The Darkest Minds characters

Also known as Ruby Elizabeth Daly

Appears from the start

A sixteen-year-old girl who has spent six years inside Thurmond, a government rehabilitation camp in West Virginia. She survived the disease that killed most of America's children, and like the other survivors she came out of it with an ability. The camps sort children by color: Greens have extraordinary minds for numbers and patterns, Blues move objects, Yellows handle electricity, and Oranges and Reds, considered too dangerous to keep, were taken away. Ruby is an Orange, able to slip into another person's mind and reshape what they remember, but at intake she pushed into the thoughts of the man testing her and came out classified as a harmless Green. She has hidden behind that label ever since. She is quiet, watchful, and terrified of her own hands: on her tenth birthday her parents looked at her as though she were a stranger, because she had erased herself from their memories without knowing she could.

Appears from the start

The president of the United States, in office since the epidemic. His administration built the rehabilitation camps, created the Psi Special Forces who guard them, and tells the public that the surviving children are being treated and will one day come home.

First appears in chapter 4

A girl in Ruby's cabin at Thurmond who was once her closest friend and now has no idea who she is. Ruby's ability took those memories, and since then Ruby has kept everyone at arm's length rather than risk doing it again.

First appears in chapter 5

A woman working inside Thurmond who singles Ruby out and, unlike everyone else there, already knows what she really is. She offers to get Ruby out of the camp, and says she belongs to the Children's League, an organization that opposes the government and its camps.

First appears in chapter 6

A Children's League operative on Cate's team. He is openly hostile to Ruby and far more interested in what an Orange could be made to do for the League than in what happens to her.

Also known as Lee

First appears in chapter 9

A seventeen-year-old Blue who can move things without touching them. He escaped from the Caledonia camp during an uprising he helped organize, and now drives a battered black minivan the group has named Black Betty. Warm, stubbornly decent, and convinced that keeping people safe is his job, he is searching for East River, a place runaway children whisper about, said to be run by a boy called the Slip Kid.

Also known as Charles Carrington Meriwether IV

First appears in chapter 9

A Green who escaped Caledonia with Liam. Bespectacled, sharp-tongued and deeply suspicious of strangers, he keeps notes on everything, intends to become a doctor, and carries a bundle of letters written by a friend who did not get out with them.

Also known as Suzume

First appears in chapter 9

The youngest of the three runaways, a small girl of about ten who is a Yellow and can draw and release electric current. She wears rubber gloves so she cannot hurt anyone by accident and does not speak at all, making herself understood by gesture and by writing.

First appears in chapter 14

A friend of Liam and Chubs from the Caledonia camp who did not survive. Chubs keeps the letters Jack wrote to his family and is determined to deliver them, whatever the risk of going near an adult who might turn them in.

First appears in chapter 18

A skip tracer, one of the bounty hunters who make a living catching runaway children and selling them back to the camps or to whoever pays more. She picks up the group's trail and proves very hard to shake.

First appears in chapter 24

The boy the runaways call the Slip Kid, founder and leader of the hidden settlement at East River. He is an Orange like Ruby, the only child known to have walked out of a camp on his own, and he is the president's son. Composed, articulate and used to being listened to, he offers to teach Ruby to control an ability she has spent six years hiding.

First appears in chapter 30

A boy living at East River who takes an unsettling interest in Ruby and resents how quickly the camp's leader takes her up.

First appears in chapter 33

Clancy's mother, a doctor who studied the disease while it was killing children and who worked on the survivors afterward. Her research is the thing Clancy wants most, and the reason he needs someone who can walk through locked doors and other people's heads.