Dunnin is a compact, carefully assembled man whose posture suggests he is always standing at a counter, even in the woods. Damp road dust has stippled his cheeks and the backs of his hands; his skin has the weathered, faintly shiny look of someone who spends long hours in a drafty booth rubbing at ink. He smells distinctly of boiled cabbage and wet wool, a fact he knows and tries to disguise with crushed mint. He walks heel-first, testing the ground as if it might require a receipt. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny paper windmill tucked in his hatband and sometimes sets it spinning for children waiting in line.

Dunnin is procedural when frightened and unexpectedly tender when someone else is in trouble. He resents people who treat rules as toys, yet quietly bends them when faced with hunger. In front of his supervisor he is precise and stiff; alone with travelers he becomes awkwardly generous. When cornered, he can become defensive and pedantic, then feel ashamed as soon as the other person turns away.

Dunnin grew up above his aunt's roadside soup stall and learned early that a neat account could keep an argument from turning into a beating. He took a junior clerk's post at the toll station on the old trail, proud to have a dry desk and a government seal to guard. Four weeks ago, the road was officially closed, but travelers kept arriving with a strange, wrapped object whose casing answered their footsteps with hollow knocks. Dunnin did not know what it was. He did know the posted toll would drive desperate people away, so he quietly charged half, entered each fare against the closed road, and made the books balance. His supervisor, Teka, taught him that a clean column could protect a worker from a careless magistrate; now Teka is demanding an explanation for the impossible traffic. Dunnin's younger brother, Kalo, has been carrying messages between the station and the nearby hamlet of Bent Ford, where the travelers are sheltering. Dunnin wants to keep his job, but the knocks have begun sounding from inside his locked desk after midnight.