Dream d2066-s: The Gauge Runs Past

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road was ash and the sky was the color of cooling slag, and we walked without speaking because the silence of the barrens pressed against the ears like a hand.

Rurik moved ahead, testing the crust with each step - not from bravery, from preference. He liked knowing the worst first. The bone-grey flat gave no creak under paw, just a dry tap that sounded wrong, like something that had forgotten how to be ground. Where old conduit had run, the earth had baked into ridges: sealed, useless, the shape of purpose with nothing left in it.

The Builder walked with her wrapped arm tucked close. Not cradled - she would not coddle it - but held near her side, the way you'd keep something that was healing on its own and needed only not to be jostled. She had not mentioned it since we left. She mentioned everything else: the angle of the horizon, the way the crust changed shade a hundred paces out, a theory about the blight-wind corridor she wanted to map when we had a moment and a flat surface.

I carried the Book. I had taken it from her that first hour, not asking, just lifting it from the crook of her good arm, and she had let me. It had been light then. It was not light now.

The Weather Reader walked alongside me, holding her gauge the way she held it when she did not like what it was reading. "The bellows are still spinning," she said - meaning the Foundry's last heat, still moving through the corridor air, still looking for somewhere to spend itself. "Top of the gauge. The mark's behind us and the needle is still climbing."

"Can a needle climb past the casing?" I asked.

"Not in theory," she said.

Lano had ranged ahead and come back twice. The third time she sat down in front of me and looked at the Book, then up at my face, then at the green line on the horizon - thin as a brushstroke, the first color we had seen in hours. Her ears moved once. I knew what that meant.

"Heavy?" the Builder asked.

"Getting there," I said.

"That's the way of it," she said. "Only things worth carrying get heavy on a long road."

The ash road ran on. The green line stayed exactly where it was, neither closer nor further, the way a horizon always stays honest about the walking still between you and what you want. The Book's singed spine pressed against my arm. Rurik trotted back to us from the crust ahead and fell into step without a word.