The orientation packet is thirty-one pages and includes a glossary.

Sora reads it at six in the morning, sitting at the desk in her room with the courtyard tree visible outside and a cup of tea she made in the small kitchen two doors down the hall. The packet covers dress code by event category, acceptable and non-acceptable topics for unscripted public conversation, a guide to the forms of address for the forty-three individuals she is most likely to encounter in the next three months, and a section titled Social Dynamics in Public-Facing Contexts, which she reads three times and is still not entirely sure how to interpret.

The glossary defines fourteen terms. One of them is Proximity Protocol, which is described as the set of behavioral standards governing physical interaction in public-facing settings, intended to ensure that interactions read as natural while remaining within the parameters appropriate to the occasion. She reads this definition twice. She writes in the margin of her copy, in small letters: who decides what reads as natural. Then she closes the packet, finishes her tea, and goes to meet Coordinator Hael in the orientation room at eight o'clock as scheduled.

Hael has the face of someone who has explained things to a great many people and has arrived at a state of profound professional equilibrium about it. Not impatience. Not warmth. Simply: competence, applied consistently and without expectation of surprise.

"Good morning," Hael says. "We'll start with event categories and dress code, move to public conduct guidelines, and finish with the social dynamics briefing. Do you have questions before we begin?"

"One," Sora says. "The glossary defines Proximity Protocol. How is the protocol calibrated for different event types?"

Hael pauses. Not the pause of someone who does not know the answer, but the pause of someone who did not expect the question to start there. "The calibration depends on the formality level and audience composition of the event. There are four tiers."

"Can you walk me through them?"

Hael begins walking her through them.

They are twenty minutes into the four tiers when the door opens.

Kaeran steps in, which Hael receives with an expression that communicates, very quietly, that this is not a standard occurrence. He is not in the clothes she has seen him in before, not the meeting attire or the corridor attire. This is something more like what a person wears when they are moving through a Tuesday morning and do not expect to be observed. He looks at the materials on the table, at Hael, and then at Sora.

"I came to check the orientation timeline," he says. To Hael, not to her.

"We're in Proximity Protocol," Hael says.

"At twenty minutes in?"

"Ms. Min had specific questions."

He looks at Sora. She looks at him. She says: "I wanted to understand the calibration before I got to the general guidelines. It seemed like the foundational concept."

He is quiet for a moment. Then he pulls out the chair across the table from her and sits down in it, which is not what she expected.

"Go on," he says to Hael.

Hael goes on.

She learns, in the following forty minutes, that there are four tiers of public-facing events: formal ceremonial, formal diplomatic, semi-formal public, and informal public. Each tier has a corresponding proximity range measured in a unit she initially thinks is a joke and then realizes is simply specific. The physical contact guidelines specify the difference between incidental contact and intentional contact, and further subdivide intentional contact into: supportive, where one party is guiding or steadying the other; affectionate, where contact is initiated for the purpose of demonstrating relational closeness; and reciprocal, which covers contact that is simultaneously both.

"Who wrote this," she says.

"The Hội" -- Hael catches something in Sora's expression and adjusts. "The Council's protocol committee. Over several sessions."

"Did any of them have firsthand experience with the situations they were categorizing?"

Hael's expression does not change. Kaeran's does something small at the corner of his mouth that she is beginning to recognize as the equivalent of a response, in a register he does not use in front of cameras.

"The protocol is intended to be comprehensive," Hael says.

"It's very comprehensive," Sora agrees. "Can we do the room calibration?"

The room calibration is where Hael stands in for the purpose of establishing spatial references. Sora finds this system eminently reasonable and is not nervous about it at all, which she confirms to herself several times during the demonstration. Hael stands beside her, then adjusts. Kaeran watches from across the table with the quality of attention she is learning to identify by now: present, not passive.

"Closer," Kaeran says.

Hael adjusts. Kaeran: "A few centimeters."

Hael adjusts again. Kaeran stands up from the table and walks over. He stands next to Sora at what Hael has, apparently, been slightly miscalibrating. The difference is small. She is very aware of it anyway.

"The tier-three range is closer than most people expect," he says, to the room generally. "Especially for someone who doesn't have a frame of reference for formal occasions."

"I have a frame of reference for formal occasions," she says.

"In what context?"

"Client presentations. Exhibition openings. Two weddings where I was asked to do something for the seating program and was put at a table with people who expected me to be interesting about it."

The corner of his mouth does the thing again. "That's a different frame of reference."

"It has a lot of overlap."

He looks at her from the tier-three range. She looks at him. Hael is writing something on the orientation clipboard and appears to be doing so with great attention.

"You're thinking about how to draw this," he says.

"I'm thinking about the calibration," she says.

"You're thinking about both."

She does not respond to this, which is its own response. He steps back to the standard orientation distance and returns to the table. Hael moves them along.

The social dynamics briefing covers three categories: press interaction, which is handled by the PR office in most cases and by Sora directly only in clearly defined informal contexts; public interaction with members of the public, which requires awareness of certain safety protocols she was not anticipating; and interaction with known individuals in the palace social circuit, which is the longest section and the one she will need to read again before the first event.

"There are forty-three individuals on the primary list," she says. "Am I expected to remember biographical details for all of them?"

"The key details," Hael says. "The packet includes a summary page for the fifteen most likely to be encountered in the first month."

"I'll remember them," she says.

Hael looks at her with professional neutrality.

"I remember things I read," she says. "It's not a particular skill. It's just what happens."

"Then the summary page should be sufficient," Hael says.

Kaeran has been reading the summary page. He looks up. "The summary page has an error. Lord Sevin's second name is spelled incorrectly. It's been that way in the system for about three years and no one has fixed it."

"I'll note that," Hael says, in the tone of someone who has noted it before.

They break for a brief intermission. Sora goes to refill her tea from the kitchen down the hall. When she comes back, Kaeran is in the corridor outside the orientation room, turned toward the window that overlooks the courtyard. He is not doing anything in particular. She is not sure if he is waiting for something or simply not ready to go back into the room.

She stops a few feet away.

"The comic," he says, without turning around. "What made you start it?"

She considers the question. "Jian mentioned something once about how you wait in the car before events. Twenty minutes early, reading, before you go in."

He turns his head slightly. "And you drew that."

"I drew what I imagined from it. You in a car, reading, waiting for the right moment to be the version of yourself the event needed."

He is quiet.

"It seemed," she says, "like a human thing to do. The waiting and the reading. I thought other people might recognize it."

"Forty-six installments later."

"People kept reading."

He turns to look at her fully. The expression is the one she still does not have a complete vocabulary for. She has added some terms in the last four days: it is not the managed expression, not the assessment expression. It is something she would probably call, if she were labeling it for herself in the margin of a sketchbook, the expression he has when he is not deciding what to do with what he is thinking.

"I read them," he says. "All of them, before the meeting."

"I know. You mentioned volume twenty-three."

"I recognized the window angle. East wing, third floor. Nobody uses that room anymore."

"Jian didn't tell me that detail. I put you there based on where the light would be at that time of day."

He looks at her for a moment in the way that she is beginning to think means he is recalibrating something.

"You inferred the window from the light," he says.

"I usually look for where the light would be for whoever I'm drawing. It felt right for that volume."

"It was right," he says. "I was in that room. For approximately the reason you implied."

She does not say anything. She takes a sip of her tea.

"That's," he starts. Stops. Then: "I'm not sure whether to find that remarkable or unsettling."

"Most people find it one and then the other," she says. "In that order."

Hael appears at the end of the corridor to indicate the second portion of orientation is ready to begin. They go back in. She takes notes on the remaining sections, asks three more questions, and leaves with a clearer picture of what the next three months will look like in practical terms.

In the evening, she sits at her desk and opens the current sketchbook to the tree-and-figure drawing she left open. She looks at it for a while. The figure at the opposite window could be anyone. She has drawn it in silhouette, without detail.

She adds one detail: a book, open, held in one hand.

She looks at the addition.

Then she turns to a fresh page and starts working on a panel she has been thinking about since the orientation room, which is the panel for volume forty-eight: the one where the Crown Prince is standing in a corridor, not doing anything in particular, turned toward a window in a way that might mean he is thinking or might mean he is waiting or might mean both, and the light is the late-afternoon kind that makes everything look like it has been there for longer than it has.

She works on the panel until almost midnight.

The hand, this time, she gets right on the first attempt.