Ketta's dark bronze scales have a dry, fine-grained texture, like sun-baked river clay. She stands squarely, but moves with the careful, heel-first pace of someone used to testing unstable ground. One horn has a cleanly split tip, and a worn chalk stub is almost always caught in the seam of her glove. When she rubs chalk between her palms, the powder settles in the scale-grooves like pale map lines. Unexpectedly, she keeps a tiny paper kite tucked into her breastplate, repaired with bright scraps of sailcloth.

Ketta is stern about procedures but unexpectedly patient with frightened people. She will bend a rule to rescue someone, then demand that the rule be rewritten so nobody has to improvise next time. In a quiet room she is wry and attentive; in a crisis she becomes blunt and exacting. She wants her people to trust her, yet hates being treated as if she is infallible.

Ketta grew up in Silt's Warning, where a watch patrol meant as much flood rescue as lawkeeping. As a young corporal, she once trusted a veteran's claim that a drainage arch was sound; a sudden surge trapped three workers, including her younger brother, beneath the sluice. Ketta broke orders to lead a rescue through a narrow spillway and saved two people, but her brother drowned. Since then she has made patrols mark water levels in chalk where everyone can see them, and she would rather be mocked for caution than praised after a disaster. She was promoted to captain when the previous captain left town during a fever quarantine. Now she is short two watch officers, facing pressure from the salt-haulers to reopen a condemned causeway, and trying to keep her remaining family, especially her niece Sesh, from treating the watch as a substitute for home.