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**Samantha Grace Albert-Nakayama** (Albert by birth, Nakayama by marriage; born 312) is a figure of the C9 universe, one of the young people who formed the House of Confidence on Aerogaea 347n, and its marksman and chemist. She is a ballistic and pneumatic variant: her lungs compress air into solid slugs, and her eyes hold a target independently of whatever her body is doing.

 

 

She is in most of the chapters of *The Glass House*, and she is present through *The Silent Decade* as the person at the kitchen table with the reports.

 

## Early life

 

Samantha was born in year 312 in urban decay, and came to the grove young. She is tall, close to 180 centimetres, and thin enough that she wears oversized clothes over it. She carries a glowing purple four on the right shoulder and is almost never seen without a hat pulled low.

 

The Sage73 was a birthday present. She took it apart the same day, to understand it[1].

 

## The Klak Grove

 

She sets the pace on the morning run, not punishing but honest[1]. She finishes her hair on the way down from her room, sitting on the rope-bridge railing with the calm of somebody who has decided gravity is a suggestion[1]. She reassembles the Sage73 in the time it takes to say a sentence, and says that is what she said[1].

 

Her arguments are short and land. When [[life/eevi-charlotte-helvig-norgaard|Eevi]] says some tastes cannot be put into words and [[life/chryssander-randolf-lyall-helvig|Chryssander]] agrees, Samantha says that is a convenient excuse to avoid trying[2].

 

In the raid she spoke from somewhere to the left of where she had been standing, and kicked a rock without looking that caught Byron across the forehead, not hard but precisely[3].

 

In the arena she drew and fired at [[life/akio-nakayama|Akio]] mid-sentence for not paying attention[4]. Against Eevi she was into the pipework before Eevi had finished reading the floor, working angles until she found the one gap that gave her both cover and a clean line, and she took the shot without hesitating[4].

 

## The Great Plateau

 

She hunted. She went further south than agreed and came back through the tree line carrying a three-winged bird with the Sage73 barrel-up on her back, and stopped when she saw [[life/marcus-norgaard|Marcus]]'s face[5]. Her read on the unmarked equipment in the cache was one line: if your cover is blown, you stop putting your name on things[5].

 

At the gate she had tracked the abort order through the comms forty minutes before anyone else arrived, and knew that somebody above Fredrick's authority had reach enough to turn a contracted company around mid-operation[6]. She watched the courier hand over the map through the scope, watched the officer unfold it, watched him read the coordinates, and lowered the scope[6]. She noticed [[life/eon|Eon]] writing in his notebook on a rock to the east, and noticed it the way she notices things, without calling attention to the noticing, and let it be[6].

 

## Marriage and children

 

She married Akio in year 335, when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-two, in the machine shop between shifts. It was a logbook and two names. Rad cut two brass washers from a scrap hydraulic pipe and set them on the ledger without a word, then went back to the bandsaw. She signed, he signed, and they went back to work[7].

 

Seral came in year 337 and Jory in year 339. The children grew up inside grey dust and generator light and the sound of her reports through the wall, and were native to it[7].

 

Through the decade she documented what Akio was becoming, not on paper but in the way she held information: the tempo, the speed of the judgments, what reached the others and in what form. She stayed. He had not done anything wrong. He had only become faster than she had predicted[7].

 

In those years he killed fifty-six million people: the trafficking networks then operating across the region, and the cities those networks were run from. BNCY's investigators counted the dead nine years later[7]. She was the only person tracking it while it happened. When he came home she looked up and did not ask[7].

 

When he brought a boy back from a square, she asked whether he was hungry. He said he had bread. She said that was not what she asked. When he said yes, she pushed her chair back, said "sit down," and went to find a pot[7].

 

## Physiology

 

Samantha's respiratory system compresses oxygen into solid slugs of air, and firing one means stopping the breath to expel it. Her skin and lungs tolerate corrosives that would take other people apart, which is what lets her work with the chemistry she works with. Her pupils glow purple and behave as independent gyroscopes: her body can be shaking or falling and the eyes stay locked on the mark.

 

She is built long and light, high-tensile rather than strong, and her frame is what she has always had to work around rather than with. In the years after the marriage she carried healthy weight for the first time.

 

She has an intuitive grasp of what will burn, explode or poison, and she used it to fortify: in the plateau years the perimeter was hers, trapped with chemical alarms.

 

## Character

 

Her perception runs faster than her body can answer, and it skips. She sees more than the people beside her and reacts to more of it, including to things that are not there: her attention does not sort a rustling bush from a gunshot, and both arrive at full volume. She is not unstable. She is flooded. In the field it means she catches what others miss and needs a spotter to tell her which of it is real, and Akio is the spotter.

 

Mathematics is the handhold. Trajectory and atomic weight hold still when nothing else does, and she holds on to them.

 

She is impatient, quick with her hands, and funnier than she is given credit for. Akio is the one who can get her to sit down and eat. In old age her hands shake around a cup and not around a rifle, and she has come to treat the noise as background radio rather than as an enemy.

 

## Family

 

Samantha is married to [[life/akio-nakayama|Akio Nakayama]]. Their children are [[life/seral-nakayama|Seral]], [[life/jory-nakayama|Jory]], [[life/ben-nakayama|Ben]] and [[life/little-miri-nakayama|Little Miri]]. She is the niece of [[life/rad-albert|Rad Albert]]. She carries both names in the record: Albert by birth and Nakayama by marriage.

 

## Appearances

 

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|The Glass House, chapter 1]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-2-the-glitch|The Glass House, chapter 2]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-3-the-lab-and-the-threat|The Glass House, chapter 3]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-5-the-first-of-senetis|The Glass House, chapter 5]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-6-the-arena|The Glass House, chapter 6]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-7-the-generator|The Glass House, chapter 7]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-8-the-cave-and-the-guide|The Glass House, chapter 8]]

- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-9-raymond|The Glass House, chapter 9]]

- [[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-17-the-explosion|The Glass House, chapter 17]]

- [[pages/book-two-book-two-chapter-one|The Silent Decade, chapter 1]]

 

## See also

 

- [[life/akio-nakayama|Akio Nakayama]]

- [[life/rad-albert|Rad Albert]]

 

## References

 

1. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|The Glass House, chapter 1]]

2. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-2-the-glitch|The Glass House, chapter 2]]

3. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-3-the-lab-and-the-threat|The Glass House, chapter 3]]

4. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-6-the-arena|The Glass House, chapter 6]]

5. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-12-the-new-normal|The Glass House, chapter 12]]

6. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-17-the-explosion|The Glass House, chapter 17]]

7. [[pages/book-two-book-two-chapter-one|The Silent Decade, chapter 1]]