Don't Save Me Without You

On a living passenger ship bound for Jupiter, a seventeen-year-old apprentice gardener discovers that the walls are sweating yellow sap and the air tastes like spoiled fruit. The only person small enough to crawl beside her through its contracting airways is the apprentice mechanic whose hand she has been finding excuses to hold for months. As passengers retch behind sealed cabin doors, the two squeeze through warm membranes with pruning hooks, cutting out rotten tissue while the ship tightens around their legs. They reach the infected lung with one oxygen cylinder, two mouthpieces, and eleven minutes before the next contraction crushes the passage home.