Ephraim's grieving conscience, who beats him over the stolen children, walks out for good, and is captured to become the Sovereign's leverage.
Sickened by the delivery of the children and by Ephraim's zoladone-numbed indifference, Volga Fjorgan makes her stand in the penthouse: she hurls his pill dispenser off the balcony and beats him bloody trying to force him to feel something, nearly throwing him over the edge before setting him down in tears—'I'm not a monster. But you are. They were just children.' She reveals she committed the kidnapping only out of love, because he was her family and it was the one thing she could do for him; when he snarls that to the children she is 'just a weapon' and that he keeps her only as one, she breaks and walks out for good.
She never boards the getaway yacht. Instead she is found by the Republic at the Cerebian Zoo—easier to catch than Ephraim—and taken into custody, kept alive only by Holiday holding off the Telemanuses, now the leverage the Sovereign uses to bend Ephraim to the rescue.
A lean, towering Obsidian giant of about twenty-three, six and a half feet tall, pale and smooth-faced with a crooked smile; puffy tear-swollen eyes, dressed plainly, later hunched alone on a cell bench.
Ephraim's estranged friend and conscience; the giant whose captivity becomes the Republic's hold over him.