Dream d1888-s: Light Leaning Toward the Conduit

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge-light shifted and we all felt it, the way you feel a tide go out from a room. Rurik stopped midstep at the edge of the bench's reach, his tail a slow flag, reading the change in the air before any of us put a name to it.

"We move," the Builder said, not a question.

The Conduit Yard opened ahead of us through a gap in the iron scaffolding - wider than I expected, a long reach of dead channels and cracked gauge-faces bolted along pipes that climbed into the smoke. The pipes were the thing to read here. Even cold, even split at the joints, they told you what had moved through them once and what might again.

The Weather Reader crossed the threshold ahead of the party. She put her hand to the nearest pipe and held it there a moment, palm flat, eyes closed. The rest of us waited in the particular way the party has learned to wait for her - not still exactly, but quiet.

"The heat runs east to west on the upper line," she said. "Something is drawing pressure from the far end. Not a fire. A channel that wants filling."

Lano's nose was already at the floor, tracking a seam in the plate-work where the conduit had settled and drawn a faint rust-line across the concrete. She trotted along it without hurrying, ears up, tail reading something the rest of us would need to walk to.

The Scavenger had his eyes on the gauge-bank to our left - a row of seven, four of them cracked clean across the face, two reading zero, one reading a number that could not be right.

"That one," he said, and the Wireman was already beside him before he finished saying it.

They did not explain to each other. The Wireman pulled a length of trace-wire from his kit and laid it against the back of the gauge. The Scavenger held the housing steady with both hands. The Listener stood a few steps back and said nothing, which was how the Listener contributed to almost everything.

I moved down the rust-line after Lano, past a bench I had not noticed at first - low, pale, bolted to a junction housing below the main rack. The kind of bench you sit at to check your work rather than to do it.

The book of readings was gone from it. Someone had been here recently enough to take it.

Oxy surfaced from the cool channel nearby and rested their chin on the bench's edge, watching the empty space where the book had been.

"Forward," I said, not because I was certain, but because the yard was asking us to be.