Katia Grim

Katia Grim arrives in ch. 21 as a level-9 Monster Truck Driver with a Juan Gris face — a doppelganger whose guide talked her into a race she cannot control, sculpting herself with a health potion for a mirror. Carl gives her a shard of gym mirror; Mordecai teaches her ears. Constitution 51, strength 11, a Rush ability, a Pathfinder skill, an art teacher's Earth Hobby Potion that made her a gear head. Hekla sent her; Hekla wants her back.

She holds the detonator outside the warehouse (ch. 23), is named a host of the blast quest with no way into the club (ch. 24) — which is why Carl closes the glass case rather than run — and Rushes through a wall when the fourth pulse fires her hotlist (ch. 25). On Odette's couch she has her real face, short-haired and pale, and twelve new levels (epilogue). Odette's warning is not about her: 'I don't think she's in on it. Not willingly.'

The lost lamb

Constitution 102 from a momentum bonus on a moving train (ch. 1); a shatter shield that explains the doppelganger rule — ten per cent metal, continuous (ch. 2); an art history professor told by Zev's audience that she is boring (ch. 6) and by Donut that she needs a mohawk. Gore-Gore takes four fingers and healing does not give them back: 'part of me is gone. I'm losing myself' (ch. 12). Carl's answer is the Ugly-Ass Backpack: a ton and a quarter of robot steel, six legs, a slug, a blob, an eleven-foot Hekla (ch. 13). A third eye that lets her watch behind her, and less human for it (ch. 18). A Makeup Table bought with both coupons; Hekla's face at 65% (ch. 10); Carl's face well enough to fool a god (ch. 33); a gnoll at 98% that a key still refuses (ch. 26).

The cowcatcher

Hekla comes back for her with thirty Daughters, and the plan is Katia's own: fasten herself to the front of a subway train as scoop and spikes (ch. 21). 'She brought the entire team to pick me up. That is more than anyone has ever done for me.' Carl feels her heartbeat through the plate. Two Dirty Little Phased Bolts in her shoulder inside her own scoop, amnesia and a bleed to 1% (ch. 22); Eva's mockery in her own voice — Fannar, the adoption, 'this is why I left you behind' (ch. 23); and Rush, the ability she hates, which misses Eva by inches and kills Hekla against the wall. Level 24 to 37 in one blow; a golden skull; the first bounty of the season (ch. 23). 'Goddamn it, there's nowhere to sit down and have a breakdown in here' (ch. 24).

Monster Truck Driver

She loots the key and, quietly, the crossbow (ch. 24). Then the boxes: a Desperado tattoo, Find Crawler, the 500,000, the Gorgo belt (ch. 25); a riot shield that turns Rush into Crowd Blast every five minutes, a baton, and one bolt for a god's eye from a princess who dislikes her brother (ch. 29). The map is hers: the prime numbers she did not see, the route in hours not days (ch. 12), and at the end the folded paper — a mirrored, upside-down noodle with a chamber between (ch. 30). She tracks blood across the saferoom floor while laughing about her mother, and is on the team for good without anyone saying so (ch. 25); the blood she stored on the cowcatcher erupts in every direction when the rules change (ch. 29). The recap calls her kill rage (ch. 25); Odette calls her zippier (epilogue); the leaderboard calls her a Monster Truck Driver, eighth.

The chair, the hostage, the corpse

Katia's book 4 is the floor where her shape is the plan. She is a pipe on a wall watching a door (ch. 6), the back seat of the Chariot, the body of Wynne and the body of Henrik at once with a bag of ghoul blood for a throat, and the head that grows back when Donut's spell runs out (ch. 11, ch. 12); a diving bell with three poles, then the camouflage on a submarine's hull (ch. 25); a second face on the back of her head to argue with Carl while driving at a boss (ch. 9). She designs the Chariot from an Earth Hobby potion's knowledge — 'Like I'm tapped directly into Wikipedia' — and wonders what it means for a society that anyone can drink expertise (ch. 4). With ten bolts of Petrify Rock Class from her box she turns Maggie-in-Chris to stone and keeps him petrified (ch. 14).

Five days alone

When Carl, Donut and Mordecai vanish into a liaison's hold, she flies the house to the land quadrant, breaches a magic door, kills scorpion men for five days, argues with Gwen and gets back on the top ten above Carl (ch. 19, ch. 20). She kills Ghazi in a small fight and loots the note that explains the artifact (ch. 22); she maps the ninth floor from a list of times (ch. 23, ch. 24) and reads the box as a reverse compass (ch. 27). 'I wasn't going to take shit any more.'

Leaving

The days without Carl and Donut, she tells him, showed her she can do this without his help. Eva is regathering the Daughters and has got Silfa and her girls killed; the former Daughters are vulnerable; 'when you're in the Carl and Donut party, you ride on the Carl and Donut rollercoaster.' She will separate on the sixth floor with Gwen, Tran, Louis, Firas, Bautista and Florin, keep the personal space through the guild system if she can, and return the Left Fang of the Green Sultan to its owner (ch. 33). Her last act on the floor is to open the real Gate five hundred metres under the sea while the decoy sits in the sand, and to leave by the tomb's stairs (ch. 34). On the question of children: pre-approved to adopt alone in Iceland, disqualified for a reason she will not give, 'glad now' — which Carl can hear is a lie (ch. 15).

Leaving

Katia is questioned first and popped away (ch. 1), and her leaving is the floor's first fact: she will go south to the other crawlers before the hunters are released and stay in the party only until the guild system is understood (ch. 3, ch. 4). She maps the floor from gate coordinates (ch. 9), organises the guild's logistics (ch. 11), wants a manager's headquarters (ch. 20) and leaves the party the day Eva is cornered by the hot springs (ch. 21). Donut names it before anyone else — 'Everybody always leaves me' (ch. 12) — and Imani turns it on Carl when he means to go down early (ch. 52).

The equipment locker

She is level 52 with Steely Skin at the start (ch. 3) and 60 at the end; a she-hulk, all business (ch. 50); a decoy Donut from a stuffed mouser (ch. 34); careful stitches on a patch jacket (ch. 36); the bramble arithmetic that tells them where the floor ends (ch. 54). At the party her arm is a locker of potions (ch. 67), she reads the queen's stat sheet from a Size-Up (ch. 73), and she gives her Apothecary beanie to Carl so he can reach a god (ch. 76).

Eva

The thread that runs under everything is Eva: ninth on the leaderboard and Katia's cold promise (ch. 8); glamoured towns and a hot-springs chase (ch. 21); a lunge across a ballroom while Eva talks about Fannar and motherhood (ch. 67). After the pit she finds Eva under the gore with Li Na, cuts off the ring hand and the rapier stub, hears 'Katia, I'm sorry' — 'I just wanted to hear you afraid for once' — and puts a sword through the breastplate (epilogue). A second golden skull; 'It's done' (ch. 77). The epilogue gives the rest: the blitz sticks that show her Annie in the crib, the cocoon she squeezed too tight, and Eva's last act — the Crown of the Sepsis Whore from her own shoulder armour onto Katia's bare head. Only one of Donut and Katia may take the stairs from the ninth floor to the tenth (epilogue).

The crown

The book's first fact about Katia is a private message: she wears the Crown of the Sepsis Whore, and Yemaya's blue shrine must be repaired to save her and Donut (ch. 15). She has carried a celestial lock box since the sixth floor with an orchid in it — three boons from Eileithyia, one of them a child and the surface — and has said nothing (ch. 19). She worships the goddess on a sponsor's scroll, is recruited by Huanxin Jinx to make Carl fix a shrine, and finds the Guild of Suffering through a stripper's tattoo and takes a job to kill Astrid (ch. 19).

The drug den

She finds the Desperado's frozen-yogurt drug den because Carl told her where it was, and is Bliss Surfing for ten hours before the assassination (ch. 28); four addictions, one going on for a while, her constitution and charisma scrambled, her intelligence still above where it was (ch. 30). She vomits a rainbow into Louis's bucket and says 'I'm sorry'; Bautista tells her to kill herself if she must; she goes anyway, propped up by Imani's spells (ch. 30). In the kitchen she takes Astrid with a shapeshifted spike a millimetre from the head and is frozen there, with a face Carl files beside Hekla's death and Donut's sobs (ch. 32). She has the orchid; she will not eat it before the ninth (ch. 33).

Iceland, and the bolt

Phase two drops her squad in Da Nang, Tran's city (ch. 38); her hydra is made of everyone's family but hers, as if the dungeon had written her off (ch. 48). Her flag is Hekla and Eva with their eyes crossed out (ch. 32). She gives Donut Jola (ch. 34), comes to Cuba through a doggie door with twenty friends (ch. 63), hands Paz the Bolt of Ophiotaurus and takes back a reusable bolt when he kills a goddess with it (ch. 69, ch. 72). Carl's Self-Immolation burns her arm off; she grows it back and calls it nothing (ch. 71, ch. 72). 'Have I ever told you […] let's just get past this' (ch. 64).

Rehab

Katia arrives carrying Tran and thinking about vehicles (ch. 4, ch. 5); Mordecai's green gel — Glory Bound compounded with Tough Love — is her rehab, taken in a field hospital with a tortoise warning that waking her early could kill her (ch. 16). Carl is bound into the dream by accident: an Icelandic children's hospital, an ex named Fannar 'telling them the truth', an adoption refused over an addiction ten years past, a silent scream in a bathroom stall, and baby Annie in the only occupied crib — her favourite and her worst memory, because she knows it is the last time (ch. 17, ch. 69). 'I love you and Donut more,' she tells him (ch. 69). The treatment works (ch. 17).

Engineer

She builds Jamal's thought-reading spider legs (ch. 15, ch. 65), turns Tran into a wall-climbing crab with a plate exoskeleton (ch. 21), rotates Donut's tiara through the charge pillows (ch. 40), tattoos a dragon-chain of Li Na's blood onto Carl's arm (ch. 40) and a barbed-wire Tripper onto Imani's ankle in his blood (ch. 47), sets the wire for the clock tower, and charges a temple as a mantaur drenched in cherry cobbler shouting that demons attack behind her (ch. 51). Her Spiked Knee Pads of the Goddess Kina, plainly meant for Carl, she keeps (ch. 56). In private chat with Bautista she promises to give Carl the flower for Donut if the raid fails (ch. 47).

The orchid

She and Donut have a plan Carl would 'Carl up' (ch. 75). With sixty-six minutes left she eats the Orchid of Eileithyia without transferring her inventory or saying goodbye: 'I love all of you' (ch. 84). She wakes to a sponsored goddess, a frozen choice, and Donut killing the woman inside the goddess with Katia's own crossbow (ch. 86). She chooses pregnancy, to reach the children in the kinder facility above, asks Louis to be the father, and is made human again: small, black-haired, missing her right arm, both legs in part, and an ear — 'We've all become experts at hiding what we've really lost.' Bautista fits the cybernetics she built for this. Eileithyia: 'It will be a boy.' Art Professor. Crawler. Hero. Human. Friend. Mother (ch. 86). She leaves Annie's card and a bra with Carl's face on it (ch. 87). Boomer, in orbit, sets aside four Cronus suits for 'a pregnant veteran on the surface' (epilogue).