Olesya Ilyukhina, a Russian woman, is first mentioned when Grace finds her uniform in 04.131 although we have already encountered her name in Cyrillic in 03.165.

Grace remembers her as “hilarious” and having “one of those infectious and jovial personalities”.

She continues to be mentioned in memories on the Space timeline in chapters 6, 7, 9, and 11.

We first meet the living Ilyukhina in 16.078 where Stratt describes her as “a materials expert and by far the best candidate for the task”.

She hugs Stratt and says “Hello! I’m here to die for Earth! Pretty awesome, yes?!”

She appears again in chapters 18 (drinking lots of vodka) and 21 (mostly talking about heroin as her choice of how to die). When she appears in chapter 23 it is noted she has “no drink in her hand”.

She is mentioned in the Space timeline again in chapter 25 and briefly in chapters 26 and 29.

In chapter 25, Grace opens Ilyukhina’s bag and finds a pendant, an old teddy bear, the emergency heroin, some books, and five liters of vodka.

Ilyukhina’s direct speech consists of 23 quoted passages, 240 tokens, and 136 unique words.

She is the only character to say the words ‘pharma’, ‘pleasantness’, ‘maximize’, ‘downhill’, ‘addicts’, ‘girl’, ‘uptight’, or ‘responsible’ and the only person other than the narrator to use the words ‘maintenance’, ‘hay’, ‘doctors’, ‘bastards’, ‘bar’, ‘doses’, or ‘officer’.