Cinder characters

Also known as Cinder

Appears from the start

A sixteen-year-old cyborg and the best mechanic in New Beijing, capital of the Eastern Commonwealth, where she runs a repair booth in the weekly market. A hover accident when she was eleven cost her a hand and a leg, replaced with crude prosthetics, and left her with a retinal display and internal wiring she hides under gloves and boots. She remembers nothing of her life before the surgery. Cyborgs have no legal standing in the Commonwealth, so she is effectively the property of her guardian, who keeps every credit she earns. Practical, blunt and stubbornly competent, she is easier with machines than with people and deeply self-conscious about a body she cannot pass off as ordinary.

Appears from the start

The household android belonging to Cinder's guardian, fitted with a faulty personality chip that gives her far more enthusiasm, vanity and opinion than her model was designed for. She helps in the workshop, follows celebrity gossip about the prince, and is the closest thing Cinder has to a friend.

Also known as Kaito

Appears from the start

The eighteen-year-old crown prince of the Eastern Commonwealth, who comes to Cinder's market booth himself with a malfunctioning royal android he wants repaired quietly. Unpretentious and easy in private, he is under severe strain: his father is dying of the plague, the Lunar queen is pressing him for an alliance, and he expects to inherit the throne far sooner than he wants.

Appears from the start

An older royal android brought to Cinder's booth by the prince in person for repair. Kai insists the job is urgent, will not say what the android was working on, and asks Cinder to keep the whole matter quiet.

First appears in chapter 2

Cinder's legal guardian and the widow of the man who adopted her. She resents Cinder as an expensive obligation forced on her by a husband who died of the plague within weeks of bringing the girl home, treats her as household property rather than family, and takes everything she earns. She is preoccupied with her daughters' marriage prospects and the family's slipping finances.

First appears in chapter 2

The younger of Adri's two daughters, fourteen, and the only member of the household who treats Cinder as a sister rather than as a machine. Cheerful and romantic, she is excited about the coming annual ball and helps Cinder scavenge parts in the junkyard.

First appears in chapter 2

Adri's elder daughter, who shares her mother's contempt for Cinder and is openly embarrassed to be associated with a cyborg.

First appears in chapter 2

Kai's father and emperor of the Eastern Commonwealth, respected as a fair and steady ruler. He has contracted letumosis and is dying in quarantine at the palace, leaving his son to manage the Commonwealth's negotiations with Luna.

First appears in chapter 4

The royal advisor, who served Kai's father for years and now steers Kai through his first weeks of rule. Formal and cautious, he is preoccupied above all with the Commonwealth's weak position against Luna.

First appears in chapter 5

The elderly head of the royal research laboratory, a brisk, evasive scientist leading the search for a cure to letumosis, the plague sweeping Earth. He administers the cyborg draft, in which cyborgs are conscripted as test subjects and do not come back, and takes an unusual and unexplained interest in Cinder once her results come in.

First appears in chapter 16

The queen of Luna, the settled colony on the moon, whose people can alter what others see and feel. She arrives in New Beijing on the first Lunar state visit in years, pressing for an alliance with the Eastern Commonwealth, and is renowned for a beauty no one at her court is permitted to question. She holds the one thing Earth most needs and intends to be paid for it in crowns.

First appears in chapter 16

Levana's head thaumaturge, the queen's chief servant and enforcer, who accompanies the Lunar delegation to Earth and handles the work Levana will not do in public.

First appears in chapter 38

The heir to the Lunar throne and Levana's niece, believed to have burned to death at the age of three in a fire in the palace nursery. Rumours that the child survived have circulated for years on both worlds, and by the close of the book they have an answer: the missing princess and Linh Cinder are the same person, which makes Cinder the one rival claim Levana cannot ignore.