Dream d1880-s: The Road Between Reaches

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge-light was already behind us, fading into the smoke-grey middle distance as we walked the district roads between one reach and the next.

The road itself was slag-packed and cracked, conduit lines dead in their housings along the left side, gauges mounted to iron posts that had not been read in years. Some still had their needles. Most had not. The Wireman paused at each one as we passed, not to fix them, only to note the last position of the needle before we left it behind.

"This one read pressure," he said at the third post.

"It reads nothing now," said the Scavenger, not unkindly.

"Still," said the Wireman, and we moved on.

Rurik walked the right margin of the road, nose low, ears catching what the silence left. He had found a rhythm here, in the industrial waste, that suited him. He is a cat who prefers a quiet that has already had things happen in it. Lano trotted close to the Builder's heels, her small nose working the air, tail low but steady. She stopped once at a drain grate, sniffed hard, then continued. Whatever it was, she had catalogued it and filed it away.

The Weather Reader came to the front of the line as the road curved east through a block of collapsed cooling towers. She stood still, let the air move past her face, then said: "Dry pressure from the north. This block holds heat longer than it should. Something in the stone."

"The stone here has been cooking for decades," said the Builder. "It breathes slow."

"Then we are warmer than we feel."

Oxy moved alongside the road where the ground was cooler, tracking a thin channel that ran parallel to the slag-pack. They had said little since the Hall, but their presence was a kind of commentary, steady and unhurried.

The Listener walked behind me and I heard him, once, murmur something to himself. Not words for us. Just the reckoning a person does when they are passing through a place that asks to be heard.

I carried what the Hall had taught me. Not in my hands. In the way I read the road ahead, the way I paused when the others paused, the way the journey between places had begun to feel like the work itself.

We had learned to make, back there. Now we were learning to carry.