The Usual Resident

About this book

Iren Vosk counts people for a living, and she is good at it. Enumerator Second Grade of the Bureau of the National Count, she is the officer they send when a district's arithmetic will not close: patient, exact, immune to stories. For the Fourteenth General Count she is assigned the Marle Fens, and at the end of a mile of drowned causeway she finds Lower Stane: twelve households, forty one people, and twelve returns that each declare one person more. The extra name is the same in every house. The handwriting never is. No one will speak the name, and in every house, in a different room, a narrow bed stands freshly made with a water glass beside it, for a resident Iren cannot find.