CHARACTER
The Testingby Joelle Charbonneau

Roman Fry

Roman Fry

Quick Facts

A ruthless Testing candidate from an unnamed colony, Roman Fry emerges as a key human antagonist to Cia’s cohort. First appearance: Chapter 5 (Testing Center dining hall). Key relationships: Cia Vale (primary adversary), Tomas Endress (targeted alongside Cia), Will (ultimately kills Roman), Annalise Walker (teammate he sabotages), Malachi Rourke (initial victim of his bullying).

Who They Are

Roman embodies the “win at all costs” competitor The Testing cultivates—a figure who hides sharp intelligence behind a thuggish exterior. Introduced as a crude bully, he steadily reveals himself as a calculating predator who treats teamwork as a ruse, ethics as a weakness, and violence as a tool. Roman’s presence clarifies the true stakes of The Testing: not simply passing exams, but surviving the people willing to turn the tests into a battleground.

Personality & Traits

Roman’s menace is part performance, part principle. He weaponizes others’ assumptions about him—playing the brute until it’s useful to show he’s brilliant—and treats every interaction as an opportunity to thin the herd. His choices strip away any romanticism about merit; for Roman, the smartest move is often the cruelest.

  • Antagonistic cruelty, immediately on display: he trips Malachi for sport in the dining hall, signaling that needless harm is part of his default behavior (Chapter 5).
  • Deceptive and strategic: during the third test, he pretends to be slow, then maneuvers to go first and answers all the problems, sabotaging his team’s chances. Cia’s later review exposes the act: “He’s smart. Very smart…Which is why his answers to the other questions make no sense. Gibberish fills those pages” (Chapter 14).
  • Ruthless survivalism: he operates by the logic of Survival in a High-Stakes Competition, removing rivals through traps and outright violence, culminating in an attempted double murder near the finish of the fourth test (Chapter 18).
  • Opportunistic predation: he accumulates gear, including a bow and arrows, by attacking other candidates, treating supplies—and lives—as resources to be seized (Chapter 18).
  • Physical menace as performance: first seen as “large,” “scruffy,” with “mean eyes,” and later gaunter yet unchanged in attitude—his “sneer” persists even as the test wears him down (Chapters 5, 18).

Character Journey

Roman doesn’t evolve so much as he unfolds. He begins as a petty bully, then reveals a mind keen enough to game a high-stakes team assessment, and finally shows his core creed in the open wilderness: eliminate competitors by any means necessary. That escalation—from hallway cruelty to coordinated sabotage to attempted murder—tracks the Testing’s own moral slide, pushing Cia to recognize that the most dangerous obstacles are not the environment or the tasks, but the people The Testing empowers.

Symbolism

Roman is the dark proof of a system’s values. He models what success looks like when intellect is uncoupled from conscience: efficient, fearless, and empty of empathy. As an emblem of Morality in a Corrupt System, he reflects the leader the United Commonwealth might secretly prize—a strategist who treats ethics as excess weight. Confronting him forces Cia to articulate a different standard for leadership: capability guided by restraint and responsibility.

Key Relationships

  • Cia Vale: Roman recognizes Cia’s competence and treats it as a threat, first targeting her circle (Malachi) and then attempting to ensnare her during the team test. His final ambush turns their intellectual rivalry into a life-or-death struggle, making him the clearest embodiment of what Cia refuses to become (Chapters 5, 14, 18).

  • Tomas Endress: Because Tomas strengthens Cia, Roman targets them as a pair—an alliance to be broken rather than outperformed. His knife attack on Tomas near the finish line is both tactical (removing a strong rival) and symbolic (shattering cooperative trust) (Chapter 18).

  • Will: In bitter irony, Roman is killed by Will—another candidate who also embraces violence when it serves his aims. Will’s intervention saves Cia and Tomas, but the act links the two men as products of the same brutal logic, blurring the line between rescue and opportunism (Chapter 18).

  • Annalise Walker: As Roman’s teammate in the third test, she becomes collateral damage in his scheme. Roman’s feigned incompetence and first-mover gambit leave teammates like Annalise exposed to penalties—and, ultimately, elimination (Chapter 14).

  • Malachi Rourke: Roman’s unprovoked trip in the dining hall makes Malachi the first example of how Roman treats weaker candidates: not as peers, but as obstacles to humiliate or remove. This early act foreshadows the escalations to come (Chapter 5).

Defining Moments

Roman’s arc is a steady climb from petty harm to fatal intent, each step revealing that cruelty is his strategy, not his flaw.

  • Tripping Malachi in the dining hall (Chapter 5): Introduces Roman’s baseline—he harms because he can. Significance: announces the human threat inside The Testing and primes readers to distrust him.
  • Orchestrating the third-test trap (Chapter 14): Feigns slowness to take the first slot, then completes all problems to sabotage teammates. Significance: exposes his intelligence and his willingness to convert cooperation into a weapon.
  • Ambush near the finish line (Chapter 18): Attacks Cia and Tomas with a knife, intent on killing them. Significance: confirms that, for Roman, success equals survival through elimination; his death by Will’s gunfire underlines how violence has become the test’s lingua franca.

Essential Quotes

“Guess that means I go first, right?” (Chapter 14)

This casual line masks a lethal calculation. Roman’s insistence on going first flips the cooperative structure of the assessment to his advantage, letting him booby-trap the exercise while appearing agreeable and even helpful.

“While I also got the correct answer, Roman was able to calculate several steps in his head, which is why he finished first. His work makes it clear why he was chosen for The Testing. He’s smart. Very smart. Which is why his answers to the other questions make no sense. Gibberish fills those pages.” (Chapter 14)

Cia’s analysis punctures Roman’s “dumb brute” façade, revealing precision masked by performance. The juxtaposition—brilliance on one problem, “gibberish” on the rest—shows intentional misdirection: intelligence deployed to deceive, not to build.

“A scream rips from my throat as a knife barely misses Tomas’s neck. For a moment I am paralyzed, watching the two wrestle in an effort to gain the upper hand. And Roman does. He pins Tomas to the ground and raises his knife just as I pull my gun from my bag and take aim.” (Chapter 18)

Here, Roman’s strategy culminates in direct violence. The image of him pinning Tomas with a raised knife crystallizes his ethic: speed, strength, and surprise in service of elimination—until another weapon (Will’s) ends his bid for victory.