Morning in the village arrived the way it always did — the sound of roosters from the direction of a neighbour's orchard, crickets that hadn't managed to stop before the sun took over, soft yellow light that eased in through the gaps in thin curtains and fell across the wooden floor in shafts that almost looked solid.
Everything as it should be.
I woke with a heaviness in my chest.
Not pain. Not fever. More a heaviness that had a source but the source wasn't visible, a heaviness that came from sleep that was thin — sleep I remembered doing but that hadn't left what sleep was supposed to leave. My head was here. My body was here. But some other part of me felt as though it hadn't fully returned from wherever it had gone last night.
I sat at the edge of the bed and didn't move for a moment.
The bracelet at my wrist felt ordinary. Slightly cool, as usual. Small still wooden beads, as usual. I rubbed my wrist without realising I was doing it.
"Aina, you're up?" Angah's voice from the kitchen.
"Yeah."
The smell of coffee. The sound of a pan. Along's and Angah's voices going back and forth about something unimportant. All of it came through the thin walls of this room and formed something that felt like reality, felt like an ordinary morning, felt like a solid argument that last night might have only been exhaustion dressed as something else.
I almost believed that.
Almost.
---
Along was already bathed and dressed when I came out of my room — damp hair, a hijab neater than usual, the way someone dresses when they're anticipating something. I sat in the dining chair and looked at her with a feeling I couldn't put a name to.
"You're ready early," I said.
Angah, who was stirring coffee in the kitchen, peeked out. "Yeah. Where are you going?"
Along picked up her cup with a movement too light, too casual, the way someone moves when they've prepared an answer and are waiting for the question to arrive. "An old friend is coming."
"A friend?" The word came out of my mouth before I had time to think about why it sounded strange.
"Just a small reunion. They said they miss seeing me."
I frowned. "A reunion at Tok's house?"
"Yeah, well. This is the village."
The answer was too easy. Not easy because it was clear — easy because it left no room for follow-up questions, easy in the way a door shut tight from inside is easy: present, visible, but impossible to push. I thought about all the years I had known Along — siblings who grew up in the same house, who knew each other's favourite songs, who had memorized each other's stories — and I couldn't remember a single time Along had ever mentioned a friend from the village. Not once.
Tok, from her rattan chair, smiled broadly when she heard that.
"That's good…" she said slowly, in a tone I couldn't determine was gratitude or relief or some third thing without an ordinary name. "This house hasn't been lively in a long time."
I looked at Tok.
The way she said it — not the way a grandmother is happy her grandchild's friends are coming. The way someone who has been waiting a long time for something and is only now watching it arrive. The way someone who knows.
---
Midday came with its own heat — village heat that was different from city heat, heat that didn't bounce off concrete surfaces but came down directly from above, straight, personal, like something choosing you specifically. No wind. The trees outside didn't move. The wall clock in the living room ticked too loudly in a silence that contained nothing but heat.
Then the sound of motorbike engines.
One. Then another. Then another.
Angah peeked through the window. "Oh, people are really coming."
Along rose from the sofa in a way that made me stop — rising not the way someone rises when they hear guests arriving, but the way something that has been held taut for a long time is finally released. Her face changed. Not changed expression — changed in a way deeper than that, like someone putting on the mask they were most comfortable wearing, the mask they had forgotten they were wearing because it had been on their face too long.
Her eyes gleamed.
I noticed that. Gleamed the way eyes gleam when there is water in them — but Along wasn't close to crying, there was no reason to cry, and that gleam didn't go away even as her expression shifted. It stayed. Like something behind those eyes that was lit with its own light.
"They're here." She went straight out without her slippers, feet touching the outdoor ground without hesitation, without noticing.
Angah and I looked at each other.
"Since when does she have friends from the village?" Angah whispered.
"I don't know either."
But Angah had already turned back to the window, and I could see her shoulders — the way they moved, the way she was breathing — and I knew she had also seen something in the way Along had walked out that she couldn't name.
---
They came in three.
Along in front, a wide smile I didn't remember ever seeing on her face before — a smile too full, too present, the smile of someone who doesn't realize they're smiling because something has been smiling them from within.
Behind her, three women.
My eyes began taking inventory the way eyes do when something is wrong but they don't yet know what they're looking for. They were roughly Along's age — late twenties, perhaps, perhaps slightly older, difficult to say precisely because there was something about their faces that evaded being placed in time. Beautiful, yes — but a beauty that had a quality that was almost untouchable, a beauty that made you feel distant rather than close, like a beautiful photograph rather than a beautiful person.
Their skin.
I couldn't stop looking at their skin.
Midday, blazing heat. We had all been sweating since morning — I could feel perspiration at the back of my neck, in the crook of my elbows, everywhere clothing met skin. Angah had wiped her forehead with her sleeve earlier. Along had damp patches at the back of her shirt when she'd gone out.
These three women came in from the heat outside with skin that was perfectly dry. No redness. No moisture. The surface of their skin looked like expensive porcelain — smooth in a way that wasn't natural smoothness but smooth that had effort inside it, smooth that was too even, without open pores, without thin lines of perspiration, without any of the small signs that showed a body working to adjust to temperature.
Their smiles appeared simultaneously when Along introduced me and Angah.
"Hi."
One word. Three voices. One moment.
Not coincidentally simultaneous — simultaneous in a way that couldn't happen by coincidence, a simultaneity that had coordination inside it, a simultaneity that made me think of clocks set to the same time, of mirrors that reflect rather than create.
I smiled back. I didn't know what else I could do.
---
They sat in the living room — cross-legged on Tok's old mengkuang mat, in a row too orderly to be unintentional, at distances from each other too equal to measure with the naked eye but that my mind calculated without my asking it to.
Tok sat in her rattan chair and smiled in a way I hadn't seen the entire time we'd been here — a wide smile, that showed her teeth, that lifted her cheeks the way a young person's cheeks lift. Too happy. Like someone who had long been waiting for a special guest and that guest had finally arrived.
Conversation began.
And here is something I would think about long after that day: the conversation *sounded* right. There was laughter. There were stories. There were questions. All the components that should be present in a reunion conversation between old friends — all of it was there, all of it in the right place, as though someone had studied the recipe for conversation and followed it carefully.
But the content.
No school names. No names of teachers remembered together. No *"remember when we..."* that was specific, that could be verified, that placed them inside a real time and a real place. When Along mentioned a neighbourhood, they nodded — but didn't add anything. When Angah asked about their work, answers came in sentences too general, too rounded, answers that were correct but that contained nothing that could be held onto.
They laughed at the right moments.
They stopped at the right moments.
They turned toward whoever was speaking in a way too synchronized, heads moving like sunflowers following the sun, as though something was giving directions that my eyes couldn't see.
I sat at the end of the sofa and drank plain water and watched.
Then I noticed something about one of them — the one sitting furthest right, whose smile was half a second slower than the other two, half a second only but enough for me to notice. Her hair was perfectly straight, falling at her shoulders in the way hair falls when it has never been disturbed by wind or sleep or its own owner's hands. When she spoke, she didn't move her hands at all — hands placed in her lap, still as something that wasn't alive, like accessories. And once, just once, when Along said something funny and the other two laughed, this woman's laugh came slightly late — and in that small gap, her face went completely blank, blank in the way a face goes blank when no one is watching, before the laugh arrived and her face changed back to what it was supposed to be.
I set my glass on the table with hands that were too careful.
---
I stood up on the pretext of getting water from the kitchen.
As I passed behind the sofa where they sat — within two, three steps of them — the bracelet at my wrist changed.
Not just warm this time.
Heavy.
As though the small wooden beads had suddenly absorbed something from the surrounding air and locked it inside, as though my wrist had become a focal point for something invisible but that had weight to it. I had to stop myself from rubbing my wrist against my thigh — stopped myself because I didn't want to draw attention, didn't want anyone to notice, didn't want anyone to ask.
I kept walking to the kitchen.
Stood in front of the sink. Turned on the tap. Cold water touched my hands and the heaviness lessened slightly, slightly, not entirely.
"Why?"
The voice came from behind me.
Soft. Close. Too close for someone I hadn't heard come in.
I turned around.
The woman who had been sitting furthest right — whose laugh was half a second late, whose hands had never moved — was standing at the kitchen doorway. I didn't know when she had come in. I didn't know how I hadn't heard her footsteps on the creaking wooden floor.
She was looking at me.
Directly. Straight. With a smile that was geometrically sweet — a symmetry too perfect, the corners of the mouth rising to equal heights on left and right, teeth visible at equal distances from upper and lower lip. A smile that, if you photographed it and mirrored it down the centre, would look exactly the same on both sides.
But her eyes.
I look at human eyes every day. I know what exists in human eyes — there is depth there, there are layers, there is light reflecting from something behind the surface that you can't reach from the outside. There is something that *is* inside a person's eyes, something that tells you you're speaking to a someone and not a something.
This woman's eyes didn't have that.
Not empty like the eyes of someone sad or someone thinking far away. Empty like a mirror — a reflecting surface, that showed you back to yourself, that kept nothing behind it. I could see my reflection in the black of those eyes. Small. Inverted.
"Nothing," I said. My voice came out more steady than I felt I deserved for this situation.
She raised one hand — slowly, in the way a hand is raised when someone is about to wave or point or touch — and then lowered it again without doing any of those things.
Her smile didn't change.
"Okay," she said.
Then she turned and went back into the living room with footsteps I couldn't hear, couldn't hear at all, the wooden floor that had creaked beneath my own feet made no sound beneath hers.
I stood in front of the sink with water still running over my hands and a heart beating in a way that was no longer only about fear but about something more fundamental — about a mind trying to reorganise what it had just received and not knowing where to put it.
The bracelet at my wrist was still heavy.
---
I passed by Angah when I returned to the living room, close enough to whisper.
"Angah."
"Hm." She didn't turn. Her eyes were forward, toward the conversation still going on.
"Do you think Along's friends are strange?"
One second passed. Two seconds.
Angah answered in a voice that barely made it out of her throat. "I thought I was the only one who felt it."
We didn't look at each other. We sat side by side and looked forward, toward the three women who sat too neatly in heat too extreme, who moved with coordination too precise, whose eyes shifted toward us occasionally in a way that wasn't like one person looking at another but like something making notes.
At the end of the sofa, Along talked and laughed in a way I didn't recognize — too open, too at ease, her eyes gleaming with a light that didn't come from any lamp in this room.
And Tok in her chair was still smiling that wide smile, the smile I had never seen on her before, the smile that looked like it belonged to someone else and had been placed on a face I knew.
I wanted there to be an explanation.
I wanted something that made sense, something I could bring to Along tomorrow and say: this is why. I wanted the *probably just me* that had always been enough before to close a door that shouldn't be opened.
But the bracelet on my wrist was still heavy.
And the woman whose laugh was half a second late was looking at me from across the room — with her symmetrical smile, with eyes that kept nothing behind them — and I knew, in a way that didn't need words to become real, that she knew I had been watching her.
And that she didn't mind.
---
*To be continued in Chapter 6.*
*Something has been in that house far longer than any of them have been alive.*
*And it has been waiting.*
*And now — it has company.*