Jayne scoffed. "Ran away from home at sixteen to keep from spendin my life behind a plow. Since then, I been all around the 'Verse, and seen the best and worst of it. Ate off platinum plates, and chased jackals off a carcass for my dinner. I been near kilt more times than I can count - shot, stabbed, blown up – even got damn near sucked out a lock once. Had enough money go through my hands to buy a fleet of ships, not that I hung on to any of it. Drank enough booze to float a barge, and had me more whores-" He stopped and gave a little throat-clearing cough when he remembered that the listener sitting beside him was a school-age boy. "And now, twenny years later, after all them adventures, I'm farmin again." Sitting in the air-conditioned cab of the big tractor ten feet above the field, he turned the wheel, and the machine U-turned neatly, discing the stalks of the last harvest back under the earth. "Then again, if farmin back home had been like this, mebbe I wouldn't of left."
"It still gets plenty boring," said Will Frye. "But I'm not ready to leave home over it. Guess some folks aren't cut out for adventuring, Mister Cobb."
Jayne looked the boy over: Kaylee's red-brown hair, cut short; light green eyes that nobody else in the Frye household shared, unless they had been his mother's; face a little more chiseled than Kay-Kay's, the chin a bit squarer. It occurred to the big merc that the boy somewhat resembled Simon. Good-looking kid. Probably just now getting hair in odd places, he thought, and starting to look at girls different. And I bet they're looking back. "If I learned anything while I was out in the back end of the 'Verse, I learned that adventure finds you more often than you find it, and in some damned unlikely places." And at damned inconvenient times.
They rode in silence for a bit, with Jayne guiding the big machine up and down the rows. Will broke the quiet from time to time with a word of guidance or advice. Jayne mostly thought.
Dinner at the Fryes's, shortly after Serenity had grounded the day before, had been an interesting affair, starting with Mama Frye asking the Shepherd to say Grace. Jayne had promptly folded his hands on the table and put on the pious face he usually reserved for judges, while watching the Captain remember that he wasn't on his boat, and that he needed these people's goodwill. Shepherd had shown mercy and not let the table blessing get too long or pointy; Mal had looked like he'd sat on one of Kaylee's jacks, but he'd bowed his head and kept silent, waiting for the soft chorus of 'Amens' before reaching for a roll.
The fare was the best Jayne had sat down to since dinner at Badger's; it was easy to see New Home was an ag world, and right prosperous. And Mama Frye was plainly used to feeding working men. He had loaded his plate, and loaded it again, trying hard to remember his table manners. Three weeks of eating like this, he thought, would have him all fattened up and ready for slaughter.
Dinner conversation was like the sound of Serenity's engines: ever-changing in volume and pitch, with extra little bits thrown in from time to time, but always there; everybody didn't talk all the time, but the table didn't stay quiet for three seconds, not with fourteen people worling to fill the silence. Kaylee and the other Fryes did most of the talking, but not all. Topics covered everything under the sun and stars: young Will's school, work around the farm, weather – always a big subject with farmers – and doings in town. Jayne noticed that nobody brought up politics, though, and Papa Frye didn't press Kaylee much for news of what she'd been doing aboard ship.
Kaylee and Wash spent a lot of time talking with her father and older brothers about the ordering of the job to come on Serenity. Despite the old freighter's current state, Kaylee was proud of it as a new mother with her babe, and eager to show it off to her family. Papa Frye allowed that Fireflys were well-built ships, and a good design for certain types of work; a militarized version of the Ought-Three had been one of the chief workhorses of the Independent fleet. That drew Zoë into the conversation: she was ship-born and ex-Army besides, and had ridden more than one Cerberus on the Independent Army's long retreat. Her comments were interesting and kind, and carefully trimmed to keep them from coming out like war stories.
Mal surprised the Fryes –and a few of the crew- with knowledgeable talk about running cattle, something he'd done since he was a kid right up until he'd joined the Volunteers. Considering the way the Captain usually talked about 'prairie folk' and 'kissing the dirt,' he made it sound like it had been a good time, mostly, and seemed to look back on that time with affection. Jayne refrained from talking about his own childhood on the family farm, not wanting to upset his hosts at table.
The only true discomfort had come from the Tams. They sat side-by-side at the middle of the long table, as far as they could get from Mama and Papa Frye, who occupied the ends. Kaylee and the Shepherd flanked them. Inara sat opposite, scarce an arm's length away from the sibs, and deftly steered conversation away from uncomfortable topics. But Jayne had seen the measuring looks in the eyes of Jim Frye and his sons as they regarded the boy Kaylee had brought home to meet the family.
Jayne couldn't figure out who River had been copycatting that night, but it wasn't Kaylee. And if it was Zoë or Inara, the little reader was showing a side of one of those two women Jayne had never seen before. She'd been quiet enough, but there had seemed to be a lot going on behind those big spooky eyes. She'd smile at her plate, then leak a tear into it, then lift her head and stare at somebody as if they'd said something, only they hadn't. Sometimes she'd make a low comment to one of her table companions that would make them blink and look at one another. It had all made Jayne wonder what Simon's latest miracle drug might be doing to her, or if she was overdue for the next shot.
Today, all the crew not involved with repairing the ship were helping out around the farm. The only exception was the whore princess, who was out letting corporate execs and Alliance officers fill her purse, so to speak. She had offered to pitch in around the house, and to help pay for the purchase of necessaries for the ship - said offers having been politely refused by Missus Frye and Mal, respectively.
The captain's refusal was easy enough to figure. Even though their Companion had figured prominently in more than one of their capers, Mal still maintained that she was a paying passenger, not crew. Taking money from Inara for ship maintenance, Jayne figured, would incur a debt that would cost Cap'n Tightpants leverage in his endless arguments with her. He scoffed. As if Malcolm Reynolds had ever 'won' an engagement with Inara Serra – 'withdraw under fire' was more like it.
"Something funny?" Will asked.
"Hn. Just thinkin about how dumb smart people can be."
Kaylee's ma was a different story. Though there was no Chapter House on New Home, Jayne knew from Kaylee that Companions were respected here, so he doubted that the lady of the house shared Mal's jackass opinions about Inara's line of work. But he also knew that the elder Fryes were both serious about their shares of the task load around their homestead; Jayne figured that Missus Frye was less worried about a high-priced call girl sharing their table and trading smiles with her menfolk than she was about some Core-bred fancy girl rearranging the flowers in her vases and feng shui'ing her furniture.
"Mister Cobb, do you know my father?"
The tractor slowed for a moment before Jayne got his wits back. "Why would you think I know your pa?"
The boy shrugged. "Nobody talks about him. Not my family, not the neighbors, nobody. They don't talk much about my mother either. I know she was Aunt Kaylee's older sister, and she disappeared when I was a year old. It's pretty clear that something happened to her before I was born. I figure he left her when she told him she was having a baby, and it broke her heart." He shifted in the seat. "Kaylee talks so fond of you in her post, and she left so quick when your ship came to port, I thought maybe she knew you from somewhere before, and went to be with you. And if you known each other long enough …"
"Then I'd know who your pa was. Sorry, kid. I met her on the ship when I hired on."
Will nodded and turned back to the windshield. "If only they'd talk to me about it."
"Well …" He hesitated. "If they're keepin it from ya, they must have a good reason. That means there's something important about it. And that means that they're sure to tell you someday, when they think you're ready and need to know." His advice sounded about as satisfying as weak tea, and he imagined the kid had heard much the same from others he'd asked. Will looked up at Jayne with troubled eyes, and the merc was sure that the boy realized that the man beside him knew more than he was telling.
-0-
Serenity was a ship with a long and varied history. She had changed hands at least four times since coming out of the yard, River was certain, and each new crew and owner had left their mark for discerning eyes to find, from the decorations in the galley, and the graffiti in the access spaces, to the odd items left behind in the smugglers' holes. River had explored every centimeter of the old girl's interior and knew them all. Her familiarity with the ship's seldom-used and hard-to-reach places had made her a natural choice for tracing wires throughout the ship - a job that was essential to proper diagnosis and repair, since Kaylee hadn't been the first of the old Firefly's mechanics to mend her with make-do parts and workarounds.
River was standing on a ladder leading up through an opening in the ceiling to an overhead access space, trying to match the faded color-coding on a bundle of wires in its raceway to a diagram in a thick binder that Papa Frye had dug up. So far, scarcely half of the wires matched. The interesting ones were those that were spliced mid-run with different colored wire; those she had to track to their sources, sometimes going from one color to another to another before she reached a module whose coding she could trust. It was a tedious and undemanding job for a person of River Tam's gifts, but it was an utterly necessary one, and she was the best qualified. And it was a job everyone felt comfortable entrusting to her; even after her recent improvements, a few of her crewmates were still leery around her when she had a sharp object in her hand, and wouldn't let her take a turn at galley duty.
In truth, River didn't mind the assignment. The solitude allowed her to relax and let her guard down a bit. Even on a world as thinly settled as New Home, the million voices were close and pressing, and she needed filters to keep from being swept away. But using her analogue of Kaylee's perception of reality, while the easiest of River's options, seemed likely to alarm the redheaded mechanic's family. Inara's filters were her usual second choice, but entailed hazards of their own around a pair of mating-age males who were already looking at her with speculative eyes. Zoë filters were safe enough, but difficult to construct and maintain. Spending her time mostly alone on the ship, doing Kaylee jobs in a Kaylee state of mind, halved the difficulty of maintaining her sanity.
The simple work allowed her mind to wander, both inside her head and far beyond it. Presently River was gathering and collating impressions of the farm and the people on it. She had already sampled all its inhabitants, from the family and hired hands down to the simple thoughts and desires of its livestock and vermin. Now, she amused herself comparing and contrasting the Fryes and the crew, arranging them on opposite sides of her mind like pieces on a chess board: Papa Frye to Mal, Mama Frye to Zoë, Matt to Wash. Kaylee stood on both sides of the board, of course, in two versions subtly different on farm and ship.
Other pairings were less clear. Rosh had a sort of Jayne flavor to him that intrigued her, but the resemblance was no closer than that between a watchdog and a wolf. He didn't smell right, either for an ape-man merc or a Frye. And the way he treated Kaylee didn't seem very brotherly, though she didn't seem to mind.
She supposed that Will, Kaylee's little brother, was most closely matched to River herself. There were similarities besides them each being youngest. The boy was different from the other males in the Frye household, looking at the world through different eyes. Not that he had trouble fitting in; his sibs and parents treated him properly, and with love. But River understood secrets, and in their glances and in the pauses in their conversations, she saw that there was something about Will Frye that his family kept close - his full parentage, likely, and the circumstances of his conception.
The Shepherd had no equivalent on the homestead – he was as out-of-place there as a horse in a rowboat. He had offered his help around the farm, but they hadn't found anything suitable for him yet. He had claimed to be 'the student of a carpenter,' but his attempt to mend a wall in the corn crib had left the brothers smiling behind their hands. Although, she thought, if their herds had been troubled by wolves - or rustlers - they would have needed only to take the hammer from Derrial Book's hand and give him a rifle.
Her reverie was suddenly interrupted. River had only a brief image of herself seen through another's eyes: a rear view, standing on the ladder in a pair of Kaylee's coveralls, her upper half invisible above the opening. Then a pair of hands gripped her hips, and she experienced a strange sort of tactile déjà vu: the hands on her felt warm and familiar, although the man they belonged to had never touched her before.
"I thought you had a nigh perfect figure when you left," Rosh said. "But I reckon losing a few pounds didn't hurt that saucy little pigu none." His fingers curled around her hipbones. "Hm, you got handles now. Better grip."
Without thinking about it, River set aside her pliers and reached down through the hole. She slapped at his hand, not hard enough to sting. "Stop it."
"That what you tell ol' Simon?" His hands slipped off her. "Bet not. How'd you hook up with a nance like that anyway? From all your post, I thought you were set on this Jayne fella."
"It didn't work out," River said quietly. "And Simon's not a nance, he just likes things neat."
"If you say so," he said doubtfully. "Seems kind of stuck-up. His sister, too. A real lamei, but you can tell by the way she looks right through you she thinks she's better than us outworld grubs. Bet she's off somewhere polishin her nails while the rest of us are workin." Rosh wound his arms around her, hugging her hips; his cheek pressed against the small of her back. "We ain't talked alone since you got back, Winnit. Whyn'cha come down so we can do this face-to-face? Bein up in that box makes your voice sound funny."
"Ahem." Kaylee's voice, somewhere behind them.
Rosh jerked, and his embrace vanished. "Wo di tien ah," he said in a hushed voice.
River descended the three rungs to the floor and turned to regard Rosh Frye's burning face and Kaylee's smirking one.
Rosh looked like a convicted man waiting for his sentence. "I'm so humped."
"You wish," his sister said, amused.
River looked at Rosh, but spoke to Kaylee. "He was your first."
All the color drained from the boy's face. "Win, you told?"
"She's a hard person to keep secrets from," Kaylee said, catching River's eyes. "But don't fret. She's got plenty of her own. She'll keep ours. She's my sister now, same as you're my brother." Her gaze shifted to the distraught boy. "Go on now. Got less than half an hour till supper, and we'll prolly want to spend it all talking about you." She made a shooing gesture, and he left, his eyes on the two women until he cleared the door, as if afraid to turn his back on them.
The redheaded girl turned to River. "So, how much explainin do I need to do?"
"He's not blood," River said. "A neighbor, a friend of your pa, his son. He was fourteen, you were twelve. Almost thirteen," she amended quickly as Kaylee's eyebrows lowered.
"I was already startin to look like a real girl by then," Kaylee said, "bumps and everything. And I'm easy enough on the eyes. I shoulda had any other young girl's chance to learn about being a woman, and my pick of curious boys to help. But that day in the woods was only two years gone. Will was just outta diapers, and there were still folks searchin the woods and the creek bottoms for my sister Mina. Most of the older boys seemed kinda scared of me, specially Matt's friends. I guess they thought I might go all Willamina on em if they touched my hair or stole a kiss."
She gazed at the wall, and River caught a brief image: a pair of young men with flared nostrils exchanging words too low to hear, then turning away. "Those were the good ones. The pastor's son and a couple others looked at me and Mina like we were tainted meat. Like what happened to us was our fault somehow, or maybe the big man had given us something catching."
"You didn't deserve to be shunned for what happened to you. They were jibas."
"I know. I think Pa saw it too. The family switched churches a month after we were rescued." Kaylee went on, "And there were a few … well, they kinda scared me." Another image, a young man looking down on her with hooded eyes, speculative eyes. "I swear, it was like what happened to me … attracted them. None of them ever got in trouble over a girl, far as I know, and one of em's even married, with kids. But I'll never stay alone in a room with him.
"Rosh was different. Whether we were alone or with folks, he treated me like a friend. We horsed around and traded stories and insults. He'd punch me in the shoulder one minute and hug me the next." She smiled. "After a while, the hugs sorta crowded out the punches, and we started spendin time up in the hayloft together. We kissed for the first time up there. Did a lotta things for the first time up there. And I never once thought of the bad man while we were doin em."
"He lost his parents right after. A fire, I think."
"Ayuh. Their house. They think it started in the kitchen. The father ran inside after his wife, and the roof came down on both of them. Rosh was in school. Ma and Pa took him in, told me and Matt we had a new brother."
"Awkward?"
"Coulda been worse. If my folks had caught us before the fire, Pa woulda took Rosh's hide half off. Then he woulda told Rosh's pa so he could finish the job. When he lost his folks, Pa would have taken him in anyway. He just would have watched us more careful." She went on, "We didn't really talk about it, but once Rosh was sleepin under our roof and Pa was callin him 'son,' we were done sneakin off to the hayloft. We got over it, and moved on." The redhead smiled. "He still gets kinda frisky with me sometimes, just to tell me he remembers. But I couldn't ask for a better brother. And I'm thinking he's pash about my beau's little sister."
River returned the smile. "Jayne is interested in him, too. I think they'll be having a talk soon."
-0-
"Damn it, Jim," Simon said, wiping perspiration from his forehead and leaving behind a black smear. "I'm a doctor, not a tractor mechanic."
"It's a harvester, not a tractor. And you're not doin so bad." Jim Frye, a few feet away, peered into an adjacent access panel on the big machine as he stripped six inches of cladding from a thick black cable in his hands, exposing several different-colored wires. "You're unschooled, but you've got good hands."
Simon thought that Kaylee's father was being rather charitable. His part of the repair job had mostly been removing various components at Jim's direction; he was sure a monkey could be trained to do the job as well. And he was sure that the elder Frye was capable of working just as efficiently alone. That left just one reason for his request for Simon's help on a task far removed from the parked Firefly where his daughter was working. He said, "I really don't see how I could be doing this wrong."
"You'd be surprised. There's an art to doing delicate work inside a little opening like this. You plan it out and take it a step at a time so you don't forget anything. It takes patience and attention to detail." He stripped a finger's width of colored insulation from the end of each wire and began to thread the end of the cable into the opening. "Must be summat like surgery."
"Somewhat," Simon agreed, setting down on a workbench the tool and fasteners and little module he had just removed from the big machine's innards. "But you never let anyone inside an incision who doesn't know his way around. I'd feel a lot more confident if I knew what all the little wires and boxes I'm handling actually do. Maybe then the hairs on the back of my neck wouldn't rise up when I touch a frayed cable."
"Frayed cable?" Alarm touched the man's voice. "Where?"
Simon frowned. "Coming out of the square module about sixty centimeters in, the one secured to the front wall with a row of fasteners through a flange along the bottom. The cable comes out the bottom of the inboard side and takes a sharp bend upward."
Kaylee's father rummaged in a toolbox and produced a miniature camera on a flexible extension. He inserted it into the panel and guided it carefully, turning this way and that as he watched a tiny screen in his hand. After a bit, he stopped. "Gorry. Will you lookit that."
Simon studied the image: a finger-thick yellow cable, scraped bare of insulation near where it entered the box. Several stray wires from the braided cable had not been inserted into the entry clamp on the box's housing, and their hair-fine ends were resting against the housing.
"Good thing we cut the power first," the man said. "You'd have touched it then, you wouldn't of liked it much. See those black marks? Been sparking some, I'd say." He pulled off his cap and scratched his head. "Thing is, there's really nothing for it to rub against, so how did the cladding get scraped off?"
"Well…" Simon reached inside the panel door and snaked his hand through the maze of wires and assemblies until his elbow was inside as well, and he could see the image of his hand on the display, touching the module. He began feeling around under it, out of sight of the camera. Presently he found what he was looking for, withdrew his arm and showed Jim a pinch of long yellow shavings. "At a guess, when it was reinstalled. The module looks much cleaner than the surrounding parts. I'd say it's a recent replacement."
"Bet your pigu it is. Olaf told me this harvester's been acting up for three weeks. He must've hired somebody else on the cheap to do some work first, then brought it to me when his shade-tree mechanic messed it up. Pop those fasteners so we can get at the connection." He returned to his work.
Simon applied himself to the module cover, now working by sight as well as touch, and had it off in a couple of minutes despite the cramped access. "Open."
"Quick work. Didn't even lose a screw?" As the man peered at the image, he said, "How come Jayne calls you Three Percent?"
Here it comes, Simon thought. "I told him once that I graduated in the top three percent of my class at medical school."
"Huh." James's eyes were fixed on the little screen as he reached past Simon to work a pair of pliers into the opening. He said, almost to himself, "You're smart. She doesn't go for smart, usually."
"Sir," he said, feeling a band tighten around his chest. "We're very serious about each other."
"Serious. That's something." He disconnected the damaged cable and pulled it free. "Follow me, and I'll show you where we keep the wire spools." As they walked together through the big repair shed, he said, "So. How did you meet?"
"When we took ship for Boros."
"Who do you know on Boros?"
"No one. It was just the next stop."
"Well, then, where were you bound?"
"It was an open-ended itinerary."
"And now you're the ship's medic?"
"Among other things."
"I got a feeling you didn't hire into that job."
"No." Simon's mouth went dry at the thought of telling Kaylee's father about his first medical emergency aboard the tramp freighter. "We were passengers at first, but…" He trailed off, hoping the man wouldn't press.
"That girl really your sister?"
"Yes," he said. "She's … not well."
They reached a tall metal stand, from which hung rows of wire spools of various sizes. Kaylee's father selected one and began pulling out a length of thick yellow cable. "You keep answerin like a witness on the stand, son, this is gonna take awhile."
You marry a woman, you marry her family. Simon said, "Jim, how do you feel about the Alliance?"
Jim Frye gave him a sidelong glance. "Like that?" He compared the wire he had unrolled to the damaged one, cut it to length, and cleaned the ends while Simon stood by, mouth still dry. Eventually the man started back, wire in hand. "New Home got occupied early in the War, and nobody made much fuss about it. Folks around here are more worried about the price of grain on Hera than they are about who's appointing the judges in Capital City. The independence movement here never got past being an excuse for the local hooligans to paint up the courthouse wall of a night."
They reached the harvester, and Jim began to work the cable into the open panel. "Alliance doesn't much care about us, either. It claims supreme jurisdiction, of course, and it left a garrison after the War. But mostly the uniforms stay close to Federal property and the Core World companies that do business here. Folks on New Home pretty much look after themselves, and each other. So long as our local lawmen and politicians don't get too big for their britches, the Alliance leaves us alone." The wire's end reached the module, and he began carefully to work it into the entry clamp. "But it seems to me it's got some funny ideas about what's important, and about what's right and wrong."
Simon began talking, haltingly at first, then gathering speed and force. Before he was done, the work on the harvester had been abandoned, and the men sat on stools at the repair bench inside the shed, sipping fruit juice as the shadows through the big open doorway shifted and lengthened.
"Well," the man said, staring into his glass. "And Reynolds has been sheltering you, for Kaywinnit's sake?"
"I'm not sure he could tell you why, really. He was ready to turn me in, at first, until he discovered River. Then he was going to dump us on a wild world where we might not have stayed free and unhurt for a day, just wash his hands of us. But he didn't. Instead he shot a man to protect us, and offered us a place on his ship." Simon shrugged. "He's a complicated man."
"But on balance he's a good one, I think. Else I never woulda let her go with him in the first place." Jim stood. "She's my baby, and I missed her every minute she was gone. But she's also my wild child, the restless one trouble's always finding, and the sooner I get her and all of you a way off this world, the better off she'll be."
-0-
"You're enjoying this." Zoë guided her horse along the mesh fence that bordered the Frye pastureland, looking ahead to where it rose over a hill and disappeared.
Mal, riding beside on the other side of the fence, took a deep breath of uncanned air and let it out. "It's somewhat of a change."
"Take you back?"
"Some. Shadow's not as green. You couldn't ride fence for a day without fillin your nose with dust. But the work's the same. How bout you?"
"Never sat a horse before the War."
Mal hid his surprise. He had known Zoë was ship-born, but… "Not even durin your carefree girlhood as a prairie chick?"
"On Sutter?" She scoffed. "I didn't ride a horse, or drive a wagon. If I left the house alone, I went on foot, and any man I met had a right to ask me my business, and it had better be my uncle's. I was freer in the Army."
They crested the hill and paused, looking down. The fence meandered down to a stand of mature trees, wide-spaced and parklike. One of them had toppled, and looked to be lying across the fenceline. Mal flicked the reins and sent his mare down the hill.
They entered the wood. Sure enough, the tree lay across the fence, mashing the fabric to the ground and bending the steel posts inward. They dismounted, hobbled their mounts to graze in the cool grass, and unpacked their woodcutting gear. Mal said, "So what made you leave behind all the comforts for three days and nights of riding fence?"
Zoë produced a hatchet and began brushing out the trunk. "If not for this, I'd have ended up in the kitchen."
"Huh," he said. Zoë had an unexplained hatred of the womanly arts. She was a fine cook, but Mal could count on one hand the number of times he'd had a scratch-cooked meal from her; Kaylee cheerfully took the first mate's share of galley duty aboard ship. But was that the real reason she was here? He passed the cutting bar over the fence and took the hatchet from her. "Wash okay with this?"
Zoë gave him a dark look. "You gonna talk or work?" She fired up the cutter and dropped it to the trunk, and its buzzing whine put an end to conversation.
So they'd been fighting, he thought. There hadn't been any hints of jealousy on Wash's part since Niska's skyplex, but Mal thought it only natural that Zoë's husband would think small of his wife leaving him for three days to play cowboy while he went crawling through Serenity's maintenance spaces. Or … had he told her of the ultimatum he'd given the captain?
Call him 'sir' a lot, Wash had once suggested sourly to his wife. He likes that. Mal scoffed as he applied the hatchet to the limbs on his end of the tree. He could also count on one hand the number of times she'd called him sir out of hearing of the others; all that deference just suited her notions of ship's discipline, was all. When they were private, she often talked to him as if he was a wayward child, just like when they were sergeant and corporal during the War.
And that, he thought, was likely the real reason they were out here alone together. Sooner or later over the next couple days, Mal was going to get an earful that his mate didn't want anyone else to hear.
Zoë finished cutting her half of the trunk into manageable sections and shut off the bar. As she passed it over the fence, she said, "You give any thought to how we're gonna pay these folks back?"
And there it is, he thought. Guess it's going to be sooner than later. "You don't think we're makin a down payment right now?" It was his turn to fire up the cutter and end the talk, mostly to give himself time to search for a better answer. But Mal had started life as a rancher, and wasn't hopeful about his prospects of finding one: he knew what he and Zoë and the others were doing here. By the time he had sectioned his half of the tree and shut off the bar, one still hadn't presented itself.
Zoë kicked the log section nearest the fence and sent it rolling away. Then she stuck a boot toe into the collapsed fabric of the fence, squatted, and gripped the top in both hands. She straightened with an effort, pulling the mesh into something resembling a fence again, while Mal applied a come-along to the bent posts, stretching the abused fencing as they righted. Mal went on, "I know this isn't much-"
"It isn't anything," she said, as she grasped the broken ends of the stretched-out strand of barbed wire that ran across the top with a pair of pliers, then twisted them together. "These are the sort of set-aside chores you put by for between harvest and planting. We're not making these folks' lives any easier, we're just freeing them up to work on our ship. If we'd never come here, they'd be working shorter hours than they are now, I expect." She bent to the pack at her feet. "Least the two of us are doing something we know needs done. I think Kaylee's pa is giving the others make-work just to make them feel useful." Pulling out a canteen, she uncapped it, took a deep pull, and offered it across the fence. "We can't leave with this hanging over our heads. Before we lift, we need to have a plan at least for clearing the debt."
Mal took the proffered canteen from her hand. "I'll come up with something. Might be risky."
"Just so long as we don't have to rob a train."
Author's note: a time or three in my stories, I've mentioned the 'Cerberus,' a class of gunboat based on the Firefly model flown by our heroes. This isn't my creation, but that of the folks at Quantum Mechanix, an online store specializing in sci-fi series items. They'll sell you a poster of the very dangerous-looking ship for a fair price, along with any number of Firefly-related stuff.