The pungent scent of antiseptic and intravenous saline dominated the sterile, stark-white air of the district hospital ward. Propped up against hospital pillows, Rian and Maya lay pale and hollow-eyed, plastic oxygen cannulas resting beneath their noses. Heavy, multi-layered woolen blankets still swaddled their frames to combat the lingering chill of severe hypothermia.

The wooden door of the recovery room creaked open slowly. A weary-looking senior police officer with graying hair, Inspector Hendra, stepped inside accompanied by two uniformed deputies. Deep exhaustion etched every line of the officer's face.

"Rian... Maya... are you both feeling steady enough to talk?" Inspector Hendra asked in a gentle, hushed tone, pulling up a small plastic chair to sit beside the bed.

Maya kept her gaze locked blankly on the hospital ceiling. Her lips trembled as single, silent tears tracked down her hollow cheeks. "They... they're never coming back, Inspector..." she rasped, her voice barely rising above a whisper.

"We are doing everything humanly possible, kids," Inspector Hendra replied patiently. He rested a brown manila folder atop the bedside cabinet. "A massive search and rescue operation has been rolling since yesterday morning. Combined SAR teams, dozens of local volunteers, and tracking dogs have been deployed across Mount Aruna. But... we've hit a massive wall."

Rian, who had been lying with his eyes closed under heavy, labored breaths, slowly rolled his head to lock eyes with the detective. "What kind of wall, Inspector? Couldn't the SAR teams find our trail from yesterday?"

"It’s not just rough terrain, Rian," Inspector Hendra said, his brow furrowing deep. "For a full week, the SAR units scoured every registered checkpoint. But the field commander's report states that the tracking dogs kept circling back to the exact same spot—a dead forest zone along the eastern ridge that isn't listed anywhere on official Mount Aruna maps. That trail doesn't exist in any conservation documents."

Rian clenched his fists tight beneath the blankets. His heart hammered violently against his ribs as the memory of the death canyon and the phantom market rushed back. "It’s not on the map, Inspector... because that place was never meant for human climbers..."

Inspector Hendra exhaled a heavy sigh, not fully grasping the weight of Rian’s words, though he understood that the psychological trauma gripping the two survivors was profound. He opened the brown folder.

"Today, considering the safety of the volunteer teams and the complete lack of physical leads, the official SAR operation is being called off," Inspector Hendra announced with a tone of heavy regret. "The rescue squads only managed to recover a handful of personal belongings left behind by your friends up on the mountain."

Rian and Maya felt as though daggers had been driven straight into their chests. The official search was over. That meant Gani, Dika, and Sita were officially classified as permanently missing.

"What items did you find, sir?" Rian choked out.

"The SAR teams recovered Dika’s torn backpack deep in the brush, along with Sita’s jacket snagged high up on an extremely treacherous rock cliff near the summit," Inspector Hendra explained. "What has completely baffled the rescue crew is that Sita’s jacket was found on a vertical precipice impossible for any human to scale without professional climbing gear. And tragically... there were no physical traces of the three of them anywhere near it."

Maya buried her face in her hands, her sobs breaking open to fill the sterile hospital room. "Gani... Dika... Sita..." she wept in bitter agony.

Inspector Hendra stood, offering Rian’s shoulder a gentle, empathetic pat. "Get some rest, you both need to heal. We will monitor the situation should any new developments arise."

As dusk settled over the base of Mount Aruna that same evening, the main SAR command post began tearing down its tents. Volunteers packed away gear, rolled up sleeping bags, and boxed up remaining rations.

Amidst the hurried packing, a young volunteer named Bayu was sorting through climbing gear evacuated from the final extraction point near the summit. As he emptied the contents of a recovery rucksack, his fingers brushed against something hard buried deep inside the outer pouch, which was caked in dried, caked-on mud.

"Huh? What's this?" Bayu muttered, tugging out a small, black rectangular device.

He wiped away the crust of mud caked across its surface. "An action camera... looks like it belonged to one of the victims."

Bayu carried the camera over to the basecamp table illuminated by a dim overhead lamp, extracting the tiny MicroSD memory card from its slot. He slotted it into a card reader hooked up to the operation laptop to check if any visual logs survived to aid the ongoing investigation.

The post commander, Pak Joko, stepped closer to peer over Bayu’s shoulder. "Check it, Bay. Maybe there's video footage from when they got turned around up there."

Bayu clicked open the DCIM folder on the screen. A single short video file sat inside with a corrupted, distorted timestamp—logged dead in the middle of the night, long before the rescue teams had reached those elevations.

"That's weird... this file was just generated," Bayu muttered, double-clicking the play button.

The laptop screen flickered to life, displaying low-resolution footage shot in near-total darkness. There was no mountain trail visible, no cliffside backdrop, no search and rescue operation.

The screen revealed only pitch-black darkness contained within the tight confines of fabric walls—a zipped-up dome tent.

Amidst a dim, pulsing red glow, three human faces slowly drifted forward, looming close to the camera lens.

Dika, Sita, and Gani.

The faces of the three friends looked utterly washed out, stripped of any trace of life, their unblinking eyes locked in a piercing, dead stare straight into the lens. They sat huddled in a tight circle within the pitch-black tent, surrounded by a freezing alpine draft that billowed thick clouds of ice vapor from their open mouths.

Bayu and Pak Joko jerked back in shock, goosebumps erupting across their skin at the sight.

On screen, Dika slowly drifted closer to the camera until his pupil-less, milky-white eyes filled the entire display. And from the laptop’s tinny speakers, a chilling, unified whisper bled out—spoken by all three of them in a cold, flat, dual-resonant drone:

"You left us behind..."

Slam!

Pak Joko panicked, violently snapping the laptop lid shut to cut off the horrifying whisper. The commander’s chest heaved with ragged breaths, cold sweat beading across his brow as he stared at Bayu in sheer horror.

Outside the command post, the mountain wind howled fiercely through the soaring pine canopy, carrying with it the lingering whispers confirming that those who had vanished up on the peak would never truly come home.