Toby Vance

Toby is fifteen but looks barely thirteen; a childhood of thin rations has kept him slight, 155 cm and 45 kg of wiry, flexible frame with a low, nimble center of gravity. His boyish face is perpetually smudged with diesel soot and machine oil over deep, dark umber-brown skin gone ashen at the knuckles, his black locs are tied up on top in a short ponytail over a close fade, the loose ends curling down at the sides, and the cautious curiosity in his watchful hazel eyes has hardened since Mara died in front of him. He has no scars and no tattoos. He wears his patched, oversized blue canvas technician's jumpsuit, bone-white stitched and patched, bound at the wrists, knees, and ankles with black rubberized webbing straps, with round grease-stained brass technician's goggles with chipped dark navy-blue rims around his neck; when he expects a fight he straps Orson's shear-gel vest over the jumpsuit, still too big for him, its grey quilting scuffed through to the gel where the attacks he never tried to block have landed. At his hip hang titanium nunchaku, two 30 cm rods of salvaged aircraft tubing joined by a short ball-bearing chain, which he learned to whip from Kira in the ruins; across his back he carries a short-hafted engineer's hammer whose hollow steel head he packs with a thermite cap, a one-attack weapon that melts through whatever it strikes and ruins itself doing it. Taped inside his sleeve he keeps a ghost-line stiletto, a needle-thin blackened blade that leaves a pinprick of a wound, which does not stop bleeding.

Orphaned at birth, and again by Orson's death and Mara's, Toby lives in a patched boiler shelter in the Surface Shanty Slums and runs messages through the 40-centimeter maintenance conduits where grown fighters cannot follow. He is Kira's eyes in the tunnels and Nadia's runner on the winter route, and he carries Orson's copied archives from hiding place to hiding place. He fights to keep Kira alive, never guessing that he is guiding her into a crossfire, and to finish the old chronicler's work of making sure the Exiles remember. He survives by lying: false routes for the Syndicate, decoy caches on the passes, a different story at every checkpoint. Since Mara died the lies have grown colder and more reckless, and even Nadia no longer knows which of his stories are true.