Javier Montejo

  August 27, 2035

  The Smell of Sweat, Regret, and Concrete Ambition

  5:12 A.M. Somewhere high above Makati. The sun isn't up. But he is.

  There is a ghost in the weight room.

  It wears the face of Don Esteban Montejo, patriarch of a dying house. Or maybe it's living in the clank of steel plates that sound too much like resignation. Either way, Javier Montejo doesn't notice. He is benching something manageable, something a man like him should never need a spotter for. Not physically, anyway.

  The gym hums with the sterile breath of pre-dawn electricity. Glass walls reflect his image back at him, not like a mirror but like an accusation. A 28-year-old heir lifting against the gravity of irrelevance. The building around him is a miracle in the loosest, most Catholic sense. Resurrection through debt. It stands like a lie that got too big to collapse. Montejo Heights. One last spasm of relevance before the name disappears from city records and business cards forever.

  And they don't even own the top.

  Three penthouse floors. Given away. Not leased, not mortgaged. Given. To the fixer. The quiet mystery with glowing eyes and fast hands. The man who solved their red tape, soothed contractors, poured capital like oil onto flames.

  In return, he got a crown.

  Javier got a condo floor and a private gym. Air-conditioned. Immaculate. Pointless.

  He switches machines, arms trembling. Ghosts follow.

  Yesterday was a blur of rejection dressed in polite smiles and glassy hotel lighting. He had met up with Isabelle Leong, French-Malaysian, MBA batchmate, and future inheritor of Maison Teratai. A woman who glides like silk and talks like a corporate merger. They had tea that cost more than most people's groceries for a week. She represented her family's empire, now nosing its way into the Philippines like a cat testing the floorboards.

  She liked Javier. Always had. Laughed at his jokes, touched his arm when she spoke. But when it came to business, she laid it out with the softness of a guillotine.

  None of the Montejo lands fit. Not strategically. Not financially. Not even sentimentally. Maison Teratai and their partners wasn't interested in nostalgia or crumbling romanticism. They wanted ports, corridors, numbers that danced. Montejo Holdings had no dance left in them. Just arthritic bones and a decaying rolodex.

  "You're good, Javi," she said, smiling like a eulogy. "But your family's done. You're wasting your talents on them."

  It had landed like a slap. He'd nodded, made a joke, watched her walk away in designer heels like the future itself. Slick. Inevitable. Foreign.

  Now he's back in the gym, dragging that moment behind him like an anchor. His reps get sloppier. The machine whines like it's trying to tell him something in a forgotten dialect of failure.

  He thinks of his father again, yesterday in their Ortigas headquarters. Don Esteban Montejo, sitting at the narra table as if it's a throne and not a coffin. That table had been around since before the first Martial Law. Older than his sense of dignity. It smelled like termite dust and compromise.

  "We'll let the board vote on it," Esteban had said.

  Cavite. The land. The last real thing. A parcel of potential currently posing as trash. But Javier had run the projections, mapped the highways, smelled the breath of future foreign logistics centers brushing just outside its perimeter. In ten years, it would be gold. In a few hours, the board would vote to sell it to the first foreign hand that waved a check.

  A few misguided dalliances with the gods of capital over the past six decades and now they're wilting like a houseplant left under a flickering fluorescent light, bleeding cash like arterial poetry, pawning off haunted paintings and memory-stained golf courses to pay debts owed not to banks, but to time itself. Every fix is a Band-Aid on a collapsing lung, a desperate ritual repeated in boardrooms scented faintly of mildew and regret.

  He pushes the weights harder. A kind of rage now. His body no longer listening. He tries to sweat out the board, Isabelle, his father, the fixer, the penthouse, the narra table, the fact that this gym is lit better than their HQ.

  Then it happens. A twist. A pop. A flash of pain.

  His shoulder screams. Something gives.

  He drops the weight. Metal slams into rubber like a gunshot muffled in velvet. His breath is sharp and stupid. He stares down at his arm like it betrayed him.

  The pain pulses. Real. Punishing. But also clear.

  His body, sculpted like a revenge fantasy, glistens under the LED lights. Broad shoulders stretch with tension, each muscle cut and precise, honed over years of discipline and vanity. His chest rises and falls in shallow bursts, the tight ridges of his abdomen flickering with strain. Veins crawl like rivers across his forearms, still flexed out of habit, beauty trapped in dysfunction. There is a cruel kind of poetry in it. To look like this and still be helpless.

  He sits there for a while, shoulder burning, brain fogged with cortisol and colonial residue. Muscles twitch in protest, a silent chorus of aesthetic perfection reduced to meat. Outside, Makati begins to light up like a crime scene. Somewhere above him, the fixer is probably brewing tea. The kind with ginseng and billion-peso kickbacks.

  Javier leans forward, clutching his shoulder, laughing. Soft at first. Then louder. Like a madman who just remembered what comedy is.

  He stares into the mirrored wall again. The reflection looks tired. Human. Angry.

  Nothing is broken. Or everything is.

  Either way, he's awake now.

  Apolinario "Pol" Guerrero

  August 27, 2035

  The Floor Disappeared, But the View Remained

  A Young Man, A Cigarette, And The Physics of Neoliberalism

  The rain had stopped. Slipped off in the night like a petty thief, leaving only puddles, the smell of concrete rot, and a sky too blue to be trusted. Morning in Manila always arrived suspiciously bright, as if to distract you from whatever broke the night before.

  From the seventy-second floor, the city looked like a lie you could almost believe.

  Pol Guerrero stood near the edge, one foot on rough cement, the other grazing rebar. The air was cool and sharp, kissed with rust and faraway diesel. Below him, the city spilled out in overlapping scars and scaffolds. Binondo buzzed quietly beneath, hidden behind a curtain of haze and ambition. The slums huddled together like secrets no one wanted to own. Condo towers stabbed upward from the chaos, glass teeth chewing on sunlight.

  The building he stood on was one was the biggest yet. Rumored to be the tallest condominium in the city when finished. A place he'd never step foot in again once it opened.

  The bay shimmered in the distance, pretending it wasn't full of trash.

  He liked it up here. Not because it was safe, it wasn't. But it was quiet.

  Pol adjusted his shirt, still damp from where the roof leaked last night. He'd slept in the barracks again. It was an old, often recycled box where the heat is your mistress. You slept with rats for music and cockroaches for company.

  Still, after months of saving up, he had a smartphone now. Prepaid. The dream was alive.

  Toto walked over, carrying a bent steel bar and the same half-dead cigarette he'd been nursing for three days. He had a face that belonged to a man who had seen too much and been paid too little. His safety harness hung loose over one shoulder, unbuckled.

  "Pare, you know what she told me?" Toto said, scratching his stomach. "'Wala kang kwenta, pati kama mo maingay.' Putangina. My own bed. I was just trying to be romantic."

  Pol smiled a little. Toto talked like this every morning. Like he needed to get the words out before they poisoned him.

  "She wasn't wrong though," Toto added. "That bed has seen more action than a jeepney on a Friday. I should charge rent. Or start a loyalty card system. Five stays, one free."

  He laughed, a phlegmy rasp that got caught somewhere in his chest.

  Pol looked at the harness. "You forgot to buckle that again."

  Toto waved him off. "Ayaw nila bigyan ng bago. 'Di raw kailangan kung mabilis lang daw ang trabaho. Wala pang safety line. Tingin mo may extra ba sila para sa atin? Sa mga tulad natin?"

  Pol didn't answer. He knew the answer. The contractor had sent a memo last month. They were short on gear. Harnesses would be rotated. Lanyards shared. You were expected to hold on tighter.

  "Eh ganun talaga," Toto said. "We're born with nothing. And they make sure we die with even less."

  He stepped forward to set the steel bar. His boot found the edge of a wet plank. No traction.

  There was a moment where time paused. Not out of drama, but confusion. The world itself blinked.

  Toto's arms flailed wide, as if trying to grab the sky. His cigarette flew. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Just the sound of a boot scraping metal, and then silence.

  Then the long drop.

  Not cinematic. Not slow motion. Just fast, final, and horribly silent.

  It felt like the air had been punched out of the floor. Like the Sisters of Fate had knocked on the ceiling of the sky just to remind everyone who's really in charge. A presence leaving the world. An absence that rang louder than noise.

  Pol didn't move. He couldn't. His brain had stopped just short of understanding. It wasn't shock exactly, not yet. It was the quiet in between. Like when you see a glass fall from the table and haven't yet heard it break.

  The city kept going.

  Vendors below shouted about fish. Squid at five-hundred per kilo. Their voices floated up like prayers that had nowhere else to go. A tricycle choked past in second gear. Horns honked with their usual desperation. Somewhere, a dog barked at the shadow of another dog.

  Nothing stopped.

  Pol walked slowly to the edge. His boots felt heavier now. Not with grief, not yet, but with weight. Reality has a way of settling into the bones before it reaches the heart.

  He looked down.

  No body. Not yet. Maybe it had landed between steel beams, or bounced off the scaffolding and was hidden in the guts of the building. Maybe it would show up on someone's Facebook live in thirty minutes.

  He imagined Toto crumpled beside a pile of construction debris, already starting to disappear into the machinery of forgetting.

  Someone cursed behind him. Just a quick exhale of breath shaped into anger.

  Another voice, older, tired, muttered, "Walang harness kasi. Nagsabi na tayo dati."

  That was the refrain. They had said it already. Said it at the last accident. Said it when Junjun fell last month and dislocated his shoulder. Said it when Arjay got hit in the leg by a falling pipe and the contractor gave him a bottle of painkillers and two days off.

  But the day didn't stop.

  The rebar still needed tying. The concrete had to be poured before noon. Cement trucks don't wait for grief. The foreman would show up and pretend to be surprised. Would raise his voice just enough for the CCTV to catch. Would write a memo that vanished into someone else's drawer.

  Maybe Toto's family would get a half-month's salary in a sealed envelope. No name. No condolences. Just a figure on a piece of paper that didn't even cover burial costs.

  Maybe not.

  Pol stepped back from the edge. His stomach was tight. He realized he hadn't exhaled yet.

  The wind picked up again, tugging at his shirt. It didn't feel like wind. It felt like a hand. Not malicious. Not gentle either. Just persistent. As if something was asking him if he understood now.

  He bent down and picked up Toto's cigarette. It had landed in a puddle next to the edge but the ember was still warm.

  He held it for a second. The stupid, stubborn thing. Still clinging to fire like it mattered.

  The view stretched out before him.

  Tondo, Ermita, the bay, the towers, the slums, the haze. From up here it all looked the same. Like a painting. Like a lie.

  Still beautiful.

  That was the worst part of all. The world did not care. It did not crack. It did not groan. It just continued. Perfect. Unmoved. Untouched by the smallness of their lives.

  Pol closed his eyes. For a second, he thought he might cry. Then the horn of a cement truck blared somewhere below.

  And just like that, the moment passed.

  Javier Montejo

  He hadn't meant to ask.

  It bloomed in him like a rash. It began as a whisper during dessert, somewhere between the salted yakitori quail egg and the waiter's apology for the absence of the regular sommelier, who, he said, had drowned last week in a bathtub full of cryptocurrency.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  His lunch companion was a mid-tier real estate influencer named Greg. Or possibly Geoff. He wore suede loafers with no socks and called everything "synergistic." He was trying to sell Javier on a golf-themed mixed-use development in Laguna with a private heliport and a blockchain museum. Javier nodded through it like a man underwater. Smiling. Breathing filtered air.

  The dessert arrived unasked for. A square of white chocolate perched on a smear of what might have been beetroot, might have been blood. Javier didn't touch it.

  Greg/Geoff kept talking. About vertical integration. About TikTok. About how people didn't want homes anymore, they wanted "narratives." Javier smiled at the appropriate beats, but inside, something was slipping loose. The thread between his family's name and its last gasp of dignity was fraying, millimeter by millimeter.

  He excused himself before the check, something he never did. Outside, the sun was violent and without apology. The valet brought his car too fast, the tires barking like they were trying to warn him. He slid into the leather seat. Let the air conditioning hit him like a bad decision.

  He didn't drive home. He didn't drive anywhere.

  Instead, he sat in the underground parking of the Shangri-La, watching heat ripple off concrete and melt into the fluorescence. He turned off the ignition. Time folded in on itself like laundry. Silence expanded.

  Then a thought: The fixer upstairs, Marius Zhu.

  It arrived uninvited. Not with a trumpet, but a breath. A name floating up from somewhere between memory and desperation.

  He texted Marius' secretary. He wrote only two words:

  Need help.

  ***

  Tieguanyin. The staff said it like a password. Set it down in front of Javier. No coaster. Just heat, porcelain, and centuries of imperial harvest. He did not drink it. He let it perfume the moment.

  The study was everything his father's office wasn't. No plaques, no framed pictures of dead patriarchs in sepia martyrdom. Just things. Real things. A lamp that cast warm light without hum. A low bookshelf filled with paperbacks, spines cracked from actual use. A record player. Off. Waiting. The kind of room designed by appetite, not ambition. If Marius liked it, it stayed. If not, it disappeared. That was the rule. Not just taste. Sovereignty.

  Then the door opened.

  Marius entered like a breeze slipping in through an unlocked window. Young. Too young. With that dangerous charm men have right after college, when the world is still pliable and everyone still believes in words like "potential." Javier could almost forget that Marius was actually slightly older than him. The sleeves of Marius' linen shirt are rolled up. His smile lit the room. It did not just invite. It commanded welcome.

  Javier stood but not fully. He offered his hand like a man presenting a case file.

  Marius shook it. His grip was light, almost theatrical.

  In the other hand, he held a mandarin. Peeled. Gleaming. Sacred.

  He plucked a slice and held it out.

  Javier declined. Quietly. With the grace of someone refusing communion.

  "I hear you needed my help?" Marius asked, settling into the chair like it had always been shaped for him. He placed the mandarin slice back in a ceramic dish Javier swore wasn't there before, untouched. His voice was soft. Velvet-lined. Slightly amused. The way a priest might sound before opening confession.

  Javier nodded. His shirt sticks to his skin in two places. He is both too hot and too aware of how hot he is. This is not his turf. It is three floors above his own, but it might as well be another country.

  "Something needs to change," he said. "With my family. With our holdings. If it keeps going like this, we won't survive another two generations. Maybe not even one."

  Marius just smiled. That smile. That soft, cruel, benevolent thing. Like a wolf smiling in your dreams. The kind of smile you cannot call evil because it is also beautiful.

  Javier wants to hate him. But it is hard to hate a sunrise.

  "I know about your meeting with Maison Teratai," Marius said lightly. "How did it go? They're generous, the expanding empires. Very liberal with their checks."

  Javier didn't ask how he knew. Of course Marius knew. Marius probably knew what shirt he had worn that day. What drink Isabelle had ordered. Whether or not she touched her food. He simply offered a neutral shrug, which meant: They weren't interested.

  Marius tapped a finger against the rim of his tea cup. "They weren't interested in your Tondo property?"

  Javier chuckled. A short, dry sound. The laugh of a man too used to absurdity to be offended by it anymore. "The Tondo property is haunted," he said. "Not metaphorically. Squatters live there. Spirits too, probably. It's impossible to evict them. Even the most powerful families in this country bleed trying."

  Marius did not laugh. He looked interested. Like a child hearing about a cave full of toys. Like someone already building a cathedral in that haunted place, one floor plan at a time.

  He calmly ate a slice of the mandarin.

  Javier could see it in Marius' eyes. That glint. That quiet, glittering thing behind the iris. A secret folded twelve times into itself. He knows something. Of course he does. Information. The last real currency in this city.

  "Name your price," Javier said, the words hitting the air like coins dropped into a wishing well. "You know something I don't. I assume you want something in return."

  Marius tilted his head. As if tasting the light. Still smiling. That smile again. The one that made you feel like he'd already read the end of your biography and found it charming.

  "I want your father's narra table," Marius replied, like he was asking for sugar in his tea.

  Javier blinked. He wasn't sure he had heard correctly. Perhaps he had suffered a mild stroke. Or was dreaming. Or both.

  "My father's... narra table?" he asked, as if the syllables might rearrange themselves into something logical upon repetition.

  "Yes," Marius said, gently, like speaking to a man with a head injury. He took in another piece of mandarin. "The one in his Ortigas office. The old hardwood piece with the satin clear lacquer and petrified wood legs. Beautiful finish. Impossible joinery. I'm sure you know the one."

  It had been in their family longer than he had. Milled from a massive narra slab before Marcos fell, dragged up four floors through a crane during an office expansion when Esteban still believed in concrete empires. Javier once watched a strong earthquake rattle the office, and the damn thing didn't move a centimeter.

  Javier stared. He was being toyed with. Teased like a schoolboy. This was a negotiation, not a séance. He leaned in. "What's the real price?"

  But Marius didn't budge. His voice was soft. His smile unwavering.

  "The table," he said again. As if the matter were spiritual.

  Javier sighed. Sat back. Accepted, at last, that this was not a joke. That some people really did want narra more than gold.

  "Fine," he muttered. "But it's not mine to give. It's Esteban's. I'll have to float it with him first."

  Marius nodded. Satisfied. "Close enough to a yes."

  He leaned forward, elbows to knees, fingers steepled like a bishop delivering sacrament in a sauna. The mandarin was gone now. Only the ghost of citrus hung in the air, mingling with tea steam and the low hum of unspoken ambition.

  "My firm's been consulting with JICA," he began, almost bored. "Metro Manila's second subway line. Western corridor. It'll run parallel to the LRT-1 like a polite cousin with better shoes."

  Javier blinked. He did not know what that meant, but the room was listening on his behalf.

  "They're finalizing alignments. Station locations. Your Tondo land is in the conversation. Not the front-runner though. Too much red tape. Too much... history." A pause. "They want ROW with less baggage. Virgin territory, bureaucratically speaking."

  He said ROW like it was an old lover.

  Javier nodded, once. His face did not move. His blood was already pacing.

  "I can convince them," Marius continued. "The Japanese. The planners. I'll nudge them toward your land. Get them to see the value of the location and choose it for their station."

  That was one. Javier counted in his head.

  "Then I'll fast-track the evictions. Hopefully no headlines. Maybe even some good press, if we're feeling blasphemous."

  Two. Javier didn't breathe.

  "Then," Marius said, folding one leg over the other, "there's Maison Teratai. Isabelle wasn't interested because she didn't know what she was looking at. Raw dirt. Bad press. But if she knew it was going to be a subway station..." More pause.

  "It'll still be a battle," Marius admitted. "But the real decision makers at Maison Teratai aren't named Isabelle. I can reach them. There are men and women behind the curtain, and I know which language they speak, literally."

  Three.

  Javier shifted in his seat. He looked down at the Tieguanyin. It was still hot. Of course it was. Everything here ran on its own divine timeline.

  "That's three separate miracles," he said.

  Marius smiled. The same impossible, perfect smile. A smile that had seen the death of things and still believed in love.

  "All that," Javier added, voice thin as thread, "for a table?"

  Marius nodded. Slow. Almost solemn.

  "It's a very good table."

  Javier rubbed the rim of his teacup like it might answer him. The pattern was hand-painted, probably by some artisan monk who had never seen asphalt. The recursion was obvious. Like a dream folding in on itself.

  "You do realize," he said carefully, "that each part depends on the others? The Japanese won't pick the site unless it's cleared. Maison Teratai won't bankroll evictions without a guaranteed station. And the evictions can't happen without money. It's a hall of mirrors."

  Marius nodded, as if Javier had just described a particularly charming home-rule game of Uno.

  "It's recursive," Javier added, just in case the man hadn't noticed.

  "It is," Marius agreed. "Like prayer. Or tax evasion."

  Javier blinked.

  Marius leaned back. The chair sighed in ancient leather. "But we don't need all the pieces to move at once. Just one. We prod the timeline. Make the illusion of motion."

  He plucked an invisible thread from his linen shirt, flicked it into the air like an offering.

  "I can get initial evictions started. No capital required. Just need a few friends in government to begin relocation procedures. A memo here, a task force there. It won't solve the problem, but it'll look like we've started solving it. That's the important part."

  Momentum. Javier hated how much sense it made.

  "Once it looks like we're moving," Marius continued, "the Japanese and Maison Teratai will start believing. Not in the project. In the inevitability of the project. That's what moves capital."

  Javier felt the floor shift beneath them. Not physically. Just ideologically. Like gravity had suddenly begun reporting to Marius instead.

  Javier crosses his legs, then uncrosses them. He drinks the tea. It tastes expensive. It tastes like hope.

  He watches Marius pick up the last slice of mandarin, which Javier thought was already finished, still smiling like the sun never hurt anyone.

  God, Javier thinks, he's ridiculous. And beautiful. And terrifying.

  He should hate him. He should. He should remember the power imbalance, the manipulation, the effortless knowing. But instead, all he remembers is the warmth of the study, the unspoken rhythm of the conversation, and the narra table.

  He's starting to really like him.

  It feels like treason. But then again, most good feelings do.

  Apolinario "Pol" Guerrero

  The envelope was too light to feel like anything real. It barely creased Aireen's palm. Pol watched her fold it, slowly, like she thought if she moved carefully enough, the paper might vanish instead of confirm something had ended.

  They stood beside the foreman's truck, parked crooked on the mud-slick edge of the site. The engine clicked softly, cooling off. The foreman himself did not say much. He had the tired look of a man who had delivered this exact envelope before.

  He scratched the back of his neck. "Sorry, ha. Ito lang kaya namin. May memo from above. You understand."

  He offered Pol another envelope. Identical. Smaller weight. Less blood.

  Pol took it without speaking. They both knew what it meant.

  Hush money, dressed like severance but meant for something else. Not just the fall, everyone knew accidents happened. But this was for the nights Pol saw crates unloaded when the site should’ve been dead quiet, for the plastic-wrapped bricks passed quick between hands, for the sharp chemical stink that didn’t belong to paint or cement. Drugs. Moved through the skeleton of the tower like it was just another pipeline. They had no money for harnesses or helmets, but for this, for silence, they paid in full.

  "There's been police asking around." The foreman added. "Be careful what you say around them."

  Later, he and Aireen walked down Ongpin Street. All the tourists have gone back home. Binondo after dark was an echo of its own history. Pre-war bones in post-war skin. Streets too narrow for the volume of lives they carried. The smell of oil, sugar, grease, and metal clung to the stones like memory.

  It was humid. It was always humid.

  Aireen walked a step ahead. She had tied her hair back. Her shirt was too thin for the wind. She looked like a girl who used to laugh and now didn't.

  "He was all I had, you know," she said. Her voice wasn't broken. Just emptied out, like a shelf after eviction. "Not like we were close-close. Pero alam mo na. Blood's weird."

  Pol nodded.

  "He was always trying to make me laugh with stories," she went on. "Sabi niya, one day, we'll both go to Tagaytay. We'll buy pineapples just to throw them at each other. Stupid stuff. Corny stuff. I never liked pineapples."

  She smiled once, small and sideways. It didn't reach her eyes.

  "I'm working na," she said. "Live-in. Korean guy. Big house. Nice enough. He doesn't touch me."

  Pol looked at her. "That's nice."

  "I know," she said. "That's why I stay."

  They passed a siopao stand, closed up for the night. Someone had drawn eyes on the shutters. The eyes watched them as they walked.

  "You got any plans?" he asked.

  Aireen shrugged. "I don't feel like planning helps anymore."

  There was no bitterness in it. No pain. Just a tired truth laid on the ground like a bag too heavy to carry.

  She stopped at the corner of an alley. A cat darted past. A drunk sang somewhere two blocks away.

  "I can't stay out long," she said. "I told my amo I was just getting sanitary napkins."

  Pol didn't laugh.

  She touched his arm lightly. Then she turned and slipped into the shadows. Gone. Like a dream you forgot mid-sentence.

  Pol walked back toward the barracks.

  ***

  The construction site was quieter now. The night shift was already at it. Men lit by floodlights, moving like insects across unfinished floors. Cement mixers moaned like sad mechanical whales.

  The barracks waited, low and crooked. It smelled like sweat, mold, and resignation.

  But he didn't make it there.

  A man stepped out from the scaffolding beside the site gate. Clean shirt. Too clean. Hair cut close. He moved like someone who had been taught to move that way.

  He raised a badge, quick, like a magician pulling out a dead dove.

  "NBI," he said. "Lino Ilagan."

  Pol blinked.

  Lino's voice was low and flat, shaped like someone trying not to scare you but already knowing you should be scared.

  "Did you know Zaira Navarro?" he asked.

  Not "What happened on the scaffolding?" Not "Did you see the fall?" Just her name. That name.

  Pol froze. The gravel stopped moving under his boots. The warning came back, word-for-word, wearing the foreman's voice like a mask:

  "There's been police asking around, be careful what you say around them."

  The city did not pause. Binondo kept breathing, unaware that something had shifted just slightly off balance.

  The wind picked up. The dust spun into lazy little devils across the dirt.

  Pol did not answer right away. He was trying to remember if it was better to lie to the law, or to the truth.

  Lino didn't move. Didn't blink. Just stood there like an unpaid debt.

  Pol's brain stuttered. He did the math, but all the numbers were guilt.

  Then a step. Lino moved forward. One step. No threat. Just inevitability.

  Pol cracked.

  "Yeah," he blurted. "Yeah. Nandito sya. Last week. Nag tatanong. About the harnesses."

  As if saying it made it disappear.

  It didn't.

  "You tell her anything?"

  Pol shook his head, eyes down. "Hindi po. I got scared. If they find out, tanggal agad. Wala na trabaho. Nobody will hire me after. They call it blacklisted."

  Lino gave a small nod. Like he already knew.

  "You want to add anything?"

  Pol stayed quiet. Thought of Toto. The stupid laugh. The cheap sandals. The way he fell, grasping at the air. Not his best friend, just someone he drank with sometimes. But he didn't deserve that. Nobody did.

  It came out before Pol could stop it. Fast. Ugly.

  "Si Toto po. He died kanina. Morning. Fell from up top. No harness. Just slipped. Accident daw. Pero we all know, wala kaming harness. Nothing there to catch him. Police came, looked, then left. They took money. Company gave us money too. Told us... quiet lang."

  He hesitated, but the words had already started. "And... may mga gamit po doon. Drugs, I think. Yung mga crates na dumarating gabi. Walang label. Minsan may mga tao na hindi namin kilala. Armed. Nakatago lagi. Hindi amoy pintura. Iba."

  Lino’s face sharpened. “Drugs?” His voice low. "You sure about that?"

  Pol realized what he’d said. The weight of it. He shook his head fast, stepped back. “Hindi po. I mean—di ko alam talaga. Baka maling akala lang. Sorry. Ayoko makisali. Hindi ako kasama doon.”

  ("No, I mean... I really don't know. Maybe I misremembered. Sorry. I don't want to be involved. I'm not involved with it.")

  Lino watched him. Eyes tired. Measuring.

  "Alright," he said finally. "If you know what's good for you, you'll leave this job."

  Pol chuckled, but there was no joy in it. "Saan po ako pupunta? Wala akong ipon. Wala na rin akong nanay at tatay. Sa squatters, minsan may tulong, minsan wala. Hindi ako palaging puwedeng umasa sa kanila."

  Lino looked at him. Hard. But not unkind.

  "Then think hard. Tomorrow, baka ikaw na mahulog sa taas. Or worse."

  He handed over a card. Government print. Looked like it had been through a few wallets already.

  "Call me. If anything."

  ***

  That night, Pol quit.

  No drama. No pleading. Just a quiet "Tama na po."

  Took his last crumpled bills, creased, soft with grease from someone else's lunch, shoved them into his pocket. Grabbed his plastic bag: two shirts, a toothbrush, and o pair of socks he'd found under someone else's bunk. That was everything. That was enough.

  And then he walked.

  The city around him was asleep, but not quiet. It murmured, electric wires humming above, rats rustling below, the low wheeze of traffic from roads he couldn't afford to take.

  Above him, the condominiums glittered like glass trophies. Lived in. Breathing.

  Behind their tinted windows: air-conditioning hums, rice cookers ticking off, television laughter. A child being scolded gently in Hokkien. A dog curled on a real carpet. Problems Pol could only imagine. School enrollment, HOA meetings, the wrong color of curtains. He looked up and saw lives lit in yellow light, soft and secure. Whole families wrapped in worlds he would never enter.

  And below?

  Below, Binondo wore its age like a second skin. The streetlights were bright, their dragon heads casting clean yellow beams over narrow streets. They made everything look sharper, too sharp. The cracks in the walls, the chipped yellowed marble, the stories no one fixed.

  The buildings on either side were old. Pre-war, post-war, mid-decline. Gray and crumbling, balconies covered in tangled wires and potted plants fighting for sun. Some leaned slightly, like they'd seen too much and wanted to rest. But they were still standing. Still in use. Like the people inside them, too stubborn to disappear.

  Somewhere, a billboard flickered. A pop star with skin like glass promised a better life through whitening soap. The ad blinked. Then died. Even the lie was tired.

  A jeepney rolled by, engine growling like an old dog. Its headlights caught a monument at the corner, besides a grand stone church, some man cast in bronze, upright, poised walking toward a future that had already arrived and turned into this.

  The plaque was worn, a man from a time long gone. Just a man cast in metal, forever walking towards nothing.

  Pol didn't know what the man did to earn a statue.

  But he knew the future that statues walking towards.

  It was this.

  Concrete in the lungs. Money in the shadows. Buildings scraping the sky while he scraped for rice.

  He looked at the man. Said nothing. Kept walking.

  The city stretched on, glittering above, rotting below.

  An hour to Tondo. To a home that didn't lie.

  Where nothing glittered, but everything was real.