Her breathing was wrong.

 

It wasn’t loud enough to alarm anyone passing by, but shallow and tense, as if each breath had been weighed and barely worth the effort.

 

Abel sat beside her bed, counting the intervals between each pained rise and fall of her chest. One hand held his daughter’s own, the other pressing a damp and warm cloth to her ear. She hissed through her teeth but didn’t pull away.

 

“I know, Anna,” he whispered, hoping she could hear.

 

The sector hummed around them: air circulation, water reclamation, fungal disinfectors, the distant thrum of systems with no concept of day or night. Sector 118 did not sleep, it simply continued.

 

They hadn’t had any medical provisions from the higher sectors in a generation, much less any personnel with the ability to handle them.

 

He tried what he could. Compresses, garlic oil, rest, things passed down from his mother. They worked — sometimes. Enough to take the edge off, enough to let her sleep in short stretches, but the fever remained. The swelling worsened. Her symptoms persisted.

 

By the second week, she even whimpered in her dreams.

 

* * *

 

As the line stretched out before him, Abel squeezed the meager chits in his pocket. With his daughter sick, he hadn’t been able to work the fields. The day retreated towards the night just as he made it to the provisioner.

 

“Alright, Abel, here you go,” Mary said. She held a burlap sack. Inside were the meager rations he could afford; two loaves of crusty bread, potatoes, grain, cheese, and beans.

 

“Thanks,” Abel replied, handing over the chits, leaving just one in his pocket, not even enough for his next supply.

 

“How’s that daughter of yours, Abel? She gettin’ any better?”

 

“I… I’m not sure,” he said.

 

Mary paused for a moment, a look of sympathy on her face. Then, she reached under the table and brought out a large round cantaloupe. “Here, maybe some fruit will cheer her up!”

 

Abel reached back in his pocket but Mary stopped him. She put a finger to her mouth and shushed, giving him a wink.

 

* * *

 

The heavy metal door thunked closed behind him as Abel took the provisions towards the kitchenette. He gave extra care to the cantaloupe, placing it next to the sink, ready to cut up for Anna. Just as he sank the knife into the fruit, Anna began screaming.

 

Abel dropped the cantaloupe and knife into the sink. He rushed to his daughter’s side.

 

Her screams echoed throughout the small room, bouncing from the metal surfaces. Abel tried to soothe her, but she was somehow asleep, writhing in a night terror.

 

It was two days before she regained consciousness.

 

“I’m hungry, papa,” she whispered in a hoarse voice.

 

The half-asleep Abel glanced up, unsure if he was still dreaming. He locked eyes with his daughter’s own weary ones and she repeated her request.

 

“I’ve got just the thing,” Abel replied.

 

He looked all over the kitchen for the cantaloupe, not seeing it anywhere. Finally, he saw it sitting among a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, still half-full with dirty water.

 

“Gah-dammit,” he cursed, pulling the fruit out of the water. The knife was stuck halfway through the rind, which split open as Abel dropped it on the counter. A fuzzy, green bloom stretched out from within, thickest near the cantaloupe’s seed cavity.

 

Abel stared at it. Anger flooded him. He lifted the halves, poised to dump straight in the incinerator before the disinfectors flagged the contamination.

 

He hesitated.

 

Not at the mold itself but its pattern. It spread in circles, the flesh immediately around it pale, almost untouched. It brought back a memory, unwelcome and sharp.

 

Before the shipments stopped, Abel had apprenticed in agronomy, learning how to grow fungi — and to kill them. The Sector’s systems now destroyed it on sight.

 

A red alarm flashed as a speaker relayed the Sector’s message:

 

FUNGAL GROWTH DETECTED

SCRUBBERS IN EFFECT

 

“Shit!” Abel yelled, grabbing a mason jar from the counter and scraping all of the fungal growth into it. He sealed it as tight as he could and tucked it behind a radiator, where it was warm and the air flow was weakest. Twice more the air scrubbers cycled, and Abel held his breath the entire time, certain the spores would die.

 

They did not. By morning, their bloom had deepened.

 

Abel needed proof. He took a slice of bread, wetted it, and placed it on a clean metal tray. He opened the sink’s drain pipe and collected a smear of grime where, despite the scrubber's best efforts, some filth remained. He spread it lightly across the bread.

 

Then, at the center, he placed a bit of the cantaloupe’s mold, placing the tray into the oven, hoping it wouldn’t set off an alarm.

 

Hours passed. Anna continued to drift in and out of consciousness. Abel returned to the tray again and again.

 

By evening growth clouded the bread in a thin gray sheen, except for a small circle around the mold. There, the surface remained pale. Clean. A flash of hope welled up in Abel’s spirit.

 

He took the remaining mold and strained it through a cheese cloth into boiling water. He diluted it once, then twice.

 

Anna stirred as he returned to her bedside.

 

“It’ll sting,” he whispered.

 

She was too tired to protest.

 

He administered the drops carefully, watching her face, watching for rash, for swelling, for the slightest shift in breath.

 

Nothing.

 

Minutes stretched.

 

Then hours.

 

Her breathing remained uneven—but steadier. The fever, which had burned against his palm for days, no longer scalded.

 

By the following morning, the swelling had lessened.

 

By nightfall, she slept without crying out.

 

Abel remained seated beside her bed, listening.

 

The Sector hummed on. Air scrubbers. Water reclaimers. Fungal disinfectors scouring the walls for the very thing that had saved her.

 

He rested his fingers lightly against her wrist, counting.

 

He did not sleep.

 

He listened to his daughter breathe.