Dream d1922-s: Roads Between Reaches

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road out of the Slag Gate was not a road so much as a decision the ground had made long ago and not bothered to revisit. Cracked plate over cracked plate, the forge-district stretched ahead of us in bands of grey and rust, dead conduit threading the verge like dried veins, the occasional gauge still bolted to a post and reading nothing, its needle pinned at some pressure the world no longer held.

The Weather Reader walked ahead of the rest of us, book of readings open against her forearm. She had been noting the sky since before first light. The cloud-mass to the south, she said without turning, is moving faster than the heat suggests it should. Something is pulling it. She wrote it down. She always wrote it down.

The Wireman caught up to her. What does that mean for us tonight?

She considered. Dry, she said. But listening hard for something.

Rurik moved along the left edge of the path where the slag lay thinnest, his dark shape low and deliberate, nose working the residue of old production. He found a cracked manifold half-buried in the shoulder and sat beside it for a moment, then moved on without ceremony. He was cataloguing, the way he always catalogued. No urgency. Just record.

The Builder had her head up, watching the upper sections of the district where the forge-stacks rose against the pale sky. She was counting something, or measuring. The Listener walked beside her and did not speak, which was how the Builder preferred to think.

Behind me, the Scavenger was telling Oxy something about the gauge posts. These ran at two atmospheres, he said, pointing to one. You can tell by the scoring on the valve seat. They had to release daily or the whole line would go. Oxy regarded the post with what I had come to recognize as attention, their pale form still in the forge-light that filtered even this far from the nearest working stack.

Lano trotted between us all, tracking some scent across the cracked plate that only she could parse. Her tail was up. She paused near a section of conduit where steam still seeped from a joint, felt the warmth, moved on. Buena, she said, very quietly, to herself or to the warmth.

I walked and watched the party spread and gather like water finding its level on the road between one reach and the next. We were carrying what we had earned. The knowledge, the names we had given to things, the small and particular trust of moving together across a place that did not care whether we passed or stayed.

The gauge posts rose and fell. The sky kept its counsel. We walked.