It happened in the middle of the night.
     Nobody saw her leave. The chickens dozed in their roosts. The farming community lay quiet. The sun was beyond the horizon. Only the stars noticed the barn roof roll open, but they were too far to do anything about it.
     She slammed the ignition bar home, and the powerful engines thrummed, sputtered, then roared to life.
     The spaceship of blackened iron, pitted brass, and hammered rivets rose up, then burst from the top of the barn. In plumes of blue flame and waves of glassy heat, it flew straight up, tearing through the thick 
layer of air.

     For months she’d worked with a sledgehammer and a welding torch. Each day, she had toiled on the ship after supper, long into the small hours of the morning, until the barn smelled of hot metal and oil.
     And now she flew it into space.
     The engines rumbled, and the vessel blazed past the wispy clouds. Another long thrust, and the craft broke free of Earth’s air and sound—hurtling into the stardust of outer space.
     She was going to the sun.
     Because.

​

Her name was Jo.
     She had long black hair lashed back without fuss. Strength was written in her posture and the steadiness of her hands. She was the kind of person who made you think twice before interrupting. Who fixed your fence without asking. Who showed up when you were sad.
     Some said that long ago she went by the name Kana Yamata—before Nebraska, before the farming community, before the barn.

 

The cockpit pressed close—copper pipes, tilted walls, a scatter of levers, a cluster of dials—a cramped box, no more than a foot and a half on any side.
     Jo wore dark quilted leather, oil-cured, stitched for fire and water and brute work. It wrapped around her in a pattern older than Nebraska. She sat in an elevated tractor-bucket seat. Legs tucked beneath her at rest. Legs down through the gaps when needed: to work 
the pedals—forward to fly, backward to slow.
     All around her, coolant water rose to her chest. It held her in a steadying, heavy embrace that softened the brutal lurch of launch and any sudden bone-deep jolts.

 

The moon’s gravity well tugged at her craft like a hand grabbing an ankle. She pulled the port ballast lever, and coolant water rushed into the compartment on that side, filling it. The ship responded to the shifted weight, leaned into the tug, and skimmed along the moon’s edge like a skiff riding a riverbank.