The Breath Between
Intro
When I first saw the prompts, my mind immediately read “scratch and sniff.”
It made me laugh at first, then an idea began to form.
Inspired by the writing prompt of “Such” and “Sniff” from the #2WordPrompt on Bluesky.
The Breath Between
In the outpost’s sealed habitat, every molecule is filtered, measured, and reused. Air never truly leaves. Records show the system has been closed for nearly seventy years, yet she smells things that shouldn’t exist: salt, cinnamon, and the faint sweetness of skin after fear.
Each morning she runs diagnostics, eyes on the data pulsing pale green across the console. “Such precision,” she says, a whisper meant to fill the silence. The graphs never falter, but she notices patterns curling beneath them, like a breath trapped inside a circuit.
That night she wakes to a scent she cannot name. The scrubbers hum in perfect rhythm. She walks to the vent, steady, unsure, and takes one quiet sniff. The air is warmer now. It tastes of rain and something human.
Something that should have long faded.
The Hum Inside
She stays there longer than she means to, her hand resting against the wall beside the vent. The metal feels warm beneath her fingers. The hum of the system is steady but too soft, like it’s holding its breath.
She marks the time in her log, though she isn’t sure why, and writes the word scent even though it doesn’t belong in technical documentation. When she looks up, the monitor has dimmed to save power. In the reflection she sees her own face framed by the glow of the console, a faint shimmer tracing her outline, as if the air itself were watching.
The warmth fades, replaced by the usual recycled chill. Still, she can’t shake the sense that something has changed. The filters might be clean, but the air feels heavy now, thick with the memory of something alive.
She pulls up the last twenty-four hours of atmospheric data, the screen filling with strings of green numbers. Everything looks perfect. Ratios unchanged. Oxygen steady. No trace compounds above baseline.
Still, she reruns the analysis.
The processor hums louder as it recalculates. For a moment, the sound matches her heartbeat. She forces herself to step back and breathe evenly. The air tastes normal again, but her mouth feels dry, as if she’s been holding her breath too long.
When the results appear, a new field flashes at the bottom of the screen. Data incomplete. That shouldn’t be possible. She checks the intake sensors, then the time stamps. The system had stopped recording for eleven seconds.
She logs the event, noting the gap, then adds a line she can’t justify: Perceived warmth. Possible pressure anomaly.
As she types, the cursor flickers in rhythm with the hum.
The Warmth Below
She traces the irregularity to a sublevel maintenance tunnel. The warmth she once felt at the vent is stronger there. Condensation forms where it shouldn’t. When she brushes her hand along the wall, the metal pulses faintly under her skin, like a living vein.
She follows the tunnel until the lights begin to flicker. The system hum is louder here, layered and uneven. Every few steps the sound dips, replaced by a low vibration that she can feel in her ribs. The maintenance hatch ahead drips with moisture, though no water lines run through this part of the outpost.
She unlocks the panel and crouches beside the exposed conduit. Inside, a faint mist curls in slow spirals, vanishing as it touches the air. Her sensor shows nothing, no heat, no gas, no particulate matter, yet her skin prickles.
For a moment, she thinks she hears it breathing.
She shuts the hatch and leans against the wall, letting the hum settle back into its rhythm. The warmth lingers on her hands.
Back in her quarters, the air feels different. Heavier, though the temperature reads the same. She removes her gloves and sees a faint residue on her palms, a shimmer that catches the light before fading. The sensors on her desk flicker once, then stabilize.
She sits in front of the console, meaning to log what she found, but the words stall halfway through the first sentence. A low vibration hums through the floor, not loud enough to alarm, just enough to feel. She closes her eyes. It matches her breathing.
When she opens them again, the cursor is moving across the screen on its own. Slow, deliberate, tracing a single word.
Below.
She stares at the word until the screen fades to black. The hum steadies, soft and patient. For a long time she doesn’t move. The warmth has left her hands, but when she exhales, the air carries a trace of moisture that shouldn’t be there.
She wipes the screen clean and tells herself the system only reflected an input error, though she never typed anything.