The first thing Yaz hit in the apartment was the punching bag.
Not because he was angry. Because hitting something felt like existing. The bag hung in the corner of the in-unit gym, red leather, perfectly weighted, probably optimized for some celebrity training regimen. His fist connected. Thwack. The bag swung. Swung back. He hit it again.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Forty-seven impacts. He stopped at forty-seven. His knuckles burned pink. He didn't know why he stopped at that number. Didn't need to know. The counting lived in his bones now, automatic as breathing.
The schedule had arrived on a tablet the first morning of May: every hour accounted for, every minute assigned.
DAILY SCHEDULE — MR. KWON 07:00 - Wake, personal hygiene 07:30 - Breakfast (delivered) 08:00 - Physical conditioning (in-unit equipment) 09:00 - Mathematics (Dr. Park) 10:30 - Break 11:00 - Literature (Ms. Abdullah) 12:30 - Lunch (delivered) 13:00 - History (Mr. Cohen) 14:30 - Break 15:00 - Science (Dr. Okonkwo) 16:30 - Music Practice (monitored) 18:00 - Dinner (delivered) 19:00 - Unstructured time 22:00 - Recommended sleep Note: All sessions recorded for quality assurance. Deviations to be reported to Thorne Industries.
Every hour. Every minute.
"Unstructured time" meant three hours. His. Except the cameras were always watching, so even unstructured time was observed time. Performed freedom. The schedule didn't mention the night. The schedule assumed he slept at 22:00 like a good product.
The schedule was wrong.
The door chimed at 8:59. Not 9:00. Early.
Yaz opened it.
Dr. Park stood in the hallway. Wire-frame glasses, gray suit, tablet under arm, face arranged into the precise shape of nothing. His eyes didn't travel the apartment, didn't catalog the view or the furniture or the obvious wealth. He walked past Yaz without waiting for invitation, sat at the dining table, opened his tablet.
"Mr. Kwon. Mathematics. We begin."
Click. The stylus against glass.
"Problem one. Solve for x."
No small talk. No "how are you settling in." No acknowledgment of who Yaz was or what he'd done or the fact that his face had been on screens in forty countries.
Just math.
Yaz sat across from him. Looked at the equation. Solved for x.
Six weeks into lessons, Dr. Park hadn't smiled once. Hadn't frowned once. Hadn't acknowledged that Yaz was anything other than a mind solving equations.
"You completed the month's problems in two weeks."
"They weren't difficult."
Long pause. Dr. Park's stylus hovered motionless above the screen. His face remained empty, but something shifted behind his eyes. Interest, maybe. Or its closest mathematical approximation.
"No. They were not."
New problems appeared on the tablet. Complex. Intimidating. University symbols Yaz had never seen, functions that curved and twisted like living things.
"These are from university curriculum. First year. Attempt them."
"I'll fail."
"This is acceptable. Failure is information."
Yaz tried. Failed. Tried again. Failed differently.
Dr. Park watched. Said nothing. Let him struggle.
Somehow, the silence tasted like permission. Permission to not be perfect. Permission to break against something without disappointing anyone. When had he ever had that? Not with Thorne, who tracked every metric. Not with audiences, who expected the Hidden Voice to always shine.
Here, in this sterile apartment, solving problems that didn't matter for a man who wanted nothing from him, Yaz discovered the strange mathematics of peace. Dr. Park didn't care about the Hidden Voice. Didn't care about Thorne. Didn't care about anything except whether x equaled seventeen.
In a world of people wanting pieces of him, Dr. Park wanted only numbers.
It was the closest thing to freedom Yaz had felt in months.
Ms. Abdullah smelled like jasmine and something older. Paper, maybe. Ink. Her hijab was deep purple today, and Yaz was learning to read the colors like weather reports. Purple meant contemplative. Green meant she was in a challenging mood. Red meant something was wrong in her life outside this apartment, though she never said what.
She sat cross-legged even in the dining chair, her second bag tucked beneath the table where she thought he couldn't see it. But Yaz saw everything. Cataloged it. Filed it away.
"The assigned reading discusses the role of art in social cohesion." Her voice curled around words like they were precious things, breakable. "The argument is that unified cultural expression promotes stability." Pause. Her eyes found his. "Do you agree?"
"It's what the chapter says."
"You keep saying that. What the chapter says. What the text says." She leaned forward. Her hands moved when she talked, painting shapes in the air between them. "I'm not asking the text, Yaz. I'm asking you."
"Why does it matter what I think?"
Something flickered across her face. Pain, maybe. Or recognition.
"Because you're a person. Not a receptacle. Not a..." She paused, searching. "...content delivery system. A person."
Her hand reached beneath the table. The second bag.
"Can I show you something? It's not on the curriculum."
He should have said no. Should have reported her. Should have protected the schedule, the system, the careful architecture of his cage.
"Yes."
She pulled out a thin book. Old. Physical pages, yellowed at the edges. The cover was blank, worn smooth by hands he couldn't see.
"Poetry. From before the Recalibration. It was almost lost. Someone saved it." She placed it between them like an offering. Like medicine. "This is not instruction. This is an invitation. Read if you want. Don't if you don't. But Yaz..." Her eyes held his. Dark and warm and entirely unlike the approved curriculum. "The writers in this book believed words could change things. I wonder if they were right."
She didn't ask for it back when she left.
That night, in the hidden space where cameras couldn't reach, Yaz read it three times. The poems were old. Some angry, some sad, some hopeful in ways that felt illegal now. But they were all alive. Breathing on the page in a way the approved texts never did.
Words as weapons. Words as wounds. Words as medicine.
Something shifted in his chest. Made room for something he couldn't name yet.
Mr. Cohen moved through time the way other people moved through rooms. Slowly. Deliberately. Always looking for exits.
His white beard caught the light from the window. His cardigan was beige today, same cut as yesterday, same cut as every day. He walked with a slight limp and didn't explain it, and his hands shook slightly when he held the tablet. Age or memory. Yaz couldn't tell which.
"The textbook describes the Cultural Recalibration as 'voluntary harmonization.'" His voice wandered, digressive, story-shaped. "This is... a way of putting it."
"What would you call it?"
Mr. Cohen removed his glasses. Cleaned them slowly. Put them back on.
"A silencing." The word landed soft and heavy. "Don't write that down. But remember it."
He pulled up an image on his tablet. A crowd. Signs. Music.
"Before. A protest. People gathered, thousands of them, and they sang. The same song, together, in the streets. This was... power. Different kind of power than now. Messy. Dangerous. Beautiful."
The image glowed on the screen. Faces Yaz didn't recognize, holding signs with words he could barely read. Their mouths were open. They were singing something. Fighting something with nothing but their voices.
"What happened to them?"
Long silence. Mr. Cohen's watery eyes went somewhere far away.
"What happens to all dangerous things. They were handled. Harmonized." He closed the image. "The textbook calls it efficiency. History calls it loss. I call it..." He trailed off. Shook his head. "I'm old. Old men ramble. Let's return to page forty-three."
He didn't look at Yaz for the rest of the session.
But that night, Yaz thought about crowds. About singing together. About dangerous beautiful things that got harmonized into silence.
He thought about the music room with cameras.
He thought about harmonizing himself into nothing.
Dr. Okonkwo's glasses lived on his forehead when he was thinking and slid down to his nose when he was explaining. Right now they were up, which meant his mind was working faster than his mouth.
"You seem distracted today. The material bores you?"
"No, I just..."
"You're a musician, yes? Sound is your material." His Nigerian accent thickened when he got excited, the words tumbling over each other. "Perhaps we should make this relevant."
He pulled up a diagram. Waves. Frequencies. Numbers that looked like music.
"Tell me. When you sing, what do you think is happening?"
"I make sound?"
"You make pressure waves." He leaned forward, and his glasses slid down. Explanation mode. "Your vocal cords vibrate, 100 to 1,000 times per second depending on pitch. These vibrations push air molecules. The molecules push more molecules. A chain reaction traveling at 343 meters per second until it reaches someone's eardrum." His smile was sharp, delighted. "You see? When you sing, you are literally touching people. Physically. The same molecules that were in your body enter theirs."
Something clicked. A key turning in a lock Yaz hadn't known was there.
"That's..."
"Intimate, yes? Powerful, yes?" Dr. Okonkwo's hands drew shapes in the air. "Your voice is not metaphor. It is physics. And physics can be optimized, enhanced, weaponized."
Weaponized.
The word tasted like copper. Like something sharp pressed against his tongue.
"Now. Let us discuss frequency response and why some voices carry more weight than others."
For the first time in weeks, Yaz listened. Really listened.
Sound as physics. Voice as weapon. Not metaphor. Mechanics.
He'd felt his voice do things to crowds. Seen them sway, seen them weep, seen them reach for him like he was something holy. He'd never understood the equation beneath the emotion.
Dr. Okonkwo didn't care about music. He cared about impact.
Maybe that's what Yaz needed to care about too.
By May, the night walks had a pattern.
2 AM: Wake (or stop pretending to sleep). 2:15: Disable door alert. 2:20: Service elevator, service corridor, service exit. 2:25: Outside. 2:26 to 5:30: Walk. 5:45: Return. 6:00: Jin arrives, suspects nothing.
The pattern was safety. As long as the pattern held, the secret held.
Whoooosh. Night air that wasn't climate-controlled. Cool. Moving. Alive. It touched his face like a question. The kind of question the apartment never asked.
Rumble rumble rumble. Delivery trucks restocking stores for a morning that would come whether anyone wanted it or not. Their headlights swept across walls, illuminating graffiti that said things in languages Yaz couldn't read. Some of it looked like anger. Some of it looked like art. Maybe those were the same thing.
Thoom thoom thoom. Bass through warehouse walls somewhere he couldn't see. Dark purple sound. The color of bruises that hadn't healed yet. The color of something fighting to exist.
The city at 3 AM belonged to different people. Night shift workers waited for buses, uniforms rumpled, eyes tired. Their bodies sagged into benches designed to prevent sleeping. A woman in scrubs checked her phone, the light painting her face blue. A man in coveralls ate something wrapped in foil, chewing mechanically, fueling a body that would work until dawn.
Couples stumbled home from wherever couples went. Holding hands. Laughing at nothing. One pair stopped under a streetlight to kiss, oblivious to the world, to time, to the boy in black clothes walking past like something transparent.
No one looked at him.
No one recognized him.
At 3 AM, everyone was too tired, too busy, too lost in their own worlds to notice a teenager in black clothes walking nowhere in particular.
He was 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 tasted like cold water after days of nothing.
He was learning not to care either.
June brought intention.
He mapped the city in his head. Not street names. Feelings. Zones. Types of air.
The rich district: quiet, clean, cameras everywhere, wrong.
The middle zones: busier even at night, some life, tolerable.
The edges: industrial, forgotten, interesting.
He found the noodle shop that never closed. Third visit, and the old woman started recognizing him. She screamed something in Cantonese that sounded like welcome and threat simultaneously. "Haaaah! Skinny boy! You again!" Her voice was sharp and warm, love expressed through volume.
He found the record shop. Still just looking through the window. Not ready to enter. Vinyl records in paper sleeves, black circles holding music from before the Recalibration. The covers showed faces he didn't recognize. Names that had been erased.
JAZZ, one sleeve said. SOUL, said another.
Words that sounded like feelings instead of categories.
He found the warehouse district where bass thumped through walls at 4 AM. THOOM THOOM THOOM. Dark purple sound. The beat of a heartbeat against concrete, something fighting to be heard. He didn't investigate yet. Filed it away. Important somehow.
The city had layers. The daylight city was performance. Everyone playing roles, following schedules, being watched.
The 3 AM city was something else. Rawer. Truer. The city with its costume off.
Yaz was learning its secrets.
The city was learning nothing about him.
That was the point.
July was gray.
Not literally. The weather was summer, bright, the city baking below his window in waves of heat that made the air shimmer. But inside Yaz's head, everything had gone the color of nothing. The color of static. The color of the space between channels when the signal died.
The tutors came. He answered their questions. His answers were correct.
"Problem twelve."
"X equals seventeen."
"Correct."
Correct. Correct. Correct. Everything technically correct. A machine made of meat. A voice with nothing to say. He moved through the sessions like something automated. Input, output, repeat. The faces in front of him registered as shapes, voices as frequencies, questions as prompts requiring responses. All technically functioning. All technically dead.
Ms. Abdullah noticed first.
"You haven't touched the book I gave you."
"I read it."
"Reading isn't the same as touching." Her voice was gentle. Worried. The worry registered somewhere distant, like hearing a siren from blocks away. "You read it like homework. Where's the you in your reading?"
He didn't have an answer. The you had gone somewhere. He didn't know where. Didn't care enough to look.
Mr. Cohen's stories wandered more than usual that week, circling around points he never quite made, watching Yaz from under bushy white eyebrows like he was waiting for something to spark. Nothing sparked.
Dr. Okonkwo assigned extra problems about sound waves, trying to find the hook that had worked before. The hook didn't catch.
The music sessions happened. He sang what they wanted. The metrics were good. The tutor reported "optimal engagement." But there was no engagement. There was nothing. Just sound coming out of a throat attached to a body attached to a schedule attached to nothing.
July 17. 3 AM. His body woke like always.
He didn't move.
The service exit was waiting. The city was waiting. The noodle shop woman would yell at him if he came, the record shop window would glow, the bass would thump through warehouse walls.
He didn't move.
What was the point? Walk the city. Count the steps. Return. Repeat.
The cage was everywhere now. Inside him. Moving didn't help because he brought the cage with him.
He stared at the ceiling. 89 tiles. He'd counted them 247 times since moving in. Every crack. Every shadow. Every imperfection in the supposedly perfect surface.
89 tiles. 247 counts. 3:47 AM.
Numbers. Everything was numbers. Numbers that meant nothing. Numbers that were just how he kept himself small enough to survive.
Maybe he didn't want to survive anymore.
The thought arrived without drama. Just a fact. Like the tiles. Like the numbers.
Maybe he didn't want to.
He lay there until 6 AM. Jin arrived. Yaz didn't answer the door.
Jin called Caroline.
Caroline called Thorne.
Thorne sent a doctor.
The doctor said "exhaustion." Prescribed rest.
Yaz rested. Which meant: lay there. Counted. Existed.
Barely.
The tutors had been paused for a week. "Rest." "Recovery."
Ms. Abdullah was the first to return.
She didn't start with curriculum. She sat across from him and waited. Her hijab was gray today. He'd never seen her wear gray before.
"I heard you were unwell."
"I was tired."
"Tired." She repeated the word like it was a lie that didn't deserve the dignity of contradiction. Her hand reached into her bag. Not the regular one. The hidden one.
"I brought you something. Not from the syllabus. Not even from my hidden bag. From my own shelf."
She placed a small book on the table. Handwritten. Old. Someone's private collection, pages filled with different hands. Different voices. Passed from person to person, copied, preserved.
"Lyrics. From musicians who fought the Recalibration. Their songs were banned. But their words survived. Someone wrote them down." She stood. Moved toward the door. "I'll leave this with you. Read it or don't. But Yaz..." She paused. Her eyes held something fierce and tender. "Silence isn't rest. It's just quiet dying. These people refused to die quietly. Perhaps that's worth something."
She left.
Yaz didn't touch the book that day.
Or the next.
But he didn't throw it away either.
Two weeks later. The hidden space. 2 AM.
Yaz took the book to the only place without cameras. The only place that was his. He opened it.
The pages were filled with handwriting. Different hands. This was a collection. Something passed from person to person across years, decades, maybe longer.
Lyrics.
He read the first entry:
They tell me to harmonizeBut my voice knows its own keyThey tell me to synchronizeBut my feet know they're freeThey can silence my mouthThey can bury my soundBut the words in my chestKeep beating underground
— Anonymous, pre-Recalibration
Three times. He read it three times.
Something moved. Deep in the gray. A flicker. Small and stubborn, refusing to go out.
He kept reading.
Forty-seven entries.
(He counted. Of course he counted. But this time, the number felt less like a cage and more like a message. Less like a prison and more like a signal.)
Forty-seven voices. Forty-seven people who refused to be silent.
Some entries were polished. Song structures, verses and choruses, careful rhymes. These were the professionals. The artists who'd had time to craft.
Some were raw. Scattered lines, fragments, incomplete thoughts. These were the desperate ones. The people writing down what they could before the words were taken.
All of them were angry.
But it wasn't angry like screaming. It was angry like clarity. Like seeing the cage for what it was and refusing to accept that the cage was everything.
Yaz had been angry for years. He just hadn't known what to do with it.
These writers had found a way. They'd taken the anger and made it mean something.
Made it survive.
He closed the book.
Opened it again.
Read it again.
The gray was still there. But somewhere underneath, something else was flickering.
A question: What if I could do that?
September arrived. Something shifted.
He returned the book to Ms. Abdullah during their next session. She looked at him. Really looked.
"You read it."
"Yes."
"What did you think?"
Long pause. Yaz searched for words. Found them waiting.
"They were angry."
"And?"
"They made it into something."
"And?"
"I want to know how."
Ms. Abdullah smiled. First time he'd seen her smile without sadness underneath.
"That's the right question." She took the book back. "The answer isn't in books. The answer is in practice. In trying. In failing. In trying again." Pause. "Have you ever written anything, Yaz? Not performed. Written. Your words. Your anger."
"No."
"Perhaps you should."
She left.
The question stayed.
September 22. Eight months in the cage.
Yaz sat in the hidden space with his laptop. The only device without Thorne monitoring. (He'd bought it with his own money, registered under a false name, kept it hidden like a heartbeat.)
He was searching for something. Didn't know what.
The banned lyrics had opened a door. But he needed more. Needed to see what was on the other side.
Search: "pre-Recalibration music"
Mostly blocked. Redirects to approved content.
Search: "underground music history"
Some results. Documentaries flagged but not removed.
He found it.
Voices Before the Silence: Hip-Hop in the Pre-Recalibration Era
The same documentary he'd glimpsed on the plane. The handler's tablet. The sound that had made him turn his head through exhaustion.
He'd forgotten about it. Pushed it down. Filed it away without knowing why.
Now he clicked it.
Now he watched.
Two hours. He watched it in one sitting. The laptop's glow painted his face blue-white in the darkness.
It started with history. The origins. The Bronx. The block parties where DJs spun records and MCs talked over them. Young people with nothing creating something from nothing. Their clothes were different. Their hair was different. Everything about them was different from the approved footage in school documentaries. They looked alive in a way that made the present feel like taxidermy.
He watched them move. Watched them gather around speakers, around turntables, around microphones. Their bodies responded to beats that were technically illegal now. Some people nodded their heads. Some people danced. All of them were connected by something invisible. A frequency Yaz could almost feel through the screen.
Then he watched them battle.
Battle.
Two people. No instruments. No backing tracks. Just words and rhythm and whatever truth they could pull from their chests and aim at their opponent like ammunition.
The battles were violent without touching. Two voices circling each other. Finding weaknesses. Exploiting them. The crowd circled around them like witnesses to something ancient and necessary. Someone would win. Someone would lose. Everyone would remember.
The screen showed rappers he'd never heard of. Names that had been erased from history. Faces that had been forgotten by everyone except the people who loved them. They stood in front of cameras that looked old, primitive, the footage grainy and washed out. But their eyes were sharp. Their words were sharper.
They talked about growing up poor. About watching their neighborhoods crumble. About the anger that built up with nowhere to go. About fathers who disappeared and mothers who worked three jobs and streets that swallowed people whole.
Until they found the mic.
One of them said: "Rap was our weapon. We couldn't fight them with money. We couldn't fight them with connections. But we could fight them with words. And words? Words could go anywhere. Could reach anyone. Could say the things they didn't want said."
Yaz paused the documentary.
Rewound.
Watched that part again.
Words could go anywhere.
The phrase landed in his chest like something with teeth. Like something that wouldn't let go.
He thought about the orphanage. Forty-seven tiles on a ceiling no one else remembered.
He thought about the fence. Chain-link diamonds pressing into his skin while he watched other children go home with parents.
He thought about the Practice Room. Cameras in every corner. Thorne's voice through the speakers telling him to sing it again, sing it better, sing it like he meant it even when meaning had been scraped out of him.
He thought about the contract. The schedule. The apartment with its climate-controlled air and its optimized furniture and its walls that felt like the inside of a coffin made of glass.
Words could go anywhere.
Even out of cages.
He pressed play.
The documentary showed the Recalibration. The suppression. How hip-hop was deemed "harmonically inconsistent" and "socially destabilizing." How the artists were silenced, the records destroyed, the culture pushed underground.
But it survived.
The documentary ended with footage of underground rap battles. Recent. Hidden. Cameras shaking, sound fuzzy, clearly filmed in secret.
The underground still existed.
Somewhere in cities like Nova Valencia, people were still battling. Still using words as weapons. Still refusing to harmonize.
The screen went black.
Yaz sat in the hidden space, lit only by the laptop's glow.
The gray was gone.
Something else was there now.
Hunger.
4 AM. He opened a blank document.
Title: (nothing yet)
He stared at the cursor blinking. Patient. Waiting.
What did he want to say?
Everything. Nothing. He didn't know how to start.
The rappers in the documentary talked about their truth. Their lives. Their pain. They made the personal political, the specific universal.
What was Yaz's truth?
The orphanage. The ceiling tiles. The counting.
The Practice Room. The cameras. The contract.
The tour. The crowds. The emptiness.
The cage. The schedule. The nothing.
He started typing.
"My name is—"
Deleted.
"I used to be—"
Deleted.
"Forty-seven tiles on the ceiling—"
He stopped.
That was it. That was where it started. The number. The counting. The way he'd survived by making the world small enough to fit inside his head.
Forty-seven tiles on the ceiling—
What came next?
He didn't know. But for the first time in months, he wanted to find out.
The next morning, Dr. Park arrived at 8:59. Exact as always.
"Problem one. Solve for x."
Yaz looked at the problem. Solved it.
"Correct. Problem two."
Solved.
"Problem three."
Solved.
Dr. Park paused. His stylus hovered. For the first time in six months, he actually looked at Yaz. Not at the tablet. At him.
"You're different today."
"Am I?"
"Your solutions are faster. Less hesitation." Long pause. "Something has changed."
Yaz almost smiled. Almost.
"I found something."
"Found what?"
"I don't know yet. But I'm going to find out."
Dr. Park studied him. The first time he'd shown any interest in Yaz beyond mathematics. Something passed across his face. Not warmth. Recognition, maybe. The acknowledgment of something alive where there had been nothing.
"Good. Stagnation is death. Problem four."
Yaz solved problem four.
But his mind was elsewhere.
That night. The hidden space. The document still open.
Forty-seven tiles on the ceiling, counting every nightWaiting for someone to notice, waiting for the light—
He stopped. Read it back.
Terrible. Too simple. Too obvious.
But real.
He kept writing.
Seven years old, no one knew my nameThey called me Hidden Voice but I never chose the game—
Better. Still rough. Still not right.
But something was there. Something that felt like him.
Not the Hidden Voice. Not Thorne's creation. Not the product on the schedule.
Him.
He wrote for three hours. Forty lines. Most of them garbage.
But forty lines was forty more than yesterday.
Forty.
Not forty-seven yet.
He wasn't ready.
But he was getting closer.
September 24. Dawn. The window.
The city sprawled below, same city he'd walked for months. Counting steps. Mapping nothing. Escaping into nothing.
Now he saw it differently.
Somewhere down there, the underground existed. The battles. The words as weapons. The refusal to harmonize.
He didn't know how to find it yet.
But he would.
School started in January. Westbridge Academy. New faces. New cage.
But between now and then: four months.
Four months to learn. To write. To fail. To try again.
Forty lines in a document. Most of them terrible.
Four months until school.
One opportunity to become something else.
He wasn't going to waste it.
End of Chapter 2