Ketta is a slim young human woman with a narrow waist, long arms, and the balanced posture of someone accustomed to moving along rooftops and ship rigging. Her face is soft-cheeked and cheerful at first glance, with large dark eyes that seem almost flirtatious until they settle on a lie. She moves with relaxed precision, never quite standing still, often shifting her weight as if feeling an invisible deck beneath her feet. Her light skin carries a warm golden undertone and a faint sheen from constant use of citrus oil and saltwater soap. Her hair is cropped at the jaw on one side and falls in a thick, uneven wave on the other, giving her a lopsided silhouette. The unexpected element is her hands: broad-palmed, heavily callused, and marked by tiny punctures from years of sewing, they look more like a sailmaker's than a dancer's. Within a minute of meeting her, most people notice that she smells strongly of lemon peel, damp linen, and iron, though she insists the iron is only in their imagination.

Ketta is warm, observant, and quick to laugh, but her friendliness has a defensive edge. She can make a frightened stranger feel protected within seconds, yet she treats close friends as potential liabilities and interrogates their motives through jokes. In public she is flirtatious, bright, and almost theatrical. In private she is quiet, exhausted, and prone to repairing objects that cannot be repaired. She longs for dependable companionship but distrusts anyone who offers it too easily.

Ketta grew up above a sailmaker's shop in the harbor district of Targat, where her mother repaired fishing nets and her father copied shipping ledgers for captains who could not write. As a child, Ketta learned to distinguish every kind of rope by touch and every regular customer by the rhythm of their footsteps on the stairs. At sixteen, she became a courier for the Lantern Stitch, a quiet mutual-aid network that smuggled medicine, forged travel papers, and escaped debtors through the city's warehouses. Her life changed when a winter fire consumed three tenements. Ketta found a locked room full of children whose door had been barred from the outside. She broke the lock with a sailmaker's hammer, but the smoke had already taken her younger brother, Garo. Since then, she has treated every locked door as a personal accusation. She now runs a small mending stall by day and carries messages for the Lantern Stitch by night. Her current crisis is that someone inside the network is selling names to the harbor magistrate, and the evidence points toward her oldest friend.