Gena is a small halfling with a tumble of bright red curls, each corkscrew springing loose from a lopsided scarf. She moves with quick, economical steps, but when she stops she unconsciously occupies the center of a room, planting herself as though guarding a doorway. Her broad, blunt fingertips are permanently blackened with lock grease, and the pads have gone glossy and hard from years of pins, springs, and tiny tools. She has an unexpectedly loud, bark-like laugh that arrives before her smile.

Gena is quick to joke when a stranger is frightened and quick to stop joking when a friend is in danger. She can be warm and generous, yet fiercely controlling when she believes someone is making a preventable mistake. In private she is restless and self-accusing; at work she is brisk, observant, and almost impossible to distract.

Gena grew up in a riverside neighborhood built over the remains of an old flood channel. Her mother, Pella, repaired clocks and her father, Dast, opened stubborn locks for travelers who had lost their keys. Gena learned both trades, then took work carrying messages through streets where adults could not squeeze between carts. At seventeen, she was hired to open the sealed floodgates beneath the district during an unusually hard storm. The city official who hired her had lied: the gates were meant to divert water toward a poor quarter, not relieve the pressure. Gena opened the mechanism anyway, believing she was saving the whole neighborhood. The diverted water destroyed dozens of homes. She pulled her younger brother, Hesh, from the flood, but their mother lost her workshop and never forgave Gena for trusting the official. Gena later exposed the scheme and helped survivors rebuild, but the official escaped justice. Now she works as a locksmith and discreet investigator, trying to find proof that will bring him back to answer for what he did. She sends money to her mother, who returns it unopened, and quietly checks on Hesh, now an apprentice mapmaker who insists he is not a child anymore.