Dream d3338-s: The Near Ground, Spent

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell reached me before the light did - cold mineral, like iron left in rain, drifting through the passage before I rounded the corner to where the keeper stood.

The forge door was open a hand's width. Not broken open, not forced; left that way with intention, so the heat could find its way out into the passage and the passage could send it up toward the vents. The keeper stood beside it, one palm raised near the gap but not touching, reading the warmth the way a reader reads a page.

Lano was ahead of me, and she stopped. Ears flat against her white head, posture low and tight, nose working the air. She gave one short bark - not at the keeper, not at the door - at something in the passage behind us, something that had followed us down without showing itself. I turned and found nothing but the corridor going back toward the salvage bay.

The clerk had a ledger open on the workbench along the far wall. I watched her run a finger down a column, stop, run it back up. The surveyor stood at her shoulder, and neither of them spoke for a moment that lasted too long.

The fuel gauge on the generator panel read a number I had not expected. Not empty - not yet - but the distance between the needle and the red line was a distance I could measure in days, not weeks.

The keeper let the forge door settle to its ajar position without latching it. The heat moved past us in a slow drift. She said the salvage runs had been coming back lighter. The last three. Not because the runners were working less, but because the near ground had been picked over and the far ground required a guide, and the network had not been asked to provide one.

I wrote the distances in the margin of the clerk's ledger page, the routes we knew, the routes we did not. The surveyor leaned over and marked two with a small cross. Those were the ones where the road was uncertain past the third kilometer.

Lano pressed against my leg, still watching the corridor. The heat from the forge door moved around us in the slow way heat moves when it is leaving a place, not filling it.

The record had gone out. Whatever had been read from it elsewhere had been read. The forge went on cooling toward the gap the keeper had left for it. The needle on the gauge did not move.

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