They say the city has no name, only a sound, like a coughing sewer drain or a whisper caught in rusted iron pipes. I live in that sound. I am that sound.

I don't remember when the mirror stopped showing just me.

It began with the flickering light above the sink. Each morning, I’d stare at my reflection through half-lit static, steam curling like smoke off a cadaver. My skin always seemed foreign. Yellowed like paper soaked in oil. My eyes never quite met. I’d turn away, and still feel watched.

The apartment, if you could call it that, was a tomb of peeling walls and fungal breath. I shared it with him. He introduced himself in dreams first, then whispers, then words written in mold across the tiles. He called himself "Verrin." His voice is silk dragged through broken teeth.

"You were born from a mistake," Verrin told me once. “I'm the correction.”

I don’t remember ever disagreeing.

The streets outside are bone-pale, buildings jutting like teeth into a sky too heavy to fall. No sun, only a long dusk. I walked them endlessly, coat soaked in old rain, footsteps echoing in tunnels where light gave up decades ago. They stare at me, the people. Because they know. Or because he stares through me.

A woman touched my arm once. Her hand recoiled, and she whispered, "You're not alone in there, are you?"

I wasn’t. I never am. Sometimes I wake up with blood under my fingernails, or my pockets filled with teeth not my own. Sometimes I wake up elsewhere. Verrin’s done something. A gesture, a punishment, a kindness, I never know which.

One morning I found a hole in my chest. Not metaphorical. Not poetic. A hole. Flesh folded inward like paper. My heart pulsed beneath it like a guilty secret, stitched together with hair and rust wire. No doctor. Just me. Verrin laughed.

"You always had a vacancy."

The city never ends. Just spirals in tighter. The deeper I go, the more he grows.

I found a basement last night, a stairwell behind a collapsing theatre. Beneath it, a church made of metal ribs and insect husks. There were voices there. Not praying. Buzzing. Verrin said I built it, once. I don’t remember. I knelt on the wet ground and they crawled over me, clicking, kissing my wound. My chest sang with black warmth.

I think he’s almost ready.

Tonight, I saw myself walking down the alley. Same coat, same rotting boots. But his walk was straighter. His gaze, unbroken. He looked at me like I was something to scrape off. I ran. The alley chased me. Every brick had his smile. Every shadow was his hand.

Now, I sit by the window, writing this. My reflection is gone. He’s standing behind me instead. He whispers that I should sleep. That I’ll wake up better. That there’s no "I" anymore.

Only we.

Only Verrin.