Dream d1875-s: The Leave We Asked For

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we crossed the last of the waste with the Weather Reader walking the edge of the road, not watching her feet.

She said, "Pressure front. The kind that settles." She said it to no one, or to all of us, which amounted to the same thing. Lano's ears went back and then forward again, reading something in the change of air that none of us had words for. The slag-burn on her paw had closed to a thin line of pink under the white fur. She was walking without the hitch now, or almost.

The Forge Hall announced itself before we saw it. The heat came first, then the smell - iron and old combustion, the particular dryness of a working furnace that has been working for years and will work for years more. The walls were corrugated and dark. The gauges on the outer face were cracked but the needles still trembled, still read.

Rurik stopped at the entrance and stood for a moment. He said nothing, which was his version of approval.

We went inside.

The red light was something you walked through rather than saw by. It pressed on the skin. The Builder went to the bench immediately - not to work, just to lay both hands flat on it, to feel what was there. The bench was bolted into the forge-engine itself, an afterthought that had become load-bearing. Everything in the hall was like that. Everything here had been added to something older and had become necessary.

In the cool channel beside the bench, Oxy hung still in the water, watching us arrive.

The Scavenger set down his pack and said, "Someone should ask if we can stay."

"I'll ask," I said.

I am not sure who I thought I was asking. The hall, maybe. The bench. The gauges. I stood in the center of the floor under the high raftered ceiling and I asked, out loud, plainly: we are here and we would like to stay and work. We have something you may need.

I took the salvaged piece from the pack and held it where the forge-light could find it. The shape of it caught the red and held it, the way metal does when it remembers being worked.

Nothing answered. But the pressure in the room shifted - not dramatically, just slightly, the way a lock sounds when the right key turns in it. The Builder looked up from the bench and nodded once.

The Weather Reader said, "Settling."

Lano circled twice on the cool floor beside the channel and lay down with her nose on her paws.

That was our answer.