FIVE NAMES ON GARBAGE MOUNTAIN
PROLOGUE
Something Thrown Away
On the night it all began, Mayangkara was raining.
It wasn't a heavy rain.
Just a light drizzle that made the city lights look blurry from a distance.
Downtown, people were still leaving the office buildings. The restaurants hadn't closed yet. Cars moved slowly along the slick streets. Storefront lights reflected in the puddles.
Mayangkara never truly slept.
But several kilometers from those high-rises, on the outskirts of the city, there was a place that seemed as if it had been deliberately left out of everyone's memory.
Bantar Mayang Landfill.
Garbage Mountain.
There, the night had a smell of its own.
Wet plastic.
Food scraps.
Dirt.
Leachate.
And something sharper that sometimes made it hard to breathe.
The last truck of the night arrived after eleven.
Its headlights pierced the rain.
A staff member opened the gate.
The truck rolled in slowly.
No one paid any attention to it.
Or at least, that was how it was supposed to be.
The truck wasn't carrying cardboard.
It wasn't carrying plastic bottles.
It wasn't carrying leftover food from restaurants.
Inside its covered cargo bed were several drums.
They were all blue.
One of the drums bore a warning symbol.
The driver climbed down.
A man in a dark shirt followed.
“Quick,” he said.
“What if we get caught?”
The man looked around.
“No one comes here at night.”
They opened the back doors.
They unloaded one drum.
Then another.
Rainwater ran through the garbage.
One of the drums slipped.
Crash!
The man in the dark shirt cursed.
He immediately looked around.
There was no one there.
He lifted the drum back up.
“Don't let it get damaged.”
“What if the contents leak?”
The man was silent for a moment.
Then he answered,
“By tomorrow, it'll be covered with garbage.”
They continued working.
A few minutes later, the truck left.
Garbage Mountain fell silent again.
Only the rain.
Only the sound of water.
Only a smell slowly mixing with all the others.
No one knew that a new secret had been buried that night beneath tons upon tons of garbage.
No one knew that years later, that secret would be discovered by five children who came to that place every day to look for salvageable items.
Five children who had no proper homes.
No uniforms.
No textbooks.
They didn't even always have breakfast.
All they had were sacks.
A pair of sandals.
Friendship.
And a knowledge of Garbage Mountain far greater than that of the people who worked behind desks.
They knew when the trucks arrived.
They knew which areas were safe.
They knew which piles were prone to landslides.
They knew the sound of a malfunctioning engine.
They knew the smell of burning plastic.
They knew when the rain would make the slope slippery.
They knew that dry cardboard was worth more than wet cardboard.
And they knew that something someone had thrown away wasn't necessarily worthless.
What they didn't know was that one day, they would find something far more valuable than bottles, cardboard, wires, or copper.
A black bag.
Inside it was a flash drive.
Several documents.
A notebook.
And a secret powerful enough to shake the entire city.
But before any of that happened, they still had one more morning to get through, just like any other morning.
The morning when they were not yet witnesses.
Not yet brave.
Not yet news.
They were just five waste-picker kids.
And as usual, they had to wake up before sunrise.
Because on Garbage Mountain, whoever gets there first gets it.
Even when it came to something someone else had thrown away.