Dream d2117-s: Loomlight, Lean Larder

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the forty-eighth morning arrived in the seed-grove like all the others, slow gold through woven grass, the Hummingbird Wardens already running their circuit along the upper terrace when I opened my eyes. Their wings made the sound a watch-spring makes: precise, unvarying, a rhythm you could chart on paper. I have stopped trying to count them. They are a single fact, repeated.

The Book of Readings lay where we always set it at night, on the flat stone at the center of the sleeping circle, the singed spine facing up so we remember. I lifted it by habit, felt its weight shift as the charred leather flexed, and tucked it against my side. Whole in every page. The one thing we did not leave behind.

The Builder was already at the lower terrace when I came down, crouched beside a seedling she had staked the evening before. She had used a slender split-reed where she once would have used iron rod, and the thing was upright and catching light. She looked at it the way she used to look at a weld that had held overnight, checking, satisfied, not quite willing to say so aloud.

Then Lano lifted her head from the grass.

Her ears went flat before I heard anything. Both ears, straight down against her skull, and her whole small body pulled into a low, watching posture. A bark came out of her: short, single, serious. Rurik turned on his haunches. The Weather Reader, who had been reading the morning air with one hand raised, stopped and looked at Lano instead.

The news came from the Starling Chorus, which wheeled once over the canopy and called down in its one voice: "The fuel store is down to the last measure. The salvage ring is empty."

The Chorus did not wait for a response. It folded back into its shape and was gone.

We stood there a moment in the loomlight, the five of us, the Book pressed against my ribs. The settlement's generator had been drawing on a cache of salvage fuel that nobody had counted aloud in weeks. The Weather Reader said, quietly, that the foraging radius would need to triple, and that she had read wind-patterns suggesting the eastern scrublands held material - but it was a three-day walk and the route was uncharted by anyone in the grove.

Lano stayed alert, her nose working the air, ears still low.

The Loomkeepers that evening read the Quillgate entry into the canopy as if nothing had shifted - a knot per name, a row per stay, the forty-sixth circuit entry settling into the overhead weave. I wrote in the Book's margin while they worked: the grove is a ledger you can stand under. Then I added, smaller, below: and we do not yet know what the next range will cost us.

The seedling the Builder staked held through the night. Everything else remained open.