A petite young woman who seems to balance on the balls of her feet even when standing still. Her rain-damp curls spring against her jaw, and her amber-flecked hazel eyes keep flicking to rooflines, drainpipes, and open windows. She takes up remarkably little space in a crowd, folding her shoulders and slipping through gaps with practiced ease, though she does not seem timid. Her palms and finger pads are roughened by brick grit and rope, with fine dark lines of old map ink caught at the creases. She leaves the impression of a quick, guarded smile glimpsed just before she vanishes around a corner.

Hett is warm toward people who are frightened or overlooked, yet suspicious of anyone who makes kindness sound like a transaction. She is bold when someone is in immediate danger and evasive when a friend asks how she is coping. In a crisis she becomes sharply practical; after it passes, she may make a joke to avoid gratitude or grief. She likes company on a roof but dislikes being watched while she works.

Hett grew up in the steep, rain-scoured lanes above Sedge Ford, where her mother patched awnings and her father kept the storm drains clear. At eleven, Hett began carrying messages across rooftops because the streets flooded faster than the bridges could be raised. She learned the city by touch and smell: slick slate, warm chimney brick, the sour breath of a blocked culvert. At sixteen, a winter cloudburst trapped her little brother in an under-street passage. Hett had to choose between fetching help and crawling into the rising water after him. She went in. She got him out, but the delay cost three neighbors their lives when the district's warning bell failed to sound. The bell had been deliberately silenced by a property factor trying to keep tenants from discovering that he had diverted their flood channel. Hett testified, and the scandal ruined him, but the victims' families still argue over whether she acted fast enough. Now she sells rooftop routes and discreet deliveries to anyone she considers safe, while quietly mapping a new set of illegal drain diversions. Her mother, Sesa, wants her to stop risking herself; her brother, Shest, admires her and has started taking reckless jobs of his own. Hett is trying to keep him out of danger without admitting how much she needs him to believe she is brave.