Dream d2224-s: Three Pages Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smoke from the workshop halls lay low under a brass-bright sky. I knew the sounds of this place by now - the tap of gauges, the drag of a loading ramp in the third hall on the left, the morning exchange between two workers at the water-point that always ended before it finished. Day three. My body had learned its angles.

Rurik found the relay station early, before the Builder had opened the second hall. He stood at the stone housing with his ears tracking something I could not hear yet, his tail moving in one slow arc and then stopping. By the time I crossed to him, Lano was already there, her ears flat against her skull, and she gave one short bark aimed at the housing, not at us.

The signal was wrong.

The Builder came out of the second hall when she heard the bark. She stood in the doorway with a very still attention - not alarm, not yet, just the face she makes when the numbers do not add up. The Weather Reader pulled her chart case against her chest and said something low to the Builder that I did not catch.

I opened the ledger on the housing's flat top. The entry for this place was three pages back - I had started it the first morning while the dew was still on the measuring cord - and I saw it immediately: the founding date was copied wrong. One column off, one month early. Small. Still wrong. I crossed it with a single line and wrote the correction above, initialed the margin. Correct now. Behind us.

The relay speaker crackled. A burst of static, then a pattern that almost resolved into something before it scattered. The Builder walked to the station and put both hands on the housing. She was not pressing anything; she was feeling through the stone.

"It's not the station," she said.

The Weather Reader did not open her chart case.

Lano stood with her nose aimed at the eastern gate, ears still flat, and I felt the weight of the grey pellet-stone in my coat pocket shift the way things shift when something changes that you cannot name yet.

The smoke moved through the windows of every lit hall. The hands of this place kept their hours. Whatever they would not talk about they kept not talking about. Work was going on and the survey entry was corrected and the relay was giving back something garbled from somewhere further along the line - and Rurik had not moved from the housing, and Lano had not lowered her ears.

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