Anselm is a broad-shouldered woman whose weather-darkened skin shines with a faint salt sheen beneath the lantern light. Her close-cropped hair is iron-grey at the temples, and her dark brown eyes keep moving toward the nearest source of sound. She stands with one boot slightly forward, weight set as if bracing against a deck's roll. Before speaking, she draws a small, audible breath through her nose and waits half a beat, a habit that makes even a crowded room seem to listen. A surprising detail for a veteran of rescue stations: she keeps a tiny paper theatre folded inside her coat and repairs its painted figures during quiet watches.

Anselm is gentle with frightened people and implacable with anyone who treats a crew as an acceptable loss. She can be patient while teaching a novice to read a signal, then startlingly blunt when a senior official dismisses one. Her compassion pulls her toward rescue; her hard-earned caution can keep her from taking a risk that others would call necessary.

Anselm grew up near the warm channels of the Sovereign Basin, where her mother repaired rescue bells and her father piloted crews through fog. As a young warden she treated each bell as a signal to answer immediately. During a winter rescue, she followed a familiar pattern of tolls into a channel whose markers had been turned. The crew she meant to save vanished beneath the ice, and Anselm survived by lashing herself to a bell-frame and listening until the current shifted. Since then she has recorded every toll, delay, and false signal she encounters. Her insistence on closing unsafe lanes has brought her into bitter conflict with merchants and officials who depend on those routes. She still exchanges letters with a former crewmate, Iseult, who believes Anselm's caution has become its own danger. Anselm keeps the paper theatre because her younger brother used to stage stories with scraps of sailcloth before he left for a distant station; she has never told him she still repairs it.