As soon as I stepped into the safehouse, Andrei made a run for me.

“You asshole!” he screamed as he charged.

I was about to ask what he meant when the air pushed out of me. My head slammed against the door, and I slid against it, sagging to the floor.

Andrei got up. I tried to rise, but he pushed me down again. He loomed over me and wound his foot in preparation for a kick, though he looked more like some blonde toy soldier ready to march.

“He’s my best friend, you asshole!” he screamed at me. “It’s all your goddamn fault, Jayson!”

Shay, beside me, stood between us. “Back off, man!” She looked down at me. “You alright?”

I groaned and stood upright, brushing myself off. My side pulsed with pain as I grabbed it, taking a seat. “It’s only Reggie’s fault.” I caught Andrei’s sneer at that remark. “Alright, a bit of mine, too.”

Shay shook her head while she stood between Andrei and me. “Shut up! Both of you. Holy. So obtuse.”

Andrei scowled and then looked at us. “And where have you two been while we held down the fort?”

Shay didn’t say anything, instead raising an eyebrow at me.

For a long time, I had been thinking about telling others the truth about my family’s involvement in this operation, but I had employed the same siloing tactics my mother did, which, in hindsight, didn’t work. It seemed now was the worst time to drop a bombshell, but it was still better than keeping it to myself.

“I’m sorry,” I started, wincing at a stab of pain on my side. God, I hope Andrei hadn’t broken anything. “There’s a lot.”

“I can wait,” Andrei said.

Shay just folded her arms. She was privy to most of what the others were not, and everyone knew it. They didn’t seem to take kindly to this favoritism. Before, Shay and I had tried to hold hands in secret. Now, even that seemed insignificant with all the information we held close to our chest.

It was time to level the playing field.

“Okay,” I said and began explaining.

I started with my father dying, a fact I had kept from them all this time. This somber reveal only garnered sympathy for a few heartbeats, though. Andrei seemed not to care until I told him about my mother, Uncle Nestor, and the Black Fire operation they led and recruited me into.

“They’re incredibly wealthy,” I said, hoping they’d focus on the money while forgetting that I had hidden these critical facts.

But this did little to sway his opinion. Based on all that had happened, Andrei seemed more concerned with staying alive than money. I should have felt the same, but in reality, money would help us stay alive. At the time, I had thought we could do anything with it, especially in my mother’s network.

I didn’t think I would gain Andrei’s sympathy ever again, but that didn’t stop me from telling him about the helicopter and the dead PNP officer that, even now, I could still envision on the ground before me, his blood sprayed against the road.

“That was your mom?” asked Andrei, head still in his hands and referring to the helicopter.

I shook my head. “She doesn’t know who that was.”

That earned a look from both of them.

That there were other terrorist groups in Manila felt less strange than admitting that we were one of them. When I recruited the others into this operation, our only concern was pushing Black Fire to get more users. Now, we had the PNP, the Giants, and potentially some other faceless terrorist groups against us. I guess this was part of the life I needed to get used to and to take more seriously if I was going to stay alive.

They would all come for us soon.

“So, what do you think happened to Reggie?” Andrei asked. He directed his question at the room, though I knew it was meant for me.

“The Giants must have got him,” I said. I struggled to embrace the next point’s reality, but it had to be said. “They’ll come for us if we don’t do anything. I don’t know how long it will take them to get here, but they will.”

I could read in Shay and Andrei’s downturned faces that they were contemplating Reggie’s vanishing as much as their own. We shouldn’t have been surprised if we found our friend floating face down in the Pasig or if we fell asleep and woke up there. I almost wanted to go there now, stand on the shores, and wait for him. Maybe I should have jumped in as well.

“Then why haven’t they reached us already?” Andrei asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Shay and Andrei all knew this, too.

“Maybe they’re staking us out,” Shay put in.

We followed her gaze as she peered at the window.

The implication didn’t register well with Andrei. “What do you mean?” he asked. “They’re watching us outside right now?”

“Could be,” said Shay, “but how does that help us?”

It doesn’t, I knew. It herded us all inside like snakes in their burrows. There was no sense dwelling on the fact that our pursuers could be just at our doorstep. We needed to think.

I was about to ponder our choices before the call came to my burner phone. I feared that my mother would scold me, but perhaps she had already accepted that her son was a useless pile. Well, you didn’t need to be my mother to know that.

Andrei’s fist clenched as the phone rang in my pocket. “Jayson? Pick it up.”

“No!” Shay called, stepping back. “I mean, it might be whoever is looking for us, right?”

Andrei did a double take, sighing at the inevitability of our predicament. “I do remember now that Reggie took a call from someone before he went.”

“He did?” That was news to me. “No more of that, then,” I told them. “No more calls to any other numbers besides our own. No silly mistakes.”

I removed the phone from my pocket and placed it on the floor, ensuring I did not answer it. We all waited before it dimmed, then lit up again as my voicemail app notified me that I had a new message.

If the Giants could track my voicemail usage, then we were doomed anyway. “I know I just told you not to take calls from anyone,” I told my team, “but this is different.”

They stayed silent as I played the message on speakerphone.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Jayson?” asked my sister. Her voice cracked from static. “Thank you for helping me. I just wanted to say that I’m alright now. You don’t need to come for me. I talked to Bryce. If you need to reach me, here’s his number.” She read it aloud. “Good luck, brother.”

She hung up.

Andrei looked confused. “Your sister is in this, too?”

“Yeah, and she’s fine. Thank God.”

“Does she know where we are?” Andrei appeared to be coming down from his earlier anger.

“No. I didn’t tell her. Had no reason to.”

That assured him a bit. Still, when he got up, he went to a set of black bags in the living room corner, next to the cartridge loader on which we uploaded the Black Fire stitchings. He rifled through the back and came up with a gun.

I threw my hands up, but it was unnecessary as Andrei found a rifle leaning against the living room wall and moved upstairs. “Call me if someone comes,” he said. “I’m not going down without a fight.”

“Won’t be necessary!” Shay called. “Reggie fixed the cameras, so we’ll at least be notified when they approach.” She looked away as if mentioning our friend was taboo.

“I’ll shoot them if they touch that gate!” Andrei called back, shutting the door up top.

Shay shook her head, stepping past me. “You’re an idiot sometimes, Jayson,” she said. “Obviously, he wants someone to talk to.”

Maybe I’d be the one up there to confront him, but right now, I wanted Andrei to simmer down more than anything. He had the guns, after all.

Shay bent forward and ran her hands through her hair. “Oh God, Jayson,” she said.

I knew that expression and the tone of her voice better than anything. Lately, it seemed the only things I had done right—The Crest and Janice’s escape—had been only for my family. If you were not related to me, you were doomed to death. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to have friends.

I slumped on the couch, drawing my head to the ceiling and counting the minutes—the seconds we had until the Giants descended upon us. If it would be anything like the dispensary, they would shoot first and ask questions later.

“We have no secret tunnels,” Shay uttered, hoping I was still listening. “No disguises to wear. No secret getaway cars, either. It’s just us here. Against them.” She sat there, looking too drained. I wanted to rush over and hug her. “What’s the best thing to do when you know you’re going to die, then?”

I wasn’t sure there was an answer to that question. Perhaps it was mania that drove me to my answer as well.

I shrugged and said, “I guess… we accept it.”

----------------------------------------

My mother’s call came several hours later, but by then, my San Miguel and Red Horse companions had made my head swirl.

It went to voicemail. I opened the app, fearing Andrei and Shay overheard.

“Jayson!” my mother called through the static. “Get back here! At once! I’m not letting you fuck this up for me!”

“Wow!” Andrei piped up. “She’s your mother? She sounds like a complete bitch.”

“She is,” Shay said and glanced at me. “Sorry, but it’s true. I would have reacted the same way if I were grounded.”

“Grounded?” Andrei asked.

Shay caught him up on the situation, making chismis while my mother kept ranting. I started tuning out after the first sentence, only listening again when my mother compared me to Papa. “Even Kenneth would have made smarter decisions than you,” she said. “You know what? Hannah was right. I shouldn’t have had children.”

Shay grabbed my arm when she heard that comment.

I blinked away while something formed in my eyes. Maybe it was the onions I had chopped earlier for the sisig, a Filipino dish made from grilled pork, usually seasoned with calamansi, a small, sour citrus fruit, and chili peppers. The plates still sizzled before us, though I had eaten mostly rice. The food seemed to tranquilize our senses, and coupled with the alcohol, we could have all taken a long nap and woken up behind bars or in hell, which is where I knew we were going next. At least, I would be.

Listening to my mother voice her disapproval of me should have stung more. For anyone with a normal upbringing, it would have. To me now, though, it only sounded like noise. She had never been there, and when she was later on, she was distant and disappointed. She cared more about the well-being of her operation than her children. She was more into this Hannah woman than Janice or I. She had given birth to me, but she was not my mother. To be a mother, you need to love your children.

Papa had loved me. He had never stopped. He had raised me alone. He could have left us in the streets. He could have given up a lot earlier. Instead, he persevered.

Maybe that’s what he was telling me to do.

“You know the worst part?” Andrei asked. I expected him to echo my thoughts of my mother essentially disowning me, but he didn’t. “Our board game cafe won’t be a thing.”

That wasn’t the worst part by far, but I knew Andrei was gripping for something positive to hang onto. I had almost forgotten about Reggie and Rei’s, the board game cafe Andrei and Reggie wanted to open.

Shay, despite the gravitas of the situation, smiled. “Who says not?” She prattled her fingers on the table. “Maybe if some miracle gets us out of here, you can start it up. You don’t even have to change the name.”

Andrei smirked, laughing quietly to himself at this. “Yeah, maybe. We got pictures of our trips to Bulacan and Iloilo. Maybe I can put those on the walls.” He found the drinking glass close to his gun and raised it. “That’s where I’ll go. To Iloilo.” He swirled the drink, staring into it. “Find me there.”

I smirked at that, and so did Shay. I didn’t know if Andrei imagined an Iloilo in the afterlife or the actual one. It seemed more likely we’d visit one of those than the latter.

“To Iloilo then,” Shay said, raising a bottle of San Miguel Flavored Beer, “and to finding each other there.”

I took up the cheer, raising my bottle of Red Horse—the harbinger of hangovers. We clanked them together, and the chiming of glass and the chugging of our throats seemed to be the bells and turning gears of the engine that would take us to death. Well, we would ride this engine as deep as it went. We would never look back.

I set my bottle down just as Andrei’s phone chimed. We looked at it, then at each other.

“Huh,” Andrei said, reading the notification. “Guess this it.”

“What?” I asked.

“Movement.”

We froze, still as statues in a cemetery.

Andrei rose, grabbing his gun.

Shay shot an arm out, stopping Andrei from going anywhere. “Wait,” she said, pointing at Andrei’s phone. “Look. It’s just one guy.” She squinted. “And a bunch of drones. What the hell are those things?”

I paid less attention to the hurricane of drones surrounding the man on the phone and more to himself. He was tall and white, though even through the pixelated feed, I could tell he was probably mixed race—likely half Pinoy, half American. His jawline looked so straight that he could have been mewing.

As I studied him, I started comparing him to people I knew or had seen. It didn’t take long.

He was the correct height and build. I imagined him standing next to my sister in their photographs on social media, which she had hidden from me until recently. He had sent my family money when I didn’t even know he was doing so. He was paying for Janice’s tuition. He was, in a way, our family’s savior.

“I know him,” I said, not wanting to hold anything back from my team now. “His name is Bryce.”

Janice had never told me his last name, and I hadn’t bothered searching her likes and comments to find the man. Still, I told the team what I knew about him.

“The same sister that called us?” Andrei asked, now sitting.

I nodded. “I only have one.” Then, I remembered the message. “And we have his phone number.”

Something panged outside—the sound of a fist on the steel of our gate. It came again, like a death knell.

We watched Bryce on the feed banging on the gate, knowing he wouldn’t get in. He looked down at the biometric lock as if it were some child’s plaything.

“How does he know we’re here?” Shay asked.

I couldn’t answer that. “Janice wouldn’t have been able to tell him because she didn’t know.” For once, I felt good about keeping information from my sister.

Andrei once again reached for his gun, and none of us stopped him. “Well, mate, I’m sorry if you know the guy, but it looks like he’s after us. That gate is thin steel. It’s not bulletproof.” He scowled, looking through the walls as if seeing Bryce in front of him. “Maybe he’s the same guy who took Reggie.”

Most likely. My gut instinct was to tell Andrei to stop, but another idea came to me. “Hold on,” I said. “Let me try something first.”

I found the voice message. Mother’s phone was sparse, but it had some default OS apps. Even without them, we still had the engines. We could feed a script into an AI actor and make it say anything we wanted—and in the voice we wanted.

“Thank you for helping me,” Janice’s message had said.

I imagined it differently.

“Thank you… for helping me.”

“…for helping me.”

“…helping me…”

“…help-…me…”