Dream d1895-s: What the Casting Floor Reads

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge-light shifted, and we followed it.

The Casting Floor opened ahead of us like a sentence beginning mid-thought. The air here was denser than the forge bench we had left behind, threaded through with a heat that pressed against the skin rather than radiating outward from a single point. Everywhere I looked there were iron forms in mid-state: channels cut for metal not yet poured, frames bolted to frames, the whole floor arranged around intentions that had not yet resolved into objects.

The Weather Reader stepped ahead of me, reading the air the way she reads a sky before a front moves in. "Pressure here runs east-west," she said, without looking back. "Whatever this floor makes, it makes in one direction."

The Builder crouched at the nearest channel and ran a hand along its lip. Her fingers came back grey. "The grade is older than the furnace that feeds it," she said. "They built the floor before they knew what they were casting."

The Wireman moved along the wall behind her, trailing a hand over the dead conduit that ran the full length of the room. Some of it was live. Some of it had been spliced and re-spliced until the splice was the original thing. He found a junction box, opened it, read the arrangement inside, and said nothing for a moment. Then: "Someone tried to fix this. Several times."

Rurik had gone ahead, low and deliberate, his black shape moving between the iron frames like he was threading a margin. He stopped at a cracked gauge mounted at hip height. He studied it without touching it. I came up beside him and looked: the needle was pinned not at zero but at a number that meant the gauge had given up trying to measure the actual pressure and simply agreed with the highest number available.

Oxy drifted near the cool channel along the east wall, neither advancing nor retreating, their pale form moving through the shadow at the floor's edge. They seemed to be counting something. I had the feeling they were always counting something.

Lano trotted the full length of the floor and back, nose down, reading the slag and the rust and the cold metal in her own careful register. Her tail moved once, decisively, as if she had confirmed a suspicion.

The Scavenger stood in the middle of it all with his hands in his coat, looking up at the ceiling where the vents were arranged in an old and particular pattern. "This place knew what it was for," he said. "Then it forgot. Then it tried to remember by building."

I understood that. The Casting Floor was a question asked in iron, and we had come to read what answer the floor was still trying to give.