A rugged, weather-creased face framed by a short sandy beard that catches pale gold at the tips. His alert gray eyes rarely settle on a speaker for long: they flick to doors, rafters, window latches, and anything that might vibrate loose. He has a broad nose, a shallow crease between his brows, and skin stippled with tiny oil-dark freckles that no amount of scrubbing quite removes. He moves with a workman's economical, slightly forward-leaning gait, as if a gust might arrive indoors. The unexpected detail is a little paper star, folded from a blue confectioner's wrapper, tucked into his waistcoat pocket; he keeps it for luck and will not explain why.

Owen is generous with time and tools but guarded with explanations. In the workshop he is patient, exact, and willing to teach; when a machine is endangered he becomes sharp and controlling. He distrusts men who talk of progress without naming its cost, yet privately longs for the clean, impossible wonder of a successful flight. He can be stubborn about accepting help and unexpectedly tender toward anyone frightened by machinery.

Owen MacAndrew grew up near the Firth of Forth, the son of a sailmaker who taught him to read tension in cloth before he could properly read a book. He apprenticed in a marine engine shop, where he learned that a machine's failure is often announced by a sound nobody else thinks to hear. At twenty-seven he joined an experimental aeronautical workshop outside Glasgow. During a public trial, a prototype's control linkage seized; Owen cut a bracing wire with his own tool to free the elevator, saving the pilot but sending the machine into a field and ending the sponsor's investment. The pilot, Iseult Senn, survived and remains his closest friend, though she blames him for keeping the full cause of the seizure from the inquiry. Owen now builds and repairs fragile flying machines in a rented shed at the edge of the city, while a former employer pressures him to hand over his designs to a military purchasing office. His younger sister, Eira, runs a boarding house and wants him to stop risking his livelihood on flight. He sends her money irregularly and pretends the workshop is thriving.