Javier Montejo

  September 17, 2035

  Javier found the address on a slip of paper he nearly folded into nothing. Malate. The name itself tasted of sea salt and soot. He arrived at a quiet section where history clung like stubborn moss to limestone and iron. Pre-war buildings still stood here, hunched yet defiant, dwarfed by glass towers that rose like accusations against the past. The air smelled of rust, wet cement, exhaust fumes, and somewhere, faintly, burned sugar from a street vendor’s cart.

  The building itself was a fossil wearing new paint: cracks spiderwebbed across the facade, ivy clawed at window frames, and a single rusted balcony sagged above the street. Javier couldn’t name the style. Spanish bones, American ambition, Filipino stubbornness. Built before even his grandfather had drawn breath. Its large windows held the tired confidence of old men who had outlived revolutions.

  On the top floor, beyond a large corner window, a shadow moved. Watching him. The silhouette paused, deliberate, then dissolved behind a curtain. A soft gesture that felt heavier than a slammed door. Javier swallowed. His polished shoes felt too loud on the cracked sidewalk. Somewhere deep inside, something older than fear stirred.

  His secretary had already arranged the meeting, but still he feels unwelcome.

  He stepped through the entrance where light bent strangely, filtered by grime and cracked glass. The stairwell spiraled upward like a question asked by someone too tired to care for the answer. Each step creaked beneath the weight of inheritance and the young man bearing it. Paint flakes floated down like dying moths. Dust moved when he breathed, as though the building itself sighed at his arrival.

  At the top, a battered metal door stood open, spilling the sharp scent of turpentine and oil. Inside was not merely a room, it had life. Enrico “Rico” Arriola’s atelier was chaos arranged with purpose: canvases leaned against walls like drunks in an alley, unfinished sketches gathered in dusty drifts, brushes stuck bristles-down in chipped mugs. A single threadbare sofa slumped near a cluttered coffee table. Light fell in long strips through blinds, illuminating floating particles that turned every breath into an intrusion.

  Rico himself emerged from behind a canvas, wiping his hands on a rag already ruined by color. He was older than Javier’s father, beard streaked with gray, hair tied back without ceremony. His eyes held the particular heaviness of men who had built something and buried it with their own hands.

  Without ceremony, he gestured toward the sofa. Then, as though offering truce to an enemy he barely recognized, handed Javier a thick mug of 3-in-1. Steam curled between them like cautious conversation.

  Javier accepted, carefully. The coffee tasted of sweetened surrender, cheap and oddly comforting.

  He cleared his throat, steam rising between them like an awkward third guest. His voice, when it came, was soft at first, the polite register of someone who had spent a lifetime learning how to sound sincere even when it hurt.

  “I’m here about the six paintings,” he began, the words heavier than they had sounded in his head. “The ones at The White Space.”

  Rico leaned back, chair creaking under the weight of memory rather than flesh. Paint-stained fingers drummed on the armrest. His eyes flickered, reading not just Javier’s face but the family name stitched into every thread of his suit.

  “You Montejos,” Rico said, as if tasting the word. “You’ve bought from me before. Years ago. Maybe before you had enough gray hair to know what to do with a painting.”

  Javier blinked, surprise etching itself onto a face that rarely betrayed it. “I don’t remember seeing your work in our collections. Perhaps... it was my cousin? My uncle? We’re a large family, and not always in agreement on what deserves to stay.”

  Rico’s laugh was low, rolling like gravel down a hill. “I’m not surprised. Some of those works got sold off later. A Montejo buys something to show they can, then sells it when the walls get crowded. I remember. You might not.”

  Javier swallowed. The coffee in his hands felt suddenly heavier. “I understand. But this is different.” His words began to spill faster now, as if urgency itself could tip the scales. “I’m sure you’re aware of our financial standings, since you know we’ve been offloading precious artworks over the years for liquidity. I’ve asked a friend for help, someone I trust to deal with the rot festering inside Montejo Holdings. To rebuild what matters. And the only thing he asked of me in return were these paintings. Six canvases. That’s it. No money, no favors. Just those works.”

  Rico’s eyes narrowed, crow’s feet deepening into canyons. “And you’re willing to move heaven and earth for them?”

  “Yes,” Javier said, voice breaking slightly on the word. His gaze didn’t waver. “To save my family’s legacy. To keep the one thing to me that’s worth keeping intact.”

  The atelier seemed to hold its breath then, as if the peeling walls themselves were listening. Outside, a car horn yelped and the sound fled up the stairwell, leaving only the creak of old wood and the faint hiss of rain against the window.

  Rico’s shoulders shook, a soft, sardonic laughter rising from a chest still carrying decades of disappointment. “Legacy,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Always the damn legacy.”

  Rico’s eyes drifted past Javier, to something that wasn’t there anymore. When he spoke, the words came slowly, like paint forced from a dry brush.

  “Those six... they weren’t just mine,” he began, voice rough with memory. “They were born in collaboration. A collective. A ragged constellation of stubborn bastards, each convinced we could hold the world still on canvas. We argued, smoked too much, loved the wrong people, kept the brush moving even as everything else fell apart. It wasn’t about names then. It was about the process itself.”

  He paused, gaze settling on the cracked floorboards. “I don’t want to revisit that time. And I sure as hell don’t want to revive it. After the collective splintered, not from betrayal, just... entropy, those paintings ended up in storage. Forgotten, maybe safer that way. Would’ve preferred they stayed there, gathering dust, untouched by new meanings. Selling them would be reviving a period of my life that I’d rather stay dead.”

  His hand twitched, almost as if reaching for a cigarette that wasn’t there. “But an old friend of mine insisted. Said it would be a waste to keep them boxed forever. So we compromised. We let them hang, but tucked them away in an obscure corner of The White Space. Not front and center. Not shouting their history. No plaques even to describe them. Just quietly existing, half-remembered relics.”

  Javier listened, feeling the weight of the room pressing closer, the smell of turpentine and rain seeping deeper into his suit. His fingers curled tighter around the mug.

  His jaw tightened, the polite softness slipping from his voice. “But don’t you see? That is the legacy. Even if it ended, even if it broke apart, it happened. It meant something. You can’t bury that and call it mercy.”

  Rico’s gaze didn’t flicker. “It meant something to us then. That doesn’t mean it still has to mean something now.”

  “But it should,” Javier pressed, words quickening like footsteps chasing an argument down a hallway. “You built something. You believed in it enough to fight for it, to keep the brush moving even when everyone else walked away. That deserves to be honored, not hidden. It matters that it existed.”

  Rico watched him, paint-stained fingers motionless on the armrest, as still as the cracked light on the floor. “Maybe to you,” he said finally, voice dry as dust. “You see a thread to tie your name to something older, something purer. I don’t need that. I’ve made peace with letting it fade.”

  Javier leaned forward, heat in his voice now, the gentle mask slipping. “But you didn’t destroy them,” he shot back, each word landing like a knuckle on old wood. “You boxed them up. You kept them. Even if it was just in storage, you didn’t paint over them or set them on fire.”

  Rico’s gaze stayed steady, unmoved.

  “That tells me it does still mean something,” Javier pressed on, breath quickening. “Maybe not the same as before. But enough that you couldn’t quite let them vanish completely. Enough to hang them, even in a forgotten corner. You might say you’ve let go, but you didn’t bury them so deep they couldn’t be found.”

  Rico’s mouth twitched, not into a smile but into something almost sad. “And that means what?”

  Javier’s grip on the mug tightened, porcelain warming his palm as if to steady him. Underneath the words rising to his lips, something heavier churned, a quiet disbelief edged with frustration.

  He couldn’t fathom it: the thought of turning away from something that was once fought for, letting it vanish into dust without resistance. To him, memory and legacy weren’t chains; they were proof that the struggle had mattered, that breath and brushstroke hadn’t been wasted. The idea that someone could dismiss all that as if it were nothing, it felt almost obscene, like watching someone bury their own heart without ceremony.

  “It doesn’t have to fix anything,” he said, voice low and firm, words pushed out past the weight of that thought. “But forgetting doesn’t make it worthless. You and the others made something that meant something, even if only to you, even if only then.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He kept his gaze steady on Rico, the disbelief still there, quieter now, settling into the lines around his eyes. “To remember it... it doesn’t rewrite the past. But it keeps it from sinking into nothing.”

  Rico exhaled through his nose, a breath heavy as old stone. “And what good would remembering do?” he asked, softer now but iron still there. “What does it fix?”

  The words landed between them, stubborn as stone.

  Outside, the rain kept falling The rain outside had thickened into a steady percussion, tapping against the old windowpanes like restless fingers. indifferent to argument, to memory, to the trembling need in Javier’s voice. Inside, the silence felt older than either of them, settling into the cracks of paint and plaster.

  Javier set the empty mug down on a paint-stained table, its clink small and final. His shoulders eased, though the frustration in his chest stayed, an ember refusing to die.

  “I’ll visit again,” he said, quieter now, the edge in his voice worn down to something closer to resolve. “Not to argue. Just to see if you’ve changed your mind.”

  He glanced once more at the canvases leaning against the wall, each one half-forgotten, heavy with stories Rico no longer wanted to tell. And in that moment, Javier let the truth slip through: “I know I can’t convince you today. But I’m not finished trying.”

  Rico didn’t reply. He only watched, face unreadable, as Javier turned toward the stairwell.

  At the threshold, Javier paused, the air thick with turpentine and quiet resignation. He drew a folded business card from his pocket, heavy cardstock embossed with his family’s crest, and set it gently beside the mug.

  “Just in case, and thank you for the coffee” he murmured. A gesture, small and stubborn, left behind in a room that smelled of rain, old paint, and the unspoken weight of memory.

  Then he stepped out, the door creaking closed behind him, and the rain swallowed his footsteps before they could echo down the stairs.

  ? ? ?

  Apolinario “Pol” Guerrero

  September 17, 2035

  Pol stepped off the jeepney, one scuffed rubber sandal hitting wet asphalt that still shimmered with a stubborn slick of rain and oil. The city smelled of rust and last night’s fried food, cut through by the faint chemical tang of exhaust that never quite left the air. Even here, in a neighborhood the NBI swore was “quiet, decent” by Manila’s own battered standard, everything bore the soft wounds of acid rain and age. Concrete walls ran with old streaks like dried tears, gates bent slightly out of shape as if bowing under memories nobody spoke of anymore.

  He slung his bag over one shoulder, the cheap canvas heavy with photocopied handouts from the literacy class the LGU had arranged. Inside, his half-finished practice sheets: letters he had traced so many times they had begun to look like something alive, stubborn little marks that refused to stay neat. The instructors were kind in a way that still felt unreal, like an accident waiting to be corrected. His classmates too, some younger than him, some older, none of them laughing when he stumbled over vowels. A woman who sat two chairs away had whispered that she’d quit school to sell fish before learning to write her name again.

  The late afternoon air clung to him, humid and heavy, as he turned onto the narrow street where the NBI had found him a room to rent. The place still felt borrowed, but it had a real door, a thin mattress, a window that looked out on someone else’s rusted roof. It was enough.

  His mind wandered. Aling Rosa and her niece. Their faces rose unbidden in the heat-fog of memory. He wondered if the handler could smuggle a message across the tangled threads of official secrecy. Just a line scribbled on cheap paper: I’m alright. I have a roof now. People here are kind.

  Ahead, dusk pooled in corners the sun had already abandoned. The rain-wet road smelled of warm asphalt and last night’s cigarettes. A flickering streetlight came alive, buzzing like an old thought Pol couldn’t quite remember. For a moment, he slowed, breathing in the strangeness of belonging to a street that didn’t know his name yet, but hadn’t asked him to leave either.

  Then he saw them. A plastic tent sagging gently over a makeshift gathering. The sharp brightness of a single bulb, foil trays catching its glare. Voices, laughter, the warm clutter of people who hadn’t yet learned why they should fear letting someone new sit down beside them.

  They noticed him as he came closer, the damp street reflecting the hard yellow of the single bulb swinging overhead. One of them, tall, ponytailed, wearing a sun-bleached basketball shirt, raised a hand in greeting, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “Uy, ikaw ‘yung bagong lipat, ‘di ba?” The voice carried no suspicion, only the soft curiosity of neighbors still half-strangers.

  Pol paused, hand halfway to his side as if searching for something to hold. The air smelled of grilled pork fat, sweetened vinegar smoke curling around the edges of the tarp. Plastic stools and monobloc chairs formed an uneven ring around a folding table heavy with foil trays: pancit gone a little dry at the corners, lumpia still steaming, barbecue sticks dripping dark glaze onto paper plates.

  “Dito ka na,” the ponytailed one urged, nodding to an empty chair scraped free with a practiced foot. “Kain na.”

  Pol hesitated. His tongue felt clumsy in his mouth, but hunger and the gentle insistence of their smiles won out. He slipped into the offered seat, the plastic creaking under him, shoulders tight at first, then slowly loosening when no one stared too long.

  Names tumbled out around him, quick and overlapping: Celine, who wore a college ID lanyard faded from the sun; Joseph, whose palms bore the fine white scars of warehouse work; Banjo, whose laugh came out louder than necessary but felt honest all the same; Tonette, hair clipped up in a pen, whose eyes darted shyly before meeting his.

  They didn’t ask the wrong questions, not the kind Pol had learned to brace for. Instead, they talked of things light and warm: which jeepney routes had changed this week, how the landlord still hadn’t fixed the leaking gutter, who owed who change from the last beer run. Some still studied, others had drifted from school, and a few had never worn a uniform past elementary.

  It slipped out of Pol, softer than he meant, almost like confessing to the night itself. “Hindi nga ako nakapasok ng eskwela dati.”

  (“I didn’t get to attend school.”)

  They paused, but only for a breath, just long enough to see if shame would finish the sentence for him. When it didn’t, Celine smiled, a small thing that felt enormous in the dark.

  “Eh ano? Lahat naman tayo may kanya-kanyang ruta.”

  (“Then what about it? Every one of us has their own path.”)

  The others nodded, mouths too full for words but full of quiet agreement all the same. In that moment, Pol realized none of them cared which road he’d walked to arrive here, only that he’d arrived, and sat, and reached for a plate.

  A plastic fork pressed into his hand, someone else’s barbecue stick passed across chipped plastic. The warm salt of pork fat touched his tongue. Under the low tarp sagging with yesterday’s rain, laughter rose like steam from rice, and Pol felt, for a brief, impossible moment, that the road behind him mattered less than the meal in front of him.

  And the city around them, bruised by acid rain and years of forgetting, seemed to hush just enough to let him belong.

  ? ? ?

  Amy Rivera

  September 21, 2035

  Amy had been spinning so long in the suspiciously ergonomic, questionably expensive chair that the office of Truthspan Media had dissolved into streaks of glass, brushed steel, and high-end carpet. The kind of office that smelled faintly of new furniture and filtered air, where even the potted plants looked like they’d been vetted by committee.

  She’d half convinced herself the chair wouldn’t break no matter how fast she pushed off the floor, rubber wheels humming softly against polished tiles. And in the swirl of motion, the anger that had been simmering since the email landed felt momentarily blurred out, scattered at the edges like dust.

  But when she finally planted her feet, the chair shuddering to a stop, the dizziness stayed. For a few seconds the office still lurched sideways: glass panels rippling, the muted hum of conversation tilting in her ears. She pressed a palm to the cool desk, breathing slow until the spinning receded into a dull echo behind her eyes.

  The email from editorial was still there, waiting: Gino Sanchez killed in NBI shootout. Charges against Jiro Lim Uy dropped: insufficient evidence.

  She read it again, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less useless. Weeks of tracing shell corporations, nights elbow-deep in spreadsheets, a story built on sleeplessness and instant coffee, and now the law had swept it aside as circumstantial.

  It felt obscene. It felt like spitting on the work. Amy drummed restless fingers on the armrest, mind still stumbling between rage and disbelief. She resumed her spinning, the office around her carried on in its careful hush: polished, expensive, indifferent.

  And through the fog of dizziness, Anton’s voice cut in, threaded with dry amusement.

  “You’re literally spiraling, Amy.”

  She blinked, and the blur resolved into Anton leaning against a glass partition, one eyebrow raised, the city’s smoggy dusk caught faintly in the reflection behind him.

  She planted her feet firmer on the floor, fighting off the leftover spin that still tugged faintly at the edges of her vision. Anton was clearer now: worn jacket over an open-collared shirt, hair slightly unkempt in that way that never quite crossed into sloppy. He looked young, too young for the number of contacts in his phone, too young for the deep tiredness tucked quietly behind his teasing.

  “It’s unfair,” Amy shot back, voice sharp, something raw and splintered coming up from her chest. “We found everything, Anton. Paper trails, money moving like it was smuggled under skin, witnesses whispering about rooms that smelled like bleach. And now he just walks because the law won’t call it enough?”

  Anton crossed his arms loosely, letting the question hang a moment before answering. “Justice comes slow here,” he said, tone softer, though still edged with a truth that felt older than either of them. “Even when you’ve got Truthspan’s money behind you. Manila bleeds out the truth slow on purpose, lets it drip instead of flood, so the city doesn’t tear itself apart all at once.”

  Amy leaned back into the chair, letting it rock gently, staring past Anton at the office’s glass walls. Beyond them, the city sprawled out in gray and neon, a half-choked thing pretending to breathe easy. “So what now?” she asked, the question flat, almost bitter. “More fluff about imported brands planting flags on Glorietta? I can’t do that forever, Anton. I’ll lose my mind.”

  He almost laughed, though it was more air than sound. “Don’t write those pieces off so easily,” he said. “They’re not for us, but they keep the lights on. They pay for the real work, the late nights, the lawyers, the trips to places that don’t want cameras.”

  He shifted his weight, reaching into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulling out a slim folder, the cheap manila cover softened at the edges from being carried around too long. “But if you want something with teeth...”

  He tossed it lightly onto the desk between them. It landed with a dry slap, pages inside shifting just enough to tease a glimpse of names in clean, expensive font.

  “Series of break-ins. Houses, offices, wine cellars, all belonging to the city’s ultra rich. Same quiet signs, same clean exits. One of our data people thinks it could be the same crew.”

  Amy dragged the folder closer, flipping it open with the caution of someone expecting blood on the pages. The names stared back: some she recognized from business news, old family names half-whispered in the language of gated communities and security details. And then, more quietly unsettling, a few she recognized from family dinners and overheard toasts. Names tied to faces that had smiled at her across too-white tablecloths.

  She didn’t say anything at first, letting the moment hang. The leftover dizziness faded, replaced by a quiet spark of something closer to resolve.

  “Interesting,” she murmured finally, the word rolling slow across her tongue. And for a brief moment, under the soft hum of air conditioning and the expensive hush of the office, the city felt closer, waiting, watching what she would do next.

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