“Okay.”
“Are you going to say something other than ‘okay’?”
“Okay.”
“Go ahead then.”
Mal paused, then said, “How long for?”
“How long for…?”
“How long d’you plan on staying at House Madrassa for, if you go?”
“I really don’t know,” Inara said.
“Not indefinitely, though.”
“Definitely not indefinitely.”
“So you can see a day when you might come back to Serenity?”
“I’m not ruling it out. And in the meantime, there’s no reason you can’t come and visit me on Sihnon. Also, there is, y’know, this newfangled thing people do called ‘sending a wave’.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of that. It’s all the rage with the kids.”
Inara looked him in the eye. “Are we good, Mal? You and me?”
He looked back at her, filled with both disappointment and hope, unsure which was the more painful of the two emotions.
“I think,” he said with deliberation, “we are.”
They sat side by side for a time, taking in the view, neither feeling the need to speak any further, Inara’s hand still on Mal’s. It was a perfect fall day—perhaps the last fall day before winter’s chill began to make itself felt—and both of them chose to enjoy it. If colder times lay in the future, so be it. Summer would come round again soon enough. It always did.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Lovegrove is the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Odin. He was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1998 and for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2004, and also reviews fiction for the Financial Times. He is the author of the Dragon-Award winning Firefly: The Ghost Machine, Firefly: The Magnificent Nine, and Firefly: Big Damn Hero with Nancy Holder, along with several Sherlock Holmes novels for Titan Books.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
BIG DAMN HERO
JAMES LOVEGROVE (ORIGINAL STORY CONCEPT BY NANCY HOLDER)
Captain Malcolm Reynolds has been kidnapped by a bunch of embittered veteran Browncoats who suspect him of sabotaging the Independents during the war. He’s placed on trial for his life, fighting compelling evidence that someone did indeed betray them to the Alliance all those years ago. Mal must prove his innocence, but his captors are desperate and destitute, and will settle for nothing less than the culprit’s blood.
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THE MAGNIFICENT NINE
JAMES LOVEGROVE
Jayne’s ex, Temperance McCloud, gets in touch with Serenity begging for help. She lives on a desert moon where bandits are trying to gain control of her town’s water supply. Jayne persuades the crew to go there, but on arrival they discover two things: outlaws with a fanatical devotion to their leader who will stop at nothing to get to the water, and that Temperance has a daughter, born less than a year after she and Jayne broke up, called Jane McCloud…
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THE GHOST MACHINE
JAMES LOVEGROVE
Mal’s crew desperately need another payday, but not desperately enough to transport a Blue Sun flightcase to Badger, no questions asked, when the area is swarming with Alliance spacecraft equally keen to regain the stolen property. Yet Jayne refuses to miss out, and sneaks the case aboard Serenity. The crew soon find themselves paralysed by hallucinations of their deepest hopes and desires, so vivid they cannot be distinguished from reality.
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GENERATIONS
TIM LEBBON
Mal wins an old map in a card game. Ancient and written in impenetrable symbols, the former owner insists it’s worthless. Yet River Tam can read it, and says it leads to one of the Arks, legendary ships that brought humans from Earth-That-W as to the ’Verse. The salvage potential alone is staggering. But the closer they get to the ancient ship, the more agitated River becomes. She says something is waiting inside, something powerful, and very angry…
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Firefly--Life Signs Page 29
