Dream d1964-s: Crossing Between One Reach and the Next

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Foundry District roads ran gray and straight between the forge-blocks, and the party walked them in the early part of the day when the smoke was just beginning to thicken into its working weight.

We were a day out from the Cooling Channel and moving toward the next reach, carrying what the last days had given us: the Scavenger's eye for salvage, the Listener's ear for what the structures were still saying, the Wireman's running count of live conduit against dead. The Builder walked with her notes folded into her coat. The Weather Reader moved slightly apart from the group, watching the sky over the forge-stacks where heat distorted everything above the rooflines.

Rurik picked his way across a patch of slag that had spilled and cooled into a rough shelf. He tested it once with a careful paw, then crossed. Lano followed him, her white coat gray at the edges from the road-dust, ears up, nose working at something in the industrial air that none of the rest of us could reach.

"Ammonia on the left block," the Weather Reader said, without looking down. "And something burning that should not be burning."

"That is the press-hall," the Wireman said. "I noted it on the first pass. The intake seal is gone. It breathes what it catches."

The Listener stopped walking, tilted his head, held it. "Still running," he said. "The press-hall. It has not stopped since the last time I listened."

The Scavenger made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Something runs in this district that nobody starts and nobody stops."

We walked on. Oxy kept pace beside me, the faint gill-motion the only sign they were attending to more than the road. Above us, a gauge bolted to the corner of the forge-block read a pressure I could not interpret. The needle was in the yellow, which in this district felt like an improvement.

The Builder stopped at a junction, looked both ways down the forge road, read something in the angle of the pipe-work. "The next reach is east," she said. "The passage narrows before it opens."

Lano had already turned east. She looked back once, tail in a slow deliberate arc, as if she had known this for some time and was only now mentioning it to the rest of us.

We followed her, as we usually did, down the narrowing between the blocks, carrying the weight and the knowledge of the road behind us, moving toward whatever the district had waiting in the next hall.