Chapter 4: Oh Wook-jae's First Story

The open mic nights at Bae Academy ran on the third Friday of every month, which meant they ran on goodwill, secondhand cables, and her father's policy of never turning away anyone who had practiced. The policy had produced, over eleven years, a reliable cross-section of Hongdae's musical ecosystem: the genuinely promising, the therapeutically committed, the occasional art school dropout performing a forty-minute tone poem about their ex-girlfriend's dissertation. Ellie had run the sound booth since she was sixteen. She had learned, in that time, that the difference between a room that listens and a room that merely waits is almost entirely a matter of monitor placement.

Tonight the room was listening. She had set the monitors correctly.

She had also, in the two weeks since the audition, done nothing she intended to do. She had not called the solicitor. She had not reviewed the lease provisions her mother had mentioned or researched HanStar's acquisition history or begun the document she had internally titled, with characteristic precision, *What I Know and What I Can Prove*. She had taught four theory classes, corrected thirty-seven pages of notation homework, and played the composition twice more in the practice room at midnight, both times to no one, both times changing nothing, which was its own form of admission.