That boy had followed her into the stars, was haunting her. A blur of dead, so many little boys and their mothers, their brothers and sisters. All of them dishonored and left for the maggots who seemed to be the only other winners on the field – save the Reapers. The Reapers didn’t even have the decency to make use of what they killed, to feed. There was no meaning but annihilation. Arran needed to make sense of the terror that had become the very boundaries of her life. So maybe her unconscious fixated on a child, on what could have been if she’d never been ordered on that fateful shakedown cruise to Eden Prime, and twisted him, left him to the fire. It made a shitty kind of sense.