Chapter 3: What the Rankings Actually Mean

The man from the corridor is already at the front of the room when they arrive.

Jiyeon sees him before she sees anything else—before the assembled trainees arranged in loose rows on the rehearsal floor, before Lim Gyutae and two other senior producers bracketing the space like load-bearing walls, before the junior staff who have positioned themselves along the periphery with the careful insignificance of people who have been told to witness something and not to speak. She sees him because she has already memorized the particular quality of how he occupies a room: like he has accounted for it in advance, like the square footage is a variable he entered into an equation hours ago and has since stopped thinking about.

He is standing at the front with his hands in his pockets, looking at nothing specific in the middle distance. He has not changed from the charcoal suit. There is a single folder on the table behind him, closed.