Half a percent

"We're here because we want to understand them, right?"
"Right."
"Not because we are them. Not because it wants us here... You know what they say. Nowhere draws lost kids to it. Are we lost kids too?" [loc. 2044]

Riley and her little brother Oliver live with Cousin. Their mother committed suicide a couple of years before the novel opens: Riley never knew her father, while Oliver's father is dead. Now Riley is biding her time until she can graduate from high school and escape Cousin's brutal regime. 

One night a girl in green appears at her second-floor window, and gives Riley directions to Nowhere, an abandoned and ruined mansion that used to belong to famous film star Leaf Winham.( Read more... )

“I can either be your doctor or your boyfriend,” Eli said. “And if I have to choose, I don’t want to be your doctor.” [p. 165]

Lazurus Lenkov first appears in Troth as an angry, unstable war veteran with PTSD, jealous of his older brother Ulysses' relationship with ex-demigod Sam Sterling and plagued by occasional flashes of foresight. Laz, unsurprisingly, is the focus of Lazarus, Home from the War, a novel which not only explores his character in more depth but also gives a different perspective on Ulysses.