I'll have a go at a proper critique of the writing...

I only make a few suggestions about your writing technique in my reviews because you have a very solid style and grasp of technique. Going back over ch.30 with a more critical eye, I still found little to comment upon negatively. You make good use of active, strong verbs with a good variety of word choices. You punctuation and sentence structure is well done and has variation in the sentence patterns so the writing never sounds repetitious or androidal.

Point of view (POV) is one of the few weaknesses in the writing, along with scene selection choice and your overall plot structure.

Of overall plot structure I tend to be forgiving. This chapter-by-chapter, posted as its written, makes it difficult to structure your complete novel smoothly. From this regard the flow of chapter is somewhat uneven--up and down--with events not always leading seemlessly from chapter to chapter. The chapter in Lee's office which was entirely flashback is one example--it jumped in abruptly rather than nestling down into the flow.

In scene selection choice, you sometimes do include moments and interactions that don't really drive the story forward. This last chapter, 30, bogged down a bit in the middle in the housing unit. You went 'round the room through their array of reactions, then you went around again, then had Mal and Wash go around again--pull out the juicy bits and put them into the one time around reactions and then move on--a scene break would have been appropriate to advance the timeline.

I like the added detail you've put in ch.30. It added greatly to the flavor and scene setting. Many of your dialog interchanges have gotten into 'talking heads' without any grounding in their physical location and scene setting. The added detail (not overdone at all) gave the needed flavor to the dialog exchanges--it was the dialog exchanges going on too long that I think gave you the sense the scene was dragging or too long.

From point of view, POV, you need to keep in mind whose story this is. Mal's? Wash's? Both, really. And to a lesser extent Zoe's, Lee's, and Khiloh's. Those are the only POV's you should be going into; the only minds whose thought we should hear, the only eyes we should see the scenes through. Contrary to another comment I do not think you should go into Gray's or Staaker's thoughts. They're minor characters who don't merit POV scenes. What is interesting about Gray and Staaker is how *Mal* and *Wash* perceive them and think about them.

Your POV--something I've commented upon before--is generally good at keeping to one character in a scene critical to than character. But in ch.30 you wandered a bit--you delved a bit into the peripheral characters' thoughts whereas to keep a true, single-chararter POV you should have let us see them as Mal saw them, with his interpretation of what he thought they were feeling.

A better way to structure this whole chapter would have been to split in between Mal and Wash--see half strictly through Mal's eyes, and half strictly though Wash's eyes, with no others', and no author's omnicient, POVs to intrude. The closer in you get to a single character the stronger is the overall scene and its effect--you 'become' that chararcter in the writing and even the narrative word choices and patterns become unique to that single character.

Instead of us watching Mal watch through the window, we see through Mal's eyes what he see through the window. Instead of hearing how he feels about it, we *feel* it as Mal feels it. Close, tight, single-character POV. Dong ma?

In this type of focused POV I suspect you'd have answered the types of questions others had about the character portrayals. If Mal seems to saintly and accepting now, I suspect that inside he was seething and wanting to kill all the guards himself, and flashing back to his own treatment at their hands--that element was sorely missing from this chapter. And Wash wouldn't seem soft if we saw into his head at the moment Gray was chained to the gate. We'd have felt his visceral reaction to it in a stronger way than him saying he knew about such things but didn't want to talk about them.

Hope this adds to the writing critique info you were looking for. Your writing is already at a very high level, without doubt, with splendid characterizations and insights. Keep on!