Chapter 1

Sunday, 12:41. The first gallery of Borobudur Temple.

Karl raised the scanner toward the stone wall and waited for his tablet to answer. For four days he had chased a single number all the way from Palo Alto, including a seventeen-hour flight across the Pacific. The number refused to appear. In the corner of the screen sat just three words, Reference data corrupted.

Behind him, a girl in an oversized grey hoodie stood with her hands in her pockets.

“You have been standing in front of this for ten minutes,” the girl said, “and you haven’t looked at it once.”

Six days earlier, that girl had only Rp 75,400 to her name.

On that Monday night, the laptop screen cast a cold white glow across Ceria’s face. It was 23:14. Across the display, lines of Python code for her Basic Algorithms assignment sat in neat rows. Clean. Logical.

if... else...

Simple conditional logic. If A is true, execute B.

At nineteen, Ceria wished life worked that cleanly.

Inside her tiny boarding-house room, logic had broken down. The air hung stuffy and stale, a faint mix of unwashed laundry and the leftover broth of that afternoon’s instant noodles. Outside, a light drizzle fell and the sputter of a Yogyakarta motorized pedicab passed down the lane, far from the Jakarta neighborhood where she had grown up.

Her fingers, nimble over the keyboard while debugging code, hovered hesitantly above the touchpad before moving to the phone beside her laptop.

She tapped the mobile banking icon. The camera scanned her face. The balance appeared.

Rp 75,400

The breath she had been holding slipped out of her lungs.

Ceria started calculating. It had become a nightly ritual.

One nineteen-liter water gallon refill, Rp 19,000, non-negotiable. Instant noodles for three meals a day, Rp 21,000. That left Rp 35,400, enough to stretch across three days, or four if she ate twice a day.

Yet those numbers were a lie. They were a distraction. Another number loomed over the room, far larger, and it did not show up on the banking screen.

Rp 500,000.

Her monthly room rent. Due tomorrow. And Ceria knew down to the minute what tomorrow morning would bring. The landlady would no longer send WhatsApp reminders. She would pound on the door with her knuckles.

Ceria set the phone down. Her eyes drifted back to the Python script on her monitor. Logic stopped working.

Right then her phone vibrated hard against the thin wooden desk, a harsh buzz that filled the quiet room.

Her heart jumped. The landlady? This late at night?

She snatched up the phone. The name on the screen was not a threat.

Mama.

Ceria cleared her throat once, then twice, chasing the tremor out of her vocal cords. She forced a smile no one would see because her voice needed the shape of it, then swiped the green icon.

“Assalamualaikum, Ma.”

“Waalaikumsalam, C!” Her mother’s voice came through crisp and full of life. The sound of home. “Still awake? You’re rarely up this late.”

“Oh, yeah, Ma. Just finishing a coding assignment.” Her eyes flicked to the laptop screen. It was the only honest sentence she could speak tonight.

“No wonder. So how’s everything going? Classes going smoothly? You’re doing okay over there, right? Staying healthy?”

That question again. Ceria glanced up at the two remaining packets of instant noodles on the shelf. She pictured the landlady’s fist hammering on her door tomorrow morning.

“I’m good, Ma.” She kept her voice as level as she could manage. “Really good. Everything… everything is fine.”

A brief silence fell on the line. Then her mother’s voice softened with relief. “Thank goodness…”

Mama paused for a beat before her tone brightened again. “Mama is so proud of you, C. Truly. A girl brave enough to study in another city, majoring in IT no less. That’s wonderful.” She gave a soft laugh. “Your Papa up there must be so proud watching you.”

Papa was gone, and “up there” in Mama’s mouth always meant that place. A single tear slipped free. Just one, salty at the corner of her lip.

“Back when you were learning to walk,” Mama went on, her voice gentle, “whenever you tumbled onto the floor tiles, you never cried. You burst out laughing instead. Always cheerful, ceria, just like your name.”

“Yeah, Ma,” Ceria whispered, her throat raspy.

“All right then, get to bed. Don’t push yourself too hard. And remember to eat properly!”

“I will, Ma. For sure. Take care of yourself over there too, Ma.”

The call ended. The phone screen went dark.

The three-by-three-meter room fell silent again.

Always cheerful.

Ceria bowed her head. A tear dropped onto the touchpad, blurring the reflected glow of her tidy Python code. She wiped it off with her sleeve and pressed Ctrl+S. In the corner of the screen, the clock ticked over to 23:41.

The code could wait until morning. The landlady would not.