The aerobic dance class was called Sunrise Burn, which Dani thought was a terrible name, and it ran at six-thirty in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which she thought was an even more terrible time. She taught it now. This was, technically, a step up.

  "Great work, everyone, keep those knees up!" she called over the music, demonstrating with her own knees in a way that cost her nothing physically and seemed to cost the fourteen adults in front of her everything. She smiled because smiling was part of the job. The music was loud enough that nobody could tell if the smile was real, which was also, in its own way, part of the job.

  She had started at the gym at seventeen, front desk, checking in memberships and handing out towels. The front desk had been fine. The front desk had required almost nothing of her beyond showing up and being pleasant, which she could do, and knowing where the equipment was, which she had learned. Then two months ago, Marco, who had run Sunrise Burn for three years, had thrown his back out on a Tuesday morning and looked at Dani across the equipment room with the expression of a man who had run out of other options.

  She'd done it. She was good at it. The clients liked her, which Marco admitted with the specific graciousness of someone who had hoped she would be terrible. She now taught four classes a week. Her pay had not changed.

  "Arms up! Up! That's it — you're doing amazing!" She was not entirely sure that was true about all of them, but it was the right thing to say, and the class ended on time, and she wiped down the equipment and changed and walked home in the thin October light with her feet aching in the specific way that feet ached when they had been doing the same thing since six-fifteen in the morning.

  She was tired. This was a normal condition. She moved through it the way she moved through most things: forward, without examining it too closely.

  "Mom, I'm home!"

  "Oh, hi Dani. Dinner's in the oven. How was work?"

  "Killing me. I'm leading the aerobic classes now."

  "Oh well that's a promotion, right, if you're actually instructing?"

  "Kinda. If I was getting paid more for it."

  Her mom made a sympathetic noise from the kitchen. "There was a letter for you. Looked like you won something."

  Dani stopped. "Really?"

  "I put it on the side — there was some junk mail but I asked Lucas to throw that out."

  She should have known, later, from the way her mom said it. The specific careful neutrality. But she was tired, and the idea of winning something felt briefly, warmly possible, and she crossed to the basement door and knocked. "Hey, stinky. You got my letter?"

  Lucas appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He was sixteen and nearly a foot taller than her now, which remained an injustice she had not come to terms with. He looked, unusually, like he was thinking about what to say before he said it.

  "Umm, yes. But I need to talk to you. Can you come down here?"

  He had not called her any names. This was their ritual — he'd called her things since she could remember, and she'd called him things back, and it was only partly that they meant them. LARP, he called it, earnestly, which was both the nerdiest possible framing and also not wrong. When he didn't do it, something was different.

  "Have you got your gang of nerdy friends down there?"

  "It's just me. No ambushes today, I promise. Please come down, it's about the letter."

  "Look, I'm tired. I've been on my feet all day."

  "Just come down," he hissed. "You won't regret it."

  She huffed and went down anyway, because she was curious and because sometimes it was easier. The den was a mess — empty Dorito packets, pizza boxes, the general archaeology of a sixteen-year-old boy's priorities — but it was just him. He held out an envelope, already opened.

  "Thank you," he said, which was also wrong. "Before you say anything, I can explain. We just need to keep it between us."

  Dani read the letter. Blinked. Read it again.

  "Depths Eternal," she said. "This is a computer game."

  "It is THE greatest game ever to be made." He said it with the absolute conviction of someone reporting a geological fact. "Believe me, this is epoch-making. We've been looking forward to this for years."

  "What is going on? I didn't enter any competition."

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "You have to be eighteen, so I—" He took a breath. "I borrowed your ID."

  "You what."

  He threw up his hands. "I never thought we would win it! But we have. I cannot believe it! We get to go to Austin, fly out there, meet the development team — and then we bring home the most advanced immersive VR game ever made, months before anyone else gets their hands on it!"

  Dani looked at him for a long moment. She thought about the letter. She thought about the fact that her name was on it. She thought about Austin, Texas, which was very far away, and about Zack's party next weekend, which was not.

  "Congratulations," she said, and turned to leave.

  "There's a catch."

  She stopped.

  "I need to ask you to do something."

  "It's fine, I won't tell mom. You owe me a month's chores."

  "Something else."

  She turned. He shifted from one foot to the other, which he did when he was about to say something he already knew she wasn't going to like.

  "The competition winners take part in the playtesting run before they can take the advance copy home. It's your name on the letter. I need you to go to Austin next weekend."

  "You cannot be serious."

  "Dani." He sank dramatically to his knees on the carpet, which was either entirely genuine or extremely calculated, and with Lucas it was always both at once. "I know you don't understand this, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity worth more than a hundred stupid parties. I am literally begging you. Please. I will do your chores for a whole year."

  Dani looked at him. She thought about what she would do with a year of someone else's chores. She thought about the fact that she was being asked to fly to Texas and play a video game she had never heard of for reasons that made no sense to her whatsoever.

  "How much," she said, "are you going to pay me?"

  He gaped. "What?"

  "Pay up, shortass, or no deal." She still called him shortass despite everything. It had become a fixed point.

  "Fifty bucks?"

  "Not a chance. You said once in a lifetime."

  He sighed with his whole body. "Alright. Five hundred dollars."

  Dani laughed, because that was absurd. "You don't have that kind of money."

  "I've been investing. In bitcoin."

  She looked at him. He looked back with the particular expression of someone who knows they are about to be dismissed and is prepared for it.

  "That's fake money," she said.

  "Oh yeah?" He stood up, which ruined the begging posture but gave him access to his full height advantage, which she knew was deliberate. "While you're out busting your ass every day trying to be a fitness instructor, I've been building a savings account from this basement, and I haven't even finished high school yet. You want to learn something? Hanging around with the jocks does not translate to success in the real world. The nerds shall inherit the Earth."

  It was an annoying speech. It was also, she thought with a flicker of something she didn't examine too closely, not entirely wrong.

  "How much in hard cash," she said, "and I mean dollars."

  "Four hundred."

  "For real?"

  "I can exchange and transfer tonight, withdraw tomorrow." He paused. "Think of all the cute clothes you could buy with that, Dani."

  She bit her lip. She read the letter a third time. She thought about what it actually said: a flight to Austin, Texas, covered in full. A studio tour. A day of playtesting some game that Lucas thought would change the world. She had nothing to lose except a weekend, a party she went to because Zack invited her and she'd never quite managed to stop doing things because Zack invited her, and the comfortable certainty that she didn't do things like this.

  "What does the playtest involve? I'm no good at computer games. I never play them."

  "You don't have to be good at it. This is not a console with a handset — you put on a VR headset and you're just there. You can feel everything. You walk around, you interact, you react. Nothing too clever." He hesitated. "Honestly? Being fast and coordinated is probably more useful than knowing the lore."

  Dani thought about that. She thought about the Sunrise Burn class, the fourteen people in front of her and the music and the smile that cost her nothing. She thought about Marco's back and the pay that hadn't changed.

  She shrugged. "Okay. Deal. Get me the money tomorrow."

  Lucas actually rushed forward and hugged her, which he had not done since he was about twelve. "You are my saviour, Dani. Every bad thing I have ever called you, I take it all back. I will love you forever!"

  "Eww, get off." She pried his arms loose. "Four hundred dollars. And tell your friends to stay out of my stuff."

  He placed a hand over his heart. "They will never bother you again." And then, because he couldn't help himself: "You will not regret this."

  She did not tell Lucas that she looked the game up that night. That seemed like information he would enjoy too much.

  She lay on her bed with her phone and searched: Depths Eternal VR. The trailer was the first result. She watched it with the volume low, not wanting to give herself away through the wall, and understood maybe a third of what she was looking at — something about a dungeon, something about monsters, an AI that had apparently been in development for a year and a half and that the press articles kept describing in ways that made her vaguely uneasy. She watched a bit where a beta tester swung a sword and seemed to feel the impact in their whole arm, and thought about the haptic suit, and thought about what Lucas had said: fast and coordinated is probably more useful than knowing the lore.

  She was fast. She was coordinated. Fifteen years of dance classes and two years of gym work had made her body a thing she could rely on, the one area of her life that consistently did what she told it to. The rest of it — the grades, the future, the vague and shapeless sense that she was supposed to want something specific and had not yet worked out what — that was less reliable. But her body she trusted.

  She watched the trailer again. She thought: how hard can it really be?

  She put her phone down and looked at the ceiling. Four hundred dollars. A flight to Texas. A free weekend, technically, because Lucas would be doing her chores. Zack's party would happen without her and nothing about that fact, when she sat with it for a moment, felt like the loss she'd assumed it would.

  That was a thing she noticed, and then put aside, because she was tired.

  She set her alarm for five-forty-five — Sunrise Burn didn't teach itself — and went to sleep, and in the morning the confirmation email was in her inbox from a Lucas who had been up before her, the travel details already filled in, her name on the booking, her seat chosen (window, because he knew her), and a note at the bottom in the subject line that read simply: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

  Dani smiled at her phone in the dark of her room. She didn't let him see that either.