Chapter 40 - The Wreckage of a Melody

The stage spotlights, blazing bright only moments before, now felt like they were scorching Michi's skin as she stumbled backstage, breath coming ragged, her legs barely steady enough to carry her off the small platform. The neon mask that had been circling her face slipped off on its own, clattering onto the dirty cement floor. Genta and Bimo greeted her with wide, triumphant grins after pulling off that last encore, but their smiles froze instantly at the sight of the drummer's face, drained white, looking as though she'd just seen a ghost.

"Chi? What's wrong? Are you sick?" Genta asked, panicked, gripping Michi's violently trembling shoulders, his voice barely audible over the crowd still chanting for one more song.

Michi didn't answer. She gently brushed off Genta's hand, turned around, and pushed through the crowd of crew members toward the emergency exit where the audience had been standing only moments earlier, her legs moving before her mind had fully caught up. Her eyes scanned every corner of the room, which had already begun to empty out. Nothing. The man in the dark jacket was gone. Rimba had left, taking with him every shattered piece of the pride and the lies she had spent so long trying to protect behind that ferocious drumming rhythm. The entire ride home, cutting through the cold of the Yogyakarta night, Michi's tears fell without any way to stop them. Inside her backpack, the wood-carved pair of drumsticks that had once been her source of freedom now felt like a sharp blade twisting straight into her own chest.

That night became the longest, most suffocating night in Arunika's entire life. The stream of short messages she sent one after another—begging for a chance to explain, apologizing, calling the man's name over and over—was met only with absolute silence. Rimba read her messages, evident from the double blue check marks that changed color, but not a single reply ever came through. She stayed up watching her phone screen well past three in the morning, retyping the same apology a dozen different ways, deleting each one before she could bring herself to send it. And to a man like Rimba Arya Swara, dishonesty was the greatest sin he despised above all else; the exact same rotten wound as his own father's deceit, the one he had always cursed onto every dark score sheet he wrote throughout his childhood.

The next morning, at the Swasemesta Music Conservatory, that bitter reality struck Michi without mercy.

When the composition class period began in the basement studio room, usually warm with creative debate, their shared desk now felt like a dead war zone. The scent of light tobacco and sweet cedar soap that usually drifted off Rimba's jacket had evaporated entirely, leaving behind a cold air that cut straight to the bone. Rimba arrived exactly on time, wearing a dark shirt, his expression completely closed off—cold, rigid, and distant, as though the woman sitting beside him were nothing more than a pocket of empty air. There was no morning greeting, no gentle glance or the usual thin smile. Only an impenetrable wall of ice.

"Rimba," Michi whispered hoarsely, her voice shaking violently. Her fingers gripped the edge of the desk tightly enough to turn her knuckles white, holding back the tears pressing urgently at her throat as the composer sat down without so much as glancing at her once. "We need to talk. About last night... I can explain everything."

Rimba didn't turn his head. He opened his laptop with a jerky, mechanical motion full of restrained fury, then slid a folder containing the final draft of their contemporary orchestral score directly in front of Michi.

"This project is done," Rimba's voice came out cold, entirely without emotion, flat as the edge of a blade of ice slicing through the air. "Your piano part's already complete. You can submit it to Professor Hans yourself. As of this second, our collaboration is off."

The sentence landed with such precision that Michi felt every ounce of oxygen in the room vanish instantly. Rimba felt betrayed on a deeply personal level, not merely over some matter of music, but because the entire foundation of trust he had built had been shattered to pieces by the mask of a liar he had cared for more than anyone else. That threat to cancel their collaboration was no longer a simple bluff; it was a death sentence for Michi's academic future, and at the same time, the beginning of the quietest, most devastating collapse she would have to pay for dearly before her departure for Vienna. She wanted to argue, to grab his sleeve and force him to look at her, but every word she'd rehearsed the night before dried up the second she saw the flat, unreachable look in his eyes.

Outside, the Yogyakarta sky seemed to weep along with her, releasing a thin drizzle that soaked the conservatory grounds. The two weeks she had left before her flight to Austria—time that had once been filled with the pulse of anticipation—now twisted into a small, silent hell. Michi knew that if she left for Vienna carrying this unresolved wound and misunderstanding with her, half of her soul would be left behind here, buried beneath the wreckage of a melody they had failed to save.

She sat alone in the empty studio for a long while after Rimba left, staring at the folder he'd shoved toward her without once looking up. The piano part inside it was flawless, technically speaking—every note exactly where it belonged, every dynamic marking precise. And yet, holding it now, it felt like the emptiest thing she had ever touched, a perfect shell with nothing living left inside it. She thought of every night they'd spent arguing over a single bar until it finally clicked into place, every small victory they'd celebrated together in this same room, and wondered whether any of it could survive what she'd just watched crumble in real time behind a pair of cold, unreadable eyes.