Dream d2263-s: The Count Before the Category

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of the town was wood-smoke and grain-dust, not something I had to learn anymore. Three days and the body adjusts: the mill sound becomes a clock, the gravel of the main path sits in the soles of my boots, and I can read the sky above the eastern roofline without asking the Weather Reader what it means.

She tells me anyway, this evening - low pressure carrying in off the ridge, no rain, just weight. Good working air, she says, and goes back to her notebook.

Rurik came in with his coat dark at the shoulders just before dark, having spent the afternoon tracking down whoever sets the eastern presses. He found them: two figures working by lantern, each running a gear-arm the size of a small door. He told me their roles and I wrote both down before I knew which of the two was which. A tally mark made before the thing tallied is still a tally mark. I left a blank after each entry and filled the gap later, when he remembered.

The Builder walked the flour hall twice this evening and came back saying nothing was out of order. That is what unnerves her about this place - nothing is ever out of order. The halls are clean, the accounts are clean, the two pairs of hands that raised this town raised it carefully. She set her tools down on the outer wall and sat beside them. I did not ask what she was thinking. She would have said she was not thinking anything.

Lano found a corner between the west storage wall and the main drum housing and stayed there through the working hour, ears up, watching the crew move in and out. She does this in a place she has lived three days: she stops moving and starts reading. I left her to it.

The workers here do not talk about when it stopped. Eighteen days between the last sign of life and tonight - I have the number, and I know better than to push through the silence that sits around it. The survey does not require the reason. The ugly true number is enough.

I sit with the ledger open against the outer hall wall, the stone cool at my back, and I write the count as I can see it: four figures moving crates, two at the press arms, one in the flour hall, one I have no role for yet. The mills turn above the roofline. Lano, still in her corner, lifts her nose to the working air.

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