Cairo

The old man repairs tombs that nobody remembers are broken.

He knows they are broken because the walls complain.

Mostly about the living.

This is not considered especially remarkable in Cairo's City of the Dead, where children play football between mausoleums, laundry hangs from carved stone, mechanics argue with engines, families argue about tomatoes, and death has had enough time to become less of an event than a neighbor.

Then the repairs stop being ordinary.

The Office of the Second Census discovers that Cairo has not simply been living beside its dead. It has been maintaining agreements, roads and boundaries older than the paperwork meant to describe them.

Some roads are for people who are leaving.

Some are for people who are waiting.

Some are apparently still under review.

The Office would like a clean distinction.

Cairo has several thousand years of evidence against this.

Soon the question is not whether the dead belong in the city.

It is whether the Office ever understood what belonging meant in the first place.

Included free: a complete Reality Services story, where the walls generally complain through the appropriate municipal channel.