Dream d1873-s: Heat Before the Gates

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground changed before the sky did.

The Scavenger moved ahead of us, his ringed tail a thread through the grey-brown haze, and I knew he was reading the slag the way the Weather Reader read clouds - not looking so much as listening with his feet. The conduit bones jutted from the dunes at intervals, black and hollow, their gauges long since cracked to uselessness, needles bent or gone entirely. Lano picked her way behind him, favoring her right forepaw, the one she'd taken the burn on two camps back. She didn't complain. She never did. But I watched the way she placed it down a half-second late, testing the ground before committing to it, and I noticed.

"Haze is thinning but it's not clean thinning," the Weather Reader said, squinting at something above the dune-line I couldn't make out. "There's heat in it. A column of it, has been for a while. The halos are all wrong - warped inward. Something's been burning ahead of us for a long time."

"Everything in the district burns," the Scavenger said, without turning. "That's what it does."

He stopped at the crest of the last ridge of slag - a long low one, glittering grey and rust where the chemical haze had settled into the pores - and waited for us to come up beside him. I came up on his left. The Builder came up on his right, the salvaged piece tucked under one arm, heavy and awkward, the piece that had no obvious name yet but that she carried like she already knew it would eventually need to be somewhere exact.

The heat reached us before the light did.

It arrived on the air as a pressure change, a warmth against the cheek that had no single source, only a direction. Then the haze ahead shifted and the red came through it, dull at first, then not dull at all - a roaring red-orange that pulsed at a rhythm too regular to be fire and too slow to be machinery and was both. The forge-District. All of it at once. Walls and stacks and open gates of a place that had been making things long before any of us arrived and would still be making things long after.

Rurik sat down on the crest beside me and looked at it with his ears forward.

"So," the Builder said.

"So," the Scavenger agreed. He shifted his pack. He did not look back the way we had come. "You'll want someone who knows how the gates read. I know how the gates read."

Lano's tail moved once.

"Well," said the Weather Reader, watching the heat-column warp the haze above the walls. "That settles that."