Chapter 1

Maja has worked out that she can do four a minute if she doesn't think about it, and three if she does. That's the kind of arithmetic you start doing after two weeks in a basement. The first week she counted envelopes. The second week she counted minutes. Now, in the fourth, she has begun experimenting with grip — whether it's faster to open with the thumb against the flap or the index finger under the corner — and she has a leading hypothesis and a control running, and she hasn't told anyone, because there are things you don't tell anyone.

The day began the way the days begin: 6.50, the gentlest alarm on her phone, the one called Daybreak that sounds like someone apologising. Porridge standing at the kitchen counter, last night's mug rinsed and reused, the bike down from the hallway with the back wheel that goes tick once per revolution and has done for three weeks — the shop still says next week — and then the ride in through the city, which she has done so often now that it has become one continuous curve. At the gate she held her key card to the reader and it flashed red, the way it does every other morning, and then green on the second try, the way it does too, and Poul behind the glass lifted two fingers without breaking off his conversation with a contractor about a downpipe. Down the stairs. Light on. First box on the table.

It's quarter past nine, and she has been here since eight.

The basement under the institute has no windows, but it does have a fluorescent tube that flickers at irregular intervals, as though it were trying to say something in a language nobody has bothered to learn. It also has a radiator that can't be adjusted, a noticeboard with a fire drill from 2011, and a calendar from a temp agency that isn't the one she works for, open at a March in a year she can't identify. It smells of paper and of something else that took her a week to place: the sweet, dusty smell of glue that dried a long time ago. A million envelopes' worth of glue.

The boxes are the system. Box 1: moved, new address known. Box 2: unknown at this address. Box 3: uncollected. Box 4: deceased. You read the return code on the label, type it into the system, and put the envelope in the right box, and when a box is full you put the lid on and write the date in marker, and then a man named Jørgen comes every Thursday and takes them away on a pallet truck.

Box 4 is the one that fills up slowest. It took her two weeks to notice and a day to work out why: the dead take up the least room. Box 2 has to be changed every other day, box 4 every other week, and when Jørgen collects it he lifts it with one hand and always says the same thing — "ah, the light one" — without meaning anything by it, because you can't work with boxes for thirty years and mean something by them.

Jørgen is sixty-something and has worked in the building longer than anyone can document. He doesn't talk much, but he'll talk about the pallet truck, which he calls Bodil, and which he has been fighting procurement about for two years to get new wheels for. "They say she's due to be phased out," he said last week, patting the steering column. "They say that about me too." Where the boxes go, Maja doesn't know. She asked. Jørgen looked at her for a long moment, as though the question were bigger than she realised.

"Ask Dorte," he said.

Everything down here is something you ask Dorte about. The key card that only works for the basement and the one toilet by the stairs: ask Dorte. Why her email address is temp04@ and not her name: ask Dorte. What happened to temp01, 02 and 03: she did actually ask Dorte that, in her first week, mostly to have something to say, and Dorte said "they finished" in a tone that closed the subject so efficiently that Maja still occasionally thinks of the three numbers as lost expeditions. Dorte is friendly enough when you can find her, but Dorte sits three floors up, where there are windows, and has a calendar with other things in it than Maja.

Envelope up. Code in. Envelope in the box.

The letters are all identical on the outside. The National Screening Biobank, it says, in a discreet blue type, and underneath, slightly smaller: Regarding renewed consent. One point one million of them went out over the spring, Dorte has told her, and twelve thousand have come back, and the twelve thousand are Maja's. She doesn't open them. She isn't allowed to open them — it's in the instruction sheet, a page and a half, that she was given on her first day, a document with no author and no date, which she has pinned to the noticeboard next to the fire drill, and whose key passages she now knows by heart: Returned items must not be opened, cf. the confidentiality of correspondence. Registration is to be based solely on the return code applied. Any irregularities are to be reported to the nearest line manager. Nobody has defined irregularities. Nobody has, in practice, defined nearest line manager either — the agency says the institute, the institute says the agency, and between the two answers sits temp04 with an instruction that presupposes a world in which somebody has thought this through. She reads the code the postal service or the mail-merge system has put there, and she sorts, and that's all of it.

It is, she is aware, not what three years of a master's degree were for. It is also not what the nine years before them were for, but that arithmetic she does even less often than the other one, because it has no units.

By eleven she has done two hundred and forty, which is under her average, because a batch from Jutland has come in with a code she hasn't seen before and she has had to look it up twice.

By half past she has stopped noticing the smell.

At ten past twelve she eats her mother's meatballs standing up, out of the box, with the lid as a plate, and reads four pages of a novel she has been reading for six weeks and will not finish.

And at ten past two, in the second box after lunch, she finds the first one.

It isn't dramatic. That's the thing she keeps coming back to afterwards — that there was no moment, no cold hand, nothing that would look like anything if you filmed it. There is only an envelope with a return label, and on the label a code, and the code is one of the deceased codes, and she types it in, and the system takes it, and she puts the envelope in box 4.

Then the next one. Also deceased.

Then two ordinary ones, an unknown at this address and a moved.

Then two more deceased, in a row.

She notices it the way you notice a wrong note in a piece of music you don't know: not as an error, just as a thing that stands out from the pattern. Box 4 fills up slowest. That's the rule down here, and it's a rule she has established herself, over four weeks, with her own hands. And in this batch there are — she counts back — seven in about eighty.

Seven in eighty is not the same as seven in six hundred.

She keeps sorting, because there are twelve thousand of them and because it's four minutes past two, but she has started keeping the deceased ones in a separate little stack next to box 4 instead of putting them straight in, and she isn't entirely sure when she made that decision.

At half past three there are nineteen in the stack.

At four she puts the lid on the box she is working from, though it isn't full, and takes the stack over to the computer and starts entering them, one by one, into a spreadsheet she opens for the purpose. Not because she has a theory. Because nineteen is more than a stack should be, and because she has never in her life been able to leave a number alone once it has looked at her.

Behind her, the fluorescent tube flickers twice and settles.