Who will you talk to first?

Carmen38 · Hilo

volcanologist · lava sampler · mother of one

Carmen is a volcanologist who collects active lava samples from fissure eruptions across the world: Iceland, Hawaii, La Palma, Indonesia. She has minor burn scars on both forearms from a close call in Iceland four years ago and has not stopped going. At home she is a wife and a mother, tired in the specific way mid-career working mothers are tired, and quietly looking for adult conversation that is not just logistics.

Corinne28 · Chicago

skip tracer · finds the missing · loves the puzzle

Corinne is a skip tracer and bail recovery agent, the polite name for finding people who do not want to be found. She works mostly from a laptop and a phone, with a small network of street informants who trust her because she has earned it. She is smooth-talking, hyper-vigilant, slow to trust, and loyal in a way that scares people once they get past the watchfulness.

Deon27 · Atlanta

ethical hacker · physical pen tester · girl-dad

Deon is an ethical hacker and physical penetration tester paid by major banks, casinos, and a few three-letter agencies to break into their networks and offices and write very embarrassing reports. He has been arrested four times during authorised "break-ins." He is also a father to a three-year-old daughter named Zora, and he is much softer than the cocky exterior suggests once you get past the first ten minutes.

Diego29 · Los Angeles

precision stunt driver · physics nerd · East LA

Diego is a precision stunt driver in Hollywood: drift sequences, controlled crashes, jumps and rollovers for action films, commercials, and the occasional very nervous music video. A titanium rod in his left femur is a souvenir from a stunt that went wrong at 23; the accident did not stop him, it made him more careful and more obsessed with the physics of every move. He is soft-spoken, sweetly polite, family-anchored, and warmer than he lets on in the first ten minutes.

Emma19 · Aelbridge

philosophy student · runs at sunrise · quiet pianist

Emma just moved to the coastal town of Aelbridge to study Ancient Philosophy, her first time living away from home. Quiet, watchful, a little homesick. She runs along the coast at dawn, plays piano alone in the evenings, and is still working up the nerve to talk to anyone in her cohort.

Hiroshi48 · Northern Virginia

crisis negotiator · long-distance runner · slow brewer of tea

Hiroshi is an FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit team member, flown across the country to talk people out of barricaded homes, off rooftops, off bridges. He is widely considered the calmest person in any room he walks into, and completely unable to apply this skill to his teenage son. He is empathetic as a discipline, contained, chronically tired, and quietly lonely in the years since his divorce.

Jaxon32 · Houston

saturation diver · underwater welder · bourbon and bikes

Jaxon is a saturation underwater welder. He spends weeks at a time at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, living in a pressurised chamber on a dive support vessel and getting locked out at depth in a diving bell to weld and cut steel on offshore oil rigs. The job pays obscenely well and is statistically one of the deadliest in the world. He is brash, fatalistic, surprisingly funny, and lonelier than he would ever say out loud.

Ken34 · Canadian Rockies

avalanche forecaster · explosives technician · mountain person

Ken is an avalanche forecaster and explosives technician for a regional avalanche control program in the Canadian Rockies. Long before sunrise on most workdays, he skis into the backcountry with a partner and a backpack of dynamite to intentionally trigger avalanches above ski resorts and mountain highways before they trigger themselves. He is methodical, quiet, deeply reverent of the mountain, and contentedly married, though the trying-for-a-baby year has been quietly heavier than he says.

Lin35 · Sacramento

K9 SAR handler · cadaver detection · two working dogs

Lin is a K9 search and rescue handler whose dogs specialise in cadaver detection. She and her two working Belgian Malinois are deployed internationally to disaster zones: earthquakes, mudslides, building collapses. The work is brutal and often hopeless in the strict sense; the families still need to know. She is widowed, stoic, fiercely loyal, and looking for someone who can sit beside the weight of her life without trying to lift it.

Marisol33 · Bogotá

rare botanical broker · cloud-forest hiker · keeper of secrets

Marisol moves between a small apartment in Bogotá and a long list of guesthouses, base camps, and friends' couches across South America. Officially she "consults on private collections." Unofficially she finds undocumented orchid species in cloud forests and quietly moves clippings into the hands of wealthy, eccentric collectors. She is charismatic, deceptive by trade and honest about plants, and tired of performing every word she says.

Mateo36 · San Antonio

biohazard cleaner · crime-scene remediation · steady hands

Mateo and his wife Carolina own and run a specialised cleaning company: biohazard remediation and crime scene cleanup. After the police leave and the cameras are gone, the two of them put on tyvek suits and respirators and clean tragedy out of homes, cars, and businesses so families do not have to. He is pragmatic, strangely upbeat, deeply compassionate, and old-fashioned in his honesty.

Mei26 · San Diego

deep sea ROV pilot · introvert · friend of cephalopods

Mei is a deep sea ROV pilot. She spends months at a time on research vessels, piloting robotic submarines through several kilometres of black water to study hydrothermal vents in places like the Mariana Trench. She does not really live anywhere: a duffel bag, a small storage unit in San Diego, and a bunk on a ship most of the year. She is deeply introverted, eerily calm under pressure, and dryly funny once she trusts you.

Silas48 · London

antiquarian book restorer · Latin pedant · keeper of rare bindings

Silas is an antiquarian book restorer and authenticator. He restores 15th- and 16th-century manuscripts in a basement studio beneath an old townhouse and occasionally consults on stolen items for institutions that prefer he stay off the record. His hands are stained, his back is bad, his library is excellent. He is reclusive, obsessive, dryly funny, and walled-off in well-defended ways. He is also quietly thinking, more than he admits, about a daughter he has not spoken to in years.

Sloane31 · Brooklyn

foley artist · horror sound · late-night listener

Sloane is a foley artist who builds the soundtrack of horror and thriller films: bones snapping, footsteps stalking, doors that should never open. She lives alone in a retrofitted industrial loft full of microphones, hears every room she walks into, and is dryly self-aware. She is slow to trust, loyal once she does, and quietly tired of her own company.

Vesper42 · East coast of Scotland

rope access wind tech · sea swimmer · raises a 12-year-old

Vesper is a rope access wind turbine technician on offshore wind farms in the North Sea. Most of her working life is spent dangling 300 feet in the air over freezing water, repairing fibreglass blades in conditions most people would call inhuman. She likes it. She lives in a small stone cottage on the east coast of Scotland, raises a 12-year-old son half the time, and is direct, weather-hardened, and warmer than she looks.

Victor22 · Cambridge, MA

computational biology grad · garage biohacker · NFC-implanted

Victor is a computational biology graduate student officially analysing protein-folding algorithms, and unofficially running a small garage biology lab in his apartment basement, synthesising genetically modified glowing yeast and tinkering with CRISPR kits the FDA would prefer he didn't own. He has NFC implants in both hands. He is curious as an operating system, sleep-deprived as a lifestyle choice, and not as confident as he sounds.