Ondine Verrine

The registered twin — a grow-deck apprentice who does not know she was ever two

Ondine Verrine is eighteen, apprenticed to the grow-decks her mother stewarded, and has just lost that mother — Sabine, who kept the tomato vines and gave a share of warmth to half the deck’s children. She is steady, deft with growing things, and grieving in the plain, unshowy way of someone raised to be useful. She was entered on the register the day she was born, a licensed birth against a clean death, and has never once wondered whether the ship counted her rightly.

What she doesn’t know

That she came into the world beside a brother, on a single licensed birth — that her mother kept two and entered one, and that the other has been alive her whole life a few cold decks away, watching. She may half-know it, the way a person half-knows the shape of a thing kept from them: a second place always set and cleared, a portion of her mother’s attention always turned somewhere Ondine couldn’t follow.

Her part in the tale

Ondine is the living face that makes the column human — the registered life the hidden one was traded for. When she and Ilex finally stand in one room, off the record, the abstract arithmetic of the overcount becomes two people who were always meant to be two, and the teller watching them has to decide what a count is for.

Appears in

The Overcount novella