Characters
- Rail is willful and highly protective of Moa. Rail was left without functioning lungs after one particularly bad probability storm, and therefore must constantly use a respirator provided to him by the Thief master Anya-Jacanca, in return for his services as a thief. Rail believes his duty is to protect unassuming, naive Moa from the roughness of the ghetto, a job he carries out dutifully. He is highly distrustful of Vago, but allows him to stay with them because he is so important to Moa. At the end of the book, it becomes apparent that Rail has romantic feelings for Moa, and vice versa.
- Moa is Rail's best friend and helps him steal things for Anya-Jacana. She is sickly and weak, and depends heavily on Rail for her own survival. She strikes up a friendship with the golem, Vago. Moa is convinced that there is more to the world beyond Orokos, though Rail does not and even scorns her convictions. The more feeling of the two, Moa tends to follow her heart more than her head, a tendency that gets her and her friends into trouble more than once. She loves Rail very much, although she's not always sure in which way.
- Vago is a golem, half man half machine. He was created by the Protectorate Chief of Police, Lysander Bane, to be a super soldier against Revenants. He was created to be a prototype and was a murderer named Tukor Kep before he lost his memories in the surgery. As he is about to finish his programing a probability storm takes him from the laboratory and places him in the home of the toy maker, Cretch. Cretch abuses Vago because Vago reminds him of a granddaughter he lost to the same storm. Vago finally has a moment where he snaps and attacks Cretch during a beating. He is later found by Rail and Moa. He wants to stay with Moa and protect her but doesn't like to be around Rail. He is eventually caught by the Secret police who program him to hate ghetto people. Vago almost murders Moa but his former compassion for her overrides his new programing. At the end of the book, Vago is sunk in the ocean and plans to stay there unless the currents happen to take him to shore someday.
Read more about this topic: Storm Thief
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
“Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—
which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
—Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)