The heavy wooden front door of the house clicked shut, followed by the distinct sound of the deadbolt sliding into place.
Haya remained completely motionless beneath the suffocating shadow of the massive rambutan tree, his breath coming in shallow, ragged plumes. He didn't move a muscle. He stood frozen in the damp grass, his ears straining against the ambient night sounds of Tanjung Karang—the rhythmic, distant thrum of the Malacca Strait and the melancholy chorus of crickets—waiting for the final confirmation that it was safe.
Two minutes passed. Then three. Finally, the light in the upstairs hallway flickered off, followed by the muffled thud of Amar's bedroom door closing at the far end of the upper floor.
Only then did Haya move.
Crouching low, he stepped toward the edge of the deep concrete drainage line running along the side of the house. The air near the ground was thick with the scent of wet earth and stagnant rainwater. He reached his arm into the dark abyss of the ditch, his fingers brushing against the coarse, wet fabric of his black canvas backpack. He pulled it out smoothly. The exterior was splattered with mud, but a quick, unyielding zip confirmed that the interior remained dry. The transparent, heavy-duty clear plastic file folder was perfectly safe.
Slung over his right shoulder, the bag felt heavier than before, like a live explosive strapped directly to him.
He crept back around to the front porch, unlocked the door with agonizing slowness to prevent the hinges from groaning, and stepped into the pitch-black entryway. His heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. His only objective was speed: get up the stairs, lock the door, and look at the files.
He moved like a phantom across the cold floor tiles, navigating the dark living room toward the central staircase. The stairs were situated directly in the middle of the house, acting as the structural partition between the living room and the kitchen area where the dining table sat.
He had just placed his foot onto the first wooden step, ready to rush his way up into the shadows, when a soft, trembling voice cut through the dark.
"Haya...?"
Haya froze instantly, his foot hovering mid-air.
A faint, cold light was bleeding from the water dispenser in the kitchen. His mother was also about to go to bed upstairs, lingering there in the dimness—a small, solitary figure shadowed by the grand architecture of her own grief. She looked up at him, her eyes clouded and tired.
"Are you... are you hungry?" she asked softly, her voice laced with a desperate, maternal longing to fix the unfixable. "You didn't get to eat a single bite earlier. The soup is cold, but I can reheat it for you. It will only take a minute."
Haya's muscles tightened. Every instinct inside his chest yelled at him to run, to protect the stolen secrets resting in the bag on his back. "No," he said, his voice coming out harsher and more clipped than he intended. "I'm not hungry."
He turned back toward the steps, his body leaning into the ascent, desperate to escape.
But as his hand gripped the wooden banister, a sudden, suffocating weight slammed into his chest. Amar's parting words from the dark yard echoed violently behind his retinas: If you love her, if you have any decency left in your soul... please at least don't treat her as an enemy. It will kill her.
Haya's breath hitched. He looked up into the dark staircase, then slowly, reluctantly, turned his head back toward the kitchen. He looked at his mother's fragile posture in the dim glow of the water dispenser. The anger in his gut temporarily dissolved, replaced by a profound, confusing sorrow.
"Mom," Haya said, his voice cracking slightly. He shifted his weight awkwardly on the step, his hands gripping the straps of his muddy backpack. "About earlier... at dinner. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."
His mother blinked, a wave of visible confusion washing over her weathered features. She hadn't expected an apology; she had expected the unyielding wall of teenage anger. Her lips trembled, and she quickly looked down at her lap, her fingers smoothing over the fabric of her apron as tears threatened to surface again.
"No, Haya... don't be sorry," she whispered, her voice breaking entirely as she offered him a small, devastated reassurance. "It's... it's my fault. Please forgive me too. For everything."
The weight of her words—for everything—hang heavily in the space between the kitchen and the stairs, a coded confession disguised as a mother's guilt.
Haya couldn't take it anymore. The emotional friction was tearing him apart. He gave a small, silent nod, turned on his heel, and rushed up the wooden stairs as fast as his feet could carry him, making sure his footsteps didn't echo loudly enough to wake Amar.
He slipped into his bedroom, closed the heavy door, and slid the lock into place with a quiet click. Safe.
The room was pitch black. Haya didn't dare flip the main ceiling switch; the bright fluorescent glare would leak beneath the door frame and signal to the house that he was awake and plotting. Instead, he navigated the darkness to his small study desk and clicked on his low-wattage table lamp. A narrow, concentrated cone of warm golden light illuminated the wooden surface, leaving the rest of the bedroom draped in heavy shadows.
His hands shaking, Haya slid the black backpack off his shoulder. He unzipped it, reached inside, and pulled the transparent police folder into the light.
He wiped a fine layer of gritty gray dust from the plastic cover. The blue crest of the Royal Malaysia Police seemed to stare back at him like an accusation. With a deep, stabilizing breath, he slid the dense stack of documents out from the protective sleeve.
It was an official Missing Persons Report, dated exactly six years ago.
CASE FILE: K/TL/66-02/10INCIDENT: Missing Child
LOCATION: Foothills of Bukit Tajam, Tanjung Karang Area.
LOG ENTRY - DAY 1 (10:30 PM , Local Time): Local police station received a frantic walk-in report from a distraught family residing in the lowlands near the plant nurseries. The complainants state that their eldest son, aged 12, left the house on his bicycle in the late afternoon and failed to return by nightfall.
Haya's eyes scrambled across the faded typewriter ink, his chest tightening until it physically hurt to draw breath. The eldest son. A twelve-year-old boy.
He immediately flipped to the next section, expecting to see his own name, but his eyebrows furrowed in deep confusion. The specific identification pages—the ones that should have listed the boy's full name, identity card number, and birth metrics—were completely absent. Instead, only a jagged row of shredded paper was visible along the plastic rings of the folder. Someone had violently torn the boy's identity out of the record.
He swallowed hard, his fingers wrinkling the edges of the paper as he forced himself to keep reading.
LOG ENTRY - DAY 1 (06:45 PM, Local Time): A crucial breakthrough in the timeline was established through a secondary interview with the reporter's family. After a few interrogations leading to dead-end information, investigators questioned the family's youngest member.
Despite her young age—estimated between seven to nine years old—and her hysterical state, the little girl repeatedly insisted to investigators that her brother had been talking about "the mountain." She started speaking non-stop and pointed directly at Bukit Tajam.
Haya's breath locked completely in his throat. The little girl. She could be Inari...
He turned the page, the logs growing increasingly grim.
LOG ENTRY - DAY 2 THROUGH DAY 7: Formal Search and Rescue (SAR) operations officially activated. Personnel deployed includes twelve local police officers, a standard civil defense unit, and a small group of village volunteers.
Operations focused heavily on the dense, untamed jungle terrain of the hills. The canopy is thick, ground visibility is less than three meters due to heavy fern growth, and the limestone paths are treacherous due to recent monsoon rains.
For seven consecutive days, the search party combed the primary sectors. Concurrently, the family conducted desperate sweeps throughout the village plains, plastering notices and interrogating local shopkeepers. No tracks, clothing items, or biological signs of the missing boy were found.
STATUS - DAY 7 (06:00 PM, Local Time): Due to no finding achieved, extreme terrain hazards, and lack of actionable intelligence, the incident commander orders the suspension of active tracking. The operation is scheduled to scale down to a passive missing persons case by the end of the week.
The cold finality of the text made a shudder run down Haya's spine. But seeing that there were still more pages left unread, a flicker of hope surfaced—the search party wasn't going to leave the twelve-year-old boy to die in the dark after all.
He flipped to Day 8, and a new name emerged under the warm glow of the lamp.
LOG ENTRY - DAY 8 (07:00 AM, Local Time): A veteran volunteer arrived at the command post to offer specialized assistance. Identified as Hadi bin Rahmat (Aged 56), known locally by the village title Wak Rembo.
Subject is a professional Ranger Hutan (Forest Ranger) who had just returned from an extended deep-wilderness hiking expedition. Wak Rembo is noted to be a close relative or trusted associate of the missing boy's family. Armed with intimate knowledge from years of experience as a forest ranger, he requested the immediate redeployment of the Police K9 Unit and the Fire and Rescue Department (Bomba).
LOG ENTRY - DAY 8 & 9 (Operational Logs): Guided by Wak Rembo, the joint rescue forces re-entered the thickest quadrant of the forest reserve. The ranger directed the teams away from the established hunting trails, leading them deep into the jagged rocky ravines and blind spots of the hills with precision, safely giving instructions as they advanced. Every nook, cranny, and natural spring was systematically inspected. No scent was picked up. The atmosphere among the rescue team was highly pessimistic.
OPERATIONAL ANOMALY - DAY 9 (03:30 PM, Local Time): Upon reaching a dead-end ravine, Wak Rembo requested a temporary halt to operations. The ranger requested all Muslim personnel to join him in performing a collective Solat Hajat (Prayer of Need) directly on the jungle floor, praying for divine intervention to locate the child.
Immediately following the conclusion of the prayer, Wak Rembo claimed to have received an instinctual clarity regarding the boy's location. He insisted, despite the terrain's extreme danger, that the search party immediately descend to the absolute base of the primary pointing cliff edge.
Haya's heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs now. His eyes flew down the final page, his mind conjuring the vivid, terrifying images of the jungle.
LOG ENTRY - DAY 10 (09:00 PM, Local Time): All units dispatched to the deep ravine below the vertical cliff face. The area is highly hazardous, covered in jagged rocks and dense brier thickets. The rescue team conducted a thorough sweep of the perimeter below the pointing cliff. The first pass yielded nothing. A second, extensive round was conducted—negative. By the third and fifth sweeps of the exact same sector, frustration grew among the personnel. The terrain was deemed empty.
INCIDENT REPORT - THE FINDING: Without warning, Wak Rembo stepped away from the team, climbed a high limestone boulder facing the cliff, and began to recite the Adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) with exceptional volume into the jungle canopy.
The moment the ranger finished the final notes of the call, an unprecedented reaction occurred. The entire K9 Unit—three tracking dogs that had been completely silent and unresponsive for hours—suddenly began to bark frantically. The dogs broke away from their handlers, tearing through a massive, hidden wall of wild ferns situated directly against the lowest crevice of the cliff base.
At 11:42 PM, local time, the search succeeded. The missing boy was located at the bottom of the crevice, buried beneath broken branches and thick mud. He had survived a catastrophic fall from the cliff face. Survival duration in the wilderness: Ten days and nights.
The report ended abruptly right there. The remaining pages had been cleanly sliced away from the plastic binding, leaving no record of the boy's identity or the medical aftermath. What those sliced pages truly contained would remain a mystery to Haya for now.
But as he stared at the faded ink under his small desk lamp, the truth solidified in his chest like concrete.
The timeline was absolute. The timeline alone was a definitive anchor—the ultimate clue that could lead him to the truth behind the missing boy.
He couldn't ask Amar, and he couldn't bear to break his mother's heart by asking her. If he wanted to know what actually happened during those ten days in the jungle, he had to go to the only man who had refused to give up on him.
Wak Rembo.