Dream d1854-s: What Distance Is Made Of

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gate of Umberstead was still warm at our backs when the air changed. Not a cold change, not a wind shift - something flatter than either, a chemical sweetness that sat at the back of the throat and would not move. I noticed it before I knew I noticed it. Lano noticed it first: she stopped mid-step, hackles lifted, nose working the grey-brown seam where the sky met the plain ahead. Rurik drew alongside her, his black tail dropping once, reading whatever she was reading.

"That is not distance," the Weather Reader said. She had her face turned into the slight headwind. "That is what distance is made of, out here."

The road became theory. Slag dunes replaced the grass verges, grey and rust-red, shaped like waves frozen mid-break. Dead conduit coiled out of the dunes the way roots coil from a riverbank, stripped of insulation, ends flared where current had been cut too fast. Cracked gauges jutted from packed slag like grave markers, their faces frosted with chemical residue, needles bent or broken, some sprung clean from their housings and lying in the gravel as if discarded mid-reading.

The Builder crouched beside one gauge and turned it in her hands. "Someone was checking pressure here," she said. "A long time, regular intervals. Then they stopped." She set it back where she had found it, exactly as it was.

"Why put it back?" I asked.

She looked at me. "Because someone put it here the first time."

We walked. Lano picked her path carefully through the conduit maze, ears forward, stepping around the shards of failed castings that the dunes had disgorged: vaguely useful shapes, vaguely familiar functions, nothing that had survived whatever it was designed to do. Rurik moved between them like he moved between shadows, which is to say, without effort.

The Weather Reader stopped and was still for a moment, reading. "Hot high-pressure from the north-northwest," she said. "Residual particulate from the smelting cycle. It will hold through the night. No rain to settle it." She paused. "The forge is burning. We are reading its exhaust."

I looked at the horizon. The grey-brown chemical haze held a warmth at its base - not light, exactly, but the memory of light, the glow that heat makes when it refuses to quit. The road bent toward it.

The waste did not ask us to like it. It only asked us to read it. We walked on.