Female, twenty-nine. On her better days she rates herself "maybe a 7," and by default wears her hair in a "limp ponytail." Seen from the outside she has a small round face, big brown eyes, and — the evening it all begins — a black angora sweater. Her narration is wry and dark-humored, swinging between elegant, essay-like asides and blunt, lightly profane panic.
When Window Shopping opens, Eira works the front desk of a failing little museum on Caligo that "served about three families a day." The morning she tries to curl her hair to impress a new intern who never shows up, her house burns down behind her — the curling iron blamed — and a landlord's voicemail leaves her the news, with no insurance to fall back on. She drives to the cliffs where she likes to sit and think, and meets a sharply dressed stranger who already knows her name. By nightfall she has climbed into his car and refused to get out; it lifts into the sky.
She is carried steadily further from home: aloft above Caligo, then to the garden town of Oxbow, then — after eleven hours of sleep — off the planet entirely. She wakes on Coda, a hostile, hyper-advanced world whose gravity and thin air nearly kill her on arrival. Processed through an overwhelmed alien medical facility, she's offered wholesale replacement of her "insufficient" body — even a full digital upload. She refuses ("I don't want new eyes and ears and bones") and counters with a request for "an exoskeleton mech suit kind of thing." By Off the Rack she's wearing a matte-black nanocarbon suit and adapting fast — but relocation hasn't fixed her. Pressed by Hugo, she names what she actually wants: not death exactly, but the right to choose it. Rather than promise her danger, Hugo offers her access to his vast database through her visor — a way to make her slow integration feel thrilling — and she takes it ("Yes please").
By Right Hand Man, months on, that database rides behind her visor and Eira has settled into a house on Coda — restless already, and newly kitted out in her matte-black suit dressed up with white, "like a space assassin." She'll keep up appearances with her arrogant, Consortium-connected neighbor Nellie Platin on one condition: that Hugo take her somewhere new. When Vesper pitches the silica planet of Threnos and Hugo's own notes wave it off as "superstitious and delusional," Eira reads them off her visor and decides that's exactly why they should go.
In Overtones the trip lands squarely on her central wound. Charmed by the Threnic — she nicknames the one that greets her "Melody" — she insists on attending their funeral rite, the Sonorium, which exists to call the dead back. Where Hugo bristles at the whole delusion of "containing the dead," Eira simply watches, visor off and wholly present: the woman who wants the option to die, standing quiet inside a rite that refuses to let anyone stay gone.