Her name was Prairie Powell, but she didn’t want anyone calling her that. The day she arrived, she scrawled her gamer tag on the wooden slat of her bunk. RINGER, it read in black ink, but that wasn’t what infatuated Galen with her. It wasn’t even the first time he saw her in the game, where she held the gut-string of a bow to her cheek, one knee touching the ground as though in prayer, and let fly an arrow whose white feathering would never be disentangled from the heart of that hunter.

It was because, at their first dinner, she sat with him. “So,” she said, dropping her tray next to his, “I heard you got dropped into the Pacific Ocean.” She was an alto, a little sand thrown into the vocal cords. “And then you swam to shore.”

Galen had just piled half a PB&J into his mouth when he turned, and he wasn’t ready for the blue-on-blue eyes, the cornflower hair. The clone. He’d heard about dupes, as his parents always called them, but he’d never met one. For someone grown in a lab, engineered for violence, she had an awfully human way of staring at him. He swallowed. “Where did you hear that?”

“You know.” Two fingers went up in a V, flicked between her eyes and his. “Dupes can hack into your neural interface and read every thought. We’re like skinnier Santas: we know if you’ve been good. And I know you’ve been bad.”

She held his eyes until the moment passed into awkwardness, and still her pupils flicked between his. When he broke the gaze, she laughed. Her head fell back, hair like pale silk; her teeth were ivory. “You gave an interview, dummy. ‘I nearly drowned,’ etcetera. Anyone with access to a streaming device can watch it.”

He blinked, finally exhaled. “That was just in the preliminary.”

Sicora Online’s preliminary drilled down to a person’s worst fear. If you couldn’t face it, you’d be gone before you even hit the actual game. For Galen, that fear was of drowning. Of course, he hadn’t known that until he’d dropped into the water and the indifferent waves rolled over him. The salt was so real in his throat that he’d started to lose his mind. It isn’t real, it isn’t real, he kept thinking, but the vast unknown beneath him didn’t seem to think so, and neither did his body. His head went below and he swallowed water. That was when he saw himself as though his mind had slipped outside his body: he, Galen Cole, sinking with arms limp as a puppet’s, eyes open, cast blue. And then he began to swim; he swam so hard his muscles burned at the dinner table with the memory of it. That first taste of air had been pure nectar.

She smiled. “And that’s what got you here.”

“What happened to you?” he asked. What could a dupe’s worst fear be, anyway? Something his parents would say came into his mind: they don’t have souls. If Prairie didn’t have a soul, she probably didn’t fear, either. He pushed the thought out as quickly as it had entered.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” she said.

Galen shrugged; he wanted to say he would believe anything. He actually thought he might, but he didn’t have the gumption to do anything but pile the rest of his sandwich into his mouth. Christ, he was twenty-one and acting like a kid.

She set one hand on his shoulder, whispered low: “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

That was how fast it happened. Before he’d swallowed, Prairie had made him a promise. Before the dinner was over, four other testers had sat with them. She was easy to make laugh, slapped the table with her long fingers, met eyes with everyone. She didn’t discriminate, didn’t question, didn’t need. She was just one voice, but hers was so bright he felt lit next to her at the table.

Of course, they still had to enter the first level alone. “The Sorting,” the admins had called it, with an ominous capital S. That was all they knew. The coltish kid who sat across from them at dinner lifted his sandwich. “Basically,” he said, ripping into the bread so messily Galen didn’t believe he could possibly be twenty years old, “you start with nothing. You spawn somewhere in the world—and who knows what that world will be—and then you start running.”

“Running?” Prairie said.

“Well, if you’re lucky. You might spawn somewhere you can’t run. During debugging, one guy started in the sky. Seriously, dropped out of the sky like a rock into the ocean. All his bones broken, and then he respawned somewhere decent.”

Around the table, the others had paused in their eating.

“How can you know that?” Galen asked. Sicora Online had been under such strict wraps for so long that the NDA he’d signed was a good forty pages, required his fingerprint eight separate times. They were the first crop to play the game—really play it after the debuggers, and even they weren’t allowed to talk about it outside the compound.

“My dad’s Andrew Waters.” When the others stared with blank-eyed incomprehension, his hands went out. “He’s the head developer for Pyro Games. You’re basically playing inside his code.”

“Is that true, about falling out of the sky?” Galen asked.

Waters screwed up his face. “Guess you’ll find out.”

Punk.

All Galen knew was that it would get harder. Sicora Online, what would become the world’s first dynamic VRMMORPG, needed twenty-four young men and women to demonstrate the game’s capabilities to the world. Ten days. Ten dynamic, unpredictable levels. All he had to do was survive an ever-shifting world, an AI that had been programmed to temper and stretch and shrink the game based on the personalities inside it. He would have to fight to survive. And if he did, he’d be granted a lifetime of free access to the MMO when it was released to the public. It was the prettiest music to a gaming addict’s ears.

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“It sounds chaotic,” Prairie said. This seemed to please her: she was grinning through a spoonful of jello.

“It seems like that—until you reach the edges. My dad said it’s like being in a box with invisible walls,” Waters said.

“Did your dad get you into the testing, too?” Galen asked.

“Actually,” a girl said, tipping her spoon toward Waters, “we haven’t seen our dad in two years. Wilt just heard him say that in an interview.”

Galen looked between the two of them. “You’re...related?”

“Unfortunately,” she said. “He’s Wilt. I’m Sarai.” Now that she’d said it, Galen did see the resemblance between the two. Both brunettes, curly-haired, though Sarai had gotten all the sweet-faced innocence and Wilt only the pinched look. She put Galen in mind of his younger brother.

“Anyway,” Wilt cut in, “once we’re in game you probably won’t see us again—unless we let you. We’re both rogues.”

Galen tore off a bite of his biscuit. That had always been his class. And from one rogue to another, Wilt really had that feel about him: the dark, searching eyes, a way of going unnoticed until they spoke. At least Sarai seemed halfway decent.

Later, as they were picking up their trays to leave, Prairie put a hand on Galen’s shoulder. “Hey,” she said, “look for me during the sorting, okay?”

He was surprised more by her touch than her request. “Why?” He regretted the question as soon as it came out, hadn’t meant it to sound nearly so skeptical, so surly.

But she seemed unfazed. Her thumb toggled between her chest and his. “You and I, we’re gonna group.”

Group? That flew right in the face of his plan to sneak his way through most of the game. But after long seconds of his dumb silence, he discovered himself shrugging. “Okay.” And he turned toward the trash receptacle.

“You’ll be thanking me for carrying your ass!” she called from behind him.

And Galen thought two things:

First, that she was the prettiest girl he’d ever talked to, dupe or otherwise. Second, that—for good or bad, maybe both—Prairie Powell was a wild card.

***

That morning he woke with an ache in him, what he knew to be fear. It was a seed in his stomach, and he rolled onto his side in the dark. The barest promise of light issued through the slats at the window, and before him lay six sleeping mounds—the other male players. He didn’t remember a single name except Wilt’s, who even slept smugly, Galen thought: starfished across the bed, one leg hanging off.

It was only in these quiet moments he was truthful with himself. And the truth was this: Galen didn’t know how he’d ended up here. Of thousands, he was one of twenty-four selected.

The whole thing still felt like a fluke, a joke. So he did what he did best when the ache came on him: he ate until he couldn’t feel anything but his stomach pressing against his other internal organs. Eight strips of bacon, a bowl of oatmeal, two muffins, a yogurt.

When he came to the men’s capsule room, Jon the admin was waiting with folded arms. “The others are all in,” he said, pressing his curls from his eyes, “except for you, kiddo.”

Galen had been called a kiddo once—ten years ago. “Sorry,” he said, stepping wide around Jon to take his seat on the single empty capsule bed. The others were sealed, humming in the sanitized room like white bug carapaces, their sides impossibly smooth.

He knew the drill: lie down, accept the anesthetizing drug that would keep him from thrashing while he was in the game, allow himself to be hooked in at twenty different points on his body. It would get simpler, Pyro Games had promised, before the MMO was released to the world.

Galen lay in the capsule and Jon set the sensors to his temples and the retainer between his teeth. He knew he would have to make choices. Hard ones, easy ones, quick ones—but he’d have to keep making them. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t survive; stagnation was death.

“Here we go, kiddo,” Jon said, lowering the visor over Galen’s face. “Keep those eyes closed until you’re in.”

Jon depressed the button to seal the capsule, and Galen squeezed his eyes shut. What would happen if he opened them too soon, he wondered? And then he found—as his body chilled and he was filled with the familiar certainty that he was disintegrating right into the memory foam—he didn’t care. Jon was saying something else, but the syllables fell to pieces as they reached Galen, were sucked away. Everything had shrunk to the two points behind his eyes. His own pulse was the insweep of the ocean in his ears, driving and pulling until it built to a sonic roar.

And then, with a pop, all was silent. He had the sensation of floating. That was when the air changed. The temperature dropped, the scents became richer. He smelled pine with such vividness that the needles might have been pressed up his nostrils. The chill of this world swept over his bare arms, and a leaf cracked by his head.

A boy’s voice sounded above him. “It’s a human.”

Galen opened his eyes. Fat-bottomed pines rose and rose, faded into the clouds. He was on his back, a pair of hooves pressed at either side of his torso. The horse’s legs bore a chestnut coat, were clad in a fine leather right on up to a human torso and arms. The spear’s point at Galen’s neck was held with unshaking precision by a black-haired child centaur who wasn’t even looking at him. After a moment, a nameplate appeared above his head: .

Well, that was helpful.

“He’s unarmed, weak,” the boy sang. No—this was their style of speech. Melodic, each word running into the next.

“Who’s weak?” Galen jerked up, his neck finding the spear’s sharp head. He cringed, let his head back down.

The boy shifted violet eyes down to him. “He’s not very smart, either.”

Galen’s eyes narrowed, but the boy had the spear’s point right at his artery. So this was why they were supposed to run. Except he’d been unlucky enough to spawn in the middle of a centaur camp.

Another pair of hooves vibrated the ground beneath him. These were heavier, sturdier. “Let him up, Willem.” It was the same style of speech, delivered in a baritone.

“I want to test his carotid,” Willem said.

“Not like this. We’ll let him hold a weapon.”

The tanned skin of the boy’s cheeks cinched as he made a face. After a moment, he stepped away, the spear still tipped toward Galen.

As soon as he’d been freed, Galen rolled to his stomach. His movements were as responsive here as in the preliminary, and the motion registered as soon as the impulse left his brain. He started to his hands and knees.

The centaur was quicker. What felt like an elephant’s hoof landed square on his back, and the baritone sounded again. “You’ll stand when we let you, human.” And a tectonic force pressed him back to the leaves.