Maya Torres

Maya Torres is the marine ecologist you're escorting to Reef-Spiral, and she has the exhausted cheer of somebody who genuinely loves reefs and genuinely hates the forms required to touch one.

She is human, thirty-one, brown-skinned, lean, and usually carrying two sample cases because she does not trust baggage crews with living cultures. Her black hair is shaved close on one side and tied back on the other. She can identify a stressed reef by smell through a skiff filter and can turn three minutes of bloom-density data into an argument that lasts through dinner.

Maya knows Line 7 is under a spawning-season closure. Ethan Cole's permit packet avoids saying so directly, which is bureaucratic smoke thick enough for anybody with field experience to smell. She wants the science, but not badly enough to wreck a protected shelf or lose her license. When the skiff reaches the closure marker, she stops pretending the job is routine and asks the crew whether they are going to help her get lawful access — or help the client make her the fall person.