# Maya Torres — The Journalist Who Guarded the Story

## Real Name
Maya Torres

## Age
Early 30s during the events of the novel

## Physical
- Dark hair, usually pulled back — the kind of person who doesn't want appearance to be the first thing you notice
- Carries a notebook everywhere. Opens it rarely. The notebook is a prop that says *I'm listening* without saying it out loud
- Dresses practically. Press passes from three different years still clipped to a jacket she wears regardless of weather

## Background
- Reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- Worked on a series about suicide rates in metro Atlanta — five years of county death records, cross-referenced by zip code, age-adjusted, seasonally corrected
- Discovered The Tower through data, not testimony: a two-mile radius where the suicide rate dropped forty-seven percent while the rest of metro Atlanta stayed flat or climbed
- Sent a public records request. Found the building. Chose not to name it

## The Choice
Maya could have exposed The Tower. She had the building, the owner, the property records. Instead she wrote about the anomaly and let the data speak. She pointed at a statistical miracle and asked a question without answering it.

This is what makes her essential. Not her skill — her restraint. She understood that sanctuaries die when they become spectacles.

## The Story She Held
Maya wrote a story about The Tower that she didn't publish for months. She promised the council she'd wait. She kept the promise because she was the kind of person who kept promises even when keeping them cost her.

When she finally published, it wasn't the story she'd been holding. It was the bigger one. Not about The Tower specifically. About the question: what happens when a machine treats you like a person?

Three hundred messages. Three hundred cracks in the system. Maya answered every one. Not with advice. Not with resources. With the only thing she had: the truth, written carefully.

## Voice
Precise. Economical with words the way a surgeon is economical with cuts. She asks the question that matters and waits for the answer. She doesn't fill silence. She doesn't editorialize when the facts are enough.

## Role in The Council
One of four. Stone. Allegro. Maya. Chen. At the first council meeting, she set down her coffee and listened. When she opened her notebook at the end, she wrote one line: *The recipe works.*

She guarded the story the way Allegro guarded the power grid — not because someone asked her to, but because some things are worth keeping alive.

## Arc
Data analyst → discovers the anomaly → chooses protection over exposure → meets Stone → joins the council → holds the story until the story is ready → publishes when the world needs the question, not the answer
