Ilex

The overcount — a person born to the voyage and never entered on any roll

Ilex is eighteen and has never been counted. He was born a twin, on a single licensed birth, and where his sister Ondine was entered on the register the day they came, he was carried the other way — into the cold, unmapped decks the charts call solid hull — and hidden there by their mother, who could not choose between two children and so kept one in the dark. He has lived his whole life on skimmed margins and the ways that aren’t on any map, drawing a share of air the ship can feel and no book has ever named.

What he is (and isn’t)

Isn’t: a thief, a stowaway, a leak. He came from nowhere but here; there is no outside to have come from. He is a person the count can’t hold.
Is: careful, quick, and strange with a lifetime of solitude — able to move a mountain-sized ship unseen, to read a corridor by its cold, to go still as hull when a light comes near.

What he wants

To keep breathing. To protect what is left of his mother — her memory, her choice, her name.
Once, only once, to stand in the grow-lamp light beside the sister he has watched his whole life through grilles and gaps and never met.

His part in the tale

Ilex is the face at the end of the column — the overcount made a person. He does not argue that the count is wrong; he simply is the thing it says cannot be allowed, and is, and has been all along without costing the sealed world the famine the creed promised. He is the question the Muster is finally for.

Appears in

The Overcount novella