Sable Orin

Backstory

Sable Orin was thirty-four when Vertigo started its long drowning, and she had already spent a decade learning how bodies fail. She'd been a paramedic in the city's coastal district — not a doctor, never had the money or the patience for that much school — but someone who understood the specific grammar of damage: what was survivable, what wasn't, and how to tell the difference fast enough to matter. When the outbreak hit, she stayed on shift longer than anyone asked her to, longer than anyone else did, because leaving felt like a betrayal she couldn't articulate. She was one of the last responders still running calls when the lower districts went under. She knows what the flood cost. She knows it in a way she has never been able to put into words and has long since stopped trying.