FIRST BREATH / ABI MARIE PALMER
Fiction
Clove was distant again at breakfast. When the holo-disc’s alarm chirped five, she gave Nat a perfunctory good-morning squeeze around the shoulders, then sat up and tore open one of the bags of nutri-mulch they each kept on their own side of the futon for convenience. Wordlessly, she slotted the mulch packet’s straw through the valve in her breathing mask and contemplatively slurped her breakfast. By the holo-disc’s cold light, she looked ghostly and very, very tired. Nat hauled herself into a sitting position beside her. “Morning, sleepy head.” “Morning,” Clove returned absently, barely pausing her breakfast slurps. She was staring at the blank wall with the calculating intensity of a scientist on the brink of an epiphany. Her tousled hair shaded her eyes. She was in no hurry to be up—she didn’t have to be at Acriture HQ for two hours. Nat, on the other hand, was already running late. She stretched and jumped out of bed, gathering her work clothes from where she
had flung them, exhausted, last night. As she smoothed out her heavy-duty overalls, she tried to make small talk with Clove. “Are you working on anything interesting today?” Clove shrugged. “Nothing that Acriture would approve of.” Why will you never give me a straight answer about your work nowadays? thought Nat, a little irritated. She said, “But isn’t that the whole point of this internship? To impress them so they’ll give you a permanent job and we can move to a safer neighbourhood?” Another shrug. Nat sighed. She didn’t have time to pursue the subject further. She pulled on her overalls, popped a denta-chew in her mouth to clean her teeth, and gathered her equipment. “Bye,” she said, her voice hollow. Clove waved her hand once, not looking up from her reverie. “You got enough air to last the day?” said Nat. Instinctively, she checked her own oxygen canister as she asked the question. The level was lime green—it’d need a 5
