Chapter 6: Ellie Signs with Wicked Star

The Wicked Star office was on the fourth floor of a building in Mapo that smelled like new carpet and someone else's ambitions, and Ellie arrived eleven minutes early because she had calculated that twelve would look anxious and ten would look practiced and eleven was the interval that most closely resembled indifference.

She had been here once before—a Thursday afternoon two weeks ago, at Wook-jae's invitation, which she had accepted only after confirming through three separate channels that the building was real, the company was registered, and the address matched the one on the Wicked Star corporate filing. She had not told Wook-jae she had done this. She had also not told him that she spent four days afterward reading entertainment law articles until the language stopped feeling like another country, or that she had printed the standard HanStar rookie contract from a forum post and used it as a baseline, annotating margins in the particular red pen she reserved for things she needed to argue with.

The research had been, she told herself, due diligence. It was not fear. Fear did not use primary sources.