The album drops on January 15th, 2159.
Yaz watches the numbers climb from a hotel room in Singapore. The tablet screen glows in the pre-dawn darkness, metrics scrolling upward like a fever chart. Streams. Downloads. Purchases. Engagement indices that mean nothing and everything at once.
One million plays in the first hour.
Ten million by noon.
Fifty million by midnight.
He sits on the bed, legs crossed, the tablet propped on a pillow. The room is expensive. Everything is expensive now. Crystal glasses he has not touched. A minibar stocked with beverages that cost more than a month of meals at the Institut. A bed so soft it feels like drowning.
Outside the window, the city pulses with light. Screens wrap the buildings like skin, every surface a canvas for content, every moment an opportunity for engagement. His face appears on a billboard across the street. Then another. Then another. The Hidden Voice, finally revealed, multiplied across a thousand surfaces.
The screens across the city pulse with his face. His name. The carefully constructed story of the Hidden Voice, finally revealed, finally available, finally consumable in twelve carefully produced tracks that sound like freedom and taste like captivity.
Thorne calls at 2 AM. His voice is thick with triumph, with the particular satisfaction of a man watching his investment mature.
"We did it, Yassine. Gold on every platform. Platinum projections by the end of the week. This is everything we built toward."
We. The word sits in Yaz's stomach like a stone. There is no we. There never was.
"Congratulations," Yaz says. His voice is the persona's voice. Warm. Grateful. The good investment appreciating its own value.
"Get some sleep. We have a busy month ahead. Press. Appearances. The final concert preparations." A pause. The sound of Thorne touching his watch, even through the phone. That unconscious gesture of calculation. "March fifteenth. You wanted to meet."
"Yes."
"Looking forward to it. Happy early birthday, Yassine."
The call ends. The tablet continues scrolling numbers. Millions of people, listening to songs that were born in a basement cage, that carry coded truths in their melodies, that belong to Thorne on paper and to Yaz in every way that actually matters.
Fifty-three million, he counts. Fifty-four. Fifty-five.
The numbers mean nothing.
What matters is what comes next.
February is for calculation.
Yaz sits in green rooms and hotel suites and the back seats of cars, his tablet open, his face arranged into the pleasant neutrality of someone reviewing fan messages when he is actually studying spreadsheets.
"7 Years."
The song he wrote on yellow paper when he was seven years old. The song that started everything.
Seven years of streaming. One hundred and seventy-three million plays across platforms. The number grows by thousands every day, even now, even with the new album dominating every chart. People still find it. People still listen. People still share it with friends and say you have to hear this, this kid wrote this when he was seven.
Licensing deals. Forty-seven commercials across three blocs. Sync fees from films and shows and interactive experiences. The melody has been sampled, covered, interpolated into a hundred other tracks.
Merchandise. Lyrics printed on shirts, on posters, on coffee mugs that people drink from every morning while they commute to jobs they chose or jobs that chose them. "Once I was seven years old" written in fonts that range from elegant to ironic.
The numbers add up.
Not millions. Not what the album will make this year. But consistent. Steady. A river instead of a flood.
Enough, Yaz thinks. Enough to start.
He closes the spreadsheet as Dayo appears in the doorway.
"Five minutes to the next interview."
Yaz stands. Adjusts his jacket. The costume of the persona.
"Ready."
March arrives with rain.
The fifteenth falls on a Thursday. Yaz wakes in a hotel room in Nova Valencia and counts the seconds between thunder and lightning. Three seconds. The storm is close. The storm is almost here.
He dresses carefully. Not the persona's costume. Something simpler. A dark jacket, clean lines, nothing designed to distract. Today is not about performance. Today is about precision.
Thorne's office occupies the top floor of a building that gleams like a tooth against the gray sky. Glass walls. Expensive art. The accumulated evidence of decades of discovering talent and extracting value.
Yaz has been here before. Three times in seven years. Each visit marked by signatures on documents he did not fully understand, by promises of futures he could not quite imagine.
Today is different.
Today he understands everything.
The receptionist smiles. The elevator rises. The doors open onto a hallway lined with gold records and platinum plaques, the mounted trophies of careers Thorne has built and owned.
Yaz walks past them without looking.
The office door is open. Thorne sits behind his desk, the city sprawling gray and rain-slicked through the windows behind him. His silver hair is perfect. His suit is charcoal. His gold watch catches the light as he gestures toward the chair across from him.
"Yassine. Happy birthday."
"Thank you."
Yaz sits. The chair is leather. Expensive. Designed to make visitors feel comfortable and slightly inferior at the same time. He notices these things now. He notices everything.
"Fourteen years old." Thorne's smile is warm. Genuine, even. The smile of a man who believes his own mythology. "A young man. Old enough to discuss these things seriously."
"Yes."
The contract sits on the desk between them. The original document, seven years old, bearing Yaz's thumbprint from when he was too young to sign his name properly. Beside it, a tablet displaying the current revenue projections. Numbers that climb upward like a fever chart.
"The album is performing beyond our most optimistic projections," Thorne says. "You should be proud, Yassine. This is the result of everything we've built together."
We. Again. Always we.
"I am proud," Yaz says. "And I have thoughts. About the future."
Thorne's eyebrows rise. Interest. Curiosity. The expression of a mentor delighted by his protégé's initiative.
"I'm listening."
Yaz takes a breath. Counts to three. Lets the words out slowly, carefully, the way you release a bowstring when you have only one arrow.
"The album revenue is yours. Every cent. Current and future. The promotional tour continues as planned. The concert happens. Everything you've built, you keep."
A pause. Thorne's expression flickers. Surprise, then confusion, then the beginning of suspicion.
"And in exchange?"
"The first song. '7 Years.' Everything from it. Streaming. Licensing. Merchandise. Past revenue and future revenue. That becomes mine."
Silence.
The rain drums against the windows. Somewhere in the building, an elevator chimes. The city breathes its gray wet breath against the glass. Yaz can hear his own heartbeat, steady, controlled, the rhythm he has practiced for months.
He does not blink. Does not fidget. Does not show any of the things a fourteen-year-old is supposed to show when sitting across from a man who has controlled his life for seven years.
Thorne laughs.
The sound is short, sharp, the laugh of a man who thinks he has heard a joke. His hand moves to his watch, touches the gold face, returns to the desk. The gesture is unconscious. Habitual. The tell Yaz has been cataloguing since he was nine years old.
Then Thorne stops laughing. Then he looks at Yaz's face and sees that this is not a joke at all.
"The first song," he says slowly. "The one that's been streaming for seven years. The one that's already been mined for everything it's worth."
"Yes."
"You want the scraps."
"I want what's mine."
Another silence. Longer this time. Thorne's hand moves to his watch. Touches the face of it. The gesture of calculation.
Yaz can see him thinking. Can see the numbers running behind those hazel-green eyes. The album is millions. Fresh. Hot. The engine of a career that will print money for years. The first song? Old news. Already exploited. The low-hanging fruit picked years ago.
What's left is scraps.
What Thorne does not see: scraps accumulated over seven years become something more than scraps. Rivers outflow floods, given enough time. And Yaz has always thought in years, not months.
"Mrs. Okonkwo came to see me," Thorne says quietly. "In November."
The name lands in the air between them. A variable Thorne has not fully solved.
"I know."
"She has... concerns. About your wellbeing. About the structure of our arrangement."
"I know."
"She implied she might share those concerns with others. If she felt the situation warranted."
Yaz says nothing. Lets the silence do its work.
Thorne touches his watch again. Rubs his thumb along the edge of the gold. The gesture of a man recalculating, adjusting, finding the path that protects his interests while appearing to concede.
"The album revenue stays mine," he says finally. "Current and future. Non-negotiable."
"Agreed."
"The promotional obligations continue. The concert. The appearances. The public persona."
"Agreed."
"And you want the first song. Everything attached to it."
"Everything."
Thorne stares at him. For a long moment, Yaz sees something shift behind those warm, careful eyes. A flicker of something that might be respect. Or might be the first cold recognition that he has underestimated the child across from him.
"Why?"
The question is simple. The answer is not.
"Because it's mine," Yaz says. "I wrote it when I was seven years old. Before you. Before the contract. Before any of this." He pauses. Lets the words find their weight. "It's the beginning of everything. I want to own my beginning."
Silence.
Then Thorne reaches for a pen. Signs the amendment with the quick, practiced strokes of a man who has signed a thousand contracts.
"Deal."
They shake hands. Thorne's grip is firm. Confident. The grip of a man who believes he has given up nothing important.
Yaz's grip is steady. Calm. The grip of a fourteen-year-old who has just won the first battle of a war that will take years to finish.
The aftermath is quiet.
Yaz walks out of the building into the rain. The city sprawls around him, gray and gleaming, screens flashing his face on buildings he has never entered. The album plays from passing cars. His voice, processed and produced and perfect, singing songs that belong to someone else now.
But not the first song. Not "7 Years."
That one is his.
He stands on the sidewalk and lets the rain soak through his jacket. Cold. Real. The sensation of something happening that he can actually feel.
You did it.
The Maestro's voice, warm and wondering, like a hand on his shoulder.
I did it.
How does it feel?
Yaz watches the rain streak down the glass towers around him. Watches the people hurry past with their umbrellas and their neural feeds and their AI-guided paths through a world that tells them exactly where to go.
Like the first step, he thinks. Not the destination. Just the first step.
That's enough for now.
Yes. That's enough.
April is preparation.
The concert approaches. Eighty thousand seats in an arena that gleams like a spacecraft landed in the heart of Nova Valencia. Screens wrap the exterior, already cycling promotional footage. The Hidden Voice Live. The culmination of everything.
Yaz rehearses. Hours every day. Running through the setlist, adjusting arrangements, working with the production team to layer his instruments into something that sounds like an orchestra but is actually just him, recorded a hundred times over, each track a different version of the same fourteen-year-old playing piano, guitar, violin, drums.
The song is almost complete.
The ballad section. The building weight. The operatic explosion. The hard rock defiance.
But the ending. The quiet coda. The resolution.
Still missing.
He plays through it every night in his hotel room. The keyboard balanced on the bed. His fingers finding the same notes, the same progression, the same moment where the defiance peaks and then...
Nothing.
It will come, the Maestro says. When you're ready.
What if I'm never ready?
Then you'll find another way. You always do.
The night before the concert, Yaz cannot sleep.
He sits at the window of his hotel room. The city spreads below him, eighty floors of distance between his feet and the ground. Screens pulse with his face. His name. The event that will happen tomorrow, that will put him in front of more people than he has ever seen in his life.
Eighty thousand people.
The number is too large to imagine. He tries to picture it and fails. Eighty thousand is not a crowd. Eighty thousand is a city. A movement. A tide.
He turns back to the keyboard. Plays through the song again. The opening. The questions. The building weight of seven years compressed into melody.
The sound fills the room. His voice, rough from rehearsals, cracking on the high notes, finding its way through the uncertainty.
The mother he never had. The choices that were made for him. The life that could have been something else entirely, if someone had kept him, if someone had wanted him, if the word in his file had been "surrendered" instead of "found."
The operatic section explodes. He has recorded the layered voices already. Himself harmonizing with himself, arguing with himself, the chaos of seven years given form.
Multiple pressures pulling in every direction. Thorne's demands. The industry's expectations. The persona that fits like armor and weighs like chains. The questions that never stop. Is this real. Is this who he is. Is any of it true.
Then the hard rock section. Guitar in hand. The defiance that has been building since he was nine years old and discovered rage, since he tried to burn everything down and learned that fire without direction just destroys.
All the anger. All the refusal. All the absolute determination to be something more than product, more than asset, more than a voice without a face waiting to be monetized.
And then.
The music stops.
The room is silent.
The ending is not there.
He sits with the silence for a long time.
The city glitters below. The clock on the wall reads 3:47 AM. In sixteen hours, he will walk onto a stage in front of eighty thousand people. In sixteen hours, he will perform a song that has no ending.
What comes after defiance?
The question rises from somewhere deep. From the Maestro. From himself. From the seven-year-old who wrote words on yellow paper and hoped someone would listen.
After you've refused to be broken. After you've screamed that they can't own you, can't erase you, can't make you disappear. What comes next?
He thinks about Thorne. About the negotiation. About the contract signed and the song won and the first step taken on a journey that will last years.
He thinks about Mrs. Okonkwo. About her guilt and her courage and the pressure she applied that helped tip the scales.
He thinks about the children at the Institut. About the ones still counting ceiling tiles. About the ones who will grow up invisible, who will become old men on benches feeding pigeons, who will never know what they could have been.
He thinks about Suki. About her note, worn soft in his pocket. Keep counting. I'll find you when the numbers make sense.
The numbers are starting to make sense.
And the ending...
The ending is not about triumph. Not about victory. Not about proving that he won.
The ending is about letting go.
His fingers find the keys. The melody shifts. Something quieter now. Something true.
What Thorne values. What the industry values. What the world tells you to want. The money. The fame. The validation of millions of strangers screaming your name.
None of it matters.
What matters is this. The music. The truth. The ability to create something from nothing and send it out into the world.
What matters is being seen. Really seen. Not as product. Not as brand. As a person. As an artist. As someone who exists.
The last notes fade. The room is silent.
The song is complete.
May 17th, 2159.
The arena is a cathedral of light and sound.
Yaz stands in the green room, alone except for his reflection. The mirror is surrounded by lights, the same kind he has seen in a hundred venues, the same kind that Mrs. Okonkwo watched him practice the persona in front of, back when this all began.
He touches the note in his pocket. Suki's note. The paper is so soft now that he can barely feel the edges. The words are ghosts. But he knows what they say.
Keep counting. I'll find you when the numbers make sense.
Eighty thousand people. That's a number. A big one.
He looks at his reflection. The face that has been hidden for seven years and revealed for nine months and seen by more people than he can comprehend.
He is wearing something simple. Black jacket, clean lines, nothing designed to distract. Not the persona's costume. Not the designed look. Just him.
Tonight, he is not performing the character.
Tonight, he is performing the truth.
The walk to the stage takes ninety-seven steps.
He counts them. Of course he counts them. He has been counting since he was seven years old, and the habit will not leave him now.
The corridor is dark. The sound of the crowd filters through the walls, a low roar like the ocean heard from a distance. Eighty thousand voices murmuring, shuffling, waiting.
At the end of the corridor, a door. Beyond the door, a ramp. Beyond the ramp, the stage.
Beyond the stage, everything.
Yaz stops. Breathes. Counts to seven.
Ready?
The Maestro's voice is quiet. Almost gone. The voice of a teacher who has taught everything they can teach.
Yes.
You don't need me anymore.
I know.
But I'm proud of you. Whatever that's worth.
Yaz smiles. The first real smile he has smiled in months.
It's worth everything.
He opens the door.
The stage is dark.
Yaz walks out alone. His footsteps echo on the hard surface. The crowd is a wall of shadows, eighty thousand shapes in the darkness, eighty thousand breaths held.
He finds the piano. Center stage. Grand. Black. The keys gleaming faintly in the ambient light.
He sits.
The spotlight finds him.
And suddenly, there is light everywhere. On his face. On his hands. On the piano that will be the foundation of everything that comes next.
Eighty thousand people, perfectly silent.
He has never heard anything so loud.
The first note is C.
Then E. Then G. A chord that hangs in the air like a question.
The piano keys are cool beneath his fingers. Smooth. Real. He can feel the grain of the ivory, the slight resistance before the hammer strikes the string. Seven years of practice distilled into this moment. Every hour in the basement. Every lesson with teachers who came and went. Every night alone with the instruments that became his only friends.
His voice is small at first. Almost a whisper. The question that has been building for seven years, finally given form.
Is this real?
The arena holds its breath. Eighty thousand people, and he can feel each one of them. Feel their attention like heat on his skin. Feel their hunger for something true, something that is not algorithm-optimized, something that comes from a real person instead of an AI construct.
Is this who I am?
The piano carries the weight of it. Each note precise. Each pause intentional. The sound system amplifies everything, sends his voice out into eighty thousand pairs of ears, but somehow the intimacy remains. Somehow it still feels like a secret shared between him and every person in this arena.
Or is this just a story I've told myself to survive?
The ballad builds. Strings layer in, pre-recorded, his own arrangements, the sound of a child who taught himself to orchestrate because no one else would do it for him.
[LYRICS PLACEHOLDER - BALLAD BUILDING]
The weight of the journey. The years that have passed. The boy who wrote words on yellow paper and watched them change the world.
The crowd is still silent. He can feel them, though. Eighty thousand hearts beating. Eighty thousand stories, each one different, each one somehow the same.
The operatic section explodes.
Suddenly the stage is chaos. Lights flash. Screens pulse with images. Yaz's voice multiplies, layered recordings of himself playing off himself, harmonizing and arguing and pleading.
It sounds like madness. Like being pulled in every direction at once. Like the negotiation and the media training and the constant performance and the endless, endless questions.
What do you want?
Who are you really?
Why did you hide?
Why did you come back?
The voices overlap. Conflict. Build toward something unbearable.
And then.
Silence.
One breath.
The crowd exhales.
Guitar.
Yaz stands. Crosses to where the electric guitar waits, cherry red, heavy in his hands.
The drums pound through his headphones. The guitar screams. His voice tears itself raw with the force of seven years of refusal.
You thought you could break me.
The crowd is on its feet now. He can see them, shapes moving in the darkness, arms raised, bodies swaying.
You thought you could take everything I am and sell it back to me in pieces.
The guitar solo tears through the arena. Every technique he has learned, every hour of practice, every callus on his fingers, channeled into two minutes of pure defiance.
You were wrong.
I'm still here.
I'm still me.
And then, impossibly, he hears it.
The crowd is singing.
His words. His melody. Eighty thousand voices carrying the song he wrote, the song that came from his pain, the song that belonged to no one but him.
The orphan who was invisible.
Eighty thousand voices now.
The coda.
Yaz sets down the guitar. Walks back to the piano. The arena falls quiet again, settling, waiting.
He sits.
He plays.
[LYRICS PLACEHOLDER - QUIET CODA]
Soft now. Just piano. Just his voice.
What Thorne values. What the industry wants. What the world tells you to chase.
The money. The fame. The endless, hungry approval of strangers.
None of it matters.
Nothing really matters.
The notes hang in the air. Delicate. True.
Anyone can see.
He plays the final chord. Lets it fade.
Nothing really matters.
Silence.
To me.
The last note hangs in the air.
Eighty thousand people, perfectly still.
Yaz sits at the piano with his head bowed. His hands rest on the keys. His heart pounds so hard he can feel it in his throat, in his wrists, in the tips of his fingers. Sweat runs down his back. His voice is raw. His muscles ache from the guitar solo, from standing, from the physical effort of performing for forty-seven minutes without stopping.
But none of that matters.
What matters is this moment. This silence. This space between the last note and whatever comes next.
Silence.
One second. Two. Three.
Then the roar.
It comes like a wave. Like a wall. Like the sound of everything he has ever wanted crashing over him at once.
Eighty thousand people, screaming.
The noise is so loud it hurts. So loud he cannot hear himself think. So loud he can only sit there, stunned, while the arena shakes with the force of eighty thousand voices saying yes and more and we see you.
He looks up.
The crowd is standing. Every single person. Arms raised. Tears on faces he can barely see through the lights. Some of them are hugging strangers. Some of them are jumping up and down. Some of them are just standing there, hands pressed to their chests, mouths open, experiencing something they will remember for the rest of their lives.
They are crying.
He is crying too. He did not plan to. He just is. The tears run down his face and he does not wipe them away. He lets them fall. Lets the moment be what it is.
For seven years, he was hidden. For seven years, he was a voice without a face, a mystery, a product. People bought his music without knowing who he was. Loved his songs without seeing the boy who wrote them. Built fantasies around a silhouette that could have been anyone.
Tonight, eighty thousand people saw him.
Really saw him.
For the first time since he was seven years old.
The lights fade.
The crowd disperses.
Yaz stands at the window of the empty arena, watching the city come back to life below. The screens still pulse with his face, with clips from the concert already circulating, with headlines that call it historic and unprecedented and the performance of a generation.
He does not feel historic. He feels tired. He feels empty in a way that is also somehow full.
He is fourteen years old.
He owns one song. His song. The beginning.
He has played for eighty thousand people and been seen, really seen, for seven minutes and forty-two seconds of absolute truth.
Suki's note is still in his pocket. Worn soft. The words almost illegible from years of touching.
Keep counting. I'll find you when the numbers make sense.
The numbers are starting to make sense.
Somewhere in the VIP section, Thorne watched the concert with an expression he could not quite control. Something had shifted. Something he did not fully understand. The boy he had cultivated was not entirely the boy on that stage.
Somewhere in the audience, Mrs. Okonkwo cried. The guilt she had carried for six years, finally dissolving into something else. Not forgiveness. Not absolution. But action. Movement. The knowledge that she had done something, in the end.
Somewhere, maybe, Suki listened. If she still followed his career. If she still remembered the boy who counted ceiling tiles with her. If she still believed that the numbers would make sense someday.
The Maestro is quiet. Not gone. Never gone. But quiet. The way a teacher is quiet when the student has learned what they needed to learn.
For now.
Yaz touches the window.
The glass is cool against his fingertips. The city sprawls below, all screens and suggestions and paths laid out for people to follow. The fence is out there somewhere, rusting around an orphanage where children still count ceiling tiles and wonder who they are.
He was one of them once. Seven years old. Found, not surrendered. A name assigned instead of given.
Now he is fourteen. He owns one song. He has stood in front of eighty thousand people and shown them who he really is.
It is not freedom. Not yet.
Thorne still has power. The contract still binds. The industry still wants to consume him, to process him, to turn him into content.
But he owns something now. A piece of himself that cannot be taken. A beginning that belongs to him alone.
The yellow paper is in his bag, back at the hotel. The song he wrote when he was seven years old. Once I was seven years old. The words that started everything.
He is twice that age now. Fourteen years. Half his life since the song was written.
The journey is not over. It is barely begun.
But he is not the invisible boy at the fence anymore. He is not the product in the basement. He is not the mask he learned to wear.
He is Yassine Kwon.
He is the Hidden Voice, finally revealed.
He is something more than what they tried to make him.
The arena is empty now.
The stage lights have dimmed. The screens have gone dark. The eighty thousand seats sit vacant, holding the ghost of something that happened here tonight.
Yaz turns from the window. Walks through the darkness. His footsteps echo in the vast space, ninety-seven steps back to the door, back to the corridor, back to the world that waits for him outside.
The roar has faded. The lights have dimmed. The crowd has dispersed into the night, carrying his music with them, humming melodies that were born in a basement cage and now live in eighty thousand throats.
Seven years.
From yellow paper to this.
He pushes open the door. The night air hits his face. Cool. Real. The city breathes around him, alive with screens and suggestions and people following paths they did not choose.
But he is choosing now. Step by step. Song by song.
The numbers are starting to make sense.
It was not freedom.
Not yet.
The cage still existed. Different bars, perhaps. Less visible. But real.
Thorne still held power. The industry still hungered. The machine still ran, and he was still inside it.
But tonight, something had changed.
Tonight, eighty thousand people had seen him. Really seen him. Not the persona. Not the brand. Not the product they had been sold.
Him.
Yassine Kwon. Fourteen years old. Half Korean, half Algerian. Found, not surrendered. A boy who wrote words on yellow paper and watched them change the world.
He walked through the empty streets of Nova Valencia. The rain had stopped. The screens reflected in puddles at his feet, his own face staring back at him, multiplied, everywhere.
Somewhere out there, Suki was listening.
Somewhere, Mrs. Okonkwo was drying her eyes.
Somewhere, children at Institut Esperança were counting ceiling tiles, not knowing that one of them had grown up to stand on a stage and sing the truth.
Yaz kept walking.
The note in his pocket. The song in his head. The beginning of something he could not yet name.
It was not freedom.
Not yet.
But it was his.
And that was the beginning of everything.