Sarah Vernon

The petty goddess who keeps the team alive without the credit she deserves.

Sarah Vernon is the person at the Belize base who knows exactly how much work goes into everything Ann-Marie gets praised for. She's the one welding the shields, running the tactical communications, tracking cell phones in the field, creating the thermal imaging tech that identifies a cybernetic eye in a crowded casino, and driving the SUV when the plan falls apart and everyone needs to get out. She's also the one standing in the lab going "I, I, I! Did the rest of us do nothing?" at least once a week. She's not wrong about that either.

Thirty-two years old, Belizean, built like someone who spends more time with industrial equipment than most people spend with other people. Short hair, multiple earrings, always wearing the welder's mask — flipped up when she's talking, flipped down when she's working. She's usually looking bored and unamused. That look has been weaponized into a kind of superpower. The people who don't know her well assume she doesn't care. The people who do know her well know that she's the reason they got out of that casino alive.

She and Ann-Marie argue constantly. About credit. About who built what. About Pyramids of Mylinical — a video game they both play obsessively and neither of them plays well. Badia calls her the petty goddess and means it as a compliment. She holds grudges the way other people hold opinions — firmly and indefinitely. But when it matters, she's there. She discovered Taraki was feeding information to the enemy. She called law enforcement in New Orleans. She figured out how to stop Zane's cybernetic eye when no one else could. Petty? Absolutely. Invaluable? Also yes.

The grenade gambit in Badia's Gambit is the story she tells most often, because it's the one that still makes her angry. Badia fired a live grenade at her own teammates to take out Lillian and Zane. The shield stopped it. Sarah survived. The calculation that went into that decision — or the absence of one — is not something Sarah has entirely processed, and she brings it up whenever the subject of Badia's tactical brilliance comes up. Which is often. She is not a quiet person about the things that bother her.