Otur

• The name: otur = bad luck, misfortune (Swedish; the opposite of tur, luck).

• Build & height: 1.92 m, tall and perfectly upright. She has never slouched, and her spine is as straight as a pendulum rod.
• Face: porcelain-pale, perfectly symmetrical, ageless, cold. A hairline crack runs down from her left eye like a fine minute-hand: the only flaw.
• Hair: wound in springs: tight coils of hair-spring piled high, tick-tensioned, with a few broken coils sticking out at the back. Ch. (The older note said brass.)
• Eyes: clock faces. Two small white dials with black numerals and moving hands. The left shows the present time. The right counts down to her death. The tiny hands stutter when she looks at Mingus (ch. 98), tremble for the first time two days before her hour (ch. 99), slow when she eats the wrong-hour bread (ch. 100), and stop at the ninth stroke (ch. 101).
• Skin & sin-mark: pale as enamel. Pride, silver, placement: everything in its place, in time. A collar of silver numerals circles her throat like a dial, I to XII, and at K-IV it has fused into a silver ring that turns, very slowly.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a gown of overlapping brass plates that tick as she breathes, each plate engraved with an appointment she has made · a high collar of gear-teeth · a short cape of black velvet over the shoulders · gloves of fine brass mesh, brass-plated at the backs (ch. 100). Every step sounds like a watch.
• Signature item: the plates of her gown: when a great appointment is kept, its plate falls off and rings on the floor. At her death they go quiet one by one, tick… tick… …tick… (ch. 101).
• Movement: precise, mechanical, never hurried, never late. She moves in ticks: each gesture stops dead at its end. She appoints by raising one finger (ch. 98).
• Voice: clipped and exact. Every sentence ends on a full stop. She states times to the second. Her balloons are perfect circles with a tiny tick-mark at twelve o'clock. Her last appointment rings out of every clock-face on the planet at once (ch. 101).
• Variant looks: Appointing (both clock-eyes spinning, a new plate etching itself on her gown, one finger raised like a conductor's). An hour of nothing (ch. 100: on a plain wooden bench under a glowing numeral, hands loosening in her lap, the music box on her knees). The last hour (her right eye reading 00:00:01). Lying in state (ch. 102: on the bench under a quilt of a hundred patches, every one sewn at the wrong hour, hands folded over the music box). Young empress (flashback: no plates yet, laughing, setting her own death).

She names a time and an event, and it will happen exactly then. "At twelve and three seconds, the bridge falls." It falls (ch. 98): not breaking, just falling, "as if gravity had been scheduled to notice it."

• Events, not wills: she can appoint things that happen (a bridge falls, a gate opens, a knee buckles, a storm breaks), never a choice ("you kneel"). The will is the one thing that can't be scheduled, which is the whole creed of the Unwound.
• Up to twelve great appointments at once, one per hour on her dial, each etched on a gown-plate as it's made. Below them, any number of small ones in a smaller hand: the Footnotes, which is why ch. 95 and ch. 98 show dozens.
• It can't be stopped, but it can be stepped around, and fulfilled to the letter. The bridge will fall at 12:00:03, so get off the bridge. And the wording is everything (ch. 97, 99): "the gears turn" doesn't say how far, so Bakasura can hold the teeth apart; "the Marka sinks" doesn't say where, so she sinks into a bucket, folded to the size of a dice (ch. 101). That's how you beat her.
• She has to keep her own appointments too.
• The Urverket rule (home field): everything happens on schedule, and unscheduled acts are crimes. Except in the gap-second (ch. 97): every schedule has one seam a day where nothing is due.
• What it can't do: schedule a will; schedule Mingus (her clock-eyes stutter: "That one isn't on any list", ch. 98; "The dog isn't on any page!", Sekund, ch. 96); schedule Vigolas himself (∞−1 isn't on any clock: she can appoint a misfortune to his body, his knee, ch. 98, but never his choices, his number or what he'll do next); or move her own hour.

• Tempo: 720.
• Home tempo: Urverket, where the planet itself keeps her time.
• Heartbeat technique: THE STRUCK HOUR. At the exact appointed instant, the misfortune lands inside one heartbeat, with no tempo at all. No one can act before an appointment, however fast they are: bad luck doesn't race you, it simply arrives. An appointment outranks tempo (ch. 98: Subtick's thousand versions, one jam). No one else's power is timed by a clock instead of a heartbeat.
• Burn cost: each appointment snaps one spring of her hair and makes her death's ticking louder in her own ears.

• Step around it: she can't stop you moving out of an appointment's way.
• Fulfil it to the letter: how, not when (ch. 99). The Marka sinks, into a bucket (ch. 101).
• The unschedulable: Mingus (the unit; on no list) and Vigolas's will and number (no clock). She can still appoint a misfortune to his body, ch. 98. Not Subtick: an appointment beats a chosen future (ch. 98).
• Off the beat: the Timekeepers swing on the tick; hit between it (Smurjan, ch. 99). Lilla Ulv shoots the watches off Sekund's fingers: "I don't know what time it is…"
• The will: she can't schedule a choice. The Unwound built a rebellion on that.
• Nothing at all: Trollmage came to "waste her time". There is nothing to appoint against an hour in which nobody does anything (ch. 100).
• Her own hour. Everybody on Urverket knows exactly when it is.

• The gown of plates.
• The brass throne that ticks, in the throne room inside the Clocktower's mile-wide dial, its numerals glowing through like stained glass; she has sat nowhere else in three hundred years (ch. 98, 100). (The old note, "she sits in front of it, never on", is superseded by the page.)
• The music box: a tiny brass box on the throne's arm, lid closed, key dusty, never wound in three hundred years: her one crooked thread, the only crooked line on the whole planet (ch. 97). Her fingertip rests on it even in battle (ch. 98). She winds it at last on the bench, and it plays something clumsy and sweet, slightly out of tune, unscheduled (ch. 100–101).
• The pocket watch with only one hour marked on its face, engraved deep: IX (ch. 99).
• The plain wooden bench under a glowing numeral, which nobody had sat on in three hundred years (ch. 100). She dies on it and lies in state on it (ch. 101–102).
• The Timekeepers: men and women in brass-buttoned black coats with clock-faces for badges and long brass batons that tick and stop whatever they strike for one second. TIMEKEEPER · K-II MARKED · Urverket. Their chief, Sekund (CHIEF TIMEKEEPER · K-I UNMARKED), a stiff little man with a pocket watch on every finger of his left hand, who in the end swings his baton without a schedule, to save a continent (ch. 102). The Ticking Gaol: cells like clock-faces, guards changing exactly on the hour.
• The Unwound (her enemies, the crew's allies): rebels who broke their own schedules and live in the gaps between the gears (wrong-hour bread, a Tuesday nobody scheduled for a wedding). Led by Kugge, twelve, grease on her cheeks and a brass cog for an earring ("You're very bad at being arrested."), with Gran Fjäder, unscheduled for forty years.

She never fights by hand. She raises a finger. She opens by appointing the crew's ground out from under them ("At twelve and three seconds, the bridge falls."), breaks them down with small humiliations (a knee, a blink, a jam), and finishes by stacking appointments until there's nowhere left to step. "You fight like people who think the future is open. It isn't. Not here. Here, the future is a list. And I write the list." (ch. 98). Team combo: Otur + Tyngd: she schedules the moment, he drops the weight on it. On the page the two arcs are linked only by the hook (ch. 102).

• Wants: control: a universe that keeps its appointments, so nothing can go wrong by surprise.
• Fears: her hour. She has been afraid every second for three hundred years.
• Contradiction: the empress of time is its prisoner, and the queen of misfortune is the most frightened person on her world.
• Traits: precise, proud, cold on the surface, lonely, curious despite herself ("…It's warm.", ch. 100), capable of a terrible tenderness (the music box under her hand), and in the end brave: she spends her death on a gift.
• Humour: icy precision. "You have forty seconds to apologise. Thirty-nine." · "I eat at seven." · "I do not sit on benches."
• Habits: checks the time constantly, though her own eye shows it; adjusts things by a millimetre; touches the music box.
• Alone: sits upright on her throne in the dim throne room, listening to her own ticking; opens the pocket watch with one hour on it (ch. 99).

• Vigolas: "You are late." / "I'm always late." (ch. 98). She appoints his left knee, and it buckles; she can't appoint him. She finds him painful to look at. Folding his own ship to keep her appointment cost him how old he is (ch. 101).
• Kompis + Mingus: Kompis is the one who sees her one crooked thread to the music box (ch. 97) and the hand that never leaves it (ch. 98): "Maybe we can stop her being alone for it." (ch. 99). Her clock-eyes stutter when she looks at the dog ("That one isn't on any list.").
• Trollmage: the one she likes. He climbs her tower in slippers with a bag of wrong-hour bread to "waste your time", and gives her the first unscheduled hour of her life on a wooden bench (ch. 100); his hand rests near hers, then on hers; he catches her as she falls: "You were right on time. I'm so proud of you." (ch. 101). "They're not going to schedule your funeral… You'd hate that. …You'd love it." (ch. 102)
• Rougeina: the assassin who "arrives one step to the left", and loses her eighth blade to an appointment (ch. 98); Kugge finds it in the stopped gears (ch. 102).
• Smurjan: "the three-eyed one blinks" (ch. 98); he reads the Timekeepers' beat (ch. 99) and counts down her last nine strokes (ch. 101). Respawn breaks every schedule; she hates him.
• Kali / Bakasura / Drekk: the borrower who forgets what she borrowed, the shadow-mouth that chokes, the navigator whose mask slips (ch. 98). Bakasura holds her gears open (ch. 97); Drekk holds the bucket the Marka sinks into (ch. 101).
• Tyngd: the next arc's general; another of the drifting order who chose the Order. He respected her; she found him uncouth.
• Sekund: her Chief Timekeeper, who learns to strike "when it SLIPS, not when it's DUE" (ch. 102).
• Kugge and the Unwound: the girl and the town who live in her one free second.
• Tövind and the Thaw Cult: the man who wound her clocks, and the cult her death left behind (ch. 170–176).

• "You are late. You have always been late. Today you will be on time: for your funeral." (ch. 98)
• "At twelve and three seconds, the bridge falls." (ch. 98)
• "You fight like people who think the future is open. It isn't. Not here. Here, the future is a list. And I write the list." (ch. 98)
• "…That one isn't on any list." (ch. 98)
• "Three hundred years. I scheduled every sunrise on this world. I have never once watched one." (ch. 100)
• "I scheduled my own death because I was afraid of it. If I chose the hour, it couldn't surprise me." (ch. 100)
• "I always wondered what it would feel like." / "What does it feel like?" / "Late." (ch. 101)
• "At the moment I stop, every appointment I have ever made is cancelled." (ch. 101)
• "You have forty seconds to apologise. Thirty-nine."
• "I scheduled everything. Even this. Especially this."