The alarm went off at five forty-seven, which was thirteen minutes before it was supposed to, which meant Naia had hit the wrong button again in the dark.

She lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling. The studio was cold in the early morning the way it always was in autumn, the kind of cold that settled into the corners overnight and refused to leave until the afternoon sun found the south-facing window. She had learned, in the two years she had lived here, to keep a blanket on the couch and another on the chair by her drafting table. The one on the bed was reserved for sleeping. The others were for working.

She sat up.

The studio was small by any reasonable standard, which was something her mother liked to mention whenever she visited, and something Naia had stopped noticing approximately six months after moving in. It was the kind of small that felt deliberate rather than unfortunate: a drafting table positioned near the window, a couch that doubled as a guest bed when Maro fell asleep mid-conversation, a kitchen that could be crossed in four steps in any direction, and walls that had gradually disappeared behind pinned sketches, color tests, and the occasional printed reference photograph. A shelf of children's books lined the wall above her desk, all of them dog-eared and annotated in the margins in her small, precise handwriting.

There was also, on the corner of the drafting table, a single copy of a slim hardcover with a matte cover in shades of grey and pale gold.

She did not look at it yet. She went to make tea first.

The kettle was the nicest thing she owned, and she was aware that this said something about her that she preferred not to examine too closely. Her father had bought it for her the year before he died, on an ordinary Saturday afternoon when she was seventeen and had just announced, with the specific certainty that belongs only to teenagers, that she was going to be an illustrator. He had not said anything discouraging. He had simply driven her to a kitchen supply store and let her choose it herself, and she had chosen the one with the wooden handle because it looked the way she imagined an illustrator's kitchen should look, though she had not yet had either an illustrator's kitchen or any clear picture of what that life would actually involve.

She thought about him sometimes in the mornings, in the first quiet minutes before the day had properly begun. It was not painful the way it used to be. It was more like reaching for something that should be in a pocket and finding the pocket empty, and feeling the shape of the absence rather than the thing itself.

She poured the water, waited, and carried the tea back to the drafting table.

The work from the night before was still spread across the surface: preliminary spreads for a webtoon cover she had been contracted to finish by Friday. The client wanted something dramatic, something that read clearly at thumbnail size, something that communicated conflict and romantic tension in a single composed image. Naia had given them three options. They had sent back a message asking for a fourth that combined elements from all three, which was the kind of feedback that sounded specific and meant nothing.

She sat down, tucked her feet under her, and picked up her pencil.

Working before the rest of the world woke up was something she had done since her first year at art school, when a professor had told the class that the brain was most honest in the early hours, before the internal editor came online and started making suggestions. Naia had tried it, half-convinced it was the kind of thing professors said to seem interesting, and had found that he was at least partially right. The things she made before eight in the morning were usually either very good or very strange, and there was rarely much distance between the two.

She worked for an hour without looking at her phone.

The cover spread was starting to find itself, the composition settling into something that had a center of gravity. She lost track of time in the way she always did when the work was going well, that particular kind of absorption where the hours moved strangely. The city outside was still mostly dark. One of her neighbors was moving around above her. She could hear the muffled rhythm of it: footsteps, water running, footsteps again.

She was reaching for her tea, which had gone lukewarm, when her phone lit up on the edge of the table.

Not a message. An app notification from the platform she used to track her published work. She received these with some regularity: a new review, a sales update, the occasional alert when a post involving her work gained traction.

This banner was different from the usual ones.

She picked up the phone and read it.

The Prince Who Forgot to Smile has been shared 200,000 times in the last 24 hours.

She put the phone down.

She picked it up again.

201,340 shares, the counter now read, because it had continued updating in the seconds she had spent staring at it.

She sat with that number for a long moment.

The book had come out eight months ago through a small independent press that had taken a chance on her after seeing her portfolio. It was a children's book, forty-two pages, about a prince who lived in a palace at the top of a very tall hill and who had, somewhere along the way, forgotten how to smile. Not because of a curse or a villain or any single dramatic event. He had simply stopped, the way people stop doing small things, slowly and without noticing, until one day they realize they cannot remember how to begin again.

The story followed a girl from the city below who climbed the hill one afternoon by accident, looking for her lost kite, and spent the afternoon in the palace gardens without realizing whose gardens they were. She did not try to fix the prince. She did not know he needed fixing. She simply sat in the garden and talked about ordinary things, and somewhere in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, the prince remembered something.

The book had sold modestly. It had received a handful of reviews, most of them kind, a few of them uncertain about what they called its unusual tone for a children's story. Naia had read those reviews and agreed that the tone was perhaps unusual, and had not been able to explain it, even to herself, in any terms that felt accurate.

Now she opened the app and looked at the shares.

There were comments attached to most of them. She began reading.

I don't know why I'm crying over a children's book at two in the morning.

The prince looks so tired. Not sad, exactly. Just tired. I have never seen that drawn before.

This is not actually about a prince at all, is it.

Whoever made this has been lonely in a very specific way.

The illustration on page 31. The way he's sitting. I've sat like that.

She gets it.

Naia set the phone face-down on the table.

She looked at the book on the corner of her drafting table. The cover: the prince at a tall window, looking out at a city that glittered somewhere below him. She had drawn him in profile, given him a certain set to his shoulders, a specific angle to his jaw. Not dramatically sad. Not obviously unhappy. Just the careful posture of someone who had been performing for a very long time and was, in this single private moment, not performing for anyone at all.

She had not thought hard about where that posture came from when she was drawing it.

She thought about it now.

She thought about the year after her father died, when she was nineteen and had not known how to talk about the loss, and so had not talked about it, and had drawn instead: figures standing at windows, sitting alone in large rooms, looking at things in the middle distance. Her professors had called it a strong creative period. She had not corrected them.

The prince, she thought, was not the only character in those forty-two pages who had forgotten something.

She had not quite understood that until this morning.

She sat with it for a while, the cold tea in her hand, the webtoon deadline on the table, the city outside beginning its slow accumulation of noise. Then she picked up her phone and called Maro.

He answered on the third ring, which meant he was already awake, which meant he had an early shoot scheduled.

Maro was a freelance photographer who took commercial contracts to pay rent and personal projects to keep himself, in his own words, from becoming someone he did not want to be. He was lanky and direct and made very good coffee and had the particular gift of knowing when to push and when to let a thing sit. He had been the first person Naia had met after moving into the building, because he had knocked on her door to borrow a screwdriver, and they had ended up talking in the doorway for the better part of an hour before either of them had thought to introduce themselves.

"Have you looked at your phone yet?" he said, instead of hello.

"Yes."

"Two hundred thousand, Naia."

"I know."

"Two hundred thousand shares in a single day."

"I know, Maro."

"That is not a small number."

"I'm aware."

A pause. She could hear him in his kitchen, the familiar sounds of it. "You're already looking for the part where it doesn't count."

She looked at the rent notice stuck to the lower corner of her window frame, which she had put there as a reminder and which had, in the way of reminders, become something she looked at without seeing. The payment was due in nine days. Her last invoice had cleared yesterday.

"It doesn't change the finances," she said. "Shares aren't the same as sales. The book earned what it earned."

"It could open doors."

"It could. It might not."

"You could at least allow yourself one hour of uncomplicated good news before you start rationalizing it into nothing."

She looked at the book on the corner of the table. "I'll try."

They talked for a few more minutes about his shoot, about a client of hers who had gone quiet mid-project, about the restaurant on the ground floor of their building that had changed management and now closed on Tuesdays for no explained reason. Easy conversation, the kind that asked nothing of either of them. She was grateful for it.

After she hung up, she opened the comments again and kept reading.

There was something disorienting about encountering so many people describing the thing she had been trying to draw: the specific texture of a loneliness that did not announce itself, that did not make dramatic demands, that simply kept a person company for years in a very quiet way. She had not known, while she was drawing it, whether she was drawing it correctly. She had not known if it was a communicable thing at all, or if she was only drawing it for herself and labeling it something else.

The comments suggested she had drawn it correctly.

She was still reading when the phone rang again.

An unknown number. Area code she did not recognize.

She let it ring through to voicemail. They did not leave one.

She went back to the webtoon cover. The composition was still there, still holding. She worked for another fifteen minutes, but some part of her attention had drifted and she could feel it.

The same number called again.

She answered.

"Ms. Yim." A formal voice, measured and professional in the specific way of institutional representatives. "This is the Communications Office of the Royal Palace of Haevon. We would like to speak with you regarding your recently published work."

Naia held the phone and looked at the webtoon spread in front of her and did not say anything for a moment that was probably slightly too long.

"I'm sorry," she said, carefully. "Which office did you say?"

The woman repeated it. Communications Office. Royal Palace. Haevon.

Haevon was a kingdom that occupied, in most people's awareness, a particular and slightly unreal space: very small, very wealthy, geographically situated in a way that had made it strategically important for several centuries, and possessed of a royal family that attracted the kind of coverage that was equal parts genuine curiosity and manufactured spectacle. The current king was considered serious and private. The crown prince was considered serious and private and considerably better-looking, which the coverage treated as if it were a relevant piece of political information.

Naia had read about Haevon the way most people did: occasionally and without retaining the specifics.

"Right," she said to the woman on the phone.

And then, because the morning had already been the kind of morning where ordinary logic seemed temporarily suspended, and because she did not have a prepared response for this particular scenario: "I'll have to call you back."

She hung up.

She sat very still at her drafting table.

She looked at the book.

Then she called Maro.

"You're not going to believe what just happened," she said.

He did not believe her immediately, which was a reasonable response. She did not entirely believe it herself. She looked up the royal palace's official website on her laptop while they were talking, found the Communications Office listed on the Contact page with the same phone number now saved in her recent calls, and read the number out to Maro.

"That matches," he said.

"I know it matches."

"Naia. You hung up on the royal palace."

"I told them I would call back."

"You panicked and hung up on the royal palace of Haevon."

"I did not panic. I needed a moment to process."

A pause. "Are you going to call them back?"

She looked at the number on her screen. She looked at the book. The prince at the window, in his private moment, not performing.

She thought about the comment that had stopped her while she was reading: Whoever made this has been lonely in a very specific way.

She wondered what they had seen in the book. She wondered what the palace had seen. She wondered if those were the same thing or entirely different things, and what either answer would mean.

"Yes," she said. "I'm going to call them back."

She washed her face first and changed out of the oversized shirt she slept in, which made no practical difference to a phone call but made her feel marginally more capable of handling whatever came next. She sat at her desk rather than the drafting table, which felt more like a work surface and less like the place where she did the things that mattered most to her.

She called the number.

The same woman answered. Ms. Pael, she said her name was. She was an associate in the Communications Office. She would like to arrange a meeting between Ms. Yim and a senior palace representative regarding a potential collaboration opportunity. The details would be more appropriately discussed in person. Would Ms. Yim be available on Thursday of that week, at ten in the morning?

Naia said she would be available.

She was given an address in the capital district of Caelvon City, which she did not need to look up because she knew it already: the main gates of Haevon Royal Palace, which she had passed by once on the way to a meeting with a publisher and had looked at briefly through the window of her train and then looked away from because she had been running late.

After the call ended, she sat at her desk for a long time without moving.

She looked at the rent notice.

She looked at the book.

She thought about what Maro had said earlier: that it might open doors. She had told him it might not, which was true. She still believed that. She also believed that she would not be able to find out which it was without going to find out.

She thought about the prince at the window, watching a city that did not know he was watching.

She turned back to the webtoon cover and picked up her pencil, but her hand hovered above the paper without moving, and she realized that she was thinking about a different drawing entirely. A window, she thought. The particular quality of morning light falling across a large room. Two people in a space designed to hold many more.

What it might look like from the inside.

She put the pencil down.

She opened her email and composed a short, professional message to Ms. Pael, confirming Thursday at ten.

Then she looked at the book one last time before putting it in her bag. She had started carrying it with her recently, for reasons she had not examined carefully: not the sample copies she gave to people, but her own copy, the one she had held in both hands when it arrived from the printer and had understood, for the first time, that she had actually made it.

The prince was still at the window. He always would be. He existed only in those pages, in that single preserved moment, not performing for anyone.

She had given him, she realized, the posture of someone who had been waiting for a very long time without knowing what they were waiting for.

She wondered where she had learned to draw that. She suspected she knew. She was not quite ready to look at it directly yet, which was fine. She had Thursday for that.

She zipped up her bag and went back to work.