Clarkesworld, April 2026
In a future where volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have driven humanity underground, the surface world is a memory and breathable air is a managed scarcity. People survive in a vast bunker network called the Colony, each resident dependent on a device called a Lung — a filtration mask permanently affixed to the face at birth, equipped with sensors that monitor particulate density and warn its wearer when the air turns lethal. Without a functioning Lung, you don’t breathe freely; you get quarantined behind plexiglass until one becomes available through official Colony channels, which means waiting in a line that stretches for decades.
Verity is a teenage scavenger, resourceful and quietly desperate, who spends her days crawling through tunnels at the Colony’s edges looking for anything of value. Her younger brother Axle — eight years old, joyful, fearless — has been locked in a quarantine cell ever since his Lung broke down. Verity visits him daily, and the two trace matching halves of a heart on the glass that separates them, a ritual that holds them together across the barrier. Freeing him has become the fixed center of her life.
Her closest companion is Widget, a boy her age who has been in love with her for years. Verity recognizes this and feels genuine guilt about it — not cruelty, but a queasy discomfort she can’t quite name, a sense that his affection boxes her in the way the bad air does. She keeps deflecting, keeps postponing the honest conversation, caught between needing him and not wanting to use him.
Widget arrives with a lead: an elderly woman named Ms. Ratchet, one of the few remaining survivors from the original upper bunkers, is willing to bequeath her Lung when she dies — in exchange for a piece of artwork her granddaughter made for her long ago. A picture drawn in pasta: macaroni, spaghetti, shells. Left behind when the upper tunnels collapsed. She wants to hold it one last time.
Verity and Widget climb a pump shaft toward the ruined upper levels, but a quake tears the ladder apart and separates them. Verity, whose own Lung is already failing — clogged with grit, leaking sulfur-taste, beeping warnings she’s been hiding from Widget — makes her way alone through the abandoned bunker. When she finally finds the small aluminum box and unfolds the pasta drawing inside, she sees two figures rendered in dried noodles standing beneath a sky full of harmless clouds: the old woman and her granddaughter, fingers interlaced.
Then her Lung announces the worst: particulate density toxic. Widget finds her and carries her out, sharing his own Lung breath by breath, and she wakes in the Colony infirmary. They finally have the honest conversation she’d been avoiding for three years — quiet, painful, relieving. The friendship survives.
Ms. Ratchet, meanwhile, has already died. She got to see the artwork. Widget retrieved her Lung as promised. Now Verity holds it in her hand — knowing it could save her own failing lungs — and gives it to Axle anyway. That night she watches through the quarantine glass as her brother snaps on the Lung, takes his first real breath in years, and slips away into the tunnels. They press their fingers to opposite sides of the glass, completing the heart one last time, before he goes.
Ryan Cole is a speculative fiction writer who lives in Virginia with his husband and snuggly pug child. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest and a graduate of the Odyssey writing workshop, and his work has appeared in Clarkesworld, PodCastle, Escape Pod, and Cast of Wonders, among others.