The production assistant had drifted back slightly, still within earshot, still wearing that uncomfortable expression.
"Ms. Han," they said, quieter now, "should I tell her you'll speak to her after, or—"
"No," Soorin said. Flat. "Don't tell her anything. Just go."
The assistant went.
She stared at the premiere card.
Breathed.
Then the lights went down.
All at once, all the way, the kind of dark that a well-designed theater could do where the whole room went from lit to almost completely black in the span of a second. The screen shifted. The animation began.
And in that dark, something brushed the back of her seat.
Just barely. Just once. The lightest contact, a hand resting on the headrest or a knee coming forward or any of the thousand ordinary ways people moved in theaters without thinking about it.
She did not move.
She did not breathe.
