Bridge of Shadows

The camera bag was heavier than it looked, and I was already regretting the second lens.

"Eight minutes," Draco said from the driver's seat. He had one hand on the wheel of the Hino and the other holding his phone up to the windshield, recording the road ahead. The speedometer needle hovered at forty. "Eight minutes of footage. That's what you promised the channel."

"I promised eight minutes of *usable* footage." I checked the battery indicator on the Sony. Ninety-one percent. The cold would eat it faster than I'd calculated. "There's a difference."

He made that sound, the one that wasn't quite a laugh. The Hino's engine rumbled under us like something alive and bored, a 2019 model with a rebuilt transmission and a dent in the passenger door that Draco refused to explain. We'd bought it three weeks ago from a man in Bekasi who'd used it to haul palm oil and had never once asked why two foreigners wanted a truck with a cracked windshield and a working radio.

The bridge appeared in the headlights at 7:52 PM.

I'd read about it. Everyone had. The Suramadu, 5,438 meters of concrete and cable stretching across the Madura Strait, the longest bridge in Indonesia, though that wasn't the number that mattered. The number that mattered was 1,082. The meters of the central span. The part where the cables sang in the wind and the water below turned black and the streetlights flickered in a pattern that engineers had been trying to fix for years.

"Jam delapan malam," I said. "Waktu Indonesia Tengah. We're early."

"Early is good." Draco adjusted the rearview mirror. In it, I could see the camera rig we'd bolted to the truck bed, a GoPro pointed backward, another pointed at the road, a third aimed at us through the windshield. Three angles. Three chances to catch something worth uploading. "Early means we get the establishing shot."

The establishing shot. Right. That was the excuse we'd given ourselves, the one we'd whispered to each other in the dark of our rented room in Surabaya while the call to prayer echoed from a dozen minarets and I pretended not to notice how his hand rested inches from mine on the mattress. The establishing shot. The bridge at night. The empty lanes. The way the lights stretched into the distance like something you could walk on if you were brave enough or stupid enough.

I wasn't brave. I was something else. Something that had spent six years running from a war that ended before I was born and a name that meant nothing here, in this country, on this bridge, in this truck with a boy whose family had done worse things than mine and somehow come out the other side with less damage.

"Ready?" Draco asked.

I wasn't. But I said yes.

He pulled onto the bridge at 7:54.

---

The first two minutes were nothing. Asphalt. Streetlights. The distant glow of Madura on the horizon. Draco kept the speed steady, and I kept the camera steady, and the Hino kept its steady rumble, and I thought about how strange it was that fear could feel so much like boredom.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm concentrating."

"You're thinking about something else."

I didn't answer. He was right, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

The bridge was emptier than I'd expected. A few cars passed us going the other way, headlights cutting through the dark like they had somewhere to be. A motorbike with three people on it, none of them wearing helmets. A bus with its interior lights on, passengers pressed against the windows like they were watching us, though they couldn't have been. We were just a truck. A truck with cameras bolted to it, but still just a truck.

"At the 800-meter mark," Draco said, "we start the ritual."

The ritual. That's what we called it. Not because we believed in it, but because the channel needed a hook, and "two guys drive across a bridge at night" wasn't a hook. "Two guys drive across a haunted bridge at night and perform a ritual that's supposed to summon something" was a hook. Never mind that the ritual was something I'd made up in a fever dream three weeks ago, a mix of half-remembered Latin and Indonesian phrases I'd found on a forum dedicated to urban legends. Never mind that we'd never tested it. Never mind that the only thing we were likely to summon was a traffic ticket.

"800 meters," I repeated. "Got it."

The wind picked up. I could hear it through the cracked window, a high whine that made the cables hum. The bridge was supposed to be beautiful. That's what the travel blogs said. A marvel of engineering. A symbol of connection between Java and Madura. But at night, with the water invisible below and the lights flickering in that pattern, it felt less like a bridge and more like a throat.

"You feel that?" Draco asked.

"Feel what?"

"The vibration. It's different."

I hadn't noticed. But now that he said it, I did. The Hino's engine had changed pitch, a subtle shift that made my teeth ache. The steering wheel trembled under Draco's hands. The cameras on the truck bed rattled in their mounts.

"It's the bridge," I said. "It's designed to move."

"Designed to move," he repeated. "That's comforting."

"We're at 600 meters. Two hundred to go."

He nodded. His jaw was tight, the way it got when he was pretending not to be scared. I'd seen that jaw in a dozen places: a courtroom in London, a hospital in Jakarta, the back of a taxi at 3 AM when we'd both been too drunk to admit we didn't want to go home. I'd seen that jaw and I'd wanted to touch it and I'd never once let myself.

The lights flickered. All of them. At once.

The camera beeped. Battery low.

"Shit," I said.

"What?"

"Battery. I thought it was at ninety percent."

"Check it."

I pulled the camera off the mount and looked at the screen. The battery indicator was red. Not low. Empty. But that was impossible. I'd charged it before we left. I'd watched the little light turn green.

"It's dead," I said.

"Then use the backup."

"The backup's in the bag. In the back."

"Then get it."

I looked at him. He looked at me. The Hino kept moving, 40 kilometers per hour, the bridge stretching ahead of us like a sentence without a period.

"We're at 750 meters," I said. "We can't stop now."

"Then we do the ritual without the camera."

"The whole point is the camera."

"The whole point," he said, "is that we're here. We're on the bridge. At 8 PM. We said we'd do it, and we're doing it."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that the camera was the only thing that made this real, that without it we were just two idiots in a truck, that the channel wouldn't care about our feelings or our fear or the way the bridge hummed like it was waiting for something. But I didn't. Because he was right. We were here. The bridge was under us. The night was around us.

And the lights were flickering again.

"800 meters," Draco said.

I put the dead camera on the dashboard. It stared at me like an eye that had given up.

"Begin the ritual," I said.

He reached over and took my hand. His fingers were cold. Mine were colder.

And the Hino's engine died.