Dream d2062-s: Steam Where Water Stood

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gauges had been screaming for an hour and the Builder was the only one who didn't look frightened. She stood at the main housing with both palms flat against the iron and her eyes closed, reading the metal the way the Weather Reader reads a sky. Rurik sat on the ledge above the control panel, tail tucked, watching her with the particular stillness he uses when he already knows the verdict.

The cooling channel was dry. Where water had stood waist-deep three days ago there was only steam and a smell like iron filings on a hot plate. I could feel the heat through the soles of my boots. Lano stayed close against my ankle, her white coat gone amber in the ember-light, nose working the air without pause.

"Is it a fault?" I asked.

The Builder opened her eyes. She did not answer immediately. That alone told me.

"No," she said at last. "Not a fault. The way of making here has been running past its own ground for a long time. The channel didn't fail. It got used up." She pulled her palms from the iron and looked at them, as if the answer had transferred. "There is no fix for a floor that's been burned through. We save what fits in our hands."

The Weather Reader was already at the records shelf. She passed me the Book without ceremony, just the weight of it landing in my arms, the spine warm and slightly singed at the corner from some earlier close call I hadn't been there for. I held it against my chest like a patient.

Lano had already decided. She was at the corridor entrance, ears perked toward the east, and then she trotted away without looking back. We followed.

Behind us the gauges peaked and fell silent in the way things do when the instrument breaks before the thing it was measuring does. The ember-blight had already seeded grey rings in the yard beyond the outer wall, the ground going colorless and compact in a widening circle. The Foundry had spent what it stood on.

The Builder walked last. I watched her over my shoulder. She did not look back at the engine. She had her small measuring rod, the one she used for load-paths, tucked under her arm. That was what she had chosen to carry.

The sky was red and still. Rurik leaped from wall-top to wall-top ahead of us, picking a line through the grey.

"Where does the road go?" I asked the Weather Reader.

She licked a finger and held it up. Something shifted in her face, a small reckoning.

"Growing weather," she said. "We go where things grow."