A bright, immune-disordered four-year-old girl from Ganymede, abducted from her Montessori by her doctor.
Mei is a four-year-old girl living on Ganymede with her botanist father, who takes evident pride when she recites the Latin names of the station's plants — a habit that also soothes her. Her mother has left for Ceres to take "mommy-alone-time," so Mei is startled when Doctor Strickland, her physician, arrives at her Montessori school claiming to take her to her mother. Instead of the hospital, Strickland and a woman named Umea carry her through disused surface tubes into a hidden facility where other children — like the older boy Sandro — are also being kept.
Mei suffers a chronic condition managed with twice-daily medicine and monitored for scratchy throat, night sweats, and blood; but this visit skips the usual questions. Left alone with the unsettling Umea, Mei is led to a cold room and shown a glass tank holding a naked, blue-eyed man whose skin is wrong and whose hands are malformed. The thing reaches for the glass and Mei begins to scream.
A four-year-old girl, small enough to be tickled and carried on a hip; hands sticky with red, blue, and green finger paint; wears a child's smock over her clothes at school.
The abducted child whose disappearance sets the book's central mystery in motion; daughter of a Ganymede botanist.