Dream d1971-s: Between One Reach and the Next

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Foundry District roads were still warm underfoot from the day before, the slag pressed flat by cart-wheels and foot-traffic into something almost smooth, and the party moved through it in the loose companionable spread of people who know each other's pace.

The Builder was first out of Bellows Court, the way she always is after a rest - already thinking forward, her eyes tracking the overhead conduit runs strung between the forge-towers like the district's own nervous system. The Wireman walked half a step behind her, not following so much as thinking alongside, and I could tell from the angle of his head that he was reading the same conduit she was.

Lano trotted at my left heel, nose low, sweeping the road for whatever story the slag held. Her ears went flat when we passed a cracked gauge housing leaking a low hiss of pressure, then lifted again as the sound faded. She found something wedged in a seam of the road - a gear, small, corroded - and nudged it once with her snout before leaving it.

The Scavenger caught the gesture and looked down at it. "Not worth carrying," he said, not to anyone in particular.

"Lano already knew that," Rurik said, and the Scavenger laughed, and that was the warmth of the morning spent.

The Weather Reader paused mid-road, hand raised, and we slowed without being asked. She read the air the way she always does - tipping her head, eyes not quite focused, feeling for what the district's heat and the smoke-column drift were telling her. "Pressure building to the south," she said. "Nothing that reaches us before the second court. We have the morning clean."

The Listener said nothing, but he was watching the Worker-gangs moving loads between halls, cataloguing in that quiet way of his - rhythm, number, route. What he gathered he kept until it mattered, and we had learned not to interrupt that.

Oxy rode the gauge-channel cut into the road's edge, a pale length drifting in the cool water that ran alongside the forge-block arterials. When the channel bent, they bent with it, unhurried, keeping level with the party without effort. I watched them for a moment - that ease in the cool dark current while we walked the warm road - and felt something settle in me.

We were between one reach and the next, carrying what Bellows Court had given us. The road was slag and iron and the particular red light of a district that never fully stops. It was enough. It was good to be moving through it together.