The thing about parallel bars was that they didn't care.

  They were chrome and bolted to the floor and completely indifferent to the fact that six months ago Sara Reynolds had been ranked fourth in the world in the heptathlon, or that she'd been two months out from Olympic trials, or that a stretch of black ice on a county road in Wisconsin had made all of that irrelevant in approximately four seconds. The bars didn't care. The gym didn't care. The fluorescent lights didn't care. The only thing that cared, in the specific and unhelpful way that feelings cared, was Sara's body, which was still in the process of learning what it was now.

  She moved through the exercise. Grip. Shift. Transfer. Her physical therapist, Dominic, stood at the end of the bars with the careful non-expression of someone who'd learned not to hover. She'd made it clear early that hovering would not be tolerated. She'd made a lot of things clear early.

  The prosthetics were good ones. Custom-fitted, carbon fiber, the kind that cost more than her first car. Her coach had helped with the fundraiser. Her coach had cried at the fundraiser, which Sara had watched on her laptop from a hospital bed and found she didn't have the bandwidth to feel anything about.

  She made it to the end of the bars.

  "Good," Dominic said.

  "I know," Sara said.

  She'd applied to the beta from her apartment, which was a new apartment in the specific way that everything in her life was new — chosen for accessibility, not for any of the reasons she'd used to choose things. Good light. Close to training facilities. Space for someone who was planning to stay.

  The ad had found her through a gaming forum she'd started lurking in around month two of recovery, when she'd needed something to do with her hands and her brain that wasn't thinking about the things she wasn't thinking about. Full immersion. Haptic feedback. A dungeon crawler where your body in the game was the body the system built for you.

  She'd read that part twice.

  The application had asked why she wanted to beta test a next-gen VR dungeon crawler. She'd typed four different answers and deleted three of them. The one she sent said: I'm a competitive athlete in recovery from a significant injury. I'm interested in full-immersion VR for reasons that are probably obvious. I'm also a fast learner, I'm good under pressure, and I don't quit. She'd almost added: I need something to be good at again. She'd deleted that one too.

  The email came on a Tuesday.

  She was doing inventory on her gaming setup — a hobby that had become something more serious over the past few months, with a strategy that was still taking shape in the back of her mind like something she wasn't ready to say out loud yet. The subject line read DEPTHS ETERNAL BETA — APPLICANT NOTIFICATION, and she opened it the way she'd trained herself to open things she wanted: without letting herself want it too much first.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Congratulations, Sara. Out of 47,000 applicants—

  She stopped reading.

  She sat very still for approximately three seconds. Long enough to check whether the feeling in her chest was real. Long enough to confirm that it was.

  Then she kept reading.

  Multi-day experience. Austin, Texas. Travel provided. Non-disclosure agreement. Fully immersive haptic system with proprioceptive integration. She looked up that last one, which led her down forty-five minutes of technical documentation about sensory feedback architecture and full-body avatar mapping before she caught herself and came back up for air.

  She thought about calling someone.

  She didn't.

  There wasn't really a list of people to call anymore. Her coach had her number but their relationship had gone quiet in the way that relationships with coaches went quiet when there was nothing left to coach. Her parents would be happy in the way that made her tired. Her fiancé — ex-fiancé, she was still calibrating the word — had been gone for six weeks, two weeks after the last surgical follow-up, which was timing she'd noted and filed away somewhere she didn't have to look at it.

  She typed back: I'll be there. Let me know what I need to sign.

  Then she went back to her gaming setup and started thinking about what a professional career in competitive VR might actually look like, because the thought had been sitting in the back of her mind for three months and this seemed like a reasonable time to let it move forward.

  She flew out of Milwaukee on a morning that was eleven degrees and aggressively gray. She'd packed light — carry-on only, efficient, the habit of someone who'd traveled to competitions since she was sixteen and knew how to move through airports with the minimum possible friction. The prosthetics got their usual brief, professional attention at security. She was used to it. The TSA agent was professionally neutral. She was professionally neutral back.

  Austin was warm. Unreasonably warm for January, which she took as a good omen even though she didn't believe in omens.

  The Helix Interactive studio was in a converted industrial building, the kind of architecture that said we used to make things here and now we make different things here. She arrived in a rideshare with her carry-on in her lap and spent the ride reviewing everything she'd been able to find about the company's VR hardware pipeline, which wasn't much because they were careful about what they released.

  The driver pulled up to the curb. She had the door open before he'd finished the sentence about having a great day.

  She stood on the sidewalk in front of the building and looked up at the lobby through the glass. Other people were arriving. A guy with a backpack who was already looking at the building like he was cataloguing it. A woman who seemed to be on the phone. She could see her own reflection in the glass, which was a thing that still sometimes surprised her — not with grief exactly, more with the specific vertigo of seeing a person she was still getting to know.

  The reflection stood straight. Carbon fiber ankles, good boots over the top, a posture that six months of physical therapy had done nothing to diminish. She looked like someone who was about to compete.

  She was. She just didn't know yet what the competition was.

  She picked up her bag and went inside.