The food vendor’s booth on my right was empty; it had been stripped down by its operator at closing, at dawn. I reminded myself of that: It had been open just hours ago. The turquoise paint on its corrugated metal sides was peeling in places, fading all over. “Mariscos” said the hand-painted letters, above a portrait of a shrimp. The word was bleached from red to pink, the shrimp to mud-green. The counter was gritty with dust. The booth had had an awning once; I saw the rusty brackets above the service pass-through. The iron barrel chained to the wall had no trash in it.

In front of me, a Ferris wheel rose against a chromakey-blue sky. Or rather, the geometric bones of the wheel were there, black against the light, thickened at the joints, flanged at regular intervals by the vertebrae of the seat buckets. The flesh for those bones was darkness and little lights and noise, and that was gone. There was rust and grit here, too. I sniffed, trying to smell alcohol or ozone, and got nothing but sun-heated metal and concrete.

It was the light, of course it was the light. When I stayed at my place in the Night Fair, I rarely went there before dawn. If I did, I went there to work, then sleep, then wake up when the Fair woke. I’d never seen the Night Fair at midmorning. But I couldn’t shake off the conviction that everything I saw had been transformed — that this was not the Ferris wheel I’d seen last night, but one a thousand years older, a thousand years broken and silent.

“Sparrow,” said a voice behind me, and if I’d been my namesake, I would have been halfway across the City in a breath.

Context is everything; wrap enough strangeness around them, and familiar things become unrecognizable. It was Dana’s voice, firmly attached to Dana’s person. She leaned in the entryway of a brown brick building. She wore a dressing gown printed with herons and palm fronds that reached almost to her ankles, and a pair of little-heeled slippers of a sort I’d only seen in movies. Her pale hair was loose and brushed back to fall straight down behind her. She’d been standing there awhile; there was half a cigarette in her fingers, and the stub of another on the porch at her feet.

“You okay, sugar?” she asked with a quirk of the lips, and I realized I hadn’t said anything yet.

“Fine. I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

More quirk. “I live here. Upstairs. You act as if I caught you trying to steal that thing.”

I shook my head. The sense of unreality, Dana in mid-necropolis, had doped me.

“No snappy comeback?”

“I guess I’m just not a morning person,” I said finally.

“That’s better. So what brings you out?” She laid the cigarette between her lips and took a long pull. She looked disturbingly undressed without lipstick.

The cigarette wasn’t hand-rolled, and I thought I could see a tobacconist’s mark printed on the paper. Luxuries, rarities, and indulgences: Dana surrounded herself with them.