The humidity in Jakarta was not just weather; it was a physical presence that lived in your clothes and sat on your chest. For Tri Puspita, the day began at 4:00 AM, when the sky was still the color of a fresh bruise.
She lived in a kos-kosan—a rooming house—tucked so deep into a labyrinth of narrow alleys that the sun only reached the pavement for two hours a day. Her room was small, but she had turned it into a sanctuary. She had a single shelf of books with curling covers and a small potted jasmine plant that struggled for light on her windowsill.
As she pinned her signature white plastic flower into her hair, she looked at her reflection. She wasn't beautiful in the way the women on the billboards were, but she had a face that looked like it could endure a hundred storms.
"One more day," she told her reflection. "One more day, and we're one step closer to the dream."
The dream was simple: a small house for her mother back in the village, far away from the exhaust fumes and the grinding noise of the capital.
The journey to work was an exercise in patience. Tri squeezed onto the orange TransJakarta bus, her body pressed against strangers. The air was a mix of cheap perfume, diesel, and sweat. Most people on the bus looked miserable, their eyes glued to their phones to escape the reality of the morning rush.
Tri, however, looked out the window. She watched a street vendor setting up his cart, the steam from the frying gorengan rising like incense. She saw a small child laughing as he chased a stray cat. She found the small joys because, without them, the city would swallow you whole.
She knew the world was harsh. She had seen the way the "preman"—the local street thugs—collected money from the poor sellers. She knew that in this city, if you fell down, most people would step over you rather than help you up. But she refused to let that knowledge turn her bitter.
The Tower of Glass
By 7:30 AM, Tri was at the Graha Kencana, a sixty-story needle of steel that pierced the smoggy clouds.
As a cleaner, Tri was part of a secret society of shadows. They moved through the building before the important people arrived and lingered long after they left. She wore her yellow vest like an invisibility cloak.
"Tri, the executive lounge on the 45th floor needs a deep clean. Someone spilled red wine during the late-night meeting," her supervisor, a man named Agus whose soul seemed to have been replaced by a clipboard, barked at her.
"Yes, Pak Agus. Right away," Tri replied, her voice soft but steady.
Up on the 45th floor, the world looked different. Here, the floors were polished granite, and the air was filtered and chilled to a perfect, artificial coolness. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the entire city looked like a toy set. From this height, you couldn't see the trash in the canals or the holes in the roads. You only saw the grandeur.
As she scrubbed the wine stain out of the expensive white carpet, she heard voices. Two men in sharp suits were standing by the window.
"The merger is finalized," one said, his voice cold. "We'll have to cut the staff in the logistics wing. About three hundred people."
"They'll survive," the other replied, checking his gold watch. "It's just business. Let's go to lunch."
Tri kept her head down. She felt a pang of sympathy for those three hundred people—people like her, who lived paycheck to paycheck. She knew the "dark side" wasn't just monsters in stories; it was the casual indifference of powerful men who could ruin lives with a stroke of a pen.
The weirdness began at 3:00 PM.
Tri was cleaning the mirrors in the ladies' restroom when the world tilted. It only lasted a second—a dizzying sensation, like the building had suddenly dropped ten floors. The water in her bucket didn't splash; it rippled in concentric circles that defied gravity, rising up in tiny liquid needles.
Then came the sound. It wasn't a noise from the street. It was a low, humming vibration that seemed to come from inside her own bones.
She looked into the mirror and froze. For a heartbeat, her reflection didn't show the restroom behind her. It showed a forest of towering, obsidian-colored trees and a sky that was a terrifying, violent shade of violet.
Tri blinked, rubbing her eyes. When she looked again, the restroom was back to normal.
"Heatstroke," she whispered, her heart racing. "I didn't drink enough water today."
But the air felt different now. It was heavy, charged with static electricity that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up. The smell of the industrial bleach she was using was suddenly replaced by something else—a scent that was ancient, earthy, and smelled faintly of lightning.
As the sun began to set, casting long, bloody shadows across the office floor, Tri felt a prickle on the back of her neck. She was alone in the accounting department, emptying the bins.
She turned around, expecting to see a security guard. The office was empty.
But as she looked at the glass wall of the conference room, she saw a smudge of soot. She walked over to wipe it away, but as she got closer, she realized it wasn't a smudge. It was a handprint.
It was much larger than a human hand, with fingers that were too long and ended in sharp, blackened points. And it wasn't on the outside of the glass. It was inside the glass, as if someone—or something—was trapped within the material itself, watching her.
Tri backed away, her breath hitching. "Just a trick of the light," she told herself, though her voice drifted off into a tremor. "Just the city playing games."
She finished her shift in a blur of nervous energy. All she wanted was to get back to her small room, lock the door, and sleep. She headed down to the basement to return her cart, her footsteps echoing too loudly in the concrete silence of the lower levels.
She didn't know that she wouldn't be going home that night. She didn't know that the "merger" these men spoke of was nothing compared to the collision of worlds that was about to claim her.
As she reached the basement door, the lights didn't just flicker. They died.