Credit Limit
The collar tightens at 6 AM. Oxygen ration expired.
Maya's throat constricts against regulation steel, the filtration device calculating her remaining breath in digital increments that tick downward like a countdown to suffocation. Twelve minutes. Eleven. Ten.
She checks her credit balance through cracked phone glass: negative forty-seven units. Yesterday's panic attack cost her three days' worth of clean air, hyperventilation treated as luxury consumption by algorithms that don't account for grief.
Outside her window, smog hangs like wet concrete. Children press faces against classroom glass, drawing pictures of something called "blue sky" from textbook descriptions they've never verified. The sun exists as theory now—a heat source filtered through atmospheric soup thick enough to chew.
Maya's neighbor coughs through paper-thin walls. Mrs. Chen, ninety-three, collar silent for two days running. The old woman's breathing sounds like gravel shifting in a tin can, rationed air whistling through lungs that remember when oxygen was free.
Nine minutes.
Maya opens her dresser drawer. Behind folded shirts, a breath tank the size of a thermos gleams like contraband silver. Black market. Five thousand credits on the underground exchange. One hour of unfiltered air that tastes like memory—or what memory would taste like if anyone could remember breathing without meters.
The tank's valve turns with the precision of a prayer wheel. Clean air hisses into her collar's reservoir, resetting the countdown, buying time measured in respiratory cycles.
Her phone buzzes. Text from unknown number: Vault opens tonight. Corner of Fifth and Ash. Bring wire cutters.
The old greenhouse project. Pre-collapse biodome that supposedly holds enough oxygen to flood six city blocks. Maya knows the stories—sealed atmosphere from before the wars, when trees grew wild and unmetered, when breath was human birthright instead of state commodity.
Eight minutes. Fresh tank or not, the collar's sensors detect unauthorized supplements. Penalty breathing. Maya's throat burns as the device adjusts compression ratios, teaching her body to want less, need less, survive on chemical substitutes that taste like copper and defeat.
She deletes the text.
Opens the window. Smog rolls in like dirty water, carrying traces of industrial processing plants and the particular sweetness of human desperation. Somewhere in the gray distance, oxygen harvesters spin their mechanical prayers, converting atmospheric poison into rationed salvation one cubic meter at a time.
Maya checks her balance again. Six minutes.
The breath tank sits on her dresser, silver and patient, holding enough stolen air to last until tomorrow's ration reset. She could stretch it. Make it last. Live one more day as a measured woman in a metered world.
Or she could empty it now. Flood her lungs with borrowed breath and walk toward Fifth and Ash, where wire cutters wait and greenhouses dream of opening like massive lungs, exhaling decades of hoarded atmosphere into a city that's forgotten how to breathe free.
The collar counts down. Five minutes.
Maya reaches for her coat.