Vicious characters

Appears from the start

A precise, controlled man in his early thirties who has just come out of a ten-year prison sentence and has one thing left on his schedule: finding Eli. He is an ExtraOrdinary, an EO, and what he can do is pain: he reaches into another person's nerves and turns the volume up until they cannot think, or down to nothing. His own pain registers strangely, so he keeps track of himself with a marker on his skin. Patient, deeply unsentimental and very good at getting people to be useful to him, he travels with an oversized ex-convict and a girl who should not be anywhere near either of them.

First appears in chapter 2

A girl of about thirteen in a yellow raincoat, quiet, watchful and considerably calmer about the company she is keeping than she should be. She is an EO herself. What she can do is bring back the dead, which is the reason she is being hunted and the reason Victor keeps her close.

First appears in chapter 3

Victor's former cellmate: enormous, covered in tattoos, and consistently mistaken for a thug by everyone who meets him. He is in fact a mild-mannered computer specialist with terrible luck, who went to prison for crimes committed with a keyboard and has been treated as muscle ever since. He handles the group's records, identities and research, and he is protective of Sydney in a way Victor is not.

Also known as Eli Cardale

First appears in chapter 8

Ten years earlier, a brilliant, charming pre-med student at Lockland University and Victor's roommate. Handsome, likeable and effortlessly good at everything he is graded on, he becomes the closest thing Victor has to a friend and the person Victor most wants to beat. His thesis argues that ExtraOrdinary abilities are not myth but medicine: a near-death experience, under the right conditions of adrenaline and will, can produce one. A decade later he and Victor are no longer on the same side of anything.

First appears in chapter 12

A Lockland student who works alongside Victor in the lab and is going out with Eli. Warm, funny and pragmatic, she is the person who makes the two roommates tolerable to each other, and Victor is quietly, uselessly in love with her. She helps with the experiments because she believes in them and because the people running them are her friends.

First appears in chapter 30

Sydney's older sister, four years ahead of her, who died before Sydney did and came back with a voice nobody can refuse: anyone who hears her wants to do what she asks and believes it was their own idea. She uses it comprehensively and without much apparent guilt, and she is not on the same side of this as her sister.

First appears in chapter 30

The police detective who worked Victor's case ten years ago and who is now dealing with a string of deaths he cannot explain and with pressure from directions he cannot account for. He is competent and increasingly aware that something in his own investigation is not his own.

First appears in chapter 40

A war veteran left with a shattered leg and constant, disabling pain, who died on a road overseas and came back able to slip briefly out of the world and step through it. Victor makes him an offer he cannot sensibly refuse: relief from the pain, on loan, in exchange for service.

First appears in chapter 24

A large, patient dog that follows Sydney everywhere. He was struck by a car and did not stay dead, which makes him both a companion and the clearest evidence of what she can do.