Belgrade

The train enters the tunnel with 312 passengers.

It comes out with 313.

Nobody notices until the extra man tries to leave.

He steps onto the platform at Vukov Spomenik, falls dead, opens his eyes and grabs the nearest employee by the collar.

“Is the siege over?”

The Office of the Second Census arrives nineteen minutes later.

The passenger is already buried.

The problem is not resurrection.

That would be easier.

Belgrade has accumulated too many deaths under too many governments, too many borders and too many unfinished versions of itself. The same city keeps producing people whose deaths were completed historically but not administratively.

The Second Census has a status for this:

INCOMPLETE.

Soon the trains are carrying more than passengers.

The Office begins discovering that a city can inherit unfinished dead the way a family inherits furniture: badly, repeatedly, and with nobody entirely sure who first agreed to keep it.

Included free: a complete Reality Services story, where the trains usually contain the number of passengers listed on the form.