Javier Montejo

  September 14, 2035

  The Square with the X You Can’t Draw

  A Montejo bedtime story. Inheritance as insomnia. Legacy as joke.

  The lights would not stop watching Javier.

  They were built into the ceiling, small sterile things, embedded like surgical instruments. The kind of lighting chosen by a professional interior designer trying to say: you are calm, you are safe, you are rich enough to afford forgetting.

  But the lights did not soothe. They glared softly, humming in a frequency just below sound. Not quite a buzz. Not quite silence. Javier imagined they were whispering to each other in a language only electronics could understand. Something about wattage. Something about death.

  He lay there, flat on a mattress engineered for spinal luxury, surrounded by sheets that had been imported from a country that probably didn’t know what a shanty fire looked like.

  He hadn’t moved for over an hour. But his heartbeat had been running laps in his chest like a trapped dog.

  The air was saturated with diffuser oils. Lavender. Sandalwood. Something labeled “Forest Serenity.” They smelled expensive, tasteful, unhelpful. The scent was trying to hypnotize him. It said: sleep now, little heir. Forget the screaming men. Forget the burning plastic.

  Earlier that evening, his maid had knocked gently, holding a tray like it was an offering to a sad god.

  “Chamomile,” she said, smiling with a practiced softness. “Real flowers, sir.”

  He drank it out of politeness. Out of desperation. Out of superstition. It tasted like hot water trying to be better than itself. He hoped it would work. It didn’t.

  He stared at the ceiling.

  And the lights stared back.

  To keep himself from thinking about everything else, he played a quiet game. He traced lines between the LEDs, sketching invisible shapes on the ceiling. Stars without sky. Points without purpose.

  He tried to make a square with an X inside using only one stroke. He failed.

  Tried again.

  And again.

  And again.

  It became a ritual. A sacred futility. Like prayer. Like damage control.

  The shapes didn’t matter. What mattered was staying one step ahead of his own thoughts.

  Because the moment he stopped drawing, the meetings would come crawling back.

  The press conferences.

  The microphones.

  The corporate condolences.

  The subtle threat of tears in his throat, never quite falling.

  The promises he made with his eyes while his mouth said nothing.

  He had become the gleaming face of Montejo Holdings. A smile with context. A name that still held some weight, though it now dragged behind him like an anchor made of bad debts.

  The PR team said he came across as sincere. That he had the “correct posture of sorrow.”

  They encouraged him to keep it up.

  They thought he was acting.

  Which he was.

  But also, he wasn’t.

  The sincerity wasn’t fake, it was weaponized. Or maybe harvested. Like a crop. One that bloomed in the dark.

  All he really wanted to do was scream. Long and loud. The kind of scream that cracked mirrors. The kind that curdled milk. The kind that made rich people lean back in their chairs and ask, “Is he okay?”

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he adjusted his collar. Smiled for cameras. Read from scripts. Spoke in sentences that began with “we understand the pain” and ended with “rest assured, we are committed.”

  He was a grief puppet, pulled by strings made of shareholder nerves.

  And the lights never stopped glowing.

  Eventually, the ceiling gave him nothing.

  The puzzle remained unsolved. The LEDs blinked like idiot stars. One line could not make a square with an X in the middle. There was no meaning left to extract, only repetition. Only ritual.

  Javier rose, carefully. Slowly. The bed exhaled as he left it, grateful to be unburdened.

  He crossed the threshold into his living room. The motion sensor caught him immediately. A soft chime sounded from somewhere in the wall. Then the lights rose, dim, ambient, hotel-like. Too warm to be real. Too smooth to be trusted.

  He hated them.

  He walked barefoot across the polished floor, past the untouched art books and the silent air conditioning vents, and turned the lights off manually. Found the switch on the wall with muscle memory. Let the room sink back into gloom.

  Much better.

  Now, the only light came from the skyline.

  Metro Manila stretched out in front of him like an accident that had learned to glow. Neon scars stitched across the horizon. Billboards blinking. Windows like stars with asthma. A pale sheen of pollution hung above everything, lit from beneath by too many promises.

  He stepped closer to the glass wall and stood there. Still. Bare.

  The city did not care who looked at it. It performed anyway.

  Somewhere in the silence, he began to trace. With his finger, he followed the jagged tops of the buildings, drawing nothing. Drawing everything. Ghost shapes. False maps. A child’s idea of constellations.

  He paused on a gap between three towers. The space formed the silhouette of a pair of pants.

  Ugly pants. Loud pants. The pants of a god with a cruel sense of humor.

  Javier stared at the shape for a long time, as if it might rearrange itself into something meaningful. It didn’t.

  Behind him, he heard the soft click of a door. A pause. A breath. Then it closed again.

  The maid. Half-asleep, maybe. Checking a sound. Saw him, naked in the dark, outlined against the skyline like some forgotten saint in a modern cathedral.

  Neither of them said anything.

  What was there to say?

  He didn’t turn around. She didn’t call out. The moment evaporated like steam. Another strange thing in a house full of them.

  The glass was cool under his fingertip.

  Below, the streets pulsed, taillights, karaoke echoes, electric sadness. Somewhere, a siren. Somewhere, a neighbor trying not to argue.

  And beneath that, beneath all of it, Tondo.

  He could feel it, even here. The blackened earth. The fenced-off ruin. The reporters. The gawkers. The livestreams.

  He remembered the ones who jumped the fence. The bodies moving over concrete like shadows desperate to become real.

  Phones raised. Shoes thin. Faces preloaded with outrage.

  Some cried. Some shouted. Some posed. All of them documented.

  They weren’t there to mourn. They were there to accuse.

  They said the Montejos were preventing them from rebuilding. Said the perimeter was an act of cruelty. Said everything with the confidence only rage can provide.

  At the time, he had flinched. Thought: this isn’t fair for them.

  Then Marius, calm, impossible, always two seconds ahead, had reminded him: Professional martyrs.

  Javier had hated it.

  Too sharp. Too calculated. The phrase felt like swallowing glass.

  But now, with the city reflected on his skin like static, he could no longer deny it.

  It was cruel.

  It was descriptive.

  Their faces had gone viral. The hashtags wrote themselves. Donations flooded in. GCash numbers became gospel.

  And he…

  He had become the villain in their story.

  A rich boy in a tower.

  A Montejo.

  He wondered, bitterly, if any of that money would find its way to the NGOs.

  The quiet ones.

  The ones dragging tarps through mud.

  The ones filling out forms in dim light.

  The ones nobody retweeted.

  Probably not.

  Because grief, he thought, had better engagement metrics.

  Grief had better lighting.

  He closed his eyes.

  Pressed his forehead to the glass.

  Breathed.

  For a moment, he imagined drawing a perfect square with an X in the middle, across the skyline, across the city, across himself.

  One line.

  Just one.

  But it was impossible.

  ? ? ?

  Amy Rivera

  September 14, 2035

  There Are No Interns, Only Witnesses

  A Story About a Story About a Story That Became the Truth

  Amy sat alone in an office that felt like it had never known dust. Every surface gleamed with intention. The floor was too clean. The air smelled like filtered ambition. This was not a newsroom. This was a cathedral for money.

  She was seated in a chair that could have paid half a semester’s tuition. It didn’t creak. Chairs that expensive never did. The desk in front of her looked like it hadn’t been used for writing in years. No coffee rings. No scratches. Just power, polished to a mirror.

  On the door was a small, tasteful plaque: Thalia Dizon.

  The name prickled something in her memory. A lecture, maybe. Third year. A voice saying, “One of the last idealists who survived mainstream media without turning into product placement.”

  Or maybe she had just dreamt that. Hard to tell, now.

  The room buzzed faintly. Machinery in the walls. Money disguised as silence.

  She shouldn’t be here.

  She knew that.

  She was wearing her boots with the scuffed toes. Her patch-covered jacket. Her shirt with the screaming frog on fire. Loud, dissonant, hers. The email said nothing about what to wear, so she dressed like someone who was not pretending.

  Outside, the skyline vibrated through the window like a nervous system. The city below was glass and chrome and traffic. It didn’t care who got published.

  It had been fast.

  Too fast.

  Wednesday: Roderick’s apartment, the strange quiet of a man surrounded by too many books and not enough sleep.

  Thursday: the email, short and professional. Interview. Friday. Bring the report.

  Friday: now. This chair. This room.

  She had skipped Media Theory to come.

  The irony was a little too on-the-nose.

  She could still hear the professor in her head, talking about Baudrillard, or maybe a meme about Baudrillard. Everything was hyperreal now anyway.

  Then the door clicked.

  In walked a woman who looked like she had never once stumbled. Sharp blazer. High-fashion edge softened just enough to pass for newsroom-friendly. Not a strand of hair out of place. Her eyes were quick, assessing, like they were already outlining a headline.

  “I’m Thalia Dizon,” she said, like the name needed no introduction.

  And it didn’t.

  She extended her hand. Amy stood, gripped it a second longer than she should have. Thalia’s hand was warm. Too warm for how cold this place felt.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “If Roderick is recommending you,” Thalia said, settling into the desk like she had always been part of it, “then I’m listening.”

  She smiled once, briefly. A small crack in the marble.

  “Back then,” she added, “he was my mentor too.”

  And with that, the interview began.

  Or the interrogation.

  Or the beginning of something that would not let her go.

  Amy spoke first.

  It came out not as a prepared statement, not as pitch or ambition or elevator-ready biography, but as something cracked from the inside.

  “It wasn’t ever the plan,” she said, glancing once at the skyline like it might offer her a cleaner version of the truth. “I didn’t want to be a reporter. I volunteered. Activism. Some awareness stuff online sure, but not actual journalism. This project, I was just… trying to help Zaira finish what she started.”

  She paused. The desk felt too big. The silence too symmetrical.

  “I only started thinking about journalism after Roderick said the word out loud.”

  Wednesday. A cup of black coffee. The peeling edge of a couch cushion. A man with a history shaped like Manila traffic, erratic, intense, occasionally poetic.

  Thalia listened without blinking. Her expression was neutral in the most surgical way possible. No judgment. Just absorption. Like she’d heard this kind of confession before.

  “I was the same,” she said after a moment, voice steady. “Back in college. I didn’t choose this. It just happened. Like a current pulling you under, but somehow you learn to breathe underwater.”

  Then she leaned forward. Elbows on the desk. Her fingers laced together with the elegance of someone who had moderated too many panels and buried too many stories.

  “What does journalism mean to you?” she asked.

  Amy blinked.

  “I.. sorry I didn’t have much time to prepare for this interview,” she said, laughing once, too fast, too human.

  “But…”

  A pause. Not dramatic. Just honest.

  “I think journalism is just… paying attention. Then telling people what you noticed. Whether it’s breaking news or chismis over merienda. Both come from the same impulse. Something happened. People should know.

  “One gets fact-checked and filed. The other’s passed around over pancit. But both shape how we understand things.

  “I think I’m drawn to that place. That space between information and connection. Where saying something out loud actually makes someone feel something. Or do something.

  “And if I can be part of that…”

  Another pause.

  “Then maybe that’s enough reason to keep going.”

  The silence after was not empty. It was full of the city. Full of the sound of Thalia choosing how to respond.

  She nodded. Once. Sharply.

  “That space you’re talking about?” she said. “That’s where the fight is.”

  She smiled again. Slower this time. Not warm. Not cold. Just real.

  “We are gatekeepers. Whether we like it or not. We choose the frame. We build the angles. People trust us to translate the world, and sometimes they don’t even know they’re doing it. It’s a heavy thing.”

  Amy nodded, then tilted her head slightly.

  “Can I ask something? About Truthspan.”

  Thalia raised an eyebrow, in a way that said of course you can.

  “I looked you up. The opinion pieces, the longform stuff? Really good. Smart. Sharp. But the numbers aren’t huge. Not yet, anyway. Is that a concern?”

  Thalia exhaled. Not annoyed. Not defensive. Just amused by the question being asked so plainly.

  “We’re still rolling things out. Algorithms take time. People don’t trust a new voice on the first try. Especially not in this country. We’re a face they haven’t seen before.”

  Then she leaned back. The chair made no sound.

  “But if you’re worried about your story being seen, don’t be. If it’s good, and I think it is, it’ll burn through the noise.”

  The office felt warmer suddenly. Or maybe heavier.

  Somewhere far below, the city honked and screamed and tried not to fall apart.

  The conversation slid from theory into structure, from ideas into spreadsheets. Smooth, like a cigarette flicked into water.

  They talked shop. The nature of media. The collapse of attention. The bottleneck of good data. The unbearable click of a bad headline. Thalia's voice was calm, authoritative, like she’d taught these things to ghosts and cabinet ministers. Amy responded as best she could, recalling lecture notes, half-read essays, and gut instinct. The world was drowning in content. Journalism was either the bucket or the hole.

  Then the mood shifted.

  Trainee program expectations.

  Deadlines.

  Workflow.

  Slack etiquette.

  Company benefits.

  And then… numbers.

  Real ones. Money.

  Amy blinked. “Wait. You’re… paying trainees?”

  Thalia almost laughed. “Above minimum wage.”

  It was the kind of absurdity Amy had no place for in her mental filing cabinet. In this economy? In this industry?

  “Our founder believes that if you want people to stay and grow, you pay them,” Thalia said, picking up her phone with a motion too elegant for the phrase she just used. “Cold hard cash. He’s pragmatic that way.”

  Amy let out something between a chuckle and a prayer. “What’s he like?”

  Thalia looked at her phone again. The smallest smile crossed her lips, like someone watching a car crash about to hit only the villain.

  “Why don’t you see for yourself?” she said, eyes still on the screen. “He’s coming in.”

  ? ? ?

  Javier Montejo

  The boardroom smelled of old people.

  Not metaphorically. Not like mahogany or decay. Not nostalgia.

  It smelled like unwashed wigs and expired vitamins. Like skin that had been losing elasticity since the Erap administration. Like loyalty rewards from dialysis clinics.

  The Montejo Holdings Board of Directors had been summoned for an emergency meeting. By Esteban. A miracle, really. Like hearing a long-dead uncle cough from inside his mausoleum.

  One by one, the clan's honored parasites shuffled into the Ortigas HQ. The elevator opened with a tone reserved for death. Out came tweed jackets, orthopedic shoes, collagen-starved faces sagging over turtle necks. The boardroom welcomed them like a mausoleum with air conditioning. They took their seats like settling into a familiar coffin.

  Javier sat among them. Not as one of them. As something else. Senior Vice President, which in Montejo terms meant: not old enough to be blamed, not young enough to be ignored.

  He glanced around.

  Faces like beef left in the sun too long. Names etched into corporate history like a joke no one found funny. These were the people who sold the Cavite land with no hesitation, no vision, no plan. A vast tract of potential, gone to the first Chinese buyer who waved a check fat enough to cover their personal debts. Not the company’s. Theirs. Credit card balances, inheritance taxes, mistresses in New Manila.

  They had auctioned off the family’s future like pawned jewelry. For gas money. For spite.

  Javier watched them converse without Esteban. Laughing softly, whispering behind raised hands. They had started the meeting already. Without the man who called it.

  Because Esteban no longer counted. That was the quiet truth beneath the luxury flooring. Esteban had long been a ceremonial CEO. A placeholder with thinning hair. The last Montejo who still bothered to iron his collar.

  Yes, he was a weak businessman. That much was fact. A man built for compromise, not conquest. A caretaker CEO in a collapsing dynasty. But still. Still.

  There was something in Javier that curled inward when they spoke about his father like this. Not love. Not loyalty. Something older. Rage, perhaps. Or grief wearing brass knuckles.

  He felt it stir in his chest like an unwanted resurrection. Watching these waxen gargoyles talk over each other, like their throats weren’t full of dust.

  The word Tondo came up again. They said it now the way you say mold or scandal. Something to be scraped off a ledger. Someone floated a buyer. “A good price,” they said. “Seventy percent of current valuation.” Another added, like a cough, “Twenty percent of what it’ll be worth when the TOD breaks ground.”

  And they nodded.

  As if that were sensible. As if selling it now, before the value blooms, was smart. As if it weren’t looting the vault before the fire even stopped.

  Javier felt his teeth clench.

  He didn’t want to scream. He wanted to laugh. The kind of laugh that sounds like choking. The kind you do when you realize your family name is a sinking ship and your cousins are hammering holes in the hull.

  He looked around again.

  The Montejo Board:

  Curdled bloodlines in tailored suits.

  Ancestry as liability.

  Their eyes wet, glazed, blinking slowly like lizards after a large meal.

  And somewhere beneath all that flesh and forgetfulness:

  The ruin of Tondo.

  Still burning.

  Even if only in reputation.

  Javier folded his hands together.

  He said nothing.

  He was trying very hard not to remember that he shared their DNA.

  The door swung open.

  Esteban Montejo entered like a man walking into his own wake.

  No one turned to greet him. No nods, no silence falling like respect. Just the low thrum of side conversation continuing as if a janitor had stepped in to collect a forgotten mop. One board member adjusted his hearing aid. Another belched softly into a tissue. They knew who he was. They simply didn’t care.

  He took his seat at the head of the table, which had not waited for him. The chair sighed beneath him, tired of being symbolic.

  He cleared his throat, and in a voice cracked by too many years of compromise, addressed the elephant in the room.

  Tondo.

  The fire. The land. The politics. The heat.

  He announced that Maison Teratai, after extended discussions, had confirmed their commitment to seeing the project through. Thanks in no small part, he added, to their consultant Marius who had secured alignment with both JICA and the Department of Transportation.

  Somewhere in the corner of the room, a projection flickered to life, showing a map. Subway lines. Dotted corridors. Progress. None of it mattered. The boardroom didn’t look up.

  Then Esteban mentioned Javier.

  Said his son had been a great help. A calming face in the storm. His press conference appearances. His government liaison work. His name slowly gaining traction, his image gently taking root in the minds of a confused public desperate for someone to trust.

  The board did not react.

  One man scratched the back of his hand. A woman flicked a bit of lint from her sleeve. No applause. No nods. No joy. Just oxygen being wasted.

  But Javier heard it. Felt it. Deep somewhere behind his ribs.

  He wasn’t supposed to care. He had trained himself not to. Had written off Esteban’s approval like a bad investment long ago. But hearing it now, in this theater of the damned, it slipped under his armor. Just a little.

  Still his father.

  Then Esteban got to the reason they were all summoned. The real one. The trapdoor beneath the floorboards.

  “I am retiring,” he said.

  It dropped like a brick in a lake. No ripples. Just a slow descent into silence.

  Javier blinked. Swallowed. Looked over, half-expecting Esteban to clarify. Joke. Rewind.

  “I will remain as chairman. I nominate Javier Montejo as the next CEO,” Esteban said.

  The sentence landed sideways in Javier’s skull. Something cracked. Something else started laughing.

  He let out an audible “What?”

  It rang louder than expected. Startled even the windows. It wasn’t a dramatic protest. Just disbelief. Pure and unfiltered. Like someone had handed him a dead cat and told him to raise it.

  The idea had always been distant. A contingency in the shape of a title. Something he would train for. Walk toward slowly. Not be shoved into like a burning elevator.

  The board, for their part, reacted with as much surprise as animated corpses could manage. A few eyebrows lifted. One gasped a little, possibly from actual respiratory failure.

  One of them muttered, “Is he ready for this?”

  It hung in the air like mildew.

  Esteban didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. His silence had weight. Or maybe it was just the weight of inevitability.

  Then he called for the vote.

  It was swift. Mechanical. A pre-recorded ritual. They raised their hands like raising the dead. One by one. Every one.

  Unanimous.

  Javier Montejo. CEO.

  He had no speech. No gratitude. No clue what to do with his arms.

  He looked at his father.

  Esteban nodded. Once. As if to say: it is done. Also: now drown.

  The room was quiet again.

  Nothing moved except the chandelier, gently swaying from air conditioning like a pendulum no one noticed was counting down.

  ? ? ?

  Amy Rivera

  The door opened.

  Time hiccupped.

  In walked a man dressed like the dress code was "Tokyo street prophet meets CEO in exile." His sneakers were clean but looked lived-in. His jacket had geometry. His shirt was something that could be studied. The outfit did not belong in a corporate building. It belonged on an art magazine cover taped to a lamppost in Berlin.

  They greeted each other like old friends pretending to be professional.

  Thalia turned to Amy. “Amy, this is Marius Zhu. Founder of Truthspan Media.”

  A pause dropped into Amy’s stomach like a rock.

  The founder.

  Of this.

  Of everything.

  She was just applying for a trainee slot. Entry-level. Intern-adjacent. She was still digesting the fact that the editor in chief Thalia Dizon herself had interviewed her, but this… this felt like being handed a grenade and asked to juggle.

  Thalia gave her one last look, a nod that was somehow both warm and clinical, and excused herself from the room.

  Amy was alone with the man who built the building.

  Marius took the chair next to Amy. Not the desk chair. Not the big boss’s throne. The visitor’s seat.

  A gesture. Deliberate.

  “I heard you’ve got a really compelling story,” Marius said as soon as Thalia’s footsteps disappeared beyond the glass.

  His smile was devastating. Not in the cinematic way. Not in the predator-in-a-suit way. But in the soft, impossible way of a high school boy who just found out class was cancelled and his crush was in the same jeepney home. It was disarming. Disastrously genuine.

  Amy blinked. She had forgotten what sincerity looked like.

  He leaned forward like he was asking her to show him a magic trick. “I want to hear it from you. Not the file. You.”

  There was no irony in his voice. No managerial distance. Just… boyish delight.

  The room changed shape around that sentence. The skyline outside blurred. The office desk became incidental. What remained was a man who looked like he’d skip a board meeting to sit cross-legged on a vinyl floor and hear a stranger's story about revolution.

  So Amy told it.

  She started slow. Careful. Unsure what level of detail this situation demanded. But Marius didn’t interrupt. Didn’t fidget. Didn’t type anything on a hidden phone.

  He just listened.

  Head tilted. Eyes wide. Repeating things back softly to confirm.

  “Right, right. That part. The elevator with no record.”

  “Okay, so that guy was off-duty?”

  “Wait, and no CCTV?”

  Each repetition made it feel like he was mapping the story on a mental corkboard lined with red string and bubblegum.

  When Amy got to that part, The Zone, he leaned in, slow and weightless, like a cat catching scent.

  “You were in a room next door?” he asked.

  Amy nodded. “Yeah. I guess they didn’t realize the vent was shared.”

  He looked delighted. “That’s so snoopy of you. I love it.”

  She tried not to smile. Failed.

  She recounted what she’d heard. Jiro’s voice. The other man. Unfamiliar cadence. Power like a dead battery, cold and heavy. But no name. No match.

  Marius gave a soft, scandalized laugh.

  “Nothing? Not even a hunch?”

  Amy shook her head. “I went through everything. Over and over. No hits. Doesn’t fit anything I’ve collected.”

  He leaned back, hand over his heart in exaggerated betrayal.

  “Aw. Tragic.” His grin was wicked, like a friend who found your worst text and was saving it for your birthday. “You’re doing so good, then you just flop the landing. Classic.”

  It wasn’t cruel.

  It wasn’t even mocking.

  It was the kind of teasing that only worked when someone already believed in you.

  And Amy, somehow, felt like she had just passed the real interview.

  Marius was silent at first. He just smiled. That same criminally unguarded, boyish smile. Like he had been waiting all day to do this exact thing. Like this was the part of the movie he kept rewatching.

  From the folds of his jacket, he produced a phone. Not the kind executives usually carried. No chrome. No ostentation. Just scratched edges and a sticker of a cartoon frog with a gun.

  “Okay, okay. Be patient,” he said, thumbing through something. His eyes scanned like a child looking for candy in a bag he already knew was full.

  A beat passed. Then another.

  “Here,” he said. And handed her the phone.

  Amy took it.

  She read.

  And the air thickened.

  The story unfolded on the screen. Her story. But not hers.

  Same bones. Different meat. The structure was sleeker. The transitions cleaner. Angles reframed like a professional photographer had snatched the camera from her hands and whispered, try this instead.

  But it was the content that made her freeze. Dates she hadn’t confirmed. Names she hadn’t chased. Internal memos. A source inside the company.

  They had been working on it, too.

  Truthspan.

  She wasn’t alone in this labyrinth. She was just crawling through one tunnel while a whole team dug from the other side.

  And somehow, they met in the middle.

  She looked up.

  Marius was slouched against his chair like gravity was just a polite suggestion. One arm flung lazily across the backrest. Head tilted. Watching her reaction like it was an eclipse.

  “You got ninety percent of it,” he said. His voice was soft now. No sarcasm. Just awe. “Freelance. No press pass. No budget. Just instinct and stubbornness.”

  He shrugged. Still smiling.

  “And that part about The Zone?” He whistled, low. “We missed that. No one got that. Not even close.”

  Then he reached into the inside of his jacket again.

  This time it wasn’t a phone.

  It was paper.

  He handed it over without ceremony.

  A job offer.

  Amy didn’t look at it. She didn’t need to.

  Marius gave her that grin again. The one that didn’t belong in this expensive building. The one that said he’d sneak into a festival through the bathroom window and still pay for your taxi home.

  “You’ve got fire,” he said. “And I want to help it grow. Not contain it. Not brand it. Just feed it the right fuel.”

  His eyes gleamed. “You in?”

  Amy nodded.

  Not because she calculated. Not because she reasoned it out. But because somewhere deep in the ribcage of her spirit, something yelled, yes, obviously, yes.

  Marius looked like someone had told him his favorite band was reuniting.

  He clapped his hands once, leaned forward.

  “You got anything else on your schedule today?”

  Amy blinked. Mental math. One elective. Already skipped. Nothing left but the commute and a bowl of kare-kare waiting at home.

  “No,” she said.

  “Perfect.” Marius stood, stretched, the kind of stretch you do when you’ve been in the cinema watching a movie three hours too long.

  “Thalia told me they originally planned to publish the story this afternoon,” he said. “But we think your intel fills in some crucial blanks. Think you’re up to working with the lead reporter?”

  “Absolutely,” Amy said.

  “Good,” he said. And meant it like he’d just been told she brought snacks for the road.

  rating, comment, whisper it through a vent.

  Your engagement is how stories like this survive the merger.