Chapter 1: First Sight (Through Cynical Eyes)
The desert heat had settled into Minjeong’s bones, a fine layer of dust and sunscreen clinging to her skin. Around her, a kaleidoscope of neon fringe and glitter moved in a sluggish river toward the main stage. She tugged at the hem of her own sequined top, a purchase she now regretted.
“This is a waste of a good outfit,” she announced, her voice barely carrying over the festival din. “And my battery’s at twenty percent. This is a humanitarian crisis.”
Her friend Soojin, a human sunset in orange chiffon, looped an arm through hers. “Stop being a brat. You need culture.”
“Culture is a museum with air conditioning. This is a sweat farm with a soundtrack.”
“It’s Karina,” the other friend, Lia, yelled, her eyes wide with zeal. “You have to see her. She’s, like, an experience.”
Minjeong snorted. “Right. Another perfectly packaged pop bot from some mega-label. I’ve seen the algorithm. She’s probably got the emotional range of a teaspoon and sings through ten layers of Auto-Tune.” She mimed pressing a button on a console. “Beep. Boop. Manufactured feeling activated.”
They shoved through the thickest part of the crowd, a crush of bodies smelling of coconut oil and spilled beer. The stage ahead was a monolithic structure, silent and dark against the bruising purple of the twilight sky. The shadows it cast were long and distorted, like stretched fingers reaching into the audience.
Minjeong checked her phone again. No service. Trapped.
Then, the house lights died.
A collective breath was sucked from fifty thousand people. The darkness was absolute, vibrating with anticipation. Minjeong felt it in her teeth.
A single, pure synth note pierced the black, hanging in the air like a frozen teardrop. Then, a snap. A pinpoint of white light appeared at the center of the stage.
It was her.
The light bloomed, revealing a figure standing perfectly still. Karina. She was wearing something dark and fluid that seemed to drink the light, her silhouette cut sharp against the sudden, deep blue wash that flooded the stage. Her hair was a shock of silver against it all.
Minjeong’s prepared sarcasm died in her throat.
The first note Karina sang wasn’t heard. It was felt. A low, resonant vibration that started in the giant subwoofers and traveled up through the dusty ground, through the soles of Minjeong’s platform boots, and settled directly behind her sternum. It wasn’t a big note. It was quiet, almost confidential, yet it commanded the entire field into utter silence.
No one moved.
Then the beat dropped. Not a chaotic blast, but a sleek, driving pulse of bass and rhythm. Karina moved with it. It wasn’t dancing; it was a physical manifestation of the sound, her body a ripple of controlled power. She prowled the stage’s edge, her gaze sweeping the crowd. It wasn’t a performing smile. It was something more intense, more knowing.
“Okay,” Minjeong breathed out, the word lost to the music. No one heard her.
She was transfixed. It was the details that unraveled her. The slight tremor in Karina’s lower lip as she held a long note. The way a single bead of sweat traced a path from her temple down the elegant line of her neck, disappearing into the dark fabric at her collarbone. The raw, unfiltered ache in the chorus that was absolutely, undeniably live. There was no bot here. This was a person, wielding a shocking, specific talent like a weapon.
Minjeong’s earlier critique felt childish, embarrassing.
During a minimalist bridge, the music faded to just a ticking hi-hat and the thrum of a bassline. Karina walked to the very front of the stage, mic in hand. She closed her eyes, lifting her face to the cool night air now sweeping across the field.
“You can forget everything out there,” she sang, her voice a smoky, intimate thing now, a secret told in the dark. “For the next few minutes… it’s just us.”
A scream started in the crowd, but was hushed by others. Minjeong didn’t scream. She just stared. A weird, hollow feeling opened up in her gut. She had a sudden, inexplicable thought: What does that voice sound like in the morning?
The thought was so private, so stupid, it shocked her.
The song built again, soaring into a final, explosive crescendo of light and sound. Karina was everywhere, all at once—center stage, at the wings, climbing onto a speaker stack, her figure backlit into a glorious, defiant silhouette against walls of swirling digital color. The crowd became a single, heaving organism, shouting the words back at her.
Minjeong’s mouth was dry. She wasn’t shouting. She was just watching, an odd stillness at the center of the frenzy.
The final note shook the air. Karina dropped her head, chest rising and falling rapidly, a strand of silver hair stuck to her damp cheek. The lights went black.
The roar was instant, deafening, a physical wave of adoration. Minjeong flinched.
The house lights came up, harsh and real. The spell was broken. People started talking, laughing, moving toward the exits.
“Told you!” Lia was screaming, shaking Minjeong’s arm. “Wasn’t she incredible? Oh my god!”
Soojin was nodding, eyes shining. “See? Culture!”
Minjeong blinked. She felt strangely disjointed, like she’d been snapped back into a body that didn’t quite fit anymore. The sensory overload of the festival rushed back in—the chatter, the smell of fryer oil from a food stand, the ache in her feet.
“Yeah,” she said, her own voice sounding foreign to her. “She was… good.”
Good. The word was pathetic. It was a lie.
She let herself be pulled by the current of the departing crowd, but she glanced back over her shoulder once, at the empty, shadowed stage. The ghost of the music seemed to echo in the hollow space behind her ribs.
She spent the rest of the night distracted. The other sets were just noise and light. Her friends’ conversations were just sounds. Her mind kept rewinding, replaying: the sweat on the neck, the tremor in the lip, the voice that promised just us.
Later, in the chaotic glow of a packed VIP bar, Soojin nudged her. “You’re being weirdly quiet. Still thinking about Karina?”
Minjeong took a long sip of her overpriced vodka soda. The ice had melted. “No,” she said, too quickly. “Just tired. And dirty. I think I have sand in places sand should never be.”
She launched into a funny, exaggerated rant about festival hygiene, making her friends laugh. It was easy. It was her brand. But it was noise to cover the signal.
Back in her absurdly expensive rented villa hours later, showered and finally alone, she lay in the king-sized bed. The silence was absolute. She stared at the pristine white ceiling.
Then she reached for her phone.
She typed the name into the search bar. Karina.
She clicked on the first video, a professional performance from a music show months ago. She watched, critically this time. Trying to find the flaw, the seam in the illusion. But there was none. Just the same captivating, unsettling precision. The same... feeling.
She watched another. And another.
At 3:17 a.m., in the dark, the phone’s glow lit her face. She was watching a fancam, a clip focused solely on Karina from tonight’s performance. There was a moment, just a second, where Karina’s gaze seemed to sweep toward the side of the crowd where Minjeong had been standing. It was meaningless, a random sweep of the audience. But Minjeong paused the video.
She zoomed in.
The image pixelated, but Karina’s expression was clear. It was fierce, full of a kind of joyous command. Minjeong’s thumb hovered over the screen.
“Shit,” she whispered to the empty, luxurious room.
She locked the phone, throwing it onto the other pillow as if it had burned her. She stared back at the ceiling, the afterimage of the stage lights still printed on her eyelids.
The hollow feeling in her gut was still there. It had a new name now, and it was quiet, and it was specific, and it was a problem.
It had a new name now, and it was quiet, and it was specific, and it was a problem.
The problem followed her back to Seoul. It was there during brand shoots, a hum beneath the photographer’s count. It flickered on her phone screen between takes. She told herself it was professional curiosity. Karina was a phenomenon; dissecting her craft was just good industry practice.
Her deep dive, however, quickly left the stage.
The polished music show performances were one thing. The fancams from concerts another. But the rabbit hole led to clumsily filmed airport arrivals, tense-looking endorsements signings, and paparazzi shots taken from moving scooters.
Minjeong saw the fire Karina had on stage. But she also saw the ashes it left behind.
There was a clip, two years old, from a festival after-party. The camera work was jittery, the light brutal and flash-lit. Karina was surrounded by a buzzing cloud of people, a chilled bottle in one hand. Her smile was a brilliant, practiced slash of white, but her eyes were somewhere else entirely. Flat. Distant. A colleague said something, leaning in too close. Karina’s response was to throw her head back and laugh, a sound that didn’t touch her eyes, and take a long, pointed swig from the bottle. The crowd cheered. It looked like a sacrifice.
Then she vanished from the frame, the energy collapsing behind her.
Another video, an interview from last year. The host was asking soft questions. Karina’s answers were polished, monotone. She sat perfectly still, knees together, hands folded. A beautiful mannequin. Then the host made an awkward joke. Karina’s smile didn’t change, but her gaze shifted to a point just above the host’s left shoulder. The temperature in the frame seemed to drop ten degrees. She gave a one-word answer. “Interesting.” It was the coldest, most dismissive word Minjeong had ever heard.
The comments were a battleground. She’s so real, she doesn’t fake it. Typical ice princess. She was probably just tired. LOL didn’t she get hospitalized for exhaustion? And wasn’t there that rumour about the gastric lavage?
Minjeong clicked off.
She found a grainy photo from a few months back. Karina exiting a well-known club at 4 AM, sunglasses on despite the dark. Her posture was ramrod straight, but she was being half-supported by a stone-faced manager, her other hand pressed tight against her own stomach. Her silver hair was messy, her jaw rigid.
It wasn’t just the potential of drugs or alcohol. It was the aftermath. The stark, lonely mechanics of being cleaned up and put away. The utter absence of the person who had held fifty thousand people in the palm of her hand.
The stage-Karina was all heat and magnetism. This other Karina was a closed circuit. A door slammed shut. A personality so cold it seemed to burn.
“You’re obsessed,” Soojin said, peering over Minjeong’s shoulder in their favorite cafe. The screen showed a paused image of Karina mid-bow, her expression empty of everything but professional courtesy.
“I’m not obsessed. I’m analyzing market saturation,” Minjeong countered, locking her phone. “It’s what a savvy content creator does.”
“You’re analyzing the specific curve of her lower lip. That’s not market research, that’s thirst.”
“Shut up.”
“It’s fine! She’s gorgeous. She’s also, by all accounts, a massive bitch. Two things can be true.”
Minjeong stirred her iced coffee. The clink of the metal spoon against the glass was annoyingly loud. “You don’t know that.”
“The cousin of my stylist’s friend worked at her label for like, three months. Said she never spoke unless it was a complaint. That she’d rehearse until she collapsed. That she’d look right through you. A beautiful ghost.”
A beautiful ghost. The phrase stuck.
That night, in her own sleek, quiet apartment that felt suddenly too big, Minjeong stood before her floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at the city’s endless electric river. She thought of the crushing heat of Coachella, the collective heartbeat of the crowd. She thought of one voice slicing through all of it, a note that felt like it was unraveling her from the inside.
Then she thought of the flat eyes in the paparazzi flash, the clinical silence after the gastric lavage rumor, the icy, one-word interview.
The contradiction was a hook, buried deep. She couldn’t shake it. The most compelling person she’d ever seen was also the most blatantly, possibly broken. It wasn’t admiration anymore. It was a dangerous, gnawing fixation. Why did the fire burn so violently? What was it trying to consume?
Her phone buzzed on the marble kitchen counter. A schedule alert for tomorrow. A partnered photoshoot. 10 AM. With ‘Aespa’s Karina.’
The sound that left her mouth was part gasp, part laugh. The problem was no longer quiet. It was sitting in her schedule, for tomorrow morning, in bold font.
The notification pulsed on her screen like a live wire. Minjeong stared at it until the letters blurred. 10:00 AM - Collaborative Photoshoot: ‘CEL&IA X AESPA’s KARINA’ - Studio Blaise.
A cold, thin sensation, like sipping carbonated water too fast, fizzed through her chest. This wasn’t distant fascination anymore. This was a conference room. This was a makeup chair. This was professional.
“Don’t be weird,” she told her reflection in the dark window. The city lights twinkled back, offering no advice.
---
Studio Blaise smelled of expensive coffee, fresh paint, and the faint, clean sting of industrial cleaner. Racks of clothes lined the walls, a fortress of fabric. Minjeong arrived precisely on time, flanked by her own stylist and a meek assistant. She wore her persona like her own sequined top—easy, bright, a little brash.
“It’s just a job,” she said to her stylist, Haeun, who was fiddling with a rack of leather jackets.
“Of course it is,” Haeun said, not looking up. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
They were led into a large, white-lit space dominated by a seamless paper backdrop. Crew members buzzed around, testing light meters, adjusting stands. And there, in a low-slung chair in the corner, was Karina.
She was smaller off-stage. Or perhaps it was that she was folded in on herself, a compact volume of potential energy. She wore simple black leggings and an oversized grey hoodie, the silver hair tucked under a black beanie. She was staring at her phone, a single AirPod in one ear. A fortress of silence surrounded her. Two people hovered nearby—a manager with a clipboard and a makeup artist holding a brush uncertainly, as if afraid to breach the perimeter.
The director, a man with energetic hands named Theo, clapped. “Ladies! Welcome. We’re going for ‘urban juxtaposition’ today. Edge, but accessible. Tension, but play. You know the drill.”
Karina looked up.
Her eyes found Minjeong’s. They were the same dark, liquid eyes from every video, but devoid of the stage’s transformative fire. They were assessing. Cool. They scanned Minjeong from her carefully tousled hair down to her designer sneakers, and then back to her face. There was no recognition, no warmth. It was a logistics check. Item received.
Minjeong felt her practiced, friendly smile solidify into something stiff. “Hi,” she said, the word too loud in the high-ceilinged room.
Karina gave a single, slight nod. “Hello.” The voice was lower than on record, sleep-rough and utterly flat. She pulled out the AirPod and stood. The hoodie dwarfed her frame.
The first hour was a symphony of awkwardness. They were styled separately. Minjeong was put into deconstructed tailoring, sharp lines and popped collars. Karina emerged in something sheer and layered, all gossamer and strategic straps. They were positioned by Theo.
“Karina, I want you here, profile to the light, looking past the lens. Winter, you’re here, but angled toward her. Like you’re seeing her for the first time.”
Minjeong’s skin prickled. She took her mark.
The lights were punishingly hot. The camera shutter was a rapid, mechanical heartbeat. Click-click-click. They moved through poses that suggested conversation without words, connection without touch. Karina was a master of form. Every arch of her back, every tilt of her chin, was precise and beautiful. And completely vacant. Her gaze, when directed at Minjeong, went through her, landing on some invisible point two feet behind her head.
“Give me something, Karina!” Theo called, a hint of frustration bleeding through. “This is a collab, not a competition. Is she interesting to look at or not?”
A faint, almost imperceptible tension tightened the line of Karina’s jaw. She shifted her focus. Her eyes landed on Minjeong’s, finally. Truly.
It was like stepping into a volt of electricity.
The flat darkness was gone, replaced by a startling, intelligent sharpness. It wasn’t friendly. It was analytical, almost challenging. What are you? it seemed to ask. Why are you here?
Minjeong, thrown, forgot to pose. She just looked back. Her own expression, she knew, had slipped from performative smolder into genuine, naked curiosity. The shutter fired.
“Yes! That! Hold that!” Theo yelled.
For ten seconds, they simply looked at each other. The crew, the lights, the noise—it all funneled into a silent tunnel between them. Minjeong saw the faint, tired lavender shadows under Karina’s eyes, proof of the ghost’s humanity. She saw the minute tightening at the corner of her mouth, a held-back comment or a swallowed sigh.
Then Karina broke it. She glanced toward her manager, a tiny jerk of her head. A reset. When she looked back for the next shot, the curtain had fallen. The ice was back.
During a wardrobe change, Minjeong found herself alone for a moment in the draped-off changing area. She heard low voices on the other side of the fabric.
“—just take it, Ning. You’re shaking.” The manager’s voice, a hushed, urgent murmur.
“I don’t want it.” Karina’s voice, a thread of steel wrapped in utter exhaustion. “It makes me fuzzy. I need to be sharp.”
“You need to be upright. You didn’t sleep. You didn’t eat. What did you even do last night?”
A pause. “I rehearsed.”
“For what? You have nothing for two days.”
“I rehearsed,” Karina repeated, the words final and stark.
Minjeong held her breath, feeling like a thief.
“Fine. At least the B-Complex and the electrolyte drink. Please. Or I’m calling the company doctor.”
A low, resigned sigh. “Fine.”
Minjeong slipped away before she could be caught.
The next set was more active. They were to walk toward the camera from opposite sides, passing each other closely. “I want that charged moment,” Theo explained. “The near-miss. The gravity.”
They did the first take. Karina walked with her predatory, runway grace. Minjeong mirrored it with her own confident swagger. They passed with a foot of space between them. The air didn’t feel charged. It felt dead.
“More!” Theo insisted. “Closer. Almost touch.”
On the fourth take, as they passed, Karina’s shoulder barely grazed Minjeong’s. It was a whisper of contact through layers of clothing. But Minjeong felt it like a brand. Karina flinched. A full-body, minute recoil she instantly controlled, smoothing her expression back to neutral.
But Minjeong had seen it. The aversion. Not personal, but total. A reflex.
Theo saw it too, but misunderstood. “Good! That tension! Do that again!”
Karina’s composure was a pane of glass under a spreading crack. Her movements became slightly sharper, her eyes a little glassier. The heat of the lights, the barrage of directives, the physical proximity—it was eroding her.
Finally, a break was called. Karina went straight to her corner, beanie pulled low, hoodie back on. She accepted a bottle of greenish liquid from her manager and sipped it, staring at the floor.
Minjeong, armed with an iced americano, felt a reckless impulse kick in. It was the same impulse that made her post a controversial review or wear something outrageous. A need to poke the still surface.
She walked over, stopping at the edge of the personal space Karina’s aura carved around her. “So, ‘urban juxtaposition,’” Minjeong said, her tone deliberately light, casual. “Pretty sure my jacket costs more than my first car. Feeling accessible?”
Karina looked up slowly. The glassiness was there, but beneath it, a flicker of annoyance. Good. Annoyance was a feeling. “It’s a concept. You don’t have to understand it.”
“Ouch. And here I thought we were bonding over the profound artistry of selling overpriced jackets.”
A beat of silence. Karina’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Winter, right? The vlogger.”
“You looked me up.”
“My team did. Background check. Standard procedure.” She took another sip of the drink, her nose wrinkling at the taste.
“Find anything juicy?”
“You broke a brand ambassador contract with a Swiss watch company because you said their 2022 line was, and I quote, ‘for finance bros with small dicks.’” Karina recited it blandly, a news bulletin. “It cost you a lot of money.”
Minjeong grinned, surprised. “Wow. They really did a deep dive. Yeah, it did. Worth it, though. The line was ugly.”
A faint, almost nonexistent twitch at the corner of Karina’s lips. Not a smile. The ghost of a smile’s distant cousin. “It was objectively ugly.”
The manager hovered, sensing an interaction lasting longer than three seconds. Karina waved a subtle hand, dismissing her.
“Do you always say exactly what you think?” Karina asked, looking at Minjeong with renewed, weary interest.
“Pretty much. It’s a blessing and a curse. Less of a curse when your trust fund can cover the lawsuits.” Minjeong leaned against a light stand. “You? Do you ever say what you think?”
The question hung in the air. Karina’s gaze turned inward, then carefully blank again. “My thoughts are irrelevant. The product is the performance.”
“The product,” Minjeong repeated. “That’s a cold way to put it.”
“It’s an accurate way.”
“Is that what last night was? Product maintenance?” The words were out before she could stop them, a direct reference to the overheard conversation. I rehearsed.
Karina went perfectly still. The air between them crackled, the friendly pretense vaporized in an instant. Her eyes, when they locked onto Minjeong’s, were no longer flat. They were dark, scorchingly intense, and full of a warning so potent it was almost physical.
“You have no idea,” Karina said, her voice low and lethally quiet, “what my nights are. So don’t talk about them like you do.”
She stood, abandoning the drink on the chair. She didn’t look at her manager. She just walked, past the crew, past Theo, toward the fire exit door at the back of the studio. She pushed it open, letting in a slice of harsh, midday sun and the groan of city traffic, and then she was gone.
The studio fell into a stunned, muffled silence. Theo looked baffled. The manager’s face was a mask of professional panic.
Minjeong stood alone by the light stand, her iced coffee dripping condensation onto the floor. Her heart thumped a hard, erratic rhythm against her ribs. The hollow feeling was gone. It was replaced by a vault, and inside that vault was a single, glowing, dangerous thing: a reaction. Raw, unfiltered, and real.
She had poked the surface, and the void had stared back with ferocious, dizzying clarity.
The manager hurried over, a tight smile plastered on. “Please excuse her. She’s under a lot of pressure today. We can continue with solo shots if you’re—”
“It’s fine,” Minjeong interrupted, her voice surprisingly steady. She offered a breezy smile, slipping her public persona back on like a glove. “We all have our moments. Tell her no hard feelings.”
But as she turned back toward the lights, the afterimage of Karina’s furious, exhausted eyes was seared onto her vision. The mystery had just gotten a name, a face, and a temper.
And Minjeong, for the first time in her easy, glittering life, felt truly, dangerously interested.