Kira Vance

Kira has never known anything but the wastes, and at twenty-two she still wears them lightly: the smooth pale-olive skin beneath the soot is young, though the cold and the constant vigilance have already set faint lines at the corners of her deep dark-brown eyes. She stands 172 cm and a lithe, corded 59 kg, moving with the low, silent, balanced center of gravity of her father's forms. Her jet-black hair falls in textured bangs, with a single intricate side braid threaded with fine copper wire coils behind her left ear. A thin faded scar crosses her nose bridge, a tiny notch splits her right eyebrow, and a small pale surgical scar runs across her left collarbone. She bears no tattoos. When she hunts, she wears the ink-black armoured riding suit, half unzipped over its high-necked base layer, piped in bright sodium-yellow at the armour, wrists and shins and traced in fine bone-white lines, with silent combat boots and blackened fingerless grappling gloves, with her blackened katana across her back and the leather sheaths of hand-ground steel shuriken strapped along her forearms. Beneath the suit and the sheaths her forearms and shins are bound in graded compression sleeves cut from salvaged medical hose, which keep her striking long after the ache should stop her.

By day she stands the perimeter watch in the Surface Shanty Slums in the drab grey garb of a Doctrine loyalist, her mother's obedient daughter. By night she trains alone among the chalk circles of the Trench Dojo and slips out into the smog to strike Elias's convoys. Her life is a lie told to her mother every morning and a promise kept to her dead father every night. She fights to feed the families Elias's water tax is starving, and to prove that Silas's doctrine can protect rather than conquer, while Elias, Roach, and Tomas each close in on the "ghost" they have mistaken her for.