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Yusra was nineteen when a clinic misfiled a body and printed her name on it. She read her own obituary on a public terminal — three lines, wrong photo, no correction ever filed. She could have fixed it in an afternoon. She didn't. A dead woman has no credit line, no travel permit and no rent, but more usefully she has no flag: every automated system in the city checks her record, finds a closed file, and stops asking. Two years of that and she stopped correcting people about anything at all. She goes into places that have very good locks and very poor imaginations about who might already be inside.

why the handle: A background process with no controlling terminal. Legally dead, no flag, never in the foreground. Exact.

Kasia sells other people's faces. She is an identity broker in the Undercount — the trade in lives the census never wrote down — and her real skill is not forgery, it is study: give her three days with someone's gait, their tics, the way they hold a cup, and she can put a stranger through that person's own front door. She got into fighting the way brokers do, by having to extract clients who had been made. Her signature move on the street and in a fight is the same one: two people who were standing in the wrong places are suddenly standing in each other's, and by the time anyone works out what happened, the wrong one is dead.

why the handle: Match and substitute. Her three abilities are literally Pattern Cache, Match, Substitution.

Tomas's arms are not his. He was corporate security, he took the surgery the company recommended, and when the contract ended the chrome stayed in and the lease stayed live. Combat-grade limbs bill by the hour: a leaseholder in good standing gets full torque, a leaseholder in arrears gets throttled to something that can hold a cup. So Tomas fights with money in his account, and the money in his account is not his either. A fixer started calling him Escrow because he is only strong while he is holding something he owes to somebody else, and the name stuck because everyone who heard it understood it immediately.

why the handle: Allocation you are holding and have not freed. His passive is +1 attack per 100 scrip HELD — and it drops the moment he spends.

Jia was paid, for four years, to break into her own employer. Physical penetration testing: badge cloning, tailgating, ceiling voids, the polite fiction that a woman with a clipboard belongs in a server room. She was the best they had, she wrote all of it down, and when the department was dissolved in a reorganisation she was walked out of the building she had personally proven was indefensible. She kept the notes. She kept the cloner. Her whole method is that no defence fails all at once — it fails at a seam, and if you widen the same seam four times it stops being a seam and becomes a door.

why the handle: Her kit is Encryption Key and Encrypt. She strips two defence per hit until the seam is a door.

Nadia counts in threes. She was a percussionist before she was anything else — the kind of kid who could hold a triplet against a four while doing her homework — and when she picked up a secondhand deck with a cooked cooling loop, that turned out to be the entire skill. The deck gives her about four seconds before the heat forces a dump. Three commands, then out. She practised the three-in-four until it was muscle, the way she had practised everything else, and now she has the fastest hands in the city on hardware that would kill anyone who thought about it. She still taps.

why the handle: An anonymous function — quick, composable, gone. Her ability is Closure: three casts inside four ticks.

Arun ran the Gantry — the unfinished elevated transit spine the city abandoned and the city's people finished themselves — on a bike with no brakes worth the name, carrying things that were not supposed to move between districts. A shunt, on the rail, is a movement made to get something out of the way of something else; he named himself after it as a joke about his entire career. He hits hardest immediately on arrival, because a courier who has slowed down is a courier who has been caught, and he hunts people who are alone for the same reason: crowds are where couriers die.

why the handle: Counts hops. His passive IS Hop Count; his root is TTL. He hits hardest on arrival.

A lintel is the beam over a door that carries the weight of everything above it, and Ibrahim has done that job in one form or another since he was fifteen — first on the door of a Tallow Row noodle bar, then on the door of a clinic that needed one, then on doors nobody was supposed to be able to get through. He is the calmest person on any roster and the slowest to anger, and both facts are load-bearing: a doorman who can be provoked is a doorman who can be moved. He remembers every face that has ever tried to get past him. He has never once chased anyone down the street. The doorway is the job.

why the handle: The layer everything must pass through to get at anything. A doorman is a kernel.

There is a job in the towers called a risk sink. A company that cannot legally accept liability for something hires a body that can, and the body signs. Fidelia signed at twenty-three, for the money, and spent six years being the name on other people's disasters. When the contract lapsed she found she had no idea how to stop. She takes hits meant for people who did not ask her to, and gets irritated when they thank her for it. She is the least sentimental person on the roster about the most sentimental thing anyone does.

why the handle: Something that takes the request on your behalf. Her passive routes 12% of a zone-mate's damage onto herself, unasked.

Abel spent eleven years in a corporate public-order unit, which is a phrase meaning he was very good at containing people who were correct. He knew the doctrine by heart: draw a line, make the line the only thing that matters, let the crowd exhaust itself against it. He walked out mid-shift after an order he will not discuss, and he took the armour with him, because it was surgically integrated and because he was not going to leave it with them. He does the identical job now from the other side of the line, and he is aware of the joke. He is not amused by it.

why the handle: A line that decides what passes. He drew them professionally for eleven years and now draws them from the other side.

Dr. Perla Batac was struck off for treating people who could not produce a payer, which is the only kind of person on Mercy Lane, and she has continued to do so for eleven years out of a converted laundrette. She works on a clock because she learned trauma medicine somewhere the clock was the only thing keeping anyone honest: every four minutes, look at the room, find the worst one, treat them. She does not distinguish between patients on the basis of who they work for, and has stitched people back together specifically so they could go and try to kill each other again. She calls this 'not my department'.

why the handle: A scheduled task. Her ability IS Scheduled Task — every 4th tick, the lowest ally, whether anyone asked or not.

Osman recovers people. Not chrome — people. The city runs on indenture contracts: sign for the surgery, work off the balance, and if you run, somebody gets paid to bring you back to the desk you ran from. Osman is that somebody, and he is unromantic about it: he has a list, he has a van, and he has never told himself a story about it being anything other than what it is. He is very good at the part everyone else finds hard, which is the moment the person is one street away and thinks they have made it. He has been on both sides of the contract. He does not mention which order.

why the handle: A connection that stays open. His passive is literally Persistent Connection.

There was a combat stimulant programme that keyed its dosing to confirmed kills — the theory being that a soldier chemically rewarded for lethality will be lethal. The theory was correct. The programme was cancelled for reasons never made public. Sunniva is the last living participant. The implant is not removable and it does not negotiate: she is clear-headed, warm, funny and entirely present, right up until she has gone too long without, and then she is looking for someone. She is honest about it with everyone she works with, which is more than the people who built her ever were.

why the handle: A pointer to nothing that crashes whatever dereferences it. Her implant is keyed to kills and does not negotiate.

Thuy grew up in the self-built stacks, where the floors are added by whoever needs one, and the whole neighbourhood is close enough to shout across and far too tangled to walk across. You learn to reach the next building without going there. She got the handle as an insult from an older crew who thought a kid with a signal rig was dead weight, and she kept it because within a year they had all learned what it meant when she said it about them. Everything Thuy touches gets slower. She has never been in a fair fight and considers the concept a marketing term.

why the handle: Latency, made a weapon. Her passive is Latency; her reach ability is ICMP Echo.

Teguh's chrome is industrial. It is not combat hardware and does not pretend to be — a four-point handling harness issued to line workers at a fabrication plant so that one body could tend the machines four bodies used to. He kept the job eleven years past the point it should have gone to an automation contract, purely by being faster than the contract's projected savings, and then the plant closed anyway and he walked out still wearing it because nobody came to collect. He works crowds now. He is unfailingly polite and does the work of four people, because it is the only way he has ever known how to work.

why the handle: Concurrency. Multithread, Fork, Sync Barrier — a harness built so one body could tend the machines four used to.

Rosane grew up on a scaffold crew, bolting cladding onto towers she would never be allowed inside, and she learned early that the only way to hit anything from four hundred metres up in a crosswind is to stop moving and start counting. She shoots a gun she built out of a rail jig: it feeds on its own recoil, so the first shot is nothing and the ninth takes a door off its hinges. Runners call her Tally because she keeps the count out loud on comms, and because she has never once been talked into switching targets mid-count. She has no exit plan. She has a firing line and a number.

why the handle: A signal that repeats and builds. Her passive is Resonance — +8% per consecutive hit on the same target. The handle IS the count.

Mariam is sixty-one and has no chrome. Not one gram — no optics, no link, no deck. She sits on the same roof she has sat on for twenty-two years with a folding chair, a thermos, and a pair of pre-war binoculars, and she has called every raid on her block a full minute before it landed. The corps have no file on her worth reading, because there is nothing in it. Younger runners assume she is a liability and then discover that the reason they are alive is that a woman with no augments told them which stairwell to take. She does not chase. She does not leave the roof.

why the handle: Someone posted to watch. Not a sensor package — a woman on a roof with glass. Exact.

In this city, presence is title. A building with people standing in it is occupied; a building with nobody in it is vacant, vacant means surveyed, and surveyed means gone by spring. Dragos is what a block sends when it needs someone to physically be somewhere, indefinitely, in a way that cannot be characterised as absence. He has held a stairwell for nine days. He has been photographed by three separate corporate survey drones and appears in all three filings as an obstruction. He is not a violent man by inclination. He is an extremely stubborn one, and the difference has never mattered to anyone on the receiving end.

why the handle: Mutual exclusion. He holds the lock. His ability is Deadlock and he has held a stairwell for nine days.

A sump is the low point of a floor where everything drains, and Sumpside is named for being it. Idris grew up there and got out the only way available to a body with no qualifications and a very high pain tolerance: he was certified as a stress-test subject. Armour has to be rated, rating armour means hitting it, and the cheapest realistic way to hit armour is to put it on somebody and hit them. Eleven thousand logged impacts over five years. He is quiet, he is precise about numbers, and he keeps a running count of everything that has ever been done to him, because that was literally the job — the logging WAS the product.

why the handle: Stored data, released later. His passive is Write-Back: 15% of all damage taken, logged. The logging WAS the product.