Chapter Text
Emma had been inside the Orion mock-up for almost an hour when she realized that three people were waiting for her to finish explaining why the current seat configuration was going to cause a problem.
She had one knee braced against the edge of the lower platform, a tablet balanced against her thigh, and a pencil tucked behind her ear even though she had not used a pencil once since arriving at Johnson Space Center three weeks earlier. The habit had followed her from her previous job, where she had spent years walking through test facilities with something to write with lodged somewhere in her hair, only to record every useful thought electronically.
“No, look,” she said, enlarging the diagram on her screen before turning it toward the systems engineer standing below her. “The clearance is technically within range when the seat is empty, but that is not the condition we actually care about. Once you account for the suit, the restraint assembly, and the way the crewmember is going to rotate through here during ingress, you have created a point where everything works perfectly on paper and becomes irritating in practice.”
“Irritating is not a technical classification,” Daniel said.
“It should be.”
The engineer beside him laughed, but Emma kept her attention on the diagram.
She was not trying to win an argument. She had already learned that arguments at NASA rarely worked that way. Nobody received a trophy for being the person who spoke most confidently in a meeting, and there was very little patience for protecting an idea simply because it happened to be yours. The work was too complicated, and the stakes were too high, for anyone to become sentimental about a drawing.
Emma pointed to the narrow space between the seat assembly and the panel.
“We keep checking this as if the crewmember will move through the capsule exactly the way the procedure describes,” she continued. “But people do not move that way. They twist. They compensate. They reach for whatever is closest when their center of gravity shifts. Luca already showed us yesterday that his shoulder naturally comes this direction when he lowers himself into position.”
Daniel looked from the screen to the mock-up.
“You think he’ll catch the suit?”
“I think he could, and I think that means we should test it with him suited instead of deciding the numbers are close enough.”
Emma watched the consideration move across his face. She had discovered quickly that Daniel always went quiet when he was actually listening, which she appreciated much more than people who nodded while preparing their next response.
He leaned closer to the opening and studied the clearance again.
“You want another run.”
“I want two,” Emma said. “One with Luca and one with someone shorter, because the movement will change depending on where the shoulder starts.”
“You have someone in mind?”
“I can find someone.”
Daniel glanced at the other engineer.
“She’s been here three weeks and she’s already volunteering astronauts for additional simulator time.”
Emma smiled as she climbed down from the platform.
“I was told initiative was encouraged.”
“You were lied to.”
“That feels like an issue for Public Affairs.”
She reached the floor and accepted the hand Daniel offered, not because she needed help but because the mock-up had enough awkward edges that refusing would have created more trouble than taking it. Her navy polo had pulled slightly loose beneath the disposable coverall she wore inside the training structure, and she adjusted it before reclaiming her tablet.
Three weeks into the job, she was beginning to understand which parts of her new life would eventually feel routine and which parts probably never would.
Her badge worked at the right doors now. She knew which conference rooms were inexplicably cold, which coffee station was least likely to be empty after ten, and which engineers could answer a question in thirty seconds versus those who needed to begin with the entire history of the Orion program. She had stopped consulting the campus map every time she crossed between buildings, and she had already developed strong opinions about parking lots she had not known existed a month ago.
The Orion mock-up had not become ordinary.
Emma had grown up in Houston, surrounded by people who treated spaceflight as both an extraordinary human achievement and a perfectly reasonable subject to discuss over backyard hamburgers. Her uncle had worked shuttle avionics. One of her mother’s closest friends had spent years supporting Mission Control. The parents of children she had gone to school with had built hardware, written procedures, trained crews, tracked weather, and occasionally disappeared from birthday parties because something had happened on orbit.
NASA had never felt distant to her.
It had always felt nearby, almost familial, an enormous complicated presence threaded through Houston life.
That familiarity had not diminished what it meant to stand inside a vehicle designed to carry human beings around the Moon. It had only made Emma understand more clearly how many ordinary workdays were required to accomplish something history would later describe in a sentence.
She walked around the lower platform, reviewing her notes while Daniel continued examining the seat.
“I’ll revise the run plan before lunch,” she said. “We can probably get it back on the schedule early next week.”
“You assume Luca is available.”
“Luca is always available when he thinks he gets to prove an engineer wrong.”
“That is not why I come here.”
The voice arrived from the entrance before Emma saw him.
Luca Parmitano stepped through the open access area with the unhurried confidence of someone who had entered enough mock-ups, simulators, capsules, laboratories, and aircraft to consider all of them extensions of the same workplace. He wore jeans, a dark polo, and the mildly pleased expression of a man who had arrived precisely in time to hear himself discussed.
Emma turned toward him.
“You spent forty minutes yesterday trying to demonstrate that the procedure was fine.”
“It was fine.”
“You caught your shoulder.”
“I adjusted.”
“You proved my point.”
“I demonstrated adaptability.”
“You complained for the rest of the run.”
“That was feedback.”
Emma folded her arms, and Luca smiled as though their disagreement had been arranged specifically for his enjoyment.
She had met him during her second week, when he had walked into a systems review, listened to her speak for several minutes, and then asked a question complicated enough that Emma had spent the next hour wondering whether she had answered it well. The following morning, he had found her near the mock-up and continued the conversation as though they had known each other for years.
He had an ease about him that made formality feel almost unnecessary. Emma understood why crews trusted him. He listened closely, disagreed without becoming dismissive, and possessed the irritating ability to make a serious point while looking as though he were merely passing through.
“Good,” she said. “You’re here. I need you for another suited ingress test.”
Luca stopped beside Daniel and looked toward the seat assembly.
“Today?”
“Next week.”
“Then why are you telling me now?”
“So you have several days to prepare emotionally.”
“I am always emotionally prepared.”
“That is not what I heard.”
Luca placed a hand over his chest with exaggerated offense.
Emma was already smiling when she noticed that he had not come alone.
The woman who stepped into view behind him did not announce herself or wait for the room to notice her. She simply followed Luca into the simulator area carrying a plain paper cup of coffee, her badge hanging from the waistband of her jeans and a pair of clear-framed glasses settled naturally on her face.
Her hair was longer than Emma had expected, though perhaps that was because so many of the images Emma remembered had been taken years earlier. The brown curls were left entirely to themselves, slightly flattened near one temple as though Christina had pushed her glasses into them several times throughout the morning. Her T-shirt was a muted charcoal gray and fitted closely through the shoulders and arms without looking styled for anything beyond an ordinary Friday at work.
She looked remarkably normal.
That was Emma’s first thought, and she disliked it immediately because it sounded ridiculous. Of course Christina Koch looked normal. Emma had spent her entire life around astronauts and had never believed that they wandered through Johnson Space Center glowing faintly or accompanied by orchestral music.
Still, there was a difference between understanding that intellectually and watching Christina Koch stand several feet away holding black coffee while Luca complained about a simulator procedure.
Emma had watched her launch.
She had watched Artemis II from her parents’ living room, seated on the same beige sectional where her family had followed missions for most of Emma’s life. She remembered her mother crying during the lunar flyby footage and her father insisting that he was not emotional while repeatedly clearing his throat.
She had watched Christina speak afterward about the mission, the crew, the teams on the ground, and the responsibility of carrying so much work with them. Emma had noticed the way she redirected praise toward engineers and flight controllers every time an interviewer tried to make the achievement solely about the astronauts.
None of that information proved useful now.
Christina glanced around the mock-up before looking at Emma, and Emma experienced the unnerving awareness that she had been staring for one second longer than politeness allowed.
Luca, predictably, noticed everything.
“Christina, have you met Emma?”
The question was casual enough that Emma could have convinced herself he had not detected the brief disruption in her otherwise functional brain, but the faint amusement at the corner of his mouth suggested otherwise.
Christina stepped forward first.
“I haven’t,” she said, extending her free hand. “Hi. Christina.”
Not Christina Koch.
Not Astronaut Koch.
Just Christina, as if there were any possibility Emma might fail to place her.
Emma transferred her tablet into her other hand and accepted the handshake.
“Emma Hart. It’s really nice to meet you.”
Her voice sounded normal. She considered this a meaningful professional accomplishment.
“You’re new to the Orion team,” Christina said.
“Three weeks on Monday.”
“How is it going?”
Emma could have given her the polished response she had used with nearly everyone who had asked that question. She could have said that the team had been welcoming, the work was exciting, and she was learning more every day.
Instead, because Christina was looking at her with a calm, direct attentiveness that made an empty answer feel strangely wasteful, Emma said, “I have learned enough to understand how much I don’t know, which I think is probably where I’m supposed to be.”
Christina smiled.
The expression changed her entire face. Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, with the left closing slightly more than the right, and the smile appeared to gather slowly before becoming impossible to contain.
“That sounds exactly right,” she said. “Anyone who thinks they understand Orion after three weeks should probably be removed from the building. It took me three years of training and a launch around the Moon,” she glanced toward Luca.
Emma laughed, some of the tightness inside her easing.
“I was hoping to make it at least a month before security got involved.”
“We can put in a good word.”
“Speak for yourself,” Luca said. “She is forcing me to repeat an ingress test.”
Christina looked toward him.
“Did you do it wrong?”
“I did it differently.”
“You did it wrong.”
Emma looked at Christina before she could stop herself.
“That is exactly what I said.”
Luca stared between them.
“This feels coordinated.”
“We just met,” Emma said.
“Apparently that was enough.”
Christina took a sip of her coffee, though Emma could see the smile remaining behind the rim of the cup.
Daniel explained the clearance concern, and the conversation shifted easily back toward the mock-up. Christina listened while he spoke, then turned toward Emma when he referenced her proposed test.
“What are you trying to capture?” she asked.
The question was straightforward, but the way Christina asked it made Emma understand that she was not being tested. She genuinely wanted to know.
Emma moved beside the platform and brought the diagram back up on her tablet.
“The procedure assumes a cleaner path than the crewmember will actually take,” she said. “The numbers work if the torso stays aligned and the shoulder rotates at the expected point, but Luca naturally shifted earlier because he was compensating for the restraint assembly.”
“I was comfortable,” Luca said.
“You complained that the seat was trying to dislocate your shoulder.”
“I was describing a sensation.”
Christina gave him a level look over the top of her glasses.
“A complaint, then.”
Emma pressed her lips together, trying not to laugh, before returning to the diagram.
“My concern is not that the clearance fails every time,” she continued. “It’s that it is inconsistent enough to become a suit or hardware issue under pressure. In training, he knows exactly what is around him, the mock-up is stationary, and nobody is asking him to move quickly. The actual situation gives us fewer advantages.”
Christina leaned closer to the screen, and Emma became intensely aware of the fact that the first woman to orbit the Moon was standing beside her while she explained a configuration problem.
She pushed the thought aside and continued.
“I want to test different body types and see whether the movement pattern repeats. If it does, we adjust the procedure or look at the seat position again. If it doesn’t, then I’ve wasted an afternoon and Luca gets to be unbearable about it.”
“I will be gracious.”
“No one believes that.”
Christina laughed, tilting her head back slightly before reaching out and catching Luca’s forearm for balance as though the reaction had moved through her faster than she expected. The gesture was brief and completely natural, but Emma noticed it because there was something unusually open in the way Christina laughed. She did not seem concerned with maintaining the composed expression Emma had seen in interviews. When something amused her, she gave herself over to it.
Luca looked at the mock-up again.
“She makes a good point,” Christina said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you arguing?”
“Because she enjoys it.”
Emma lifted one shoulder.
“He’s not wrong.”
Christina looked at her again, the smile returning more quietly this time.
There was nothing flirtatious in the moment. Emma knew that. Christina was friendly, and Emma had already heard enough from coworkers to understand that friendliness was her natural setting. She remembered names. She asked questions. She made people feel as though their work mattered because, to her, it did.
Still, Emma found herself holding Christina’s gaze for an extra beat before returning to the tablet.
They remained in the mock-up area for another fifteen minutes. Christina had come to ask Luca about an Artemis III training issue involving Orion procedures, though the discussion broadened quickly once Daniel joined in. Emma contributed when she had something useful to say and listened when she did not, which had always been her preferred way to work.
The initial shock of Christina’s presence gradually loosened its grip on her. Engineering restored the room to a scale Emma understood. There were drawings, constraints, questions, and people trying to find the least imperfect solution among dozens of possibilities.
At some point, she forgot to be nervous.
She challenged one of Luca’s assumptions. She asked Christina how the Artemis II crew had physically moved through a similar sequence during training. She disagreed when Christina suggested the issue might be addressed procedurally instead of structurally, then explained why.
Christina did not seem offended.
She looked pleased.
“That makes sense,” she said after Emma finished. “You would still be asking the crew to compensate for something the system created.”
“Exactly.”
“Then test it.”
Emma nodded once.
“I will.”
It was only after Christina and Luca stepped away from the platform that Emma realized she had just told Christina Koch she was wrong about Orion.
She decided not to examine that too closely.
“It was nice meeting you,” Christina said as she started toward the exit. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
Emma managed not to respond with anything embarrassing.
“You too.”
Christina lifted her coffee in a small farewell before following Luca into the hallway.
Emma watched them go for approximately half a second before forcing her attention back to the mock-up.
Daniel waited until they were fully out of sight.
“You handled that well.”
Emma looked at him.
“Handled what?”
“Meeting Christina.”
“I meet people all the time.”
“You forgot what you were doing with your hands.”
Emma glanced down at the tablet she was holding against her chest.
“I was reorganizing.”
“Of course.”
She pointed toward the seat assembly.
“Do you want the revised run plan or not?”
Daniel smiled and returned to work.
Emma did the same, though for the next several minutes she remained distinctly aware that Christina’s black coffee cup had left a faint circular mark on the edge of the workstation.
She told herself she noticed because it needed to be wiped away.
That was all.
---
Camille found her shortly after noon, standing at a counter outside the simulator area and eating almonds from a small plastic container while revising the test schedule.
Unlike Emma, Camille had worked at Johnson long enough to move through the buildings as if every hallway belonged to her. She arrived wearing navy trousers, a cream blouse, and the expression of someone carrying information she had been waiting impatiently to deliver. Her blonde curls fell around her face.
“You met Christina Koch.”
Emma did not look up from her tablet.
“Good afternoon to you too.”
Camille placed both hands on the counter.
“You met Christina Koch, and I had to hear about it from Luca.”
“That seems like an issue between you and Luca.”
“You did not text me.”
“It happened forty minutes ago.”
“You have sent me messages from meetings.”
“That was different.”
“You sent me six messages during your benefits orientation.”
“The health plan was confusing.”
Camille stared at her.
Emma finally looked up.
“Yes, I met her.”
“And?”
“And she came by to talk to Luca.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is exactly what happened.”
Camille pulled a stool closer and sat down.
Emma had known her for almost twelve years, which meant Camille could detect emotional dishonesty from a shift in punctuation. They had met through mutual friends in their early twenties, when Emma had still been in graduate school and Camille had been working her first communications job in Houston. Megan had joined their orbit not long afterward, and the three of them had moved through jobs, apartments, relationships, family emergencies, and increasingly elaborate birthday dinners together.
Camille narrowed her eyes.
“Was she nice?”
“Very.”
“Was she intimidating?”
“No.”
That answer came quickly because it was true. Christina had not been intimidating. Emma had been intimidated, which was not the same thing.
Camille noticed the distinction anyway.
“You were nervous.”
“I was not nervous.”
“You are eating emergency almonds.”
Emma looked down at the container.
“These are lunch almonds.”
“You only eat almonds when you forget to bring an actual meal.”
“I was busy.”
“You were flustered.”
Emma closed the lid and placed the container beside her tablet.
“She is Christina Koch.”
Camille’s expression softened into amusement.
“There it is.”
“I've followed her career.”
“We all did.”
“She orbited the Moon.”
“I am familiar with her résumé.”
“She also looks directly at you when she talks, which is more disorienting than it should be.”
Camille smiled slowly.
“Interesting.”
“Do not make it interesting.”
“I have not made anything interesting. You did that entirely on your own.”
Emma returned to the schedule, though the numbers in front of her had become less cooperative.
“She was wearing glasses,” she said.
Camille went still for one deliberate second.
Emma looked up.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That was a normal observation.”
“Of course it was.”
“She looks different in person.”
“Different how?”
Emma considered the question.
“More normal, I guess, although that sounds stupid.”
“It does.”
“Thank you.”
Camille reached for one of the almonds Emma had supposedly finished with.
“People always say that about astronauts. They expect them to be larger somehow.”
“It wasn’t that. She just looked like she had walked over from another meeting. Jeans, T-shirt, coffee, badge clipped at her waist. Her hair was curly and a little messy.”
“You noticed a lot.”
“I have eyes.”
“Apparently very functional ones.”
Emma gave her a warning look, which only encouraged her.
Before Camille could continue, Megan appeared at the far end of the hallway carrying a canvas tote bag and waving with more enthusiasm than the distance required.
Megan worked as a data engineer supporting mission systems, which meant she spent much of her day translating complicated information into forms that other complicated people could argue about. She was tall, perpetually energetic, and incapable of entering a conversation without assuming she had already been included.
“Are we still going out tonight?” she asked as soon as she reached them.
“Yes,” Camille said.
Emma looked at her.
“We had not actually decided that.”
“We decided yesterday.”
“We discussed the possibility.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘Friday cannot come fast enough.’”
“That was about the workweek ending.”
Megan dropped her tote onto the counter.
“It can be about two things.”
Camille turned toward her.
“Emma met Christina Koch.”
Megan’s attention shifted immediately.
“Today?”
“Apparently she wears glasses,” Camille said.
Emma closed her eyes briefly.
“I regret telling you anything.”
Megan leaned against the counter.
“How was she?”
“Smart. Friendly. Normal.”
“Hot?”
Emma opened her eyes.
Camille looked delighted.
“That is not what I said.”
“That was not my question.”
Emma picked up her tablet.
“I have work.”
Megan stepped sideways and blocked her escape without appearing to move intentionally.
“Emma.”
“I met her in the Orion simulator while discussing seat clearance.”
“That did not answer the question.”
Emma looked between both of her friends and understood that resistance would only prolong the conversation.
“She is attractive,” she said carefully. “Objectively.”
Camille smiled.
“Objectively.”
“Yes, I mean she is a fit astronaut...”
“That is usually how attraction works.”
Emma exhaled through her nose.
The truth was that she had not thought of Christina that way inside the simulator. Not exactly. Emma had registered the fitted shirt, the glasses, the curls, and the shape of her smile, but those details had arrived tangled with recognition and professional admiration.
She had spent years being attracted to women without knowing what to do with that attraction.
Men had been simpler, not because she preferred them, but because dating them followed a script she understood. A man asked her out. She accepted or declined. Expectations developed along familiar lines. She had been in relationships with men, slept with men, loved two of them seriously, and ended those relationships for reasons that had nothing to do with the quiet awareness that women also caught her attention.
With women, Emma’s attraction had always remained theoretical.
She noticed them. She wondered. She imagined, occasionally, what it would feel like to cross that line.
Then life continued.
She had never dated a woman, never kissed one, and never given herself a reason compelling enough to examine why.
Meeting Christina in a simulator was not a reason.
It was barely an event.
Emma turned her attention back to her friends.
“What time are we going out?”
Megan raised both arms in victory.
“Seven-thirty.”
“Where?”
“The Wildcatter.”
Emma knew the place, she had been once or twice in her twenties. It sat far enough from the most predictable after-work crowds to feel like a night out, but close enough to Johnson that half the room usually had some connection to NASA. There was a long bar, a patio, and live music on Fridays, with a broad open space in front of the stage that became a dance floor once enough people stopped pretending they were only there for drinks.
Camille pointed toward Emma.
“You are not wearing an Orion polo.”
“I was not planning to.”
“No button-up either.”
“I own other clothes.”
Megan exchanged a look with Camille.
“We have seen the hiking boots.”
“They are good boots.”
“They are excellent boots,” Camille said. “They are not coming dancing.”
A familiar voice entered the conversation.
“Who is dancing?”
Luca approached from the hallway with his hands in his pockets, his expression already suggesting that he considered himself invited to whatever answer followed.
Camille did not bother hiding her sigh.
“No one.”
“I heard dancing.”
“You heard a private conversation.”
“I heard a public word in a public hallway.”
Megan smiled.
“We’re going to the Wildcatter.”
Camille turned toward her.
“Megan.”
“What? Luca’s fun.”
“I am,” Luca agreed.
Emma laughed.
Camille looked at all three of them and recognized defeat.
“This was supposed to be a girls’ night.”
“I am very comfortable with women,” Luca said.
“That is not the qualification.”
“What is the qualification?”
“There isn’t one because you were not invited.”
Luca looked at Emma.
“May I come?”
Emma shrugged.
“I’m not the gatekeeper.”
He looked at Megan.
“I already invited you.”
Luca turned back to Camille with a satisfied expression.
“Democracy.”
“That is not democracy.”
“It is now.”
Camille gathered her phone and tablet from the counter.
“You are buying the first round.”
“Reasonable.”
“And you are not bringing twenty people from the astronaut office.”
Luca placed a hand over his heart.
“I would never.”
Camille stared at him.
Emma stared at him.
Megan stared at him.
Luca smiled.
“I will see who is free.”
“No,” Camille called after him as he started walking away.
He lifted one hand without turning around.
Emma watched him disappear down the hallway, then looked at her friends.
“He is absolutely inviting other people.”
“Obviously. That's how Luca works,” Megan said.
Camille shook her head.
“I should have chosen a bar farther away.”
Emma picked up her tablet again.
“You say that now, but you’ll be dancing with him by ten.”
“I have a boyfriend.”
“Your boyfriend is meeting us there.”
“I can still object on principle.”
Megan looped an arm through Camille’s and began steering her away.
“Seven-thirty, Emma. Wear something that does not have a mission patch.”
“I make no promises.”
“You own a black bodysuit,” Camille called over her shoulder.
Emma laughed.
“I am not wearing a bodysuit to a NASA happy hour.”
“It is not a NASA happy hour anymore.”
Emma looked down at her schedule after they left, but her concentration did not immediately return.
The afternoon stretched ahead of her with several hours of work, a revised test plan, and at least one meeting she had not prepared for as thoroughly as she preferred.
Friday night felt pleasantly distant.
By six-thirty, Emma was home in her apartment, standing in front of her closet with damp hair and a towel wrapped securely around her body, staring at the black bodysuit Camille had mentioned.
She reached past it for a fitted dark green top.