The village spoke of Sophea in the way people speak of ghosts in low voices and halves of sentences. Samreth went from hut to hut beneath an uneasy sun, asking the same question until the words lost shape. "Sophea?" he would ask. "Have you seen her?"
Each answer closed differently. One man shook his head, eyes empty. A woman pressed a rosary to her lips and whispered, "She's gone, son." An old fisherman spat into the dust and said nothing at all. The official faces — stern, practiced — said it plainly: dead. But the way the teller's fingers trembled, the way his voice dropped, told Samreth another truth. People said what made them safe to say.
The news did not fit what was lodged in Samreth's chest. He had felt Sophea's warmth at the riverbank; he had smelled the smoke from her hair; he had watched the stubborn set of her jaw when danger came. The stories that said she was gone rang hollow in his ears.
So he took the road to Lok Ta Sovan.
Sovan's hut was smaller than Samreth had remembered — a crooked roof, a thin trail of incense curling into the dry air — but the old man's eyes were the same as ever: wide with memory, somehow older and younger at once. When Samreth told him he had come to find Sophea, Sovan did not speak right away. He lifted a clay cup, held it between hands that had felt the weight of many years, and finally said, "She hides where the land keeps its secrets. On the mountain they call Phnom Sampov. The name landed in Samreth like a stone.
"Where is that?" Samreth asked, though he already knew the rough geography.
Sovan pointed weakly to the west. "Near Battambang. Not far from the city, but far from men. The warriors did not touch the mountain the same way. She may have gone to hide there." He paused, then in a voice low as cloth, added, "If she is alive, she is strong. If she is dead, the mountain will curse the men who took her."
Samreth thanked him and walked out into the sun with the mountain's name turning like a coin in his mouth.
He thought of the maps he had studied back in his time. Phnom Sampov — a limestone rise in Battambang province, a place marked by temples and by the sorrowful history of caves and memorials — lay about twelve kilometers west of Battambang city. The road from Kampong Thom to Battambang was long and stubborn — roughly three hundred ten kilometers by road, an odyssey by vehicle that could be done in half a day but by foot would swallow weeks. Samreth measured the distance in his head and felt the weight of each kilometer like a promise.
He left Kompong Thom at dusk. No cart, no friendly driver — only the thin pack he had brought back from 2025, Athisa's low murmur at his shoulder, and a pair of feet that suddenly felt as if they belonged to a different man. He walked by road out of town, through rice paddies puckered by the season, past fields where farmers bent like supplicants to the land. He slept without a mattress under the lulling chorus of insects, waking with the dawn when the sky bled its first color.
The days blurred. Samreth kept one ritual: every evening, he would sit and imagine Sophea's face, etching it into his mind so memory would never fade. He drank from bottled water he had carried from the city and ate dry bread that tasted of home and hunger. Athisa's quiet guidance kept the worst of weariness from claiming him; the voice mapped the safer paths, warned of dangerous patrol routes, and urged him to avoid main roads at daylight. When soldiers passed, he folded into shadow like a folded map.
On the fifth day out of Kompong Thom, the countryside changed; the drizzle of homes and paddy gave way to rougher earth, to patches of thicket and stone. On the ninth day he crossed a river by plank and felt that the mountain had moved closer — a mass on the horizon that grew, day by day, until, on the twelfth morning, its silhouette carved itself into the sky like a memory returning to shape.
By the time Sampov rose fully before him, Samreth's legs shook. His skin had browned; his shirt had gone the dull color of dust. He had walked nearly thirteen days, steady as a heartbeat, counting paces as if they were prayers.
He entered the small settlements that cluster around Phnom Sampov like beads on a string. People watched him — a stranger in weary clothes with the haunted look of someone who'd crossed with ghosts. He asked, at first politely, then with the thin edge of desperation that comes from a love stretched past endurance: "Have you seen Sophea? Sophea, a woman who worked with the resistance?"
Some shook heads. One old woman, her back curved like an old reed, took his hand and examined him as if reading the lines of his palm. "You look like a man who has looked for something for a long time," she said. "Why do you ask? They say women ran to the caves when the world split. They say many did not come back."
Samreth's throat closed. He knew the caves of Phnom Sampov: the places men had taken refuge, the killing caves, the temples. The mountain held both sanctuary and sorrow. He pressed on, climbing the path that wound upward through scraggly trees, past altars where locals left fruit and incense for the dead.
At the top, where the wind cut cold, he found Lok Ta Sovan's last named contact — a small, weathered shrine and, leaning against its stones, a scrap of cloth. It was the same ribbon he had seen once in the ruins beside the broken lotus: a small strip of fabric, faded by sun and wind, the color Sophea liked to tie at her sleeve. His hands trembled when he touched it.
He did not fall to his knees. There was no theatrical collapse, only the slow release of breath like a man who had climbed too far to be surprised by the height. Somewhere below, the mountain kept its secrets. If Sophea waited, she was hidden in stone and shadow and time.
Samreth sat on a jagged rock and let the wind take his tears. He had walked nearly thirteen days from Kampong Thom and every step had carved its line deeper into his bones. He had expected answers at the summit, or the sight of the woman who had become both his refuge and his reason. Instead, a single ribbon — a promise frayed by the world.
He wrapped the scrap around his wrist and felt, more than knew, that the search had only begun. The mountain did not give up its living easily. But Samreth did not either. He would move day and night, press into caves, question elders, and follow the faintest thread. He would find her, or he would accept that some truths are preserved only in memory. Either way, he would not turn back now.
Below, Battambang pulsed — a town of roads and sorrow, of people who had learned to look away. Above, Phnom Sampov held its silence like a vow. Samreth rose, shoulders set like iron, and began his descent toward the places where the living and the dead still whispered each other's names.