Character Dossier: Nyx Thorne, the Weapon Who Chose

I get more letters about Nyx Thorne than any other character I have ever written. More than Aria. More than Maya. More than Adeline, and Adeline has nine books. The letters are usually some version of one of three questions, and I want to answer all three honestly, in one place, for the people who keep writing them.

The questions are: what is her real name, did she love Marcus, and will she be all right.

I will get to all of them. I will start where I started — with a thirteen-year-old at a chess set in Geneva — and I will go in order, and I will not pretend I know everything, because there are things about Nyx that I do not know either, and I have made my peace with that.

Some of what follows assumes you have finished Unbroken. If you have not, save this for after.

I. The Name

Her birth name is Anna Volkov. It is on a Russian birth certificate filed in Saint Petersburg in 2001 by a woman who used the name Elena Volkov for the paperwork and Glass Lily for everything that mattered.

I drafted Anna in three places — a baby book Elena keeps in Marked's cut prologue, a school enrollment form in Brooklyn from 2007, and a single line in Elena's Covenant file that survives in the dossier Nyx finds in Unbroken. The name is not in the published trilogy. Nyx never says it aloud, never sees it written, never asks. By the time she could have asked Marcus, she had stopped wanting to. By the time she could have asked the file, she had decided she did not need to.

Nyx is what Marcus called her from the night of her seventh birthday. He told her once it was Greek for night, which is true, and once that it was a goddess older than the gods, which is also true, and never told her it was an operative codename he had been assigned to apply to the next NYX-grade child the Covenant produced. The Covenant had been waiting for a candidate to call Nyx for thirteen years before Anna Volkov was born. Marcus did not name her. Marcus delivered her.

Thorne she chose herself, at sixteen. The Covenant did not require operatives to choose their own surnames. Marcus was, by that point, encouraging it. He gave her a list of nine surnames and asked her to pick one. She picked Thorne and watched his face. She told me, in the version of the second-act drafting I never put on the page, that she picked it because the word had a sharp edge in her mouth and she wanted to know if he liked sharp things. He did. She filed that information.

She used Sofia for eighteen months in Buenos Aires and Montreal — the legend Father Mendoza knew her by — and Mrs. Cross for the wedding paperwork and the lease in Montreal. The name on the apartment door, by the time Unbroken closes, is N. Cross. She put the N there and not the Anna, because Anna belonged to a woman who died in 2008, and she has decided she does not want her back.

That is the name. There is no clean answer. There is only a person who has been three women and is becoming a fourth.

II. The Chess Set, Geneva, 2008

I have to tell you about the chess set, because every reader of Unbroken writes me about chapter seventeen and what I cut.

Marcus took custody of Anna Volkov on the seventeenth of October, 2008. Elena had been declared dead nine days earlier of an apparent heroin overdose in a Brooklyn rowhouse. The death was not faked. The death was not an overdose. The death was a Circle housekeeping I will not detail here because it sits, mostly intact, in the Unbroken flash drive Nyx finds in Marked chapter twenty-five.

Marcus arrived at the Brooklyn safehouse three days after Elena's funeral. He brought a chess set. He brought it because he had been instructed to bring something kind, and he did not know what kindness looked like for a child, and chess was the closest thing he had ever loved. He set it up on the kitchen table. He told the seven-year-old, who had not spoken in four days, that he would teach her to play if she wanted.

She wanted.

They played every night for five years. By the time Nyx was twelve she could beat Marcus three games in seven, which is to say that he was letting her win three. By the time she was fifteen she could beat Marcus six in seven. He stopped letting her win the year he started training her, because by then his pleasure in her was a different kind of pleasure, and she did not need the gift of his patience anymore. The chess set went into a Geneva cabinet. He did not bring it out for her again until Unbroken chapter twenty-seven, in an Estonia bunker, when he was already five months dead and his protégée Elena was using it as a manipulation prop.

Nyx left the chess set on the bunker floor. CIA tactical retrieved it, logged it as evidence, and the chain-of-custody officer — a woman named Diane I never put on the page — burned the chessboard for me, off the books, in a hotel parking lot in Tallinn. The pieces went to a Geneva landfill in two separate Diplomatic Pouch labels. I do not know if that detail is canon. I know I needed it to be true.

III. The Mother

Elena Volkov was NYX-3, codename Glass Lily, recruited at twenty-one out of a Saint Petersburg ballet company by a Marcus Kline who was then thirty-one and had not yet been given the chair.

The relationship was operational from the first night and personal from the third. Elena was, in the Covenant file Nyx reads in Unbroken, the only operative under Marcus's direct handling who he ever had a sexual relationship with. The pregnancy in 2001 was unauthorized. Elena did not tell Marcus. Marcus did not, in the Covenant's official record, know whose child Anna was. In Elena's private journals — which exist in my drafting folder and not on the page — she calls the child his, every time, in handwriting that gets steadier across nine months.

The Brooklyn legend was Elena's penalty assignment. The Covenant did not punish her for the pregnancy, because the Covenant had use for the child, but it relocated her permanently from European fieldwork to a long-form American legend that included a cover marriage, a heroin addiction, and a child it could observe. Elena played the legend for six years. She did not, in the end, manage the addiction. The addiction managed her. The Brooklyn rowhouse Anna grew up in had needles in the bathroom drawer and bedtime stories every night, in Russian, in a voice that did not slur until the very end.

I want to say something I have been afraid to say in the published trilogy.

Elena loved her daughter. Across six years of cover she did not phone in. The bedtime stories were real. The Russian songs were real. The seventy-three-dollar birthday present in the Unbroken flashback — Anna's first chess set, before Marcus's — was real, and it was hidden in a cabinet behind the canned tomatoes when Marcus arrived, and Anna took it with her to Geneva and lost it sometime in 2014, and never told Marcus what it was. Elena was an operative. Elena was an addict. Elena was a mother. All three things were true. The Covenant required only the first. Anna kept the third, in private, for the rest of her life.

That is, I think, the trilogy's quietest answer to its loudest question. Was Nyx capable of love before Declan? Yes. She was. She had loved her mother, and she had been loved back, and the Covenant had spent fifteen years trying to make her forget it. They almost succeeded. They did not quite.

IV. The Conditioning

Marcus's training was not torture. The trilogy is careful about this, and I am being careful here.

Marcus's training was, technically, kind. It looked like a relationship. It looked like attention. It looked like a man who saw a child more clearly than anyone else had ever seen her, and who used that clarity to remake her, slowly, into someone the world could not return to. The training included gymnastics, languages, music, mathematics, ballroom dance, marksmanship, edged-weapon drills, surveillance fieldcraft, two forms of close-quarters combat, and a weekly conversation about what Anna was for. The weekly conversation was the worst of it. Anna learned, over fifteen years, to be for whatever Marcus needed her to be for, and to feel grateful for the chance.

The conditioning produced predictable artifacts. The threat-modeling reflex — seven ways to kill a man in three seconds — that Nyx demonstrates in Marked chapter three is a real one and was drilled into her at fifteen. The coffee-assessment reflex — two sugars, no cream, scanned for alteration — was drilled into her at thirteen and was the reflex that almost broke her in Marked chapter ten when Declan made her coffee correctly. The dissociation under combat stress that frightens her after Geneva — the I was perfect and it felt right terror of Unbroken chapter sixteen — is the conditioning doing what it was designed to do: render her competent at scale, repeatable under pressure, and terrified of herself afterward.

Nothing the trilogy depicts about Nyx's conditioning is exaggerated. I researched too much of it. There are pages in my drafting folder I will not show anyone.

V. The Copper Story

Readers ask about Copper. Copper was real.

Nyx tells Declan about Copper in Marked chapter ten as a reciprocal gift, after he takes a bullet for her in Brooklyn. Copper was a stray cat she took in at fourteen, in the Geneva apartment, against Marcus's standing order on attachments. She kept him in a closet for three months. Marcus found him on a Tuesday and explained, in a quiet voice, that the closet was a bad hiding place and that she would need to choose what to do about the animal. She chose. The choice broke something in her she did not get back until she was twenty-eight years old and standing in a New Zealand garden with Declan Cross.

The version she tells Declan in chapter ten is honest about the cat. It is dishonest about Marcus. She told Declan she had given Copper away to a neighbor. She had not. She had done what Marcus had told her to do. She did not lie to Declan because she was hiding. She lied to him because she wanted, for one evening, to have been the kind of girl who gave a cat away to a neighbor.

She told him the true version in the Norway cabin, in Unbroken chapter seventeen, off-page. I am telling you here because it is the kindest thing I know about her — that, given a choice, even at twenty-eight, she did not want to remember herself the way the Covenant had made her.

VI. Did She Love Marcus

Yes.

The trilogy spends three books refusing to let her say this and one chapter — Unbroken chapter seventeen, with Dr. Chen — finally letting her. She loved him as a father. She loved the chess games, and the patience, and the feeling of mattering. She also hated him, with a perfectly clean operational hatred, for what he did to her and to her mother and to forty-three other people across fifteen years. Both things were true and both stayed true. Trauma bonding does not resolve. It gets carried. Nyx carries it, in the closing chapters of Unbroken, the way a person carries a scar. The scar is not the person. The scar is, however, on the person, permanently, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dissociation.

I needed her to be allowed to mourn him. I needed it for me, and I needed it for the women who write me letters about Unbroken chapter seventeen, who are very rarely writing about Nyx.

VII. Will She Be All Right

I think so. Mostly.

The epilogue gives you the version of Nyx I believe in. Teaching at the refugee center. Married to Declan. The Tuesday panic attack in Unbroken chapter thirty-three is the load-bearing scene of the epilogue arc, because it is the moment Nyx demonstrates that healing is not the absence of the symptom — it is calling Declan instead of hiding it. That is the version of all right I am offering. Not a fixed woman. A choosing one.

She still has the dreams. She still has the months when Marcus's voice gets louder. She still has, at the very back of her drafting folder, an unsent letter to Andrei Volkov — her uncle, the surviving Circle member — that I did not put in the trilogy because the trilogy did not need it. I am not telling you what the letter says. I am telling you it exists.

That is the dossier. Anna Volkov, Nyx Thorne, Sofia of the refugee center, Mrs. Cross of the apartment door. Four women. One person. Choosing, daily, which of them is doing the talking.

— Elara