Scion: Year of the Dragon

“Mountain doesn’t care how you feel about it, Key. You gotta stand on your skis either way.”

I wish I had some witty quote as a way to begin to talk about the year I blew out my knee, but I was never that great at remembering things I read and connecting them. In the rehab hospital, they had me meet with this therapist named Kate. She specialized in something called “narrative medicine,” which seemed like a silly and contrived concept at the time. Kate insisted I write in a journal every night, pen and paper, and she taught me to take control of my story—to reframe the narrative, as she’d put it. So I wrote about how the life I’d spent my entire life preparing for and working toward had evaporated in one unlucky turn. Somehow, as I kept writing that year, it became a story about me helping to create the most powerful space engine ever built. How’s that for reframing, Kate? So I guess we should start at the crash—early season, World Cup, Copper Mountain, Colorado, downhill, gate 13.

When I crashed, I felt everything. It’s still stunning to me how suddenly it unfolded. Even at 240 frames per second, my downhill ski washed out in the span of three frames. I was perfectly positioned in the middle-C of the turn, just approaching the gate. A few frames after my downhill ski washed out, I was upside down, flying through the air at over sixty miles per hour, headed for what was the most brutal-looking crash in a downhill event in living memory. My body ragdolled in a way that sent mothers rushing to cover the eyes of their children. But that horrific sequence of the accident wasn’t what had ruined my future. Spectators who witnessed the accident likely assumed that the small mercy was that I had to have been unconscious before my knee exploded. Maybe only my sister Chiara would understand: world-class skiers like us feel the snow faster than an ordinary person can comprehend. I registered every microsecond of that fall, and it wasn’t the crash that destroyed my knee. As I turned over backwards—and this is the most innocuous-looking moment of the footage—the tail of my left ski touched the snow so briefly that it’s almost imperceptible on one frame. That touch twisted my knee in a sudden, near-instantaneous jerk, torquing my leg in a perfectly destructive motion. And that was it. I remember having a crystal clarity about those microseconds after that ski touched the snow, flying backwards knowing that it was over, thinking, That’s it, Gio. Your whole life. I knew I would never ski again. My knee was already gone before my body even hit the snow. It only got worse from there. That knowledge, that pain, and the additional understanding that there was still a terrible crash to come. Get ready, Gio, I thought. Here it comes. Six broken ribs. A collapsed lung. My shoulder in pieces. None of that mattered. My entire future had exploded in that single frame of video, from a touch of the ski that looked harmless to the untrained eye.

I didn’t lose consciousness after ragdolling across the hardpack. I was alert as patrol untangled my shattered body from the safety net, backboarded me, and skied me down to the base where I was helicoptered down to Denver. I was perfectly calm, clear-eyed and responsive, so much so that rescue was concerned by my demeanor. I didn’t feel that much pain, though, probably from the adrenaline, and I didn’t go out until they put me under for surgery.

The doctors didn’t touch my shoulder in that first surgery, which was to stabilize my battered rib cage and restore blood flow to my left foot; they also made the first fruitless attempt to save the tibial plateau in my left knee.

Mom and Chiara were there when I woke up. In that moment, Chiara was probably more crushed than I was, because she thought I didn’t know yet. I could see it in her eyes. I saved them the angst and let them know where my expectations lay.

“Were they able to save my leg?” I asked.

I was lying flat in a neck brace and couldn’t see my foot, and was so drugged up I couldn’t feel anything.

“For now, my Gio,” Mom said in English.

“Dad’s got an orthopedist flying in from Zurich,” Chiara said. “He and Stephano are in the air now. Nadia’s coming in tomorrow, first thing in the morning.”

It hurt to breathe, much less talk.

“It’s okay, Key,” I told her.

“You were winning, Gio,” she said. She was rubbing my hand, moving my broken shoulder.

“Other hand,” I told her, gesturing with my head.

The next several weeks after the initial crash were brutal. I had nine surgeries that month, most on my leg and shoulder, and had I not been adamant about the knee replacement, it likely would have been many more. It was difficult for me to get it through Dad and Stephano’s heads that I’d be lucky to walk again, much less ski. It’s tough to convince a Hatton that money can’t buy everything, especially when you have enough money to buy the best hospitals, much less the best doctors in them. No amount of nanotech or stem cell treatments or even the greatest artist of a surgeon would ever un-screw what had happened to my knee.

When they showed me the hardware before the replacement, I thought the knee looked remarkably organic. No barbaric metals or fittings, just smooth, glass-like nano-polymers. It was never going to stand up to Super G, though. For Dad, it was like throwing in the towel. I think Nadia and Stephano were both more worried about what would become of Gio’s life after skiing. What do you do when the life planned for you is over at twenty-one? I was about to find out. So it was from early December into January that my body got rebuilt in Denver, and I remember it was roughly Chinese New Year when they finally discharged me to rehab, because my physical therapist on the ortho floor in Denver was Chinese. I remember her telling me as I was being packed up to fly out, “Gio, the year of the yellow dragon is a good year for recovery. You’re very strong.”

I didn’t feel very strong.

Stephano came back from Germany to fly with me from Denver to Clearwater. They had to drug me to high heaven to get me comfortable on the couch on Dad’s plane, but I knew it would be better to be close to home.

“Brought you a present,” Stephano told me halfway through the flight, flashing files from his watch into my tablet.

“Something tells me that’s not going to be light reading.”

“Engineering courses. Time to put all that math tutoring you got at Holderness to work.”

It was Stephano’s not-so-subtle way of welcoming me to the family business.

“I got a lot more gate training in New Hampshire than math.”

“I saw your scores. Time to sharpen your mind and put that to work instead.”

“Nice,” I said. “Mind if I rehab my leg a little first?”

“You can do both, Gio,” Stephano said. “We’re going to need you in the coming years. Dad’s got a lot on his plate. Plus, when you’re not in PT, you’re just going to be sitting on your ass or lying in bed. Doing something useful will help get your mind in the right place.”

Stephano was eight years older than me, and he had that typical first-child, weight-of-the-world complex that drove me and Nadia crazy when we were younger. Not only did he drop the engineering courses on my tablet but he had a schedule, a dropbox for coursework, and an AI guide from the Dresden branch to check my work and jump on tutorials at the push of a button. I don’t think he’d have understood it if I told him I might like a week to contemplate my future, maybe sit on a beach and reflect on the life I’d lost for a day or so. Pain or pain medicine be damned; in his mind, I was perfectly capable of doing math.

I humored Stephano. Sure, I was angry and frustrated and depressed, but I was also circumspect enough to realize that nobody was going to feel sorry for me—a Hatton? “Oh, poor Gio, your professional skiing career that your dad’s money bought didn’t pan out? Pardon me while I weep for the cruelty of this harsh world.”

So when I got to rehab, I did math to keep Stephano happy, and whenever Chiara was struggling enough to ask for my help, I looked at her GS suit’s motion capture and her VR footage from Holderness. Struggling was a relative term for Key that year. That was her year sixteen season, and she’d gotten a lot stronger and a lot faster. She was skiing scared, though, jumpy at speed, which she’d never shown any sign of before. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why. “It was a fluke,” I had to tell her, over and over. “You can’t be afraid of crashing.” She would swear that she wasn’t, but I could see it even though she was killing every high school girl in New Hampshire. Key wasn’t ready for the top college girls yet, much less the women. If she was even a little scared, the courses would eat her alive at the next level, never mind the competition. She was starting to get noticed, though, turning the right heads.

I spent six weeks in the Palm End rehab hospital in Clearwater. I’d done my share of pool work in my ski training, so that part of rehab felt like familiar territory, even if my motivation was different now. Each day was filled with boredom, pain, and frustration, and what slow, incremental progress I did make was hard to place as any true gain. I’d never get back what had been lost. I was miserable.

A week or so into my rehab sessions they sent me to the narrative therapist, Kate, who gave me a journal and yet another task: catalog my story, begin to rewrite it; figure out the story of Gio Hatton and his bum knee; figure out how I wanted it to start, not end. The crash was the beginning of a new story, not the end, she told me. It was hard to feel progress, though, and it was beginning to annoy me how I could feel both a deep sense of self-pity and be disgusted by it at the same time. Those first few journal entries were rough.

My leg ached. My mind fought against itself. Mom came by every day for lunch to try and cheer me up, which was also exhausting, because I felt obligated to put on a brave face. The only thing I was even remotely excited about was Chiara’s progress. She’d done well enough at Eastern Regionals to qualify for Nationals in GS and Slalom, but I didn’t like what I’d seen from the training footage she sent me of her Super-G at Mittersill, and again it was the same thing. Skiing scared.

“You’re too square,” I told her when we talked early in the week. “You’re skiing like a robot, Key.”

“Grant says it’s faster.”

“Counter high and hard and come square in transition. You’re too flat to the gate, especially on your left.”

“Fast enough to win at Burke.”

“Not at Nationals, Key. Attack more, especially high in the turn.”

She ended up doing well enough, both at Mittersill and Nationals, to get invited to train with the D-teamers at Copper in the fall. It was a huge step up, and nice to see. Kate asked me a few times if I was trying to live vicariously through Chiara. She thought there was something going on psychologically with Chiara’s skiing, but it wasn’t anything beyond my desire to support my sister. Chiara had been there for me more than anyone in Denver. Called me nearly every night from New Hampshire. I was going to coach her if it helped.

Key came down to Clearwater to visit once her ski season ended, and by that time I was walking with an exo-brace and a cane—limited distances, of course, but walking. The hospital was getting ready to discharge me. Dad was still in Germany, but Chiara told me during one of her visits to the hospital that Stephano was coming back to check in on me.

“He can send me more homework from Germany,” I said.

“He probably thinks you won’t do it if he doesn’t assign it in person,” Chiara said.

She was sitting with me as I ate lunch between pool sessions.

“Are you good, Gio?” she asked.

I thought she was talking about my half-empty lunch tray.

“It’s crap, but I’m eating okay,” I said.

“No, I mean...you know what I mean.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “No, Key. No. I’m not good. But I’m working with a therapist here, trying to be a little better today than yesterday. Good doesn’t just happen, apparently.”

“I still cry when I think about it,” she said.

“I don’t, Chiara. It was just a crash. I’m going to be fine.”

The following week, I was discharged. My plan was to continue rehabbing at the house in Clearwater until I could walk without the exo-brace. I’d figure out my next steps from there. Stephano showed up driving a gas-powered sports car that he’d borrowed from some gearhead engineer friend over at A & A. He insisted on taking me for a ride down to St. Pete.

“You know how to drive that thing?” I asked him.

“I took classes in Germany,” he said. “Autobahn.”

I still had the cane, but I was slowly trying to ditch the exo-brace, and my right arm was out of the sling by that point. He must have thought I looked okay. He drove like a maniac, like every twentieth-century macho movie star trying to prove how rebellious he was. He kept looking over at me.

“Watch the damn road!” I yelled at him.

After a few times looking over at me, he caught on to the fact I wasn’t loving the experience. Before too long, he’d pulled over.

“What’s up, Gio? You okay?”

I shook my head at him.

“It’s not the speed, is it? I figured it might be fun for you, after being cooped up in the hospital.”

“I appreciate it, Steph. It’s not the speed. It’s just...” I hated to admit it to him, but I had to own it. “It hurts. My knee still hurts. It’s too much.”

He looked so dejected. “Gio, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t even...”

“It’s fine,” I told him. “I’ll get there. It hasn’t even been, what, four months?”

“Stupid,” he said, shaking his head.

He slowed down after that, and the ride wasn’t so bad. We ended up having lunch in St. Pete and then heading back home by way of the Space Ladder. He had something he wanted to show me over at the A & A labs.

We ended up getting keyed into a gigantic hangar that looked like some top-secret annex to the Air and Space Museum. There were full-size rocket engines all along the concourse. I was happy that Stephano encouraged me to wear my exo in, because the facility was enormous. We walked around for about a half hour before we came to Dad’s engines. I hadn’t taken nearly the interest in that stuff as Stephano and Nadia did, but I’d certainly heard enough talk around dinner tables to know some of the particulars—which engines were on which types of ships, their power sources, the basics behind the physics of each. It was pretty cool to see how many of Dad’s engines were out in space at that moment, moving ships of all different types around the solar system. I was getting tired, though, from all that walking.

“I want you to see one more,” Stephano said. “You okay?”

I shrugged. The knee was starting to ache, but I tried to play it off like I was fine.

That final walk had to have been a quarter mile, through an open door and into another hangar, across that hangar and into a secure area.

“This one’s secret,” Stephano said. “There’s stuff even we don’t know about this project.

I knew enough to know that the engine in that back room wasn’t functional—at least not yet. It was a life-size model suspended from a four-story scaffolding. The biggest rocket we’d seen all day.

“What does it look like to you?” Stephano said.

“Like a bigger A-3,” I said.

“Good. Go on, Gio.”

“Magnetic. Looks like probably plasma-driven fusion engine, or at least aspiring to be. What’s it pushing?”

“Nothing yet. That’s the A-5. Next generation of fusion propulsion.”

Stephano’s face absolutely lit up. He looked at that engine like it was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen under a perfect sunset, with the same awe tourists on the beach in Tampa gawk at the Space Ladder, disbelieving that such a wonder of engineering genius could exist.

“It’s beautiful, right?”

“I guess,” I said. “How far along is it?”

“Not nearly far enough,” he said. “It needs to get about a third more powerful and twice as compact. Mr. Hartsock has stringent specifications we’re going to need to meet. I’m not even sure Dad has all the details on the ship, but it’s high priority and big money, brother. Dad’s got half of Dresden working on it.”

“You and Nadia too?”

“And you if you’re up for it,” Stephano said. “When you’re ready, of course.”

I sighed. I figured he’d been up to something all day, the car ride, the grand tour.

“Humor me, brother,” Steph said. “I want you to close your eyes for a minute.”

“Really, Steph?”

“Really. Please, Gio.”

I shook my head.

“Do you remember Park City a couple winters ago?”

“Nationals,” I said. “I remember. Week after Christmas.”

“The night before your race, after we’d eaten, you disappeared and I went looking for you.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said.

“I found you in the garage in the hotel, working under a florescent light, probably forty degrees. I leaned against the wall, drinking a beer, watching you tune your GS skis; probably fifteen minutes I stayed there, just to see if you’d even look up. You never did. You looked at those skis the way Dad and I look at engines. It’s in you. The way you tune skis, the way you skied, the technical mindset, the genius of it. You’re an engineer whether you see it or not, Gio. Close your eyes and go back there. Picture those skis.”

“Steph?”

“Gio. Please, humor me. Like your lady at the hospital and your journals. We’re going to visualize.”

I’m not sure whether he was pulling it out of his ass or what, but I did humor him, and I stood there with my eyes closed, and in about thirty seconds, I could picture that cold, musty hotel garage in Park City like I was back there. The smell of the wax. The heat of the iron. The way the metal of a sharp ski pulls against the skin of your palms. Brushing the base to a perfectly smooth black.

“Picture that black,” he said. “Now make it darker and endless. Perfect blackness into the infinite. Picture a ship that’s a mile long. That A-5’s nozzle is suspended in front of you, housed in a magnetic shield the shape of a bell nearly four stories tall. The rocket is getting ready to burn, starting to emit a warm orange glow. You don’t want to be floating behind her, Gio, because when she goes off, she’s going to spit a stream of plasma hotter than the sun. The magnetics alone, just the force to contain that stream in the cone could launch a stone from here to Germany in less than a minute.”

“You’ve done the math on that, Stephano?”

“Shut up and visualize, Gio. Visualize the hyperbole and forget the math. Think of the power—the most violent eruption of the world’s volcanoes channeled to a single point the width of a firehose, streaming through the blackness of space, pushing a vessel the size of a cruise ship past Jupiter at speeds you can’t imagine. Can you see it?”

I couldn’t see it quite as clearly as the skis, but I thought I could understand his obsession a little better.

“That’s what this A-5 is, brother. That’s what we do, what we build. If we can get you to look at that rocket with even a fraction of the intensity you tune your damn skis...”

I opened my eyes, and found him looking up at the machine, or at least the model, the same look of awe in his eyes.

“It’s going to be the greatest engine ever built,” he said.

“That’s what you and Dad said about the last one.”

“Exactly,” he said. “You’re catching on.”

I was pretty quiet on the way back to the house, thinking about all the years I’d spent skiing, assuming it was my way out. I was pondering all the energy I’d put toward that idea of escaping Hatton. Working with Stephano and Nadia and Dad—was that such a terrible fate? I guess I’d thought skiing was cooler, a way to carve out my own path. But it never was, not really. Nobody sniffed the level me and Key were skiing at without living on a mountain, private schooling and coaching at every level, gate training nearly every day, the gear, alignment specialists, bootfitters. I guess I’d saved Dad a few thousand on ski techs by learning to tune my own skis at Holderness. But nobody really carves their own path without help somewhere.

So what does a rich, bum-kneed, former ski-racing son-of-a-fusion rocket engineer do when he gets called to Dresden to help his siblings oversee the design of the greatest engine ever built? He finishes his outpatient rehab as best he can, he shifts his frame a little each night in his journals, and when May rolls around and it starts to get ungodly hot in Florida, he trusts his big brother and hops on a plane.

I’d been to Germany probably ten times that I could remember as I was growing up. My German sucked, and frankly, I wasn’t thrilled about moving there, but everyone in the family was supportive, and my physical therapy team in Florida was happy enough with my progress that they were willing to direct my recovery remotely.

Initially, Stephano set me up in his guest bedroom while they were setting up my flat. I enjoyed being around Stephano and Nadia daily—for the first time really since the three of us were kids.

The problem was the work, or, more rightly, the office. When Stephano brought me over, I had no idea what he envisioned for me at Hatton. I’d been taking college-level courses while skiing, and the stuff he had me working on in rehab was advanced stuff, but it was entry-level coursework for their new-hire engineers. Stephano had me in with the A-5 development team immediately, though. Deep waters. I barely understood half the things the engineers talked about when they had the courtesy to speak English for me. I didn’t enjoy feeling like the dumbest person in the room.

“It’ll take some time to adjust,” Stephano kept telling me, and he caught a vibe off me that the workplace wasn’t all that welcoming. The hostility wasn’t ever direct, because none of them were stupid enough to denigrate Rainer Hatton’s youngest son.

“You let me know if anyone steps out of line,” Stephano told me.

“Yeah, that’s just what I need, Steph, big brother stepping in. That’ll prove it’s not nepotism.”

“You’re smart, Gio,” he told me. “Every single person who’s new to this company goes through an adjustment period. You shouldn’t need to take any crap while you’re learning.”

The best thing I could compare it to was being picked last for a team on the playground when you were a kid. Every one of those engineers knew they didn’t want me there, and I knew it too. I was a time-waste, a liability. The only question was whether they could eventually turn me into an asset, beyond whatever future familial influence I might hold.

Meanwhile, they had a rocket to build that year, and it wasn’t going well. The model Steph had theatrically taken me to visit in Florida was a dead print, a slug of a theoretical engine that didn’t exist. A & A had set the deadline for specs of a working engine at the end of the year. Otherwise, they were going to seek other submissions and pull funding. With current technology, no design existed that could make a fusion rocket that powerful and compact.

The engineers were testing different fusion reactors, trying to figure out how to scale them up within the limited space of the ship’s fuselage, which we knew little about beyond dimensions and mass. In order to help bring me up to speed, a pair of young engineers, Ilsa and Jonas, got stuck with me. I think they didn’t know what to make of it, because they both understood that a friendship with one of the Hattons wasn’t going to hurt their careers, but being seen as too friendly by the senior engineers also had its implications.

Ilsa would send me files on designs that had been proposed and discarded, and occasionally, when I could pull him away from his work, Jonas and I would go over the positive aspects and the critical flaws that ultimately brought about the team abandoning those designs. Dad had a thing about AI in his design process, because he’d been burned by critical blind spots in early projects. It was a lot of extra work, but I think that was Dad’s point. It was why A & A came to Hatton—old-school, hard-nosed German engineering ethic. I was feeling very American in Dresden.

After about six weeks, Chiara came over for summer break. By that point I was walking again, almost pain free. I still had to wear a conventional brace, but I’d ditched the cane, and the limp was getting progressively slighter. Seven months out from the accident, Chiara and I took a walk in Lingner Park by the Elbe on a warm, overcast day. It was the first time I’d seen her since Clearwater, and that last few months of the ski season had changed her physically. The contrast between my atrophied legs and her lower body—the developing physique of a world-class ski racer—it was striking to me. She didn’t want to talk about training, though.

“I can’t believe you’re walking, Gio,” she said at one point. “I don’t know if you know how close you were to losing your leg that first operation.”

“I know,” I told her. “I talked with Mom and the orthopedist.”

“It’s what, six months now?”

“Seven, maybe. Bloody miracle, right?”

“Are you okay, Gio?” she asked me. “I know everyone says you’re doing well, including you, but they don’t really know what you lost. You’re really never going to be able to ski again?”

“I don’t think so, Key. Maybe real slow recreational stuff with a brace someday, but not the way you mean it.”

She sighed. “What happened, Gio?”

“Fluke,” I said. “Ski lost the edge at the wrong time. I should have just washed out like we’ve both done a thousand times before.”

“That’s what scares me. That I could do everything right...”

“You could also do everything right and win, Key. That’s a lot more likely than what happened to me. There’s no making sense of it.”

Suddenly she was looking at me with tears in her eyes.

“Chiara, I’m okay,” I told her.

She melted. She began crying so hard I thought she might fall over. It was the last thing I expected, and suddenly I found myself in the middle of the park consoling my sister as she cried in a way I’d never seen from her, maybe ever.

“I was so scared,” she kept saying. “Gio.”

I wasn’t sure what had brought all that out of her, but I wrote about it in my journal that night, which made me ponder it in the weeks that followed. We all lose our heroes at some point, or at least we realize they’re as fragile and flawed as we are. I guess I didn’t realize how much I’d been that for her. She was just this goofy middle-school kid following me and my friends around the mountain, struggling to keep up. That more than anything was what stuck with me writing in my journal, that I’d need another way to be heroic. I skied like a god, and I was going to have to let that go, figure out how to limp my way through life in a way that made my sister proud each day. That was that.

After Key left that summer, I found myself feeling a bit lonely, so I started reaching out to Jonas and Ilsa outside work. I didn’t really know anyone in Dresden outside the family, and Nadia and Stephano were so busy it was difficult to get them to come out for a beer. So in August, me, Jonas, and Ilsa started meeting in the beergarden, most of the time just to hang out, but occasionally, we’d talk about the project. At that point, the senior engineers were exploring materials limitations. The real problem was that the fusion reactor was still too large and the nozzle also too large, but compressing the rocket further made it physically impossible to generate a strong enough magnetic field to contain the plasma stream. The lead engineers thought they would be able to find a materials solution. I didn’t know that they couldn’t, but the attitude around the office made me pessimistic. They sure didn’t act like they were on the right track. I reviewed the flawed designs with Jonas and Ilsa. What seemed obvious right away was that there were two paths—the materials solution, which the senior engineers surmised was most solvable, and the second path they’d already dismissed as impossible: multiple engines. They’d worked through the multi-engine solution for nearly a year before finally giving it up as too complex. As Ilsa and Jonas explained it, a reactor design powerful enough to fire two plasma nozzles with the necessary ejection force didn’t exist. “What about multiple reactors too?” I asked them. It was just me being ignorant, asking to be educated. “Two reactors, two nozzles? Should work, no?”

It seemed a simple enough question, and I knew there had to be an answer that explained why so many intelligent engineers hadn’t thought of the obvious. Ilsa and Jonas weren’t able to answer, but thought it was a question of orientation and plasma flow. The only way to fit two powerful enough reactors into the fuselage was to stack them, which they guessed would create a critical imbalance in the plasma flow.

It was a curious enough question that I asked Jonas to run simulations on it—to disregard the plasma flow problem—two reactors, two engines. Would the numbers work?

About a week later, he came back to me with the result. Reactor size came in well within A & A’s specifications, and the engine system was significantly more powerful than they were asking it to be. So I asked Ilsa and Jonas whether we should take it to the senior engineers.

“We must be missing something,” Jonas told me. “It’s something big enough and obvious enough they’re going to laugh us right out of the room.”

“They can laugh at me all they want,” I told him. “Or they can explain why it’s stupid. Either way, we get an answer.”

“Maybe you can do this,” he said. “It’s our career too, though.”

“Tell them you’re humoring the dumb skier.”

“There’s a problem with that, Gio,” Ilsa told me. “I think everyone knows you well enough by now to know you’re not stupid.”

“Let’s go get an answer then,” I said.

The only time we had access to the senior engineers was during the design meeting each Thursday. It was run by the project manager who worked for Nadia, so I didn’t feel the same kind of pressure Ilsa and Jonas did about going into that meeting with the objective of interrupting. But then you get in the room with fifty people who all seem much smarter than you, and you know the second you speak up, all eyes will be on you. But I thought about Chiara and that moment we’d had in the park. I’d told her myself: you can’t ski scared. What the hell? Was it going to be worse than anything that had happened to me in December? What could these people do to me? I raised my hand toward the end of the meeting, stood up, and politely asked someone to help me understand what we’d missed.

I realized as I started talking that I’d touched a nerve. Apparently, that debate had been hashed and re-hashed over months. It’d been fiery and time-consuming, at times quite heated, and finally put to bed at great effort and expense. It was like I’d asked to exhume the body from a homicide everyone thought had been solved. Everyone looked at the project manager after I’d finished, wondering how he’d deal with the now-exhumed corpse I’d unwittingly dragged into the room.

“It took us nearly a year to discover that idea was the fastest way to blow a spaceship halfway to Jupiter from here, Mr. Hatton,” he joked. “But it is a good question we struggled with for a long time.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I didn’t mean to derail any progress we’re making. I’m just hoping we might get an explanation on why the group ultimately decided to go in another direction.”

“I can assign someone to answer your questions,” he said, “in a more appropriate venue.”

I had a sense right there that I’d hit on the solution. I had no idea how, but something about the passions dredged up in that room told me it was worth digging into.

That weekend, Nadia let me in on some of the details that Ilsa and Jonas hadn’t been privy to. That debate had divided the whole development team for over a year, leading to the dismissal of the previous project manager. We’d lost sixteen engineers who resigned in protest, which was how Jonas and Ilsa ended up being transferred in. The whole thing had been a mess.

“Way to stick your finger right in the socket, Gio,” Nadia said.

“What if we got it wrong?” I asked her.

“Then it was an expensive mistake.”

“It’d be more expensive if we’re barking up the wrong tree now, no?”

Nadia suggested I drop it. I still didn’t understand the problem, so I went and had a conversation with Dad. If anyone was going to have a grip on the problem it was Rainer Hatton, Mr. Space Engine. I actually caught him in a pretty good mood that Wednesday at home. I came well-prepped, following a discussion with Ilsa, Jonas, and one of the senior engineers. Dad seemed genuinely pleased I was invested in the problem, which meant I was invested in the family business, which he’d probably figured had about as much chance of happening as the A-5 itself at that moment.

Dad explained it better. It was a problem of balance, and the danger was backpressure. If the plasma didn’t flow out evenly and consistently, pressure would build up in the system behind the nozzles, leading to an explosion when the reactors fired. There needed to be balance between the two reactors, which was impossible, because the top reactor’s plasma stream would cool at a faster rate than the lower one, because it was positioned much farther from the nozzles. That temperature difference with the plasma being ejected at those speeds would cause backpressure, then an eruption.

“That seems like it’s a solvable problem,” I said.

“It might be, Gio,” he said. “But probably not by January.”

“A lot can happen in a year,” I said.

“You’d know,” he said. “Anyway, keep thinking about it.”

I woke up the following morning with the answer. I didn’t exactly know it was the answer, but it was. I was in that state when you wake up and are still half dreaming. The Swiss orthopedist Dad had flown into Denver to save my knee, Dr. Herzweiler, was struggling to explain the vascular system of my knee to me. It was a replay of that same actual conversation when he’d tried to explain how blood should flow to the knee. He’d used the word “anastomoses” like ten times, and I didn’t quite follow what the hell he was talking about. I had to look the word up later. It occurred to me in that dream-like state that there’d never been a more efficient closed system for moving plasma around than the cardiovascular system. And that was how it was oriented, according to Dr. Herzweiler. Anastomoses. Interconnected loops upon loops that created redundancies: in the case one capillary got blocked, the blood would find a way around. I didn’t know how to do it, but I knew how it should be oriented, like a knee. The two reactors like halves of a joint, the output between them, looping out and around the bottom engine toward the two nozzles, redundant loops in the system allowing for backpressure to dissipate. I drew about ten terrible diagrams in my fourth therapy journal.

I showed it to Ilsa and Jonas quietly, and they were excited enough about the possibility to begin to run design sims and numbers. After the idea hadn’t fallen apart in two weeks, we discussed it with the senior engineer who’d talked with us earlier. He said it looked promising enough to prototype. Then the prospect got serious.

I got deep into the details, and didn’t properly come up for air for most of October. By the time the team was testing prototype designs in VR, it was mid-November, Mom and Chiara were out in Colorado, and I was trying to decide whether to fly back with Stephano for Thanksgiving. I could have counted on one hand the number of times I’d even spoken to Key since her visit that summer. She’d been training non-stop for early-season out at Copper, and I’d been too deep in work, but as much as I wanted to see her, I decided to stay in Dresden. I wanted to see the prototyping through, to learn how the team developed the models, to understand the details the way Dad did.

When Stephano got back the first week of December, we didn’t have much time to talk before he had to jet off to Russia again, but he told me explicitly to call Chiara. Apparently, it hadn’t gone so well out at Copper.

She was back at Holderness by the time I called, but she didn’t want to talk about anything but Colorado. She was in tears about two sentences in. The technicians had messed up her boots. The coaches were clueless from what it sounded to me. She couldn’t even get her skis tuned right. The D-team girls were also pretty nasty to her from what it sounded like. I didn’t really know any of the women’s coaches at that level, but I offered to make a few calls on her behalf, for what it was worth. Then she said something I hadn’t expected.

“Matteo told me I could come to Cervinia in January if things weren’t working out,” she said.

The Italians had made me the same offer a few times, but I’d thought it was a joke, and I’d already raced for the States by that point. Chiara was seriously considering it, though.

“Key, you probably haven’t spent six months your entire life in Italy. Are you seriously thinking about it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can spend the next ten years in the Alps training. Then I’ll be Italian enough.”

“We’re American, though.”

“And Italian.”

“Mom’s Italian.”

“Dad’s German. So what? I don’t want to ski for them.”

“It’s more than the ski team, Key, it’s the country too. And if you can’t beat those girls racing as an American, what makes you think you’ll do any better as an Italian?”

“I feel like it’s right, Gio.” she said. “They want me.”

I asked her to sleep on it. I slept on it. She sent me her VR footage and her motion capture, and despite the slew of problems that had brought her to tears, she wasn’t that far off. It was going to happen for her. My only question was when, and possibly whether the Italians were trying to open the door early to poach her away. Chiara needed to be ready.

It occurred to me over the course of those couple weeks that the anniversary of my crash was approaching. I knew the date. I didn’t care to make anything of it. A lot had happened, and there was a lot to be optimistic about. I was walking almost normally, for one.

I got word from Stephano that Mom and Key were coming over for Christmas. We were all going up to Bologna to have Christmas with Mom’s family. I had a suspicion that Chiara wasn’t going back to Holderness after New Year’s. She told me to wait to talk about it in person. So Christmas day, after a typically-eternal dinner with the extended family. Key and I stepped out for a walk, nearly too fat and happy to actually walk.

She’d made her decision. She was shooting for her first start with the Italian team the third week of January in Zermatt. After New Year’s, she was heading up to Cortina to get oriented with the team and get her gear dialed in. Mom and Dad had given her their blessing, and Key was sure it was the right path.

We walked for a while and talked about it, and I hugged her and told her I’d be there in a second if she needed anything. Then we had a great week with Mom’s family in Bologna.

When I got back to Dresden, the A-5 team was reviewing the final sim work before submitting the design to A & A for approval. Nadia told me to expect to hear about it sometime in February. After a fair amount of initial tension adopting the new design concept, the entire department had come around and worked through the deadline. Both the math and the modeling surpassed A & A’s demands. It was still somewhat surreal that I’d had a hand in it, almost like my entire time in Dresden was part of that weird dream about knee surgery. The department waited each day for news from A & A. In the meantime, the team was pivoting from design concept to discussions with the metallurgists and machinists and engineers who would make the A-5 a real working engine.

Chiara was keeping me updated on her training each night. It was going much better than Copper, but in her words, “not great.” She sent me footage intermittently, but I couldn’t nearly give it the attention I wished I could. As the event neared, her messages grew increasingly anxious, until finally, the week before, she called me. The techs couldn’t get her skis right, or at least that’s what she was saying. I wasn’t sure whether she was just freaking out about the pressure or there was actually something wrong with her gear. I kept trying to tell her it was going to be all right, that it was just skiing, the same skiing she’d been doing her whole life.

“Will you come, Gio? I want you to be my tech. Just this once. Please? Nobody knows me better than you do.”

“Thursday?” I asked, referring to the start of training.

“Race runs on Saturday,” she said.

“Make sure Matteo’s okay with it. I don’t want to step on any toes.”

“He’ll be fine,” she said.

I was just about to let Stephano and Nadia know my plans when Dad called. He never called me. He never called anyone. A & A had approved the design for the A-5 and were sending a group to meet with our team the following week.

“I’ll be in Zermatt tuning my sister’s skis,” I told him.

He laughed. “That’s perfect, Gio,” he said. “You tell Chiara she makes us proud.”

Zermatt wasn’t a major race that year. Two of the top five Italian women weren’t even racing, nor were any of the American A-teamers, but it was still a World Cup start, and at seventeen, it was a big deal for Key.

I met her in the village in Zermatt on Wednesday night. We had dinner. We talked a little about her training. Then we went up to the flat Dad had rented, and I had a look at her boots and her skis. Her setup was good enough for training. The rest we could dial in by Saturday.

The following day was strange for me. It was the first time I’d been back in a ski town since the accident, and I couldn’t get on the hill, because I couldn’t ski anymore. In a way, it was kind of like not being able to walk again. Everywhere I needed to be to watch Key was inaccessible. The lift to the race course was halfway up the mountain, so I couldn’t even catch her there. We messaged and talked throughout the day, and there was video coverage streamed in FIS headquarters in the village, which I had to call Matteo to get credentialed into. Key looked decent in the morning, but she was clearly outclassed by some of the savvier, seasoned pros. In a downhill, you’re doing pretty well at seventeen when you look like you belong on the hill, and Key did, but she was way too loose up top where it was tight and technical, and she was tight down below where she should have been able to open it up. Nerves. It was tough to tell whether it was the big stage or some of that scared energy still hanging on. She hadn’t done much downhill since my accident, and kids don’t do much at all before college.

I was sitting in the viewing area Thursday afternoon, watching the Slovenian girls, when somebody called out to me.

I turned around to see Anda Burkhardt, an Austrian racer I’d met at a juniors race camp a few summers back at Mont Blanc. I’d missed the Austrians that morning, so I didn’t see that she was racing.

“Gio! Oh, my God! What are you doing here?”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m here with my sister. She’s getting her first start on Saturday.”

I’d turned in my chair to meet eyes with her, but she’d surprised me, so I hadn’t stood up yet. She came over beside me and put her hand on my shoulder, and she saw I was about to get up.

“Can you—” then she felt embarrassed about asking me.

“Stand?” I said, getting up from the chair and kissing her cheek. “Sure. I can even walk a little.”

“That’s so good to see. I was so scared for you. I can’t tell you how nice it is to see you on two feet again.”

“It’s nice to be on them,” I said. “Can’t get up to the racecourse, though. Those days are over.”

She looked saddened by that statement. “You said you’re here with your sister? I thought the yanks were skipping through to St. Anton?”

“She’s skiing for Italy.”

“I didn’t see a Hatton on the roster.”

“Chiara DiBenedetto. Our mom’s name sounded more Italian than Hatton.”

“I’ll have to watch for her.”

“You better.”

“I didn’t even know you had a sister.”

“You will soon.”

“If she’s as competitive as you, Gio, we’re all in trouble, I’m sure.”

She stepped back and looked at me standing there and shook her head.

“I’m going to tell everyone how good you look. And I’ll watch out for your sister.”

“You better, Anda.”

“I’ve got to run and eat before the afternoon session,” Anda said. “But what’s this, you come to Europe and don’t even message me, Giorgio Hatton?”

“I live in Dresden now.”

“You know where we train,” she said, kissing me on the cheek again. “I want to see you this weekend.”

Chiara and I did a coaching session that evening, discussing that upper section. It was technical; Chiara wasn’t. This was the problem. Matteo had already discussed it with her, albeit a little differently. She got defensive and walked off.

“Mountain doesn’t care how you feel about it, Key,” I shouted to the other room. “You gotta stand on your skis either way.”

I went through her gear while she was sulking. Whoever the Italians were using did a decent job on her skis, but I didn’t love how forward she was on her bindings, not for downhill, so I moved the contact back almost 5mm and charged the plate. I spent a good three hours on both pairs, giving them a proper sharpening, and I tried to guess the wax as best I could from the base area. It was going to be tough to get perfect if I couldn’t get up there on the snow.

On Friday, Chiara didn’t fare much better, but she told me she felt better. Her edges were perfect, I’d just gotten the wax wrong by a few degrees. Zermatt was as tough as anywhere, because the elevation drop was so pronounced: the right wax for the top wasn’t great by the bottom third of the course. We were getting closer, though.

“One of the Austrian girls asked about you, Gio,” Chiara said the night before the race, after we’d finished our VR session.

“You need to worry about countering into that ninth gate. Let me worry about Anda.”

Chiara smiled at me. “I told her we’d have dinner with her after the race tomorrow, before you go back to Dresden.”

“I think you’re going to like the race-circuit life a little too much, Key. You need to remember to take care of the skiing part first.”

She turned her shoulder and leaned into my chest, repeating what I’d told her probably fifty times those two days. “High into seven, set up the nine.”

I woke up early that Saturday to check on the weather and temperature. When I stepped out, it was cold and quiet in the village. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the light was starting to get gray over the Alps. My knee, probably for the first time that week in the cold, didn’t ache. It felt normal, and I felt good. I had a sense about Chiara. She was going to be all right. I headed back inside to prep her skis and cook her breakfast. I figured she’d be up early, jittering in anticipation, but I had to wake her three hours before her start time. She was calm.

I saw her off on the gondola, and I had this weird vision of a big brother putting his little sister on the school bus for her first day of kindergarten, only Chiara was a pupil no longer, she was a full professor about to hold class.

I was the only one in Zermatt, but Mom, Nadia, Steph, and even Dad hopped on a group stream a few minutes before Key was scheduled to run.

“How’s she look?” Dad asked me.

“She looks strong,” I said. “But it’s her first start, so I’m just hoping she holds her own.”

With such a low seed, Key was scheduled third out of the start gate. At some point while the second girl was racing, Dad casually said the following: “By the way, Gio, I spoke with Julian Hartsock over at A & A about our engine yesterday, and he was very impressed with the design. The A-5 is moving forward.”

“Good news,” I said, too focused on the skiing to really appreciate the gravity of that comment.

By the time I’d realized the significance of what Dad had said, Chiara was in the gate. The feed was in French, but the presenter did her name better justice than an English speaker would, “Chiara DiBenedetto, Italia.”

Key shot out, calm and focused, skated a few steps into her tuck and was flying. She stayed high in the first two turns. I told them it was all about gate nine. I was watching on the big screen in the sleepy media room in the FIS headquarters. Coaches were just getting their coffee. Some of the veteran women were coming in and out, getting last instructions, and a few eyes were trained on the screen, watching the early racers for a few last clues about how the course might run. Chiara looked fast, and the next shot of her coming into the seven was perfect: she was high, early, countered to hell and blasting into that steep pitch with the kind of reckless intensity that wins downhills. Nobody in that room but me had cause to be staring a hole through that screen like I was as she came into the nine attacking.

“YES!” I shouted at the top of my lungs as she held her edge through the heart of that critical turn. “Go Key! Yes!”

The Swiss coach in front of me spilled his coffee, turned back toward me and was about to say something until he recognized me and turned back toward the screen. Everyone else in the room started watching too. Her first split was two seconds faster than the first two girls. Key was putting up a serious time. Everyone in the room got quiet, watching, murmuring, nervous. She skied tight out of the top and flattened out through the middle. Chiara was a picture. She came into the finish without even a minor hiccup and dropped a time up there that left even the Austrians in the room looking doubtful.

I didn’t shout again, but I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. I stood there clenching my fists alone. The family was ecstatic on the stream.

“Is she going to win, Gio?” Nadia asked.

“The Austrians may have something to say about that,” I said. “Maybe the Canadian, Schlepper. It’s a good time. A real good time.”

Dad told me he’d see me soon and hopped off the call. Stephano too. Mom and Nadia stayed on with me for another few minutes.

I was about to head back to the flat, and then I realized that Key was so fast she was going to have to sit it out in the tent up there until she got passed by. I thought there was a good chance she would, based on the training times of the best women. I didn’t really know what to do with myself while she was up there. I wished I could go up, but I couldn’t ski.

Anda appeared in the media room, all suited up, she was getting ready to head up for her run. She shook her head, wide eyed. “You Hattons are something else,” she said, and then walked out.

The contenders wouldn’t start for a while still. It was another several hours before Key would come down. I headed back to the flat. I couldn’t watch in the FIS room, rooting for everyone else to be slow. As I took my tablet out of the bag to watch the rest of the race, my pesky journal fell out onto the bed. It was the fifth paper notebook I’d filled with my scribblings, all the way back to that first one in Clearwater. “The Year of the Yellow Dragon,” I’d written at the start of each journal, “a good year for healing.”

I still had a week or so left till the Year of the Yellow Earth Snake. A new knee, a new fusion engine, and a new Hatton golden child—surprise bronze medalist in her first World Cup start. Not a bad year, considering. I decided I was good. This would be my last entry until I needed those notebooks again. I opened to where I’d left off and wrote the date, followed by a single word.

Blessed.