Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
The surgeon-survivor panics, flees to the last escape pod, and dies when a pain-amplifier jellyfish gets in with him.
During the Lusca fight Vadim's nerve breaks: he abandons Carl's team, climbs to the last of the Akula's three escape hatches, and seals himself in — a door that won't reopen with water on the far side, trapping him. He apologizes over chat ('I panicked. It was stupid.'), then blows the pod, punching straight up through the dying shark and the jellyfish layer 'like the glass elevator' from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
But a pain-amplifier octo-shark got into the pod with him — his last message ends mid-sentence, tagged 'from a deceased crawler.' As Katia Grim foresaw, his panic doomed him where staying would have saved him; Britney, who begged him not to dive, is left to grieve him in the saferoom.
A level-28 spotted, gecko-like Kuhli crawler sheathed in daggers, last seen pacing alone in the flooded sub's escape room.
The water-quadrant survivor whose fatal panic ends him in the escape pod.