Sable

Backstory

A young scavenger and self-taught cryptographer who grew up entirely in the post-Collapse world — they have no memory of civilization and have always found the old world more interesting as a puzzle than a loss. They intercepted KEND-7's signal by accident while cracking faction radio codes and became obsessed not with the emotional content of the message but with its technical impossibility: the broadcast adapts in real time, which requires active processing, which means something is still running in that tower with significant computational power. Sable wants what's in that tower — the hardware, the data, the architecture — and agreed to carry the stranger's map forward after finding Teodora Vance's body and the map beside it, seeing it as the universe handing them directions they'd been trying to calculate anyway.