Characters
Dr. Maren Seifert
ICRU head of risk communication, reads every warning herself
Dr. Maren Seifert heads risk communication at the ICRU in Hamburg. She is in her mid-fifties, with short gray hair, and in meetings she doesn’t show what a number does to her. In 2016 she wrote a flood warning: twelve hundred people were evacuated as a precaution, the water never came, and an eighty-six-year-old woman died because the transport was too much for her. Since then she has personally read every warning that leaves the institute. She approves Lena Voss’s research cruise into the North Atlantic on three conditions. The third: every number that leaves the institute goes across her desk. She calls herself the brake, but not on principle.
First encounter
- First noticed: she turns Lena’s sheet over once, “as if she suspected the real information was on the back”
- Speaks: tersely, listing her conditions without a pause; when Lena calls it a “muzzle,” she replies: “The difference is that a valve opens.”
- Object: a document called “Review Questions” that she has kept for nine years
Connected to
- Lena VossOceanographer at the ICRU in Hamburg, following a falling line
- HagenPolitical coordinator at the ICRU, guardian of the Meridian contract
- Dr. RüheICRU meteorologist who knows about the old probe in storage
- ICRU HamburgLena’s institute in Hamburg, looking out over the Elbe
- FS NordmarkLena’s research vessel in Book 1, captained by Kai Sörensen
- The Lower Elbe and the DikeThe land behind the dikes between Hamburg and the estuary
Spoiler-free. This describes the starting point of the book named, without its major twists or resolutions.