Miles wasn't ready for this now.  Hell, he wasn't ready for this ever.  He'd had the unenviable task before of informing next-of-kin or the friends who stood in that place, but they'd always been adults.  Never children, never so wide open and unarmored.

Mina and Jin's excitement was quelled, as they looked at him.  Because if things had gone well, wouldn't he be puffing it off already, taking the credit?  There was no way to make this better, and only one way to make it over.  He wanted to kneel, to grovel, but it seemed only right to look Jin in the eye.  He took a deep breath.

"I'm sorry.  I'm so sorry.  Something went wrong with the cryorevi—no, with the cryoprep.  There was nothing Raven-sensei could do.  We tried . . . we think your mother died during her cryoprep eighteen months ago, or sometime soon after."

Jin and Mina stood still in shock.  But not crying, not yet.  They just stared at Miles.  Stared and stared.

"But we wanted to see her," said Mina, in a thin little voice.  "You said we would see her."

Jin's voice was throaty, husky, entirely unlike himself.  "You promised . . ."

The trio had fallen apart from each other at the blow of this news.  Quite spontaneously and uncharacteristically, Jin's hand found Mina's.  Mina's other hand wavered and gripped Vorlynkin's again; he looked down at her in dismay.  "Now?" he said.  "Are you sure . . . ?"  His hard gaze rose as if to nail Miles to the wall.

"They have a right," said Miles in reluctance.  "Though I don't know if an ugly memory is better than no memory.  I just . . . don't know."

"Neither do I," admitted Vorlynkin.

Mina's chin jutted out.  "I want to see.  I want to see her."

Jin gulped and nodded.

"Wait a moment, then . . ."  Miles slipped—fled—back through the door and said, "Raven, we have visitors.  Next of kin.  Can we, ah, tidy her up a bit?"

Raven the supposed Jacksonian hard-ass looked deeply shaken at this news.  "Oh gods, it's not those poor kids?  What are they doing here?  Must they come in?"

"They've a right," Miles repeated, wondering why those words seemed to resonate in his mind.  He ought to know, but these days he couldn't blame every memory lapse on his own ten-year-old cryorevival.

Raven, Tanaka and Miles hurried to get the silent figure decently draped, to remove the useless tangle of technology from about her, tubes and electrodes and the strange cap.  Miles smoothed the short black hair back over the ears.  Its slickness rendered the middle-aged female face sophisticated yet skull-like, and Miles wondered how the children's mother had worn her hair.  Weird little things like that could matter all out of proportion.  A swift and useless tidying up, this.

Over, let it be over.  Miles went to the door and held it wide.