Silent. Dense. Deafening.
Arka blinked slowly. His eyelids felt heavy, as though they had just been smeared with wet cement. The violent wind that had been tearing at his shirt collar was gone. So was the hoarse blare of horns from the distant Slipi toll road. The universe had suddenly been gagged by an invisible giant hand.
He pressed his fingers against the base of his throat, trembling. A pulse. Fast and frantic. Proof that he hadn't yet become a restless ghost drifting through filthy ceiling panels. But... why had everything died?
Arka braced himself on one elbow. He rose slowly. His joints creaked stiffly. And that was when he saw it. An anomaly on a scale that made his stomach feel as though it were being turned inside out at full speed.
The rain hadn't stopped.
The rain had been nailed to the air.
Millions of droplets hung motionless as far as the eye could see, glittering as they reflected the dirty yellow glow of the capital's streetlights, their brightness frozen without a flicker. The sight resembled a colossal curtain of glass beads wrapped around all of Jakarta. The air on this rooftop no longer felt like gas. It was dense. Sticky. Like cold gelatin refusing to be drawn into his lungs.
The metal disc in his right palm twitched faintly. It glowed gold. Its warmth seeped into Arka's muscle tissue, neutralizing the painful throb of the ragged wound that was now closing on its own, leaving behind a faint fractal-shaped scar beneath his skin. The scent of pure ozone and scorched copper gnawed at his nostrils.
"Holy shit..." he breathed.
His voice died right at his lips. It dropped like a block of lead. There was no echo. No reverberation. The acoustic space around him was completely dead.
He extended his left index finger. Hesitantly, he touched a droplet the size of a corn kernel directly in front of his eye. Cold. So sharp it burned his nerve endings. The droplet didn't burst and wet his skin. Its surface flexed for a moment under his touch, then sprang back to its original coordinates when he pulled his finger away. The water had just been stripped of its nature as a liquid.
Paranoia seized the base of his skull. Arka stepped forward. He stumbled. He pushed through the curtain of raindrops before him as though crossing a thorny thicket. Strangely, the droplets shifted aside, opening a path for his body when the glow from the metal artifact touched them, then closed ranks again behind his back. This thing was protecting him from the stasis taking place.
He reached the edge of the roof—the place where, five minutes ago, he had intended to smash his own skull.
He peered down.
The city was... in a coma. At a red-light intersection three blocks away, a massive cargo truck had stopped dead. Its black exhaust hung in the air like a clump of dirty cotton that had failed to disperse. On the opposite sidewalk, a street-side fried rice vendor stood frozen. The rice he had tossed from his spatula had stopped at the peak of its arc, floating eternally above the rigid, smoking iron wok. Even a sparrow that had accidentally flown beneath a building's ledge was now suspended in the air, its wings spread asymmetrically.
It wasn't only gravity that had been stopped tonight. Time was being shackled right at its heart.
Arka tightened his grip on the artifact. His breathing shortened. His eyes frantically scanned every corner of this breathless landscape. All this time, he had always begged the world to stop demanding things from him. He had always wanted people to stop hounding him with their toxic expectations. And tonight... atop a shabby concrete altar reeking of urine... the universe had granted his wish in the most unimaginable way.
Time had gone down on its knees before him.
"So this is what it feels like..." Arka chuckled. Hollow. Bitter. His eyes reddened as he held back an explosion of emotions too complicated for his tear ducts to translate. "All it takes is threatening to jump... to make the whole world shut up?"
He tipped his head back and stared at the starless sky. The frozen rain above resembled counterfeit stars laughing at his misfortune since morning.
The despair that had been so dense and absolute began to peel away. It fell like filthy grime. The emptiness inside his chest was suddenly filled by something far darker. More primordial. A thirst for power born prematurely from the womb of trauma. A spark of arrogance he had buried for decades beneath the ridiculous label of being a 'good person.'
His lips curved into a thin smile. An asymmetrical smile he had never shown Naya, Rian, or his uncle.
If he could stop the ticking of the clock in this vicious world that loved to trample him... why bother dying?