The Debt of Air

About

Coriolis Station, 2094. Eleven hundred people under a worker-owned charter, breathing an atmosphere that is legally a loan. Every kilogram of nitrogen and oxygen in the hull is financed; the co-op services the debt in refined volatiles, and when it misses, the consortium seals corridors. Vasha Reyes runs life support and knows the station's mass balance the way a farmer knows rain. Fourteen months ago a scrubber stack failed on her shift and her wife walked into it. Tem has lungs that will not last three years, a place on a treatment queue the station cannot afford, and the distinction of being the person who filed the incident report that blamed the hardware instead of Vasha's sequencing. Now the consortium's compliance auditor has arrived with the authority to seal volume and one discretionary allocation to spend — a new scrubber stack or a debt restructure, not both — and a habit of asking questions that cannot be answered in kilograms. Then Module Nine vents, two people die, the interlock history is under Vasha's credentials, and the insurance clause it triggers would wipe four years of debt and hand the consortium the charter. A grief story with an airlock in it: hard engineering, a marriage with an accident inside it, a third person who is neither a temptation nor a villain, and a sabotage whose perpetrator has a reason that holds up under audit. Desire is adult and frank and cuts away at the door. Five endings; in none of them does everybody breathe.

Cast

• Vasha Reyes protagonist; life-support lead
• Tem Adeyemi-Reyes Vasha's wife; rigger, fourteen months post-injury
• Ori Kessendra consortium compliance auditor
• M Mireille Ocampo co-op chair; elected, exhausted no portrait yet
• Dag Wynter atmosphere technician; Vasha's second, and the one who found Module Nine
• D Dr Susannah Okonkwo-Feld station physician; keeps the treatment queue no portrait yet