Mal had seen bleak. Mal was intimately familiar with bleak. This was somewhere entirely past bleak.

She'd taken the weapons and the compass and the silly goggles and the sunscreen; she'd listened to the impromptu - what was it - stun gonne demonstration; she'd wondered if she should perhaps have stayed and looked around more - but the only way out was through, supposedly, and the more answers she found in the near future the better.

There was dust in her teeth already. She grimaced and raised a hand lazily. "Are we going, then?"