When readers last saw Oar - on of the last members of a race of glass humans discovered by Explorer Festina Ramos on the planet Melaquin - it was in james Alan Gardne's acclaimed debut novel Expendable. The eternally youthful, virtually indestructible see-through beauty had supposedly plunged to her death from an 80-story building. B, as se herself will tell you in Ascending, Oar is very much alive.