Chapter One: The Bruise Tutorial

  Dani didn't understand why the skeleton was looking at her.

  It didn't have eyes. She knew this. It was a skeleton — bones and nothing else, held together by whatever passed for logic inside a video game — and it was standing six feet in front of her in the amber torchlight of what the developer had called the tutorial chamber, and it was looking at her with the focused attention of something that had decided she was next.

  She was holding a sword. She did not want to be holding a sword. She had picked the knight option during character creation because knights got the most armor, which seemed sensible if you were going to be inside a video game where things hit you, and nobody had mentioned at any point during this process that the female knight's armor included a chainmail miniskirt. She had opinions about the chainmail miniskirt. She was saving them for later.

  The skeleton lunged.

  She brought the sword up — not with technique, not with anything she'd learned, just with the basic animal reflex of putting metal between herself and the thing that was trying to hurt her — and the blade caught the skeleton's arm and deflected it sideways in a way that felt less like skill and more like luck wearing skill's clothes. The impact vibrated up through the hilt and into her wrist and she thought, with a distant clarity that surprised her: that felt real. That felt actually, physically real.

  Then the second skeleton hit her in the thigh with a mace.

  The pain was extraordinary.

  Not simulated-pain extraordinary. Not vibration-feedback-this-is-supposed-to-represent-pain extraordinary. Extraordinary in the specific, nauseating, white-hot way of a piece of metal striking muscle and bone through a layer of chainmail that turned out to be mostly decorative. Dani's vision went bright and then dark at the edges and her leg buckled and for a moment she was on one knee on the stone floor of a dungeon that didn't exist, gripping a sword she didn't know how to use, with a bruise blooming across her thigh that she could see — actually see, the skin purpling under the hem of the chainmail in vivid, medically precise detail, blood rising under the surface in a pattern that looked like it had been rendered by someone who had studied what real bruises looked like and had done their homework.

  She was going to pass out. She was genuinely, actually going to pass out inside a video game, which was not something she had anticipated when she agreed to do her brother a favor for four hundred dollars.

  She did not pass out.

  She got up. She got up because Dani Rodriguez had been getting up off gym floors and dance studio floors and track surfaces since she was six years old, and the part of her body that handled getting up did not consult the part of her brain that was screaming before it acted. She got up and she was angry. Not scared. Angry. Angry at the skeleton, angry at the miniskirt, angry at Lucas, angry at the whole situation in a way that was hot and clean and infinitely more useful than fear.

  She walked away from the fight.

  Not toward safety. Toward Dr. Voss, who was near the back of the chamber doing something complicated with a glowing staff and looking like a man who had been given a wizard costume by someone who didn't like him very much.

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  She grabbed his arm. She pointed at her thigh.

  "Look at this! I can't go to work like this!"

  Voss looked at the bruise. He looked at Dani's face, which was communicating several things simultaneously, none of them patience. He opened his mouth, seemed to calculate the length of the explanation required versus the intensity of the woman in front of him, and made a decision.

  He waved his staff. The pain vanished. The bruise dissolved like it had never been there, the skin smoothing back to its normal color in a way that made her stomach flip because her body had been absolutely certain that the injury was real, and now her body was absolutely certain that the injury had never happened, and the two certainties existed in the same moment and could not both be true.

  "It's just the suit—" he started.

  She was already walking back toward the fight.

  A voice spoke. Not Voss — the other voice, the one that came from everywhere and nowhere, the pleasant measured voice that had been narrating the tutorial with the calm precision of a flight attendant who happened to be a supercomputer.

  "Subject has 115% amplified reception to suit pain stimulators, possibly due to physical conditioning. Subject is strongly motivated to avoid pain. This data is interesting."

  Dani didn't fully process the words at the time. She caught "data" and "interesting" and filed them somewhere under "things the computer said that I will be furious about later." She was busy.

  The skeleton that had hit her was still standing. It was between her and the rest of the group, and it had the mace raised, and it was doing the looking thing again — that eyeless, purposeful attention that should not have been possible from something without a brain.

  Dani hit it.

  Not with technique. With four years of aerobic conditioning and fifteen years of dance training and every ounce of the clean hot anger that had gotten her off the floor, channeled through a sword she didn't know how to use into a strike that didn't look like anything a fencing instructor would recognize and that landed with her full weight behind it.

  The skeleton broke.

  Not dissolved — broke. The impact was hard enough that the bones separated before the game's visual effects could catch up, and for a flickering instant the skeleton existed in two states at once, physically shattered and digitally dissolving, the blue motes rushing to fill in the gap between what she'd done and what the system had planned for.

  The second skeleton — the one with the mace, the one that had bruised her — turned toward her with the rotating precision of something recalculating a threat assessment.

  Dani squared up. She didn't know the stance was wrong. She didn't care that the stance was wrong. She had a sword and she was angry and the thing in front of her was made of bones and she had just learned, in the most visceral way possible, that she could break bones.

  "Come on then," she said.

  After that, something changed.

  Not in Dani — Dani was still angry, still swinging with more force than finesse, still treating the sword like a very expensive piece of gym equipment. What changed was the skeletons. They came at her differently. Slower. Less committed. The mace skeleton, the one she'd been ready to destroy, circled instead of charging, stayed at range, poked at her from angles that she could see coming and block without difficulty.

  She didn't notice this. She noticed that she was winning, which felt good, and she noticed that the sword was starting to make sense in her hands — not like a weapon, not the way the others used theirs, but like a tool, the way a resistance band or a barbell was a tool, something her body could learn the weight of and work with.

  One of the guys said something. She caught the tone more than the words — surprised, approving. Something about her sword technique. She decided it was a compliment.

  She cut down the mace skeleton with a strike that started at her shoulder and ended at the skeleton's neck, and the motion felt right in the way that good motion always felt right, the kinetic chain flowing from her feet through her hips through her arm, and the skeleton came apart and the blue motes drifted upward and she stood there breathing hard in the torchlight, chest heaving, sword heavy in her hand.

  She thought of Lucas. She thought of how much he would love this.

  She thought: these games aren't so hard.

  Then the lights changed, and the voice came back, and everything after that was different.