Chapter 19: Wook-jae's Exit Strategy

The interview published at 6:14 AM on Friday.

Ellie found it at 6:31, seventeen minutes after waking from the three hours of sleep she had managed between 3 and 6 AM, phone in hand before she had fully identified which room she was in. The notification came not from a news aggregator but from a mutual contact in the Sangam-dong composition community—someone who had been at the showcase, someone whose opinion she respected, someone who had forwarded the link with a single line of text: *thought you should see this before it circulates further.*

It had already circulated. The share count in the bottom corner was four digits.