Dream d1929-s: Roads Between One Reach

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forge-district stretched out ahead of us in long grey corridors of slag-heaped road, and we walked them as people walk who have learned something and are not yet ready to set it down.

The Tempering Range was behind us now - I could still feel the heat of it in my jacket, smell iron in the weave of my sleeve. The road ahead ran between rusted conduit stacks and dead transformer housings, the orange-grey industrial light turning everything to the color of cooling metal. The Weather Reader moved to the front of the column and looked at the sky above the district - a narrow sky, squeezed between exhaust towers - and told us what she found there.

Cold front from the northwest, she said. Two hours, maybe three before it arrives. The pressure is already changing.

I could see it in Lano too. She trotted two steps ahead, nose low, ears half-cocked. The dog always knew before the sky showed. She would circle back, press against my ankle, look up with that precise animal attention, and move forward again - a weather instrument running on four legs.

The Wireman was mapping as he walked, sketching dead conduit runs in a battered notebook, calling out to the Builder whenever a junction-box showed possible salvage. The Builder would glance, consider, shake her head or nod without breaking stride. They had developed a shorthand over the last few reaches that cost neither of them more than half a second per exchange. Efficiency like that takes weeks of bad road to build.

The Scavenger had gone wide on the left flank, picking through a collapsed loading bay where crates had spilled their contents into slow-oxidized piles. Rurik walked beside him now, the black cat weaving between the Scavenger's feet in that maddening way cats have, somehow never quite tripped over.

You are helping or you are not, the Scavenger said.

Rurik sat on a crate and watched him work.

Oxy came back from ahead. They had been moving up the channel that ran beside the road, the cool seam where industrial runoff had once flowed and now stood still. They came to a stop beside the Listener and they were quiet together for a while in the way that two careful things are quiet.

The Listener said: the gauges on the substations - some of them are still ticking.

Not broken, then, I said.

Not all of them, he said.

The cold front arrived exactly when the Weather Reader had said it would. We walked into it with our shoulders up and our hands in our pockets, carrying what the Range had given us, moving toward the next reach of the district and whatever work was bolted and waiting there.