Jace was a ghost producer—the kind of talent who made platinum records for people who couldn't find middle C. He’d worked with Tyga once, four years ago, on a throwaway track about champagne flutes. It paid for his mother’s surgery. He hadn’t thought about it since.

The file landed in Jace’s inbox at 11:47 PM on a Saturday. No subject line. Just the attachment: dont-kill-the-party--feat.-tyga-.aiff .

He soloed the vocal track. Beneath Tyga’s voice, buried at -36dB, was a second recording. A police scanner. A woman’s voice, calm as frost: “Officer down at Pacific Coast Highway. Single vehicle. Rolls-Royce Wraith. Victim identified as Michael Ray Nguyen-Stevenson—professionally known as Tyga.”

And somewhere, in a corrupted audio file floating through a dead man’s cloud storage, the beat goes on. Un, deux, trois. Don’t kill the party. The party kills you.

His phone buzzed. Unknown number. One line: “Delete the file or you kill the party for real.”

Jace stared at the screen. The child counting in French played again, looping. Un, deux, trois. He realized it wasn’t a sample. It was a voicemail. His own voicemail, from a number he didn’t recognize, timestamped for next month. His future self, or something pretending to be him, whispering through a six-year-old’s voice: Don’t kill the party. The party’s not a song. The party’s the last night he has left.