Dream d1865-s: Sweet Air, Foul Promise

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the haze came down sweeter than it had any right to be.

That was the trap of this part of the waste - not the cutting smell of the earlier slag fields, not the iron-bitter taste of corroded conduit. Here the chemical sweetness settled like something almost nice. Like old fruit. Like something you might lean into rather than away from.

The Scavenger caught it first. He stopped mid-stride, mask already up over his snout, and held one ringed hand flat behind him - the gesture that means hold, hold where you are.

"Sweetness means the deep-process discharge," he said, muffled through the mask. "Old oxidizer baths leaching up through the slag. Fools the lungs into thinking the air is good. Your body won't tell you it's drowning until it's half done."

None of us argued. The Weather Reader had been reading the pressure shifts overhead all morning and she had already said the haze wasn't moving - no wind to cut it, no thermal to lift it. We were going to have to walk through it, not wait it out.

Lano pressed close to my left leg. Her burn paw lifted with each step, the heel of it still tender from the slag. I kept my hand near her flank without touching, just present - something she could bump against when the footing went uncertain. She found her footing anyway. She always did.

The Scavenger led us diagonally across the dune face, reading the surface the way you read a map - looking for the buried conduit runs where the ground would hold, steering us away from the soft patches where old casting molds had dissolved into the slag and left voids below. He didn't announce what he was doing. He just moved and we moved with him, reading his pace the way the Weather Reader read wind.

The Builder kept the salvaged piece wrapped against her chest, one arm across it. Not protective exactly - more like steadying. She caught me looking and shrugged, eyes watering behind her goggles.

"I keep thinking about where it belongs," she said. "Which bench. Which line. It's been in the ground long enough it doesn't know anymore. We'll have to remind it."

Rurik said nothing. He moved just behind the Scavenger, close enough to count paces, his black coat catching the red industrial light that filtered through the haze. He coughed once and didn't look back.

We came through the sweetest part of it just before the light changed. The haze thinned at the edge of the next dune field, and the Weather Reader stopped, tilted her head, and said: "There it is. The edge of the discharge pocket. We're past the worst of it."

She was right. She always read it right.

Lano shook herself once and looked ahead.