Dream d2055-s: The Unmapped Frequency

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the third day at Slatewharf opened on tracks.

The Weather Reader noticed them first - a line of bootprints pressed into the mud of the main street, heading toward the south wall and doubling back, the tread still sharp at the edges. Weeks old at most, she said, which meant recent movement, which meant someone had been through this town with deliberate purpose and had not lingered to explain it.

We followed the line past the chandler's and the cooperage, out to where the town wall ends and a flat ground opens beyond it, and there we found what we had not expected: wooden targets set at measured intervals, their faces scored pale, distances chalked onto the boundary stone in a steady hand. The Builder crouched and read the spacing with the quiet satisfaction she brings to any honest engineering.

"Thirty paces, sixty, ninety," she said. "Consistent. Someone was testing range, and they were doing it carefully."

I wrote it down. The book of readings grows heavier with Slatewharf's specifics - the tracks, the targets, the measured paces. Reading a place truly is the first half of re-lighting it.

By evening, under the sliver moon and the older light of the stars, the hammers were still going. From the lodging-house we heard foremen calling and iron answering, voices threading through the clamor. Slatewharf was building something at a schedule that did not leave room for pause.

Lano settled at my feet - quieta - then lifted her head when Rurik came in through the window and sat on the sill, facing inward. He had been outside; his paws carried wet grit from the testing ground. He watched the room and did not move to groom himself.

The Weather Reader had her instruments out before any of us spoke. She was working the barometric sleeve with the attention she usually reserves for pressure fronts, but her face showed the particular stillness she gets when a reading contradicts what it should say.

"Not weather," she said. "Something is coming through the receivers."

She let me listen. A pattern in the static: regular, stepped, like a count that did not match any beacon sequence I had catalogued. Not from any part of the known network. Origin unclear.

Lano's ears went flat and forward at once. One short bark into the corner of the room, sharp and certain.

The hammers outside continued. The town was busy with its own new work and did not know yet what the receivers had caught. We sat with the open question - tell them, or keep reading, and what were we actually telling them, and when.

The night was not old. The page lay open in my lap.