Three weeks since Tokyo, and Yaz still does not know where he lives.
The car smells like nothing. Aggressively, expensively nothing. Leather seats designed to erase every trace of previous passengers. Climate control calibrated to nineteen degrees, the exact temperature some algorithm determined he preferred based on data harvested from twelve months of touring. Jin's hands rest steady on the wheel, the rearview mirror reflecting eyes that notice everything and reveal nothing.
Through the tinted window, Nova Valencia slides past like a dream. Streets he had watched through a chain-link fence for seven years. Buildings he had counted and recounted from a basement practice room. The city that contained his entire childhood, now filtered through glass so dark it turns afternoon into permanent dusk.
Hummm. The engine, barely audible. Shhhh. Tires on pavement, whisper-quiet.
They pass an industrial district. Warehouses. Old factories converted to something. Bass thudding faintly through concrete walls. Yaz notes the location without knowing why. Files it away. His brain does this now, catalogs exits and hiding places, maps every space for the moment he might need to disappear.
Jin speaks for the first time in forty minutes.
"We're arriving, Mr. Kwon."
The tower rises through the windshield. Glass and steel, climbing toward clouds. Yaz counts floors automatically. Stops himself at twenty-three. The building keeps going. Keeps climbing. Forty-seven floors visible from this angle. The rest hidden by perspective.
The car glides to a stop. Private entrance. Not the main lobby. Celebrities do not use front doors. High-value assets require specialized handling.
Jin opens Yaz's door. The air outside is different. Cool but not cold. Carrying smells the car had erased: exhaust, street food, the particular scent of a city breathing.
The lobby swallows them.
Marble floors. White. Gold veins running through like something trying to escape. A security desk where guards in gray suits track his entrance with eyes that see without acknowledging. An art installation in the center, abstract, massive, meaning nothing.
A man in an immaculate suit appears. Fifties, white, smile that does not reach his eyes.
"Mr. Kwon. Welcome to Meridian Tower. We've been expecting you."
Expecting. As if he had a choice. As if expecting was not the same as preparing the cage.
"Thank you."
The words taste like someone else's. Polite. Empty. The Hidden Voice's words, worn smooth from years of performing gratitude he did not feel.
"The penthouse has been prepared to Mr. Thorne's specifications. If there's anything you need, anything at all, we're at your service. Twenty-four hours."
Yaz nods. Says nothing more.
Jin touches his elbow. Light pressure. Direction.
"I'll wait in the car until you're settled. Two hours."
Not a question. Not an offer. Information. Jin deals in information, not comfort.
"Okay."
The elevator climbs forty-seven floors.
Yaz stands against the brushed steel wall, watching the digital counter rise. Twelve. Twenty-three. Thirty-five. The numbers climb like a fever, like a pulse, like something he cannot stop. Jin stands slightly behind him, hands clasped, breathing steady and professional and utterly silent.
Forty-seven.
Ding.
The number lands in his chest before his mind processes it. Forty-seven. The same number as the tiles. The same number as the years compressed into seven. The same number as everything he cannot stop counting.
The doors slide open with a soft shhhh of expensive machinery.
White. Everything white. Walls, floors, the ceiling that stretches impossibly high. The apartment opens before him like a mouth waiting to swallow something whole.
"Mr. Kwon."
Caroline Vance stands just inside the double doors. Tablet in hand. Heels clicking against marble. Her voice is clipped, efficient, the sound of a woman who speaks in bullet points and breathes in quarterly projections.
"Welcome. I trust the journey was acceptable."
"It was fine."
Three weeks since Tokyo. Three weeks of debriefs and medical exams and contracts reviewed and smiles practiced for cameras he never saw. Three weeks in controlled environments, processed through systems designed to turn boys into products and products into revenue streams.
And now this.
Caroline turns without waiting for more. Her heels go click click click against the marble, each step a metronome marking time he cannot escape.
Yaz follows.
What else is there to do?
The main space opens like a wound.
Floor-to-ceiling windows along the eastern wall. The city sprawls below, a circuit board blinking and breathing and utterly indifferent to his arrival. Climate-controlled air touches his face. The temperature is perfect. Nineteen degrees exactly. His preference, recorded somewhere, known by systems that learn faster than he can forget.
"Living area." Caroline gestures with her tablet. "The furniture was selected by Mr. Thorne's design team. The sofa is Italian leather, the tables are reclaimed oak. Everything can be replaced if you have preferences, within approved parameters."
Within approved parameters. Even comfort has conditions.
The couch faces the window, not a screen. Thorne's message: Look at what you've achieved. Look at the city you watched through a fence for seven years, now spread beneath you like something you could touch if the glass would only disappear.
No photographs anywhere. No history. No identity except the one curated by people who understand branding better than breathing.
A single orchid on the coffee table. Alive, barely. Requiring constant maintenance to survive.
"Climate control is automated but can be adjusted. The system learns your preferences over time."
The system learns. Not: you can control it. The system learns you. Maps your patterns. Anticipates your needs before you know you have them.
Caroline moves toward the kitchen. Yaz follows, his eyes tracking the space, counting without deciding to. Twenty-three steps from window to kitchen counter. The floor is pale hardwood, each plank fitted precisely against the next.
The kitchen counter is marble. White, veined with gray.
His eyes trace the pattern.
One. Seven. Twelve. Twenty-three. Thirty-one.
Forty-seven gray specks.
He counts again to be sure.
Forty-seven.
The same number as the tiles on the orphanage ceiling. The same number as the floors in this building. The same number that follows him like a shadow, like a ghost, like something that refuses to let go.
His chest tightens. His breath catches. Hhhh. A sound he does not mean to make.
"Mr. Kwon?"
"Nothing." He swallows. "Continue."
The bedroom smells like nothing.
Not clean. Not fresh. Nothing. The aggressive absence of scent, as if someone had surgically removed any evidence that air could carry memory.
Caroline stands in the doorway, tablet glowing. "Blackout curtains for optimal sleep conditions. The mattress is orthopedic, important for performance stamina. Mr. Thorne had it specially commissioned."
The bed is enormous. King-sized. White linens stretched tight, not a wrinkle visible. The kind of precision that comes from staff who arrive when you are gone and leave before you return.
Yaz looks at it.
He already knows he will not sleep in it.
Something about the precision. The optimization. The specialness of it. Someone decided what kind of rest he needed before asking what kind of rest he wanted. The mattress is not for him. It is for the body that needs to perform. For the voice that needs to work. The person who sleeps in this bed is an instrument, and instruments require maintenance.
"The bathroom is through there." Caroline gestures. "Amenities stocked. Additional items can be requested through the tablet."
Yaz nods. Does not move. Does not touch anything.
The music room is last.
Caroline opens the door and Yaz's stomach drops.
A grand piano, black, gleaming. The same model as the Practice Room. Seven years and the shape has not changed, the keys have not shifted, the weight of it sitting in space exactly like it sat in the basement where he learned to turn counting into melody.
Guitars on wall mounts. Acoustic, electric, classical. Ten of them. All pristine. Never played.
A microphone on a stand, professional grade. Recording equipment behind glass, interfaces blinking soft blue.
And in the corners, small and red and unblinking: cameras.
"The music room." Caroline's voice is smooth. Practiced. "Mr. Thorne expects you to maintain your skills. Practice sessions should be logged. The system tracks usage. The recording equipment connects directly to Thorne Industries' servers for remote review."
Remote review.
Yaz stares at the cameras. They do not pretend to be hidden. They do not need to. This is not surveillance. This is supervision. There is a difference. Surveillance implies you might do something wrong. Supervision implies you belong to someone.
The Practice Room. Seven years. Cameras in every corner.
He had left. He had negotiated. He had won.
And here it is again. The same room. The same lights. The same message: We see you. We own what we see.
Something cold moves through his chest. Not anger. He is too tired for anger. Something quieter. Flatter.
Patience.
He can wait.
"I understand."
Caroline's tablet beeps. She checks it, nods. "The tablet on the counter contains schedules, contacts, and house protocols. Jin will return in two hours if you need transport. Tomorrow, tutors arrive at nine."
She pauses at the door. Her eyes meet his for the first time since the elevator. Blue-gray, like the windows, like the city, like everything designed to be beautiful without being warm.
"Mr. Thorne has invested significantly in your comfort, Mr. Kwon. I'm sure you'll make the most of it."
"I'm sure I will."
The door closes.
Click.
The silence that follows is not empty. It is full. Climate control hum. Cameras watching. Forty-seven gray specks in marble that no one told him to count.
He is alone.
He has never felt less free.
The sun sets in stages.
Gold bleeding through buildings. Then orange. Pink. Purple. The blue that is not quite dark. Finally, city lights begin. Scattered at first. Then everywhere. A second sky beneath the first.
Yaz stands at the window and watches.
He has not moved in forty-three minutes.
His body tracks time even when he does not want it to. Counts minutes like breaths, like steps, like the gray specks in marble that pattern his vision when he closes his eyes.
The window is triple-glazed. Fifteen millimeters of engineered silence separating him from the world outside. He presses his palm against it. Cold. His reflection presses back, ghost-thin, layered over the city like something that does not quite exist.
Outside, cars move. Lights blink. The machinery of millions of lives hums and clicks and breathes. But he cannot hear any of it. The glass keeps everything out.
Or keeps him in.
Same thing.
He stands until his legs ache. Until the city transforms from gold to blue to the sodium-orange of artificial light. Until the window becomes a mirror and the mirror becomes a cell and the cell becomes the only thing he knows.
The couch waits behind him. Italian leather. Cold.
He sits.
The cushions accept his weight without complaint. No creak, no resistance. Furniture designed to accommodate without acknowledging. He could disappear into this couch and it would simply reshape around his absence.
His hand finds his phone in his pocket. The edges dig into his palm. He has not looked at it in three weeks. Handlers took it during debriefs. Returned it at the airport. He put it in his pocket without thinking, the way you carry something that belongs to someone you used to be.
Now he looks.
The screen glows. Notifications cascade.
4,847 unread messages. 2,903 missed calls. 12,456 social media notifications.
All from strangers.
He opens messages at random. Scrolls.
OMG I LOVE YOU SO MUCH YOU CHANGED MY LIFE
Your music is fake industry garbage
I would literally die for you please notice me
You don't deserve anything you have
Please respond please please I've sent 47 messages
Your song saved me from myself
You're a sellout and everyone knows it
I named my baby after you
Please notice me please please please
He closes the app.
Opens another.
Same.
Another.
Same.
Forty-seven hundred people who think they know him. Who have opinions about someone they have never met. Who love or hate a projection, a frequency, a ghost that wears his face and speaks with his voice and belongs to a man who touches his gold watch when he calculates value.
The messages taste like copper. Like digital glass. Like something meant to nourish that has curdled into poison.
He deletes the apps.
All of them.
Tap. One gone. Tap. Another. Tap. Tap. Tap.
His thumb pressing glass, erasing portals to strangers who scream into the void expecting him to answer. Expecting him to be the frequency they need. Expecting the Hidden Voice to exist at 11 PM in an empty apartment forty-seven floors above a city that knows his face but not his name.
The phone feels lighter after. The same weight, technically. But lighter.
He sets it on the marble counter. Forty-seven specks stare back at him in the screen's glow.
Coincidence.
He does not believe in coincidence anymore.
The bed waits in the darkness.
He stands in the doorway and looks at it. Orthopedic. Commissioned. Optimal.
He cannot.
It is not defiance exactly. More like preservation. If he sleeps in that bed, he accepts something. Agrees to something. Becomes the person Thorne designed the bed for. The instrument that requires maintenance. The investment that must be protected.
The couch is uncomfortable. Cold leather that does not warm.
He lies down anyway.
The ceiling above him: eighty-nine panels.
He counts them until his eyes close.
He does not dream.
At midnight, his body wakes him.
He walks the apartment without turning on lights. His feet know distances his eyes do not need to measure. The darkness is not frightening. The darkness is accurate. It shows him the shape of his cage without pretending there are no bars.
Kitchen to living area: twenty-three steps. Living area to bedroom: seventeen steps. Bedroom to bathroom: eight steps. Bathroom to closet: twelve steps. Closet to music room: fifteen steps. Music room back to kitchen: twenty-eight steps.
Total circuit: one hundred and three steps.
He does it three times to confirm.
One hundred and three. One hundred and three. One hundred and three.
The number means nothing. But knowing it means something. It means the space has dimensions. It means the cage has edges. It means he can map his own captivity and know, at least, where the walls stand.
On the third circuit, he looks up.
The ceiling in the main room is coffered. Square panels, recessed lighting, architectural detail for people who notice such things.
He counts.
Eighty-nine.
Not forty-seven. Eighty-nine. Almost double.
He does not know if that is better or worse.
At 2:14 AM, Yaz wakes on the couch.
His eyes open to darkness and he does not know where he is.
The ceiling is wrong. Too far away. Too many tiles. For one heartbeat, maybe two, he is in the orphanage. In the Practice Room. In Tokyo. Everywhere and nowhere.
Then city lights through the window bring him back.
The Loft.
His apartment.
His cage.
2:15 AM. The clock glows blue across the room. He stares at it until the numbers change. 2:16. 2:17.
Counting minutes now. Counting because he cannot stop.
The silence is wrong.
At the orphanage, there had been sounds. Other children breathing, turning, crying in sleep. The building settling. Pipes knocking. Creeeak. Drip. Thump. Life happening beyond his door.
Here, nothing.
Climate control hum. That is all. The soundproofing works both ways. It keeps the city out. It keeps him in. It keeps everything at a distance that tastes like something dead.
He needs out.
Just for a minute.
Just to prove he can.
The closet is dark.
Yaz navigates by memory. Twelve steps from bathroom. Turn left. Three steps to the back wall.
He had noticed it during Caroline's tour. A seam that did not quite align. A panel slightly raised. The kind of imperfection that should not exist in a space designed to be perfect.
His hand finds it in the darkness.
Presses.
Nothing.
Presses harder.
Click.
The panel swings inward.
Behind the false wall: a space. Not large. Maybe two meters by two meters. Unfinished. Concrete where the rest of the apartment is marble. Exposed conduits along one wall. A single electrical outlet. Emergency lighting that casts everything in dim amber.
No cameras.
He checks. Looks in every corner. Runs his hands along rough walls, searches for the red light that watches him everywhere else.
Nothing.
This space is not designed. It is leftover. A gap between the apartment and the building's infrastructure. Someone had covered it with a panel and forgotten about it.
Or maybe not forgotten.
Maybe left it. For someone who needed a place to disappear.
Yaz stands in the darkness and breathes.
Haaah.
The air is different here. Not climate-controlled. Not optimized. It smells like concrete and dust and something almost like freedom.
He cannot live here. He cannot hide here forever.
But he can exist here. Unobserved. Unwatched. Uncounted.
For the first time since Tokyo, something loosens in his chest.
Not happiness. Not relief.
Possibility.
The cage has a crack.
At 3 AM, Yaz opens the front door.
The alert system blinks red on the panel beside the frame. Standard protocol for high-value individuals. Door opens, notification sent to security team.
He had learned the override during tour security briefings. Four digits. Hold for three seconds.
Beep beep beep beep.
The light switches from red to green.
He opens the door.
No alarm.
No notification.
Just the hallway, empty and humming with fluorescent light.
He takes nothing. No phone. They could track it. No wallet. He does not need money. Where he is going, money would not help. Just himself, in black clothes, in the middle of the night.
The Hidden Voice does not exist at 3 AM.
Maybe Yaz can.
Service elevator at the end of the hall. Behind a panel marked STAFF ONLY.
He presses the button. The elevator arrives empty. No cameras inside. Service elevators are not worth monitoring. Only workers use them.
Down forty-seven floors.
He does not count this time. Does not need to.
Whirrrr. The building's bones carrying him down.
Service corridor: gray, industrial, no marble. Workers' hallway. The real skin beneath the luxury mask.
Delivery entrance: propped open with a brick. Someone's shortcut. Someone who never imagined a penthouse resident would use it.
And then: outside.
Whoooosh.
Air that is not climate-controlled. Cool. Moving. Alive.
Noise that is not silence. Distant traffic. A horn somewhere far. Bass thudding thudding thudding through warehouse walls he cannot see.
The city.
The streets at 3 AM belong to different people.
Night shift workers wait for buses, uniforms rumpled, eyes tired. Their bodies sag into benches designed to prevent sleeping. A woman in scrubs checks her phone, the light painting her face blue. A man in coveralls eats something wrapped in foil, chewing mechanically, fueling a body that will work until dawn.
Couples stumble home from wherever couples go. Holding hands. Laughing at nothing. One pair stops under a streetlight to kiss, oblivious to the world, to time, to the boy in black clothes walking past like a ghost.
Homeless figures nest in doorways, wrapped in whatever warmth they have found. Cardboard. Blankets. Each other. One old man sits against a shuttered storefront, eyes open, watching Yaz pass without acknowledgment. They share something, Yaz thinks. The knowledge that home is not a building. Home is wherever you are when the world stops looking at you.
Delivery trucks rumble rumble rumble through intersections, restocking stores for a morning that will come whether anyone wants it or not. Their headlights sweep across walls, illuminating graffiti that says things in languages Yaz cannot read.
No one looks at him.
No one recognizes him.
At 3 AM, everyone is too tired, too busy, too lost in their own worlds to notice a teenager in black clothes walking nowhere in particular.
He is invisible.
Actually invisible. Not hidden-by-design invisible. Not Hidden-Voice invisible. Just a person. Walking. Existing. Taking up space without anyone caring.
The invisibility tastes like cold water. Like something necessary finally given.
He passes a noodle shop, still open, steam fogging the windows. A woman behind the counter, old, small, screaming at someone in Cantonese. Her voice is sharp and warm at the same time, the sound of someone who loves through noise. A customer at the counter laughs. The woman laughs too. Throws a towel at him. He catches it. They have done this before. They will do it again.
Through the glass, Yaz smells broth and ginger and five-spice and something being made with care. His stomach tightens. Not hunger exactly. Something older. The memory of meals he did not eat because appetite requires safety and safety was never guaranteed.
He does not stop. But he remembers.
He passes a record shop, closed now, security grate pulled down. But through the grate he sees the window display. Vinyl records. Actual vinyl. Black circles in paper sleeves, artifacts from before the Recalibration, from before music became frequency and frequency became product. The covers show faces he does not recognize. Names he has never heard. Musicians who played before the world decided what music was allowed to mean.
JAZZ, one sleeve says. SOUL, says another. RHYTHM AND BLUES.
Words that sound like feelings instead of categories.
He does not stop. But he remembers.
He passes an industrial area. Warehouses and old factories, concrete and brick, the bones of a city that used to make things. Bass THOOM THOOM THOOM through walls somewhere he cannot see. The beat is heavy. Dark purple. The sound of a heartbeat against a riot shield, the sound of something fighting to be heard.
A group outside a warehouse door. Smoking. Laughing. His age, maybe older. Their clothes are different from his. Not curated. Not selected from approved parameters. Chosen. The kind of clothes you wear because you want to, not because someone decided you should.
Music leaks through the door every time it opens. Someone coming out. Someone going in. The bass swallows everything, erases thought, leaves only rhythm.
What is in there? Why are they here at 4 AM?
He wants to know. Does not ask. Not yet.
Keeps walking.
But he remembers the location. Files it away.
Three hours pass. He does not count his steps.
That feels like progress.
At 5:45 AM, Yaz returns.
Reverse route. Service entrance. Service elevator. Service corridor. The building's skeleton welcoming him without question.
He re-enables the door alert. Red light steady.
Jin arrives in fifteen minutes. Will never know.
This secret is his.
The first secret he has kept from Thorne since the orphanage.
It tastes like swallowing something sharp and necessary. Painful and good.
The sun rises over Nova Valencia.
Slowly. Then all at once. Then impossible to look at directly.
Yaz stands at the window and lets it fill his eyes.
Behind him, the apartment waits. Eighty-nine ceiling tiles. Forty-seven gray specks in marble. One hundred and three steps in a circuit. Cameras in the music room. Climate control humming humming humming. A bed he will not sleep in.
Before him, the city wakes. Traffic beginning. Lights switching off. Lives resuming.
Somewhere down there: the noodle shop. The record shop. The bass through warehouse walls.
Somewhere down there: a world he does not know yet.
He will learn it. In the dark. In the hours Thorne cannot see.
The window is triple-glazed. Soundproof. He cannot hear the city any more than he can touch it.
But he walked in it. Breathed it. Been invisible in it.
The cage has walls. The cage has cameras. The cage has everything Thorne designed it to have.
But the cage also has a crack.
A hidden space.
A service elevator.
A door alert that can be disabled.
And a city that does not know his name.
Forty-seven specks in the marble.
He counts them twice.
The same number as the ceiling tiles in the orphanage. The same number as the floors in this building. Coincidence or message, he does not know. Maybe both. Maybe neither.
But he knows this:
The number is not a prison.
It is a key.
He just has to figure out what it unlocks.
End of Chapter 1