Morning arrived in a color that didn't exist in Jakarta—a pale green-gold that looked like light remembering leaves. The pendopo (open pavilion for gatherings) stirred with the kind of quiet that means work: sandals against wood, the clack of a ladle, rope uncoiling into a useful line. Arindra stepped out into air that had already made up its mind to be kind. Rakanta was waiting with two canteens and a coil of cord slung across his chest. Sembada checked a basket of wedges and pegs as if they were old friends who sometimes lied.
"We walk the northern edge," Rakanta said. "Then the ridge. Then we listen. If the listening goes well, we look."
"Look at what?" Arindra asked, tightening the strap of his satchel.
"Old bones," Rakanta said. "Stone that forgot its name."
Ki Marta appeared long enough to fix Arindra's stance with two fingers and a patient frown, then nodded as if satisfied to lend him to the day. "Breath first," he said. "Then steps."
They followed a path that refused to call itself a road, skirting the terraces on the narrow berms where dry feet keep wet fields honest. Arindra walked the edges as he'd been taught yesterday: weight forward, then down, then through; greet the soil instead of surprising it. He marked distances without thinking—twenty paces from the first paddy to the banana clump, then thirty-five to the old jackfruit tree whose trunk had chosen to grow around a split stick long ago. The terraces lay like a patient geometry lesson, each bund a line, each plot a rectangle calibrated by water and habit. He'd sketched a thousand site plans where water was a problem. Here, water was the teacher.
"Who placed the terraces?" he asked.
"People," Rakanta said. "And their dead. The ground learns."
"And the design?" Arindra said. "The rhythm?"
Rakanta's mouth tilted as if considering whether the answer had earned the right to be a sentence. "The river spoke. People answered without interrupting."
They cut north into a corridor of bamboo that whispered like an aunt in prayer. Sembada paused to adjust a worn cloth marker tied around a culm. "Last week," he said, more to himself than them, and re-tied the knot with a neat twist that would mean something later.
"What are you watching for?" Arindra asked.
"Mis-remembered edges," Sembada said. "Things that should be in straight lines developing opinions."
He meant sabotage and he didn't, the way farmers will say the weather is in a mood and mean both cloud and government. They moved on. The bamboo corridor opened onto a humpbacked causeway, older than the terraces, older perhaps than the village. It lifted the path over a marsh where reeds wrote their cursive signatures in wind. The stones of the causeway were not rough; they were smoothed to a fatigue that spoke of centuries of feet.
Rakanta tapped the edge with his toe. "Hear it?" he asked.
Arindra did. Not the bell-like ring of tight stone, not the dull thud of rotten foundation. A muted solidity, the sound of matter that still remembered how to carry weight. "It's holding," he said.
"For now," Sembada said, crouching to trace a hairline seam. He pushed a wedge gently into a gap no wider than a thumbnail. "Someone's taught it to hesitate."
Arindra knelt and put his palm to the slab. Usually he needed a tool: a probe, a level, a string line. Here his hand was enough. The skin of the stone told a story: thousands upon thousands of footfalls, evenly distributed—then recently, a cluster of heavy steps stopping at the same three places. The three places Sembada's wedge now remembered.
"Three men," Arindra said before he could doubt the arrogance of saying it. "Or one man walking back and forth with a sack of rocks." He traced the intervals in air. "Same stride. Same weight. Repetition."
Sembada's eyes acknowledged the thought without ceremony. "It's always repetition," he said. "That's how you make a habit in the land."
They crossed the causeway in the line Sembada chose, stepping where the habits were good. Beyond, the land rose, the path braiding itself through low scrub and small trees whose leaves flashed silver underneath when they argued with the breeze. The sun climbed but didn't insist. Arindra felt his city rhythms pull at him—emails, calls, malevolent deadlines—then let them go like birds you finally admit were never yours.
They reached a ridge just before midday. The world opened the way a curtain opens when the audience has been patient. To the west, the terraces made a bright geometry of labor. To the east, hills shouldered up into a line of darker green. And below them, stitched into a shallow valley, stones lay not like geology but like memory: courses and angles and half-remembered curves, all finding rest where a city once argued with time.
"Kota Hilang," Rakanta said. The Lost City. He didn't gesture with pride or sorrow. He said it like a craftsman naming a tool broken by inheritance.
Arindra's heart did what hearts do in the presence of a pattern too large for breath. He sat on the ridge and let his eyes perform the work they loved: grids, alignments, voids that meant more than emptiness. Not piles. Lines. Not random. Intent.
"Rakanta," he said, the name coming out on a breath, "this wasn't destroyed by an enemy."
"No," Rakanta said softly. "It was destroyed by its friends."
Sembada cupped a hand over his brow. "Buried," he said. "Guided down."
Arindra stood and squinted until the glare gave him an honest version of the past's angles. The field of ruin was not a scatter; it was a plan turned inward. Streets had been coaxed into becoming trenches. Courtyards had been allowed to collapse on themselves in controlled stages. Load-bearing walls had been undermined in ways that let them fold instead of shatter. The city had been convinced to lie down.
"Whoever did this," Arindra said, throat tight, "loved it enough to end it well."
"Or hated what it had become," Rakanta said. "Both truths drink from the same jar."
Arindra took his satchel and pulled out chalk and string. He knew he would feel foolish until the lines answered. He tied the string to a small stone, made a plumb of it, then stood on the ridge and sighted along three points: a surviving column stump, a line of dressed stones pretending to be a creek-bank, a lonely lintel lying like a man who had decided the stars were a better ceiling. He dropped the string and marked. He did it again, and again, until a ghost grid began to emerge. Not orthogonal in the modern way. Rotated. Fourteen degrees off what his muscles expected.
"Why fourteen?" he asked, mostly to the air. "What did you aim at?"
"The mountain," Sembada said, pointing with his chin to a peak that now made itself known just past the line of hills, wearing a cloud like a hat. "Or the star that sleeps above it."
"Orientation," Arindra murmured. "Seasonal light. Breeze. Sound." He pointed to where a broad shallow stair had once led to a civic space now convincingly meadow. "That plaza would have caught a morning wind and sent it down the colonnade. And there—" He swallowed. "An aqueduct. Not to bring water in. To take it away when the river sulked."
Rakanta watched him work without interrupting, the way a man watches a foreign dance and waits to clap until he learns where the rhythm hides. "Say what you see," he prompted finally.
Arindra wiped sweat from his temple and grinned because seeing a logic bloom in land is its own intoxication. "They built on a Mandala," he said. "A sacred center diagram—only not drawn on a floor. Written into the city's mouth and lungs. The center isn't a point; it's a set of relationships. If you stand there—" he walked to a patch of ground that had once been something and faced the mountain "—you can hear the rest of the city talk to you."
He stood. He listened. He didn't know what he was listening for until he knew. The breeze braided itself around his ears with the faintest of chords. The insects were loud everywhere but here. The ground under his boot felt like a yes.
Sembada rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "We taught the children a drill in that circle when I was a boy," he said. "We did not know why the dust liked their feet more there."
Rakanta's gaze went east, where the line of hills held its counsel. "If the city was laid down to sleep," he said, "who sang?"
"The same hands who built it," Arindra said. "Or the ones who learned their language."
He walked down into the ruins, careful where he placed his weight, as if stepping on a sleeping rib cage. Rakanta and Sembada followed without speaking. Up close, the cuts in the stones told him what kind of chisel had been used, what kind of mood. He crouched by a block whose face bore a faint, abraded groove. He blew dust. The groove winked back. Not weather. Script. Aksara Jawa (Javanese letters), so faint they preferred memory to light.
He traced the air above the groove, not touching. "Ka… na… ra," he whispered, not trusting the syllables to be anything but clumsy. Not words—positions. Strokes that knew where to live in relation to others.
The air cooled the way a room cools when a door opens in a house and no one walking admits it. Sembada straightened so his spine could see better. Rakanta's hand hovered near his blade.
"Do not wake anything with an excuse to be angry," he said.
"I'm not," Arindra said. "I'm trying to—" He stopped. He was about to say remember. He closed his mouth around the word like a seed.
A smear of black marred the corner of a wall nearby, low where a child might draw. It didn't look like fire. It looked like shadow that had decided to stain. He knelt. The grass around the mark grew with the slight reluctance of things bullied. He laid the back of his fingers near the smear. Cold without temperature.
"Bayangan," he said. "But not one that drifted in to snack. It was… placed."
"Called," Rakanta said. "Or taught."
Sembada crouched and sniffed—then grimaced. "Oil," he said. "Mixed with something bitter. Smells like a temple when the wrong prayers get said."
"Saboteurs," Arindra said. "People who know what the city is and don't want it remembered."
Rakanta's mouth did not become a line; it became a blade sheathed. "Or people who want it remembered wrong," he said. "That is the more popular crime."
They moved carefully from mark to mark. Twice more they found the stain of shadow coaxed into being with residue and rhythm. On the third, the black had crept further, a vine of nothing climbing a stone that wanted a name. Sembada set a small wedge beneath the block's corner to shift its angle; when the shadow moved to keep its grip, Rakanta drew a circle around it with the tip of his blade—not touching stone, drawing in dust. The circle was imperfect—on purpose, a question left in the line. The stain stopped, baffled.
"Blank answers make easy doors," Rakanta murmured. "Questions are harder to open from the wrong side."
Arindra breathed out, surprised by how much relief could weigh. He looked up the slope toward the ridge—and froze. On the far side, at the lip of the bamboo, a figure stood where no figure had stood a moment ago. A hat. A loose jacket the color of bark in shade. Hands empty. There and then gone, not like a Bayangan collapsing, but like a person who'd decided not to be seen.
"Did you—" he began.
"Yes," Rakanta said, already moving. "Sembada, the east flank. Arindra with me."
They climbed in a line that admitted urgency without inviting panic. The bamboo whispered their names in a language that mistrusted consonants. Rakanta reached the edge first and stopped so abruptly that Arindra had to pull a step out of the air. The bamboo floor bore the evidence of feet: the shallow, clean scuff of a light person who knows how to step between sounds. A strip of cloth had caught on a node and torn—a gray band, woven tight, the kind used to bind a bundle or a forearm. Rakanta lifted it with two fingers and sniffed. He frowned.
"Not ours," he said. "Not the court. Smells like boiled bark. And iron."
Arindra took the strip. It was tough, almost waxed. Faint scratch marks on one side where someone had worried it with a thumbnail. He could see the person if he didn't try too hard: thin, quick, hands that had learned to do small, precise harm.
"Why watch us?" he asked.
"Because we are watching," Rakanta said. "It is polite to return the favor."
Sembada ghosted up on the other side and shook his head once. No one. He pointed with his lips toward the ridge, where a small cairn had been knocked and re-stacked incorrectly, its top stone sitting proud like a bad idea. He reset it with a firm tap, and the forest changed the way a room changes when someone admits a thought you were all refusing to host.
They descended into the ruin again. The sun had tilted; shadows became opinions instead of facts. Arindra stood at the circle he'd felt in his bones and faced the mountain. He closed his eyes. The breeze moved past his ears in a soft two-note. The insects hummed one pitch lower here than anywhere else. He stepped to the right, one pace. The chord collapsed. He stepped back. The chord returned.
"There," he said, pointing to bare air. "Center."
Sembada stared at the nothing, then nodded the way a man nods at a truth he always suspected but never had an excuse to say out loud. "What does the center do?" he asked.
"It holds the agreement together," Arindra said. "If you break the center, you don't destroy the city—you make it lie to itself."
Rakanta looked at the three shadow stains and the strip of cloth in his hand. "Someone is teaching it to lie again," he said. "And watching to see who objects."
Arindra's throat worked. He thought of his grandmother's fingers tracing letters in the air and naming them like people: you are better in company. He thought of the causeway's patient slabs and the habit of a land being nudged toward hesitation.
"We can reset some of the lines," he said quickly, before doubt could ask for proof. "Not rebuild. Not yet. But remind. With stakes. With cord. With reflex."
Sembada's grin was a weathered door, surprised and pleased to open. "Talk tools," he said. "I like you when you talk tools."
Rakanta's eyes measured distances without moving. "Do what you can before the light forgets us," he said. "Do it in a way that will be hard to unteach."
They worked with the gentle urgency of people fixing a leak before the rain remembers to be cruel. Sembada cut pegs from green wood that had the good manners to accept a taper. Arindra set them in lines that were not new—merely re-spoken. Cord ran from peg to peg, not tight, not slack, a line that knew enough to forgive. He aligned the grid fourteen degrees to disrespect his own modern instincts and respect the city's older ones. He didn't draw circles; he found them. He didn't write letters; he placed strokes where the air wanted them.
The ruin let out a sigh a person could mistake for a breeze. A knot of shadow at the edge of a fallen wall softened, then slunk into the crack between two stones and stopped wanting to be.
"Good," Sembada said simply.
Rakanta stood at the circle and tilted his head as if listening for a note too low for pride. "Better," he conceded.
Arindra straightened, pressed the small of his back with his knuckles, and looked up at the ridge one more time because curiosity is a habit that will get you killed later if you don't let it breathe now. No figure. No torn cloth. But the bamboo's whisper had a flavor—like the aftertaste of iron.
A sound interrupted the ruin's relieved breathing. Not the kentongan from earlier. Closer. A soft, deliberate tap—stone on stone—coming from beneath the ground where the city had folded itself. Three taps, a pause. Two taps. The same pattern the kentongan had called at dawn, spoken now through earth.
Rakanta's face changed in a way that made the air look for a place to hide. "That is not an echo," he said. "Someone is awake under us."
Sembada's hand found the cord and plucked it lightly, as if asking the line to carry a message. It thrummed a note that felt like the inside of a bell. The tapping answered—one tap now, then another, impatient and almost—cheerful?
"The tunnels," Rakanta said. "Of course the city kept its veins." His eyes cut to Arindra. "And of course someone else found them first."
The ground two courtyards away shifted—subtle, then less so—as if something beneath had turned over and decided to face the door. A fissure breathed. Dust lifted in a tidy column and then began to settle back down as if reconsidering.
"Back," Rakanta said, voice low and even in a way that made obedience graceful. "Do not run. Do not give the land a reason to misunderstand our weight."
Arindra obeyed until the fissure exhaled a word that wasn't a word in any language he knew and still knew him. It felt like the shape of his name spoken by the wrong geometry.
He stopped. The cord in his hand hummed a warning. Sembada's eyes cut to him: move.
Arindra took a step—and the ground a stride beyond him sunk half a hand-span and stayed, as if some great thing below had put its elbow there and said wait.
He didn't move. Rakanta didn't blink. Sembada did not breathe. The tapping resumed—one, two, three—this time from two different places at once.
Soft hook, Arindra thought distantly, absurdly. Cliffhanger, said everything else.
He tightened his grip on the cord until his knuckles confessed. The earth listened as if it were preparing to answer politely or not at all.