The captain brings her in amid a hail of gunfire. Her eyes are closed and the left leg of her trousers is wet with blood, but someone had the sense to put a tourniquet on her and the wound has almost stopped bleeding. 'What happened?' he asks as the ship hums in take-off. The wound turns out to be a bullet, and he shivers. Please don't let it have hit the artery, please don't let it have hit the artery…
'Job went bad,' Mal says bluntly, and he doesn't listen for any more.
Later, as Kaylee sleeps and he cleans his instruments, he realises what the tourniquet was. The scarf is stiff, the colours lost to the rusty hue of dried blood. He washes it carefully, but the brown stains never fully fade away.