Following a man who travels between the worlds has brought me to this place of cold gray and squalling lives. No matter how bright the sun, I doubt it could ever wash the gray off of this strange city.

The first time I had given chase, I had hopped the freight train just behind him. I doubt he’d noticed me, but he slipped me at the border between our worlds. Thinking him gone for good, I abandoned my hunt.

I had not expected him to keep crossing back and forth.

I ask a man selling things from a cart where I am and he looks at me as if I were defective. Noo Yawk, he says, and I cannot tell if he means it as answer or insult.

Is everything here gray? Even the people? Their clothes, their faces. Flat. Monochrome. When they pay attention to each other, they only scream. Reasoning that my dusty, trail-bleached clothes make me obvious, I waylay a man about my size and drag him into an alley. A few people see me do it, but nobody helps him. He stops screaming eventually. Under his clothes he is pale and filthy.

Returning to the street in my new black garments, I check the silver watch from my pocket as I see them do and think on how to find the traveler. Despair creeps until I remember the inventor that fled our world.

A man driving a horse and cart takes me to the inventor’s tower. Another screamer, he shouts at the horse, the sky, other people. I am glad to get out of his carriage, to give him all of the strange coins in my pocket. This makes him smile.

The tower sits near the only color I have seen in this place and it is glorious.

Green. So much green. I am dizzy for moments as I fight the urge to run and roll in it, to fill my pockets with green. Instead I place my hand against the side of the spire and enter when a door opens.

At first the inventor is afraid of me, he hides and throws handfuls of junk metal. It takes me some time to calm him down enough to listen. That I am not here for him or to make him come back with me.

I explain what I need.

The mechanical bird he brings me is shiny and black. When switched on, it stops to peer at each of its feet before ruffling feathers sharp enough to cut flesh. I speak to it in a low voice, expressing admiration for the beauty of its feathers and beak.

The bird preens and rolls its head. Vain and charming creature.

The inventor tells me he is called Bram. Its speech grates on my ears but I compliment the melody anyway. After a brief discussion, Bram lies out of the tower window.

Impressive. But I decide to take the stairs.

Bram and I head east and south, him a black speck against the gray sky. We push a hard pace. Is it impossible to find a straight line in this infernal discard of buildings and flesh? I will blame those twists and turns for the trail growing faint.

Bram and I are too late.

The building looks like the prisons from our world. Too many lives packed together in here: squaling and screaming and shitting and dying and copulating. I long for the cleanliness of my world’s desert, even if the perversion of its cities outstrips this one.

Or so I think until I find that the traveling man has left behind his cargo in his haste to get away. When I kick in the door of his room, there is a half-naked man dressed in women’s clothes and hugging a large case. From his stinking mouth with its missing teeth, he screams something about payment. Shrugging, I hand him the silver watch and knock him in the direction of the door. Bram flies in the open window and lands on my shoulder. He is very light for a metal bird.

Inside the case are thirteen jars filled with clear liquid. Floating within each are perfect silvery ovals cross-hatched with metal strings of different thicknesses.

Who can afford siren’s vocal chords in this world?
Why do they need so many? What are they building?