Settlement medic and medicinal herb cultivation — first generation, age 46
She is precise in her opinions and slow to offer them; when she does speak, people listen, which she finds more burden than relief. She runs her medical work the way she runs her herb beds — methodically, with a distrust of shortcuts that is really a distrust of hope. She does not perform warmth, but she remembers the specific details of every person she has treated, and this functions, in practice, as its own form of care.
She trained in ship-board medicine, a specialty that prepared her for everything except what happens to a body that spent months in cryo without full cellular repair — knowledge she acquired by watching three colleagues die in the first two years. She was among the eight roused during the fourteen weeks and has spoken to almost no one about it; what Peder Voss said to her during that period she has replayed until she can no longer locate the original sequence of words. She grows medicinal plants on the south-facing cut of the Long Ledge in soil she composted from kelp and fish waste over four years.
Four months ago she received a brief transmission from the Shoulder addressed only to her by name; she has told no one, including Maren Hoek.