The jet touched down at Teterboro just after ten in the morning. Dayo had flown into this airport a dozen times in the past two years, but today the tarmac felt different. He wasn’t arriving as a performer or a tourist. He was arriving as a general mustering troops.

Max and Bella flanked him down the stairs, both in dark coats that didn’t quite hide the hardware underneath.

The car was waiting. Black, anonymous, arranged through a service that didn’t keep logs. Dayo slid into the back seat and checked his phone for the first time since takeoff. Three messages, all from the same thread. The four label heads confirming their arrival times. They’d been eager. That was either a good sign or a trap he couldn’t see yet.

He looked out the window as the city unspooled around him. New York in autumn had a particular smell — exhaust, pretzels, the last gasp of summer heat rising from the pavement. The system had laid the foundation for everything he had now. The [Global Spotlight] card he’d pulled in that desperate moment had turned him from a struggling artist into a phenomenon. But the card wasn’t what he was selling today. The card was his secret, would always be his secret. What he was offering them was something else entirely.

Market Resonance.

It was a system feature that functioned like a predictive engine for timing. It analyzed market conditions, audience behavior patterns, competitor release schedules, and a dozen other data streams Dayo couldn’t fully explain even if he wanted to — which he didn’t. What it gave him was knowledge. The optimal window to drop a single. The perfect day to release a video. The exact moment when the market was hungry and the competition was quiet.

It didn’t make the art. It made the timing inevitable. In an industry where releasing a track two days early meant getting buried by a bigger artist, or three days late meant missing the viral wave entirely, Market Resonance was the difference between a hit and a footnote. It was worth more than any recording studio, any marketing budget, any radio deal. It was the reason Dayo’s releases always seemed to land with perfect weight, always at the exact moment the world was ready to pay attention.

That was what he’d share with them. A version of it, anyway. Enough to make them feel like they were getting inside the machine. Enough to make the alliance worth their while.

The car pulled up to the hotel. Max went in first, then Bella, then Dayo. The suite was on the thirty-fifth floor, high enough to see the park but not so high that it felt like showing off. Dayo had asked for it specifically. Neutral ground. No label’s offices, no artist’s ego palace. Just a room with a long table, good light, and the kind of anonymity that let people speak freely.

He walked to the window and looked down at the avenue. Five label heads. Michael’s label was number one in the world, had been for fifteen years, and it sat at the top like a spider at the center of a web. The remaining four — no, five now — had been living in that shadow for too long.

Dayo knew their stories. He’d made it his business to know.

Helena Voss at Vanguard ran the number two label in the world. She’d built it from nothing in the seventies, signing artists nobody wanted and turning them into legends. Michael had come for her three times — first by poaching her flagship artist in 2014, then by blocking three of her biggest acts from Grammy nominations through backroom committee deals, finally by convincing a streaming platform to change their algorithm in a way that buried her catalog for six months. She was sixty-two years old, wore no jewelry, and had a handshake that could crack walnuts. Dayo had met her once at an awards show. She’d looked at him like she was measuring him for something.

Darius Cole at Meridian was number three. Former artist himself, grew up in Detroit, understood the business from both sides in a way the executives who’d never touched a microphone never could. Michael had made his niece disappear from the industry. Not dead — just gone. One day she had a deal, a single climbing the charts, a future. The next day her label dropped her, her manager stopped returning calls, and every radio programmer in the country suddenly forgot her name. Darius had been smiling and nodding at Michael ever since, but Dayo had seen his eyes at industry events. Some smiles don’t reach the eyes.

Paolo Romano at Eclipse held down number four. Italian-American from Brooklyn, the youngest of the group at forty-nine, and the most visibly hungry. Michael had bought two of his subsidiary labels and shuttered them, absorbed the catalog and fired two hundred people. Paolo lost forty million dollars and spent three years rebuilding from the wreckage. He laughed too loud at industry parties and shook everyone’s hand twice. Dayo recognized the act. Nervous energy wearing a confidence costume.

Tom Kellerman at UCL was number five. Silver-haired, Ivy League, the kind of old-money American who played squash on Wednesdays and had memberships at clubs that didn’t admit people until their grandparents died. Michael had humiliated him publicly at a conference in 2019, calling UCL’s entire business model "a retirement home for irrelevant artists" in front of two hundred industry executives. Kellerman had laughed it off, but the story followed him for years. Nobody forgets being called irrelevant by the most powerful man in the room.

Although he had history with UCL which was Luna’s past label and they also gave him hard time but that was the past so it should remain that way.

And finally Sarah Mitchell at MLL, the number six label that punched above its weight. She was fifty-five, from Ohio, had started as an intern in the mailroom and worked her way to the corner office through sheer refusal to quit. Michael had never bothered to destroy her directly — she’d been too small to matter — but he’d blocked six of her artists from festival slots, convinced promoters that MLL acts weren’t "commercially viable," and generally made her life harder every time she got close to a breakthrough. The small cruelties, the ones that didn’t make headlines but wore you down year after year.

Five people. Five different reasons to want gone.

And they were all scared.

That was the part Dayo kept coming back to. These weren’t small players. They ran companies that generated billions in revenue, employed thousands of people, shaped culture around the world. And every one of them had been living in fear of a man who wasn’t even their boss. Michael had created enmity with almost everybody, but nobody pushed back because the cost was too high. Cross Michael and you didn’t die. You just disappeared from the industry — your phone went quiet, your meetings got cancelled, your name became a whisper that nobody wanted to repeat out loud. Not dead. Just erased.

Dayo had been the first to push back and survive. That was his currency in this room. The fact that he’d gone up against Michael repeatedly — the sabotaged releases, the stolen masters, the industry blacklisting — and come out on top every time. That was rare. That was unprecedented. And it was why these five people, who’d never been in the same room together for anything more important than a photo op, were flying into New York to hear what he had to say.

He checked his watch. Ten forty-five. The first arrival was due in fifteen minutes.

Dayo walked to the long table and counted the chairs. Six total, including his. He’d had Felix sweep the suite that morning — no bugs, no recorders, nothing that shouldn’t be there. The hotel staff had been told it was a private business meeting for a film production company. Standard cover.

His phone buzzed. Felix, from the office: "All clear. Communications encrypted. I’m monitoring the building’s network. Nothing unusual."

Dayo typed back: "Thanks. Stand by."

He sat in his chair and looked at the empty seats. For a moment, the absurdity of it almost made him laugh. Two years ago he was nobody. A transmigrated soul in a young man’s body, figuring out how to sing in public without panicking. Now he was about to sit across from five of the most powerful executives in the music industry and ask them to help him take down a man who’d controlled their world for two decades.

The system had made him visible. Market Resonance had made him smart. But this — this alliance, this war — this was him. The person he’d become through the fighting.

At eleven sharp, the door opened.

Helena Voss walked in first. She always did — Dayo had asked around. Silver hair pulled back tight, black suit without a wrinkle, no jewelry, no makeup that he could detect. She looked at the room the way a general surveys a battlefield, cataloging exits and furniture and seating arrangements in a single glance. Her eyes found Dayo and she nodded, a small movement that wasn’t quite a greeting and wasn’t quite approval. Just acknowledgment.

"Helena. Thank you for coming."

"You said it was important." She took the chair to his left, the one closest to the window, and settled into it like she was growing roots. "Important enough to pull me out of a board meeting. I hope you’re not wasting my time."

"Not wasting anything. Promise." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Darius Cole came next, fedora in hand, moving with the loose-limbed walk of a man who’d spent his twenties on stage. He was smaller than Dayo expected — compact, contained, every movement economical. He nodded at Helena, nodded at Dayo, and took the seat at the far end without a word. His eyes stayed on the door, watchful.

Paolo Romano burst in third, too loud, too fast, shaking Dayo’s hand with both of his. "Jason! Good to finally do this properly. Last time we talked was what, the Grammy afterparty? You were having a much better night than I was." He laughed at his own joke and took the middle seat, drumming his fingers on the table. The nervous energy filled the room like a smell.

Tom Kellerman entered fourth, buttoning his jacket as he crossed the threshold. Tall, thin, the kind of man who looked like he’d been born in a tie. He shook Dayo’s hand with a grip that was firm but brief, the minimum required contact, and took the seat opposite Helena. "Mr. Dayo. I must say, your phone call was... unexpected."

"Good unexpected or bad unexpected?"

"We’ll see, won’t we?"

Sarah Mitchell arrived last, five minutes late but not apologetic about it. She wore a navy blazer and comfortable shoes and carried a leather satchel that had seen better decades. She looked at the room — at Helena, at Darius, at Paolo and Tom — and her expression shifted from business to something more careful. She knew what this meant. All of them in one place. That alone was an act of rebellion.

"Sarah. Thanks for making it."

"I’ve been waiting for this call for three years, Jason. I just didn’t know who’d be making it." She took the last open chair and set her satchel on the floor. "So. Here we are. The five of us and the biggest problem in the music industry. Let’s hear what you’ve got."

Dayo looked around the table. Five label heads. Five empty chairs now filled. He thought about Michael, probably in his office right now, probably thinking he still controlled everything. Probably completely unaware that the people he’d spent two decades terrorizing were sitting in the same room, breathing the same air, finally talking.

"Before we get into specifics," Dayo said, "I want to be clear about something. This meeting never happened. There are no minutes, no recordings, no assistants waiting outside. What we discuss here stays in this room. If anyone’s not comfortable with that, there’s the door. No hard feelings."

Nobody moved.

"Good." Dayo leaned forward and put his hands on the table. "Then let’s talk about why we’re all here. And why, for the first time in twenty years, we have a chance to change everything."

He could feel it — the shift in the air, the moment before something important begins. Outside, New York kept moving, indifferent, vast. But in this room, on the thirty-fifth floor, five powerful people who’d been afraid for too long were finally ready to listen.

The war was about to start.

A huge thanks to JohnLight, Metzolino and WarMachine78 for the Golden tickets extra Chapters coming later in the day.