Dream d1866-s: The Ground Does Not Hold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the slag gave way beneath my boot with a sound like a held breath finally let out, and the whole dune shifted, a slow sick lurch that sent a ripple down toward where Lano was picking her careful way three steps ahead of me. She froze. Hackles up. One front paw lifted, her bad paw, the one still pink along the pad where the burn had not fully closed. She held that posture for a count of three and then the Scavenger was beside her, crouched low, one hand testing the surface ahead of her in a widening arc before he nodded once and she set the paw down and moved.

He did not make much of it. That was what I had learned about him. He had a gift for treating necessary things as ordinary.

The haze had thickened through the morning into something almost visible, a brown-grey curtain that softened the shapes of the conduit stacks to our west. The Weather Reader walked with her eyes half-closed, reading something in the pressure or the taste of the air I could not access. The Builder walked close to me, the salvaged piece wrapped in a strip of cloth and tucked against her chest where she kept it warm and level, as though it were fragile enough to mind the cold. Maybe it was. We did not know yet what the Foundry's bench would need it for. We only knew it had come out of the slag for a reason.

"Shifting again," the Weather Reader said, quietly, not to any one of us. "Not storm. Something the furnaces breathe out when they cycle."

"When does it lift?"

"When they stop running." She paused. "They do not stop running."

Rurik moved in close to my ankles, not anxious but present, the way he got when the ground was not reliable. The Scavenger moved ahead of us in a slow diagonal, testing each step before committing, reading some language in the surface I had not been taught. When a section went gray and powdery he went around it. When it stayed dark he crossed. We followed his line exactly.

The Builder adjusted the salvaged piece against her chest and kept her eyes on his feet.

Once Lano made a short sound, not alarm, just acknowledgment, and the Scavenger paused and changed his line by half a meter and the soft patch he had not yet identified slid a little and settled. He looked back at her. She had already moved on.

There is something to be said for a party that has learned to lean without explaining it. We crossed the hardest stretch of the dunes on each other's instincts, not on any plan, and by the time the footing firmed again the haze had thinned just enough that we could see, ahead, the first suggestion of the forge-light through the grey.