At first, it had been the factory manager yelling at her and the other workers to go back to work, promising to forgive and forget once the machines were running again. When that hadn’t worked—mainly because Darmana knew that retaliation would follow and told her coworkers that—the management sent strikebreakers. There were some minor scuffles, but many of her neighbors who’d come to watch the drama had cell phones. The strikebreakers were, too, clearly villains, and if it got onto social media, then corporate stocks would drop.

Darmana was not deeply educated, but she was savvy. She understood the power of social media. She had her cousin’s cell phone, and she raised it as the corporate man and the tougher-looking man in black approached her.

They came right up to her and stopped only a few feet away, with the one who looked like a soldier a pace back. The corporate man stopped so close that Darmana could have reached out and touched him. She tried to stop the hand holding the cell phone from trembling, but she was too frightened. It was hard to say who frightened her more—the corporate man who could fire her and everyone else here, or the man in black.

There was something awful about him. He was taller than the well-dressed man and much taller than she was. He looked to be over six feet, with broad shoulders and a powerful build. A white man with maybe a bit of West African blood. Handsome, in his way, except for the eyes. They were as cold and dead as stones.

The corporate man broke the silence. He spoke Indonesian with an accent that she could not place. Not American. Maybe German? She wasn’t sure.

“My name is Michael Augustus Stafford,” he said. “Your name is Darmana, right? You are the leader of this little protest.”

It wasn’t a question, so Darmana merely waited for more.

“What you are doing is hurting business,” said Michael Augustus Stafford. “It’s hurting your friends and coworkers. Surely, you understand that you’ve already lost much in wages that you’ll never be able to recoup. How is that helping any of you?”

“You’re paying starvation wages,” she said, trying to keep fear out of her voice.

“No one here is fainting from hunger,” said Stafford. He managed a smile that showed very good teeth. His breath, however, stank of cigars and whiskey.

Darmana didn’t even bother to reply to that. Everyone who worked at the factory was stick thin. She had two children at home, the oldest of whom would soon leave school at age twelve to work right alongside her mother. Her daughter told her that she dreamed they were all dead and the town was filled with pecong—ghosts who were stuck in their shrouds. Only the factory was a big shroud in which all of the ghosts worked forever and ever.