Dream d1916-s: The Slag Gate Leans

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the party turned toward the Slag Gate as one body, drawn by the shift in the forge-light. It had been leaning west all morning, the red-and-grey wash of it steady and familiar, but now it tilted forward like a question, like something in the District had changed its mind about us.

The Builder stopped first. She put her hand flat against the iron of the gate frame, not gripping, just resting, feeling for heat and vibration. "There is work running," she said. "Not old work. Something woke up."

The Wireman moved alongside her and pressed his ear to a coil of conduit bolted to the post. I watched his eyes go still in that way they do when he is listening past the surface noise. "Two cycles," he said finally. "One on the main line, one that shouldn't be there. A ghost cycle."

The Weather Reader came up last, pulling her coat tighter though the heat off the furnace face should have been enough. She had been reading the air since we crossed the outer waste, and she looked tired in the particular way she looks when the data is strange. "Temperature gradient doesn't match the smoke," she said. "Something is burning cold."

Rurik had already slipped through the gate on his own, because he is a cat and will not wait. He reappeared a moment later from behind a cracked pressure tank, looked at us all, flicked his tail twice.

"He says it's passable," the Scavenger said.

"He says nothing," the Listener said. "But he came back, which means the same thing."

Lano pressed forward, nose working. She moved in short arcs, head low, mapping something we could not smell. She stopped at the base of the forge-engine where the small bench was bolted in, sniffed the cool channel beside it, then sat. Ears up. Watching.

There was a book of readings tucked under the bench - not new, the cover swollen with old heat - and beside it a gauge whose needle pointed at a number that made no obvious sense. The Builder crouched to read the gauge. I watched her face. She said nothing for a moment.

"The last operator left a note," she said, opening the book. "Not finished. They expected to come back."

The forge-light leaned forward again, as if listening too.

I stepped through the Slag Gate. The work was here and it was ours now to read, and none of us spoke while the Builder turned the pages, and the ghost cycle ran its quiet loop beneath our feet.