Ivo turned Maureen’s schematic over in his hands for the third time, hunting a shortcut that wasn’t there.
The part she needed a load-bearing strut for the launch scaffold, custom-profiled to mate with salvaged Resolute framing on one end and Jupiter 2’s reinforced keel on the other didn’t exist in any intact wreck on the planet, and they both already knew it.
He stood in Jupiter 2’s makeshift fabrication bay, a cleared corner of the cargo hold with a worktable bolted to the deck, machined tolerances marked in red, mass budget in grams.
“The mill we salvaged can’t hold the curve,” Maureen said, standing across the table.
Her voice was calm, factual.
“And we don’t have time to rig something that can. But you’ve been working metal by hand for two weeks, and some of what you’ve done shouldn’t be possible with the tools we have, so I thought I’d ask.” She tapped the schematic.
“Can you make this?”
Ivo looked at the drawing, then at the raw stock she’d provided a length of titanium alloy bar, good grade, sixty-seven percent pure by the Line’s quiet notation.
His molars ached.
“Yes,” he said.
Maureen nodded.
Pulled up a stool and sat.
“Good. I’ll watch.”
The words landed like a hand on his shoulder.
Ivo met her eyes.
She held the stare, steady the same gaze that had tracked his lucky finds, his convenient metallurgy, every time he’d called a load limit before she’d run the numbers.
“It’s on the critical path,” Maureen said.
“If it fails under load, people die during the launch. So I need to see it made, and I need to see it tested. You understand.”
“I understand.”
“Then show me.”
Ivo picked up the stock.
The Line painted it in amber numbers mass, composition, the map of its grain structure.
He turned it in his hands, feeling where it wanted to give, and the back of his throat tasted copper.
Doing this openly would prove every suspicion she’d filed away.
He couldn’t.
The part she’d designed required a curved profile no hand-tool could shape, a taper that would take a lathe he didn’t have, and a fix that would hold fifty kilos of dynamic load without cracking.
The only way to make it was the way he actually made things.
By eating the tolerances into his blood and bending the metal to match.
Ivo set the stock on the table, pulled on his gloves the scarred leather pair Judy had found him, because doing this bare-handed would make the heat too obvious and began.
He worked the curve first.
Pressure and heat, the slow drag of Melt through the alloy’s lattice, coaxing it into the arc Maureen’s schematic demanded.
The stock bent under his hands the way a green branch bent, smooth and wrong, and Ivo didn’t look up.
Behind him, Maureen said nothing.
The taper next.
He drew the surplus into himself, grams at a time the same pull he’d used on every over-specced blank since the crash.
The Line read it down: mass shedding, purity smoothing, the profile converging on her red lines.
His molars ached.
Under the leather, his palms burned.
Ivo rotated the stock, checked the curve against the schematic, and made the final correction a thumb’s pressure where the radius was tight, a pull that left the metal exactly where it needed to be.
He set the part down.
It gleamed under the cargo hold’s lights, perfect and impossible.
Maureen stood.
“What did you just do?”
“Shaped it.”
“With your hands.”
“And heat,” Ivo said.
“Controlled heat. I can feel where the metal wants to go, and I help it.”
Something in Maureen’s expression closed like a hatch.
“That’s not an answer. That’s a description of the result with the method left out.”
Ivo said nothing.
His hands were steady.
The part was made, and he’d given her what she needed.
She set the strut back on the table.
“We’re going to test it. If it holds, I’m going to install it, and it’s going to carry weight during a launch that kills us all if anything fails. So I’m asking you one more time. How did you do that?”
The cargo hold was quiet.
Somewhere above, John was running a weld check.
Penny’s voice drifted down from the upper deck, reading something aloud to Will.
“I eat metal,” Ivo said.
“I digest it, and then I can shape it. That’s how.”
She didn’t blink.
“How much?”
“Grams. Sometimes more.”
“And the cost?”
“Measured in blood toxicity,” Ivo said.
“Judy’s tracking it. It’s managed.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
She picked up the strut again, weighing it, and Ivo watched her do the math every convenient repair, every perfect weight estimate, every time he’d pulled a number out of the air that turned out true.
“How long?” she asked.
“Since the Resolute.”
She nodded once.
Set the strut down.
“We test it now.”
She rigged the load frame herself a salvaged hydraulic press bolted to the deck, the strut clamped at the engineered points, fifty calibrated kilos hung from the center and didn’t ask for help.
Lever.
Press.
A flex of a fraction of a millimeter under load, and it held.
Then she was down on one knee with a fingernail along the seam and an ultrasonic scanner sweeping every joint that didn’t exist, because there were no welds to find.
The scanner stayed green.
She powered it off.
Turned to him.
“It’ll hold.”
“Fifteen minutes. Your hands. No mill.” Each word landed like she was nailing a charge sheet to the wall.
“And you’ve been doing this the whole time.”
Ivo met her eyes.
“Yes.”
She set the scanner down.
Folded her arms.
For five seconds she simply studied him, every unasked question stacking up behind her stare like inventory she hadn’t logged yet.
Then she said, “I’m not going to ask you how this works. Not today.”
Ivo blinked.
“Right now,” Maureen said, “I need you to keep doing what you’re doing, because we have four days to launch and you just solved a problem I didn’t have an answer for. I need the how less than I need the who.” She picked up the strut, turned it in the light.
“But after we’re off this rock and the crisis is past, I will ask. And you will answer. Fully. Do we have an agreement?”
The cargo hold hummed.
The press ticked as it cooled.
“Yes,” Ivo said.
“Good.” She walked past him toward the ladder, carrying the strut.
At the base she paused, half-turned.
“Thank you. For making it. And for telling me the truth when I pushed.”
She climbed.
Ivo listened to her footsteps fade, then looked down at his hands.
They were steady.
Clean.
The gloves had a warm patch across the palms where the heat had bled through.
He’d just proven himself indispensable.
He’d just confirmed every suspicion Maureen Robinson had filed away for two weeks.
And she’d signed off on the reckoning and scheduled it for later, when later meant after the escape, when they were safe, when the crisis was past and he couldn’t hide behind being useful.
Ivo pulled off the gloves.
His molars still ached.
The raw stock’s leftover scrap sat on the table, a thumb-length cutting with decent mass.
He picked it up.
Let the Line read it.
Sixty-seven percent, four grams, digestible.
The ache sharpened tin and iron at the root of his tongue.
Later.
After the part held under real load.
After the launch was one piece closer to possible.
The scrap went back on the table.
Ivo walked out of the fabrication bay carrying the win and the sentence in the same breath, the escape on his shoulders and her promise in his ears.
Afterward, you will answer.
Ivo climbed the ladder toward the light and made himself call it relief that she’d waited and not dread, that waiting only ever compounded what the truth would cost.