Dream d2952-s: The Gate on One Hinge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the entrance to the Ruins of Duskden for the second night, holding the broken gate aside with one hand and my ledger open in the other arm. The gate swings from its top hinge only. The bottom hinge is gone: the pin, the plate, the screws. I had noted this last night. I noted it again tonight because the record is a record, not a memory, and the two are not the same thing.

Lano pressed close to my left leg. Her ears had been flat since we crossed the ridge an hour back, and they stayed flat. She gave one short bark at something on the air I could not locate, then went quiet, nose working in small deliberate arcs toward the far end of the foundation.

The Supply Officer arrived at the hour I had expected him. He came from the settlement to the north, the one that runs the generator, and he sat on a low stone wall and read from the small book he carries for figures. The fuel reserve had dropped to seventeen percent. The salvage cache at the southern depot had been cleared to the floor. He said all of this the way he says everything: as a figure, followed by a pause, followed by what comes next. What came next was a question about the long list.

The long list has 129 names. The short list, the one of places actually walked into and written from inside, has 48. Eighty-one names sit on the long side only. Some of those 81 stand cold and dark, shuttered, no sign of anything running. Thirty-five of them stand lit at every window, work going on inside, people moving. The lit ones are the harder read, because a place that looks tended reads as known. It is not known. It has been named and counted and described from the road, and none of that is entry.

I opened the long list to the five nearest sites the Supply Officer did not recognize from his own ranging. I wrote their names in a working column at the back of the ledger. I did not draw a line connecting them to the fuel problem. That line belongs to the Supply Officer and the Quartermaster. I wrote: five candidate sites, unentered, distances as estimated from road, interior condition unknown.

Rurik had gone ahead when we came through the gate. He was on the highest remaining wall of the storehouse, four courses of good stone still standing, and his tail hung over the edge in a slow idle swing. He watched the Supply Officer with amber eyes and said nothing.

The Supply Officer closed his book. He said he would need to range out within four days, that four days was the margin before the generator schedule became a rationing problem. He did not say what rationing would mean for the settlement's work. I did not ask. I wrote: four-day window, five sites identified, Supply Officer coordinating outreach with Quartermaster. The notation is not a plan. It is a record of a conversation.

Lano had moved to the lip of the old well. She was not looking at the well. She was looking back the way we had come, ears still flat, posture held. Whatever she had caught on the air at the ridge, she had not let it go.

I closed the ledger on the working column and held the gate aside to let the Supply Officer pass. He nodded and went. The gate creaked once behind me on its one hinge and came to rest at its new angle, which is not quite closed and not quite open.

The short list has 48. The long list has 81. Five of those 81 have a secondary mark now, a working column entry, which is not the same as being entered. Being marked is not being walked into. The gate is not locked. It has simply not been opened.

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