A colonist caught in town when the warning came, Clay Dahlke rushed off to fetch his wife and daughter from the farthest farm — and never made it back to the shelter.
Clay Dahlke is a First Landing colonist whose family lives in the house farthest outside town. When Carol Chiwewe's people spread the warning of the incoming shockwave, Clay was in town gathering supplies; he immediately set out to bring his wife and daughter to safety, and no one was sent with him. When head counts in the alien ruins come up short, the Dahlkes are the family missing — three kilometers out, with the storm nearly on top of them.
Amos, refusing to leave a little girl to die, straps on a pack to attempt the six-kilometer round-trip rescue, but the black storm-wall arrives first and Holden judges it too late. Clay and his family stand as the human cost of the cataclysm's impossibly short warning.
An adult male colonist of First Landing, unseen on the page here; known only as a husband and father from the settlement's most remote farmstead.
Colonist whose outlying family goes missing in the evacuation, prompting Amos's desperate rescue attempt against the storm.