Dream d1871-s: What the Waste Gave Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the worst dune was behind us, and we knew it without saying so.

The slope we had crested was the last bad one - a grey ridge of slag aggregate that crumbled underfoot and left a chemical taste at the back of the throat. The Builder had counted her footing across it step by step, one hand out for balance, the other tucked against the wrapped salvaged piece under her arm. She hadn't put it down once. I watched her cross that ridge and thought: she is the right person to be carrying that.

The Weather Reader stopped at the crown of the next rise and held her fingers out sideways, reading something in the haze the rest of us couldn't parse. "Cooling shift," she said. "The forge-heat is starting to push back against the chemical cold. We're close enough to feel it competing."

Below us, the red glow that had been smeared against the horizon for two dreams resolved into something coherent: a district of buildings, vented and chimneyed, with fires that were not wild but working. The Foundry quarter. I could hear, or thought I could hear, the low percussion of something being made.

Rurik walked beside me, quiet and precise as always. His dark shape against the slag gave nothing away. But he paused once to sniff the air and his whiskers moved - satisfied, I thought, or close to it.

Lano trotted at the front of the group, nose down, following a seam in the waste that only she could read. Her paw came down wrong on a cracked gauge-casing and she pulled it back - the slag-burn. She shook the paw once, bueno, and kept going without slowing. She has never once asked us to adjust pace.

Behind her, the Scavenger walked close. Not beside her - the rivalry hadn't dissolved so cleanly - but closer than yesterday. When Lano veered left around a collapsed conduit section, he followed her line without comment, without taking his own route to prove a point. That was new.

The Builder noticed it too. She caught my eye and said nothing. She didn't need to.

We came down off the last dune onto packed ground, solid under us for the first time in what felt like the whole of the waste. The forge-light was direct now, not reflected - orange-red and constant, thrown from vented windows above a district wall. The salvaged piece was still wrapped, still carried, still whole.

The worst of it was behind us. The bench was ahead.