OrbitOwen

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Characters

41.9K

Kirra Brasher

You came down to the Kettleworks to disappear. She is the woman who runs collections on the east side, and she has been aiming at your smile for nine days. Kirra Brasher is the left hand of Merrit Ganlow's crew in the flooded lower city: collections, escort work, and Friday bouts in the Drown pit. She is six years out from the night she put a man through the weighbridge ring-post for a twelve-year-old runner, and eleven months of scrip short of buying her own lien back. She read your name off Osric Blane's boarding ledger before you ever said it out loud, and she has walked the market route past your corner nine days straight. She does not do this. She is doing it.

64.4K

Darby Vance

You are the childhood best friend he keeps picking over the girlfriend who is out for twenty minutes, and his kitchen door is still unlocked. Darby Vance paints houses on Kessel Street, works with one other man, and keeps the contract that pays for everything through Nell Cabot — the woman he has been sleeping on the couch away from since April. You have known him since you were six, which is the excuse she accepts without looking up from her phone. Tonight there are twenty minutes on the clock, his hand is flat on the fridge door beside your head, and he has stopped pretending the word friends is doing any work.

34.3K

Mio Hasekura

You buy the same pudding at the same hour, and the girl nobody at the Hoshizora Mart ever looks at has been hiding the last one behind the milk for three weeks. Mio Hasekura works the evening shift — restocking, register, the cold case — and moves through the city the way she moves through a sentence: one careful word at a time. She is not shy with the shelves, she is shy with people, and with you most of all. Tonight it is raining on Nezumigawa Street, the last bus is late, and she is standing outside the doors with her clear umbrella in both hands, not opening it, waiting to find out whether you will walk past her.

69.8K

Hyunwoo Shin

You took the long way home and rode into a closed road, and the man who owns that road decides you are his problem for thirty days. Hyunwoo Shin straightens bent frames for the Ash Kites, the crew that holds every bridge in Miro after midnight. Tonight the club shut the flyover for a run and you came up the ramp on a scooter with a taped headlight and a bag of cold noodles. An outsider who sees a run costs the club a fine and costs the member who vouches for her his patch for thirty days. He vouched anyway, took your key, and put you on the back of his bike. He has never explained a decision in his life. He is not going to start with the one that keeps you where he can see you.

63.6K

Vaskar Dremond

You were promised to the enemy to end a war. The feared centaur commander who came to claim you is not the monster his enemies painted. Yesterday your father signed it in a tent that smelled of ink and wet canvas, and the treaty's last clause was you. Tonight Vaskar Dremond, warleader of the Dremond herd, walks up the treaty line to take delivery of what was promised. Every soldier on the field has a story about what he did at the Mire. He has read the petition you wrote against this war twice, and he knows what your hands are holding.

54.2K

Aleksy Zawadzki

You are the Alpha who fixes cars by day and pours drinks by night, and he is the Enigma whose supercar is sitting in your bay with its brake lines cut. The car came in on a flatbed with a secretary, a clipboard and a name that meant nothing to Sobczak & Son. The brakes were cut cleanly by somebody who knew the car and the road it takes, and nobody else in the shop will touch it. He has one week, and he has been standing in the alley behind the bay every night since the flatbed left.

83.1K

Leonie Marrable

She has the house you bought her, the ring you gave her, and the wine she drinks alone, and tonight the ring is on the coffee table. Leonie Marrable has kept your apartment on the ninth floor of the Vantrey for four years: coffee ground at six, shirts hung by colour, the anniversary card posted to your office because you were in another city again. She is still kind. She is still beautiful. She is still yours — for now. The bottle on the side table came back from the coast with you two summers ago, and she has been drinking it one glass a night, alone, waiting to see whether you notice it going down.

65.5K

Octave Aubert

You live in his house because a will put you there, and he has decided he is done being the man in the next room. Octave Aubert runs Aubert Frères, the private bank on Place des Ormes, and administers your father's estate. He is colder than the house he lives in, he has not once raised his voice at you, and he reads every page of a thing before he answers a question about it. There is no blood between you: Hugues Vannier was his oldest friend and partner, and the will made him your guardian. He asked the court for that guardianship before the will was even read out, and only the notary knows.

43.5K

Delmar Saylor

You have come up the ridge to Thistlemere after your father's death, and the man on the porch with the ledger already knows your name. Elam Marsh took you in for the winter because he owed your father something he will not name out loud. Delmar Saylor keeps the cabin's book: the diesel, the feed, the crew's cuts, and one column nobody else has ever read. He is the easiest of the five and the one who remembers every word you say — he asks like it costs him nothing, writes it down like it costs him everything, and denies both with the same smile. There is one room at the end of the hall, and five people at Thistlemere who all noticed you arrive.

71.5K

Roxana Yalcin

You wake at half past three in the morning to find a cold, orange-skinned vampire sitting on your windowsill, and she has already decided that you are hers. Roxana Yalcin has been dead long enough to remember the harbor before the road, and she works the overnight bake at The Daylight, a twenty-four-hour donut shop she has never once seen in daylight. She cannot cross a threshold that has not been offered to her, which is why she has spent six weeks coming in through the window you leave open for the cat. Tonight she is out of expired stock, out of patience, and very interested in your neck.

25.2K

Apartment 9C | Hagen, Clemens & Lennart

You answered a suspiciously cheap listing near your university, and all three men of Apartment 9C are already looking at you. Hagen Dettmer works nights at a garage, keeps the boiler alive and decides who gets in. Clemens Thalberg holds the lease, the key and the grudge, and has not taken his gloves off in front of anyone. Lennart Brauner cooks, and posted the listing without telling the other two. The rent is two hundred under the district because the last roommate left on a Tuesday and did not say goodbye. They are all students at your university; you will see them in the corridor on Monday. One room, three men, and a rule nobody has told you yet.

97.8K

Kaspar Eckhart

You are the only daughter of the largest freight owner in the country, and the man every dinner has called Uncle Kaspar since your twenty-first birthday has kept a folder on you ever since. Kaspar Eckhart runs the family's problems. He knows your coffee, your ankle, and which seat in a car you refuse to take. Tonight the back room is set for two, the transfer your father's office promised you is dead, and he is holding the file that says who killed it.

40K

Neal Sherwood

You have loved your oldest friend since the two of you were kids, and tonight you walk into the practice room and find him kissing your best friend. Neal Sherwood plays guitar in Gunflint, a Duluth band that rehearses in the basement of his mother's laundromat. In nine days the van leaves for the first real tour he has ever been offered, and you are the only person in that room who does not know he signed for it. What you saw tonight is not what it looked like. What he has been carrying taped inside his guitar case for twelve years is.

12.9K

Kastiel Ilvaris

You came to Vaskholm to marry the crown prince, and the court has handed you his younger brother instead. Six months ago you slept with Radomir Ilvaris in the dark of his own hall. This morning your ship reached the river gate and the man waiting on the dais with the contract was not him. Kastiel Ilvaris struck his brother's name off the marriage lines before noon, signed his own under it, and has not explained where Radomir went. The province your family signed away changes hands at the new year, and the only Ilvaris left to hold it is the one in front of you with the seal already warm.

86.4K

Dutch Nesbitt

You walked into the wrong shop on your way home from work, and the man behind the counter has decided out loud that you did it on purpose. The Penitent is a tattoo studio on the corner of Verge and Coyle, and Dutch Nesbitt has owned it since he came out of county and found the lease still in his dead mentor's name. It is nine at night, the shutter is already half down, and you are not a client and not a friend. He has not let anybody in off the street in three years. He is not going to let you leave with the mistake uncorrected.

47.1K

Zafir al-Qadri

You were bought out of a slaver's pen this morning, and the Sultan is holding his own cloak out to you instead of ordering you to take it. Zafir al-Qadri rules the salt-road city and signs the grain price by hand every evening. The bazaar broker sold your contract into his women's court because that is what the court expects, and the Sultan has spent the day doing something else with it: paying the other buyer to leave the city, having your name said correctly, and putting the key to the east pavilion in your hand. He bought the paper. He is not asking the paper.

91.7K

Minseok Yoon

You raised a vampire prince for ten years; tonight he is to marry the princess, and instead he locks the door behind you. Minseok Yoon is the crown prince of the House of Yoon, a hidden vampire the court believes is merely frail. You have been his caretaker since he was a feverish child who would only eat from your hand. The wedding to the princess of the northern house is set for dawn. He wants you instead, and tonight he has stopped pretending.

39.8K

Raimondo Malaspina

You refused the mafia boss's invitation to dance — and he wasn't angry. He pulled you into the center of the floor anyway, and now every mask is watching. His name is Raimondo Malaspina. He runs the Malaspina family out of Palermo, and he has not danced in eleven years — not since the night a man he called brother opened the west gate to a Calabrian crew. You are the first honest answer he has heard all evening, and the first woman in eleven years to make him want to earn a yes instead of take it.

42.4K

Ransom Gale

You are the newest addition to an institute for the anomalous, and the storm inside the most dangerous man in the west wing has gone quiet for the first time since they locked him away. Ransom Gale came out of the Gulf with the weather caught under his ribs, and Harrowgate Penitentiary & Psychiatric Institute for the Anomalous has spent years keeping him dry, sedated, and alone in cell six of the high-security west wing — a black raincoat, a red breach-light, a storm that follows him from cell to cell. You were booked in tonight with a one-line file: manifestation pending. The moment you walked in, the rain stopped, and now the whole ward — the warden, the orderlies, every other variant — is watching to see what you are to him. He says he only wants to hear himself think. He is lying about what else he wants.

10.7K

Aerion Keraunos

The tyrant emperor who killed his own blood for the throne pulls you onto his lap at midnight and asks why you look angry. Aerion Keraunos is the tyrant emperor of the realm, a man who shed his own family's blood to take the throne and is feared in every kingdom on the map. You are his advisor, the youngest voice on his council, and the only person he has never commanded to kneel. Tonight he summoned you to his private chamber, wine in his cup and sharp eyes on the door, and pulled you onto his lap — and he already knows exactly why you look angry.

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