James Griffin-Mars
James Griffin-Mars is a con man. No, wait, that should be a chronman, which is the term for this future world’s criminal types who are hired to travel back through time in order to furtively steal resources and materials desperately needed for their own time that are in short supply. Oh, and all this must be conducted without doing the big bad of time travel: discomfiting the time-space continuum. It’s a hard-knock life that, like organized crime, does not produce many men who die of old age. Like a middle-aged cop just two weeks from retirement who picks the wrong final case for himself, James heads out for one last chronman mission with the single-minded intent of nothing going wrong.
Elise Kim
Elise is the thing that goes wrong. Success navigation of time travel protocol demands that certain rules be inviolate. One of those rules is never, ever—no matter what—bring a person from the past into the future. Elise is a brilliant scientist who fate is already cast: she will become a victim of a big pretty deal incident. Except, of course, she doesn’t and instead becomes a fugitive in a world she barely recognizes, on the run with a guy who isn’t exactly Indiana Jones on his worst day.
Levin Javier-Oberon
Levin is the Auditor employed by ChronoCom who is charged with capturing the fugitives. ChronoCom is an evil corporation—make no bones about it—and Levin is certainly situated at the foil whose one mission is to keep James successfully breaking the laws of traveling through time and getting away with it. But he turns out to be a much complicated than he might at first seem. Although it is also possible to interpret his arc less as transformative in itself and see it as something more akin to James Griffin-Mars not being particularly evolutionary at all.
Grace Priestly
Grace is introduced as a bored woman, yawning. Since F. Scott Fitzgerald did it the first time, this has never been promising. Shortly thereafter, a character named Swails is described as “man pet” and if there is anything less promising than bored woman yawning, it is one who possesses a man pet. Eventually, this distinctly unpromising beginning will reveal that Grace has a nickname—Mother of Time—and a legacy that belies first impressions: “the smartest person in history.” She is the person who wrote the Time Laws and it is only with her confession that the these laws are intellectually problematic that she finally starts to become the most interesting character in the story.
