In a city where only one kind of music is allowed,

he hides an old blues tape in a locked box.

Chapter 1

January. A cold day. Windy, but not many clouds.

Beep… Beep…

Evan Rowley was awakened by the alarm. Mechanically, he sat up and silenced the buzzing on his phone. The sky outside was still dark, blanketed in gray. The sidewalks were nearly empty. A few cars rolled past, their white-yellow and red headlights staining the air above the road. The trees along the street had been trimmed to perfect uniformity. Not a single leaf remained.

Evan pulled out a locked box from the farthest corner of his wardrobe. Inside were a few old cassette tapes—his most precious ones.

“Hmm… what to listen to today…”

“Maybe this one…”

Carefully, he removed a Robert Johnson tape—King of the Delta Blues Singers—and placed it into his battered Walkman. He slid on his headphones and pressed play. A slide guitar drifted in, smooth yet restless. Robert's aged voice cracked through the static.

“I went down to the cross road, fell down on my knees.”

He brushed his teeth, washed his face, and hurried out. Whether to hide the headphones or shield himself from the cold, he wrapped a thick scarf around his head and pulled on a wool cap. His shoulders hunched forward, trying to bury his face deeper into the fabric.

At the bus stop by the crossroads, a city bus was just arriving. Evan frowned—not because of the cold, but as if disturbed by having to leave the music. He pressed pause, reluctantly, then gingerly removed his headphones from beneath the layers and boarded the bus.

Inside, the air hit him like a fist—body odor, onions from someone’s breakfast, stale tobacco drifting from a coat sleeve. It all merged into a thick nausea. The walls of the bus were pasted with posters and slogans. One, in oversized calligraphy, read:

“Core Socialist Values Must Enter the Heart, the Mind, and the Soul.”

Another poster displayed the face of a middle-aged man. Not ugly, but certainly not beautiful. His skin had the uncanny smoothness of bad digital editing. His eyes were steely, his lips curved into a smirk that wasn’t quite a smile. Beside his portrait, in bold red and yellow, were the words:

“The People’s Chairman Is Our Guiding Sun!”

Evan shifted his gaze away casually, as if by reflex, careful not to let the cameras—or the passengers—catch even a flicker of discomfort on his face.

At exactly 7:00, the bus's screen flickered on. The morning broadcast began.

Beep... Beep...

“Red flags fly with the wind, the songs of victory ring proud!”

“The heroic people stand united, firm as steel!”

Everyone stopped what they were doing. Silence fell. The passengers sat still, heads slightly tilted upward. The red dots of the cameras blinked in rhythm with the music, like a metronome of obedience.

The song’s melody was a flat, unwavering line—more a command than a tune. The singer wasn't singing; he was shouting, each phrase forced through his lungs like slogans painted onto brick. The pounding drums struck like fists against the listener’s ears.

Evan glanced toward the rear of the bus. A few passengers had begun singing along, parroting the chorus with growing fervor. The “music” quickly dissolved into a loud, messy blend of off-beat echoes, garbled lyrics, and fractured timing. Still, in the eyes of some, he saw a light. A kind of fever.

From the noise emerged a smaller voice—a boy, maybe seven or eight, in a school uniform.

“Who dares invade us will be destroyed!”

He stood rigidly upright, burdened by a comically large backpack. His hands beat the rhythm awkwardly on his chest, shouting the lyrics in full voice, entirely off-key. His face was grave, focused, his eyes locked onto the animated red flags fluttering across the TV screen.

Evan had seen it all before, yet the dizziness still came. He longed to put his headphones back on, to seal himself inside that tiny world of strings and ghosts. But he knew better. For the sake of his job, his safety, his freedom—this was not a line worth crossing.

And that knowledge sickened him.

He turned to the window. The glass caught his reflection—his hair disheveled from the removed scarf, his beard trimmed with deliberate care. His coat, neatly pressed, hugged his body like a second skin. He looked exactly as he should.

This was not the first time he had heard the song. But each time, it felt like standing trial. A private interrogation waged by trumpets and drums.

Had he grown used to this? Or had he always been this weak?

Beyond the window, the morning sun was rising. Its light spilled over more slogans, more posters. Everything looked normal. As if sunlight no longer brought warmth, but only lent brilliance to printed faces.

Evan tried to summon a memory. Was the world always like this?

He remembered propaganda from long ago, portraits of other men, slogans with different fonts. But something felt irreversibly different now. He couldn’t name it. The thought collapsed before it could take shape.

His mind fogged. He stopped trying.

The music ended, finally. The screen faded to black, then displayed a final line in proud, flashing text:

“Only the music the People love is the music that is right.”