Dream d1894-s: The Roads Between Reaches

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge-district roads stretched ahead in long grey bands, cracked at their edges where old heat had buckled the stone and no one had come back to smooth it. We were moving again, the whole party of us, out of the Conduit Yard with its sealed valves and its tidied gauges, into the wider waste between one reach and the next.

Rurik ranged ahead the way he did on travel days, checking each junction before we reached it, then sitting on a broken kerb-stone until we caught up, then moving again. He had a system. I had stopped trying to understand it.

Lano trotted at my heel for a while, then drifted to the Builder's side, nose working at something in the cracked gutter. Her ears went flat when a pipe above us vented - a hard percussive release that echoed off the iron walls - and then she shook herself and trotted on.

The Weather Reader had been reading the sky since first light, and now she stopped us at a fork in the road between two cooling towers.

"There is pressure building from the north district," she said. "Not rain. Heat. We will feel it in an hour."

"How much heat?" the Wireman asked.

"Enough to make the metal sing."

The Scavenger was already sorting what he carried, redistributing weight across his pack, the quiet professional habit of someone who knew that a heavy load in rising heat was a different problem than a heavy load in the cool of morning. The Listener watched him and did the same with his own kit without needing to be told.

The Builder had been quiet for most of the walk. At the next wide section of road, where a long drainage channel ran beside the path, she stopped and looked at the far wall of the district - the dark iron face of the next forge-block, its vents still cold, its doors sealed.

"That one's been shut a long time," she said.

"How can you tell?" I asked.

"The oxide rings on the vent pipes. Two seasons at least. Maybe three."

Oxy surfaced briefly from the drainage channel, blinked at the sealed doors, and submerged again.

The heat came when the Weather Reader had said it would, pressing down from the north, and the iron walls around us began to make their small sounds - pings and low groans, the metal remembering its purpose. Lano sneezed once - sharp, definitive - and pushed ahead.

We were still in the waste between reaches, but we were walking, and the forge-block ahead of us held its shape in the heat haze, fixed and knowable, something to walk toward.