Vetur is on her way to work when she gets a glimpse of a dark-haired man in the neighbourhood coffeehouse and there’s something about his stiff shoulders that’s enough to set her off all over again. She manages to make it past the corner, out of sight of the coffeehouse, before her legs go weak, her arms won’t move, everything becomes too sharp, the colours too bright, the minor details too big. Heart rate one hundred and eighty one beats per minute, Zoé beeps, and the same feeling washes over her again: he’s following her, he knows where she works, he’s back at it, she has to hide. Someone comes up and asks if she’s okay and she doesn’t hear the voice until long after the words have been spoken; it takes her for ever to absorb their meaning, and she says Yes, she’s fine, she tells Zoé not to sound the alarm, the last thing she wants is for the sirens to start wailing like last time. She exhales, inhales, exhales again. He can’t get in here. He can’t get into this neighbourhood. That couldn’t have been him. And thinking about it now, the guy didn’t look anything like Daníel, that guy was clean-cut and wearing a nice blazer, like someone who belongs in this neighbourhood, like someone who can get into this neighbourhood.

She’s doubled over with her hands on her knees. She straightens up and puts one foot in front of the other, heads towards the school as quickly as she can. She goes directly to her classroom and tries to calm down. By the time the first student walks in, she’s stopped trembling. By noon, she has almost forgotten the whole thing.

After classes are over for the day, a representative from PSYCH, the Icelandic Psychological Association, comes in to talk to the teaching staff about how to prepare students. Experience has shown that it is best to play the test down a little, he says, to show them it’s no big deal. Otherwise, they tend to blow it out of proportion.

‘So how exactly are we supposed to spin this for them? Tell them it’s some kind of treat?’ asks Húnbogi, palms out in front of him, which, Vetur thinks, is about as close as you can get to throwing up your hands without actually throwing up your hands.

The representative tilts his head and thinks for a moment.

‘No,’ he says, his voice measured. ‘Not a treat. But the closer we get to the referendum, the more cases we’re seeing of young people who can’t sleep due to test anxiety. Perhaps the adults in their homes are trying to form their own opinions about the marking mandate and don’t realise that their children are like sponges, soaking up all that tension and uncertainty with very little context. Which is why we think it’s important to call it a “sensitivity assessment” when dealing with individuals under eighteen years of age. Not an “empathy test”. The language we use is important. We don’t want young people to get the feeling that this is something they can fail. We’re not marking anyone.’

The representative, Ólafur Tandri Sveinbjörnsson, is probably a little older than Vetur, somewhere between thirty and forty. He’s often PSYCH’s media spokesperson. The headmaster requested him specifically. Vetur understands why this man has been so successful in his field. There’s something unassuming about him, something straightforward. If he were a house, he’d be built on rock. Not on sand like the rest of them.

‘We’re hoping these measures will forestall anxiety, dysphoria, shame, and even bullying. As teachers, you know better than anyone, of course, that this is a sensitive age, an age when individuals fall prey to herd mentality, when most of us want to fit in with the group. Your students will never see the results of their assessments. If need be, we’ll be in touch with their form class leaders directly, but we identify very few problematic cases in marked schools, usually only in children who show clear signs of distress – trauma or neglect.’

‘Excuse me, sorry,’ says someone. Vetur sees it’s one of the mothers on the parents’ council. ‘Are you saying that parents won’t be informed which students fail and which students pass?’

‘That’s up to the school board,’ says Ólafur Tandri. ‘But we need to tread carefully. If a child is diagnosed below the norm, we need to take particular care with them. So, on that level, it would be logical for other parents to be informed. It takes a village, you know? But the danger then is that parents might unconsciously keep their kids away from the sick child and that would run counter to the whole point of the assessment. Antisocial behaviour needs to be met with social integration. If an assessment resulted in further isolation, we’d just be throwing the child out of the frying pan and into the fire.’

‘Something like that would never happen in this neighbourhood,’ answers the mother.

‘We should hope not,’ says Ólafur Tandri.

‘What happens if a child is diagnosed below the norm?’

‘If the assessors believe there’s cause to intervene, they’ll be in touch with the headmaster and the form class leader, and together, they’ll offer appropriate resources to the parents.’

Vetur hurries out ahead of her co-workers. A few of the upper-division students are standing at the entrance; two of them are leaning against a wall, eating apples, a trend she can’t fathom. She cuts across the schoolyard, past the transparent, plexiglassed football pitch. She walks quickly; she’d said she was going to the theatre when a colleague suggested going to 104.5, the coffeehouse on the border of the 104 and 105 postcodes where she’d thought she’d seen Daníel this morning. Why? Why does she do these things to herself? Someone had then asked what play she was going to see, and she’d said she wasn’t sure, she was going with her mum, and it was a surprise. Anxiety feeds on lies. Now she has to remember to check what’s showing tonight so she can answer questions on Monday.

She can’t be bothered with the conversations people have after these kinds of meetings. Can’t be bothered listening to her co-workers agreeing on fundamentals but disagreeing about trivialities, can’t be bothered keeping her mouth shut while she listens to arguments she’s heard a thousand times and then counterarguments she’s heard a thousand times, can’t be bothered walking the tightrope between wanting to say something and nothing to Húnbogi and then saying something to Húnbogi, who she can’t be bothered to have a crush on but still does have a crush on because he’s cute and somehow that lethal combination of knowing it and not knowing it, and when she thinks about him in the abstract, he’s like a layer cake of alternating confidence and insecurity, and she can’t be bothered to deal with that, either, although thinking about someone in the abstract is, of course, an entirely different thing from the tremor that shoots through her unexpectedly, the almost physical draw that pulls at her without warning, not to mention the self-consciousness and clumsiness and jokes that miss their marks.

She can hear a child crying in one of the apartments above. There’s water running from a kitchen tap, plates clattering, and Vetur catches the savoury scent of someone’s dinner wafting on the breeze. The pavement is bare – there are no weeds here, no cracks, the trees are as-yet only scrawny saplings. The eastern half of the neighbourhood, the part that’s closest to the old industrial harbour, is still under construction; during the day, the sound of machinery carries into her classroom. But the western half is more or less finished – its white streets designed in a classic European style, tall buildings rising on either side like rows of perfectly straight teeth. The Viðey Quarter, located on the east side of Reykjavík and named after the island of Viðey just offshore, is the only marked neighbourhood in the downtown area. The other marked neighbourhoods are each at a similar stage of completion; one is located north-east of the city in a reforested area, the other on the coast, about half an hour to the south-west.

If they renew her contract at the end of the semester, she’ll sell her apartment on Kleppsvegur and buy in the Viðey Quarter instead. It’s the only way.

Soon Vetur catches sight of the thirty-foot glass wall, silvery and transparent, which encircles the neighbourhood. The wall ascends even higher at the end of the street, becoming a convex gate that faces the ocean and the thoroughfare that runs along the coast. This is gate one of two – the other is further up the hill at the other end of the neighbourhood. When Vetur was a teenager, there were some big warehouses here, but after they suffered major water damage it was decided the land would be elevated and the capital area enclosed, girded from the sea with the same plexiglass, all the way from Mt Esja north of the city to the lava fields in the...