The first camera flash blinds him.
Then the second. The third. A storm of white light that turns the press conference into a series of frozen moments, each one burned onto his retinas before the next arrives. Yaz stands at the podium, thirteen years old, his face visible to the world for the first time in seven years. His palms are damp against the wood. He can feel his heartbeat in his throat, in his wrists, in the tips of his fingers that are gripping the podium's edge with practiced casualness.
The silhouette is gone.
Seven years of hiding. Seven years of being a voice without a face, a mystery the world had constructed theories around. And now. This.
The room smells like expensive cologne and nervous sweat and the ozone-sharp scent of too many electronics running too hot. Three hundred journalists pack the space. Their tablets glow like small blue windows into infinity. Neural feeds blink at temples. Recording devices of every generation point at him like weapons.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Thorne says from somewhere to his left, his voice warm and practiced and perfectly calibrated for the microphones, "allow me to introduce Yassine Kwon. The Hidden Voice."
The roar that follows is not applause. It is something hungrier. The sound of a thousand journalists realizing they are witnessing history, their tablets and recorders and neural feeds capturing every pixel of the boy who had been mystery and was now flesh.
Yaz smiles.
The smile he has practiced. The one that reaches his eyes just enough to look genuine but costs him nothing. The Peter Parker smile. Quick. Charming. A little cocky.
"Hi," he says into the microphone. His voice comes out steady. Deeper than it was at seven, controlled in ways it was not at nine. "I guess the secret's out."
Laughter. Exactly where he expected it.
Good, the Maestro says from the back of his mind. They believe it.
They believe what they want to see.
The questions come like artillery fire.
"Yassine, where have you been for the past seven years?"
"How does it feel to finally show your face?"
"Is it true you've mastered ten instruments?"
"What's your message to the millions who have been waiting?"
He answers each one with the deflections the media coach taught him. Humor first, then a pivot. Never answer what they ask. Answer what you want them to hear.
"Where have I been? Practicing, mostly. Turns out learning ten instruments takes a while. Who knew?"
"How does it feel? Honestly? A little bright." He gestures at the camera flashes. "Could we dim these? I've been in a basement. My eyes are sensitive."
More laughter. The journalists lean forward, hungry, delighted. They have found their story. The mysterious prodigy. The charming revelation. The boy behind the music that changed everything.
None of them see what is underneath.
The reveal happens on August 3rd, 2158.
Within hours, Yaz's face is everywhere. Screens across the three blocs display the press conference footage on rotation. His name trends on every platform. The algorithm, that great invisible machine, churns his image through a billion feeds, a billion neural suggestions, a billion moments of recognition.
There he is. The Hidden Voice. Finally.
Yaz watches himself on the screen in his hotel room. The hotel is expensive. Everything is expensive now. Thorne has spared no cost for this moment, this unveiling, this culmination of seven years of cultivation.
On the screen, the Yaz from six hours ago answers another question with practiced ease. A joke lands. The audience laughs. The persona performs.
The real Yaz sits on the bed and feels nothing.
Not nothing. Something. But it is buried so deep that finding it would require tools he does not have time to use. The tour starts in two months. There are interviews scheduled every day until then. The machine is running, and he is inside it.
How do you feel?
The Maestro's voice is gentle. Curious.
Like I'm watching someone else, Yaz thinks. Like that person on the screen is a character I invented, and now everyone thinks he's real.
He is real. He's part of you.
The worst part.
No. The necessary part. The part that survives.
Yaz lies back on the bed. The ceiling is white. Unmarked. No tiles to count. No cracks to trace. Just smoothness, expensive and empty.
He is thirteen years old. He has been famous for seven years and anonymous for all of them. Now the anonymity is gone, stripped away like skin, and what remains is this. A boy in a hotel room. A face on a billion screens. A voice that belongs to everyone except himself.
September brings the interviews.
They blur together. Studio after studio, each one lit the same way, furnished with the same comfortable chairs designed to make conversation feel intimate while cameras capture every microexpression. The hosts smile with practiced warmth. They ask the same questions in different words.
"What was it like, growing up hidden?"
"Tell us about your creative process."
"Who is the real Yassine Kwon?"
Yaz answers each time with variations of the same script. The persona speaks. The real boy watches from underneath, counting the minutes until the segment ends.
Forty-seven minutes in this studio. Twelve questions asked. Three times the host touched her earpiece. Once, a stagehand dropped something behind the curtain. Thwack. Like a book hitting the floor.
Counting helps. Counting always helps.
"You have such a quick wit," the host says during a break. Her smile is genuine. Her eyes are tired in a way she does not know he can see. "Is that natural, or did someone teach you?"
"I had a good teacher," Yaz says. "Life."
She laughs. He smiles. The cameras roll again.
Fourteen more interviews this week, he calculates. Sixty-three before the tour starts. At forty-seven minutes each, that's forty-nine hours and twenty-one minutes of performing.
Fifty hours, the Maestro corrects gently. You forgot the buffer time.
Right. Fifty hours of being someone I'm not.
Someone you are. Just not all of who you are.
The distinction feels important. Yaz holds onto it the way he used to hold onto the fence. Pressing his fingers into the chain-link until the pattern bit into his skin. Grounding himself in sensation when everything else felt like fog.
The tour begins in October.
Cities blur into each other. Nova Valencia. São Paulo. Lagos. Singapore. Each venue larger than the last. Each crowd more desperate to see the face that matches the voice they have loved for seven years.
The schedule is a machine. Wake at 6 AM. Sound check at 8. Interviews from 10 to 2. Lunch in a car between locations. More interviews until 5. Dinner with executives who want photographs. Performance at 8. Meet and greet until 11. Sleep on a plane. Repeat.
Yaz performs.
He plays piano. Guitar. Violin. Drums. He moves between instruments with the fluidity that seven years of training has given him, his body remembering what his mind no longer has to think about. The music flows. The crowd screams. The persona waves and winks and throws out lines that land like punches.
"You've been waiting seven years for this? I hope I'm worth it!"
The crowd roars. Forty thousand voices. Fifty thousand. Sixty.
Each arena smells the same. Sweat and electricity and something synthetic that might be hope or might be desperation. The lights are always too hot. The stages too large. The distances between Yaz and the audience measured in meters that feel like light-years.
Backstage, between sets, Yaz stands in green rooms that all look the same. Mirrors surrounded by lights. Couches that smell of leather and other performers' anxiety. Tables covered with water bottles and fruit no one eats. His reflection stares back at him from every surface. The styled hair. The designed look. The costume of the persona.
He touches the note in his pocket. Suki's note. The paper is soft now, worn from years of handling. The words almost illegible.
Keep counting. I'll find you when the numbers make sense.
The numbers are starting to make sense. He just cannot tell her yet.
His fingers are calloused now in new ways. Different patterns from the endless performances. His voice is hoarse by the end of each night. His body aches in places he did not know could ache. But the show must go on. The machine keeps running. And he runs inside it.
The song begins in the stolen hours.
Between interviews and rehearsals and performances, there are moments. Small gaps in the schedule where Yaz can be alone. A hotel room at 2 AM. A green room before sound check. The backseat of a car between venues, while Dayo drives and the city scrolls past like a dream he cannot wake from.
In these moments, he finds keyboards. Pianos. Sometimes just his phone, recording voice memos that he will layer later into something larger.
You've written songs about pieces of yourself, the Maestro says one night. The hotel room is dark except for the city glow through the window. Yaz sits at a keyboard he requested, his fingers resting on the keys without pressing. Now write one about all of it.
All of it?
Everything. The confusion. The chaos. The question you've been asking since you were seven years old.
What question?
But he knows. He has always known. The question that underlies everything, that has been waiting beneath every song, every performance, every mask.
Is this real? Is this who I am? Is any of this actually happening, or am I dreaming inside a dream, trapped in a fantasy I cannot escape?
His fingers press down. A chord. Soft. Questioning.
The first notes of something he does not yet have a name for.
The song takes shape over weeks.
It is different from anything he has written before. Larger. More complex. It moves through sections like movements of a symphony, each one a different texture, a different emotion.
The opening is a ballad. Quiet. Vulnerable. A voice asking the questions that keep him awake at night.
When you were here before
Couldn't look you in the eye
You're just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
And I wish I was special
You're so fucking special
But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I do here ?
I don't belong here
Is this real, he sings into the empty hotel room. Is this just something I invented to survive?
The words are not quite right yet. They will come. They always do.
The second section builds. Strings. Weight. The accumulation of seven years pressed into melody. The mother he never had. The choices that were made for him. The price of becoming what others wanted him to be.
I don't care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice
When I'm not around
You're so fucking special
I wish i was special
But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I do here ?
I don't belong here
She's running out again
She's running out...
I didn't choose this, the melody says. But I'm here now. And I have to live with what I've become.
And then. The explosion.
November arrives with rain.
Yaz is in a hotel room in London. Or what used to be London before the reorganization. The city has a different name now, but the rain is the same. Constant. Gray. The sound of it on the window like a rhythm section that never stops.
He works on the operatic section of the song. This is the chaos. The madness. The part where everything happens at once, where the voices multiply and overlap and argue with each other.
Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You're so fucking special
I wish I was special...
But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I do here ?
I don't belong here
I don't belong here
He records himself singing different parts. Layers them. The result is cacophonic and theatrical and exactly right. The sound of being torn in every direction. The sound of negotiations and manipulations and power games played over his head while he stood there and smiled and pretended not to notice.
The sound of seven years compressed into two minutes of controlled explosion.
This is ambitious, the Maestro says. There is something in the voice. Admiration, maybe. Or concern.
It has to be. This is the one they'll remember.
Why?
Yaz stops playing. Looks at his reflection in the window. The rain blurs his features into something unrecognizable. A shape. An outline. A boy who might be anyone.
Because this is the one I'm going to perform when I'm free.
Mrs. Okonkwo arrives on a Tuesday.
She appears in the lobby of the production company's London office. Yaz sees her through the glass wall of the conference room where he is pretending to review merchandise concepts. Hoodies with his silhouette. Posters with his face. Products bearing the brand of The Hidden Voice. Coffee mugs. Phone cases. A line of headphones with his signature etched into the band.
She is wearing her orange headwrap. The one she always wore at the orphanage. Her bracelet clicks against her wrist as she speaks to the receptionist. Click. Click. The sound of guilt she has carried for six years. The sound of something finally breaking free.
Something in Yaz's chest does something complicated. A twist. A pull. The feeling of seeing a ghost who is not dead, just absent. For six years she brought him meals and watched him practice and said nothing. For six years she was complicit. And now she is here, in this glass tower, her African print standing out against the corporate gray like a flame in a snowfield.
She has requested a meeting with Thorne.
Yaz is not invited. But he positions himself in the hallway outside the office, pretending to answer messages on his tablet, listening through the door that is not quite closed.
"I've worked at the Institut for twelve years." Her voice is steady. Calm. The voice of someone who has rehearsed. "I've watched Yassine for six of them. I've kept records."
A pause. The creak of expensive leather as someone shifts in a chair. Then Thorne's voice, smooth and careful: "Records of what, exactly?"
"Of everything."
The word lands like a stone in still water. Yaz can picture the ripples spreading across Thorne's face. The slight tightening around the mouth. The calculation happening behind those hazel-green eyes.
"Teachers dismissed," Mrs. Okonkwo continues. Her voice does not waver. "Schedules altered. A child isolated from peers, from normal development, from anything resembling a childhood. Financial arrangements that don't appear in official budgets. Visitors who signed in under false names. I'm not sure what it all adds up to. But I think others might be interested in finding out."
"Are you threatening me, Mrs. Okonkwo?"
"I'm telling you what I've observed." A pause. The click of her bracelet. Once. "And I'm asking what happens when this is over. When the tour ends. When the album is released. When you have what you want. What does Yassine have?"
Silence.
Yaz counts the seconds. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
"What do you want?" Thorne's voice has changed. Harder. More careful. The voice he uses when he is recalculating. The voice Yaz has studied for years, catalogued, learned to predict.
"I want to know that he'll have something of his own. Something you can't take."
The meeting ends fourteen minutes later. Mrs. Okonkwo walks out of the office without looking at Yaz. But her hand brushes against his shoulder as she passes. Barely a touch. A gesture meant for him alone. The weight of six years of silence, finally becoming action.
Click. Her bracelet. Once. Twice.
She's finally doing something, the Maestro says.
I know.
How does that feel?
Yaz watches her disappear into the elevator. The doors close. She is gone. The glass and chrome of the building swallows her absence.
Like it might not be too late. Like maybe I'm not as alone as I thought.
December.
The tour is winding down. Three more cities. Two more weeks. Then the album release in January, the final push of promotion, the negotiation Yaz has been planning for months.
at night.
He played the guitar until his fingers ache. Until the calluses that have built over seven years of practice start to tear. Until the music sounds like what he feels. Rage. Determination. The absolute refusal to be owned.
The guitar screams through his headphones. He has borrowed an electric from the venue's house band. A Les Paul. Cherry red. Heavy in his hands in a way that feels like responsibility. The weight of defiance given form.
So you think you can break me, the melody says. So you think you can take everything I am and sell it back to me in pieces.
You're wrong.
I'm still here.
I'm still me.
The guitar screams. The drums pound through his headphones, a track he recorded last week and has been layering into the arrangement. The song builds toward something. A climax. A resolution.
But it does not arrive.
Between sessions, Yaz calculates.
He has been watching the numbers for months now. The streaming metrics. The licensing deals. The merchandise revenue that flows through Thorne's accounts with percentage splits that favor the producer, always the producer.
But "7 Years" is different.
"7 Years" was written before the contract. Released before the terms were finalized. It exists in a gray area that even Thorne's lawyers have not fully closed.
Seven years of streaming. One hundred and seventy million plays across platforms. Licensing to commercials in forty-seven markets. Sync fees from films, from shows, from virtual reality experiences. Merchandise with lyrics that have become cultural touchstones. Kids who were not born when Yaz wrote the song singing it on playgrounds.
The numbers add up.
Not millions. Not what the album will make. But enough. Enough for independence. Enough for a start. Enough to own something.
The album will make him rich, Yaz thinks, staring at the spreadsheet on his tablet. But "7 Years" will make me free.
The problem crystallizes on a Thursday.
Yaz is in a green room in Tokyo. The final show of the tour is tomorrow night. Eighty thousand people in an arena that gleams like the future. The biggest performance of his life.
He plays through the song on a keyboard borrowed from the house band. The opening. The ballad. The building weight. The operatic explosion. The hard rock defiance.
And then.
Nothing.
The song stops after the guitar solo. After the declaration of resistance. After the refusal to be broken.
But where is the ending?
What comes after defiance? the Maestro asks. The voice is patient. Knowing.
I don't know.
Think.
I am thinking. I've been thinking for weeks. The song won't finish.
Because you don't know how it ends.
Yaz stops playing. The green room is silent except for the hum of air conditioning and the distant sound of stagehands setting up for tomorrow.
You're saying the song won't finish until I know how my story ends.
I'm saying you can't write a resolution until you know what you're resolving. The negotiation. The concert. Whatever happens next. The song is waiting for you to live it.
The meeting is set for March 15th.
Yaz requests it during Thorne's final tour visit. They are backstage after a show. Sixty thousand people have just screamed his name. His ears are still ringing. His hands still vibrate with the memory of guitar strings and piano keys. Sweat dries on his skin beneath the costume, the designed look, the persona's armor.
"I'd like to meet," Yaz says. His voice is calm. Level. The voice of someone who has been planning for longer than Thorne can imagine. "To discuss the future."
Thorne's eyebrows rise. Surprise. Then pleasure. The expression of a man who believes his investment is finally appreciating its own value. His hand moves to the gold watch. Touches the face of it. The unconscious gesture Yaz has been cataloguing for years.
"Of course." The word comes out warm. Generous. The voice of a mentor delighted by his protégé's growth. "After the album releases. We'll have much to celebrate."
"March 15th," Yaz says. "My birthday."
"Poetic." Thorne's smile widens. "I like it. Fourteen years old. A young man now. Old enough to discuss these things like equals."
Equals. The word sits in Yaz's stomach like a stone. They have never been equals. They will never be equals. But Thorne believes his own mythology. Believes that what he has done is cultivation, not captivity. Protection, not ownership.
Let him believe.
He thinks you're grateful, the Maestro observes. He thinks this is about asking for more. A bigger percentage. A better cut. The ordinary negotiations of ordinary business.
I know.
What is it actually about?
Yaz watches Thorne walk away. The silver hair. The expensive suit. The watch that has measured out deals and contracts and negotiations for generations. The man who found a seven-year-old's song and saw not art but asset. Not a child but an investment.
It's about trading one thing for another, Yaz thinks. It's about making him think he's winning while I take back the only thing that matters.
And what's that?
My beginning. The song I wrote when I was seven. The proof that I existed before any of this. Before Thorne. Before the contract. Before the machine.
The Maestro is quiet for a moment. Processing.
That's not nothing, it says finally.
No. It's everything.
The night before the final tour show, Yaz sits at the hotel window.
The city glitters below. Tokyo. Rebuilt after the war. Gleaming with screens and suggestions and the optimized paths of a billion guided lives.
The song is spread across the bed behind him. Sheets of notation. Voice memos. Fragments that have not yet become a whole.
The ballad is finished. The opera is finished. The hard rock section is finished.
But the ending. The quiet coda. The resolution.
It will come when you're ready, the Maestro says. When you know what you're saying.
What if it doesn't come in time?
Then you perform what you have. And the audience feels the incompleteness. And they ache for the resolution the same way you ache for it.
That's not an answer.
No. It's truth. The best songs are not comfortable. The best songs are honest. And sometimes honest means admitting you don't know how the story ends.
Yaz presses his forehead against the cool glass. The city sprawls beneath him. Somewhere out there, millions of people know his face now. His name. The carefully constructed story of the Hidden Voice revealed.
None of them know this. None of them know that he is sitting in a hotel room with an unfinished masterpiece, counting the days until a negotiation that will change everything.
March 15th. His fourteenth birthday. The meeting is set.
The trade is ready. Album revenue for first song revenue. Let Thorne keep the millions from the new album. Yaz wants "7 Years." His beginning. The song he wrote on yellow paper when he was seven years old.
Thorne will think he is winning. Thorne always thinks he is winning.
But "7 Years" has been streaming for seven years. Licensing. Merchandise. Royalties that have accumulated while Yaz learned ten instruments and planned his escape.
It is not millions. But it is his.
And it is enough.
The song waits.
Yaz looks at the scattered pages. The fragments. The almost-complete thing that needs only its final breath to become alive.
You'll know when you know, the Maestro says.
What if I never know?
Then you'll find another way to say it. Another song. Another story. You've been finding ways for seven years. You'll find this one too.
Yaz gathers the pages. Stacks them neatly. Places them in the bag he carries everywhere now. The bag that contains everything important. Suki's note. The yellow paper from when he was seven. The broken guitar string from his first lesson.
The evidence of who he has been. The fragments of who he might become.
Tomorrow is the final show. Sixty thousand people.
Then the album release. The numbers. The proof that Thorne's investment has paid off.
Then March. His birthday. The negotiation.
And somewhere in there, somehow, the song will find its ending.
It has to.
Yaz stands at the window until the city lights begin to dim. Until the screens shift from advertisements to gentle blue sleep suggestions. Until the guided world settles into its optimized rest.
The song has no ending. Not yet.
It stops after the guitar solo. After the defiance. After the declaration that they cannot break him, cannot own him, cannot make him disappear.
But what comes after?
Peace? Triumph? Exhaustion? Something else entirely?
The Maestro waits in the back of his mind. Patient as always.
You'll know when you know.
Yaz stares at the city. The hotel room is dark except for the glow through the window. Somewhere out there, millions of people know his face, his name, his carefully constructed story.
None of them know this: that the Hidden Voice is about to make a trade that will change everything.
March 15th. His fourteenth birthday. The meeting is set.
The song waits for its ending.
So does Yaz.