Dream d1917-s: Heat Taken, Leave Given

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Slag Gate loomed in smoke and pressure before we crossed it, and the Weather Reader paused at the threshold to read the air.

"Dry heat coming west," she said, tilting her face into the rolling smoke. "From something burning that has been burning a long time." She said it the way she always does, without alarm, the way a person might note the direction of a river.

Then we walked through.

The gate was not a door but a feeling - the moment the open waste became the interior of something enormous and purposeful. The light changed to red-grey, forge-lit and low. Dead conduit ran in bundles along the ceiling, some of it cracked and dripping mineral residue onto the slag-dark floor. Cracked gauges hung from iron brackets, needles frozen in positions that no longer meant anything, dials obscured by decades of ash and grease. The air had weight to it.

Lano pressed close to my leg as we crossed. Her ears stayed flat for a moment, reading the noise - the deep thrum of the engine, the pressure cycling somewhere behind the walls. Then her nose went up, sorting it all, and her tail gave one slow wag. She had decided it was safe.

"Look," said the Builder, and she pointed to the bench.

It was bolted directly into the engine housing, a small bright thing against all that iron. Somebody had thought to bolt it there - had looked at the forge-engine and decided it was a right place to sit and work. Beside it, a cool channel ran alongside the machinery, the only place in the Foundry District where the temperature dropped. Something pale rested there.

Oxy surfaced from the channel, their gills fanning slowly.

"Gauge reads fine," they said, which was either a literal report or a joke about the cracked instruments above us - with Oxy it was often both.

The Scavenger had already started walking the walls, his hands tracing the conduit, noting where it lived and what it connected. The Listener stood in the center of the hall with his eyes closed. "The engine is in good rhythm," he said after a moment. "Not straining."

The Wireman crouched by a junction box and pried it open with interest.

Rurik sat on the bench. Just sat on it, as though claiming it by presence, which among the party passed for a formal declaration.

"We stay?" the Dreamer's companion asked - Lano, looking up at me from the forge-lit floor, her fur tinged amber in the red light.

The Builder looked at the Wireman. The Weather Reader looked at the ceiling. The Scavenger's hands had not stopped moving along the wall.

We took leave to stay.