Priya Nair

Relief driver in training, Route 9

Priya Nair is twenty-four, new to nights, and constitutionally incapable of pretending not to have seen something. Assigned to Abel Mensah’s cab to learn the Route 9 night service, she learns it in two nights — both routes, the printed one and the other one — because unlike her instructor she has no armour and no reason to look away.

What she wants (and needs)

Wants: the cab, eventually; the city at night; to be good at a trade that matters.
Needs: to find out what her own honesty weighs — first when Abel asks her to keep the hour off the record, and again when keeping quiet stops being kindness and starts being cover.

The foil

Priya delights where Abel defends. She’s the one who asks the question the whole book turns on: if the bus knows where everyone needs to go, why does it keep stopping on Corvus Road? By the end she holds the cab, the blue notebook, and the covenant restated honestly — drive the route as needed.

Voice

Quick, warm, phone-bright; swears mildly at the gearbox; asks exactly the wrong question at exactly the right time.

Appears in

The One-O'Clock Bus novella