---
The second week was heavier than the first.
Not because the work had grown — the work had been a lot from the first day, Zayriel had never pretended it would be otherwise. But the first week had novelty to it, had the adrenaline of being new that made the mind more alert than usual, had a reason to come early and stay late without feeling truly tired.
The second week had no novelty anymore.
What it had was only work, and the way Zayriel's operation ran — files that came without mentioned deadlines but with understood ones, meetings rescheduled with twenty minutes' notice, the way he placed something on my desk without saying anything and left in the way of someone who knew it would be done by the time he needed it.
I did it. Everything was finished. Always on time.
But there was a price paid for being on time — and that price was called the tiredness I carried back to the car every afternoon, tiredness that sat in my body like something physical with weight and position.
"You okay?"
*Syahmi*. The desk to the right, his third coffee of the day, with a face that said he had been noticing something since a while ago but had only just asked.
"Fine." I didn't look up from my screen. "Just a bit tired."
"The second week is always like that." He leaned back in his chair. "The first week you're still in impress-everyone mode. The second week you start feeling the actual weight of the job."
I turned to look at him.
*Syahmi* raised his shoulders — the way of someone saying something they knew was true and right but didn't want to look like they knew. "Farhana was the same. The second week her face was like — " he made a dramatically tired face " — but by the third week she was fine."
"Did you know Farhana long?"
"Over two years." *Syahmi* turned his chair slightly toward me. "She's fine as a person. Neat, efficient, knew how to work with *En.* Zayriel."
"Why did she leave?"
*Syahmi* was quiet for a moment — not the quiet of someone who didn't know the answer. The quiet of someone deciding how much of the answer to give.
"She said she wanted to rest." Short. Then he turned back to his screen. "But Farhana isn't the resting type."
I looked at my screen again.
The sentence sat in my mind in the way certain sentences sat — not loud, not intrusive, but there. Staying. With a small weight that didn't ask permission.
*Farhana isn't the resting type.*
---
*Haziq* from the IT department came to my desk after two.
I saw him from a distance first — tall, casual in a way that was different from the casual of ordinary office people, with a smile that arrived before he reached his destination. He placed his laptop beside my desk, sat in the empty chair beside it, and started talking in the way of someone who never felt awkward with new people.
"*Haziq*. IT." He extended his hand. "You're the new one right? Sorry for the late introduction — I was out of town for a week."
"*Aina*." I smiled. "It's fine."
"Your laptop has a slight issue — *En.* Zayriel asked me to check it." He opened my laptop in a professional way but there was something in how he sat, in how he leaned slightly toward the screen that reduced the distance between us, casual in a way that wasn't aware of itself.
"Will it take long?" I asked.
"Just a bit." He typed something, eyes on the screen. "How long have you been here?"
"Second week."
"Still okay?" He glanced at me briefly — with a smile that was in his eyes too, not only at his lips.
"Ask me after the third week."
He laughed. I laughed.
And in the ordinary laughter, in the ordinary conversation, in the ordinary working distance between two people who had just met —
I noticed something.
Silence.
Not the room's silence. A different silence — the kind of silence that happened when something stopped.
The sound of the keyboard from the room at the end.
That had been there since morning. That existed in the background of the entire day like the sound of the air conditioning or the office lights. That I hadn't realised I was aware of until it was absent.
Stopped.
I didn't turn toward the door of the room at the end. I didn't let myself turn.
But I felt — in a way that had no scientific name but was genuinely there — the feeling of being watched from a direction that wasn't moving.
"Done." *Haziq* closed my laptop. "Nothing major, just settings." He stood, took his laptop. "If anything else comes up, just ping me."
"Okay. Thank you."
He walked away.
And three seconds later — only three seconds, enough time for *Haziq* to move away from my desk — the sound of the keyboard from the room at the end started again.
Slowly at first.
Then returning to its normal pace.
Like something that had been briefly interrupted and decided to continue.
I looked at my screen. Typed. Worked.
And in my mind, in the part that had learned to store certain things without processing them — I stored this too.
The sound that stopped.
Three seconds.
Then came back.
---
In the afternoon, in the pantry, *Hana* and I stood with our respective cups waiting for the hot water.
Ordinary conversation — the weekend, plans, a new food stall *Hana* had found near the office. And in that ordinary conversation, in the way of talking between people who were starting to feel comfortable with each other —
I didn't know how it came out.
"This bracelet," I said, half to myself, half to *Hana* — my hand rising to my wrist without realising it. "There's a small symbol on one of the beads. Like an engraving. I only noticed it last week."
*Hana* looked at the bracelet. "Oh how pretty. Is it antique?"
"Passed down." I turned the bracelet slowly at my wrist — and in that movement, in the way the pantry light fell from above, the symbol on the first bead was visible for a moment. Not clearly. Not enough to describe precisely. But there — like lines that crossed in a way that had purpose, like something that if you knew how to read it you would know what it said.
"Pretty," *Hana* said again. Then the hot water was ready and she poured it into her cup and the conversation shifted to other things.
I poured hot water into my cup.
And in the small mirror on the pantry wall — a mirror placed there to ensure the door didn't collide with anyone from the blind corner — I saw the reflection of the pantry door that was half open.
And beyond that door — in the corridor that should have had people passing through at a time like this — a figure stood.
Not moving.
Too far to see clearly in that small mirror. But close enough for me to know it was there.
And close enough for me to know — from the way it stood, from the set of its shoulders, from the way it existed in that corridor in the way of someone not passing through but standing with purpose —
it was Zayriel.
I turned around.
The corridor was empty.
*Hana* was still talking about the new food stall, cup in hand, not seeing what I had just seen or not seen or perhaps wrongly seen in the small mirror that couldn't be fully trusted.
I smiled at *Hana*.
Stepped out of the pantry.
And stopped for a moment in the corridor — looking left, looking right, toward the end where Zayriel's room was with its door half open as always.
The sound of the keyboard was coming from inside.
Controlled. As usual. As though nothing had happened.
I walked to my desk.
Sat.
Opened a file.
And noticed that the hand holding my coffee cup was not quite steady.
---
Before leaving, I went to *Syahmi*'s desk to return the stapler I had borrowed earlier.
*Syahmi* was there, *Hana* was there, *Dina* had left early. Small conversation — weekend plans, whether or not, *Syahmi* who always had plans and *Hana* who always said she'd join but always cancelled.
"*Haziq* wants to hang out tomorrow," *Syahmi* mentioned, casually, to no one in particular. "He asked if *Aina* wants to join or not."
I opened my mouth to answer —
"*Aina* has something on tomorrow."
A voice from a direction I hadn't expected.
Everyone turned.
Zayriel stood at the door of his room — jacket already in hand, bag on shoulder, ready to leave. His eyes on me. Not on *Syahmi*. Not on *Hana*.
On me.
"Right?" he said.
One word. In an ordinary tone. In an ordinary way. With everything on the surface looking ordinary.
But there was something in the way he said *right* — in the way his eyes were on me, in the way the sentence came out before I could answer for myself — that wasn't ordinary. That was too personal for a professional boss. That had something in it I couldn't name precisely but that felt like —
not a question.
Not a reminder.
Something deeper than both of those and darker than I wanted to sit with for too long.
I smiled.
"Yes. I have something on."
Zayriel nodded once. Turned. Walked to the lift with unhurried steps, in the way he always walked, with shoulders that carried no tension anyone could read from outside.
The lift door opened. Closed. He was gone.
*Syahmi* looked at me with one eyebrow raised.
"What something?" he asked, slowly, in a tone that said he knew there was no something.
I picked up my bag.
"Something." I smiled at him. "Tomorrow."
I walked out of the office with steps I made sure weren't hurried — in the way of someone walking when they didn't want to look like they were running.
---
In the lift, alone, I stood with the lift mirror in front of me and my own face that I wasn't really looking at.
*Right.*
One word.
I tried to put it in a safe category — an overprotective boss, someone who cared too much, the Malay way that sometimes involved itself in other people's matters without ill intent.
It fit.
All those categories fit.
But there was something that didn't fit — something smaller than all those categories, that sat beneath all the reasonable explanations, saying —
he knew *Haziq* had asked.
Before *Syahmi* mentioned it.
Before I could answer.
He knew.
The lift reached the ground floor.
The door opened.
I stepped out into a night that had already gone dark and a wind that had already gone cold and my car parked in the same place as always — with everything ordinary around me, with everything that should have made me feel normal —
and the bracelet at my wrist went cold.
Slow. Deep.
In the way I recognised.
---
That night I sat at my desk with the bracelet in front of me.
Taken off my wrist for the first time in — I didn't remember how long. Laid straight on the surface of the desk. Under the brightest bedroom light I had.
I looked at it.
Small wooden beads. A red string. A neat fastening at the end made in the way of hands that knew what they were making.
And the symbol on each bead — clearer now, in the right light, in a way I had never seen before because I had never looked at it this way before.
Not decorative engravings.
Each symbol was different from the one before — not random, not a repeating pattern, but different in the way each letter in a sentence was different. Arranged from left to right, from the first bead to the last, in a sequence that only looked right when the bracelet was laid out like this.
Like it was a sentence.
Like it had always been a sentence — from the first day it was at my wrist, from the first day *Tok Wan* wore it, from years before I was born — and no one had ever read it because no one had ever laid it straight under a light and looked.
I leaned closer.
The first symbol — two lines crossing at the centre, with one point above and one below. Like a compass that wasn't pointing in the right direction. Like something that was pointing at two places at once.
The second symbol — an incomplete circle, open at one corner, with three small lines coming out from that opening. Like something that had almost closed but hadn't.
The third symbol —
My phone vibrated.
I came back from a state I hadn't realised I had entered — a state that felt as though I had been sitting here longer than I thought, in a silence that felt deeper than the ordinary silence of my room on an ordinary night.
*Haziq*.
*Hey, are you free tomorrow? Wanted to invite you to hang out for a bit. Nothing big, just to lepak.*
I looked at the message.
Then at the bracelet on the desk.
Then at the message again.
Something in my chest shifted — not large, not dramatic, only something small and warm that I couldn't remember the last time I had felt. Like something that had long been sitting in a state of alert suddenly being able to breathe a little.
I typed — *Sure. What time?*
Sent.
Put the bracelet back on.
Lay on the bed with the same ceiling and the same fan and the same walls — but that night everything felt slightly different. Slightly lighter. In the way of something that had long been heavy suddenly having a little room to breathe.
I closed my eyes.
And for the first time in weeks —
the dream didn't come.
At all.
No forest. No sourceless light. No creature at a distance that grew closer every night.
Only sleep.
Only ordinary darkness.
Only rest that I hadn't realised I needed until it was there.
And in that ordinary darkness — in the most normal sleep I'd had in a long time — there was something that didn't know how to sit in this stillness, that moved in the space between aware and unaware, that was neither dream nor reality.
Something that felt like something far away losing control.
Something that felt like something that had been there — that was always there, that I had grown accustomed to even though I had never named it — was suddenly absent.
And in that absence —
a silence different from ordinary silence.
A silence with weight.
A silence that was waiting.
— END OF CHAPTER 5 —