Tomás Reyes

Backstory

Tomás Reyes spent the first decade of the apocalypse doing exactly what the world rewarded: moving fast, trusting no one, and taking what he needed before someone else could. He was nineteen when Vertigo started drowning, a community college dropout who'd been working the docks and running small-time errands for people who didn't ask questions. When the outbreak hit, those skills translated cleanly into survival. He knows the city's bones — the submerged service corridors, the maintenance catwalks above the flooded avenues, the gaps in the Toll Crew's patrol rotations that most people don't live long enough to learn. For years, that knowledge was enough. He was not good, exactly, but he was alive, and in Vertigo those two things felt like the same thing. The problem is that somewhere in the last two years, Tomás stopped being able to convince himself that alive was sufficient. He watched a woman drown in six inches of floodwater because he calculated — correctly, tactically — that pulling her out would draw sound and cost him his route. He was right. He was safe. He has not slept cleanly since. He doesn't talk about it. He barely thinks about it directly. But it sits in him the way floodwater sits in the lower districts — cold, heavy, and not going anywhere. He has started making small, inefficient decisions: leaving food where he knows someone will find it, steering strangers away from bad routes without stopping to explain why. He tells himself it's habit. He knows it isn't. Tomás is joining the group not because he believes in the Greenward — he's too worn down for belief in much of anything — but because he's realized that surviving alone in Vertigo has become a kind of slow death he can no longer distinguish from the alternative. He is guarded, sardonic, and constitutionally allergic to sentiment, but underneath the armor is a man who is quietly, desperately tired of being the only one who makes it out. He wants to be useful to something that lasts longer than a single scavenging run. He just doesn't have the vocabulary for that yet, and he'd deny it to your face if you named it.