Penelope Turm

An accountant who took the books with her, and the reason Fenris's quiet life ends.

Who she is

Early twenties, dark hair falling across her face, and eyes the chapters keep describing as calculating rather than frightened. Ch. 81 gives her "intelligent eyes that held far too much knowledge".

Ch. 89 supplies the whole of it in a news bulletin: Penelope "Poppy" Turm, a former accountant for several Caruso front companies, in hiding for weeks after taking financial records with her.

She is not rescued into safety. She was already running the operation that brings Caruso down, and Fenris walks into the middle of it.

She is angry about being saved

Ch. 81. Two men have her against a wall in an alley and Fenris frightens them off without touching them. She does not thank him.

You shouldn't have done that.

They weren't random muggers. They were looking for me specifically.

She is right. The reprisal falls on Marco Rosetti's shop the same night.

What she took

Not money and not product. Ch. 84 has Caruso say it: "Names, dates, locations", enough to imprison him and half his organisation. Ch. 89 itemises it as money laundering, trafficking routes, and evidence of murders.

She reads the situation better than anybody in it

Ch. 87, zip-tied in the back of the car that is fleeing, she tells her kidnapper what is about to happen to him:

PPY: You know he's not going to stop, right? Not until he gets what he wants. VNC: And what exactly does he want, sweetheart? PPY: Me. Obviously. Though I'm betting he doesn't even know why yet.

She is right again, and better informed about Fenris's motive than Fenris is. He answers the question a page later under the bridge, and his answer is Milo: "Just trying to atone for my sins."

Her own question to him is the one nobody else in the arc asks:

PPY: Why are you doing this? You don't know me. You don't owe me anything.

She finishes it herself

The car goes off the Riverside Bridge, Fenris pulls her out of the river, and then leaves. What dismantles the Caruso organisation is not the fight. It is her walking into federal custody with the documents.

Ch. 89 has her at a podium, and she spends her one public statement on the person who is not there:

PPY: There are people who risked everything to keep me alive [...] Heroes who will never be recognized because that's not what heroes do - they just do what's right, and then they go back to their lives.

Fenris hears it on a television in the butcher shop while arranging beef, and does not look up.

Open questions

• Why she was working for Caruso in the first place, and when she decided to take the records.
• Whether she and Fenris ever meet again. The saga does not use her after ch. 89.