Dream d1881-s: What the Gauge Wants Read

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we turned toward the Gauge Walk and the forge-light leaned with us, tilting its red weight across the iron plates as though it already knew where we were headed.

The Wireman went first, picking his way through a scatter of dead conduit that lay across the mouth of the Walk like dropped rope. He crouched at a junction box, pressed his ear against the housing, then stood and gave a short nod. Something in here was still drawing current, he said. Faint. But there.

The Builder moved up beside him. She ran one gloved hand along the gauge housing at the Walk's entrance, a wide steel face webbed with old cracks, its needle frozen just past the halfway mark. She tapped it twice with a knuckle. This one's a liar, she said. That needle's been stuck since before we got here.

The Weather Reader had stopped a few paces back. She was reading the air the way she always does, head slightly lifted, eyes not quite focused on anything visible. The pressure dropped since the last hall, she said. The heat's coming from deeper in. Whatever's burning, it's burning further down.

Oxy found the cool gauge-channel before any of us noticed they'd moved. They slipped into the narrow trough that ran beside the main conduit housing and surfaced with a small quiet sound, the pale of their skin going blue-grey in the forge-glow. They turned their head and looked back at me with that patient attention that means they've already measured something and are waiting for me to catch up.

Rurik padded past my ankles and sat beside the channel, watching Oxy with the companionable silence he reserves for the companions he respects most. His ears were up. He could hear something I couldn't yet.

Lano stayed close to my left heel, her nose working at the seam where two iron plates met the floor. Her ears pricked forward. Then she turned and looked up at me, just once, and trotted six steps further along the Walk, and stopped.

The Scavenger had the book of readings out. He was already moving his finger down a column, lips not quite moving, cross-referencing something against the gauge housings mounted along the Walk's upper rail, each one labeled in a different hand.

I followed Lano's lead and stood where the Walk widened into the reading station, where the gauges ran in a long row and the forge-light pooled thick and amber on the iron plates, and I could feel the pressure of the work beneath us, distant and steady, like a breath the whole building was holding.

There was something here that wanted reading. We had arrived to read it.