“Twenty million PHP,” said my mother. “In return, you work your ass off pushing Black Fire across Manila. You'll need to create your own stitching, though.”
She had told me “stitchings” meant the episodes contained in Black Fire. “I don’t know how to do that at all.”
“We have our AIs to check originality, write scripts, build sets, and weave everything together. I don’t need creators. I need someone who knows the city and surrounding provinces well to get the word out.”
It sounded strange that my mother thought I would be an expert on this topic. I was only 23. She must have been twice my age. I was ashamed I didn’t even know my mother’s age. Then again, could I blame myself? She was the one that left us.
“If you’re anything like your father,” she continued, “then you won’t run away.”
Ah. That was true.
“People that you trust,” she went on from earlier.
She didn’t say, “A team that can get the job done,” for even I knew, in this line of work, that you needed a loyal group to stick beside, even if they were incompetent. They would eventually learn.
My father’s manuscript sat in my backpack. I could feel its familiar weight like a parent would a child hanging from their back.
There was just one more question. “Who is going to test all this?”
We were standing on a balcony overlooking the roundabout. As soon as I asked the question, my mother pointed down.
The front doors opened. Men with concealed weapons stepped out, pulling people by their arms. Zipped ties bound their wrists, and opaque garbage bags cover their heads. I cringed at seeing them.
“Relax,” said my mother beside me. “They’re squatters. We pay them 1000 PHP a head. Cash. They’re drugged the whole journey over and back, many times over, so they’re not talking.”
I saw this play out in front of me. Ernesto and Quin led a man in jeans and a hoodie to a van. The driver wore a gas mask. They closed their door, and I imagined the interior filling with gas. The van pulled away shortly after.
I turned to go, eager to contact my friends, when my mother told me to look in the duffel bag she had arranged for me.
I found a burner phone. Foam pads surrounded the ugly device. I could have dropped it off the mansion and onto the roundabout, but it wouldn’t have broken. “It’s only our network,” she said. “We will see everything, of course, but you can take it all around Luzon.”
I kept searching and found credit cards, cash, and IDs belonging to men with other names but with my picture on them. There were passports, driver’s licenses, and others. “How did you do this?”
“AIs. I have enough photos of you that we can put you in all sorts of poses.”
My mother, who I had thought dead, was creating fake IDs for me. It felt strange. Why didn’t she come and say hello? Not even once?
I kept searching but couldn’t find anything like the multo device that Reggie, our ex-tech guru, had used to hijack cars on Manila’s fleet network. I explained this to my mother.
“Fleet network?” she asked and shook her head. “Nothing like that for a Bernal.”
She led me outside the Bernal Palace and to a garage sitting on the far side of the lawn. Ernesto and Quin followed, instructing others to escort the Black Fire testers into their vans.
The garage doors opened as my mother stepped towards them.
The headlights turned on.
I caught myself looking at six different vehicles: a FOTON SUV, a Mitsubishi, a Toyota, an Infusion Motors sedan, and a Tesla. Charging cables snaked from the walls into each vehicle. They weren’t polished to a shine; rather, they looked more pedestrian and worn in.
My new burner phone lit up.
My mother spoke. “They’re yours, my son.”
----------------------------------------
The paper was still in my wallet from when Shay, Andrei, Reggie, and I had tossed our phones into Laguna Lake. I had only scribbled one address on it, but hopefully, it was the right one.
I blazed down EDSA Boulevard at midnight in the Infusion Motors sedan my mother had granted me. I didn’t want any traffic, and I’m surprised she was still awake. Didn’t she have school or work? Maybe she was just as lost as I had been until I met my mother. Now, I felt more free than ever in this city.
I parked the car under an auto-crane and walked the rest of the way, making a game of avoiding direct line of sight from the PNP surveillance drones that patrolled the area.
The first thing I noticed on Balagtas Street was the squad cars. Forming a gridlock, they lined the alleys and streets—not just cars, but armored SUVs and larger vans.
Tondo’s crowds passed, and so did I. I was indistinguishable, still in the same clothes I had worn when leaving Papa’s. I thought about how long it would take to revisit Taguig, but I heeded Uncle Nestor’s words carefully and knew I would never return.
I had to thank Papa for not bringing us here. Despite the Manila government legitimizing and gentrifying the district, somehow, Tondo’s slums crept back, reclaiming land and pushing against the surrounding ports. It seemed the docks had been placed after the slums when the opposite was true.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Shacks loomed precariously over Manila Bay. Only five years ago, trash flotsam had gathered in a thick, sludgy layer. One of the first things the Giants had done was clean up Manila Bay and, by extension, the Pasig. Seabins like the tops of smokestacks of ships sunken underwater sucked in whatever little trash there was, while huge signs reminded passersby of the exorbitant sums of littering.
I went down a street that should have been an alley. I heard people talking and a baby crying. A trike roared behind me, flinging fossil fuels up. Police spoke to residents leaning against corrugated steel panels covering windows. Rusted bikes and dog cages sat in corners. A stack of white plastic chairs lay next to me. Because of all the potted plants, I may have been in a jungle.
High above, a capture drone zoomed past, thinking nothing of my adventure into this crowded alley. It should have. It would have caught an early glimpse of my future unfolding.
Among all the playful flirting and risky advances, I remembered Shay’s laugh the most. It was more like a snort, her nostrils flaring. Despite what she thought, I found it endearing.
I heard that laugh, and when I knocked on the door, I heard it dissipate. I didn’t even wait long for her.
Shay opened the door and stepped out, looking like she had just left bed. She wore pajama bottoms and an oversized black T-shirt from a band she had probably never listened to. She looked around for drones before pulling me inside.
“What’s the deal?” she asked, shutting the door and adjusting three locks. “Why come all this way? How did you get here?”
I frowned. I resisted the urge to reach out for her and shook the thought away. “Believe me, I wouldn’t have come unless it was urgent.”
She shook her head and folded her arms. “People are disappearing, you know. Tondo isn’t safe anymore. I would have left if I had somewhere to go.” She looked at my phone. “Don’t just carry it around like that. Especially if it’s new.”
I stared at the phone my mother had given me. “Yeah… it is new. And I got one for you too.”
She raised a brow. “Huh?” She scanned me slowly and deliberately. “So you got a job? Something legitimate?”
“Yeah, you could say that. That’s what I came to talk to you about.”
She smirked. “This isn’t like TelePerformix, right? I hate that place.” She looked around the house as if we would be overheard.
“Much better,” I continued, trying not to say much. “It’s lucrative, and I need a team to help me.”
She bobbed her head. She was not as desperate as I was. Even from standing in this anteroom, the kitchen around the corner, I could see the cabinets of medals, silverware, and souvenirs from the provinces. Judging from this myriad of possessions, I guessed she had been doing quite well scavenging fiction—much better than I had. I saw a pair of shoes that belonged to adults and kids.
“Hmm,” she considered. “I take this isn’t usual employment?”
I shook my head. How was I going to word it? “It will require most of your time. And you can’t work on anything else.”
She must have understood this was something important. “How lucrative?”
I had come prepared for this. I turned over my black duffel bag and opened a pocket. I had counted the number of bills in the wad, but it was a stack of 1,000s. I may as well have been Uncle Nestor trying to bribe away his nephew. “There’s more,” I told her. “Way more.”
She took the stack with less indecision than I had before.
After that, Shay needed no more convincing. She took a JanSport backpack from a coat rack and filled it with clothes and a toothbrush.
“Where to?” she asked, one thumb wrapped around the strap.
It was then that I thought of more. What did I owe to my mother? My Uncle? I could have taken what little money my mother had given me and run. I had a car, and I had Shay. I could find Janice. I could work in another province and leave the Bernal family behind, just as they had left me, regardless of whether it was my father’s fault.
Maybe I would have in another life. However, this time, I was too curious and perhaps too greedy.
“I’ll drive,” I said.
----------------------------------------
As we pulled away from Tondo, I began explaining. “Black Fire.”
We had a budget. We’d need dealers. The Giants would be looking for the stuff, so we’d have to set up trusted networks. The cartridges themselves could be disguised as batteries, film rolls, or bottles of pills. We thought out loud of fronts to erect, delivery networks, and places on the dark web where we could sell Black Fire. I imagine us as street vendors selling balut in their rolling carts. Among their other street food options would be harmless vapes that were not harmless at all.
I explained these to Shay, and I thought she would run. When she perked at the first mention of the vape drug, I knew I had her. “What’s our budget?” she asked.
“Twenty million PHP.”
She whistled. “Shit.”
“I know.”
“You found some really big people. How?”
I thought for more than a quarter minute of telling Shay I had just discovered the mother I thought was dead was not only alive but leading an operation of engineered hallucinogenics. Instead, I settled on saying, “Luck.”
That was enough for Shay, who rolled down the window and flung her arms out. She screamed as we drove on, excited as I was to make a massive killing. She pulled herself back inside. “I have a feeling,” she began, “that I packed this bag for a reason.”
We drove deep into the city, passing the holographic ad panels displaying Vocaloid girls dancing and singing karaoke, their bright hair bobbing. People stood underneath the adverts with their selfie drones and danced along.
I let Shay text while I drove, and she learned that Andrei and Reggie shared an apartment near Poblacion. We stopped by and I told Andrei the specifics, while Reggie listened as he cooking us sinigang, a sour Filipino soup typically made with tamarind and meat. Andrei mulled it over, comparing two pistols on the table before him. I didn’t ask how he procured those or if they were even his.
“You’re serious about the budget?” Andrei asked me. “You’re not fucking with me, are you?”
With two guns in front of him, I could have said anything not to upset him. “It’s real.”
“Then I demand a retainer.” Andrei looked at Shay and Reggie. “That’s fair, right? To show us you’re serious.”
Reggie perked up, but Shay looked down. I hadn’t wholly earned their trust over our endeavors against the Giants. We had been nothing more than that, but we were about to become leagues closer.
The brick of 1,000 PHP bills was all the proof they needed, though Andrei still had to rifle through the stack to check their authenticity. As he went through it, his gaze turned from sharp to flat to simple joy. “Shit,” he said. “Alright, Jayson, you have my attention.”
Three people arrayed before me; souls that I could take into the thick of things. For once, I felt I could provide something for someone. I was given a lifeline.
Mother had earned her life herself, and I had been thrust into it. It was now as much my project as hers. Finally, I felt that I was part of a family again
“It’s called The Crest and its Killers,” I said.