Chapter 7: Practice Room, 2 A.M.

The fluorescent tube in Studio B's far corner had been flickering for eleven days.

Jiyeon had stopped noticing it somewhere around the third night of late sessions, the way you stopped noticing a particular ache once it became permanent furniture. Now it was simply part of the room's ambient texture: the mirror, the bare barre along the east wall, the rubber floor with its ghost-prints of a thousand rehearsal formations worn into the surface, and the light that couldn't decide whether to exist.

She had the room until two. After two, the booking system defaulted to maintenance access, which in practice meant nobody came, but she'd learned not to test that policy.