Reached characters

Appears from the start

Known from earlier: Cassia's grandfather, killed on his eightieth birthday under the Society's rules, who left her two poems that were never among the hundred the Society preserved and told her the words were hers to use.

Appears from the start

Known from earlier: Cassia's mother, whose work with plants and crops took her across the provinces before the family was demoted to farm labour.

Appears from the start

One of the three narrators. Returned to the Society by the Rising, she works as a sorter in the central city and waits for a signal that has not come. In her own time she trades with the Archivists, who deal in everything the Society forbids, and she has begun collecting and preserving the writing and art that ordinary people make for themselves rather than the hundred approved pieces.

Appears from the start

One of the three narrators. He flies for the Rising, moving people and supplies wherever he is told, having joined a rebellion he does not trust because there was nothing else left to join. He remembers what following the Rising cost his father, and he intends to get back to Cassia whatever plans the rebellion has for either of them.

Appears from the start

One of the three narrators, and the last of the three to be heard from directly. A physic in the Society's medical service, he has been a member of the Rising for years, long before Cassia knew the rebellion existed. He believes in it completely: it gave him work that mattered at a time when nothing else did, and he carries out the tasks it sets him without needing to be told why.

First appears in chapter 5

A pilot for the Rising, who escaped the work camp with Cassia and crossed the Carving with her. Fearless, competitive and impossible to predict, she has made herself indispensable in the air and is closer to Ky than Cassia finds comfortable.

First appears in chapter 32

A young woman Xander comes to know through his medical work, careful, private and quietly stubborn, who has lost more to the way the Society ordered things than she says at first.

First appears in chapter 24

The leader of the Rising, known throughout the rebellion only by the title. For its ordinary members the Pilot has always been a voice and a promise rather than a person, and what the Pilot intends for the cities once the takeover is complete is not something the rank and file have been told.

First appears in chapter 40

An old man living beyond the reach of both the Society and the Rising, who worked on the original cure long before the rebellion had any use for it. Difficult, exacting and contemptuous of anyone who wants to own a remedy, he is the one person likely to be able to make something that works against the mutation.

First appears in chapter 44

A leader from the settlements outside the Society's borders, connected to the farmers who once lived in the canyons. Her people kept knowledge, seeds and records that the Society spent generations trying to erase.