Dream d1862-s: What the Ground Kept

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road through the Trash Lands turned back on itself and we did not know it until we had walked the same cracked conduit twice.

The second time I saw the bent gauge, its needle frozen at three-quarters full, I knew. The Scavenger knew before I did. He had been reading the ground the whole morning - the angle of the slag heaps, the direction the failed castings had been tipped - and when we rounded the same lip of industrial waste and saw the same soot-stained retaining wall, he pulled up short and made a quiet sound that was not quite a laugh.

"False path," he said. "The waste folds it. Things that could not be kept get pushed in here until the ground itself loses its shape."

The Weather Reader read the air instead of the sky. The chemical haze made a lid overhead, grey-brown and close, and she told us what moved beneath it: a slow pressure from the northwest, a sourness in the particulate, something that had been burning for a long time in a place we had not reached yet. Not a forecast. A diagnosis.

Lano padded close to the Builder's heel, carrying her weight careful on the paw. The burn was knitting. You could see the difference from the day before if you knew to look - a little less stiff in the step, a little less deliberate about where she set it down. The Builder watched without watching, the way she always did.

Rurik found the thing.

He had gone ahead, low and quick, while the rest of us stood at the doubled path arguing which slag-line to follow. He came back sitting on his haunches beside a half-buried seam in the waste and looked at the Scavenger with an expression that passed something between them.

"This one was not thrown," Rurik said. "This was buried."

The Scavenger crouched and began to clear the edge with his hands, methodical and unrushed. What came free was something I recognized only in shape, the way you recognize a word you have not heard for years. It fit the weight of what we already carried. The salvaged piece we had pulled from the slag two stops back had a mate here, a component the Foundry bench would want. We had been carrying the wrong half of a pair and the other half had been buried in the place that discards things.

The Builder made a small sound and took it from the Scavenger's hands and held it against the first piece and did not speak for a moment.

"Someone knew," she said at last.

"Someone hoped," the Scavenger said.

We stood in the grey-brown light with the wound in the road behind us and the Foundry somewhere ahead and the two pieces finally together, and the Weather Reader said the pressure was beginning to shift.