Song to listen to for this chapter:
"Malagueña," composed by Lecuona/Tárrega
____________________________________________________
The world changed on a Tuesday.
Or maybe the world had already changed, and Yaz was only noticing it now, the way you notice a bruise days after the fall. The cafeteria was louder than usual. Not the normal loud of children eating and dropping spoons and crying over nothing. A different loud. An electric loud. The sound of people pretending not to talk about something while talking about nothing else.
He sat in his usual spot. Third from the end, near the wall. The porridge had skinned over. He broke the skin with his spoon and did not eat what was underneath.
Across the room, two caretakers huddled near the coffee machine. Their voices were pitched low, but Yaz had learned to read mouths the way other children read books. The boy. The song. Fifty million. Their eyes kept sliding toward him and sliding away, like water off something it could not grip.
Fifty million.
The number meant nothing. It was too large to hold, too vast to fit inside the cafeteria or the orphanage or the city or even his head. Fifty million was not a number. It was a weather system. It was a flood.
"They're looking at you."
Suki sat down beside him. She did not look at him when she said it. She looked at the wall, at the spot where the paint was peeling in a shape that might have been a bird.
"I know."
"Everyone is looking at you."
"I know."
She was quiet for a moment. Her spoon moved through her porridge in small circles, not eating, just stirring. The motion was familiar. Yaz had watched her do it a hundred times. But something was different now. The circles were tighter. Faster.
"What does it feel like?" she asked.
Yaz thought about the question. What did it feel like? The song was out there, somewhere, traveling through wires and waves and the invisible things that connected screens to screens. Fifty million people had pressed play. Fifty million strangers had heard his voice singing words he had written on yellow paper in a storage room that smelled like dust and machine oil.
"Strange," he said. "Like being in two places at once. Here and... everywhere else."
Suki nodded. She understood strange. She understood being in two places, or no places, or the places in between.
"Are you scared?"
He considered lying. Lying was easier sometimes, smoother, the way a stone skips across water instead of sinking. But Suki would know. Suki always knew.
"A little," he admitted. "I don't know what happens next."
"Neither does anyone."
It should not have been comforting. It was.
The meetings started the following morning.
Yaz was pulled from lessons at 9:47. He knew the time because he had been counting the minutes until outdoor hour (one hundred and thirteen) and the interruption made him lose his place. A woman he did not recognize appeared at the classroom door. Gray suit, gray hair, gray expression. She spoke to Ms. Reyes in a voice too low to hear, and then Ms. Reyes looked at him, and then everyone looked at him, and the looking felt like hands pressing against his skin from all directions at once.
"Yassine. Please come with me."
He stood. His chair scraped against the floor. Skreee. A small sound that seemed very large in the sudden silence. Twenty-three pairs of eyes watched him walk to the door. He did not count them. He already knew the number.
The hallway was empty. The gray woman walked quickly, her heels clicking against the linoleum. Tk tk tk tk. A rhythm without music. Yaz followed two steps behind, his shorter legs working harder to keep pace. He did not ask where they were going. Asking was a kind of hoping, and hoping felt dangerous now.
They stopped outside Mr. Henriksen's office.
The gray woman knocked once, opened the door without waiting for an answer, and gestured for Yaz to enter. The gesture was not unkind. It was not kind either. It was the gesture of someone who moved children from one place to another the way you moved chairs or boxes or anything else that needed to be somewhere it was not.
Yaz entered.
Mr. Henriksen sat behind his desk, the same desk where files lived and died, where children were processed and sorted and eventually forgotten. But he was not alone. Two other people occupied the chairs across from him. A woman Yaz recognized. A man he did not.
Mrs. Okonkwo turned when the door opened. Her face did something complicated. Relief and worry and hope and fear, all at once, like weather changing faster than clouds could keep up. Her bracelet clicked against the arm of her chair. Clk. Just once.
"Yassine," she said. "Come. Sit."
There was an empty chair beside her. Small, wooden, the kind that creaked when you shifted your weight. Yaz sat. The chair creaked. He tried not to shift.
The man across the desk was watching him.
He was tall. Yaz could tell even though the man was sitting, could tell by the length of his legs and the way his shoulders seemed to press against the boundaries of the chair, as if the furniture had been built for smaller people. His skin was medium brown, well-cared-for, the skin of someone who had time and money to care for things. His hair was silver-gray, cropped close to his skull in a way that suggested precision. His eyes were hazel-green. Warm, when he wanted them to be. Calculating beneath.
He wore a thin gold watch on his left wrist. Antique. The kind that meant something had been inherited, that there was a past with objects in it, a family that passed things down instead of leaving children in places where strangers would find them.
"Yassine," the man said. "I've been looking forward to meeting you."
His voice was deep. Smooth. The kind of voice that came from training, from practice, from knowing exactly how words should sound before they left your mouth. Every syllable was considered. Every pause was placed.
"I'm Elias Thorne. A friend of Dayo's."
Dayo. The name was familiar. The man with the recording equipment, the one who had captured the song, who had made it possible for fifty million people to hear what Yaz had made in the storage room. Dayo had cried when Yaz sang. This man did not look like someone who cried.
"Hello," Yaz said.
It was not enough. He knew it was not enough. But it was all he had.
Thorne smiled. The smile reached his eyes, or seemed to. "Hello indeed. Do you know why I'm here, Yassine?"
Yaz shook his head.
"I'm here because I heard your song. Your '7 Years.' And I think..." Thorne paused. The pause was perfectly timed, the kind of pause that made you lean forward without meaning to. "I think you might be the most remarkable thing I've encountered in thirty years of working with music."
The words should have felt good. They were shaped like good words, arranged like compliments, delivered with the warmth of genuine admiration. But something in them did not sit right. Something in the way Thorne said thing instead of person. Something in the way his eyes moved, calculating, measuring, as if Yaz were a problem to be solved rather than a boy to be known.
Mrs. Okonkwo's hand found Yaz's knee under the table. A small pressure. A reminder that she was there.
"Mr. Thorne is a music producer," she said. "He helps artists. Like Dayo."
"I do more than help," Thorne said. His smile did not waver. "I protect. I cultivate. I take extraordinary talent and give it the space to grow without being crushed by a world that doesn't know how to handle extraordinary things."
Yaz looked at him. At the watch. At the suit that probably cost more than everything in the orphanage combined. At the certainty in his posture, the way he sat like someone who was used to being listened to and agreed with.
"What does that mean?" Yaz asked. "For me?"
Thorne's smile widened. Approval. As if Yaz had passed a test he did not know he was taking.
"It means, Yassine, that the world isn't ready for you yet. Your song is everywhere. Fifty million plays and counting. But if people knew who you were, where you were, what you were..." He shook his head slowly. "They would tear you apart. Not out of malice. Out of hunger. The world is starving for something real, something true. You've given them a taste. Now they want more. They always want more."
The room was very quiet. Yaz could hear the clock on the wall. Tik. Tik. Tik. He could hear Mrs. Okonkwo breathing, shallow and quick. He could hear his own heart, which had started doing something strange, beating harder than the moment seemed to require.
"What I'm proposing," Thorne continued, "is protection. A contract. You stay here, at the Institut, where you're safe and hidden. I provide training. Real training. Instruments, teachers, everything you need to develop your gift. And when you're ready, when we're both ready, we reveal you to the world. Not as a curiosity. As an artist. Fully formed. Unbreakable."
Yaz 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 the question the Maestro had asked him: What will they remember about you?
"How long?" he asked.
Thorne's eyebrows rose slightly. A flicker of something. Surprise, maybe. Or recalculation.
"How long until I'm ready?"
"That depends on you, Yassine. On how quickly you learn. How deeply you grow." Thorne leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hazel-green eyes fixed on Yaz's face. "But I'm thinking years, not months. This isn't a sprint. It's a building. We're building something extraordinary."
Years.
The word settled in Yaz's stomach like a stone. Years of staying here. Years of being hidden. Years of the same forty-seven tiles and eighty-three steps and porridge that skinned over before you could eat it.
But also: years of training. Years of learning. Years of becoming something more than a boy who wrote words on yellow paper and hoped someone would listen.
"What do you think, Yassine?" Mrs. Okonkwo's voice was soft. Careful. "This is your choice. Whatever you decide, I'll support you."
He looked at her. At the tiredness in her eyes that never quite went away. At the bracelet on her wrist, the wooden beads from her mother, from a life before this one. She had brought him to Dayo. She had opened the door. And now she was here, sitting beside him, offering to let him choose.
This is what you asked for, the Maestro said. Warm. Present. Encouraging. Someone sees you now. Someone is offering to invest in you. In what you can become.
But what about the fence? Yaz thought. What about leaving?
The fence will still be there, the Maestro replied. The question is whether you'll be ready to cross it when the time comes.
Yaz looked at Thorne. At the gold watch ticking away seconds that were also years, also opportunities, also the shape of a future he could not quite see.
"Okay," he said.
The word was small. It was almost nothing. But it was enough.
The contract was three pages long.
Yaz could not read most of it. The words were too big, too legal, too adult. Exclusive representation. Intellectual property. Non-disclosure. They floated past his eyes like clouds he could not catch. But Mrs. Okonkwo read it. Slowly. Her finger tracing each line, her lips moving without sound.
"It says you'll provide training," she said to Thorne. "Teachers. Instruments. Resources."
"Everything he needs."
"And the orphanage? He stays here?"
"For now. Stability is crucial. Disruption could harm his development."
Disruption. Another word that meant more than it said. Yaz thought about adoption. About families that came to look at children, to choose them, to take them away to lives that had rooms and dinners and names that meant something. Would families still come for him? Would he be allowed to go if they did?
He did not ask. The answer felt like something he did not want to know.
"What about the song?" Mrs. Okonkwo asked. "The money it makes?"
Thorne's smile flickered. Just for a moment. A shadow passing across the sun.
"All revenue is held in trust until Yassine reaches adulthood. I take a percentage for management, as is standard. The rest accumulates. It will be waiting for him when he's ready."
Waiting. Everything was waiting. The money. The reveal. The world. Yaz was seven years old, and his entire life had become a waiting room.
But waiting rooms led somewhere. That was the point of them. You waited, and then a door opened, and you went through to whatever was on the other side.
He picked up the pen Thorne offered. It was heavy. Silver. The kind of pen that cost money and meant business. His fingers wrapped around it awkwardly, still learning the shapes that writing required.
"Here," Thorne said, pointing to a line at the bottom of the last page. "And here." He pressed his thumb against an ink pad, then gestured for Yaz to do the same. "Your thumbprint, as your signature."
The ink was cold. Blue-black. It stained the pad of Yaz's thumb, settled into the whorls and ridges that made his fingerprint unique, that made him him. He pressed it against the paper. The print appeared. Small. Detailed. A map of himself, captured and contractual.
"Excellent," Thorne said. He gathered the pages, tapped them against the desk to align them, slid them into a leather folder. "Welcome to the Thorne Audio Collective, Yassine. We're going to make beautiful things together."
He stood. He shook Mrs. Okonkwo's hand, then bent slightly to shake Yaz's. His grip was firm but not crushing, the grip of someone who had learned exactly how much pressure to apply.
"I'll be in touch about the training schedule. We start next week."
And then he was gone. The door closed behind him. The room felt smaller somehow, as if he had taken up more space than his body accounted for.
Mrs. Okonkwo let out a breath. Long. Slow. The breath of someone who had been holding something and could finally let it go.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
Yaz looked at his thumb. The ink was still there, blue-black against his olive-brown skin. A mark. A promise. A binding.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I feel like something happened. But I don't know what yet."
She nodded. Her hand found his shoulder, squeezed gently.
"That's usually how it is," she said. "With the things that matter."
The storage room was gone.
Not gone, exactly. It was still there, in the basement, at the end of the dim corridor. But it was not the same. Yaz knew this the moment he pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The flickering bulb had been replaced. Bright, steady light filled the space now, illuminating corners that had lived in shadow for as long as Yaz had known them. The stacked mattresses were gone. The broken chairs were gone. The boxes of old records and forgotten things, the dust that had settled on every surface like a gray blanket, the smell of mold and machine oil and time... all gone.
In their place: acoustic panels covering the walls. Gray, professional, the color of things that meant business. A proper chair, padded, adjustable. A music stand, black metal, waiting for sheets that did not yet exist. Instrument cases lined one wall. Black rectangles of possibility, closed and mysterious.
And in the corner, where the broken radio had sat for years, waiting for batteries that no one would give it: nothing. Empty space. The radio was gone too.
"Your studio," Thorne had called it. Your studio. As if ownership could be transferred through renovation, as if replacing the old things with new things made the space his instead of just different.
Yaz walked to the corner where the radio had been. He crouched down. Touched the floor where it had sat. The concrete was clean now, swept, free of the dust that had coated everything for as long as he could remember.
He had meant to do something with that radio. He did not know what. But it had felt important, the way broken things sometimes felt important, the way potential felt important even when you could not name what it was potential for.
Now it was gone. Someone had decided he did not need it. Someone had decided a lot of things, apparently.
It's just a room, the Maestro said. What you made here, what you created, that came from inside you. Not from the dust. Not from the darkness. Not from a broken radio. From you.
But I liked the dust, Yaz thought. I liked that it was mine. That no one else came here.
Things change, the Maestro replied. Rooms change. The question is whether you change with them, or whether you let them change you.
Yaz stood up. His knees ached from crouching, a small pain that reminded him he had a body, that the body was real even when everything else felt like a dream.
He walked to the instrument cases. Ran his fingers along the edges. They were cool and smooth, the texture of expensive things, of things that had been chosen and purchased and transported here specifically for him.
One case was smaller than the others. Differently shaped. He unlatched it.
A guitar.
It lay in its velvet bed like something sleeping. Wood the color of honey, curves that caught the new bright light, strings that stretched from bridge to headstock in perfect parallel lines. It was beautiful. More beautiful than anything Yaz had ever been given. More beautiful than anything he had ever been allowed to touch.
He lifted it out carefully. The weight surprised him. Heavier than he expected, solid, present. His left hand found the neck, fingers curling around the wood. His right hand hovered over the strings.
He had never held a guitar before. Had never held any instrument, really, except the broken radio and that did not count because it did not make sound, because it was waiting for something that never came. But this... this was different. This was alive in a way the radio had never been alive. This was potential that was not broken, not waiting, not silent.
He touched a string.
The sound that emerged was small and bright, a single note that hung in the air for a moment before fading. Not music, exactly. Just a beginning. Just a first word in a language he did not yet speak.
But he would learn. That was the point. That was why the room had changed, why the dust was gone, why a man in an expensive suit had come to the orphanage and offered him a contract and a future shaped like years he could not see.
He would learn to speak this language. And then, maybe, he would be able to say things he did not yet have words for.
He put the guitar back in its case. Closed the latches. Looked around the room one more time.
It was not his storage room anymore. It was not the place where he had hidden and created and whispered words to himself in the dark. It was something else now. Something new.
A cage, maybe.
Or a chrysalis.
He did not yet know which.
Javier Ruiz arrived on the first day of summer.
Yaz knew it was summer because the light through the dormitory window had changed. Warmer. Yellower. The kind of light that meant the sun was high and the days were long and somewhere, beyond the fence and the street and the buildings, people were swimming in pools and eating ice cream and doing all the things that summer meant for people who were not waiting inside gray walls for their lives to begin.
Javier was nothing like Thorne.
Where Thorne was silver and smooth and precise, Javier was brown and warm and loose. His hair curled past his ears, dark with threads of gray, uncombed in a way that suggested he did not care about combing or perhaps cared deeply and wanted you to think he did not. His beard was short, neat at the edges but wild in the middle, salt-and-pepper chaos contained by discipline. His hands were large, callused, the hands of someone who had spent decades pressing strings against frets, who had earned his skill through repetition rather than inheritance.
"So," Javier said, settling into the chair across from Yaz in the Practice Room. "You are the one. The seven-year-old who made the world cry."
His accent was Spanish. Not Spanish like a textbook, but Spanish like a song, the words rising and falling in rhythms that made everything sound more interesting than it probably was.
Yaz did not know what to say. Was it a compliment? A question? A challenge?
"I wrote a song," he said finally. "I didn't mean to make anyone cry."
Javier laughed. The sound was big and warm, filling the Practice Room the way the new lights could not, making the space feel almost like the old storage room had felt, like somewhere you might want to stay.
"That is the best kind of cry," Javier said. "The accidental cry. The surprised cry. You were not trying to manipulate, you were just being true, and the truth made people feel things they did not expect to feel." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "That is very rare, pequeño. Very rare and very valuable. Do not let anyone teach you to do it on purpose. On purpose ruins everything."
Pequeño. Little one. The same word Elena Vasquez would use, years later, in a different lesson, about a different instrument. But Yaz did not know that yet. He only knew that the word felt good in Javier's mouth, felt like affection rather than diminishment.
"Mr. Thorne says you're going to teach me guitar."
Javier's expression flickered. Just slightly. A small tightening around his eyes that was there and then gone.
"Mr. Thorne says many things. Some of them are even true." He reached for the guitar case beside his chair, unlatched it with practiced ease. "But yes. I am here to teach you guitar. Or rather, I am here to help you discover what you already know but have not yet found."
He lifted his own guitar from its case. Larger than the one in Yaz's studio, older, more worn. The wood was darker, marked by years of use, nicks and scratches that told stories Yaz could not read. Javier held it like a friend, like something he had known for so long it was no longer separate from himself.
"The guitar," he said, "she is an extension of the heart. When you play, you are not making sound. You are letting your soul breathe through wood and string."
He strummed once. A chord. Full and bright and somehow sad at the same time, the way a sunset was bright and sad, the way endings and beginnings could be the same thing.
"Do you know what that was?"
Yaz shook his head.
"That was an E minor. The saddest chord in the world. Or the most hopeful, depending on what comes after." Javier smiled. "Music is like that. Nothing means anything by itself. Everything depends on context. On what comes before and what comes after. On who is listening and how they feel when they listen."
He set his guitar aside and gestured toward the case by the wall. "Now. Let us see if your friend will speak to you."
Yaz retrieved his guitar. Held it the way he had held it before, left hand on the neck, right hand hovering. The weight was still surprising, still present, still asking something of him he did not know how to give.
"First position," Javier said. He stood, moved behind Yaz, adjusted his grip with gentle hands. "Here. Yes. Elbow out. Wrist straight. The neck should rest in the V between thumb and palm, not grip. You are holding a partner, not strangling a suspect."
Yaz adjusted. The position felt awkward, unnatural, like trying to learn a new way of standing.
"Now. The right hand. Your fingers will learn many patterns, many techniques. But for now, just... touch. Feel the strings. Learn where they are, how they respond. The guitar will teach you, if you let her."
Yaz touched the strings. First one, then another. Small sounds, bright and separate, notes that did not yet know how to be music.
"Good," Javier said. "Very good. You are not afraid of her. That is important. Some students are afraid of the instrument. They think it will judge them, reveal them, show them something about themselves they do not want to see. But you..." He paused. Considered. "You have already been seen, haven't you? By the world. By fifty million strangers who heard your voice."
Yaz's fingers stilled on the strings.
"The hardest part is over," Javier continued. "The being seen. The being known. Now we just have to teach your hands what your heart already understands."
He returned to his seat, picked up his own guitar. "I am going to play something. You are going to listen. Not to learn it, not yet. Just to hear it. To let it inside you. Can you do that?"
Yaz nodded.
Javier began to play.
The piece was called "Malagueña," though Yaz did not learn that until later. What he knew, in the moment, was that the music was warm and fast and alive. It was sunshine on stone. It was dancing in kitchens. It was something he had never heard and somehow had always known, as if the melody had been waiting inside him for years and Javier was just finding the door.
His fingers twitched. They wanted to move. To join. To be part of whatever magic was happening in the space between Javier's hands and his guitar.
When the piece ended, the silence felt loud.
"That," Javier said quietly, "is where we are going. Not today. Not tomorrow. But eventually. If you trust the guitar. If you trust yourself."
Yaz looked down at the instrument in his lap. The honey-colored wood. The parallel strings. The possibility.
"I want to learn," he said. "I want to play like that."
Javier smiled. The smile crinkled the corners of his eyes, made him look older and younger at the same time.
"Then let's begin."
The days that followed were made of music.
Yaz woke before the bell now. Not because his body surfaced from sleep too early, but because the waiting was unbearable. The waiting for the time to pass until lessons, until he could go down to the Practice Room and hold the guitar and learn another chord, another pattern, another small piece of the language that was becoming his.
Javier came three times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The days in between felt stretched, endless, like the spaces between notes in a slow song. Yaz practiced during those spaces. Hours and hours, until his fingers ached, until the tips grew hard and callused, until the frets pressed marks into his skin that stayed even when he stopped playing.
"You're obsessed," Suki said one evening, finding him in the Practice Room after dinner. "You missed outdoor hour again."
She was right. He had not noticed the bell, had not heard the other children filing out to the yard, had not thought about the fence or the families or any of the things that had consumed him for months before the contract, before the guitar, before this new hunger that felt like the old hunger but had a name now, had a shape.
"I'm learning," he said. It was not an excuse. It was the truth.
Suki sat down against the wall. Cross-legged, small, her dark eyes watching him in that way she had, the way that saw everything and judged nothing.
"Play me something."
Yaz's fingers hesitated. He had not played for anyone except Javier. The Practice Room was private, the music was private, the stumbling and struggling and slow progress was private. Opening it to someone else felt like opening a door that should stay closed.
But Suki was not someone else. Suki was the girl who counted cracks in the ceiling. Suki was the one who understood without needing to be told.
He played an E minor chord. The saddest chord in the world. Then a G major. Then a C. The progression Javier had taught him, the bones of countless songs, the foundation on which everything else would be built.
The sound was imperfect. His fingers did not land quite right, the transitions were slow and awkward, there was buzzing on the third string because he was not pressing hard enough. But it was music. His music. Something that had not existed before he made it exist.
Suki listened with her whole body. Her eyes closed, her head tilted slightly, her hands still in her lap. When he finished, she did not open her eyes immediately. She stayed in the silence, in the space where the music had been.
"It's different," she said finally, "from the singing. Smaller. But also bigger, somehow. Like..." She paused, searching for words. "Like you're learning a new way to be heard."
Yaz nodded. She understood. She always understood.
"Do you ever think about leaving?" she asked. The question was quiet, careful, the kind of question that was really several questions pretending to be one.
"Sometimes. But I don't know where I'd go."
"Anywhere. Everywhere." She opened her eyes. They were wet. Not crying, but close. The almost-crying of someone who had been thinking about something for a long time and had finally said it out loud. "My family... the one that's been visiting... they might be serious. They might actually want me."
Yaz's fingers tightened on the guitar neck. The strings pressed into his calluses, hard and present.
"That's good," he said. "Isn't it?"
"I don't know. It feels like leaving. Like abandoning something. Or someone."
She looked at him. The look said everything the words could not.
"You wouldn't be abandoning me," Yaz said, though the words felt strange in his mouth, felt like something he should feel but was not sure he did. "You'd be getting what you wanted. What everyone wants."
"What about what you want?"
The question hung in the air. Outside, through the walls and floors and all the barriers between, he could hear the bell ringing. Outdoor hour ending. Children moving. The rhythms of the orphanage continuing without him, indifferent to the conversation happening in the basement, to the choices being made and unmade in small rooms by small people.
"I want to be remembered," he said. It was what he had always wanted. What the Maestro had helped him understand, what the song had made real, what the contract promised but could not guarantee. "I want to matter. I want to leave something behind that isn't just... absence."
Suki nodded slowly. She did not argue. She did not tell him he was wrong or right or foolish or wise. She just nodded, and the nod was acceptance, and acceptance was the closest thing they had to love.
"Then stay," she said. "Learn. Become whatever they're making you into. And when you get out, when you finally cross that fence..." She stood up, brushed dust off her pants, headed for the door. "Remember me. That's all. Just remember."
She left.
Yaz sat alone with his guitar and the new lights and the empty corner where the broken radio had been. He played the E minor chord again. The saddest chord. The most hopeful. Depending on what came after.
The string snapped on a Thursday.
Yaz was practicing "Malagueña." Not playing it, not really. Playing suggested fluency, suggested mastery. He was practicing. Struggling through the passages Javier had taught him, his fingers fumbling, his timing off, his frustration building like water behind a dam that was starting to crack.
The crack happened all at once.
One moment the string was there, taut and responsive. The next it was whipping through the air, a thin silver snake suddenly free, the sound of its breaking lost in the larger silence of everything that came after.
Yaz stared at the guitar. At the gap where the first string should be. At the coiled remnant hanging from the tuning peg like something that had given up.
His chest did something complicated. Not quite sadness. Closer to recognition. The broken string was like the broken radio. Something that had been whole and now was not. Something that had worked and now could not. Evidence that everything eventually came apart, no matter how beautiful, no matter how carefully you held it.
He reached out and touched the broken end. The metal was sharp. It pressed a thin line into his fingertip, not quite breaking the skin, just reminding him that sharpness existed, that even beautiful things could hurt you if you were not careful.
Keep it.
The Maestro. Quiet. Almost casual. As if suggesting something that did not matter but actually mattered very much.
Why?
Because it's yours. Because you broke it, which means you were trying. Because someday you'll look at it and remember what it felt like to be here, learning, struggling, becoming something you couldn't imagine when you started.
Yaz wrapped the broken string around his finger. Coiled it into a small spiral that fit in the palm of his hand. He put it in his pocket, where the yellow paper had been, where the words of "7 Years" had lived before they became something the world could hear.
A memento. A reminder. A first of what would become many.
Javier came the next day. He saw the broken string and laughed.
"Congratulations," he said. "You have earned your first battle scar. A guitar player who has never broken a string is a guitar player who has never really played."
He taught Yaz how to replace it. How to thread the new string through the bridge, wind it around the tuning peg, bring it slowly into tune. The process was delicate, precise, the kind of thing that required patience Yaz was not sure he had.
But he did it. The new string settled into place, found its tension, produced a note that was almost like the old note, almost but not quite, because nothing could ever be exactly the same as the thing it replaced.
"There," Javier said. "Good as new. Or good as different, which is sometimes better."
Good as different. Yaz thought about that for a long time after.
Thorne returned in August.
He arrived on a Wednesday, which broke the pattern, which made Yaz notice him before he noticed anything else. Wednesdays were Javier days. Wednesdays were music and warmth and the feeling that maybe, despite everything, he was learning something real, becoming something more than he had been.
But Javier was not there when Yaz came down to the Practice Room. Thorne was.
He sat in Javier's chair, one leg crossed over the other, the gold watch catching the bright light. He was reading something on a tablet. Papers, maybe. Numbers. The things that lived in devices and meant money and control and all the adult concerns that children were supposed to be shielded from but never really were.
"Yassine," he said without looking up. "Come in. Sit."
Yaz sat. The chair was still warm from whoever had been there before. Javier? Someone else? Did it matter?
"I've been hearing good things," Thorne continued, setting the tablet aside. "Javier says you're progressing remarkably. Faster than expected. The kind of aptitude that suggests genuine gift rather than merely hard work."
The words should have felt like praise. They were shaped like praise. But something in the delivery was off, clinical, the way a doctor might describe the progress of a disease rather than the growth of a person.
"Thank you," Yaz said. It was what you were supposed to say.
"I want to check in with you. See how you're feeling. Whether the arrangement is meeting your needs."
Yaz thought about the arrangement. The Practice Room. The guitar. The lessons three times a week. The hours of practice in between. The way his fingers had changed, hardened, learned to move in patterns that would have been impossible two months ago.
"It's good," he said. "I'm learning."
"And the other children? Are they treating you differently? Asking questions?"
The question was casual. Too casual. The casualness of someone who wanted information but did not want to seem like they wanted it.
"They look at me sometimes. But they don't ask."
"Good. That's good. The less attention, the better. For now." Thorne uncrossed his legs, leaned forward slightly. The posture of someone about to say something important. "I want you to know that everything we're doing, everything I'm investing in your development, it's for your benefit. Your protection. The world is dangerous for people like you, Yassine. People with gifts. The world wants to consume them, use them up, spit them out when they're no longer useful."
His voice had changed. Softer. More sincere. The voice of someone sharing a secret, letting you into a confidence you were supposed to treasure.
"I was young once, you know. With talent. With dreams. And I watched the industry destroy people I cared about. Chew them up and throw them away. I swore I would never let that happen to anyone I worked with." He paused. Let the pause do its work. "That includes you."
Yaz did not know what to say. The words felt true. They felt like truth. But there was something beneath them, something he could not quite reach, a current running under the surface of the river that was pulling in a direction he could not see.
"Thank you," he said again. Because what else was there?
Thorne nodded. Satisfied. He stood, adjusted his jacket, checked his watch.
"Dayo is going to install some additional equipment in the Practice Room. Recording devices. To track your progress, document your development. Nothing invasive. Just... documentation."
He said it like it was nothing. Like cameras and microphones watching you practice were as normal as the lights or the chair or the acoustic panels.
"Okay," Yaz said.
What else could he say?
Thorne left. The door closed. The room was quiet again, the kind of quiet that was not really quiet, the kind that held the echoes of conversations that had just ended and the anticipation of ones that had not yet begun.
Someone sees you now, the Maestro said. The voice was still warm. Still encouraging. But there was something else there too, something that might have been warning, might have been caution. The question is whether that's what you wanted. And what it will cost.
The recording equipment arrived the next day.
Dayo installed it himself. He worked quietly, efficiently, mounting devices in corners that Yaz had not noticed before, threading wires along the edges where wall met ceiling. He did not look at Yaz while he worked. He did not speak. His hands moved with the practiced certainty of someone who had done this many times, in many rooms, for many purposes.
When he was finished, he stood in the center of the Practice Room and looked around. Checking. Verifying. Making sure everything was where it was supposed to be, watching what it was supposed to watch.
"You okay?" he asked finally. The first words he had spoken since arriving.
Yaz was sitting with his guitar. Not playing. Just holding. The weight was familiar now, comfortable, the way a blanket was comfortable, the way the forty-seven tiles above his bed were comfortable because they did not change.
"I think so."
Dayo nodded. He looked tired. The tiredness was old, settled into his face like something that had been there for years and would be there for years more. The tiredness of someone who knew things but could not say them, who carried secrets that were not his to tell.
"Thorne is..." He stopped. Started again. "Just be careful. Pay attention. Not everything is what it seems."
It was not advice. Not exactly. It was the shape of advice, the shadow of it, the thing you said when you wanted to warn someone but could not take responsibility for the warning.
"What do you mean?"
Dayo was already at the door. Already leaving. His hand on the knob, his back half-turned, his face in profile.
"I mean... there's always a red light. Even when you can't see it. Remember that."
He left.
Yaz sat alone in the Practice Room. The guitar hummed against his chest, warm as a heartbeat. Someone had seen him. Someone was investing in him. The world was finally opening.
But in the corner, barely visible, a small red light blinked. Once. Twice. Watching.
He played an E minor chord. The saddest chord. The most hopeful.
And he tried not to notice the light watching him watch it back.