Dream d2129-s: I know we were here.

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I wake knowing my name.

That is all I can say with certainty at first - that the syllables are mine, that my hands belong to me, that the weight of the pack against my shoulder blades is familiar in the way a worn tool is familiar. I sit up. The poles stand bare above us, lashed cross-hatching against a sky that has gone flat and almost colorless, as though the light arrived this morning without instruction.

Lano is already sitting. She has her hands in her lap and she is looking at them the way you look at a word you know how to spell but cannot hear yourself saying. Rurik is beside her, his black coat distinct even in this strange flatness, and he meets my eyes with an expression that is not fear exactly - more like standing in a doorway you have walked through a hundred times and finding nothing on the other side.

The Builder says, "I know we were here." She says it carefully. "I can feel the shape of having been here. But it's - "

She doesn't finish. None of us have a word for it. The grove-days are like a room behind a painted-over door: the room is there, the door is there, but the paint is seamless and there is no handle and you press your palm flat against it and feel only the wall's own cold.

The Weather Reader stands and walks a few steps and stands again. She lifts her face to the flat light. Whatever she reads there she keeps to herself.

There is a warden making its circuit along the nearest loom-row. It moves the way wardens always move - interval, dart, hover - the same patrol this light has always held, so exact you could set a gauge by it. I watch it reach a place where a knot has slipped, one cross-thread hanging loose from the pole, unraveling into the morning air. The warden hovers over it. Just hovers. Its wings' percussion is too small to be audible from here, but I can feel the frequency of it in my sternum. It has no hands. It has no thread. The patrol runs the same arc it always runs and the knot is simply past the edge of what the warden can hold.

Lano opens the Book. She finds a page. She reads something, and her expression changes - not to grief, but to the particular steadiness of encountering yourself from outside, as a stranger might. She is reading about herself. She cannot feel what she is reading.

She passes it to me without a word. The poles stand bare above us. The loose thread lifts on the morning's one slow current, and the warden resumes its circuit.

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