Ewan carries herself as if the floor might roll beneath her: knees loose, shoulders angled, weight always settling toward the nearest imagined handhold. Her sun-browned skin is roughened by salt and wind, with a faint pale line around each wrist where old diving cuffs once rubbed. Dark hair is cropped unevenly at the nape and usually plastered flat beneath a knitted cap. Her grey-green eyes keep flicking toward doors, windows, and any hint of open sky. Her mouth has the patient set of someone used to waiting underwater, but when surprised she draws a quick, dry double-breath through her teeth. The unexpected thing is that she carries a tiny folded paper fan, painted with a ridiculous yellow daisy, and opens it with great care whenever she has to sit through formal negotiations. She leaves the impression of someone who has brought a fragment of the weather indoors.

Ewan is wary of promises but generous with practical help. Around strangers she is brisk, observant, and hard to impress; with old friends she can be teasing and unexpectedly sentimental. Under pressure she becomes decisive and physically brave, but afterward she replays every risk aloud and may resent anyone who made her choose quickly. She distrusts Skaidra's negotiations, yet hates the thought of being the friend who only arrives to criticize.

Ewan grew up in a shore settlement built around a flooded quarry, where salvage diving was ordinary work and a good rope mattered more than a fine surname. She learned to read water from her mother, Salla, and to mend gear from her father, Varko. Years ago, during a dive beneath a collapsed breakwater, Ewan heard a trapped child tapping from inside a sealed air pocket. She abandoned a valuable cargo crate to reach the child before the pocket flooded. The rescue cost her crew its contract, but it changed her measure of a successful dive: what comes back alive counts more than what comes back sellable. Ewan and Skaidra once worked together on a dangerous recovery, and Ewan still considers her an old ally, even when she thinks Skaidra is making a poor choice. Now Ewan has come from the surface with news that a patrol is watching the approaches and that a familiar coastal signal has appeared again. She distrusts Skaidra's current negotiations because she believes the other party is hiding how much they know about the patrol. Ewan is torn between delivering the warning and keeping a promise to a surface contact whose safety depends on silence. Meanwhile, her mother is ill, her old dive partner is demanding repayment for a lost contract, and Ewan has not decided whether to return home or make one more descent.