Escape by Journey 🎶
____________________________________________________________________
The watching begins in July.
Not the instruments. Yaz has watched those for three years, learned their secrets, memorized their demands. Not the cameras either, though the red light still blinks its patient rhythm in the corner, recording everything, seeing nothing that matters.
No. This watching is different.
Yaz watches the routines.
He watches the staff change shifts at seven in the morning, fourteen minutes of overlap when the night guards hand off to the day guards, clipboards passed, coffee poured, words exchanged about nothing important. He watches the kitchen deliveries arrive at nine, the back door propped open for exactly twenty-three minutes while boxes are unloaded and checked and signed for. He watches the maintenance workers come on Tuesdays and Thursdays, their tool belts jingling as they fix things that were never really broken, their eyes never once landing on the small boy sitting quietly in the common room, counting their steps.
He watches the gaps.
Every system has gaps. That is what Yaz has learned. The cage that holds him is not a solid wall. It is a pattern, a routine, a series of interlocking pieces that fit together most of the time but not all of the time. And in the spaces where the pieces do not quite touch, in the moments when the routine fails to overlap perfectly with itself, there are openings.
He just has to find one big enough to walk through.
The service entrance is on the east side of the building.
Yaz discovers it in the third week of watching. A door, plain and gray and unremarkable, marked with a sign that says STAFF ONLY in letters that have faded from years of being ignored. The door leads to a short hallway, which leads to an alley, which leads to the street, which leads to the city, which leads to the world.
Not the fence. The fence is what everyone expects. The fence is what Thorne's security watches, what the cameras monitor, what the locks and codes and procedures are designed to contain. The fence is the obvious barrier, the visible cage, the wall that says you cannot pass.
But the door. The door is different.
Yaz times it over six weeks. He sits in the common room during the late hours, pretending to read, pretending to sleep, pretending to be the good quiet boy who has learned his lesson and no longer makes trouble. And while he pretends, he watches.
The door is unguarded for eleven minutes every Wednesday night.
The shift change happens at 3 AM. The night guard, a heavy man named Pavel who smells like cigarettes and boredom, walks his final round at 2:47. By 2:49, he is in the break room, pouring coffee, waiting to hand off to the morning guard. The morning guard, a thin woman whose name Yaz has never learned, arrives at 3:00 exactly. She signs in, checks the monitors, begins her rounds at 3:02.
Eleven minutes. From 2:49 to 3:00. Eleven minutes when no one is watching the east corridor, when no one is near the service entrance, when the door with the faded sign sits unguarded in the dark.
Eleven minutes. It is enough.
The preparations are small. Careful.
Food first. Yaz takes a roll from breakfast, slips it into his pocket, transfers it to his locker when no one is looking. The next day, an apple. The day after, a packet of crackers from the common room cabinet. He builds a collection slowly, a handful of calories at a time, enough to last three days if he is careful. Maybe four.
Clothes next. The orphanage uniform is beige and obvious, institutional in a way that screams I do not belong here to anyone who sees it. Yaz needs something else. Something that looks like he chose it, like he belongs to someone, like he has a place in the world.
He finds a jacket in the lost and found. Dark blue, slightly too big, a zipper that sticks in the middle. He takes it during lunch when the common room is empty, stuffs it behind his locker, waits three days to make sure no one notices it is missing.
Money last.
Mrs. Okonkwo's desk has a drawer she thinks no one knows about. The drawer has a lock, but the lock is old and simple and Yaz has been watching her open it for three years. Inside the drawer is a small envelope. Inside the envelope is emergency cash. Forty euros in small bills, kept for situations that never seem to arise.
Yaz takes twenty. Half. The betrayal makes it easier. She let him drown in this cage. She can spare twenty euros.
He does not feel guilty. He does not let himself feel guilty. Guilt is for people who expect to be forgiven. Yaz expects nothing.
The song begins without him meaning it to.
It happens at night, in the Practice Room, during the hours when he is supposed to be sleeping. Yaz sits at the piano, not practicing, just thinking. His fingers rest on the keys without pressing them. His mind is full of the door, the timing, the eleven minutes that will change everything.
What does freedom sound like?
The Maestro's voice is soft. Curious. The voice of someone asking a question they do not know the answer to.
I don't know.
Then find out.
Yaz's fingers move. A single note. Middle C. The sound hangs in the air, simple and clear, the beginning of everything and nothing.
Another note. G. Higher. Reaching.
A third. E. Between them. A chord that sounds like asking.
That, the Maestro says. That sounds like wanting something. Now make it sound like believing you can have it.
The song builds over weeks.
Yaz works on it in stolen moments, between the watching and the preparing and the waiting. The melody starts quiet, uncertain, the sound of someone who has been in a cage so long they have forgotten what the outside looks like. But then it builds. Layers adding to layers. The piano joined by strings he hears in his head, by drums that pulse like a heartbeat gathering courage, by a voice that rises from whisper to cry to something that sounds like flight.
He calls it "Escape."
The title arrives before the song is finished. It arrives in the middle of a sleepless night, when Yaz is lying in his bed staring at the ceiling tiles, counting them for the thousandth time, wondering if the door will really be unguarded, if the eleven minutes will really be enough, if the outside will really be different from the inside.
Escape. Not freedom. Freedom is a destination, a place you arrive at and stay. Escape is motion. Movement. The act of leaving, regardless of where you end up.
That is what he wants. Not to arrive somewhere. Just to leave.
The song needs an ending, the Maestro says, when Yaz plays through what he has. Where does it go after the rising? What happens when you reach the top?
I don't know yet.
Then leave it unfinished. Finish it when you know.
September.
A Wednesday.
2:47 AM.
Yaz lies in his bed, fully clothed under the blanket, the dark blue jacket hidden beneath his pillow. Around him, forty-six other children breathe in sleep, their bodies rising and falling in rhythms they do not control, their dreams carrying them to places they cannot go when awake.
He waits. The ceiling tiles count themselves in the darkness. Forty-seven. The same as always. The same as the day he arrived, the day Suki left, the day he turned seven and no one remembered.
2:49.
He moves.
The dormitory door opens silently. Yaz has tested it, practiced the angle that avoids the creak, the pressure that keeps the hinges from squealing. He slips through. The hallway is dark, emergency lights casting pale green shadows on the institutional walls.
Left. Past the common room. Past the kitchen. Past the storage closet where he found the broken radio three years ago, the radio that played "Seven Years" to the world, the radio that started everything.
The east corridor stretches before him. Long. Empty. The door at the end, gray and plain and unremarkable, waiting.
Yaz walks. His footsteps are soft. His heart pounds in his chest, so loud he is certain someone will hear it, certain an alarm will sound, certain a hand will land on his shoulder and a voice will say where do you think you're going.
Nothing happens.
The door is unlocked. Of course it is. It is a service entrance, not a prison exit. No one locks it because no one expects a child to walk through it. No one expects the cage to have a door-shaped gap that has been there all along.
He pushes. The door swings open. Cool night air rushes in, tasting like exhaust and rain and something else. Something he has not tasted in three years.
The outside.
Go, the Maestro says. Finish the song later. Go now.
Yaz steps through.
Nova Valencia at night is a city made of light.
Screens cover every surface. Building facades glow with advertisements, recommendations, content streams that never pause. Sidewalks pulse with embedded displays, guiding footsteps, suggesting routes, nudging pedestrians toward destinations they did not choose. Even the sky is not dark, not truly, because the light pollution creates a permanent twilight that hides the stars behind a veil of artificial day.
Yaz stands in the alley behind the orphanage, staring. His breath makes small clouds in the cool air. His hands are shaking. He does not know if it is fear or cold or excitement or all three at once.
He is outside.
He is outside.
The thought repeats in his mind, too large to hold, too strange to process. For three years, the world has existed only as glimpses through windows, sounds through walls, faces on the other side of the fence. For three years, he has imagined this moment, planned for it, dreamed of it in the dark hours when the ceiling tiles counted themselves.
And now it is here. He is here. Standing in an alley that smells like garbage and rain, wearing a stolen jacket that does not quite fit, carrying twenty euros and a handful of food and a song that does not have an ending.
Move, the Maestro says. You have eight minutes before someone notices. Move.
Yaz moves.
The city wakes slowly.
Yaz walks through the early morning hours, staying to side streets, avoiding the main avenues where the screens are brightest and the surveillance is heaviest. He passes closed shops and sleeping cafés and apartments with their windows dark. He passes benches where homeless people sleep under blankets of newspaper. He passes a dog that looks at him without interest and a cat that looks at him without anything at all.
Dawn arrives. The sky shifts from black to gray to a pale orange that reminds Yaz of Mrs. Okonkwo's headwrap, the thought arriving before he can stop it, the pang of something like guilt that he pushes away because guilt is useless now.
The screens brighten. The content increases. And the people appear.
They emerge from buildings and transit stations and underground tunnels, flooding the sidewalks in waves, each wave larger than the last. They carry bags and devices and expressions that look like they are going somewhere but also like they have been going somewhere forever and have not yet arrived.
Yaz watches them.
A woman walks past, her eyes fixed on her device, her feet following a glowing line on the sidewalk that guides her left, right, straight, left again. She does not look up. She does not need to. The algorithm knows where she is going. The algorithm tells her when to turn. The algorithm is faster and smarter and more reliable than her own sense of direction, so why would she use anything else?
She passes Yaz without seeing him. He is ten years old, standing alone on a street corner in a jacket that does not fit, and she does not see him because her device does not tell her to look.
Another man. Same pattern. Eyes down, feet guided, moving through the city like a piece on a game board, following rules he did not write.
Another woman. Another man. A teenager with earbuds in, nodding to music that Yaz cannot hear, her lips moving to lyrics that someone else wrote, her body occupying space that she has not chosen.
They are all the same. Different faces, different clothes, different destinations. But the same. Following. Guided. Content.
They look trapped, Yaz thinks.
Yes, the Maestro says. But do they know it?
The Content District is in the heart of the city.
Yaz finds it by accident, following the flow of people, letting the current carry him into wider avenues and brighter streets. The buildings here are taller. The screens are larger. The people are more carefully dressed, more carefully posed, more carefully existing.
Ring lights glow in windows. Tripods stand on balconies. Everywhere Yaz looks, someone is filming. A woman poses in front of a café, adjusting her expression between shots. A man speaks into a small camera, his hands gesturing at nothing, his voice too loud for the empty street. A group of teenagers arranges themselves in front of a mural, taking picture after picture after picture, their faces frozen in smiles that do not reach their eyes.
They are performing, Yaz realizes. All of them. Performing their lives for audiences they cannot see, turning every moment into content, every meal into material, every thought into something that can be liked and shared and forgotten.
The woman finishes her poses. Checks her device. Her face falls for a moment, something like disappointment flickering across her features. Then she rearranges her expression, finds a new angle, starts again.
The man keeps speaking into his camera. His voice cracks. He stops, takes a breath, starts the same sentence over. Yaz counts seven attempts before the man is satisfied.
The teenagers finish their photos. One of them looks at the results, deletes most of them, sighs. "Nobody's going to care about this," she says. The others shrug. They move to a different mural. Start again.
This is what they do with freedom, Yaz thinks. They use it to build cages for themselves.
Yes, the Maestro says. The bars are made of attention. The lock is made of likes. And nobody has the key because nobody thinks to look for it.
The screen finds him in the afternoon.
Yaz is walking down a main avenue, hungry now, his stolen food running low. The crowds have thinned. The lunch rush is over. The city has settled into the quiet rhythm of early afternoon, when everyone who has somewhere to be is already there.
And then he looks up.
The screen is massive. Three stories tall, covering the entire side of a building, playing a loop of content that changes every thirty seconds. News. Advertisements. Entertainment. Weather. An endless stream of information that no one is watching but everyone is seeing.
The loop changes. A silhouette appears. Yaz's silhouette. The outline of a boy at a piano, the image that Thorne created for the brand, the shape that means "The Hidden Voice" to anyone who has been paying attention.
Text scrolls beneath the image. THE HIDDEN VOICE: NEW MUSIC COMING? ALBUM EXPECTED 2156. STAY TUNED.
Yaz stares.
He is looking at himself. At the product he has become. At the thing that exists in the world while he has been trapped in a basement, learning instruments and waiting for a reveal that keeps receding.
A woman walks past. Middle-aged. Tired-looking. Earbuds in, music playing, her lips moving to words she is not thinking about. Yaz recognizes the melody. It is "Mad World." His song. The song he wrote in the darkness about the darkness, the song that escaped when he could not.
She hums as she passes him. Her eyes slide over him without stopping. He is a child on a street corner, wearing a jacket that does not fit, invisible and irrelevant.
She is listening to his song. She is walking past him. And she does not know he exists.
You wrote a song about escape, the Maestro says. The voice is quiet. Sad. But where did you escape to?
Yaz does not answer. He stands beneath the screen showing his silhouette, watching the woman disappear into the crowd, feeling something crack in his chest that he does not have a name for.
He is more invisible here than he ever was in the cage.
Night comes.
Yaz finds the underpass by accident, following side streets away from the screens, away from the lights, looking for somewhere quiet, somewhere the algorithm does not reach. The underpass is beneath a transit hub, a tunnel that pedestrians use to cross from one side of the station to the other. During the day, it is crowded. At night, it is empty.
Almost empty.
A man sits against the wall, a guitar in his lap. Old. Weathered. The guitar, and the man. Both of them worn down by years of use, years of playing, years of existing in a city that has moved on without them.
Yaz stops. Watches.
The man plays. The music is simple. Real. No screens, no amplification, no audience. Just fingers on strings, voice on air, sound that exists for a moment and then disappears, leaving nothing behind but the memory of having heard it.
It is beautiful. And it is completely ignored. The few people who pass through the underpass do not stop. They do not look. They walk past as if the music does not exist, their earbuds in, their eyes on their devices, their attention already claimed by content that is louder and brighter and more optimized for engagement.
The song ends. The man looks up. His eyes find Yaz, standing at the edge of the tunnel, watching.
"You play?" the man asks. His voice is rough. Tired.
"A little."
"Hmm." The man adjusts his guitar. Studies Yaz with eyes that have seen too much and expect too little. "You're out late. Parents know where you are?"
"No."
"Hmm." The man does not ask more. Privacy or indifference. Yaz cannot tell which. "You want to learn something?"
"What?"
"How to play for no one." The man strums a chord. Lets it fade. "That's the hardest thing. Playing when nobody's listening. Creating when nobody cares. Most people can't do it. They need the audience, the applause, the little numbers going up on the screen." He shakes his head. "But that's not music. That's performance. Music is what happens when no one's watching."
Yaz thinks about the Practice Room. The red light blinking. The cameras recording. Three years of playing for someone who was always watching, always waiting, always planning how to use what he created.
"I've never played for no one," he says.
"Then you've never really played." The man picks a few notes. A melody Yaz does not recognize. "The screens want your attention. The algorithm wants your music. Everyone wants something from you. But music, real music, it doesn't want anything. It just is." He stops playing. Looks at Yaz. "You understand?"
"I think so."
"Good." The man turns back to his guitar. "Now go away. I've got no one to play for."
Yaz goes. But the words stay with him. Playing for no one. Creating when nobody cares. The hardest thing.
He finds a corner of the underpass away from the man, away from the occasional pedestrian, away from everything. He sits with his back against the cold concrete wall, his knees drawn to his chest, his stolen food almost gone.
The song plays in his head. "Escape." The melody he wrote in the Practice Room, building from quiet to soaring, rising toward something he could not name.
But now he hears it differently.
The song is about hope. About believing you can leave. About gathering courage and taking the step and walking through the door that was there all along.
But it does not have an ending.
Because Yaz does not know what comes after escape. He planned the leaving. He did not plan the arriving. He thought freedom was out here, in the screens and the streets and the crowds of people going somewhere. He thought escape meant finding a different cage, a better cage, a cage that did not feel like a cage.
But the cage is everywhere.
The screens guide people who do not know they are being guided. The algorithm suggests choices to people who think they are choosing. The Content District is full of performers who have turned their lives into products, their moments into material, their freedom into a different kind of captivity.
You're looking for freedom out there, the Maestro says. What if it's not a place?
Then what is it?
I don't know. But I know what it's not. It's not here. It's not outside. It's not on the other side of any door you can walk through.
Yaz thinks about this. The underpass is quiet. The man with the guitar has stopped playing. The city hums above, screens glowing, algorithm churning, people following paths they did not choose.
He was outside. He was free. He had written a song about this moment, soaring and triumphant and full of hope.
🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶
Come on
He's just a young boy out of school
Livin' his world like he wants to
They're makin' laws, but they don't understand
Turns a boy into a fightin' man
They won't take me
They won't break me
No one to tell him what to do
Had to learn everything the hard way
He's on the street, breakin' all the rules
I'm tellin' you, that ain't nobody's fool, no
They won't take me
They won't break me
No, no, no
Oh now he's leavin', gettin' out from the masquerade
Oh, gotta go
Reno, if you're with me tonight I wanna hear you make some noise
I don't think you heard me right, if you're with me make some noise
I'm finally out in the clear and I'm free
I've got dreams I'm livin' for
I'm movin' on where they'll never find me
Rollin' on to anywhere
Yeah, yeah-yeah
I'll break away, yes I'm on my way
I'm leavin' today, yes I'm on my way
Just when you think you had it all figured out
Runnin' scared can change your mind
I never knew I had so much to give
How hard times can fool ya
Oh I'm okay, I'm alright
Feelin' good out on your own
Yeah
I'll break away, I'll break away tonight
I've got dreams I'm livin' for (c'mon yeah, yeah, yeah)
Ooh, I'll break away
Yes, I'm on my way
I'm leavin', leavin' today
Yes, I'm on my way
This is my escape
Yes, I'm on
Ooh, I'll break away
I don't need to stay
Ooh
I'll run away
Yes I'm on my way
I'm leavin', leavin' today
Yes, I'm on my way
This is my escape
Yes I'm on my way, on my way, on my way
I'll break away
Yes, I don't need to stay
You want some rock and roll?
🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶
But standing beneath a screen showing his own silhouette while a stranger walked past humming his older song, neither of them knowing the other existed, the new song felt naive.
Escape was easy.
The question was: escape to what?