FIVE WASTED YEARS

CHAPTER 10: THE FIRE THAT HASN'T DIED

The call came in at 2:14 on a Thursday afternoon, while the documents were still under examination.

*Warehouse fire. Cikarang industrial zone. Multiple workers unaccounted for.*

Arga was already pulling on his turnout coat when the dispatcher read out the details, and something in him went cold. He knew the name of the company that owned that warehouse. He had seen it on a dozen pages over the past weeks, printed in neat letterhead beside Rendra Wijaya's signature.

He had no time to think about what that meant. The engine was already moving.

They arrived to a wall of smoke so thick it turned the afternoon to dusk. Black clouds poured from the roof and rolled across the parking lot, carrying the bitter stench of burning plastic and something chemical underneath. On the east side of the building, where industrial equipment was stored, flames climbed the walls in long orange tongues.

Arga moved the way he had been trained to move—the way his body moved now without asking his mind. He directed the evacuation according to protocol, kept the exit routes clear, sent two men to cross-check the list of workers against the ones gathered, shivering, by the gate. Hoses unrolled. Water roared.

A security guard came running toward him, his uniform torn at the shoulder.

"Pak! There's still someone inside!" He pointed toward the west wing. "The admin office—Bu Wati, the clerk—she never came out!"

Arga turned to the operation commander. A moment of eye contact. A single nod. Permission granted.

He went in with two colleagues—Yoga and an older firefighter named Bambang—following the route the safety team had already checked. Inside, the world shrank to the circle of his flashlight beam and the rasp of his own breathing in the mask. Smoke hung in layers. Heat pressed against him from every direction like a living thing.

They found the clerk in the administration office, trapped behind a filing cabinet that had toppled across the doorway. She was conscious, coughing, eyes streaming.

"Ibu, I've got you. Don't move. We're getting you out."

Arga braced his shoulder against the cabinet and heaved. Metal screeched. Bambang pulled the woman free, and Yoga got an arm around her waist. Arga took her other side, and together they guided her back toward the exit, step by step, shouting to each other over the roar.

They were almost there. Arga could see the gray rectangle of daylight at the end of the corridor.

Then the ceiling gave way.

There was no warning—only a deep, groaning crack overhead, and then the world came down. Arga shoved the clerk forward into Yoga's arms with all his strength. Something heavy struck his shoulder, his back, his legs. He hit the floor. Debris poured over him in a rush of dust and sparks.

When the noise stopped, he was alone.

His left leg was pinned beneath a slab of collapsed material. He tried to move it. Pain shot up to his hip, white and blinding. He tried again and nearly blacked out.

*Stay awake. Stay awake. Count your breaths.*

He fumbled for his radio and pressed the emergency signal. Once. Twice. Again. Through the static he thought he heard voices, but the smoke was thickening, creeping into the pocket of space around him, and his air gauge was dropping faster than it should.

* * *

Outside, the news spread fast. *Arga hasn't been found.*

Dimas heard it from a contact at the fire department and immediately began calling everyone he knew, demanding confirmation, refusing to believe the first version he was given. Nadira heard it from Yoga, who had found her number among Arga's emergency contacts and called her in a shaking voice, still coughing up smoke.

She drove to the nearest hospital with her hands welded to the steering wheel. Afterward she couldn't remember the journey. She only remembered standing at the emergency entrance, watching ambulance after ambulance unload, searching every stretcher for his face.

No one knew how long Arga would have to hold on inside that building.

No one knew if he could.

* * *

The rescue team reached him forty-one minutes after the collapse.

He was conscious—barely. His leg was injured, his breathing labored, his face gray behind a fogged mask. They cut him free and carried him out on a stretcher into the blinding daylight, while his colleagues went back in to make sure every last worker had been evacuated. Every single one. Bu Wati, the clerk, sat on the back step of an ambulance with an oxygen mask over her face, alive.

At the hospital, the doctor explained it simply. A fractured leg. Smoke inhalation. He would need monitoring, and a long recovery, before he could even think about returning to duty.

Nadira stood outside the treatment room with red, swollen eyes. When the nurse finally let her in for a few minutes, she stopped just inside the door.

Arga lay on the narrow bed with his leg bandaged and raised, an oxygen tube looped beneath his nose, his skin still faintly smudged with soot the nurses had missed. He looked smaller than she had ever seen him. He looked like a man who had very nearly not come back.

And for the first time, Nadira truly understood. The man she had dismissed for five years as too simple, too ordinary, too poor—that man had walked into a burning building to pull out a stranger, and he had never once asked anyone to praise him for it.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her voice shook. "I'm sorry it took almost losing you for me to understand what you do. What you've always done." She stood at the side of the bed, not daring to touch him. "I won't force you to come back to me. I just need you to know—I regret every lie I ever told you. Every single one."

Arga opened his eyes. He looked at her for a long time, calm, unreadable.

He didn't make her any promises. He didn't push her away with cruel words, either. The truth was, he didn't know what he wanted. Not yet.

All he knew was that this time, he had to heal his body and his mind first, before deciding anything at all.

Through the window, beyond the hospital car park, the sky over Cikarang was still smudged with black. The warehouse fire was out. But as Arga closed his eyes again, he knew, as surely as he knew his own name, that the fire Rendra Wijaya had set in his life was still burning.