"You told us that was no good for you," Whedon said slowly, "that it was too slow. That's why you're here."

"Please," Rachel said again, tears beginning to stream down her face. "It... hurts..."

"Well, I can help you with that," Whedon replied simply. "You know how proud Dr. Mathias is of how you're progressing..."

"I'm not progressing..." River said. Then the video cut to what seemed to be a few minutes later. River now looked tense and alert, staring at something that seemed to be off-camera, muttering incoherently to herself.

"Tell me what you see," Whedon asked. River turned to look at him with a blank expression.

"You lost the first one," she said. "You cut too deep, he died on the table. One of your attendants cried and you comforted her... for doing such good work." She spat out the last few words, as if trying to remove a foul taste from her mouth.

"Do you understand that that is true?" Whedon asked. "What we do here is very important and you are a part of that."

"I would like to see my brother," River then said firmly.

"Well, you can write to him, if you like..." Whedon began, but it was clear that wouldn't satisfy River.

"I need to..." River said firmly, but then seemed to calm down slightly. "I would like, please, to see him..."

"Well, I'm sure he's very busy..." Whedon replied, after a pause. River looked away from him, looking very disappointed.

"Yes..." she muttered. "Yes, I'm sure..."

If Alan had been startled by River's appearance by that session, then the next segment, Session 165, was even more alarming. River, her hair now falling over her face, was pacing back and forth in front of the desk, rambling incoherently and gesticulating wildly. Alan couldn't say for certain whether the words that came to him were the words that River had actually said, or whether he had made some of them up himself to try and match the sounds she was making:

"Yes, I had a system. You make an assumption because you had a system. Your system... You're symptomatic, it's chronic! You think it's benign, but it has to be cut out! This system is simple; blankets folded on the sheet on top of the mattress... The mattress can't be trusted; it has to be gutted... I looked under twenty and found a pea and you wonder why I'm not sleeping? You're worried that I cut up my mattress for no good reason, but I had a perfect reason that you can't see! Can't... see... anyone... Even the orderlies wear masks..."

"Why did you cut up your mattress?" Whedon asked, apparently completely unperturbed by River's deteriorating condition.

"I am trying to protect my spine!" River snarled, glaring at the doctor.

"Are you worried you might be injured?" Whedon quickly said. "Your movement trainers have given you an excellent review..."

"No-one will give me a mission!" River suddenly exclaimed.

"A mission?" Whedon asked.

"I have a reason!" River mumbled. "I'm... reasonable... I've a reason!" The video then suddenly cut to another part of the same interview, and once again Alan found himself having to guess what River was rambling:

"My movement hasn't been dictated yet, but I'm not feared for nothing! I... am a... sti... sty... You know I'm a spy... Something wrong... with the body politic..."

Once again the video cut, and River was suddenly screaming, collapsing onto the table as if an invisible force was pushing her down.

"They're sticking in me!" she screamed. "It's into me, it's driving me crazy! Get it out! Get it out! You cut it out!"

Before Alan even had time to process what he had just witnessed, the video cut to another card titled Session 416: First excerpt. Now when Alan saw River she looked positively frightening. She was sat facing away from Whedon, her hair wild and sticking out at odd angles.

"You're very quiet today," Whedon said, scribbling some notes down on a piece of paper. "How did your session with Dr. Mathias go?"

River's head turned slowly to face the doctor. Her expression was positively dead; she looked like someone who was in a trance.

"He gave me a mission," she said coldly.

"Really?" Whedon asked. "Did he tell you your mission out loud or did you just hear it?"

River said nothing for a moment, before turning away again.

"He plays hide and seek with me," she said.

"Dr. Mathias?" Whedon asked.

"My brother," River replied. "He's a doctor. He thinks he can find me, but... I am deep down, and I do not make a sound..."

"River, what mission did Dr. Mathias give you?" Whedon asked.

"I can't tell you," River replied simply.

"You can tell me anything," Whedon said with as much false sincerity as he could muster. "You know that."

"Can't... tell..." River muttered. Then she raised her arm and stretched it out towards the doctor, the palm of her hand upwards. "I'll have to write it down..." she said simply.

The next title card read Session 416: Second excerpt. When the excerpt began River was gone. Instead, Whedon was alone, making horrible straining noises. He then gasped and lurched forward, making horrible gagging sounds. His arm came into view as he placed his blood-soaked pencil onto the table. As the horrible gagging sounds increased, he collapsed onto the floor, and issued one final death-rattle.

Suddenly River burst into view, pressing her blood-soaked hand on what Alan assumed to be the glass dividing the interview room and the observation area. She was looking directly at the camera, breathing fast, looking terrified out of her mind, apparently appalled by what she had just done.

"I can see you," she said in a loud whisper. Then the video stopped, and there was nothing else to see.