Dream d1883-s: The Gauge Tells No Lies

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Foundry District pressed itself against us like a second skin, hot and particulate, the smell of burning iron threading through everything we breathed. We had come to the Gauge Walk, a long corridor of pipe and plate bolted directly into the flank of the forge-engine, and the engine was running. You could feel it in the soles of your feet.

The gauges ran the length of the wall, each one a different size, each one reading something different. Pressure. Temperature. Draw. Flow. The Builder moved along them with the kind of patience that only comes from having been wrong before. She pressed a palm flat against a junction, read something in the vibration, moved to the next. She did not speak, but her face said plenty.

The Weather Reader walked beside her, not touching anything, watching the space between the needles and their pins. "The reading jumps when she crosses that seam," she said, without pointing. She did not need to. We all watched the nearest gauge shiver as the Builder's boot passed over a particular section of grating.

"Dirty power," the Builder said. It was not a question.

"Dirty power," the Weather Reader agreed, and she tilted her head as though she were hearing something the rest of us could not. "And pressure that doesn't know which way it wants to go."

The Scavenger had already drifted toward the discard-piles that banked up against the far wall, slow and quiet as he always moved when he was reading something with his eyes. He crouched, turned a piece of conduit over in his hands, set it down, picked up something else. He was cataloguing. He did it without being asked, which was the kind of person he was.

Oxy had settled into the cool channel that ran beside the bench, the long flat trough where slag-water moved slow and grey. They watched the main gauge above the engine housing with an attention that felt almost devotional. Every jump of the needle, their eyes tracked. Every settling, their head tilted a fraction.

Rurik sat on the bench itself, tail wrapped around his feet, watching Oxy watch the gauge. Lano had pressed herself against my leg, her nose working steadily, sorting the smell of hot metal from something else she had found underneath it. Her ears were forward. Whatever she was reading, she was reading it carefully.

The Wireman had said nothing yet. He stood at the far end of the walk, looking at where the pipe came out of the wall and ran into the dark. He was already thinking about what came next.

So were we all.