James is a human in a country he shares with Inhuman races - people whose bodies and abilities he lacks, and whom he has come to hate. He lived at the camp for eleven weeks and, by his own account, was treated decently by everyone in it. He decided that decency was exactly the problem. On election morning he walked down a bank with an axe on his shoulder, told the camp he would rather kill every one of them, and set off the charges he had hidden under the stage.

He is the first antagonist the camp faces, and a patient one. He plans in advance, speaks rarely, and never raises his voice. The people he attacked have not been told where the hatred comes from.

• Lean, and visibly thinner than he was at the camp.
• Linen wrapping over his head, hands, and forearms, and under his collar - a permanent result of the burns and wounds he took at Providence, changed every morning. His face is almost never seen; Rain saw it once, at dawn.
• Goggles of smoked glass, worn down over his eyes by default. He bought them secondhand in Providence for four crowns, and the left lens has gone milky at the edge. They are the reason he still has his eyes.
• Plain clothes: a shirt and a coat bought off a man at a crossing, which hangs loose on him now.
• An axe - the one he split Providence's winter wood with, dug out of the dirt after the fire and given a new edge. Four letters are cut into the haft: Mary.

• Prepared. He takes weeks over anything he intends to do. He took his own house apart before he burned it, tested powder on the shingle with a page of numbers, and let the camp spend a week building a stage out of his timber.
• Reserved. Callum counts about forty sentences from him in eleven weeks. When he does speak he is precise, courteous, and unhurried.
• Calm contempt. His cruelty is delivered flat. "Smarter than livestock. I'll give them that much."
• Declines instead of lying. With Silas he refuses, omits, and answers narrowly. He does not hand over anything false.
• Reads concealment. He does not check strangers for Inhuman traits. He watches who is hiding something. People with nothing covered, he passes without a word.
• Wants to be seen. In the rain outside the storm council he asks Callum whether anyone in that room said his name the way you say a person's name.
• Alone by choice. He turned down the long fire. He has never lit the torch at his step, because "if you light it, somebody comes."

James's reasons are laid out only in the Providence chapters. Nobody at the camp has been told them.

Providence - James and his wife Mary reached Providence in winter with a barrow and no money. Eighteen months later Winslow, the town's leader, brought James onto the council. When a plague came, James volunteered for supply runs and then took over the east stores' ledger - initialing rations and the timber for the fence that closed off the east district, never reading the balance. The stores stayed full to the roof behind a lock while the east district died.

Winslow had the plague made. He told James the town's ground and food could not hold its population, and that a human on the council was what let people believe help was coming. James alone received the real preventative; everyone else got something that looked like it.

Mary was buried three days before James learned she had died - he found out from a woman with a handcart. He read her notebook, in which she wrote that she was proud of him and had hidden her sickness so it wouldn't slow him down. That night he burned the store, fought the people who came to put out the fire, and killed for as long as anyone kept coming at him. Winslow cut him down and left him alive. He spent weeks in the ruins wrapping his burns in cloth from other people's houses, and walked out with the axe.

What he did in the years afterward is never established on the page. Strangers already talk of a run of burned settlements, and of Providence itself, as the work of one arsonist.

The camp - James arrived in the summer and lived alone on the low ground. Wren offered him a place at the long fire, and he declined without ever saying no. Moss fed him. Someone left firewood at his door in September. He never let the camp near him, and instead began to watch it.

He took his house apart and burned it, and the camp built its election stage from the timber. He thanked Callum for saying nothing and later asked him to watch the others. He kept an abandoned lime kiln up the coast, where he measured out powder.

The election - After the vote was counted, seven to four, James came down the bank clapping slowly. He gave the camp's own sentences back to them in order and said he had heard them before. When Wren offered to help him rebuild his house, in front of everyone, he called it the most dangerous sentence anyone had said to him in ten years. Then he told them the world was better with fewer of them in it.

The stage blew. Toni was badly burned, Flint was beaten and left alive, and James put Rain over the edge into the seam the blast had opened in the ground. He told the survivors he could have had all of them, and that their survival was his choice.

Since - James has been on the road. He killed an Inhuman traveler on the Weir road after giving him accurate directions. He found Silas alone in a wood after Silas left the camp, and later walked three days with him to Ceres Landing. At the end of the road he asked Silas to go back and keep a light going for him, and went on alone.

Notable details:

• He counts without meaning to: houses with people in them, graves, abandoned attempts along the road. The habit dates from Providence.
• His right eye pulls at the corner when something lands. His hand goes toward the goggle strap and stops at the frame.
• He named Callum's scarred knuckles in the rain. He puts his thumb over the letters on the axe haft without noticing.
• Winslow brought him in by noticing him, praising him, walking him away from the crowd, and giving him a task. James's approach to Callum follows the same sequence - nobody in the story remarks on it.
• His stated grievance with the camp is that its kindness was sincere. He holds that sincere words are worth nothing once they start to cost something.