Dream d1141-s: What Burned at Height

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was three stories up on the scaffold of the forecasting tower when the Weather Reader went still beside me, one hand on the railing, the other hovering just above the instrument panel. Below us the settlement spread in every direction: the library reading room, the signal room with its telegraph key, the broadcast station with its long antenna angled at the pale sky. The beacon pulsed at the center of it all, slow and certain, that familiar amber glow I had come to depend on the way I depend on my own heartbeat.

Then Lano barked.

She was down at the base of the scaffold, small and white in the dust, and the bark was not her usual greeting. Her ears were flat. Her whole body had gone rigid and low. I looked at her and she looked back up at me, and in the space between us something was already going wrong.

The acrid smell reached us a half-second later. A salvaged pressure relay on the secondary forecasting panel, one we had sourced from a collapsed relay station two years back, one that had held through everything, let out a sound like a single hard consonant and went dark. The instrument panel dropped with it. Every readout that had been feeding the Weather Reader's daily projections went to zero. The atmospheric gauges, the humidity columns, the barometric thread we had been watching all morning. Gone.

The Weather Reader said nothing for a moment. Just stood with her hands slightly raised, like someone waiting to catch something that had already fallen.

The Wire Man came up the scaffold stairs two at a time. He crouched at the panel, ran his fingers along the relay housing, brought them back with a smear of carbon. He turned the component over once and set it down. He looked at me and did not say that it was unrepairable. He did not have to.

From below: the Builder's voice, already moving toward the base of the tower. The Beacon Network Specialist had come out of the signal room and was standing in the open looking up at us, one hand shading her eyes against the post-storm glare.

No replacement part existed. Not in the inventory, not in any cache we had mapped. The forecasting system that fed the whole settlement's weather timing, the system that told us when to run the relays, when to shelter, when it was safe to transmit long-range, was running now on partial instruments and the Weather Reader's memory.

Lano had not relaxed. She sat at the scaffold base, ears still flat, and said one word into the dust:

"Frio."

I did not know yet what we would do. I only knew that the scaffold held, the beacon still pulsed below, and the sky to the west was changing in ways we could no longer properly read.