A short mythic fable about grit, grease, and the impossible.

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Nobody sees Jo leave. One moment the farm is asleep; the next, the barn roof rolls open and a hand-built iron ship blasts its way into the sky.

     A woman from Nebraska—quiet, stubborn, with a samurai’s bloodline—has spent long nights with a sledgehammer and a welding torch in her barn. Now she flies the ship past the moon, through gravity wells and solar gales, and into the blazing fury of a star that roars in her mind and forbids her to come closer.

     With a church bell welded to a railroad chain and a hymn her grandmother sang in Japan, she dares anyway.