Cesar.

On Sundays, César takes the Honda CG125 — secondhand, black, rust on the exhaust — and rides to FRIM, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia. Twenty minutes by motorbike from his neighborhood. The tropical forest that begins where the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur end: trails between giant dipterocarps, tree ferns, cicadas that don't stop even in the rain.

Once he found fresh leopard prints in the mud on the trail. Hind prints, retractable claws not visible, trilobed pad. A melanistic leopard had passed through hours earlier. César crouched down, studied the tracks for ten minutes. Didn't take a photo. He stayed still, listening. The forest was quiet — a sign that the animal wasn't far.

He went back the following week. And the week after. He's never seen it. But every time, fresh tracks in different places.

What César looks for on those trails isn't the leopard. Or not only. It's the kind of silence that doesn't exist in SS2 even at midnight, when the cicadas in the wasteland are still going and the stray dogs bark at irregular intervals. In FRIM the silence has a different texture: that of a large animal deciding not to show itself.

Priya once pointed out a fifty-meter dipterocarp and gave him the approximate age of the tree. César doesn't remember the number. He remembers thinking that that trunk had been there longer than any building in Kuala Lumpur. There's a difference between knowing something and feeling it when you look up at a canopy you can't take in with a single glance.

When he comes back from the forest, the motorbike smells of wet earth and foliage. If it's rained — and in an equatorial climate it rains almost every afternoon — the tires bring red mud from the trail. He cleans it off on the pavement below the block before going up to 7B. Sometimes he stays a while looking at the street from the parked bike, helmet still on, not quite ready to go inside. The neighborhood sounds different after FRIM. Faster. Flatter.