Characters
The blackout didn’t change who these people were. It just removed everything they were using to hide it.
Kimberly Sterns
Upper West Side, Manhattan. Fall 2021.
Kimberly is seventeen years old. She goes to high school, works part time at a GameStop on 86th and Broadway, and lives alone in a two bedroom apartment on West 84th Street. Her father comes home on weekends. Most nights she makes her own dinner and waits.
She is a military kid. Her father is an Army captain at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Her mother was a healthcare worker at Mount Sinai West, which every New Yorker over thirty still calls Roosevelt, and she died during the first wave of COVID in April 2020. Kimberly was sixteen. Her father told her she was strong and could handle anything. She heard it as an instruction.
She is slim and physically fit from volleyball and the kind of constant walking that comes with living in New York. Brown hair, usually in a loose ponytail. She carries a small pocket knife in her boot at all times. Her father insisted on it.
She pushed the grief into a place where she didn’t have to look at it. Then the blackout took away every distraction she had built to keep it there.
Her father drilled the basics into her for years. Firearms. First aid. How to read a map and use a compass. She always thought it was habit rather than preparation. On the night of the blackout, she finds out the difference between the two.
Natalie Oliver
Upper West Side, Manhattan. Fall 2021.
Natalie is twenty two years old. She came to New York from Indiana at twenty to start college, saved up for two years to do it, and took to the city like she had been waiting for it her whole life. She works part time at a GameStop on 86th and Broadway. She goes to parties. She breezes through her coursework without much effort because she is, underneath everything, genuinely sharp.
She is an extrovert in the truest sense. She reads people quickly and accurately and uses humor the way some people use armor. Around most people she is the funniest person in the room. Around the right people she is something quieter and more genuine. She is five foot seven, with a short choppy blonde bob, blue eyes, layered gold necklaces, and nails in dark or neutral shades.
Her family is back in Indiana. All of them. She calls home more often than she tells anyone. The city is exactly where she wants to be and she misses home more than she expected when she left.
She noticed something in Kim early. Not the grief specifically, but the presence of something being held at a careful distance. She didn’t push. She just made her laugh, and kept making her laugh, and let the rest follow at its own pace.
On the night of the blackout she is working the closing shift at the GameStop. She pulls the security gate down to stop people sheltering inside and waits. In the back room she finds a Game Boy Color, a stack of used cartridges, and a sealed pack of double A batteries. She figures someone will come. She’s right.
Captain James Sterns
Fort Dix, New Jersey. Fall 2021.
James Sterns is an Army captain stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Close enough to come home to Manhattan on weekends. Far enough that the weeks were always Kimberly’s alone.
He loved his wife deeply. When Rose died he buried himself in work. He told Kimberly she was strong and could handle anything. He meant it as the highest compliment he knew how to give. He did not stay long enough to find out what she did with it.
On the night of the blackout, he is on base. Every vehicle, every radio, every system he has is dead. He knows his daughter is alone in Manhattan. Getting to her is a different problem entirely.
He is not the villain of this story. What he becomes is something more complicated and harder to forgive than that.
The photo Kimberly pinned at Columbus Circle
Carmen and Luis Delgado
Apartment 4C, West 84th Street. Fall 2021.
Carmen is seventy one and Luis is seventy four. They have lived two doors down from Kimberly for more than forty years, since long before the Upper West Side had wine bars and organic markets. Carmen was friends with Kimberly’s mother. They have known Kimberly since she was small.
Carmen cooks in the mornings. Luis tinkers in the afternoons. They run on a schedule that has not changed in decades, and they are always inside with the door locked before the light goes. After Rose died, Carmen showed up every day for two weeks with a covered dish. She never once said she was sorry. She handed over the food and gave Kimberly a look that said she knew.
Carmen pressed a spare key into Kimberly’s hand not long after Rose died, and Kimberly gave them one to her own apartment in return. Somewhere along the way the three of them became a lot more than neighbors, and nobody ever needed to say so.
Luis wears a wind up watch from the 1980s. It has no battery and nothing electronic to fail, which he says is the whole point. He has not taken it off in forty years.
When the lights go out, the first door Kimberly knocks on is theirs.
The Sheriffs. Others who appear without warning and leave a mark. More character profiles are on the way.
The Severed City characters are grounded in real human experience. Moreover each character carries the weight of the world that existed before the blackout. Kimberly Sterns is the primary Severed City character. At seventeen years old, she navigates a collapsed New York City alone. However she is not without resources. Because her father trained her well, she knows how to survive even though he is no longer reachable.
Natalie Oliver is the second lead among the Severed City characters. Originally from Indiana, she is twenty two years old and becomes the closest thing to family that Kimberly has. Furthermore their friendship is the emotional core of Book One. Although they are very different people, their connection is immediate and genuine.
Captain James Sterns is Kimberly’s father and therefore one of the most important Severed City characters in the series. Although he loves his daughter, the distance between them grows throughout the story. Consequently what he becomes is something Kimberly will spend a long time trying to understand. More Severed City characters are added to this page as the story develops. Read about the world these characters inhabit on The World page.
