Dana Jaxon

Dana Jaxon, Peter Jaxon’s cousin and the oldest Jaxon, is a former runner who becomes a trainer and then claims the family seat in the Household. Her story links the everyday work of preparing children for the Colony’s defenses with a contested transfer of political authority: Dana first appears as a figure shaping the next generation, then is recognized as the person whose place in the Household had been passed over.

Identity and Background

Dana is Uncle Willem’s daughter and Peter’s cousin. Eight years older than Peter, she had been a runner before standing down from that role to take over the training pits after the birth of her first daughter, Ellie. Her change of work joins family life to the Colony’s practical needs: she leaves the runner’s position, but remains directly involved in preparing young people for service.

Dana has two daughters. Ellie, her first, has already come out of the Sanctuary and is a trainee in the pits; her youngest, Kat, is still there. Ellie is in first grade, tall and slender like her mother, with long black hair braided in the Watcher style. These details make Dana’s family present within the same training ground where she exercises authority: her daughter is not simply part of her private life but one of the children under instruction.

The Training Pits

The pits are three broad depressions in the earth, each twenty meters long, with high earthen walls designed to contain stray bolts, arrows, and badly thrown blades. Dana is training a group of five new recruits—three girls and two boys, between nine and thirteen—when Peter sees her at work. She regards the group with a stony expression, and the severity of the ritual sets the tone for the children’s effort to prove themselves.

Dana’s position there gives her a role in reproducing the Colony’s defensive culture. The trainees’ rigid posture and anxious seriousness recall Peter’s own entry into the pits, while Ellie’s presence makes that continuity familial as well as institutional. Dana is both the trainer who assesses the young recruits and the mother whose daughter is learning the same discipline.

The Jaxon Seat

After Theo’s place in the Household becomes an issue, Sanjay tells Peter that the seat rightfully belongs to Dana. His argument rests on her seniority: she was, and remains, the oldest Jaxon. Dana had previously turned the position down, but Sanjay says the circumstances of that decision were not comfortable for the Household. Her father had just been killed, and its members believed she might have been willing to serve if Peter’s father had not pressured her to stand aside.

The Household’s view reframes the earlier transfer as an irregularity rather than a settled choice. Sanjay says the members have met and agreed that the seat is Dana’s. When Peter asks whether she wants it, he answers that she does: after he explained the situation, she accepted. The decision changes Dana’s standing from a relative whose claim had been deferred to the acknowledged representative of her family.

The Household Proceedings

Dana later occupies the Jaxon seat at a Household proceeding involving Peter. Soo has been asked to recuse herself, leaving five members present: Sanjay at the center of the table, with Old Chou, Jimmy Molyneau, Walter Fisher, and Dana on either side. The odd number of members prevents a deadlock, and Soo’s absence helps shape the conditions under which the decision will be made.

Peter reads the room as a place where the outcome has already been determined. Old Chou is the only person willing to meet his eye; the others look away, Dana among them. Her presence is therefore significant but not openly explanatory: she is there as the Jaxon representative, while the strained silence and averted looks register the weight of the proceedings around Peter.

Significance

Dana’s trajectory turns on recognition. She first appears in a concrete working role, directing children through a demanding exercise; later, the Household acknowledges that political authority within the family should have belonged to her. The account gives both sides of that change: she had once refused the seat, but that refusal took place after her father’s death and under pressure from Peter’s father, and she accepts it when the Household revisits the matter.

The contrast between the pits and the long table sharpens her place in the Colony. At the pits, authority is enacted through training and ritual; in the Household, it is enacted through family standing, deliberation, and the allocation of a seat. Dana connects these forms of service without being reduced to either one: she is a mother and former runner, a trainer of the Colony’s children, and the oldest Jaxon whose claim to representation is finally affirmed.