THE BOTTLE IN THE RIVER

Chapter 5

"It means the easy part is over." The old woman pulled her shawl tighter, already turning to leave, as if she'd said more than she'd meant to. "The luck he's given you is real. So is what's coming to collect it. Watch the skies past the river, Bara. And don't trust anyone who's suddenly very interested in being your friend."

She was gone before either of them could ask another question, footsteps fading too quickly down a hallway that hadn't seemed long enough to swallow sound that fast.

Bara looked down at Titan, who looked back up at him with those strange, too-aware eyes, and understood, with a cold settling certainty, that whatever this was — it had only just begun.

"They're already here."

Sari's text lit up his phone screen at just past midnight, three days after the old woman's visit, and Bara was awake to see it because he hadn't managed to sleep properly since. He sat up in the dark, Titan stirring against the pillow beside him, wings buzzing low and anxious.

What do you mean? he typed back.

Two guys came into the store tonight asking about you. Not customers. They had a photo of you from the bridge video. Asked Pak Hendra where you live. He told them.

Bara's chest went cold. Of course he did.

What did they look like?

Normal. That's what's creepy. Suits. Polite. One of them had gold eyes though, Bara. I'm not joking. GOLD. Like a coin.

He was already out of bed, already crossing to his mother's door to check she was asleep and safe, already running through the old woman's warning in his head — don't trust anyone who's suddenly very interested in being your friend — when Titan went rigid on his shoulder, then let out a high, thin sound Bara had never heard from him before, something between a warning and a cry.

The apartment's single window rattled, though there was no wind.

Bara crossed to it slowly, heart hammering, and looked down into the alley three floors below.

Two figures stood there in the orange wash of the streetlamp, perfectly still, faces tilted up toward his window as if they'd known exactly which one was his the whole time. Even from here, even through old glass and darkness, he could see it — a faint, unnatural gleam where their eyes should have been catching shadow instead of light.

One of them raised a hand. Not a wave. Something closer to an acknowledgment. We see you.

Titan's wings beat frantic and fast against Bara's collarbone, and the small golden light of him flared bright enough to throw shaking shadows across the ceiling, bright enough that for one disoriented second Bara wondered if the bee was trying to warn him or trying to hide.

Behind him, his mother's door creaked open.

"Bara?" Her voice, sleep-rough, already afraid. "What's out there?"

He didn't answer right away. He was too busy watching the two figures in the alley finally, unhurriedly, start to walk toward the building's entrance — no rush in their steps at all, the terrible unhurried confidence of people who already knew exactly how this was going to end.

"Ma," he said quietly, not turning around. "Get your shoes on."

"Don't open that door."

Bara said it before he'd even finished thinking it, already dragging the old wooden dresser across the hallway floor, already hearing his mother's bare feet slap against the tile behind him as she grabbed the one bag she kept packed by habit — old habit, older than him, a habit from a life before he was born that he'd never once asked her about.

"Bara, what is happening—"

"I don't know. I don't know, just—" The dresser scraped, caught on a floor tile, refused to move the last half-meter he needed. Downstairs, faint through the concrete, he heard the building's front gate groan open on its rusted hinge, though he knew for a fact his neighbor kept it padlocked at night.

Titan launched off his shoulder and hovered at the door, wings a blur, body pulsing gold in a rhythm that felt less like light and more like a heartbeat. Warning. Counting down.

"The window," Bara said. "Ma, the fire escape, now—"

The door didn't break so much as it simply stopped being a door. One second it was old plywood painted the same tired green as every other door on the floor; the next it folded inward like paper crushed in a fist, and the two men from the alley stepped through the wreckage without hurrying, without so much as glancing at the splinters catching in their pressed sleeves.

Up close, the gold in their eyes wasn't a trick of streetlight. It moved. Slow, oil-thick, like something alive behind the iris.

"Bara Adhitama." The taller one said his name the way you'd read an item off an inventory list. "You're holding something that doesn't belong to you."

"He's not holding anything, get out of my house—" His mother's voice, and then her body, stepping in front of him again, small and immovable, and Bara felt something in his chest crack sideways at the sight of it, because he understood exactly what she was doing and exactly how little it would matter to a man whose eyes moved like that.

"Ma, move—"

The shorter man raised two fingers, almost lazily, and the air between him and Bara's mother rippled like heat off asphalt. She was lifted — not thrown, lifted, gently, terribly, off her feet and pinned against the far wall a full meter off the ground, gasping, hands scrabbling uselessly at nothing.

"MA!"

Titan screamed. There was no other word for the sound the bee made, a high, splitting note that shattered the single lightbulb overhead and plunged the room into gold-tinted dark, and something in Bara's blood answered it before his mind had caught up to giving an order.

He didn't decide to move. His body simply understood, the way it had understood the river, and he crossed the ruined doorway in one stride that covered three meters of floor and slammed both hands into the shorter man's chest.

The wall behind the man cratered. Concrete dust rained from the ceiling. His mother dropped, and Bara caught her — caught her clean out of the air without breaking stride, without thinking, the way you catch something you love on pure animal instinct — and the taller man was already moving too, gold eyes flaring wide with something that, for just a flicker, looked almost like fear.

"He's stronger than the file said," the taller man snapped, backing toward the ruined doorway. "Fall back—"