Dust characters

Appears from the start

The machinist who was condemned to cleaning, refused, crossed the surface and came back. She is now mayor of Silo 18, an office she never wanted and holds badly, because the silo will not accept anyone else and because it gives her the authority to keep digging. She spends her time in Mechanical rather than the offices at the top, working on a tunnel toward the neighboring silo. Practical, blunt and unable to leave a broken thing alone, she is admired by the down-deep, resented by much of the rest of the silo, and haunted by the people who died in the uprising her survival set off.

First appears in chapter 2

A pilot from the world before the silos, and Donald Keene's younger sister, who has been woken out of deep freeze in Silo 1 by her brother and hidden on an unused level. Everything she knew is centuries gone, and the only work she can do is the work she was trained for: flying unmanned aircraft, launched from the surface, out over a landscape nobody has looked at properly in generations. Level-headed and quicker than her brother to act, she is the one person in Silo 1 he trusts.

First appears in chapter 3

The head of IT in Silo 18 and the keeper of everything the department guards, which now includes the truth about the fifty silos and the book that governs them. He spends his days below the server room with the archives and a radio, reporting to a voice from Silo 1 that expects obedience, and telling it as little as he can. Careful, patient and in love with Juliette, he is the counterweight to her habit of forcing things.

Also known as the Shepherd

First appears in chapter 4

The man who speaks to Silo 18 from Silo 1 and is taken there for the facility's founder. He runs the place under a name that is not his, keeps his sister hidden on a lower level, and is slowly dying from something in his lungs. He knows the whole of the plan because he helped draw the building it is carried out in, and he wants to end it rather than complete it, without yet knowing how.

First appears in chapter 4

A pale, thin former miner in Silo 18's down-deep and one of Juliette's closest friends on the digging crew. He hates the idea of the surface as much as anyone but works the excavator anyway because she asked, and he says out loud the doubts the rest of the crew keep to themselves.

Also known as Jimmy Parker

First appears in chapter 5

The lone adult survivor of Silo 17, who spent more than thirty years alone behind a steel door before Juliette came down the ramp. He now shares the empty silo with a handful of children who grew up wild in its farms, and he speaks to Juliette by radio while she digs toward him. Gentle, awkward and easily frightened by crowds and noise, he is more comfortable with the dead silo than he expects to be with a living one.

First appears in chapter 6

The eldest of the children living wild in Silo 17's farm levels, a young man who has kept the younger ones alive for years without any adult help and who governs them by rules of his own making. He is suspicious of outsiders, protective to the point of hostility, and unwilling to be told that the way he has run things was wrong.

First appears in chapter 6

The youngest of the Silo 17 children, a small girl who has taught herself to read from loose pages she has collected and bound together, and who guards that book of scraps above anything else she owns. She attaches herself quickly to the adults who are kind to her, and she has a dog she will not be parted from.

First appears in chapter 8

Juliette's father, a doctor who left the mid-level nurseries to work in the down-deep to be nearer his daughter. Quiet and careful, he treats the injuries the digging produces and the arguments it causes, and the long estrangement between the two of them has only recently begun to close.

First appears in chapter 8

The head of Mechanical in Silo 18, a friend of Juliette's since long before either of them mattered to the silo. She lost her husband in the uprising and has never entirely stopped blaming the events Juliette set in motion, so her loyalty comes with an edge to it. She is a capable organizer and the person the down-deep actually listens to day to day.

First appears in chapter 10

A mechanic in Silo 18's down-deep, sharp-tongued and unimpressed by rank, who argues with Juliette as readily as she works for her. She has a talent for seeing what a group of frightened people actually needs, which turns out to matter more than her talent with a wrench.

First appears in chapter 10

The sheriff of Silo 18, who took the badge after the uprising and would like the silo to be quiet and lawful again. He is uneasy with a mayor who spends her time underground with a digging machine, and uneasier still with what he half knows about why.

First appears in chapter 12

A priest in Silo 18's mid levels with a substantial following, who preaches that the digging is a sin against the order the silo was given and that its mayor is leading people toward the deaths of everyone. He is a genuine believer rather than an opportunist, which makes him harder to answer.

First appears in chapter 22

A security officer serving a shift in Silo 1, assigned to the quiet night hours and bored enough to be curious. He notices things he is not meant to notice on the lower levels and has to decide what the facility's rules are actually worth.

First appears in chapter 30

The founder of the silo project, a former senator and military officer who has slept through most of the centuries his design has been running. When he is woken, he finds his authority in the hands of a man he trusted, and he intends to take it back and finish what he started.