Over twenty-five thousand people had applied. She’d made it to the top 120, the first round of interviews, and into the top fifty for the second round. She’d been one of the youngest candidates there, at twenty-four up against plenty with more than a decade of experience on her. There were people with doctorates when the ink on Naomi’s master’s degree was barely dry.

Naomi hadn’t made the final cut. Others were better. That was that.

When the names were revealed, they were all men.

Valerie stood in the bright sun waiting for Naomi, brown curls tied back from the wind, eyes hidden by mirrored aviators, her transparent filter mask barely obscuring her nose and mouth. Valerie had gained her pilot’s license years ago and kept it up to date. She’d been Naomi’s instructor for some of her flight hours. Naomi had expected something large and loud, but when she saw the zero-G plane emblazoned with Hawthorne’s planet-and-star company logo parked on the runway, her mouth had dropped open.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Valerie said. “Being CEO has its perks. Though I’m not going to fly it.”

Their pilot walked across the tarmac, face half-hidden by her own shades and mask, but Naomi still recognised her. Jerrie Hixon—pilot to the Ares mission to Mars, the firecracker who would rip any interviewer to shreds if they made some tired reference to her red hair in the context of the red planet.

“I’m not your Mars pin-up. And the planet isn’t even red! Not truly,” Naomi had watched Hixon exclaim on a morning talk show with some far-too-perky hosts. “Under the dust it’s green and caramel and sand and grey. Not red.” She wasn’t invited on talk shows much anymore. She didn’t play the game.

Hixon was out from Houston to visit the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley for work, Valerie explained, and so she’d called in a favour. Later, Naomi would learn that Valerie was already courting Hixon for Project Atalanta. She’d spent over eight years gathering information on her proposed team before offering them jobs.

“No need to twist my arm to fly one of these on a day off,” Hixon said, grin splitting wide as she took in the gleaming craft. Civilians buying extortionate tickets for a ride on one of these was one of Valerie’s highest profit cash streams.

Naomi shook Hixon’s hand, but seeing the pilot didn’t help with her shame. Here was an inspiring woman with an illustrious career—she’d been to Mars, for Christ’s sake—and Naomi was the imposter who’d just been told she wasn’t good enough.