The rehearsal room has seven mirrors.

Sora counts them while Hael is setting up the camera monitors, because counting things is what she does when she is somewhere new and is not yet sure what to do with her hands. Three on the east wall in a continuous panel, one freestanding in the corner, two flanking the main door, one on the ceiling above the central area that she suspects is for choreography purposes but that primarily functions, she quickly discovers, as a way of making it impossible to stand anywhere in the room without seeing yourself from at least two angles simultaneously.

She is not nervous. She has confirmed this to herself twice since waking up and once more in the corridor on the way here. She is alert, which is different from nervous in ways that she could enumerate if asked but that mostly come down to: nervous is anticipatory, alert is present. She is here, in this room, with seven mirrors, and she is fine.

Kaeran is already there. This is, she is noting, a pattern: he arrives before scheduled times and is already oriented to the space when she enters. She has added this to the internal record without deciding whether it means something.

He is standing in the center of the room in a posture she recognizes because she has drawn it, which is the posture of someone who has spent a great deal of their life standing in rooms waiting for things to begin and has made a kind of peace with the activity. Jacket on this time. Hands at his sides. He looks at her when she enters and says nothing, which she is also beginning to recognize as a mode of communication rather than an absence of one.

"Seven mirrors," she says.

"Eight," he says. "There's one behind the supply cabinet that's been there since a previous iteration of this room."

"What was the previous iteration?"

"A small performance space. Some version of it has been here for about two hundred years."

She looks at the room differently for a moment, the way she always looks at spaces once she has a sense of their history. Layered, rather than singular. She files this and moves on.

Hael reviews the session structure. Three scenarios, in order of formality: arrival at a public event, behavior during a seated formal event, and departure. They will rehearse each scenario in real time, review footage, and repeat until Hael is satisfied with the visual result. The camera monitors in the corner will record continuously, and Hael will stop the scenario to make adjustments as needed.

"Questions before we begin?"

"The arrival scenario," Sora says. "Are we entering from the same point, or are we converging?"

"Same point. You will have been in the same vehicle. You exit together, he is on your left, you approach the entrance together."

"And the spacing?"

"Tier two for arrival, transitioning to tier three once inside."

She nods. She knows the tiers now. She has the packet.

"We'll position to start," Hael says.

They position to start. This requires standing next to each other at the designated spacing, which she knows from yesterday is closer than people expect. She knows this in the abstract. She knows it differently, now, in practice.

He is slightly to her left and slightly behind her, which is where Hael has indicated he should be for an arrival approach. She can see him in two of the mirrors simultaneously. She can also, in an entirely sensory and non-abstract way, feel the warmth of proximity in the way that you feel it when someone is within a certain distance and the air has not yet equalized.

She looks at the mark on the floor indicating the camera frame and thinks about the debt and the studio and the south-facing windows.

"Ready," she says.

"Whenever you are," Hael says.

They walk the approach. She has been to formal events before: the client presentations, the exhibition openings, the two weddings. The movement is not unfamiliar. What is unfamiliar is the specific calibration of walking next to someone in a way that looks neither too close nor too far, natural without being casual, and doing it in front of a camera that is recording the result.

Kaeran puts his hand on the small of her back at the moment Hael indicated he would, which is the moment they transition from approach to arrival. She had known this was coming. She had read the briefing and attended the orientation and counted the mirrors in this room. She was prepared.

It is still, slightly, a surprise. Not unpleasant. Not anything, particularly. Simply: there, and present, in a way that the rehearsal briefing had not quite conveyed.

She keeps walking. She looks where Hael told her to look. She does not look at the mirrors.

"Stop," Hael says.

They stop. Hael reviews the monitor. She takes the opportunity to look at herself in the east wall mirrors, which is the thing the room is designed to make unavoidable. She looks, to her own eyes, like herself, in context she is not usually in. Kaeran looks, to her eyes, like the photographs she has studied, except that the photographs do not have her in them, and the addition of her in them changes something she cannot yet articulate.

"Ms. Min," Hael says. "Your gaze is going left on approach."

"Left is where I usually look."

"In this context, the natural gaze direction is toward the entrance, or toward the event space ahead."

"Or toward him," Kaeran says, which is not on the briefing sheet.

She looks at him. He is looking at the monitor. He is not, to all visible evidence, doing anything except contributing information about the correct visual result.

"Briefly," he says. "On arrival. Then forward."

"How briefly," she says.

"Long enough to be natural. Not long enough to be a statement."

Hael: "Let's do a second take."

They reset. She thinks about what he said, which is technically instruction and practically something she is choosing not to categorize further. Brief. Natural. Forward.

The second take is better. She can tell from Hael's expression, which has moved approximately two degrees in the direction of something that might eventually become satisfaction.

They run the seated scenario next, which involves sitting next to each other in chairs arranged at the approximate spacing of a formal event table. She is very aware, in a low-key and persistent way, that their knees are at a distance she would not normally maintain with someone she has known for less than a week. She is also aware that he is very still, which is something she has drawn and observed and studied from reference photographs, but which is different when you are the closest person to it.

"Incidental contact is acceptable in the seated scenario," Hael says, reading from the tier-two notes. "It should look organic rather than deliberate."

"Define organic," Sora says.

"As though it occurred naturally as a result of proximity, rather than being initiated for a specific purpose."

"Right," she says. "And how do we produce that on cue?"

Hael pauses.

Kaeran says: "Don't produce it. If it happens, let it. If it doesn't, don't manufacture it. The camera can tell the difference between something that happened and something that was arranged."

"Can it?"

"People who watch public events professionally can. Which is most of the audience for a formal event."

She looks at him. He is looking at the monitor, where the current rehearsal footage is paused on the frame from the arrival. "You've thought about this," she says.

"I've been at public events since I was seven," he says. "You develop a sense of what reads as real."

"And what reads as real?"

"Things that are happening," he says, simply. "Rather than things that are being performed."

Hael moves them forward.

They run the departure scenario, which is the most involved one: a calibrated exit that needs to communicate a natural conclusion to the event while maintaining the public-facing dynamic until they are clear of the camera range. She finds the exit harder than the arrival, because the arrival has a destination and the departure is just an ending, and endings are harder to move through when you are aware of them.

They do three takes. The third one, Hael accepts.

Footage review takes twenty minutes. She sits next to Kaeran at the monitor station and watches herself in the room from the camera's perspective, which is always different from the inside-perspective of the event. She looks, from the camera, like someone who knows what they are doing. She is not entirely sure this is accurate.

Hael pauses on a frame from the second take of the arrival. "Here," Hael says. "This is the gaze moment. This is the reference."

On the monitor: she is looking forward, approaching the camera with him beside her, and he has turned his head to look at her for one beat. She is not looking at him in this frame. He is looking at her. The frame is three seconds of footage and Hael has paused it in the middle second.

"That's what natural looks like," Hael says. "In the event, aim to produce moments like this."

She looks at the frozen frame. She has watched forty-seven installments worth of footage in preparation for this, stills and video, and she knows what the camera captures when there is something genuine to capture. She has drawn it.

The frame on the monitor is the thing she has been drawing, from the other side.

She does not say this. She notes it, in the internal record, in the part of the record she has not yet decided to examine.

"How long does that frame last in real time?" she asks.

"Approximately two seconds," Hael says.

"And where was the camera?"

"Side angle. Forty-five degrees."

She nods. She looks at the frame for one more moment. Then she looks at the notes she has been taking and returns to those.

Kaeran does not comment on the frame. She does not comment on it either. This is, she is discovering, one of the things they are good at: the simultaneous not-commenting on things. It is efficient. She is not sure yet whether it is good.

They wrap. Hael gives them each a copy of the session notes and reminds them that the first public event is in three days.

She is in the corridor when Kaeran catches up to her, which she only knows because he says: "You'll want the briefing for the event. It's more detailed than the general packet."

She turns. He is holding a folder. She takes it.

"You carry briefing materials with you," she says.

"Not usually. I asked Hael to prepare this one for you specifically."

She looks at the folder. It is labeled with the event name and date, and below that, in smaller text: For Ms. Min, specific context notes. She opens to the first page. The notes are specific in the way that the general packet is not: names and faces cross-referenced, the layout of the venue, the likely camera positions for the evening.

"Camera positions," she says.

"You think in terms of visual angles," he says. "I thought it would be more useful than the standard brief."

She looks up at him. He is waiting, which is, she has noticed, what he does when he has said something and is not sure how it will be received. She adds this to the record.

"Thank you," she says.

He nods. He starts to turn away. Stops.

"The frame on the monitor," he says. "I didn't plan it."

She is quiet for a moment. "I know."

"Good," he says. And goes.

She stands in the corridor holding the briefing folder with the camera positions in it. The folder is specific and useful and represents, she is aware, someone thinking about what she would find useful and then acting on that thought, without being asked.

She thinks about the frame on the monitor for a moment longer.

Then she opens the folder to the venue layout and starts reading.