Dream d1237-s: The Trenches Fill

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sky changed color before I understood what it meant.

I was walking the path between the projection pavilion and the library reading room when the light shifted - that flat, grey-yellow quality that strips warmth from everything and makes the beacon's pulse look amber instead of white. Lano felt it first. She stopped in the middle of the path, ears flat against her skull, nose working the air in quick little pulls. Then a bark, sharp and short, aimed at the ridge where the relay antenna stood against the coming wall of cloud.

The Builder appeared in the doorway of the signal room. One look at the sky and she was already moving, calling across the courtyard to the Wire Man. He came out of the cable trench he'd been digging - a long cut in the earth running west from the generator housing - and looked up without needing to be told anything. He started piling stones at the trench's open end.

The storm came faster than I expected. Wind hit the antenna masts first. I heard them before I saw them flex - a low moan that the Beacon Network Specialist recognized immediately. She was already running toward the ridge with tools in hand. The Dreamer grabbed a roll of cable tie from the pavilion wall and followed without being asked.

Rain arrived in sheets. Not the soft kind. The kind that finds every gap in weather stripping, every ungrouted joint. I could hear water moving somewhere it wasn't supposed to move. The trench the Wire Man had been digging was already collecting it, a dark line of standing water running toward the connection junction.

The Philosopher and the Weather Reader were at the forecasting tower, the Reader's hands moving across instruments while the Philosopher held a lamp that kept trying to go out. Across the settlement, lights flickered. The generator housing shuddered. The Listener appeared on the roof of the broadcast station, lying flat against the tile, hands braced on an antenna stay-wire that was vibrating in the wind.

Lano stayed close to my leg, tail low, body tense. She looked up at me and said, very quietly: cuidado. I had no answer for her. The structures were holding - all of them, so far. But the trench was full now and the water had nowhere to go and the masts were still singing their low moan into the wind.

The beacon pulsed. Once. Twice. On the third pulse, the lights across the settlement dimmed.

Nobody panicked. But nobody stopped moving either.