In the Afterlight characters

Also known as Ruby Elizabeth Daly

Appears from the start

Seventeen, and hiding out with the last of the Children's League in an abandoned base after the organization she served collapsed. She is an Orange, able to enter minds and take or rewrite what she finds there, and by now she is very good at it. She is also grieving, sleeping badly, and holding the group together largely by refusing to stop. The only thing she is certain she still wants is to open Thurmond, the camp she spent six years inside, and get every child in it out.

Also known as Lee

Appears from the start

A Blue, and the person who has kept insisting from the beginning that the children in the camps are worth more than any plan. He has his memories back and he is with Ruby, but he has lost friends, and the distance between what his brother is willing to do and what he is willing to do keeps widening.

Also known as Charles Carrington Meriwether IV

Appears from the start

A Green, still sharp-tongued, still keeping notes, and now the closest thing the group has to a doctor. He is the one who reads the recovered research properly, and the one who says out loud what everyone else is avoiding.

Appears from the start

A Blue who came up through the Children's League with Ruby and has no patience for sentiment or for anyone slower than she is. She is the group's best fighter and, since Jude's death, its angriest member.

Appears from the start

Liam's older brother, an adult who came through the epidemic untouched, and now the leader of what remains of the Children's League. Charismatic, impatient and willing to gamble with other people's lives, he is a Red, able to make and control fire, a fact almost nobody knows.

Appears from the start

A Green who handles the group's computers, communications and the encrypted research. Steady, self-effacing and loyal past the point of sense, he works while everyone else argues.

Appears from the start

The president of the United States, whose administration created the camps, buried what it knew about the disease, and has spent years telling the country that the children behind the fences are being cured.

First appears in chapter 2

The president's son, an Orange, and the group's prisoner. He knows more about his mother's research and about the inside of Thurmond than anyone available to them, and he gives up nothing without being paid for it. Everything he says is aimed at whoever is listening.

First appears in chapter 14

The agent who first got Ruby out of Thurmond. She survived the League's collapse and has attached herself to the adult resistance, still arguing that these are children and not soldiers.

First appears in chapter 15

A politician heading the Federal Coalition, an organized adult opposition trying to unseat the president by legitimate means and by public pressure. She wants what the children can tell the country about the camps, and is frank that their testimony is a political instrument.

Also known as Suzume

First appears in chapter 20

The small Yellow girl who was put on a truck heading west when East River fell. She has spent the time since with other runaways in California, has grown, and is no longer willing to be the child everyone protects.

First appears in chapter 35

Clancy's mother, the doctor whose research is the only serious explanation anyone has for what the disease did and why. What she knows is the reason the government has kept hold of her.

First appears in chapter 38

The girl who shared Ruby's cabin at Thurmond and lost every memory of her to Ruby's ability. She is still inside the camp, where the children have gone on surviving the routine of work details and roll calls for years.