Page 117 of K-Pop Double Life

“Clear.”

Jason checked the identification for the driver and his assistant, and stayed with the stadium’s operations manager while he and the driver went over the manifest.

“Everything matches,” Jason said. “Start unloading.”

I watched as the cases were rolled in. Jason and I watched several of the larger cases being opened in case someone was inside one. Lighting fixtures. Audio cables. Spare microphones. The pyrotechnics in boxes with bright red warning labels.

When everything had been unloaded, I looked at Jason, dissatisfied.

Jason didn’t answer immediately. He shook hands with the driver, who climbed back into the cab and started the truck.

“Either we’re chasing ghosts,” I said, “or Sara Yoon has another plan.”

47

SEE YOU AFTER THE SHOW

JIN — SEOUL

World Cup Stadium was enormous when it was empty.

Fifty thousand seats rose into the Seoul sky, surrounding a stage large enough to hold every dream we’d chased since debut. That night those seats would be filled with fans.

Aidan stood at the center of a cluster of security personnel—Korean National Police, private contractors, Starhouse security, Liam beside him looking as if he hadn’t slept in days.

“Every entrance is controlled,” Aidan said. “Credentials verified against government IDs. Facial recognition at the main gates. Every crew member has been re-vetted.”

We ran one more rehearsal before the show, running through every number, every blocking. It should have been routine. We’d been running this setlist across four continents, and our bodies knew the choreography the way they knew breathing, below conscious thought, reliable in the dark.

Of the fifty thousand seats, only a few were filled that early, with Starhouse executives in them, paying more attention to their phones than to us. Metal and concrete rising into the summer sky, the upper tiers barely visible in the flat afternoon light, the whole structure quietly waiting to be filled. Sound moved differently in a space like this. The sound system techs had been running levels all morning, calibrating, and sometimes a chord would drift out from the monitors and get swallowed immediately by all that air.

I had been to this stadium once before, as a child. A school trip to a football game. I remembered the scale of it, the way the tiers seemed to go up forever and the people at the top looked like they belonged to a different world than the ones on the field below. I’d been maybe nine or ten. I’d eaten triangle kimbap from a convenience store bag and lost my friend Seung-ju in the crowd for twenty minutes and cried, quietly, with my face turned away so no one would see.

That was what I remembered about World Cup Stadium. Not the game. The feeling of being very small inside something very large.

As a teen and then an adult, I’d watched concerts there. Acts whose names I’d learned as an idol in training, part of the unspoken curriculum of understanding what a stage could be, what it meant to be so famous that the largest venues on earth were the only rooms that fit you.

When Starhouse announced the Seoul finale, they called it the capstone of a historic tour. Marketing language. But also, if I stood here and looked at it honestly, not entirely wrong.

I had debuted at eighteen in a showcase venue that held eight hundred people. Three years ago we had first sold out the Olympic Gymnastics Arena, and I had stood offstage beforehand shaking so hard Min-kyu had to hold my shoulders. Tonight we were here.

Pryzm was playing World Cup Stadium.

The thought arrived without the pride I’d expected. Instead it felt simply true, a fact laid next to another fact, waiting to be assessed. We had worked for this. We had earned it, in the way you earned anything that required years of your body and your youth and the parts of yourself you never got back.

The tech argument behind me had resolved into a decision. I heard footsteps, a brief exchange, then quiet. A chord drifted from the monitors and dissolved into the air.

I thought about the athletes who had competed in this stadium, the thousands of voices that had witnessed something that became history.

If I was going to become part of the stadium’s history, I wanted it to be for an outstanding performance. Nothing more than that.

I wanted to walk off this stage and find Sang-hoon in the wings, the way I had found him almost every night of the tour, and I wanted my parents in the crowd, and I wanted the version of the future that still existed if the concert went the way it was supposed to.

Don’t forget to live, my father had said, the morning I left for Starhouse.

I stood at center stage, while a pair of techs compared notes on lighting cues, and looked up. The lighting grid was enormous. Steel and cable and LED arrays provided the infrastructure of a spectacle.

At the back of the stage, the five of us had marked our opening positions so many times that our bodies knew instinctively where to go. The choreographer was talking Woo through a transition he’d been sliding on. Tae stretched out his leg against a monitor stack. Haneul stood with his headphones around his neck, saying something to Min-kyu with his eyes almost closed.