A woman was waiting in the small visitor's lounge the next afternoon, the same room where delegations and grieving families and the occasional confused contract client sat when they needed somewhere quiet that wasn't a hallway.
Jayden's aunt had introduced herself the day of the memorial as his sister, but Sam corrected the record gently afterward, explaining that the woman who'd come was actually the only family Jayden had left at all, an aunt who'd raised him from twelve onward after both his parents died in a beast incursion outside Academy 12's perimeter, close enough to the school that they'd never managed to get him fully clear of what happened that day.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap, a cardigan pulled tight around her shoulders despite the facility's climate control running warm, and when Sophie walked in she looked up with an expression that had already decided something before either of them said a word.
