The first four days of the ten are spent finding the piece.
Not writing it. Finding it. The distinction matters because Mira understands the distinction the same way Ori does, which is the first sign that the algorithm was right about more than the subscores.
They meet in practice room seven every morning at nine. Mira arrives exactly on time each day with her notebook already open to the previous session's notes and her coffee from somewhere in the building that produces better coffee than the production catering table. Ori arrives two minutes early. They work until noon and sometimes past it without noticing.
The first two days are conversation.
They talk about source material the way builders talk about ground before breaking it: testing the quality, checking for what is solid and what will shift under weight. Mira's source is a specific and private thing she describes in its emotional terms rather than its narrative ones, which Ori understands because he operates the same way. Being heard by the wrong person at the wrong time. What it costs when something true about you enters the world in a context that cannot hold it correctly.
He listens to her describe it.
He thinks about Lecture Hall 3.
"It's the same source," he says.
She looks at him. "Not the same event."
"The same emotional territory. The exposure. The thing leaving the inside and entering a space that didn't know what to do with it."
She is quiet for a moment. Then: "Which means the piece is about that territory. Not our specific events. The territory itself."
"The experience of being known without consent," he says.
She writes this in her notebook. She reads it back. She nods once.
The source is found.
Day three: structure.
Mira draws the architecture of the ten minutes in her notebook as a diagram, which is different from Ori's structural maps but serves the same function. She divides the ten minutes into four sections with specific emotional functions: opening, which establishes the territory; development, which takes the listener inside it; turn, which is the moment of choice within the territory; resolution, which does not promise comfort but promises arrival.
He looks at the diagram.
"The turn," he says. "That's where the piece earns its resolution."
"Yes." She points to the turn section. "It needs to be the hardest part to perform. The most exposed. If the turn is managed the resolution is dishonest."
He thinks about the preliminary piece's bridge. The unresolved beat. The one word Kael identified that was resolving too early.
"It needs to hang," he says.
"Longer than is comfortable."
"Yes."
She draws a longer line under the turn section in the diagram.
They divide the writing: Mira takes the opening and the structural framework of the development. Ori takes the emotional core of the development and the turn. They will write the resolution together.
"What's my role in performance," Ori asks.
She looks at him with the directness he has come to recognize as her default mode. "You carry the turn. I carry the technical architecture. Both of us carry the resolution." She pauses. "The audience needs to hear me and feel you. Separately and then together."
He thinks about what that requires from a ten-minute collaborative piece.
"We need to find the moment the two things become one thing," he says.
"Yes." She taps the resolution section of the diagram. "Here."
Days four and five: writing.
They write in the practice room side by side, not collaboratively in the moment but in parallel, each working on their assigned sections and then reading back to the other, the exchange happening across the small table with the directness of two people who have established that honesty is more useful than management.
Mira's opening section is technically precise in its construction and emotionally accurate in its content, the form and feeling arriving together from the first draft in the way that Ori's work arrived on the first draft of the Round Two bridge. Years of technical training producing the capacity for the first draft to be the right draft.
He reads it and thinks about the system's note: the one draft is not luck. It is accumulation.
His development section comes in two drafts, the first close and the second right.
The turn arrives in three drafts across two days, which is faster than any equivalent section in either previous piece, the accumulated practice of building two complete pieces in six weeks sitting underneath this one as foundation.
He reads the turn to Mira on day five.
She listens without writing anything in her notebook.
When he finishes she says: "The third line."
"I know," he says.
"It resolves—"
"Too early. I know." He looks at the line. "It's the same problem I had in the preliminary piece bridge."
"The same solution?"
He thinks about the word Kael identified. One word changed. The settling word replaced by a word that hangs.
He changes one word in the third line.
He reads it to her.
She is quiet for a moment.
"Yes," she says. Exactly the way Dray said it to the keyboard phrase in the practice room.
Day six: first full performance.
They perform the complete piece together for the first time, standing in practice room seven with the keyboard silent and no recording device and no audience. Just the two of them and the ten minutes and the piece in its assembled form.
It is not yet a collaboration.
It is two people performing their separate sections in sequence, the architecture correct and the content strong and the specific chemistry of two people becoming one sound not yet present. The resolution, which they wrote together and which they perform together, sounds like two people performing in the same space rather than two people making the same thing.
They stop at the end.
He looks at her.
"We're still separate," she says.
"Yes."
"The resolution needs us to be the same thing for thirty seconds." She looks at her notebook. "We're not the same thing yet."
He thinks about what makes two people the same thing in a performance context. Not matching, which is a technical achievement. Something more specific: the shared commitment to the same moment, the mutual decision to be fully in the same place at the same time without one of them managing it.
"We need to run the turn into the resolution without stopping," he says. "No breath between them. No reset."
She looks at him. "The turn is yours. The resolution starts as mine."
"Which means the handoff has to be seamless."
"Which means we have to trust the handoff."
They look at each other across the practice room.
"Again," she says.
They run the transition between the turn and the resolution twelve times.
On the eighth attempt something happens that was not happening on the first seven. He finishes the turn's final line and she comes in on the resolution and the breath between them is gone, the two sounds arriving in the same moment, and the resolution is not two people performing but something that is briefly one thing.
They hold it for the full thirty seconds.
They stop.
The practice room is quiet.
"Eight," she says.
"Eight," he confirms.
"We need it to be one," she says. Meaning the first attempt on performance night.
"We have four days."
"Four days," she agrees.
She opens her notebook and begins annotating the transition.
He picks up his pen.
They work.