Vengeful characters

First appears in chapter 4

Years on from the cemetery, Victor is alive on borrowed terms. The resurrection that brought him back did not hold: every few days his body simply stops, and he has to be restarted, and his control over pain has gone unreliable enough that lights fail and electronics die around him when it slips. He is still precise, still patient, still the most dangerous person in most rooms he enters, and he is spending what time he has looking for someone who can repair what Sydney's power left half-finished.

First appears in chapter 4

The wife of a mid-level figure in Merit's organized crime, sharp, well-dressed and long past being impressed by any of them. She has spent years running the parts of her husband's career he takes credit for, and being treated as decoration for her trouble. When he decides she has become inconvenient and leaves her to die, she does not stay dead: she comes back able to unmake whatever she touches, and she has a very clear idea of what she is owed.

First appears in chapter 4

Marcella's husband, a mid-level Merit criminal with more ambition than judgement, who has built his standing on his wife's work and does not intend to keep sharing it.

First appears in chapter 6

Older now than the girl in the yellow raincoat, and the only reason Victor is still walking around: bringing him back is her routine and her responsibility. She is quieter than she used to be, grieving a sister she chose not to raise, and increasingly aware that the family she has assembled is held together by her ability rather than by anything softer.

First appears in chapter 6

Still enormous, still tattooed, still mistaken for the muscle. Mitch handles the records, the money and the research, keeps the household running, and stays because of Sydney rather than because of Victor. He has never been an EO, and he is the only ordinary person in the room by choice.

Also known as Eli Cardale

First appears in chapter 8

Locked in a government facility built to hold people like him, in a cell designed around the fact that he heals from anything. He has not changed his mind about a single thing: he still believes the ExtraOrdinaries are wrong things wearing people, that removing them was righteous work, and that his own survival is evidence of purpose. He is patient, courteous with his captors, and waiting.

First appears in chapter 10

A young woman who is never quite the same young woman twice. She takes other people's shapes and wears them as easily as a coat, moving through the city as whoever is convenient, and nobody who meets her can say for certain what she looks like underneath. She is entertained by other people's ambitions and attaches herself to the most interesting one available.

First appears in chapter 12

The detective who finally arrested Eli, now running the government body set up to find, hold and study ExtraOrdinaries. He is a career officer trying to keep an unaccountable programme inside some kind of line, and he does not entirely control the people working under him.

First appears in chapter 16

The war veteran whose ruined leg Victor silenced in exchange for service, and who can still step briefly out of the world and through it. He remains on call, and the arrangement remains exactly as one-sided as it was.

First appears in chapter 20

The scientist attached to the facility holding Eli, who regards an unkillable subject less as a prisoner than as an opportunity. He wants to know how the healing works, and he is prepared to take Eli apart repeatedly to find out.

First appears in chapter 8

Sydney's dog, large, patient and dead once already, who has been with her longer than anyone else in the household.

Appears from the start

Sydney's older sister, dead before this book begins. She came back from her own drowning with a voice no one could refuse, spent years steering Eli and the people who should have been stopping him, and treated her younger sister as expendable. Sydney was asked to bring her back and would not.