Granger

The orphanage on the outskirts of the Imperial City was not a cruel place, but it was not a kind one either. It was simply a place where children without families waited to become adults without families, sustained by charity and the faint hope that something better was coming. Granger grew up there alongside Lesley, the two of them forming the kind of bond that only develops between people who have no one else.

He was always different from the other children — quieter, more intense, prone to long silences that the staff found unsettling. He heard music where others heard noise: the rhythm of rain on the roof, the percussion of footsteps on cobblestones, the strange harmony of a city that never quite went silent. He taught himself to play every instrument he could find, and when he ran out of instruments, he found other ways to make music.

The violin came first. Then the gun.

He discovered, almost by accident, that the mechanics of marksmanship and the mechanics of music were not so different — both required precision, timing, breath control, the ability to feel the moment before it arrived. He became extraordinary at both. His custom revolver, which he named after a melody only he could hear, fired rounds that he loaded himself, each one tuned to a specific purpose.

When Lesley disappeared into the world of mercenary work, Granger followed — not because he needed the money, but because the world outside the orphanage was full of sounds he had never heard, and he intended to hear all of them. He fights with the focused intensity of a performer who knows this might be his last concert, and the cold precision of someone who has never missed a note in his life.

The music never stops. Neither does he.