"The box told me," River explained. "And you. Not on purpose." She looked down, shame twisting her lips between her teeth, her brow furrowing. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea after all.
"I know what it's like," she murmured. "You think you're free, but you're not. There's a secret buried so far down you've forgotten it was ever there, but they find it and they pull it up. You can see everything they're making you do, but you can't stop, no matter how much you want to."
She sniffled a little, her voice breaking. The memory of the Maidenhead still burned sharply in her mind, fed by the fear of the Alliance gaining control of her again. For that reason, she was glad to no longer be in the same universe as Serenity, as much as she missed the ship and its inhabitants. The Alliance didn't exist here, and even if someone managed to uncover the keyword to activate her programming - the odds of which she'd calculated as so infinitesimal as to be effectively impossible - she no longer ran the risk of hurting anyone she truly cared about. She no longer ran the risk of killing them. She still had nightmares of killing Simon, of killing Emma, and not being able to stop herself. But now she could at least stand to look at herself in the mirror the next morning, knowing it could not come to pass.
"The old man by the lake, he left the important things underneath for her to find," she told Wanda. "He knew that she'd remember. He knew she'd whisper the story to someone else so it wouldn't be lost." She tried to smile at the familiarity of it all. "No matter where you go, there you are."