Alicia Donadio—the Colonel

Alicia Donadio and the Colonel share a profound but largely unexplained bond, revealed most clearly when Alicia abandons the safety of the Colony’s Wall to try to save him. His death leaves her grieving and costs her standing in the community; Peter can see the depth of her attachment, but not its history or precise character.

A Bond Kept Private

The Colonel’s relationship with Alicia is marked less by open tenderness than by what she withholds. Peter knows that the bond exists, yet Alicia rarely speaks of it and never gives him its details. He does not read it as a father-daughter relationship: he has noticed no warmth of that kind between them. Instead, when the Colonel’s name comes up or he appears on the catwalk at night, Alicia grows rigid and distant. Peter is careful not to treat that reserve as proof of indifference. The connection is real, he understands, even if its terms remain inaccessible to him.

The Colonel’s own manner helps preserve the mystery around him. The Colony’s residents know him simply as the Colonel, without another name, and he follows designs they do not understand. His absences are familiar enough that Peter initially sees nothing unusual in not having seen him for days. Alicia’s attachment therefore belongs to a private region of her life that Peter can detect but cannot explain; the novel makes its emotional reality clearer than its origins.

The Attack at the Wall

The crisis begins when the Colonel appears on a catwalk near Firing Platform Three after half-night. A small group notices him, but his presence seems ordinary: he has never entirely stopped acting like a soldier on watch. Then a group of virals approaches the field. The Colonel runs toward them, and they overwhelm him before those on the Wall can meaningfully intervene. The Colony watches him die.

A lone girl then runs from the darkness toward Main Gate, and the defenders mistake her for another viral. Arrows and bolts are already flying when Alicia recognizes that the approaching figure is human and shouts for the others to hold fire and bring ropes. With Soo absent, there is no time to wait for the usual authorization to descend beyond the Wall. Alicia climbs onto the rampart with a rope and goes over herself, landing hard and running toward the girl as the virals remain near the Colonel’s body.

Her response connects two urgent acts of recognition: she understands that the girl is a person in danger, and she has just witnessed the death of someone to whom she is deeply attached. The text does not say that Alicia’s rescue attempt is a deliberate response to the Colonel’s death, but it places her descent immediately after it. Faced with danger on both sides of the Wall, she acts rather than remain behind the defenses.

Grief, Risk, and Consequence

Afterward, Peter asks why the Colonel went out toward the virals, since he does not seem to have been someone who would simply let himself die. Alicia does not answer. Her silence preserves the same boundary she has maintained around the Colonel throughout their relationship; neither Peter’s question nor the crisis unlocks an account of what passed between them.

Alicia does, however, name one immediate consequence of her actions: she has been fired. She concedes that she should not have gone over the Wall as she did and says that she lost her head when she saw the girl outside. Her wound makes the cost of that decision present, while the Colony’s judgment turns an act of rescue into a breach of authority. Yet Peter sees that her distress is not only about losing her position. The Colonel’s death has exposed the grief she otherwise keeps contained: though she offers no explanation, Peter understands that her tears are for him.

What Peter Can Know

The relationship is built through a contrast between visible attachment and withheld biography. Alicia’s rigidity, silence, and willingness to leave the Wall show that the Colonel matters profoundly to her; none establishes whether he raised her, what history they shared, or why he went toward the virals. The story keeps those answers out of Peter’s reach and does not replace them with a simple family label.

That restraint gives the bond its particular weight. The Colonel’s death is a public catastrophe witnessed from the Colony’s defenses, but Alicia’s grief is intimate and mostly unspoken. Her attempt to save the girl does not erase her loss, and her dismissal does not resolve it. Peter can recognize the attachment without possessing its story: the relationship remains both a fact of Alicia’s life and one of the limits of what he knows about her.