Javier Montejo

  August 29, 2035

  How Javier Montejo Died and was Reborn as a Decorative Table

  A Miscommunication in Hardwood

  The room is beige. The kind of beige that smells like old aircon filters and long-forgotten compromises. The kind of beige that makes you forget your name.

  There are five people here.

  No, six, if you count the ghost of relevance slowly leaking out of Javier's pores.

  Across the sleek hardwood table sits Madeline Leong, CEO and chairwoman of Maison Teratai, who has the practiced elegance of someone who has fired an entire division by whisper. Her earrings cost more than some border disputes, and her perfume has a body count. She doesn't look at Javier. She audits him.

  To her right, Geng Zhaoye, board member and Maison Teratai's largest shareholder, who has the posture of a man who has stood beside empires as they fell, and didn't flinch once. His face is carved from stone imported from some distant province that no longer exists. His frown has the kind of edge that makes the Soviet Union look like the Teletubbies show.

  Then there is Isabelle, perfectly poised in the corner of his vision. Not speaking. Not needing to. Just present, like an heirloom blade left unsheathed on the table.

  On Javier's side, Marius Zhu, who sits like he belongs in every room and also like he's observing it all from a different plane. The one where moves are made three layers below the words being said.

  And then, Javier.

  Javier Montejo, son of Esteban. The representative. The client. The bag of soft meat in a pressed suit with a last name that means something, apparently.

  Two days ago, Javier thought he understood power.

  Two days ago, Esteban agreed to whisk away his narra table for a miracle from Marius.

  Two days ago, Marius placed calls in Mandarin and English to get the gears turning.

  Two days ago, Javier imagined a plan with a timeline measured in months and the urgency of carpenters building a cathedral.

  One day ago, the Eviction Act, or Republic Act 7279 if you somehow prefer the tongue of bureaucracy, was invoked. One Day Ago. A law that normally required six months of lobbying, three board meetings, and a suitcase full of cash.

  One day ago, Madeline Leong and Geng Zhaoye were on a plane headed to Manila.

  Javier had assumed, like any reasonable person, that such people didn't just come to Manila. Not for meetings. Maybe for galas. Maybe to punish someone. But to negotiate? No. They sent lawyers, secretaries, stern-faced proxies in foreign-tailored suits.

  But Marius called.

  Once.

  Maybe twice.

  And they got on a plane.

  They got on a plane.

  Madeline Leong, whose name makes acquisition teams flinch before her legal team even opens their mouths.

  Geng Zhaoye, the Mainland benefactor's preferred emissary for things not meant to be written down.

  Both arrived before Javier.

  Then, the worst assumption, a cardinal sin.

  He thought the meeting would be in English.

  He truly did.

  Not just hoped, assumed. Like an idiot. Like a schoolboy who brought a ballpen to a gunfight.

  Because English is the language of business, right?

  Because they were in Manila. Because he was the host.

  Because he studied Mandarin for two years in college, but all he remembers now is how to say "I'm sorry" and "my mother is a teacher."

  Because Marius spoke to him in English the whole week.

  Because Isabelle spoke to him in English.

  Because the first email said "Preliminary Exploratory Development Discussion."

  Because he didn't realize that when real money enters the room, the language switches. It always switches.

  Of course it's in Mandarin.

  Of course.

  Because Marius didn't need to code-switch. Because Madeline doesn't waste tongue-space on colonial languages. Because Geng Zhaoye probably doesn't even hear English anymore unless it's begging.

  He missed the memo. Or there was no memo. Or the memo was encoded in the kind of assumptions that never make it into words.

  And now he's sitting here, drowning in tones and diplomatic velocity, watching Marius slice through billion-peso implications with post-native fluency.

  Marius occasionally turns to him and says things like, "I told them you're the client."

  And then keeps going.

  He doesn't know the rest of what Marius said, but he's fairly certain it wasn't "He is the spine of this operation."

  Javier is not the spine.

  He is the appendix. Forgotten, vaguely dangerous, and entirely vestigial.

  Javier nods. He drinks tea. He is vaguely aware he is no longer necessary. He understands now that he is not at the table, he is the table. Beautiful. Symbolic. Heavy. Unmoving.

  He tries not to meet Isabelle's gaze.

  Not because he fears her. But because he fears what she sees.

  And worse, what she doesn't.

  Marius looks at him like a puppeteer remembering that one of the strings is purely decorative. He asks questions about Tondo. Questions he already knew the answers to. Questions which Javier answers in a voice two octaves too high and a register too low. He makes sounds, syllables, a pantomime of knowledge. Marius smiles like a magician whose rabbit just mooed.

  Outside, in the metaphysical distance, a conceptual bulldozer stirs.

  Inside, a very physical kettle sings.

  Tea is served. A break.

  The liquid is a warm golden hue. A colonial compromise.

  For a moment, the languages collapse into English. A temporary ceasefire from missiles made of Mandarin.

  And then, Madeline Leong begins her questioning.

  She smiles like a woman who has eaten her third husband and is wondering if you're dessert.

  "Do you like art, Javier?" she asks.

  "Do you believe in marriage?"

  "Are you fertile?" (She doesn't say this one aloud, but the air hums with it.)

  Isabelle looks at her nails.

  They are immaculate. They are war-ready.

  Javier smiles. He tries to perform heterosexuality. The form of it, at least.

  A gallant lean. A slight chuckle. Something about enjoying museums.

  His face is a crumbling mask of confidence, slipping further with every polite nod.

  Geng Zhaoye doesn't acknowledge this exchange.

  He is communing with the spirit of capital.

  Or perhaps simply asleep with his eyes open.

  Either way, his frown is tectonic.

  Javier checks his phone.

  No messages. No lifeline.

  Just Esteban's last text from this morning:

  "Don't mess this up. Marius knows what he's doing."

  He stares at it. It stares back.

  A mirror made of pixels and paternal neglect.

  Esteban is out. Playing golf with a minor congressman.

  Javier is not here to contribute.

  He is here because he exists, and someone needed to.

  A warm body in a Montejo suit.

  The tea is gone.

  Mandarin returns. The language, not the fruit.

  Though Javier would have preferred if it was the fruit.

  The room hums with deals. Power coagulates in the corners.

  Marius is smiling. Not the human smile.

  The other one.

  The smile of a chess player who's already won and is now just arranging the pieces for aesthetic pleasure.

  Javier wishes he could dissolve.

  Not vanish, no, that would be dramatic.

  Just slowly, politely evaporate into the beige.

  Become a decorative table. A motif.

  A tragic shade in the design.

  He thinks: "I should have studied more Mandarin."

  And beneath that: "I should not be here."

  And beneath that: "Why is everyone so calm when the ground is clearly shifting?"

  And beneath that: nothing. Just beige.

  The meeting continues.

  And Javier, the appendix, the decorative string, the future failed husband of Isabelle Leong, sits and sips the last of his tea, nodding at ghosts.

  Apolinario "Pol" Guerrero

  August 27, 2035?

  Cinema of Soft-Bodied Saints

  Starring: One Malady, One Martyr, and the National Bureau of Interventions

  Pol is dead. Or in debt. Or dreaming.

  Maybe he's dreaming of being dead.

  Maybe the dead is dreaming him.

  He lies on a woven banig soaked through with sweat and mosquito curses, in a house that's not a house, on land that's not land, in a country that's not a country but a hallucination of asphalt and despair. His soul is stuck, lodged like a bottle cap in the drainage of time.

  "You've been here before," says a voice. A coconut tree with human teeth.

  "Don't listen to him," whispers another. A talking rat in a barong Tagalog, bleeding from one eye. "You never left."

  His forehead simmers. Fever like fire borrowed from a volcano's secret. He's a furnace. A human kiln. He's boiling in his own regrets.

  Someone is fanning him.

  A neighbor?

  A goddess with cracked heels and calloused hands.

  "Salabat," she says.

  Ginger. Burned gold in a plastic cup. It tastes like childhood punishment.

  Ice cubes melt on his temples like reluctant ghosts. Compresses folded from election flyers and Diyos Mabalik sa Imo pamphlets. They bless nothing. Heal no one. But still, they try.

  The fever licks at him like a stray dog that's learned to love salt.

  Each breath is a gamble. Each blink is a cutscene.

  In the margins of his coma,

  He sees his mother, not in her best form, there was never a best form, but in the shape she wore when hope hadn't yet betrayed her. Hair tied back with a plastic clip that was once pink, now the color of chalk. She stands by a corner, steam billowing around her. Lugaw boiling in a battered pot that knew the taste of aluminum corrosion better than broth.

  "?10 kung walang itlog. ?15 kung may kaunting awa ang mundo."

  She calls out to passing tricycle drivers, to schoolchildren with exact change, to construction workers with hollow stomachs. She doesn't smile, but her eyes do. A kind of exhaustion-glow.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  He remembers sitting beside her on a plastic stool too small for his growing bones.

  Helping scoop the porridge. Dropping coins into a repurposed ice cream tub.

  Then, his father stumbles into the room like a war veteran without medals. One sandal broken, pants stained with pier-water and fatigue. He smells of sweat, salt, and sea ghosts.

  But he's smiling. Holding a red and white plastic bag.

  Jollibee.

  God.

  A ritual.

  He places it on the table like a religious offering.

  Inside: one piece Chickenjoy. Gravy cup with a crack.

  A side of cold spaghetti that somehow still glows orange in the dark.

  The meal for saints. For paydays. For proof that a father can provide.

  They split it. Pol gets the drumstick.

  His father dips bread into the rice-soaked gravy, nodding like a priest mid-homily.

  They do not talk. The silence tastes like joy disguised as desperation.

  "Someday," his father says. "You'll eat this every day."

  "Even the peach mango pie?"

  "Even that."

  The sky is suddenly grey, and the world is plastic.

  A dump site stretches out before him, endless piles of wrappers, broken dolls, syringes without stories. Rats that do not run from children.

  He is maybe seven. Maybe nine.

  There is a rhythm to the scavenging. A method. You learn to spot the glint of copper wires like they're buried treasure.

  You learn which mountains of trash bite, and which merely hiss.

  His best friend Jomari once found a broken tablet. They watched half an episode of Dragon Ball Z before the screen gave up. It was the happiest week of their lives.

  Then there was Lito. The boy who was playing too close to the mechanical maw of the compactor.

  A scream, then nothing.

  No body.

  Just blood on a Hello Kitty lunchbox.

  "It was quick," someone said.

  "He didn't feel anything."

  But Pol knew. You always feel it.

  He remembers.

  A friend: flattened by a trash compactor.

  Another: sold to a foreigner who smelled like detergent and passport pages.

  He remembers their names. All of them.

  Even the one who only spoke in whistles.

  "You shouldn't remember that," says the Ceiling Spider. "It's bad for your health."

  "But it's all I have," Pol croaks,

  or thinks,

  or dreams he croaks.

  Then, Rowena. She used to sing My Heart Will Go On with perfect pitch. Had braces made of paper clips. She was eleven when the man came. Pink, fat, and smiling too hard.

  Her aunt said it was a blessing.

  Said she was going to "America," which meant Quezon City for a week, then gone.

  Pol remembers seeing her the day before.

  She gave him her last Choc Nut and whispered:

  "I'll give you more and more after this."

  She cried when she said it,

  but smiled the whole time.

  Like she was afraid her sadness might void the sale.

  She never came back.

  The song stuck in his head like a curse.

  Thirteen.

  Hard hat too big. ID says he's sixteen, but nobody checks.

  The foreman calls him Boy.

  Everyone calls everyone Boy, even the 40-year-old man with a missing toe.

  The rebar slices your hands in tiny, invisible lines that only show when you try to eat salty chips.

  Cement dust lives in your lungs, sets up a home, sends postcards.

  They joke about him dying, but not in a mean way.

  "Pag may nahulog, dagdag sahod nating lahat."

  "'Di ka pa pwedeng mamatay. May utang ka sa kantina."

  He remembers the feeling of wet cement splashing on his leg.

  It was hot.

  He remembers thinking: this is what being buried alive might feel like.

  He kept working anyway.

  Sixteen.

  The sky cracked open like a stomach full of bile.

  Winds tore through their home like debt collectors.

  He and his parents held the walls with their arms.

  They were losing.

  Water rose to his knees. Then his waist.

  Then he was screaming without sound.

  Afterwards: nothing.

  No house.

  No mother.

  No father.

  He slept beside the corpse of a refrigerator for two nights,

  until Aling Rosa found him.

  She smells of onions, mothballs, and divine pity.

  Aling Rosa's house is held together by nails, prayers, and jealousy.

  She brings him in without a word. Just a nod. Just a tap on the shoulder like he's being tagged into life again.

  He helps patch the roof with flattened sardine cans.

  Washes dishes with ashes when there's no soap.

  They make sinigang from the neighbor's kamias tree and three-week-old pork.

  She never says "I love you."

  But once, she gives him the last spoon of rice.

  "Tulog ka na. Huwag mong isipin masyado."

  "Ano pong iisipin?"

  "Lahat."

  Then, one Christmas, they dressed him up as Joseph.

  It was a recycled bathrobe.

  His staff was a broomstick with the bristles taped off.

  The Baby Jesus was a shampoo bottle in a towel.

  Mary cried the whole time because her crush didn't show up.

  But people clapped anyway.

  There was free spaghetti.

  The electricity didn't cut out that night.

  It was one of the best nights of his life.

  Toto always smelled like gin, grease, and sweat baked by the sun.

  He cursed like it was punctuation, spat anywhere, and called every woman he met "darling."

  His nails were black with dirt, his laugh loud enough to scare stray cats off the scaffolding.

  But he was Pol's friend.

  Not the clean kind. Not the sentimental kind.

  The kind that handed you the better share of canned sardines without a word.

  The kind that covered for you when you were too sick to lift hollow blocks.

  On lunch breaks, they sat side by side on sacks of gravel.

  Toto would talk about some girl from Pasig he was "definitely gonna marry this time,"

  while Pol chewed silently, listening, knowing it was probably the third girl that month.

  "'Di tayo magtatagal dito," Toto said once, watching the city stretch below.

  "Pero kung mamamatay man ako dito, at least libre ang tanawin."

  He laughed.

  He always laughed.

  Until the day he danced with the air, and no harness was there to follow.

  And then the memories fold into one another like bad origami.

  Lugaw spills into cement dust.

  His father turns into the man at the compactor controls.

  He sees the plastic Baby Jesus floating in a flood.

  Rowena's singing becomes the storm.

  Toto is drowning in cement.

  He sees his father kneeling during Mass, eyes closed so hard they might implode.

  The rats wear hard hats and speak the language of anime.

  Pol doesn't know if he's awake.

  He doesn't know if he's real.

  He only knows one thing:

  The past is not gone. It's fermenting.

  He lies there.

  Somewhere between sweating and shivering.

  Between the dead and the not-yet-dead.

  The present is soft and full of holes.

  That moment when the church doors swing open.

  When someone pats your back without asking why you look tired.

  When the community sings off-key, but still sings.

  "Pol," a voice says, soft as a hymn from a dying cassette.

  "You are not alone."

  He isn't.

  Even in death.

  Even in dream.

  Even in the fever-soaked intermission of his life.

  Someone is praying for him.

  He doesn't know who.

  Maybe everyone.

  Or maybe just Aling Rosa.

  Whispering to the cracked saints.

  Asking for one more miracle.

  Just one more.

  And somehow, that's enough to keep his heart beating.

  Even if only barely.

  Javier Montejo

  The door closes with a soft hiss, like a guillotine designed by a Japanese minimalist.

  Javier exhales the words like a man coughing out ghosts.

  "What the fuck was that?"

  Marius smiles.

  Isabelle chuckles.

  The conference room is still beige. But now it glows. The air is heavy with victory. Victory smells like jasmine tea, air-conditioned leather, and distant displacements.

  The deal, has been struck.

  Maison Teratai has committed.

  A Memorandum of Understanding, signed in spirit, sealed by glances, notarized by the sheer force of Marius' reality-bending confidence.

  Isabelle Leong leans back in her chair like a princess in exile watching her country burn just the way she planned.

  She chuckles into her tea. "You should've seen your face," she says. "Somewhere between a hostage and a flower girl."

  Javier turns to her, stunned. "You knew she'd sign?"

  She shrugs, elegant and amused. "She was ready before the plane left Changi."

  Javier blinks at them like a man who wandered into the backroom of history by accident.

  Marius walks to the window, fingers tracing the cold edge of the glass. He doesn't even look back as he says: "We pre-negotiated the MoU. This was theater. Necessary theater. But theater."

  Javier slumps into his chair. "So I was, what? The audience?"

  "No," Marius says, with a grin Javier can feel in his spine. "You were the stage. We needed Madeline and Geng Zhaoye in Manila to show the Japanese that we are serious."

  It dawns on him slowly.

  They knew each other.

  Of course they did.

  Of course they did.

  Of fucking course they did.

  He recalled them meeting in the lobby.

  She called Marius "大哥" "dàgē", big brother.

  A word Javier now recalled in Mandarin class.

  But Isabelle said it not in a familial way. Not exactly.

  More like how one might refer to a high-functioning demigod.

  He did not connect the dots until it was too late.

  "I didn't," Javier muttered, "realize you two knew each other."

  Isabelle's voice lifted, casual, rehearsed without seeming so. "We ran in the same circles during undergrad in Shanghai. I didn't know he'd already come back to Manila."

  "Came back?" Javier asked, like a man realizing the map he was using was upside down.

  "I'm Filipino," Marius replied.

  He looked at Javier.

  The smile was perfectly constructed, but it stopped just short of the eyes.

  A silent correction.

  A scalpel disguised as a fact.

  An accusation for the crime of assumption.

  Another assumption. Dead on arrival.

  Zhu.

  Not Tan. Not Sy. Not Co.

  Not one of the gentle surnames of the Fil-Chi tapestry.

  Not Malaysian-Chinese. Not Taiwanese.

  The People's Republic of China Chinese.

  Zhu like a verdict. Zhu like a wall. Zhu like an origin that doesn't bother to explain itself to colonies.

  Javier had always assumed Marius was Chinese.

  Not Filipino-Chinese. Just... Chinese. Generic. Foreign. Safe to simplify.

  But now, in the pause between sentences, Javier sees it.

  Not the charmer. Not the fixer.

  Not the man with the plan.

  But the thing behind the silk screen.

  The engine.

  The intelligence moving through rooms like it had birthright there.

  A machine of intent wrapped in linen and human tone.

  And then... It's gone. The moment slides away like water down polished stone.

  Isabelle, still smiling, adds: "My actual brother is the one Marius spends the most time with. I was just in the periphery. I wouldn't have been informed about his whereabouts."

  Javier nods.

  Of course not.

  He's not even in the periphery.

  He's in the audience, watching the play, unsure of which act he walked in on.

  Marius says something in Mandarin, a smooth, gliding sentence with the weight of old favors and inside jokes.

  Isabelle responds, laughing too quickly. Then blushing.

  Not the diplomatic smile-blush of heiresses and power brokers.

  The real kind.

  The teenage girl hearing her idol say her name on a live stream kind.

  Javier hears it. Not all of it. The tones blur, as usual.

  But one sound rings clear.

  Not Mandarin.

  Japanese.

  Hotaro.

  A name.

  Syllables wrapped in something intimate. Not just familiarity, but affection.

  Javier feels it in his spine:

  This was not for him.

  If anyone else had heard it, it would be intelligence.

  A lead. A thread to pull.

  But he is not anyone else.

  He is Javier Montejo, the decorative stage, the client, the last to know.

  And still, the name lingers.

  Hotaro.

  Like smoke that smells like someone else's perfume.

  Something else caught him in that exchange.

  Another one of his slow realizations.

  "You have a brother?" Javier blurts, like a toddler discovering other people have families too.

  He has known Isabelle for years. She's been to his parties. Went on vacations together. Played the cello at his sister's wedding. She never once mentioned a brother.

  She laughs.

  A light, elegant laugh.

  The kind that doesn't actually leave the throat, just dances on the cheekbones.

  "Don't you read the news?" she asks, as if Javier had just confessed to not knowing the moon existed.

  No. He does not read the news.

  He reads briefings. He skims prospectuses.

  He inhales asset maps and financial projections.

  But he did not, somehow, know that Isabelle Leong has a brother, a brother that would be in The News, and that Marius Zhu is close to him, and that they all probably once played mahjong with god-kings in a rooftop garden in Singapore while a soft jazz version of L'Internationale played in the background.

  He is a Montejo. He is an heir. He is individually wealthy.

  But in this room, he is a civilian.

  They move on.

  The world doesn't wait for people who are slow to realize things.

  The talk turns to logistics.

  Marius, now businesslike, lays it out.

  The bureaucratic beast of relocation has already awoken.

  Two sites: one in Quezon City, the other a public housing complex within Tondo.

  Thirty years of squatting history, dissolving into bureaucracy, corrugated steel, and cement.

  The people don't like it. Of course they don't.

  Most want to stay in Tondo.

  Because memory has roots, and roots do not migrate easily.

  But the Tondo condos only have so many units.

  The rest will have to move inland, away from the sea. Away from history. Away from the future they weren't consulted on.

  Marius speaks of them like a surgeon discussing tissue, clinically, without malice.

  He will let the government workers handle the push.

  Maison Teratai will fund the effort, the eviction, the relocation, the "compensation", whatever that word means now, in this strange new dialect of progress.

  The sun outside has begun to set.

  Or maybe it's rising somewhere else.

  It doesn't matter.

  Inside this beige room, the future has already arrived.

  And Javier Montejo, linen suit, stunned eyes, unremarkable lineage despite the branding, sits very still, wondering how long before it all makes sense again.

  Apolinario "Pol" Guerrero

  He wakes to the soft hum of a machine and the faint smell of alcohol. Not the drunk kind, the hospital kind. His throat is dry. His skin itches from sweat and dried fever.

  The ceiling is plain. White. Too white.

  Not home.

  Pol blinks. Then blinks again.

  The fan above him creaks gently. There's a curtain drawn halfway.

  He's covered in a thin sheet. His body feels hollow and heavy all at once.

  A nurse walks in. Older woman, mid-40s maybe, with tired but kind eyes. She pauses when she sees him awake.

  "Ay, gising na," she says with a small smile. "Good morning."

  She walks to the side of the bed and checks the IV drip.

  Pol clears his throat, voice barely there. "Saan ako?"

  "Tondo General," the nurse replies gently. "Private room ka. Don't worry, safe ka dito."

  He tries to sit up but gives up halfway.

  "Anong araw na?"

  "September 2. Halos one week ka na tulog. High fever. Malala talaga nung una."

  One week.

  The fever dreams still cling to him, his parents, the church, the compactor, the storm.

  He remembers lugaw and rats and the sound of someone praying for him.

  "May nag visit ba?" he asks. "Si Aling Rosa?"

  The nurse shakes her head. "Wala pa ngayon. Baka mamaya. Pero may gustong kumausap sa'yo."

  Pol's brow furrows. "Sino?"

  "'Di ko sure exactly. Basta taga-gobyerno. Galing sa... ah, NBI yata?"

  Pol exhales slowly. His stomach tightens.

  Them again.

  The nurse pats his arm lightly, almost like a tita.

  "Wag ka matakot, ha. Mabait naman 'yung babae. At saka—buhay ka, 'di ba? Ibig sabihin may mga taong may pake."

  She gives him a reassuring smile before heading to the door.

  "Pahinga ka muna. Papasok na siya."

  Then she's gone.

  Pol lies still, chest rising and falling.

  The hospital lights buzz above him.

  He closes his eyes, but the dreams stay.

  The fever's gone, but something else lingers. Something heavier.

  The woman entered the room, sits down lightly on the chair, crossing one leg over the other, glancing at him with polite concern.

  "So, Pol, right? I'm Sarah Borja. NBI."

  She smiles, not overly warm, but trying to put him at ease.

  "You've been out for like, almost a week. Grabe. September 2 na."

  Pol just stares at her. Waits.

  "Okay, so, I know you didn't want to talk to us before. Ayaw mo talaga. That's fine. I respect that."

  She tilts her head.

  "But we still moved. Witness Protection. You're in it."

  Pol squints at her. "Hindi naman ako pumayag."

  "Yeah, no need naman talaga. We can start the process even if you didn't say yes. Lalo na when people around you, like si Aling Rosa and your Barangay, they were like super persistent. They did the hard part. Kept you alive."

  She motions vaguely at the IV drip.

  "We just stepped in to make sure no one could get to you."

  The private room. The elephant in the room. It is the room. Safety, from... things.

  Pol says nothing. She sighs a little.

  "Look, Pol. I get it. You just want to go home. You don't want to get involved. Totally understandable. You've seen too much already, right?"

  She pauses. Her tone shifts.

  "But... I also heard about your friend. Yung close sa'yo, is Toto"

  Pol's lips tighten. His hands curl into weak fists under the blanket.

  "I'm sorry. I really am."

  Then her eyes flick toward the door, checking it.

  She stands and leans in slightly, voice lower, no more pretense.

  "Alam mo ba... Toto's not the only one. That girl? Zaira Navarro? The one asking questions about the tower?"

  She looks him straight in the eye.

  "She's dead too."

  Pol looks at her, the slow dread crawling in.

  "These people, Pol, they're dangerous. Like, actual scary people. And they don't stop until everything's quiet. No witnesses, no noise. Just construction and lies."

  She walks to the door, hand on the knob, pauses. Turns back.

  "You don't owe them anything, okay? You don't need to cover for them. You don't have to be loyal to people who'd rather see you dead than heard."

  She gives a small nod.

  "Think about it lang."

  Then she's gone.

  And the silence returns. No longer peaceful, but sharp.