Characters

Angel of the Abyss is what remains when rage is not extinguished, but trained until it can be trusted.

The Nexus Dynamics security team calls it "The Glitch Ghost." An anomalous entity that shreds firewalls and crashes corporate systems with terrifying capability and zero tactical logic during GG's operations. Their intrusion countermeasures hesitate around...

El Money should be dead. The mathematics are not ambiguous. A kid from the margins with no corporate backing, no augments, no legal name on any record — the Sprawl's actuarial tables give him a life expectancy somewhere between "already happened" and "next...

Guardian Corporation spent approximately 2.3 million credits building GG into a weapon. Forty-seven successful operations. Zero failures. Highest efficiency rating in her cohort. They called her "the Ghost."

Gabriel Okafor uploaded his consciousness to preserve two thousand years of sacred knowledge. In thirty-seven years, he has transmitted it to no one.

A musician whose work is restricted to two distribution channels neither of which the corporations measure as commercial should not be the most popular human producer in the Sprawl. A performer who refuses interviews, who refuses brand deals, who refuses to...

Harris "Tink" Delacroix is what happens when a corporation hires the exact kind of person its culture normally exists to exclude, protects him just long enough for him to succeed, and then discovers success has made him impossible to retain.

Helena Voss has led Nexus Dynamics for twenty-two years. Three assassination attempts. Two corporate wars. Zero sick days. Her resting heart rate during the Cascade — while 2.1 billion people died across seventy-two hours — was 72 bpm. She took 847 pages of...

Kira Vasquez — known to everyone in the Dregs as Patch — runs the only pre-Cascade electronics repair shop still operating in The Deep Dregs. She fixes neural interfaces, combat implants, ancient terminals, things that shouldn't exist. She asks no questions...

Marcus Chen was one of eleven people in the Nexus emergency coordination center during the 72 Hours of the Cascade. He is the only one still alive. What happened to the other ten is classified at a level that requires Chen's own authorization to access.

Former ORACLE systems architect. Transcended human existence at age 34 through a process that no corporation, faction, or theological movement has successfully replicated, explained, or — despite considerable investment — disproven.

Viktor Okonkwo is the most powerful man in the physical world. Every building, every transit tube, every cargo container riding the Orbital Elevator — his. Nexus owns the data. ORACLE's remnants haunt consciousness. Viktor owns the ground you stand on, and...