Dream d1938-s: Leave to Stay

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Gauge Walk came back to us a second time, and we let it.

The Weather Reader went first across the waste, her coat catching the updraft off the cooling slag fields. She did not need to consult anything. She held her hands open at her sides and read the air the way another person reads a wall for damp. "It is pushing west," she said. "The heat is staying low today. We can move through it clean."

We moved through it. Rurik kept close to the base of the iron stanchions where the shadow held longest. He is black and the forge-light finds him easily, so he has learned to use the architecture. Oxy rode the cool gauge-channel that runs alongside the Walk, their gills brushing the underside of the current. I watched them from the grating above: a pale shape moving steadily, unhurried, as if the journey were not a journey at all but simply the direction water goes.

Lano trotted at my heel and then did not. I looked back and she had stopped at the first of the big gauges, nose pressed to the glass face, tail held low and reading. Her ears were up. She was receiving something.

"She smells the bench," the Builder said. She said it the way you say a thing you already know.

And there it was again: the small bright bench bolted into the side of the forge-engine, set into the heat like a decision someone made a long time ago and never took back. The iron was warm. The bolts were old but solid. Someone had run a straight edge along the seat at some point and left no mark, which means they found it level.

The Scavenger ran a hand along the bracket where it met the engine wall. The Listener crouched at the base. Neither of them spoke. They were assessing, and their assessment was not a question.

"We could stay here," the Wireman said. He said it plainly. Not as a proposal.

"We are staying here," the Builder said.

That is how it happened. No vote, no ceremony. The bench was bolted into the engine and we came to rest around it, and the Gauge Walk settled into the background noise of a place you are living in rather than passing through. Oxy surfaced in the cool channel beside the bench and rested their chin on the edge of the grating. Lano circled once and lay down with her back against the warm iron. Rurik climbed to the top of the nearest gauge housing and sat with his tail wrapped around him, watching the smoke.

We took leave to stay. The forge did not object.