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**Rad Albert** (born 300) is a figure of the C9 universe, the smith and coordinator of the Great Plateau, and the man who built and held the shelter that took in the House of Confidence after the Klak Grove fell. He is an umbral-plasma variant, and his hands are the conduit.
**Rad Albert** (born 301) is a figure of the C9 universe, the smith and coordinator of the Great Plateau, and the man who built and held the shelter that took in the House of Confidence after the Klak Grove fell. He is an umbral-plasma variant, and his hands are the conduit.
He is married to [[life/mae-albert|Mae Albert]], and their son is [[life/matthew-albert|Matthew Albert]]. [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama]] is his niece. He came out of the Red Desert and the industrial shelter systems, and by year 330 he was running the plateau, its power, its water and its walls.
## Early life and the shelter years
Rad was born in year 300. He worked as a shelter technician in the years before the displacement and kept his abilities out of sight deliberately, to avoid being noticed, which cost him. When [[life/commander-fredrick|Commander Fredrick]] called him a liar and picked him up by the collar and threw him into the shelves, he took it and did not fight back, because the cover was worth more than the answer[1].
Rad was born in year 301 and was twenty-nine in year 330. He worked as a shelter technician in the years before the displacement and kept his abilities out of sight deliberately, to avoid being noticed, which cost him. When [[life/commander-fredrick|Commander Fredrick]] called him a liar and picked him up by the collar and threw him into the shelves, he took it and did not fight back, because the cover was worth more than the answer[1].
He got up slowly afterwards, with the deliberateness of a man who has considered staying down and rejected it, and looked at Fredrick[1].
## The Great Plateau
He is a large man who takes up space without filling it the way intimidating people do; he simply exists at a scale that makes you aware of the dimensions of the room. He waits with the expression of somebody who has already made the calculation and is letting the other person catch up[1].
He took in eighty refugees and put a settlement around them. When one of them, an older woman with grey at her temples and the bearing of someone who has made decisions under pressure and expects to make more, looked at him about it, he smiled and said happy housewarming[1].
He recognised his niece at the shelter, mid-sentence, and stopped: *Wait. Samantha?*[1]
Through the plateau chapters he is at a console, tracking numbers that are still, barely, in the survivable range[2]. He found [[life/chryssander-randolf-lyall-helvig|Chryssander]]'s temperature professionally unacceptable and put him on a cot, and could tell the particular wrong of an engine that had given more than it had from every other kind of wrong, having learned the difference over years[3].
He read the device out of the cache. Standard issue carries a stamp and this carried nothing, and he had seen the frequency signature once before, three years earlier, on equipment belonging to somebody who was not authorised to be at the first shelter. Somebody had run a parallel operation six months ahead of them[3].
At the gate he braced the upper rail and reinforced the hinges through the night, set down the weld when Chryssander came to him, and asked what he needed. He is a full head taller and twice the mass, and he had been looking at Chryssander the same way since the young man arrived on the plateau: as somebody he has decided is worth the attention, with the questioning finished. When it was over he carried him, and did not put him down when asked, and set him against the gate carefully when it was time[4].
## Physiology
Rad's power runs on his own metabolism rather than on anything borrowed. Creating matter or fusing steel costs energy, and the energy is his: to build a gate he has to eat enormously, and if he does not eat, the body takes the fuel out of his own muscle. What goes into the walls comes out of him.
His skin is a containment vessel, and holds his internal energy in. The shadow form is not an escalation, it is the containment failing, entropy venting outward, and it is dangerous to be near and worse to be.
He is built broad and heavy through the shoulders, with thick forearms and hands out of proportion to the rest of him, and the hands are the conduits. His eyes are luminous yellow. He wears an aged grey lab coat with the sleeves rolled.
Because the power drains him fast, he hoards. Conservation is not a habit he picked up; it is the shape of his physiology expressed as behaviour.
## Character
He does not rush. He works structurally: if the beam moves, does the roof come down. Faced with eighty refugees he is not moved first and organised second; he arrives already counting water rations, bedding space and sanitation.
He connects people to resources, which is the whole of his leadership and most of his affection. He thanked Marcus for handing him a box in the ruined library in the way people say things when they mean considerably more than the words[1].
In later years the red in his hair goes to grey and rust, he moves less, and he does the heavy lifting at a distance. He is the father figure to the eighty he saved.
## Family
Rad is married to [[life/mae-albert|Mae Albert]]. Their son is [[life/matthew-albert|Matthew Albert]]. [[life/samantha-grace-albert-nakayama|Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama]] is his niece.
## Appearances
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-8-the-cave-and-the-guide|The Glass House, chapter 8]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-10-the-hunter-s-ground|The Glass House, chapter 10]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-12-the-new-normal|The Glass House, chapter 12]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-15-the-crucible|The Glass House, chapter 15]]
- [[pages/book-two-book-two-chapter-one|The Silent Decade, chapter 1]]
## See also
- [[life/mae-albert|Mae Albert]]
- [[life/matthew-albert|Matthew Albert]]
## References
1. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-8-the-cave-and-the-guide|The Glass House, chapter 8]]
2. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-10-the-hunter-s-ground|The Glass House, chapter 10]]
3. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-12-the-new-normal|The Glass House, chapter 12]]
4. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-15-the-crucible|The Glass House, chapter 15]]