“I hate stupid women, sir,” she said.
“They are truly despicable,” he agreed amiably.
“Hey, what’s the rush?” Jayne called at them.
When Mal looked back, Jayne had his arms around two of the intoxicated young women, and the third was carefully threading the stick of her Alliance pennant through the stitches of his left earflap.
“I love your hat! You look so cute!” the pennant-threader squealed.
The blondest of the three reached overhead, jumping repeatedly as she tried to touch the orange pompom crest. Grinning from ear to ear, Jayne reveled in the attention. Mal and Zoë didn’t comment, just kept on walking up the street.
“Hey, wait up,” Jayne shouted at their backs. The girls detached themselves and reeled away, laughing.
Jayne closed the gap, still savoring his moment of adulation. He adjusted the fit of his hat and the angle of its newly acquired decoration. Unable to control himself, Mal snatched away the loathsome symbol, threw it to the pavement, and ground it under his boot heel.
Jayne didn’t bend down to recover the pennant. Emotionally, it seemed he had already moved on. “After we get our business done, how’s about we spend the night in port? There’s so many parties…”
“And we have a cargo bay full of chemicals I don’t particularly want to hang onto any longer than necessary,” Mal said.
“Oh, right. On account of they might blow up on us.” Jayne smiled unpleasantly, less of a smile and more of a scowl with bared teeth. “I swear, sometimes the jobs we take—”
Irked, Mal rounded on him. “Are what, Jayne? Dangerous? Foolhardy? Scrapin’ the barrel so hard, we’ve dug right through the bottom?”
“Well, yeah. Why do we bother with ’em?”
“’Cause those are the only jobs we can get and stay under the radar. They’re what keeps us flying and out of prison, or maybe getting our necks stretched.”
Jayne waved him off. “Ease up, Mal. Don’t take it out on me. I’m not the one who lost your war for you.”
Zoë thrust herself between them, stepping toe to toe with Jayne. Chin raised, she bored her steely gaze into him. “I think you might want to shut your mouth, Jayne, before I shut it for you.”
It was a serious threat and Jayne took it as such. “Didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” he groused. His cheeks were red, this time from embarrassment. Jayne hated backing down. “You two are livin’ in the past, is all. Like Badger said, war’s over. Been over a long whiles. Might as well make the most of the peace.”
Zoë opened her mouth to speak, then seemed to catch herself. She gave Jayne a long, measuring glance, like the slowest burn a Firefly-class transport vessel could achieve.
“What?” he protested indignantly. “It’s just the plain truth. The war is over. And losing’s not so bad. Ain’t as if it’s the end of the world. I’ve lost stuff lots of times. Poker games, loot from robberies, a horse, my virginity, and…” He glanced down at the pennant Mal had stomped into the dust. His eyes widened. “Oh, no!” he groaned, reaching down and grabbing up the torn pieces. He held them out to Mal accusingly. “She wrote her wave code on it. See? Now I can’t read it. You scraped off half the writing.”
“Losing ain’t so bad,” Mal echoed. “Besides, she weren’t no good.”
“How d’you figure that?” Jayne asked.
“She liked that hat of yours.”
Jayne drew himself up to his full, considerable height. “My mom knitted this hat. You’re just jealous.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Mal retorted.
Muttering to himself, Jayne tried to piece the pennant back together. He gave up after a few seconds and in frustration threw the tatters into the air.
“All right, listen up now,” Mal said as they drew near Taggart’s Bar. “The meet with Hunter Covington is at six sharp. We establish whether he’s above board, or elsewise. If he is, we receive whatever it is he wants us to carry, then we fetch Kaylee and have her verify our shuttle’s all fixed. I’ll pay the repair bill, we’ll get rid of that loaner, and meantime Wash’ll be prepping for dustoff.”
“Did this Covington fella tell you what he’s got for us to transport?” Jayne asked.
“Said he preferred to discuss it in person rather’n by wave,” Mal said.
Hunter Covington was one of the things that Mal liked least, an unknown quantity. He had requested a quote for shipping “a small item” to a nearby location that would be disclosed when they met. Mal wasn’t keen on the vagueness, nor on doing business with an out-and-out stranger, but had nonetheless arranged a meetup at Taggart’s since they were on Persephone anyway. Only a rich man or a dolt turned down potential paid work, and Mal was certainly not the former and trusted he wasn’t the latter.
“Crucial thing,” he added, “we don’t mention that we might get blown up before we deliver his goods. Got that?”
“That’s smart,” Jayne said earnestly.
They strolled past the store where Mal had bought Kaylee her pink, frilly layer-cake dress for that society ball a while back. Today the living mannequins were dressed in the colors of the Alliance, holding flags and waving at the window-shoppers. The folks in the street cheered and waved back at them.
At another store farther down the row, a scrap-merchant-cum-pawnbroker, Mal and Kaylee had haggled many times over parts for Serenity, while across the street was the grocery where the crew usually purchased protein blocks for the galley. Every gorramn shopfront had put up a flag to celebrate the day when Persephone had joined the Alliance. Or maybe it was just to avoid being blacklisted by Alliance loyalists. Maybe secretly they were as angry as Mal was. He could hope.
The trio cut down a narrow alley that was made even narrower by avalanches of bricks that had cascaded out of the walls of the three-story buildings on either side. High overhead, a transport barge rumbled and popped, belching a trail of smoke as it crawled up into the sky.
After a right turn into the next adjoining street, Mal, Zoë, and Jayne found themselves face to face with another gaggle of drunken girls, these wearing Alliance-flag capes and hats. After they’d filed past, one of girls called back to Mal, “Want my wave code, honey?”
Jayne let out a low growl.
From that, Mal reckoned he hadn’t been forgiven yet. But Jayne was never one to hold a grudge for long. Not because of any charity on his part; he simply had a very short — and narrow — attention span.
As they progressed along the street, the stores got shabbier and shabbier and became interspersed with boarded-up, roofless commercial buildings inhabited by a few scattered squatters. The smoke was thicker here; it rasped the back of Mal’s throat and it smelled like the inhabitants were burning dried dung. A beggar sat cross-legged on the sidewalk with a dirt-caked hand extended to passersby.
They kept going, to an even more desolate and sparsely inhabited part of town. Their destination was one of the few drinking establishments still open for business on this street. Above the entrance a hand-painted sign, hanging somewhat askew, read “Taggart’s Bar and Lounge.” It might as well have said, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” This was the kind of place where Mal did the kind of deals he was forced to make these days.
The rumble of music and shouting from inside could be heard half a block away. The front wall of the squat, cinderblock structure had been whitewashed once upon a time, but now it was covered by a band of graffiti from the sidewalk to as far as a person could comfortably reach, layer upon layer covering all but a few specks of the white. The green metal double saloon doors were cracked and rusting. The holographic front window hummed and shorted in an erratic, irritating rhythm. Under the window, a puddle of something on the pavement glistened purple and sticky in the dim light. Could’ve been blood.