A beam of light formed a circle on the wood floor, which showed its age in scuffs and nicks, all invisible to the audience because of the angle of the seats, because of the shadows crisscrossing the theater, but mostly because of Delia’s mom, Claire Meyer. She took her mark center stage, and Delia peered around the curtain, her own feet filling the same space they had since she was a child, able to stand on her own.

Tight as a spring, Delia’s body slowly relaxed as her mother settled into the first refrain. The voice that had lulled Delia to sleep her entire life transfixed every member of the audience, and Delia was reminded of how not everything could be boiled down to genetics.

She snuck a glance at the influx of messages from ValleyStart and her teammates. They crawled onto her phone, a hand-me-down from her dad, which she later realized meant he no longer had one of his own. “Your mother’s the one they all want to talk to anyway,” he’d said when she’d tried to give it back.

The one girl, Lucy, was a Pulse 4. A 4. Wow. And she lived in Palo Alto. She’d bring so much to the team, growing up right in the heart of the tech world. The other girl, Maddie, hadn’t given her Pulse—a clear sign that she beat at the top end of the scale, at least according to Delia’s best friend, Cassie. In fact, Maddie hadn’t given much of anything aside from a simple text that read: Arriving from Boston midday. –Maddie Li. Boston, a real city girl.

Delia had taken the two-hour trip east from Littlewood, Illinois, to Chicago a few times to see shows with her parents and had gone to the science museum once on a field trip, but the labyrinth of streets and density of people were as unfamiliar as they were unimaginable. Delia liked trees. And the long shadows they cast.

Keeping an ear on her mom’s lyrics for the next lighting change, Delia opened the messages app and typed.

Hi girls!

Great response if they were twelve. Erase.

I’m looking forward to meeting you both.

And now they’re forty-five. Erase.

Delia considered saying something about Pulse, but what? She’d only signed up for the app a couple of months ago when she found out she was accepted to ValleyStart. She hadn’t even told her parents she’d applied to the incubator until she’d gotten in. The odds were insane. As was the cost.

That was part of the reason for these early performances at the small theater her parents owned; the season usually kicked off at the end of June, but this year, shows had started before Memorial Day. Some of the newer actors still weren’t up to speed.