Sax

• Build & height: 1.93 m, tall and thin, all angles, a little stooped, as if leaning over a cutting table.
• Face: pale, calm, blank. Not cruel. Unattached, like a balloon whose string was cut (ch. 119). It cracks exactly once (ch. 124), when someone asks who is on the other end of his last thread.
• Hair: colourless ash, cut very short, as if he cut it himself without a mirror.
• Eyes: pale grey, unfocused at a middle distance, the eyes of a man who has nobody to look for.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a plain dark shirt · a long grey coat with too many pockets, every pocket stuffed with snipped ends of thread, gold and red and grey, trailing behind him like a comet's tail (ch. 119) · no hat, no gloves (he needs the feel of the shears).
• Signature item: the shears: "slim and silver, no longer than a forearm, so sharp the starlight bends round the edges." (ch. 119) Not the oar-sized shears of his Severers.
• Movement: unhurried and uncanny. He steps onto the star's rim "before anyone sees him do it", three steps behind the crew. By ch.
• Voice: quiet, reasonable, almost gentle ("Rest well. You won't miss each other."). His balloons have no tail: they float near him, connected to nothing. The SFX of his power is the only loud thing about him.
• Variant looks: Comet (ch. 119: stepping off a skiff, thread-ends streaming). Cutting the seam (ch. 122–123: alone at the far end of the white fire, shears opened around a seam a mile long). Cracked (ch. 124: one hand to his chest, "I don't remember."). Adrift (ch. 124: a tiny figure spinning slowly on the starlight sea, one tear floating up off his cheek, held by nothing).

His shears cut any bond: a thread between people, a binding, an alliance, the seam of a star. Cut things stay apart until someone chooses to rejoin them.

• Threads: he opens his shears in the empty space between a man's hand and a dog's head, exactly where the thread runs: snip. The golden pulse line goes dark, and Kompis feels nothing: "I'm looking at him. And I don't feel anything." No anchor, no Subtick (ch. 119–120).
• The crew: snip, snip, snip, and the crew fight as strangers: they still know each other, but the pull is gone; Rougeina's Swap to cover Smurjan arrives half a second late, the Triple Pulse comes apart, Vigolas forgets why he was lunging (ch. 120).
• Actions: he cuts the thread between Vigolas and his own jump, and Vigolas stops mid-air; he snips the line of a Swap, and Rougeina arrives nowhere (ch. 124).
• Words: he cuts Orka's "and", the word itself, mid-sentence, and her binding fails (ch. 123).
• Seams: his shears open round the Dawnstar's seam of white fire, a mile long, and the star begins to split (ch. 122).
• SFX: snip. Always lower-case, always alone in its panel. The cut ends drift like seeds.

• Tempo: 900.
• Home tempo: the open Current, where nothing is tied to anything.
• Heartbeat technique: SNIP. Inside one heartbeat he cuts the bond between a person and their own action: a lunge from its target, a jump from its landing, a Swap from its destination. The motion simply stops halfway, in the same beat it began (ch. 124). No one else cuts you loose from what you were about to do.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): every bond he cuts, he loses one of his own. Every burned beat cuts more, so it costs more of him. By ch. 124 he had one left, and he cut it himself, and the overflow took the shape of his whole body: nothing holds him any more, not even the ground. He drifts.

Every bond he cuts, he loses one of his own. He has cut so many that he remembers no one who ever loved him (beats). Greed-sight finds almost nothing of value in him. The one frayed thread left in his chest runs down into the dark of the Current, toward something very far away and very old, and he can't say whose it is: "…I don't remember. I cut everyone. I don't remember who that one is. I just never could make myself—" (ch. 124)

• Rejoining. Cut things stay apart until someone chooses to rejoin them. Kompis, reading the Lust Codex with a friend, earns THE KNOT (ch. 122) and ties the Mingus thread back by choosing the dog again (ch. 123), then every crew thread, feeling both ends.
• Cut and tie. On a splitting star, he cut and Kompis tied, faster and faster: "Why do you keep doing that? They'll just get cut again." / "Because I want them tied. That's all a knot is." (ch. 124)
• Another word. Orka, her "and" cut, finds "with" (ch. 124).
• His last thread. Vigolas's Greed-sight found it ("His chest! He's got one left!").
• How he was beaten (ch. 124): he wasn't, exactly. Offered the chance to feel his last thread again ("I can tie it tighter. Whoever it is."), he refused ("If I felt them, I'd have to feel all of it. Everything I cut.") and cut it himself. Ivar: "Leave him, boy. Some people would rather drift than be held." With nothing cutting, Kompis and Orka knotted the star.

• The slim silver shears.
• The coat of cut ends: hundreds of snipped threads in his pockets, among them the gold of the Kompis–Mingus thread ("the strongest one I've ever cut").
• The Severers (SEVERER · K-II MARKED · Rank Certification): shears the size of oars, silent skiffs, raids on the star's rim (ch. 119–121).

Disconnection. He opens by cutting the bond that holds the strongest fighter up (Kompis to Mingus), then the bonds between the rest, and lets a team come apart into individuals. He fights at a calm distance, cutting not people but what connects them to things: their targets, their landings, their words. He never finishes; he lets things fall apart. Severer combo: Sax + the Severers: they hack at the seam with oar-shears while he cuts the binders.

• Wants: not to feel it. Everything he cut, all at once, is the one thing he will not face.
• Fears: being tied again, and so having to feel.
• Contradictions: a man who keeps every end he cuts; a cutter of bonds who never could make himself cut one; a villain whose last act is mercy to himself and cruelty to whoever is on the other end.
• Humour: detached, almost courteous ("Tomorrow, the star. Rest well. You won't miss each other.").
• Habits: tucks each cut end into a pocket; turns his shears over in his fingers.
• Alone: drifts, and asks the dark one question.

• Kompis: "You cut. I tie." The duel that made the Knot. Kompis offered to tie his last thread tighter, and Sax said no.
• Mingus: the thread he cut, and the dog who stayed anyway. Proof that love isn't the thread.
• Vigolas: whose Greed-sight found his last thread; whose jump he cut.
• Rougeina: whose Swap he cut into nowhere (Smurjan caught her by the wrist above the white fire).
• Ivar: "Some people would rather drift than be held."
• Ingrith: the office he served (dead ch. 143; the Severers have no certifier now).

• "It's the strongest one I've ever cut. Thicker than most marriages." (ch. 120)
• "Tomorrow, the star. Rest well. You won't miss each other." (ch. 120)
• "Interesting. Then I'll cut something you can't tie." (ch. 123)
• "You can't tie a star, dog-man." (ch. 124)
• "…Why do you keep doing that? They'll just get cut again." (ch. 124)
• "If I felt them, I'd have to feel all of it. Everything I cut." (ch. 124)
• "…Who was it…" (ch. 124)