Chapter Three

Mal stepped into the silent infirmary. They were still running dark, so no extra lights were on. He could no longer tell if it was night or day. He'd been up so long, his body was convinced it was time to hibernate, but all the coffee he'd had made it impossible. Book was propped up in a chair, open Bible held against his stomach. From the way he was sleeping, he'd get a right bad crick in his neck. Mal nudged him, and Book startled awake.

"Go get some sleep, Shepherd."

Book wiped his eyes with thumb and forefinger and then checked his watch.

"All right, then. Let me know if anything changes, will you?"

"Not a problem." There was a pause. "Tell me, Shepherd, your faith makin' this any less worse?"

Book stopped in the doorway and looked at Mal, who'd stepped aside for him.

"A very foolish person might answer that having faith in God means such things don't matter so much or that the righteous don't have such things happen to them."

"That'd be a foolish person indeed," Mal agreed with him. There was something in his eyes, some faint spark that was more than anger, something verging on hatred.

"I'd only say that my faith helps me get through the bad times. It's a comfort, not a cure-all."

They faced each other for a long moment, and then Mal inclined his head the barest degree and went inside. Book left for his quarters.

Kaylee still slept on the middle gurney, but she was no longer restrained. She hadn't been conscious in over a day, and when she had been, she'd only cried and cried. There'd been no comfort to give her. Her face was still flushed with fever, her temperature so high it hurt to touch her skin. She would kick off her blankets and five minutes later, start shivering with cold. Simon still hadn't found anything that would bring the fever down.

Inara lay on the right hand couch, her wrists strapped down. When she'd been awake earlier that day, she had tried to pull out her IVs, and then spat curses that curled his hair to remember.  Zoe had been lucid for a short while, until she lapsed into something far too close to a coma. All three of them showed the effect of three days' worth of fever – drawn faces, weight loss, dull hair, and the room reeked like a distillery. He'd finally installed an air filter when Simon mentioned that he'd gotten dizzy.

Mal stepped over to Inara's couch and stood between her and Kaylee. The news from Buggered wasn't good. After an initial decline, the mortality stats were up. Over forty percent of the women taken ill by the virus before Serenity had cleared atmo had died. Simon mentioned he expected the final statistics to be above eighty-five percent, since the course of the illness looked to be at least a week long. He talked about things like point mutation, RNA replication, and disease vectors, but what it added up to was that in two weeks or so, more than eight hundred thousand women on Buggered were going to die.

And for all of him, they could go twist in the wind, so long as the three women in here kept body and soul together. He brushed a few strands of hair away from Inara's face. Strange how they rarely had one pleasant thing to say to another, but he remembered well enough how she'd offered to stay with that huan gwin on Persephone when it looked like he would lose the duel. And she'd used her leverage with a councilor to get medical aid after he'd been rescued from Niska. He'd the feeling that if it were in her power, she'd keep him almost in the same manner as so many of her clients wanted to keep her. No, that wasn't fair. She'd never shown any interest in depriving him of his freedom.

She didn't respond to his touch, sunk too far in fever dreams to feel it. He took her hand in his, unbuckled the strap that held it down, and brought it to his lips to kiss her knuckles as gently as he could, fearful of either hurting her or causing her to wake. The skin of her hand was hot and dry against his lips.

"Don't you go nowhere," he whispered to her, and laid her hand back down, deciding not to rebuckle the strap around it.

He kissed Kaylee on the forehead and stroked her hair. The skin around her eyes was puffy from all the crying she'd done. Simon had said not to mind; it was the fever talking, the virus, and not anything real. Mal didn't quite rightly believe him, though. He'd known well enough after he'd pitched Early off into the black, that something had shattered Kaylee's disposition. Where normally the regard of her smile left him feeling like he'd been standing under a warm springtime sun, now and then there was a cold, fitful wind that blew across with no warning and dark clouds that blocked her light. She'd declined to tell him what Early had threatened her with, and he hadn't pushed it, hoping she'd confide in Inara or Book, maybe even in Simon. Had it been within his power, he would have killed Early a hundred times over for what he'd done, and unlike Early, there was no way for him to take his anger and fear out on a virus.

Of the three, Zoe could be said to be doing the best. She stirred every few hours, seeming to sense when Wash came to check on her. There'd been no violence in her, only a drawn, pained expression that haunted him. He'd seen too many men gut shot or holding a severed limb with just that same expression – hurting too much to know just how bad it was and confused by the shock and pain.

Simon had said there was no trace of this illness or one like it in the Medacad archives. The Alliance was supposed to be working on a vaccine and an antiviral medication, but there'd been no mention from them on progress. It wasn't the first time, Mal suspected, that the Alliance had simply quarantined a world and conveniently "forgot" about it. In the meantime, Simon had been working twenty hours and sleeping four, then working another twenty hours in an attempt to come up with something that might help.

Mal looked at the faces of the three people more dear to him than any he could think of. He sat in the chair Book had left, put his head in his hands, and did his best not to weep.

Simon's face rested on a sheaf of printouts listing blood chemistry, cell counts, and one hundred different hormones. His snores rattled the curled up corners at the top of the stack. His hand slowly slipped off the desk until it hung limply at his side.

River stood just behind him, staring into his dreams. It was prying, she knew, like opening the door to the bathroom when someone was in there, but it might give her a chance to better explain what she knew, and that might save Zoe, Kaylee, and Inara.

"Where are the gorram neuralizers?" Simon shouted at the faceless staff nurse.

She put in his hands what were supposed to be neuralizers, but they changed as soon as he looked at them, and he was left holding another useless credit slip. There were bodies piled up all around the operating table. The worst part of it was that while they were dead, he could still save them, if only he got to them in time. He thought of mothers and fathers weeping with joy to get their child back, a child whose lips were no longer purple with death, a child with all her limbs attached the proper way. If only he could get those gorram neuralizers.

"It's singing."

Simon looked up from the operating table. The faceless nurse was holding up a book of poetry by a minor Arielian aristocrat. On the other side of the table, past the anesthesiologist holding a vacuum tube (what was he doing with that? Didn't he know he was supposed to use an intubator?) was River. She was eleven or so and looking up at him with that cocked eyebrow that told him he was about to be informed of something he'd missed, but she'd found elementary beyond belief.

"What's singing, River?"

She climbed up on a box beside the table so that she was eye to eye with him.

"The amygdala is," she replied, looking down at his patient. "And the corpus callosum, the neocortex, the anterior commisure, the splenium, and the temporal lobes."

"That's … those are the places in your brain that were damaged."

"Not damaged," she sighed, as though talking to a village idiot was quite the tiring thing "Rearranged, altered, supposedly improved, though they never got that far."

"That's good?" He checked the vitals of his patient. Temperature was 39.7, blood pressure 177 over 100, pulse 100, and respirations 45 per minute. Things were going downhill.

"No, dummy, that's not good. Choirs sing together. Brain cells fire asynchronously. Otherwise, the whole thing just seizures. You know that."

"That's nice, River," he answered, searching his tray of instruments for a neutralizer. "That's lovely, really, but I've got to save this patient, and I don't have ti-"

He looked down at his patient. It was Kaylee. She was dead.

He sat up with a jerk, gasping for air, and jerked again when River put her hands on his shoulders.

"It's singing," she insisted.

He stood shakily and guided River back to his bed, where she'd been sleeping while he worked on figuring out what he could do about this virus. Her skin was warm, so he checked her temp, 38.3 degrees. Feverish, but nowhere near as high as the others. Again, though, none of the fever medications he'd used were any good. Fever was normally the body turning up its thermostat in a ploy to burn out the invading germs. He was beginning to suspect that this was something a little different.

[Bankrupt popsicle stand], what a dream, he thought, rubbing his eyes. And where was the amphaytolactine? He was due to give River another shot. She watched him as he found a new syringe and the vial. His head would not clear of sleep, so he shook it, blinking to clear his eyes.

Amphaytolactine, it was a compound that affected several different centers of the brain, but not all of the ones that were injured in River. What had she said? Rearranged Supposedly improved. It also affected preoptic nucleus, the part of the brain that controlled body temperature. He stopped, trying not to scare away the idea that had just started to form.

"River, are you singing right now?" he asked.

She grinned at him, hugely. "Some. A little bit. But it's better. Not so in tune."

In tune, synchronous. Synchronous synaptic firings could cause epileptic seizures of the brain. That small idea was scratching on the inside of his head. Amygdala. Beef up that part of the brain, overstimulate it – like what had happened to River – caused aggression, sometimes to the point of unreasoning violence.

Inara's attack on Mal. The woman, Doreen, that the others had mentioned.

But what about Kaylee?

Neocortex and temporal lobes. Of course. Severe depression affected both of those cognitive centers, depressing activity, changing the magnetic field of the brain, and disrupting the delicate balance of neurotransmitters. It would take an enormous attack, but a new virus, completely unrecognized by the immune system might be able to infiltrate quickly enough to cause such a disruption.

Zoe? Her complaint, before she'd passed out had been of a terrible headache. The headache could have been caused by the fever, the high blood pressure, the rapid change in vital stats, but… corpus callosum, the splenium, and the anterior commisure were all part of the connection between the hemispheres of the brain. Zoe'd also had trouble getting her vision to focus, speaking, and naming things when he'd examined her. If the connection between the two hemispheres was damaged, or the brain was trying desperately to shunt around aggravated areas and the connection was overwhelmed by increased blood supply, straining the blood vessels…

He looked at his right hand, the vial of amphaytolactine clutched in his fingers, and then he looked up at River.

She had been sick all along.

The amphaytolactine had kept her fever down and prevented the virus from gaining a foothold in her brain. He looked at his left hand where he still held the syringe, and then in a scramble that nearly tripped him headfirst into the bulkhead, he ran for the infirmary.

"Check this!" he barked at Mal, waking him up.

"Whu-"

"Check my math. I can't make a mistake, and I'm too tired to redo it."

Mal took the pad of paper from Simon, focusing his gritty eyes on the column of numbers. Body weight in kilos, microliters per kilo, multiplication, and a dosage of some annotated drug.

"Wash'd be better for this," he groaned, looking for something to write with. "He can parse differential equations in his head."

"Wash isn't here. You are."

It took a few minutes. He double, then tripled checked the numbers.

"They're good."

Simon laid out three tiny syringes, graduated in tenths of milliliters, and began preparing the doses.

"You figured something out," Mal said, watching him closely.

"You could say that. Actually, it was River. She…" He stopped as he realized what he was about to say. She'd told him in a dream. His sister had been in his dream, and she had spoken to him. His knees wouldn't hold him up.

"Doc?"

He shook off his bafflement and returned his attention to the task at hand.

"Wash, man, wake up."

There was something shaking his shoulder. Groaning, he reached for his wife. Zoe would make whatever this was go away.

Zoe wasn't there. The bed wasn't there for that matter. He was sleeping in the cockpit. His face was stuck to the radar screen. Painfully, he sat up, feeling the skin of his face pull away from the screen. Jayne's hand was on his shoulder.

"Zoe's askin' for you. Mal told me to bring you down."

For a second, he couldn't phrase the question. "She's…"

"Better," Jayne shrugged, the slightest smile tugging on his mouth. "Prolly better'n you're doin."

His feet didn't touch the deck as he ran down to the infirmary. Mal grabbed him just before he went in.

"Now listen," he said sternly, the marks of several sleepless nights on his face. "She's tired, her head hurts, and she's still runnin' a fever. Simon thinks he's got a handle on this, but he doesn't know for sure."

"Right. Gotcha. Could you please move before I try to hurt you, captain?"

Mal let him go, and as soon as Wash stepped into the infirmary, his eyes found hers, and she smiled. It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.