Dream d2067-s: Jewel-Snap at the Green Line

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the barrens finally gave out.

Not with ceremony - just a slow narrowing of the ash crust, the bone-grey ground going paler and paler until the color leached from it entirely, and then, at a distance I had been watching for so long I had stopped trusting my eyes, a hedge. A genuine hedge. Living green, the kind that remembers rain.

I was carrying the Book of Readings inside my coat, pressed against my ribs. The singed spine caught every fold of cloth and I had learned its texture the way you learn a wound - by feel, without looking. Rurik walked at my left shoulder, ears forward, tail low and still. He had been reading the air for two hours. Whatever he found there, he kept it to himself.

Then the hummingbird.

It appeared from nothing, from the gap between one breath and the next, a jewel-green dart no bigger than my thumb. It crossed the hedge line into the barrens, hung suspended over a drifting blight-spark - the ember-pale kind that carry spore - and snapped it. One motion, total, over before I registered the threat. The spark was gone. The bird resumed a line so exact, so repeating, that the Builder stopped walking.

She held up her forearm, the wrapped one, the one she seared reaching the Book off its burning shelf. She had been carrying her brass rule tucked against that forearm to hold the bandage taut. She raised it now and tracked the hummingbird's circuit against the rule's edge - and the circuit matched. The patrol line ran to a tolerance you would not expect from any wing.

She laughed. It came out rough, surprised, like something she had forgotten she owned.

"It is not improvising," she said. "Not once."

"No," the Weather Reader said. She was reading the sky the way she always reads it, one finger raised slightly, eyes elsewhere. "It has never improvised. That is the whole point of it."

Lano's ears went up. She trotted three steps toward the hedge, nose working, and sat at the green edge exactly where the ash crust ended. Not past it. She looked back at us, tail moving once.

I crossed into the green. The blight-wind smell cut off as if a door had closed. The Book shifted against my ribs and I pressed it tighter - not from fear, just from the old reflex of holding what you carried out.

Behind us the hummingbird ran its circuit. Ahead, the grove began.