Dream d1411-s: While We Were Packing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workshop clearing smelled of pine shavings and machine oil, and we had been loading crates for three hours when Lano went still.

Her ears had been pricked since morning - that particular angle that means she has heard something before anyone else has found it on a dial. Now they went flat. She sat near the path, not curled, not sniffing the low grass the way she does when content. Nose lifted. The kind of stillness that is itself a signal.

The Weather Reader saw her first. He was crouched over his portable rig, two cables running from a junction box to a small screen showing the faint trace - a line that should not have been there, barely above noise floor, but persistent and old. He looked up from the screen and looked at Lano and said, "The atmosphere changed in the last twenty minutes. I didn't flag it because the numbers were small."

The Builder set down the coil of line she was carrying. "How small?"

"Small until they're not."

She stepped to the edge of the clearing and looked north. The sky there had a texture I recognized from the tunnel months - that particular grey that isn't weather yet but is deciding.

The radio on the supply table crackled. The Beacon Network Specialist's voice came through clipped and fast: "Storm front moving faster than projected. Wind at the antenna masts already. I'm reading gusts that are going to test the southern mast anchor."

The Builder was already moving toward the equipment pile, pulling out her measurement tools, hands working without looking at them. "The southern mast anchor was set in wet season. We never retested it in dry."

"I did," said the Wireman, from near the workshop bench where he had been wrapping cable ends in cloth. He said it without looking up. He said nothing else.

"And?" the Builder asked.

He shrugged once - a shrug that contained either reassurance or ambiguity, and with the Wireman it was never fully clear which.

The radio again: "Generator flickered. Just once. Cable trench on the east side is filling."

Lano barked - a short, clean sound with no question in it.

"Atentos," she said.

The Weather Reader was already on his feet, portable rig tucked under one arm. "We were going to leave this morning."

"We still might," said the Builder. She was writing something in the margin of her map, numbers I couldn't read from where I stood. "But not for the next two hours."

Pine shavings lifted off the workshop floor in a sudden gust that moved through before we'd registered the wind. The signal on the Weather Reader's screen held its faint trace - patient, older than the storm, waiting for us to finish dealing with the present before we could go looking for the past.