Cut

Chapter 1 · Day Three

When the camera started rolling, he had to think of his own name twice.

"We'll go name, age, agency. Just relax."

The writer turned a finger twice. The red light beside the lens was already on. Just relax is something people say after the shooting has started. From the moment that sentence comes out, it's already footage. He knew that.

"I'm Bae Yeon-woo."

The voice was strange. It had been strange for three days.

The cords sat a half step high and the resonance was shallow. This body had a habit of pulling sound from above instead of pushing it up from below. Sing like that and you don't get through ten songs. He knew that too. Knowing and fixing are separate problems.

"Twenty-three. AION Entertainment."

The writer looked up. She was reacting to the word AION, not to him. He could tell the difference. He had spent ten years learning to tell the eyes that looked at him from the eyes that looked at his agency.

"How long were you a trainee?"

"Five years."

"Ever make a debut lineup in that time?"

"Once."

"So why didn't it happen?"

The writer smiled. There was no malice in it. This was the kind of program that asked that. The entry requirement was having been cut once, so asking about the wound was the same as asking for an introduction.

If I knew why it hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here.

He didn't answer. About three seconds passed. Three seconds is a very long time on television. The editor would keep these three seconds. Keep them, and lay something thin underneath. And then put a caption on it.

"I don't remember it well."

The writer's pen stopped.

"Remember?"

"I had an accident. Three weeks in the hospital. Things before that come and go in patches."

It wasn't a lie. That was the good part. This body's chart really did run three weeks, and the doctor really had written temporary memory gaps. He had read that document seventeen times in three days. The alibi for every strange thing he was going to do from here on was already in it.

The writer wrote something quickly. Her eyes brightened a little. It was the look of someone who had just found a story.

"That must have been hard. Last thing — one line on why you're here."

Red light. Lens. One sub-camera three meters back. He didn't look straight into it. He looked at a point up and to the right of the lens, four centimeters above. It makes the eyes less severe than a head-on stare, and it lowers the odds of being cut in the edit.

"Because this is the last time."

Somebody behind the camera laughed, short.

"Good. Cut."

There were a hundred people in the waiting room.

All of them had been cut once. That was the condition of entry. LAST CALL. The final call. Whoever named it must have thought he'd come up with a pretty good name.

He was handed a number. 63. A magnet type for the chest, the corner lifting slightly. He pressed it flat with a thumbnail.

Choosing a seat, he looked at the ceiling out of habit. Two lighting rails, three cameras, one of them a jib. Put your back to the direction the jib swings and you get the back of your head. He sat against the opposite wall.

Body first.

He raised his left hand and folded the fingers down one at a time. Slow. The little finger especially. He lifted his toes, tightened the calf, let it go. Legs that had been lying down for three weeks were honest. There was no muscle in them.

He drew breath in. The ribs opened upward only. The bottom didn't open.

Sixteen bars.

He used to go sixteen bars on one breath. His body did. This one shook at eight.

Half. Half means you don't survive the third verse on a stage. The third verse is where the chorus repeats and the choreography density peaks, where the camera stays longest, which is to say where people die.

He calculated. It struck him as odd that he wasn't angry. The anger had all happened three days ago.

When he opened his eyes in the hospital bed, the first thing he saw was the fluorescent light on the ceiling, and the second was the television mounted on the wall. The sound was off. A ticker ran across the bottom.

VERTEX's REI killed in traffic accident during tour transit — dead at 29

He read the sentence three times. After three times he looked at his own hands. The hands were strange. The shape of the nails was different, and there was no callus on the second joint of the right index finger. That callus had come from learning to hold a mic wrong at nineteen. He had carried it around for ten years.

It wasn't there.

A nurse came in and called his name.

"Bae Yeon-woo? Ah, you're awake."

He didn't open his mouth. Not because his throat was blocked but because it took time to register the name as his. The nurse confirmed the emergency contact, said his mother was on her way up from out of town, and he nodded. In that moment he did exactly one thing.

He accepted it.

He didn't ask why. He didn't ask how, either. If ten of his twenty-nine years in this industry had taught him one thing, it was that while you're holding on to what happened and demanding a reason, the set has already moved to the next bar. When the in-ear cuts out on stage, the one who panics dies and the one who counts mouth shapes lives.

So he counted the next bar.

This body's phone was in the drawer beside the bed. The lock was four digits, a birthday. At the top of the message list was one from AION's New Artist Development team.

[AION ENT] Bae Yeon-woo, this is notice of the termination of your trainee contract.

The date was two days before the accident.

Below it there was one more.

[LAST CALL Production] Bae Yeon-woo, congratulations on passing the first round. Details for the first shoot day…

The date was one day before the accident.

Cut, applied, passed, and hit by a car the next day. The owner of this body had thrashed once, at the end, and had disappeared before the thrash arrived.

He sat between those two sentences for a long time.

…I'm sorry.

He didn't say it out loud, because he didn't know who it was to.

The waiting room door opened.

"Sixty-three, sixty-five, seventy-one. Individual evaluation, on deck."

He stood. One knee folded and straightened. Nobody saw it.

The corridor was narrow and there were cameras along both walls. From here on there are no private moments. He arranged his face. It arranged itself without his noticing that he was doing it. Ten years doesn't stay in the body, he understood now. It stays in the face. He had left the body behind and the way of using a face had followed him anyway.

What can I do.

That was the only question he had asked in three days.

He had decided not to ask why he was alive. He knew whose body it was now, too. One question was left. With a twenty-nine-year-old's head and a twenty-three-year-old's empty body, was there a way to survive out of a hundred people.

If there wasn't, he would have to make one.

At the end of the corridor a few staff were standing together. Production vests, broadcaster lanyards, and agency people. Agency people come to watch how their own trainees come out. He scanned the lanyard colors out of habit.

His steps stopped there.

A woman was leaning against the wall looking at a tablet. The sleeves of her blazer were folded back twice, she was holding the tablet in her left hand, and with the index finger of her right she was tapping the screen. Four taps and a rest. Four taps and a rest.

It was four-four time.

Ju-yeon-ah.

The name came before anything else.

Seven years ago, in the practice room on the third basement level, twenty-three people stood in front of a mirror and one of them always counted like that. With a finger. Without sound. Four beats and a rest.

She hadn't debuted.

He had watched her get cut. He had said nothing that day. He was two months from his own debut then, he had his hands full with himself, and above all he had thought, who am I to step in. How comfortable that thought had been was something he understood only later.

Seven years on, she was standing here.

There was a company name on the lanyard. Under it, a department.

AION ENTERTAINMENT / New Artist Development — Baek Ju-yeon

New Artist Development. The team that picks trainees, evaluates them, builds debut lineups, and cuts them.

He thought of the message that had cut him three weeks ago. The sender was a department name only, but a person had sent it. A person had erased the name.

Baek Ju-yeon looked up.

Their eyes met. She looked at him, did not recognize him, dropped her eyes to the number on his chest and went back to the tablet. It took less than two seconds.

Of course. This face was not new to her. It was a name she had already erased.

"Sixty-three, go ahead."

He walked toward the door.

Chapter 2 · Inventory

There was no sofa in Jin Dong-hyeok's office.

The rumor was that he'd had it removed so he wouldn't have to tell anyone to sit, and Baek Ju-yeon was inclined to believe the rumor. She had been in this room a dozen or so times in seven years and had never once sat down.

"Ms. Baek."

"Yes, Director."

"You're taking this one."

A single sheet slid across the desk. There was a department code and a project name on the cover.

New Artist Development Team 2 / Boy Group Debut Project (working title) V-2

V minus two. Or V-two. Read it either way, it meant one thing. After VERTEX.

"We've got twelve going into LAST CALL. If five of ours land in the final twenty, we get a team. Four and we don't."

"…Five."

"I said four and we don't."

He was not a man who repeated himself. That he had repeated it meant the number was not up for negotiation.

Ju-yeon turned a page. Participant list, budget, scale of broadcast sponsorship, and a draft concept. Her hand stopped on the first line of the draft concept.

Concept direction — the team carrying on the VERTEX line. "The Sound That Was Left."

"Director."

"What."

"This is…"

You're selling a dead man's name.

"…Are we using REI-sunbae's image?"

Jin Dong-hyeok was looking at his monitor. It took about four seconds for him to answer, and the four seconds weren't for thinking. They were for finishing the sentence he was reading.

"Baek. Do you know how many copies the memorial album moved?"

"I know."

"Then we're done."

Ju-yeon closed the folder.

"What happens if the team doesn't come out?"

"Then the project goes away."

"And if the project goes away."

"So does the person in charge of it."

Only then did he look up. His face said he did not mean it unkindly. That made it a more accurate threat. There's room to negotiate with malice. There isn't with fact.

"Ms. Baek, how many years have you been with us."

"Seven."

"Counting the trainee years."

"Ten."

"How many teams have you debuted in ten years."

Ju-yeon didn't answer. He hadn't wanted an answer either.

"Five. Five people."

Leaving the room, she closed the door quietly. Not because she didn't want to slam it, but because she knew that people who slam doors don't get called in again.

In the corridor on the seventeenth floor she ran into a junior.

Second year, New Artist Development.

"Manager, I heard you got that one."

"…Yes."

"Congratulations."

"…"

"Ah — is it not congratulations?"

The junior smiled. They both knew what the words meant when they came out with a smile on them.

"There was some talk about V-2 in our team. That nobody wanted to take it."

"…Was there."

"Yeah. Ji-yeong-sunbae got out of it first, apparently. Said it was obviously not going to work and her name would be the only thing on it."

"…"

"And then you ended up with it."

Ju-yeon nodded.

"Good luck with it."

The junior went past.

She stood there a moment.

Nobody wanted to take it.

That was accurate. Jin Dong-hyeok hadn't given her an opportunity. He had given the thing nobody would take to the person who was still standing there at the end.

Most of what she had been handed in seven years had been like that.

And it wasn't purely bad. Nobody takes away the work nobody is watching.

Ju-yeon shifted the folder in her hands and walked.

At the end of the corridor a large panel hung on the wall. VERTEX, five of them. Shot three years ago. The company hadn't taken it down. There was no reason to. The photograph still sold.

Second from the left was REI.

She didn't slow down. Not slowing down took effort.

Han Ji-un. There was no one at the company who called him by that name anymore. It was a case of the stage name eating the given name whole, and after he died it was more so. The memorial coverage all said REI. The three syllables of Han Ji-un existed only in the family's interview.

Seven years ago that boy had stood two places to her right on the third basement level. Twenty-three people did the same choreography in front of a mirror, five of them debuted, and the other eighteen went somewhere.

The day she was cut, he said nothing.

She had never resented it. To be exact, she had decided she wasn't entitled to. He had been two months from debut then. Expecting anything from a kid who could barely manage his own situation was shameless, she had concluded at twenty-one, and she had not revised that conclusion in seven years.

Only that when he died and several people at this company cried, she remembered that she hadn't.

She passed the panel and pressed the elevator button.

The shoot was in Ilsan. Forty minutes by car; by the time she arrived the individual evaluations were already turning over.

Ju-yeon leaned against the corridor wall and woke the tablet. She opened the participant list on the company account. A hundred came up, and when she filtered by agency it dropped to twelve.

AION / 12 participants

14 Kim Do-yun · 22 Jang Se-hyeok · 29 Im Ha-ram · 37 Noh Si-uk

41 Jo Eun-seong · 55 Kang Tae-rim · 63 Bae Yeon-woo · 68 Mun Yu-il

74 Yun Do-gyeom · 81 Seo Jun-jae · 90 Choi Ra-on · 96 Lee Geon-u

She tapped the screen with a finger. Four taps and a rest. An old habit, and one she had no intention of correcting.

She ran down the list from the top. Fourteen, Kim Do-yun, can sing and can't dance. Twenty-two, Jang Se-hyeok, the reverse. Twenty-nine, Im Ha-ram, can do both and freezes in front of a camera. There was an evaluation she had written attached to every name. Seven years of them were in her head.

Her finger stopped at sixty-three.

Bae Yeon-woo.

Why is he here.

She had deleted this name from a list three weeks ago. The release notice had gone out from her account. Five had been cut from the roster and he was one of them.

She opened the profile. Photo, physical data, year of entry, date of final evaluation. The contract end date was stamped three weeks back.

And below it there was one more line.

※ Eligibility screening passed — not unaffiliated as of release date (application received day after contract end)

Ju-yeon read the line twice.

It meant he had applied the day after he was cut.

The notice had gone out Tuesday morning, so this kid had written the application for this program Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. Rewritten a personal statement, chosen a free-selection song, filmed a video and uploaded it. One day after being cut.

She had seen plenty of kids like that. Kids like that generally didn't last. Thrashing almost never turns into ability.

The problem was that the agency field still said AION. Application received the day after the contract end. On paper this kid still counted as one of ours.

Which meant he could be counted as one of the five.

Ju-yeon bookmarked the entry. Having done it, she found it slightly funny. She had just put a name she erased three weeks ago back on a list.

The corridor got loud suddenly. Production was calling the next group.

"Sixty-three, sixty-five, seventy-one. Individual evaluation, on deck."

Three of them went past in front of her. She looked up and went back to the tablet. She didn't look at faces. She looked at the numbers. 63, 65, 71. All she needed was to confirm whether they were numbers on her list.

It took about two seconds.

Later she would go back over these two seconds many times. If I had lifted my head just a little more. But to the woman she was that day, sixty-three was a number, and numbers are easier to count than people.

The evaluation room door closed.

Ju-yeon put the tablet to sleep. Her face showed in the black screen. A woman with her blazer sleeves folded back twice. A lanyard around her neck.

AION ENTERTAINMENT / New Artist Development — Baek Ju-yeon

The name was there.

In ten years the only places her name had been printed were that lanyard and the bottom box of an internal approval line. Not on an album credit, not on a profile, not on a backstage staff list. The names of the kids she picked were everywhere.

Five.

She woke the tablet again.