Nate stirred at the distant sound of foot traffic.

  Had he left a window open…? Dear god , his head was pounding…! and what was that smell?!

  His blurry eyes open to strange tiles and a tiny bloodied hand.

  “So filthy…” a small voice whispered on his ear, “Who…”

  Who said that? Nate tried to ask and the small voice started to do so in his stead… his voice but not his voice… in a language he shouldn’t understand.

  “What?!”

  Nate jerked up, staring at the bloodied hands of a child where there should have been his own and a filthy, filthy alleyway, smelling of rot and worst where his apartment should have been.

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  “No, no, no, no, no…”

  if his arms rubbed enough against his filthy, filthy shirt, if he made himself small and walked on his tiptoes, if he holt his breath, if he…

  A huge rat scurried from a pile of awful nearby.

  Nate screamed, and ran for the mouth of the alley, and froze, mouth gaping.

  There it was, a busy street, except the people wore capes, top hats and corset dresses, dodging horse-drawn carriages and loud street-vendors. All these chaos flanked by half-timber three-story buildings with way too many chimneys, spewing their black smoke into an over casted sky, where the top of a freaking zeppelin lazily skimmed the lower clouds.

  Nate fell to his knees yelling and pulling on the hairs of his scalp, drawing mutters and gazes from the crowd. At some point a mustachioed man in a dark-green uniform knelt before him.

  “Are you all right boy? Where are your parents? Which way is your home…?”

  “I-I… don’t know…”