Shift Omnibus Edition characters

Also known as Donny

Appears from the start

A first-term congressman from Georgia and a trained architect, young, earnest and out of his depth in Washington. He took the seat with help from a powerful senator he admires, and he still thinks of building things rather than legislating as his real skill. When that senator hands him a design job, a shelter to be sunk beside a proposed nuclear waste facility in his home state, he treats it as the chance to make something that will outlast his career. He is married and trying to keep the marriage steady across the distance between Washington and home.

First appears in chapter 2

The senior senator from Georgia, a former military officer with a surgeon's calm and enormous influence in Washington. He is the driving force behind a national waste depot and the world exposition planned on the same Georgia ground, and he is the man who put Donald in Congress. He gives instructions rather than reasons, and the people around him are used to that.

First appears in chapter 3

Donald's friend from their college years and now a fellow congressman, easy-going, ambitious and better at politics than Donald is. He was the one who introduced Donald to the circles he now moves in, and he keeps turning up around the Georgia project.

First appears in chapter 4

Donald's wife, who stays behind in Savannah running her own work while he serves in Washington. Steady, sharp and patient with a marriage conducted mostly by phone, she is the person Donald measures his choices against, and the growing secrecy of his Georgia commission strains what is left of their time together.

First appears in chapter 8

Senator Thurman's daughter, an accomplished engineer, and the woman Donald was involved with in college before he met his wife. Brilliant, direct and entirely at ease in her father's world, she is assigned to work on the same Georgia project, taking the machinery and the lower levels while Donald handles the shape of the building. Her presence unsettles him and his marriage in equal measure.

First appears in chapter 10

Donald's younger sister, a military pilot who flies unmanned aircraft on deployment overseas. Practical and unsentimental where her brother is anxious, she is the family member he talks to most honestly, and their conversations run through the years he spends on the Georgia commission.

First appears in chapter 24

A quiet English scientist attached to Thurman's circle, older than the politicians around him and treated by them with unusual deference. His work concerns machines built at the scale of molecules, and what he has seen of that field has frightened him into helping plan for a world that does not survive it.

First appears in chapter 32

A porter in Silo 18 generations before Juliette's time, seventeen years old, who carries loads up and down the great staircase for a living and knows the silo by its landings rather than its levels. Born in circumstances the silo's laws frown on and estranged from his farmer father, he is proud, restless and drawn toward the people muttering that the silo should be run differently.

First appears in chapter 34

The head of Silo 1's psychiatric oversight, the man who reads the reports from every silo and decides what each one needs. He has spent more waking years than anyone on the problem of why the silos fail, and he keeps his conclusions largely to himself.

First appears in chapter 36

Mission's closest childhood friend, taken as a shadow into Silo 18's IT department, where he is being taught things he is not allowed to repeat. The promotion has put a distance between the two of them that neither knows how to close.

Also known as Mrs. Crowe

First appears in chapter 40

An ancient schoolteacher in Silo 18's mid levels who has taught generations of the silo's children, Mission's among them, and who is far older than the silo's rules on age and replacement should allow. She keeps a room full of salvaged oddments and speaks about the past in ways that make the authorities uneasy, and the young people who grew up in her classroom are devoted to her.

First appears in chapter 66

A teenage boy in Silo 17, the son of that silo's head of IT, awkward and solitary and more interested in being left alone than in the trouble spreading through the levels around him. He is given the run of the server room by his father, which is the only place in the silo where anyone can hear what is really happening.

First appears in chapter 78

A cat that finds its way to Jimmy in the emptied levels of Silo 17 and stays. For a long stretch of his life it is the only other living thing he speaks to.