Billy Squire

Stubble and a rough, weathered look define Billy's face, framed by ash-blond hair left messy at a medium length. His green eyes sit narrow beneath a black knit cap. A tall man, he dresses plainly: a dark turtleneck under a maroon jacket whose collar he keeps turned up, tan trousers, and a watch strapped to his left wrist. The letters RC, standing for the Red Circus, mark the jacket's left sleeve.

In the years before joining the movement, Billy kept his hair cropped short and his face shaved clean.

Loss defines Billy. In his earlier life he was a soldier of firm principles and an attentive parent, raising his daughter Biddy to treat people gently and to step in for anyone struggling. When Ostania's government began punishing dissent, he chose silence to shield his family, a caution that put him at odds with his daughter. Her death at a protest hollowed him out, and grief curdled into the extremism that eventually placed him at the head of the Red Circus. He convinces himself he has forgotten her so anger can keep him running, and though he privately knows the group's methods are wrong, he never lifts a hand to stop them.

Fragments of the old Billy survive underneath. Children stir his empathy because they carry echoes of his daughter. Throughout the hijacking he sidesteps real cruelty, rigging dummy collar bombs instead of live ones, letting his young hostages step out to relieve themselves, and accepting food and water for them mid-negotiation. Anya Forger's stubborn compassion gradually cracks his resolve. Choosing to act as a father one final time, he walks off the bus, gives himself up, and shoulders the entire blame so the authorities will treat his comrades leniently.

A photograph places Billy in an Ostanian army uniform in his younger days. His wife vanished from the household for reasons never explained, so he brought Biddy up alone and taught her generosity. When he once scolded her for emptying their pantry to feed hungry neighborhood cats, she reminded him that he was the one who raised her to care for others, an answer that quietly made him proud.

Biddy grew into an idealist and joined the Red Circus while it was still a student movement. Wary of the group and of the state's harshness toward demonstrators, Billy begged her to stay away. She refused, saying she would sooner die for her convictions than live somewhere criticism was forbidden. The protest turned violent, and Billy found her among the dead. Flagged by the State Security Service over his connection to her, he escaped Ostania with the Red Circus's help and rose over the following years to lead the group as it radicalized. After the SSS and the assassin network Garden dismantled most of the organization, he slipped back into Berlint with a handful of survivors, planning to bargain their jailed comrades free and win refuge in neutral Nortica.

The plan targets two Eden Academy school buses. Billy directs the first takeover personally, incapacitating the chaperoning dorm tutor, blasting the tire of a pursuing car, and fastening dummy bombs onto Anya Forger and Damian Desmond to keep the children compliant. To the police he demands freedom for seventeen jailed members plus safe travel out of the country, offering five students back for every prisoner released. The scheme collapses when the second bus's hijackers are located and killed. Confronted by Anya, whose words echo Biddy's almost exactly, Billy admits to himself that he never truly forgot his daughter. Refusing to watch another girl die, he collects his group's weapons, steps off the bus, and surrenders, claiming he coerced the others so they will be spared the worst. He is led away watching Anya reunite with her friends.