In the twentieth century, he would have been called an essayist; in the eighteenth century, a pamphleteer. In the twenty-first century, he is a blogger, and he writes under the name, "The Loner."

Clio was thirty-three years old. She was black. And she was single. She told people that her singleness didn't define her, but the more she said it, the more she thought she was lying.

The eight-year-old girl is alone and miles from home. Low-lying branches rake the front of her catamount-fur parka. Flurries of sunlight flitter through the pine needles above her head, scattering shadows across her purple knitted hat. Knitted mittens dangle from her wrists. The day is crisp, cold, windless, and still; a quiet, snow-drawn afternoon — except for the girl, her head down, her momentum forward, her legs punching through the snow like pistons driven with steam.

Cold winter rain batters the thin trunk of the decrepit birch tree, its white bark peeling from its pulp like dead skin, leaving it empty and naked, shivering in the bitter wind. A seventeen-year-old boy, Ignatius Best, Eliza's older brother, leans against its base, insensitive to its plight. "I am a monad," he says, his head nodding slowly in agreement with himself, "but perforated."

She stands at a wooden butcher's block in the middle of her kitchen, pounding bread dough with her fists, her jet-black hair falling straight and long behind her shoulders and framing her pale, oval face. Her eyes are still-water pools reflecting the pitch of a new moon night. She has a nose that curves like the ears of a bat and lips like crescent moons slung sideways in the sky. Her name is Secret Best and she has been blind for three years, seven months, and two days.

He has eyes of golden brown, eyes like amber ale, eyes that view the world through a constant glow of wide-eyed amber glee. He has a round white face framed by golden-brown hair that flits over his cheeks and eyes like amber hummingbirds at a feeder. His chuckles sound like pebbles preparing to avalanche.

His salt-and-pepper spiny-tailed beard follows the line of his jaw but does not cover his cheeks, and his salt-and-pepper spiny-tailed hair grows in a single ear-to-ear meridian over the apex of his scalp. Both hair and beard seem twisted from firework wicks, and between them is a sun-drenched face constantly on the verge of exploding.

Radicalaya wears the uniform of the Vermont State Police, and the single chevron on her sleeve means she is a Trooper First Class in the Field Force Division. She is the only African-American female in the division. Though she scores a 31% on the body mass index, proving that her five-foot, three-inch frame not only appears obese, but is scientifically defined as such, she has never failed her physical fitness test, and if she's read the manual correctly, they can't fire her for pure obesity.

The boy is Saoshyant Root. He is not an 'I' or a 'me' or anything but Saoshyant Root, for there is no 'I' in him, no pillar of individuality standing strong; instead, there is a whirlwind, a cyclonic pandemonium of granular sensations that has surged for nine years, three months, and eleven days; a tornado born from the wild swirling winds that blow, congregate, and become, occupying the same space, the same time — the breath of life — and in passing on, passing through, achieving the climax of their power, those wild swirling winds create this: Saoshyant: an ineluctable modality of peace and calm at the center of a raging tornado of sand-speckled sensations.

Thievery is an itinerant professor with Drinkwater College, an unaccredited institution with no official students and no formal campus. Conceived as a lecture series funded by the University of Vermont in 1972, Drinkwater was established as its own separate college when, in 1990, a state representative named Axelrod Twin convinced the legislature in Montpelier to fund the lecture series in perpetuity. The official mission of Drinkwater College is "to exercise the mental acuity of the citizens of Vermont by engaging them in face-to-face discussions on a liberal variety of topics."

The soles of Deyja's moccasins drag along the wooden planks like carcasses being dragged home from the hunt. His breathing is quick and shallow: shallow because his entire respiratory system exists in his head, and quick because his next breath interests him more than this one; but his breathing is also forced: he pushes the breaths in and out like a man giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to himself.

Over the last four days, Danaë Clement has become a creature without a survival instinct, and now, tied to the rock, listening to her captors leave, their silent processional of shuffling feet declining into the midnight wood, she knows she should scream, but her body will not allow it. She pushes at it with all her being, but her body refuses to, can't, doesn't, won't scream out, scream out, "Skrinkle lee!"

Ba'alatania Best taps her finger on the kitchen table and sighs in frustration. She is sixty-seven years old and has never been much of a letter writer. Though passionate and sarcastic in person, Ba'alatania's voice becomes, she feels, cold and dead on the page. She flips the page in her homemade, leather-bound notebook and begins again.

Origenes Best is sixty-nine years old. He has a fat face, brown hair that's fading into a wiser and sadder shade of fox fur, and a scruff of unshaven facial hair. His mouth pulls to the side in a constant grimace, making it appear as if a fisher's hook is caught in one of his thick, dry lips.

Before she'd gone to bed, Damayanti Clement had been a skinny girl with scales on her skin and kinky dreadlocks on her head, but on the twenty-ninth morning after her seventeenth birthday, she became the most beautiful woman in the territory.

Omega Twin, a man living in Capitolshire, is "a chap who just wants to keep his eye on things." Omega Twin has followers, whom the whole territory knows as Twinnies, "like that boy there, dressed in black, with the clipboard." The Twinnies watch what people do, listen to what people say, and report back to Omega Twin. "But it's not like he keeps the information to himself, using it to acquire some kind of power." Instead, he sends a monthly newsletter to anyone who requests it, reporting on the goings-on in the territory.