Dream d1887-s: The Far Side of the Walk

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge-district roads ran red in the morning, and we were moving.

The slag-pits had cooled overnight to a dull iron grey, and the light coming through the slatted overheads was the color of a banked furnace - not quite heat, not quite dark. We had the Gauge Walk behind us now. Ahead, another reach of the Foundry District, its chimneys visible as smears against the upper air.

Lano trotted at my heel, her white coat catching red from the light. Her ears were up. She had been sniffing the air since dawn, reading something in it she hadn't shared.

"Road's clear to the junction," the Scavenger said, coming back from the near curve. He had a habit of materializing from around corners with news that was always calm and specific. It made the harder stretches easier.

The Weather Reader had stopped ahead of us, one hand out, palm up. Not catching rain. Reading pressure.

"We'll have a push before midday," she said. "Something moving in from the eastern flues. Warm and wet."

"How wet," the Builder asked.

"Wet enough to slow us if we wait it out. We move now, we're through before it hits."

No argument. The Wireman adjusted the coil on his shoulder - the remnant cable we'd salvaged from the last gate station - and the Listener shifted the log-case under his arm. We were carrying more than we had set out with. That seemed right.

Oxy kept pace in the run-off channel beside the road, the narrow conduit that drained cooling water from the forge-blocks. Cold in there, clean enough. They moved without effort, gills fanning. Every few minutes they surfaced to look at the rest of us, check we were still there.

Rurik walked beside me, tail low - not unhappy, just watching.

"Gauge back there was reading wrong," he said.

"They were all reading wrong," I said.

"Not all. Two of them were reading each other."

I thought about that as we walked. The dead conduit ran along the left wall, sockets empty, some cracked and spilling insulation. A broken gauge-face caught the red light and threw it back without meaning.

The Builder said, quiet, almost to herself: "We carry what we learned, or we carry nothing."

No one disagreed.

We came around a long bend and the next reach opened up: another belt of forge-blocks, another run of pressure-pipes, another district of making and smoke. Lano's tail lifted. She trotted forward two paces, then looked back at me.

We kept walking.