The song finished itself on Wednesday night.
Yaz did not know what time it was. Late. The kind of late where the building stopped breathing, where even the pipes went quiet, where the only sounds were the ones you made yourself. He sat in the storage room with the yellow paper on his knee, and the last words came, and then there were no more words to come.
He had filled both sides of the paper now. His handwriting was worse on the back, cramped and uneven, the pencil pressing too hard in some places and too soft in others. But the words were all there. Every line. Every verse. Every piece of the shape he had been building since his birthday, since the fence, since the day he understood that time had a form and his life was passing through it whether he wanted it to or not.
He read it from the beginning.
Once I was seven years old, my mama told me
Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely
Once I was seven years old
The words moved through him like something physical. He could feel them in his throat, in his chest, in the places where feelings lived before they became anything else.
I only see my goals, I don't believe in failure
'Cause I know the smallest voices, they can make it major
He kept reading. Past the verses about eleven and twenty that he had added in the darkness. Past the father he had invented the way he had invented the mother. Past all the pieces of a life he had not lived but could imagine, could feel, could somehow make true through the act of writing it down.
Soon I'll be sixty years old, will I think the world is cold
Or will I have a lot of children who can warm me
Soon I'll be sixty years old
The last line. He stared at it. The words stared back.
Once I was seven years old
That was how it ended. The same as how it began. A circle. A return. Once I was seven years old, and then I lived a whole life, and at the end of it I was still that boy, still standing at the fence, still watching the world through the diamonds of chain-link, still hoping someone would see me.
He opened his mouth.
The first sound that came out was not quite a voice. It was breath with shape. Air that knew where it was going. He had never sung before. Not really. The humming in the bathroom had been noise, not music. This was different. This was the words becoming sound, the sound becoming something that existed outside of him, something that filled the storage room and pressed against the walls and rose toward the ceiling he could not see.
"Once I was seven years old, my mama told me..."
His voice cracked on mama. He kept going.
"Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely..."
The melody was not something he had learned. It was something he had always known. Somewhere in the deep place, in the warm place, in the part of him that the Maestro had spoken from, there was a song that had been waiting. Now it was coming out. Now it was real.
He sang the whole thing.
His voice was small. A child's voice, thin and high, breaking in places where the emotion was too big for the words. But the words carried it. The words held the voice the way a cup holds water, giving it shape, keeping it from spilling everywhere.
When he finished, his face was wet.
He had not noticed the tears starting. They were just there, running down his cheeks, dripping onto the yellow paper, leaving small dark spots where they landed. He touched one with his finger. The paper was soft where the tear had been. Soft and real.
He waited for the Maestro to speak.
The silence stretched. Long. Complete. The kind of silence that was not empty but full. Full of something that did not need words.
The Maestro was quiet.
The work spoke for itself.
Thursday brought a problem.
Yaz woke with the song still humming in his chest, the words circling through his mind the way they had circled for days. But now there was something else. A question he had not asked before, had not needed to ask, because the song had not existed yet.
How does an orphan share a song with the world?
He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling he could not see (forty-seven tiles, always forty-seven), and turned the question over. The song was complete. It lived on yellow paper in his pocket, folded and refolded until the creases were soft as cloth. It was his. It was real. It existed.
But no one had heard it.
No one except the walls of the storage room, which could not tell anyone. No one except the darkness, which did not have ears. The song might as well not exist if it lived only in his pocket, only in his voice, only in the space between his lungs and the air that carried the words away and let them die.
He thought about the families through the fence. They had phones. Little rectangles of glass that connected to the world, that could send words and sounds and images anywhere, to anyone, in less time than it took to blink. He did not have a phone. Children in orphanages did not have phones. They had nothing, except what they found in recycling bins and rescued from trash cans and built in secret rooms when no one was watching.
He thought about the television in the common room. It played things the world had made. Bright, empty things that meant nothing and felt like nothing. But someone had made them. Someone had sent them through the wires and waves and whatever else connected the screens to the source. How did that work? How did sound get from one place to another?
He did not know.
He was seven years old. He knew how to count ceiling tiles and collect pencil stubs and write words that were true. He did not know how to make the world hear him.
The bell rang. CLANG CLANG CLANG.
He got up. He dressed. He walked to breakfast. He ate porridge that had already skinned over. He went through the motions of a day that was like every other day, carrying the song in his pocket, carrying the question in his head.
How does an orphan share a song with the world?
The answer came in the afternoon.
Not the way Yaz expected. Not through the Maestro, not through a sudden insight, not through any of the ways answers had come before. It came through a door. Through a woman in an orange headwrap. Through a moment of terror that became something else.
Mrs. Okonkwo found him in the storage room.
He did not hear her coming. He was sitting against the mattresses, the yellow paper in his hands, singing softly to himself the way he had sung the night before. Not full voice. Half voice, maybe. Quarter voice. Just enough to hear the words, to feel the melody, to remind himself that the song was real.
The door opened.
Light fell into the room, bright and sudden, turning the darkness into something with edges. Mrs. Okonkwo stood in the doorway, her shape outlined by the fluorescent glow of the corridor behind her. Her bracelet caught the light. Clk. Just once. The sound of wood against wood.
Yaz froze.
His hands tightened on the paper. His voice died in his throat. His whole body went small and still, the way it always went when adults appeared without warning, when the safe space became unsafe, when the thing he was doing might be the wrong thing.
"Yassine."
Her voice was soft. Not angry. Not surprised. Just his name, spoken the way she always spoke it, like it was a small living thing she was being careful not to crush.
"What are you doing down here?"
He did not answer. He could not answer. The words were stuck somewhere between his stomach and his mouth, refusing to move.
She stepped into the room. The door swung shut behind her, but not all the way. A sliver of light remained. Enough to see. Enough to be seen.
"I've been looking for you," she said. "You missed afternoon lessons."
He had missed afternoon lessons. He had not meant to. Time had slipped away, the way it did in the storage room, the way it did when he was singing.
"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was small. A mouse voice. A voice that wanted to disappear.
Mrs. Okonkwo did not look angry. She looked... curious. Her eyes moved from his face to his hands, to the yellow paper he was holding like something precious, like something that might fly away if he let go.
"What is that?"
The question was simple. The answer was not.
"Nothing," he said. And then, because that was a lie, and because he was tired of lies, and because something in her face made him want to tell the truth: "Something. I made something."
She did not respond immediately. She stood there, looking at him, her eyes the same warm brown they had always been, her face holding something he could not read. The silence stretched. Not uncomfortable. Just waiting.
"Show me," she said finally.
Yaz's hands shook. The paper trembled. He could feel his heart in his throat, in his wrists, in the tips of his fingers that were holding the only thing he had ever made.
"It's... I wrote it," he said. "It's a song. Or something like a song. I don't know what to call it."
"Sing it for me."
Three words. Simple words. Words that should have been easy to answer.
But they were not easy. They were the hardest words anyone had ever said to him. Because singing the song for Mrs. Okonkwo meant letting her hear it. And letting her hear it meant she might not like it. Might think it was stupid, or wrong, or the ramblings of a child who thought too much and felt too much and did not know how to be normal.
She might look at him the way Tomás had looked when he said So?
She might confirm what he had always feared: that he was nothing, that his words were nothing, that the song was just noise made by a boy who wanted to matter but never would.
"I can't," he whispered.
"Why not?"
He did not have an answer. Or he had too many answers, and none of them would fit into words.
Mrs. Okonkwo did something unexpected. She sat down. Right there, on the dusty floor of the storage room, in her good clothes, in the dirt and the dimness. She sat across from him, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap, her eyes level with his.
"I have time," she said. "And I would like to hear it. Whatever it is."
The silence returned. But it was different now. Warmer. Less like a wall and more like a blanket.
Yaz looked at the paper. At the words he had written. At the shape of the song that had cost him everything and nothing, that had come from the deepest places inside him, that was true in a way nothing else in his life had ever been true.
He opened his mouth.
He closed his eyes.
He sang.
"Once I was seven years old, my mama told me..."
The voice that came out was not the mouse voice. It was something else. Something fuller, rounder, more real. The words knew where to go. The melody knew how to carry them. He did not have to think about what came next. The song had its own momentum now. It moved through him like water through a riverbed, finding its course, flowing where it needed to flow.
"Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely..."
He sang about the mama he did not have and the friends he had not made. He sang about the goals he could not see but believed in anyway. He sang about the smallest voices, the ones that could make it major, the ones that refused to be nothing even when the world said they were nothing.
"Soon I'll be sixty years old, will I think the world is cold..."
He sang about the old man on the bench. About the fear of becoming him. About the hope that there might be another way, that children might warm him, that the future did not have to be the cold thing he was afraid it would be.
"Once I was seven years old..."
The last note faded.
He opened his eyes.
Mrs. Okonkwo was crying.
Not loud crying. Not the hiccupping, gasping kind that the younger children did when they were overwhelmed. Quiet crying. The kind where tears just appear, running down your face, and you do not wipe them away because wiping them away would mean acknowledging them, and acknowledging them would mean stopping, and you do not want to stop.
Her eyes were wet. Her mouth was a line that wanted to tremble but was holding itself together through force of will.
"Where did you learn this?" she asked.
Her voice was different. Rougher. Like the tears had scraped against something on their way out.
"I didn't learn it," Yaz said. The truth was simple. The truth was all he had. "I felt it."
The silence that followed was very long.
Mrs. Okonkwo reached up and wiped her face with the back of her hand. The gesture was quick, almost angry, like she was annoyed at herself for crying. Her bracelet clicked. Clk clk.
"We say in my language," she said slowly, "'Nwata kwụụ aka ya, o soro okenye rie nri.' If a child washes his hands, he can eat with elders."
She looked at him. Really looked, the way she had looked at him in the common room, the way she had looked at him when he asked where he came from.
"You have washed your hands, Yassine. Now... we eat."
He did not understand what she meant. But something in her voice made him think he was about to find out.
Friday was a phone call.
Yaz did not hear it. He was in lessons when it happened, sitting at his desk, pretending to pay attention to numbers and words that meant nothing compared to the numbers and words in his pocket. But Mrs. Okonkwo told him about it later, in the quiet hour before dinner, when she found him at his usual spot by the window.
"I called a friend," she said. "Someone I knew before I came here. Before..."
She did not finish the sentence. Yaz did not need her to. He knew about before. Everyone in the orphanage had a before, even the adults. Before was the time when things were different. Before was the life that had led to this life. Before was the country, the family, the son she had lost. He did not know the details. He knew enough.
"His name is Dayo. He works in media. Recording. Production. The things that make sounds travel from one place to another."
Yaz's heart did something. A flutter. A lurch. The feeling of a door opening onto a room he had never entered.
"I played him the recording I made on my phone," Mrs. Okonkwo continued. "Of you. Singing. In the storage room."
She had recorded him. He had not known she was recording. The thought should have felt like a violation, like she had taken something without asking. But it did not. It felt like she had given something. Like she had taken the song and put it somewhere safe, somewhere it could not be lost or forgotten or destroyed.
"What did he say?"
Mrs. Okonkwo's face did something complicated. A smile that was not quite a smile. A sadness that was not quite sadness.
"He said he wants to hear more. He said he wants to record it properly. He said..." She paused. Her eyes moved to the window, to the sky beyond, to something Yaz could not see. "He said he has worked in music for thirty years, and he has never heard anything like this."
The words landed in Yaz's chest. Heavy. Light. Both at once.
Never heard anything like this.
He did not know if that was good or bad. He did not know what it meant for a grown-up who had heard thirty years of music to say that a seven-year-old's song was different from all of it.
"He's coming tomorrow," Mrs. Okonkwo said. "To record. If you want to."
If he wanted to.
The choice sat in front of him like a door. He could say no. He could keep the song in his pocket, keep it safe, keep it his. No one would ever hear it except Mrs. Okonkwo and the walls of the storage room. It would stay small. It would stay private. It would stay protected from the world and whatever the world might do to it.
Or he could say yes. He could let the song go. He could send it out into the world and see what happened, even though what happened might be nothing, might be worse than nothing, might be the confirmation of everything he feared.
"Yes," he said. "I want to."
The word was small. But it was enough.
Saturday was the recording.
Dayo arrived at two o'clock. He was tall, dark-skinned like Mrs. Okonkwo, with gray in his beard and lines around his eyes that suggested he had smiled a lot and cried a lot and maybe done both at the same time. He carried two cases: one large, one small. The large one held equipment Yaz did not recognize. The small one held wires and adapters and things that connected to other things.
They set up in the storage room.
It felt strange, having adults in the space that had been his secret. Dayo moved the boxes, shifted the mattresses, created a clear area near the corner where the light from the single bulb fell strongest. He set up a microphone on a small stand. It was black and silver, shaped like a cylinder, pointed at the spot where Yaz would stand.
"Just sing," Dayo said. His voice was deep, calm, the voice of someone who had done this a thousand times. "Pretend I'm not here. Pretend the microphone isn't here. Just sing it the way you sang it for her."
He pointed at Mrs. Okonkwo, who stood near the door, her hands clasped in front of her, her bracelet silent.
Yaz looked at the microphone. At Dayo. At Mrs. Okonkwo. At the yellow paper in his hands, creased and soft, holding the words that were about to become something else.
His hands were shaking.
Mrs. Okonkwo stepped forward. She knelt beside him, the way she had knelt in the storage room the day before. Her hand found his. Warm. Solid. Real.
"You can do this," she said. Quietly, just for him.
Then she let go.
She stepped back. She stood by the door. Dayo pressed something on his equipment, and a small red light appeared.
"Whenever you're ready," Dayo said.
Yaz closed his eyes.
He thought about the fence. About the families walking past, the children on shoulders, the ice cream wiped from small fingers. He thought about the old man on the bench, feeding pigeons, waiting for nothing. He thought about his birthday, when no one remembered. About the question: What will they remember about you?
He thought about the mama he did not have, and the advice she never gave, and the words he had written anyway because the wish was true even if the mother was not.
He opened his mouth.
He sang.
The storage room disappeared. The microphone disappeared. Dayo and Mrs. Okonkwo and the boxes and the mattresses and the flickering bulb, all of it faded, and there was only the song. Only the words. Only the feeling that had lived inside him for seven years, the loneliness and the wanting and the fear and the hope, all of it pouring out in a voice that was small and thin and somehow also larger than the room could hold.
Once I was seven years old, my mama told me...
Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely...
The melody came from somewhere he did not understand. It rose and fell like breathing, like heartbeats, like the rhythm of time itself. He did not have to think about it. The song knew where to go. He was just the vessel. He was just the voice.
I only see my goals, I don't believe in failure...
'Cause I know the smallest voices, they can make it major...
He sang through the chorus. Through the verses about eleven and twenty. Through the father who got sixty-one and the hope of children who would visit once or twice a month. Through all of it, every word, every line, every piece of the shape he had built from nothing.
Soon I'll be sixty years old, will I think the world is cold...
Or will I have a lot of children who can warm me...
Soon I'll be sixty years old...
The last note hung in the air. Then it faded. Then there was silence.
Yaz opened his eyes.
Dayo was staring at him. His mouth was open. The red light on the equipment was still glowing.
"Again?" he asked.
The word was automatic. The question engineers asked after every take. Standard procedure. Do another one, in case there were mistakes, in case the levels were wrong, in case the artist wanted to try something different.
But Yaz shook his head.
"No," he said. "That's it."
He knew, somehow, that he could not sing it better. He could not sing it differently. The song had come out the way it needed to come out, once, complete, the way a river only flows downstream, the way time only moves forward.
Dayo did not argue. He just nodded. Then he looked at Mrs. Okonkwo. Then he looked back at Yaz.
"I've worked in this industry for thirty years," he said slowly. "I have recorded hundreds of artists. Thousands of songs. I have heard voices that trained for decades. Voices that cost millions to produce."
He paused. The silence was heavy.
"I have never heard anything like that."
Saturday night was quiet.
Dayo left with his cases, with the recording saved on a device smaller than Yaz's hand. He said he would work on it. Upload it. Send it into the world through the wires and waves and whatever else carried sounds from one place to another.
Yaz did not know what that meant. He only knew that the song was gone now. Out of his hands. In the hands of a man with gray in his beard and thirty years of experience and equipment that could make a child's voice travel farther than a child's voice had any right to travel.
He lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling he could not see, and waited for the Maestro to speak.
The silence stretched.
You did it.
The voice, when it came, was soft. Different from before. Less like a teacher and more like something else. A friend, maybe. A part of himself that he was only beginning to understand.
You made something. You let it go. Whatever happens next, you did that.
Yaz nodded in the darkness. Not that the Maestro could see him nod. Not that nodding meant anything when you were lying in bed in a dormitory full of sleeping children.
But it felt right. The gesture of agreement. The acknowledgment that something had changed.
He had made something. He had let it go.
Now he had to wait.
Sunday was waiting.
The day passed like every other day. Breakfast, quiet hour, outdoor hour, lunch. Yaz stood at the fence and watched the old man feed his pigeons and wondered if anything was different yet. Wondered if anyone, anywhere in the world, had heard his voice coming out of their phones or screens or whatever devices people used to listen to things.
Probably not. Probably the song was still sitting on Dayo's equipment, or traveling slowly through the wires, or waiting in some queue of things that would eventually be released. Probably nothing had changed. Probably nothing would change.
He went to bed that night expecting nothing.
Monday arrived with Mrs. Okonkwo's face.
Yaz first in the cafeteria at breakfast. He was eating his porridge, breaking the gray skin, not tasting anything, when she appeared beside his table. Her bracelet was silent. Her hands were clasped together, tight, the knuckles slightly pale.
Her face was strange.
Not sad. Not happy. Something else. Something Yaz did not have a word for.
"Yassine," she said. "Come with me."
He put down his spoon. He followed her out of the cafeteria, through the hallways, past the classrooms and the common room and the administrative offices. She did not explain where they were going. She just walked, and he walked behind her, and the building was quiet around them because it was early, because most of the children were still eating, because something was happening that the building did not yet understand.
She took him to a small room near Mr. Henriksen's office. A room with a desk, a chair, a screen on the wall. The screen was on. Numbers were moving across it. Words were scrolling past, too fast to read.
"Look," Mrs. Okonkwo said.
Yaz looked.
The number at the top of the screen was large. Very large. Larger than any number he had ever seen outside of mathematics lessons.
48,237,891
Forty-eight million. Two hundred thirty-seven thousand. Eight hundred ninety-one.
And as he watched, the number changed. 48,237,943. Then 48,238,017. Then 48,238,152. Going up. Constantly. Like the second hand on a clock, but faster, measuring something that was growing instead of something that was passing.
"That's how many people have heard your song," Mrs. Okonkwo said. Her voice was quiet. Almost a whisper. "Since last night."
Forty-eight million people.
Yaz did not understand the number. It was too big. It was like being told that the sun was ninety-three million miles away, or that the ocean contained three hundred quintillion gallons of water. Numbers that were real but also meaningless, too vast to hold in a human mind.
But then he looked at the words scrolling beneath the number. Comments, Mrs. Okonkwo explained. From people who had heard the song. From all over the world. From the Europe-America bloc and the Africa bloc and the Asia-Pacific bloc. From cities he had never heard of and countries he could not find on a map.
He's like me.
This is what I feel but can't say.
I called my mother. I hadn't talked to her in three years. I called her and I cried.
Where did this child come from? Where did he learn to feel like this?
The smallest voices can make it major. My God. My God.
The comments kept coming. Too fast to read all of them. But Yaz read enough. He read the words of people he would never meet, people who had heard his voice coming out of their devices, people whose lives had been interrupted by a song written on yellow paper by a boy in an orphanage.
He's like me.
That one stuck. That one stayed.
Someone out there, somewhere in the forty-eight million, had heard the song and thought: he's like me. Someone had felt the loneliness and the wanting and the fear and the hope. Someone had recognized themselves in the words that had come from the deepest places inside Yaz.
He was not alone.
For the first time in seven years, in two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days, in all the porridge and the tiles and the fence and the gray, he was not alone.
Someone had heard him.
The rest of Monday was a blur.
People came and went. Mr. Henriksen appeared, his gray face less gray than usual, looking at Yaz like he was seeing him for the first time. Ms. Varga came too, standing in the corner of the room, her tired eyes less tired, her mouth moving without words. Other caretakers. Other adults. People whose names Yaz did not know, appearing and disappearing, all of them looking at the screen, at the numbers, at the boy who had made the numbers happen.
The number kept climbing.
50,000,000.
Fifty million. By noon. Fifty million people who had heard the song that started in a storage room, that lived on yellow paper, that was true in a way nothing AI-generated had ever been true.
Someone called it a cultural event. Yaz did not know what that meant. He only knew that the world was paying attention, that his voice had traveled farther than he had ever imagined a voice could travel, that the question he had asked himself, what will they remember about you, had an answer now.
They would remember this.
Tuesday evening, Yaz returned to the window.
The same window he had looked through since he was small. The east-facing window in Dormitory A, third from the north corner. The window that caught the morning light, that turned dust into gold, that showed the yard and the fence and the street beyond.
The sun was setting. Orange light spilled through the glass, pooling on the floor, turning everything the color of warmth.
He pressed his forehead to the window. The glass was warm now. Not cold, like it had been in March, when he had whispered happy birthday to himself and no one had answered.
Everything looked the same. The fence. The street. The bench where the old man would sit tomorrow, feeding pigeons, waiting for nothing. The buildings beyond, holding lives he could not see.
But everything was different.
Now you know.
The Maestro. Quiet. Patient. The voice that had been with him since the beginning, that had asked the questions, that had guided him toward the answers.
Now you know what it means to make something. To let it go. To have it heard.
Yaz did not respond. He did not need to. The knowing was enough.
You asked what they would remember about you. Now you know.
They will remember this. They will remember the boy who sang about time and loneliness and hope. They will remember the smallest voice that made it major.
You are not no one anymore, Yassine. You never were. But now the world knows it too.
The light shifted. The sun sank lower. The orange turned to pink, the pink to purple, the purple to the particular blue of evening settling in.
Yaz stood at the window and watched the world that had finally seen him.
He was seven years old.
And now, the world knew it too.