The silence wasn't peaceful. It was a held breath, a vacuum waiting to be filled with screams. Theo moved through the familiar alley like a ghost in his own life, every sense tuned to the frequency of threat. He heard the distant, sporadic sounds of the new Jakarta—a muffled crash, a short yell that was abruptly cut off, the low, omnipresent moan of the city's dying infrastructure. No more compressors. Just the wind whistling through broken windows.
He reached his apartment building. The door to his unit stood ajar, just as he'd left it. The darkness inside felt heavier now, a container of absence rather than a home.
He didn't call out. He closed the door softly, wedged a chair under the knob, and stood in the center of the room. His breathing was the loudest thing.
Then something inside him cracked.
"Mel?"
His voice came out small, childlike. He took a step toward the balcony, then stopped. His hands were shaking. Not from adrenaline. From something deeper, more fundamental.
"Melin, are you—"
He knew she wasn't there. He'd already searched. But his mind kept offering the possibility, a cruel loop of hope. Maybe she came back. Maybe she's hiding. Maybe she's hurt and can't call out.
He walked to the balcony door, pushed it open. The ruined garden stared back at him, dead and accusing. The broken stems. The spilled soil. Her phone, cracked and dark.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to the empty space. "I'm sorry I wasn't here. I'm sorry I—"
His throat closed. The apology died. Because what was he apologizing for? For working? For leaving that morning? For not knowing the world would end?
A sound escaped him—not quite a sob, not quite a laugh. A broken noise from a broken system.
He staggered back inside, his vision swimming. The apartment spun. He grabbed the edge of the sink to steady himself, staring down at the unwashed dishes from their last dinner together. A plate with dried sambal residue. Two forks. Evidence of a life that had been real just hours ago.
His reflection stared back at him from the darkened window—hollow-eyed, grime-streaked, a stranger wearing his face.
"You left Anwar," he told his reflection. "You let go."
The reflection didn't answer. Didn't judge. It just stared with dead eyes.
Theo's legs gave out. He slid down to sit on the floor, his back against the cabinet. The exhaustion hit him all at once—a physical weight that crushed the air from his lungs. He'd been running on adrenaline and fear, and now the tank was empty.
His eyes drifted closed. The darkness behind his eyelids was full of images: Melin's smile. Dead-fish eyes. Mr. Anwar's scream. The Brute's blind face. They flickered past like a broken film reel, each frame burning itself into his brain.
I have to find her. I have to. Tomorrow. I'll find her tomorrow.
The thought was a lifeline. A reason to open his eyes again.
But not now. Now, his body demanded payment for the day's violence. Sleep pulled at him with irresistible gravity.
He didn't make it to the bed. He simply slumped where he sat, his head tilting back against the cabinet, his breathing slowing. The city's distant moans became a lullaby. The darkness became total.
Theo slept.
He woke to grey light filtering through the grimy windows. His neck screamed in protest, his body a map of aches and bruises. For a moment, he didn't remember. Then it all came crashing back.
Melin. Gone.
He pushed himself up with a groan, his muscles stiff. The apartment was cold. Silent. But he was still here. Still alive. Still functional.
Think in systems. Pressure. Flow. Survival is a set of requirements.
The technician's mind reasserted itself, pushing the psychotic fog of last night into a locked compartment. There would be time for breaking down later. Right now, there was work to do.
He moved with quiet, brutal efficiency. First: assess damage. He peeled off his torn, bloodstained pants, examining the cuts and bruises beneath. Nothing serious. Surface damage only. He washed his face and hands in the sink with the last trickle of water from the tap, scrubbing away the grime and dried blood.
Then: gather tools. Define the objective.
He pulled his heavy-duty backpack from the closet. The essentials became components in a survival circuit:
- Clothing: Durable pants, thick socks, his spare technician's uniform. Layers were insulation. Insulation was stability.
- Nutrition: He emptied the kitchen cabinet. Canned sardines, packets of instant noodles, a bag of rice. High-calorie density. Fuel for the engine.
- Hydration: His two large stainless-steel water bottles. Corrosion-resistant. Reliable.
- Tools: His leather belt pouch was his heart. Wrench, screwdrivers, multi-meter, lockpicks (for maintenance access, he'd always said), a roll of high-tensile duct tape. A small butane soldering torch. These were his prosthetics.
- Medical: The pharmacy's loss was a blow. He scavenged their bathroom: a half-empty bottle of iodine, bandages, the potent headache powder Melin used. A pathetic arsenal against the new world's ailments.
- Communication/Information: He grabbed the handheld two-way radio from its charger. Its green power light was a tiny beacon of hope. He found a small, rugged solar charger Melin had bought for a camping trip they never took. Finally, a notebook and pens. Data recording was critical.
He changed into the sturdy boots, lacing them tight. An anchor point.
The objective: Find Melin.
He stood still, the packed bag a heavy promise on his shoulder. The question arose not from emotion, but from analysis. Was her disappearance a system failure, or a targeted event?
The chaos was a smokescreen. Perfect for getting lost in. Perfect for taking someone. The timing wasn't coincidence—it was correlated. The pandemic had a source. The news had mentioned the meteor shower. The "Red Rain." Initial reports of "strange illness" had geographic clusters. Melin was a biologist at the zoo. She worked with living systems, with containment protocols. Connection, or just tragic detail?
His eyes drifted to the wall. There, beside a photo of them at Puncak, was a large, laminated map of Jakarta he'd printed years ago for a DIY project. It was decoration, a splash of color. Now, it was a strategic schematic.
He approached it, his fingers leaving faint smudges on the laminate. He found their alley, a tiny vein in the vast urban circulatory system. His eyes tracked outward. Where was the heart of the chaos? Where did the pressure originate?
Fragments of the looped news broadcast, the panicked whispers in the office tower, the clerk's last words—"stones fell in Kemang." Kemang. South. An affluent area. A potential epicenter.
And the zoo. Ragunan. Where Melin worked. A large, open space with biological samples. A potential target or a containment zone? It was a vector, a point of interest.
Two possible nodes. Two systems to investigate.
He needed more data. He needed to listen to the city's new, desperate signals.
Carefully, he turned on the two-way radio, volume low, and cycled through the channels. Static. Static. A sobbing prayer in Bahasa. More static. Then—a clipped, panicked transmission:
"—site! Repeat, do not approach the Cendana site! The growth is—it's consuming the building! It's—"
The transmission dissolved into a scream of feedback, then static.
A data point. A location. A phenomenon. Growth. Consuming.
Theo's mind, the map, and the radio signal triangulated a terrible new reality. This wasn't random sickness. It was a transformative event with focal points. Points of high pressure. He knew nothing of genetic seeds or alien harvests. He only knew his wife was gone in the middle of it, and her workplace was near one of these loci.
He had his initial heading. South. Toward the whispered points of origin. He would move from the perimeter toward the turbulence, tracing the disturbance backward, scavenging information and supplies, using the silence as his conduit.
He took one last look around the room that had been his world. His eyes fell on the balcony.
He walked over, pushed the torn curtain aside. Melin's mini-garden lay in final ruin under the bruised sky. The broken tomato stems were now limp and black. The spilled soil was a dry, dead plain. The passionfruit vine hung like a skeletal hand, its last few leaves curled and brittle. No life, no gentle tending hand.
It was a tiny, silent apocalypse. A perfect metaphor in the dark.
Theo turned his back on it, shouldered his pack of hopes and tools, and melted into the deeper darkness of the hallway. The search was no longer a cry of despair. It was a silent, calculated mission. The technician had a working hypothesis. Now he had to gather evidence, follow the fault lines, and find the missing component in the broken system: her.