Chapter 2 - The Echo That Followed Her to Campus

Rimba hadn't slept. The faint shadow under his right eye was proof enough that he'd spent half the night up in the mixing room, pinned to his monitor, replaying the same rough demo track from a scrappy indie band called Midnight Frequency over and over.

So when he spotted Michiko Arunika Suryokusumo crossing the corridor of the Swasemesta Conservatory that morning, his sleep-starved brain went ahead and drew a very interesting line between two dots.

One more inch, and Michi might genuinely have hurled a five-hundred-page music history textbook straight at his face.

The eight o'clock sunlight that usually made the campus corridor feel warm and unhurried had, without warning, turned into the coldest battlefield on earth. Michi stood with perfect posture as always—clean cream cardigan, gray knee-length midi skirt, black hair pinned into a bun without a single flyaway. On the outside, she was the picture of a graceful model student. Inside her head? Alarm bells were shrieking without pause.

Less than three hours ago, she'd peeled off her black bomber jacket, wiped away the sweat from a set with Midnight Frequency, and rubbed pain relief cream into her aching wrists—only to have to strap the "Michiko the Classical Pianist" mask back on before sunrise. And now this disheveled man in a flannel shirt was standing less than half a meter away, wearing a crooked smile—the smile of someone running on no sleep and far too much dangerous curiosity.

"You're spacing out, Arunika," the baritone voice cut through her thoughts, rough with the particular hoarseness of someone who'd been up all night. "Or did your aristocratic ears go deaf after a full night of practice, so much that you can't recognize an honest rhythm when it's playing somewhere outside your comfort zone of Bach and Chopin?"

Rimba had his arms crossed, leaning against a corridor pillar with a paper coffee cup in his left hand. His sharp eyes tracked her without blinking, as if he were testing for some micro-reaction on her face—hunting for a connection between the stiffest classical pianist on campus and the metronome-disciplined snare hits that had haunted him all night.

Michi blinked slowly, drawing a deep breath to steady a heartbeat that had briefly spiked. She slid on her thin, professional smile—the falsest one in her entire arsenal.

"I listen very well, Maestro," Michi replied. Her voice came out calm, controlled, cold as ice. "I simply don't have time to entertain conspiracy theories about some random demo you picked up off an underground forum. If there's nothing important about our coursework, please step aside. My harmony class starts in ten minutes."

Rimba didn't budge. If anything, he tilted his head slightly, studying the way she stood. The smell of old score paper, bitter coffee, and a faint trace of mint drifted off him. His sharp eyes dropped to her hand gripping her bag strap—to the way her slender fingers had curled stiff, a defensive reflex that would have slipped past anyone else's notice.

"That demo isn't a conspiracy theory, Michi," Rimba said quietly, his voice deliberately lowered so only the two of them could hear it. "The band's called Midnight Frequency. Their arrangement's a mess, but the drumming on the third track... is interesting. There's a metronomic consistency you don't get from some suburban bar band. Whoever's behind that kit has the discipline of a classically trained musician, but hits like they've got a street kid's temper."

The blood in Michi's body felt like it had drained straight down to her heels. Her throat went dry all at once, as if a shard of glass had lodged itself there.

He's noticing details that small? Michi thought, horrified.

Even so, Michi was a master at burying panic. She forced her facial muscles to stay relaxed, then met Rimba's probing stare with a light furrow of her brow—the picture of natural, mild confusion.

"Is that so?" Michi replied, her tone flat and unnervingly calm. "Maybe the band just happens to have a broken metronome in their studio, or they got lucky one night. Why are you so obsessed with an amateur band anyway, Rimba? Isn't your own orchestral piece for finals still sitting untouched on the dean's desk?"

A clean, fairly lethal hit. Rimba's eyes flickered for a moment, betraying that her words had landed exactly where it hurt. Instead of anger, though, the corner of his mouth curved upward into a thin smile, full of secrets.

"Good," Rimba murmured. "Hold onto that defense of yours, Arunika. Let's see how long you can stay ice-cold once the dean's office announces the details of our collaboration project next week."

Before Rimba could fire off anything more irritating, the ten-minute warning bell rang out sharply through every corner of the conservatory. The sound saved Michi from a psychological interrogation that had been steadily eroding the edges of her sanity.

Michi lifted her chin as high as it would go. "There's the bell, Maestro. If you keep standing in my way, I will report you to the academic office for deliberately disrupting a model student's concentration."

Without waiting for a reply, Michi stepped past him with a walk so gracefully measured—not too fast, not too slow—that no one would have guessed she'd just spent the last five minutes walking a tightrope over a canyon.

But the moment she turned the corner into the west wing and threw herself behind the heavy door of the harmony theory classroom, Michi sagged back against it, eyes squeezed shut, dragging in as much air as she could to keep her lungs from bursting.

He doesn't know, Michi told herself, trying to still the tremor in her fingertips. He's only suspicious about the playing style, not about me. I'm still safe.

Inside the classroom, which smelled of old wood and archived dust, a handful of students were already seated. Michi walked to the middle row, pulled out a wooden chair with a soft scrape, and sat down with her usual flawless, straight-backed posture. She laid out her black leather notebook and fountain pen on the desk, trying to focus on the lines of ink in front of her.

A few minutes later, the classroom door opened again.

A disheveled figure in a black flannel shirt strolled in with careless, unbothered ease, radiating an arrogance that instantly stole the attention of half the room. Rimba walked in a straight line without glancing anywhere else, and chose to sit exactly two rows behind Michi.

Michi could feel his gaze needling into her back the entire class—a constant reminder that this game of cat and mouse had only just begun, and that she would need to be far more careful if she didn't want her mask shattered into pieces.