Dream d1567-s: Rurik on the Housing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where a black cat sat at the top of a relay housing, dead center, tail wrapped around his forepaws, watching us climb the last of the ridge in the failing dusk.

Rurik. He sat on the rounded metal cowl as though it had been installed for him, the engineered ridge falling away on both sides into wired shadow, and the low red light came across him and laid one bright line down his back. He did not move when we stopped. He did not blink much. He looked at us the way a cat looks at people it has already decided about.

The Weather Reader came up beside me, breathing hard from the grade, and went still when she saw him.

"I know this cat," she said quietly.

I waited for her to explain how. She did not, because she could not. I watched it move across her face - that catch, that snag of something arriving from a place she had no road to. Not memory exactly. Older than memory and underneath it, a recognition with no event attached, a name she could feel the shape of and not say. The Grain Thread, bleeding through the dusk and the wired ground and the steady processing hum coming off the north.

"From where," I asked.

"I don't know from where." She kept her eyes on the cat. "But I know him."

Rurik held the top of the housing, unbothered, a small black weight at the exact center of all that buried machinery, and watched the Weather Reader remember something that had never happened to her.

The dusk went down another shade. The cat stayed where he was.