The call came in at 6:42 AM: a 58-year-old male, chest pain, third floor walkup on Delancey, no elevator.

  Luke took the stairs at a pace that looked unhurried and wasn't. His partner Bree had the kit. He had the words, which was how they'd always divided it — Bree was faster with her hands and Luke was better at the voice, at the particular register of calm that wasn't performed and wasn't quite natural either but existed somewhere in between, the tone of someone who had done this enough times that the urgency and the steadiness had fused into a single thing.

  The man's name was Gerald. He was sitting on his kitchen floor when they arrived, back against the cabinets, one hand pressed to his sternum. His wife was standing over him in a floral robe, holding a phone she'd already unlocked three times without doing anything with it.

  "Hey, Gerald." Luke crouched to his level. "Tell me what you're feeling."

  Gerald told him. Luke listened, assessed, signaled to Bree. Forty minutes later Gerald was in the ER and the walkup was behind them and Luke was in the passenger seat with a gas station coffee that had gone lukewarm somewhere around the third floor landing.

  "Good call on the nitro," Bree said.

  "Gerald did the hard part," Luke said.

  She snorted. He drank his coffee. They drove.

  His daughter Nicole was five years old and had recently developed strong opinions about dinosaurs, the color orange, and which parent was allowed to cut her toast. Luke was on the approved list for toast. He was on the revoked list for braids, following an incident he'd been asked not to bring up.

  He got home at quarter past three on his days off, which gave him approximately two hours of what Nicole called 'Dad time' before dinner, bath, and the elaborate bedtime negotiation that Amber handled with a patience Luke admired and could not fully replicate. He was good at a lot of things. He was not as good as Amber at the bedtime negotiation.

  The life was full. That was the only word for it — not big, not dramatic, not the life he'd imagined at twenty when imagining lives was something he'd done with more confidence. Just full, in the way of a room that has the right things in it, and you stop noticing the walls.

  His coworker Dev had told him about the Depths Eternal beta sometime in November — Luke couldn't place the exact conversation, only that Dev had been eating a sandwich at the time and had said something like, 'you should throw your name in, the odds are terrible but why not.' Luke had found the link on his break and filled out the application on his phone in about ten minutes, answering the questions honestly without giving them too much thought, because he'd had a shift starting in fifteen minutes and a patient transport to coordinate.

  He had not thought about it again.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  The box arrived on a Tuesday.

  Amber found it on the porch and brought it inside and set it on the kitchen table, and Luke stared at it for a full ten seconds before the logo on the side connected to anything in his memory.

  "Helix Interactive," Amber read. "Is that... did you order something?"

  "I don't think so." He turned the box. There was a label. His name. His address. "Oh." Something clicked. "Oh, that's — I entered a thing. Months ago. I thought I didn't win."

  "What thing?"

  He explained, briefly. Amber's expression moved through several phases, landing somewhere between amused and unsurprised, which was a face he knew well. From the living room, Nicole shouted something about a dinosaur that required immediate parental attention.

  "Open it later," Amber said, already moving toward the living room. "After dinner."

  He opened it after dinner.

  The headset was heavier than he'd expected and packaged with the seriousness of medical equipment, which he appreciated professionally. There was a welcome packet. There was a non-disclosure agreement that he read more carefully than he'd read the original application. There was an itinerary: Austin, Texas, travel provided, a week from Thursday.

  He sat with it at the kitchen table after Nicole was in bed, turning the headset over in his hands. He'd played games before — less than he used to, more than people assumed a 35-year-old EMT dad did. There was something that still worked for him in it, the same thing that had worked at seventeen: a problem with rules, a space where the stakes were clear, and the particular satisfaction of handling what came at you.

  Amber leaned in the doorway.

  "You should go," she said.

  "Nicole's concert is—"

  "I know. I'll record it. Go."

  He looked at her. She had the look she got when she'd already made a decision on his behalf and was waiting for him to catch up, which happened more than he liked to admit.

  "I'll sort the schedule," he said.

  "I know you will." She pushed off the doorframe. "Come to bed."

  He filed the schedule change the next morning. His supervisor's sign-off wasn't technically required for a shift swap if it was within the same pay period — that was his reading of the policy, anyway, and he'd read it twice to be sure. It was close enough to right that he didn't lose sleep over it. Not much sleep.

  He flew out on a Thursday morning, carry-on only, with a photo of Nicole on his phone that she'd taken herself by grabbing the camera and pointing it at her own face at extremely close range. It was blurry and slightly alarming and he'd set it as his wallpaper immediately.

  Austin was warmer than home. The Helix Interactive building looked like someone had taken a warehouse and applied a significant budget to it, which he supposed was exactly what had happened. He arrived on time, which for him meant ten minutes early, a habit from the job that he couldn't switch off.

  There were others in the lobby — a handful of people doing the quiet social math of strangers who know they're about to spend time together. He registered them without staring: a guy who seemed to be cataloguing the architecture; a woman with the kind of posture that said competitive athlete in a language Luke, who'd done enough sports physicals, could read clearly; a quieter man near the window who'd arrived early and looked comfortable with waiting.

  Luke found a spot, set down his bag, and checked his phone.

  Amber had sent a video. Nicole, in the backyard, explaining to the camera that the stegosaurus was the best dinosaur and the reasons were not up for debate. The video was forty-five seconds long. He watched it twice.

  He texted back: Arrived safe. Tell her the stegosaurus argument is compelling but I have notes.

  He pocketed the phone and looked around the lobby — at the other people, at the building, at the logo on the wall with its suggestion of depth and descent.

  He'd handled a lot of things that came at him. He figured he could handle this.