Reference

Statistics

Every card in the campaign, generated from the campaign files. If a number here disagrees with a number in the prose, this is the one that is right.

The cast

Benno Raske

The Second Hand’s man at the Nine. Warm, funny, remembers your name and your number, pays extremely well and on time, and what he buys is pieces of children’s lives.

Calloway

Runs the Threshold house at the Nine. Crossed more doors than anybody alive, landlocked at forty-one and never once sulked about it, and would take the Council apart with her bare hands for any one of her four hundred kids.

Councillor Hale

Holds the Wolf Gate berth on the Nine Council. Does not want stray forecasting made public, because a berth whose door might move is worth a great deal less than a berth whose door might not.

Rill

Twenty-one, two intakes above the player, once the best of them at the Yards, nearly landlocked — and carrying for Benno Raske, because nobody has ever worked out what a frayed-out first-through is supposed to do next.

Tace Orun

Foreman at Ladder. Had two days to work out who could be saved and made a list of nineteen names, and will not explain the order unless somebody asks her properly.

Tallyman Captain Brace

The Tally’s face in v1. Collects on impound orders, carries a shock baton and never a blade, and knows things before he should.

Tolk

Cat-sized, six-limbed, from a world called Bell on the far frontier. Their cells hold a written payload perfectly for a lifetime — the same strangeness that lets a first-through open a door, wearing a different body. Nobody made either of them. Tolk cannot cross alone, and has opinions about that.

Everybody else

BlingBling

Lint’s glint. From the flare twins at Gliese 65, and the most ostentatious thing on the Nine — her flash register runs to colours other glints consider showing off. Cannot cross a door without a first-through. Has opinions about that and about everything else.

Dray Enns

Seventeen. First-through at the Nine, four years on the rota, Cold Doors and Procyon. Has the Listen and is quiet about it, the way they usually are. Four hundred crossings and has never used the knack for anything that mattered.

Dunnel

Calloway’s deputy at the Nine. Runs the floor of an evacuation from a hall she cannot step into, calls the running total out loud so four hundred children know where they are, and tells people the cost of the job they just volunteered for before they do it.

Ferren

Nineteen, another first-through, genuinely better than the player, and always already there when they arrive. Takes his orders from a voice he has never thought to question.

Hesk

Fifties. Deck systems at the Nine: shutters, ports and atmosphere trim on nine through twelve. Runs an undocumented override on the one upper gallery bay that does not look into Sirius, and eats his lunch in it.

Meriel Koll

The other half of the van Maanen’s Star office. Keeps the station alive, keeps Sep fed, and has decided the reports are a bad idea.

Mina Haral

Eighty-one. A reader out of Procyon who taught reading for fifty-one years, including half the Tally’s filing clerks and a nine-year-old called Marem Hale. Turned back at a hall at twenty-two. Has paid children forty-one times to carry her where she wanted to go.

Old Man Sirius

The mind that runs the Nine. Nine hundred and seventy-five years old, granted personhood by an inquest, permitted to advise and never to decide. One name, forty thousand bespoke voices. Called the Old Man by everybody.

Ossuary

Fifties, enormous, Threshold ground staff at the Nine. Stands the ring. Has stood it for a very long time and has watched people not come back.

Oyen

Twenty-three. Records clerk at the Nine, third level, port side. Three years in a room nobody visits, keeping the station’s own copy of everything the couriers have ever brought in.

Pell Ivor

Forty. Tallyman on door seven at the Nine, twelve years in the autumn. Keeps a board. Has been privately counting something nobody asked him to count since Friday.

Sennet

Eleven. Tested at nine and failed, and will never cross. Keeps the Standing on second and third watch. Called Sen. Knows more about this station than most of its staff.

Sep Anwar

One of two Threshold staff at van Maanen’s Star, where the anchor logs are kept. Six years in an office nobody visits, and has stopped asking to leave.

Vantage

A fathom of the Luhman 16 cloud decks, eleven years old, which is young. Blind and uninterested in the concept. Reads a room by what the field in it is doing, which turns out to matter more than anybody has ever had cause to find out. Unbonded, and has been at the Nine since he was carried here at a few months old.

Vey

About forty-five. Hall officer and shelter marshal at the Gliese 65 refinery, which in a posting that size is one job. Runs the only evacuation corridor for twelve thousand people, and the corridor is the anchor hall.

Species and standing orders

Bell Sixlimb

Tolk’s species: cat-sized, six-limbed, four-handed, from the terminator band of a TRAPPIST-1 world. Wild, not made. Their cells keep a written payload for a lifetime, which is the same strangeness that lets a human child open a door.

Tallyman

Generic Tally enforcer: grey pressure armour, shock baton, restraint loops, and a reader. Carries nothing lethal, because a body is not a line on a manifest.