The gate at the east entrance of Kaelthorn Palace is smaller than the main entrance, which Sora knows from reference photographs because she has studied the palace's architectural layout more than she would like to admit. The east gate is used for appointments that are not intended to be public, which the staff member who emailed the access instructions described as a matter of scheduling convenience and which Sora understands to mean: we are not ready to announce this yet, and possibly we may never be, and you should conduct yourself accordingly.

She arrives seven minutes early. She spends four of those minutes standing on the pavement outside the gate, sketchbook in her bag, looking at the stonework. The palace is the same wrong proportions she identified from the bus yesterday, wider than photographs suggest, with a quality of horizontal weight that compression removes entirely. She makes a note of this in the margin of her brain, filed under things to correct retroactively, and then the gate opens and a staff member whose name badge reads Coordinator Hael leads her through.

She is taken to a room that is formal without being ceremonial: a meeting table, chairs upholstered in a color she would describe as institutional dignity, tall windows letting in morning light that the room seems designed to handle gracefully. A water pitcher. A folder at her place. She sits where indicated, opens the folder, and reads.

The folder contains a two-page overview of the proposal, a list of expected public appearances for the following three months, and a summary of the NDA she will be asked to sign if she agrees. She reads all of it before anyone else enters the room. This is a habit she developed in her first year of taking commission work: read everything before you agree to anything, because the thing you skimmed is always the thing that matters.

The PR director arrives first, followed by a legal representative and two additional staff whose roles are not immediately clear. Then, after a pause that has the quality of something timed, the door opens again.

She knows him from forty-seven installments of careful study and one eleven-minute meeting the previous afternoon, and she is still not prepared.

It is not that he is different from what she expected. It is that there is no buffer between her and the fact of him: no screen, no crowd, no comfortable distance from which to observe without being observed in return. He is three meters away and then two meters away and then he is sitting directly across from her at the meeting table, and the internal model she has been building for eight months does an immediate, involuntary recalibration.

Taller, she had noted yesterday. She notes it again now, at closer range. The stillness is more pronounced in a smaller room, the kind of stillness that takes up space without movement. He is wearing something that is not quite a suit and not quite casual, the precise midpoint between the two that communicates: I am here for business, but this is not a state occasion. She has drawn him in similar configurations and has, she now realizes, been slightly off on the collar.

He looks at her. Not with assessment this time. With something more neutral than that, or more careful.

"You're the one who drew the comic," he says. It is not a question.

"That's one way to put it," she says.

He waits, as though he expected more. She does not provide more. He looks at her for one additional beat, something shifting slightly in his expression, and then the PR director begins the meeting.

The framing is the same as yesterday, offered again now with Kaeran in the room: she is not a problem to manage. She is a narrative. The artist who saw through the official image to something real, and rendered it without agenda. The story of them, as the director constructs it, writes itself. All they are asking is for the two of them to occupy that story publicly for three months.

Sora is watching Kaeran while the director talks.

His expression does not change in any dramatic way. But there is something in the set of his jaw, the faint tension at the corner of his mouth, that she recognizes from volume thirty-one, the panel where he is being briefed on something he finds distasteful and is not going to say so. She drew it from a photograph taken at a press conference, and she thought at the time that she was probably misreading the image, projecting an internal state onto an expression that might mean something entirely different.

She was not misreading it.

She looks back at the director.

"What exactly do you want from me?" she asks. "Specifically."

The director explains specifically. Public appearances, on average two per month, ranging from formal events to more casual outings designed to read as organic. A cover story for how they met, which they will be given time to rehearse. A set of behavioral guidelines for public settings, which she will receive in writing. And, the director says, with the particular care of someone approaching the main point: her continued presence on social media, in the voice and register her audience already knows. Not managed posts. Not approved content. Her actual voice, talking about her actual experience, filtered through the understanding that certain specifics remain confidential per the NDA.

"You want me to keep posting," Sora says.

"We want the account to keep existing," the director says. "The way it already exists."

Sora looks across the table at Kaeran.

He is looking at her. She cannot read his expression as cleanly as she could read it in volume thirty-one's photograph, which is interesting, because she is considerably closer to him now and the light is better. She has the sudden, specific sense that he has more control over what his face communicates than she has been giving him credit for.

"You agreed to this," she says. Not an accusation. A question.

He is quiet for a moment in the way she has come to understand means he is choosing his words with unusual care.

"I don't have a better option," he says.

It is, she thinks, the most honest thing anyone in this room has said this morning. The directness of it lands somewhere she does not entirely expect. She nods, once, and turns back to the director.

"What is the figure?"

The figure is stated. She does not react visibly, because she has been practicing not reacting visibly to things since she was sixteen and learned it was a useful skill. Inside, something that has been coiled since yesterday shifts and releases slightly. The debt. The studio. The south-facing windows she has been imagining for three years.

"I have one condition," she says.

The director waits.

"I don't do approved posts. I don't send content for review before I publish it. The account stays the way it is or the account is not part of this."

There is a pause. The director glances at Kaeran. Kaeran says nothing. The director looks back at Sora.

"That can be accommodated," the director says, in the tone of someone who will be having a follow-up conversation about this later, in a room Sora will not be in.

She signs the preliminary agreement.

On the way out, she passes through the east wing corridor, which is lined with what she initially takes to be portraits but which turn out on closer inspection to be a mix of formal portraits and considerably older paintings, landscapes and court scenes and one piece that appears to be a map from several centuries ago. She slows without meaning to.

"The wing was renovated three times," Coordinator Hael says from just behind her left shoulder, with the patient tone of someone who answers this implicit question frequently. "The older pieces were kept. They didn't want the transition to be too visible."

Sora looks at the map. The geography is similar to Vaerath's coastline but not identical, the borders drawn differently, several cities marked with names she does not recognize. "They changed things but kept the evidence of what it looked like before," she says.

"Something like that."

She looks at the map for another moment. Then she keeps walking.

She is almost at the east gate when she hears footsteps behind her, a different cadence than Hael's. She does not turn around immediately.

"Ms. Min."

She turns. Kaeran is standing in the corridor, jacket unbuttoned now, which is a small thing and registers as such: he has been in a formal meeting and is now in a hallway between things, and he has unbuttoned his jacket because there is no camera and no audience and this is what he does when there is no camera and no audience. She files it without deciding to.

"You didn't ask about the extension clause," he says.

"I read it."

"Most people ask about it."

"It says possible extension subject to evaluation of outcomes. I understood it."

He looks at her with the expression she cannot read cleanly, the one she suspects has a more specific meaning than she has access to yet.

"The NDA has a provision for your professional work," he says. "Commissions, client projects. They're exempt. You won't need to clear anything through the office."

She studies him. "That wasn't in the folder."

"It was added this morning."

She does not say anything for a moment. He has, she realizes, read her situation from somewhere, the freelance work, the financial structure of it, the fact that her income is client-dependent and that a blanket NDA could complicate that in ways the palace's legal team might not have considered without prompting. He prompted them. This morning, before she arrived.

"Thank you," she says.

He nods once, turns, and walks back the way he came. The jacket is still unbuttoned until he rounds the corner and she cannot see him anymore.

She steps through the east gate onto the street. The city sounds come back immediately, ordinary and various.

She opens her sketchbook.

She has not drawn him facing directly forward since last night, when she turned the drawing face-down and could not look at it. She draws him now in the corridor, jacket open, at the moment just before he turned to walk away. The expression she cannot read cleanly. The posture that is slightly different from the one she has been drawing for eight months, because it is not performing anything for anyone.

She looks at the drawing.

This is not, she thinks, the face she has been drawing. This is the original.

She does not know what to do with that. She closes the sketchbook and takes the bus home.

In four days, she will come back with her things, and it will be different. She will have a room in the palace. She will have a contract making the arrangement official. She will be, in the language of the agreement she just signed, the Crown Prince's girlfriend, for all public purposes, for a period of three months.

In four days, she will stop being someone who observes him from a comfortable and careful distance.

She stares out the bus window at the city going past, at the ordinary street-level world of it, the kind of world she knows how to navigate without a protocol document.

She is, she tells herself, fine.

The drawing in her sketchbook has his jacket open and his expression at the angle where she could almost read it.

She is fine.