Oscar was missing, and the police were coming to question his daughter. That was reality; he couldn’t run away from it. Kasper prayed she would be home in time for him not to have to face them alone.

He went into the cramped living room and turned on the architect lamp over the small desk that he had squeezed in despite Iben’s protests. True, there wasn’t a lot of space, but where else was he going to put it? If he were to be home to greet her from school, to prepare their meals, and be a parent, he had to be able to work when she went to sleep. Hanging on the wall over the desk was a drawing of Copenhagen’s new incineration plant, the ambitious CopenHill, or more formally, the Amager Resource Center, a.k.a. ARC. His workplace for the past year and what occupied most of his waking hours, besides Iben.

He spread out four sheets of paper on the desk and leaned down over the rows of numbers. They specified the preceding week’s emissions from the plant’s six internal pipes, called the scrubbers. These pipes cleansed and led the smoke from the ovens to the 123-meter-tall chimney, so it could puff out clean, white steam over the city. Kasper was employed as a process engineer to design data pathways and keep an eye on harmful emissions of toxic substances from burning the trash, but also to optimize the use of the energy the incinerator produced. He oversaw all stages of the incineration process, from garbage pickup around the city to the computer-controlled claw in the waste silo itself.

ARC was unique in a lot of ways. Under the motto “We take and we give back,” this incineration plant had been considered much more than a garbage dump from the beginning. Designed by world-renowned architecture group BIG, the plant had a roof that was built as an eighty-five-meter-high ski slope, complete with lifts, a café, and a unique Italian plastic underlay that made it possible to whiz down the slope without a single snowflake. CopenHill was the city’s new recreational gathering place and landmark. The roof project alone was rumored to have cost three hundred million Danish kroner.