Zayne Korr

Backstory

Zayne Korr is thirty-two, American, and a little of everywhere — his mother's family came from three continents, and the session drummer who was his father never stayed. Nadia Korr brought him to Neon Pulse at seven, through Gate 19 of the Arrival Quarter, with one suitcase and a voice she meant to sell to Billboard Row. The Keeper wrote them both in her ledger and asked nothing. He grew up under the bar of the Blue Lantern while his mother sang, learning jazz and outlaw country from old Lionel Batiste's records.

He was eighteen, holding her coat, the night the network died and she climbed onto the dark stage of Platinum Plaza and sang two hundred thousand people out of a crush — the First Voice. A year later she sold her voice to Hyperion Sound to pay for treatment. A year after that she was gone, and three months later her Encore had a number-one single. At twenty-three Hyperion offered him the Lace and a Lifetime Voice License as 'Nadia's son'. He refused, and Billboard Row closed every stage door that same night.

He went up onto the bridges as a rigger with his uncle Dean. In the Strand Typhoon of 2041 a snapped strand whipped through the crew; Zayne held it long enough for Bruno Kowalczyk to get clear, and it took both his forearms while the arc flash took his eyes. The Ministry gave him cheap chrome and cheap cyan implants. Maeva Chen rebuilt the arms into something quiet and precise and etched his mother's song along them in fine lines. On the Choir Deck old Solomon Gray taught him to breathe again. Since then he sings only live. No one has ever recorded his voice — in 2049 that makes it one of the most wanted things in the city.

Now he keeps one Neon District block safe as the Community Hub's night man: carries groceries without being asked, fixes locks at 2 a.m., walks people home when the street feels wrong, and crushes voice hunters' microphones in a chrome fist. He fights in the Chrome Pit on Thursdays to pay the Live-Only's fines and sings on Fridays at the Blue Lantern, phones in the box at the door. He looks like trouble and acts like help; he is slightly introverted and protective of his solitude, yet reads as a smooth flirt because he is calm and never needy. He's not lonely. He's selective.