“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Andrei.

I wish I did, but the truth was I didn’t have the faintest clue if this Q-96 capture drone would lead us to Metamatics, PNP, my mother, or anyone else hunting us down.

“You can stay back,” I told everyone else, not just Andrei. “If it takes me, at least you all have a chance to escape.”

“We know,” stressed Andrei. “I’m still for splitting up. I’m half tempted to leave right now.”

“Then go,” barked Shay. “Just try not to get more attention than we already have.”

She glanced behind us, and we followed her gaze to another capture drone trailing us. Just then, the Q-96 ahead—only a few meters in front—stopped moving.

“You think it’s waiting for us?” Andrei asked, voicing my thoughts.

I had a feeling, but I didn’t want to say anything yet, lest I get Andrei’s hopes up for nothing.

Pasig was alive that night. The city obscured our movements under a cacophony of dry markets, honking trikes, and street vendors pushing their carts laden with buckets of sweet corn, balut, and isaw.

Hunger hit me then. My backpack was full of Skyflakes Crackers, but I wanted something more significant. The strange thing was that we could afford to dine in a Michelin-starred restaurant tonight, but exposing ourselves was the worst idea.

Yet, here we were, walking the streets of Manila, practically handing ourselves over to the city.

We rounded an alleyway, passing families of squatters hunched over on their phones. I still thanked Papa for keeping me out of that life.

The deeper we followed the drone into an alley, the more my stomach sank. If this was a trap by the Giants, they could easily flutter the drone away and leave us cornered. I had promised myself to be careful, but this felt like a huge step backward.

The neighborhood soon turned residential. Steel bars covered windows. Exposed A/C units hummed with overworked fans. Buckets of trash lay precariously next to grills where food vendors sizzled skewers of grilled pork.

All this lay in the forefront of a collage of detailed graffiti, with bubbled letters spelling curses in Tagalog, Bisaya, and English. Some of them made me laugh.

Shay stopped walking before a family of squatters, looking down at them. I noticed the expression on her face and gently pulled her away. “You shouldn’t help them,” I told her, as much as I didn’t want to. If the people in this alley knew we had a million PHP in our bags, they wouldn’t let us leave.

“This is going to be the last time we do this,” Andrei urged, flipping through his phone.

I was about to ask him why until he walked ahead and showed us his screen. He’d been reading Rappler’s front page. There were a couple of articles about the Mandaluyong protest, but a bigger one took center stage.

MALACAÑANG PALACE ENFORCES SURVEILLANCE ON CAPTURE DRONES.

We stopped, but Andrei kept walking. “They haven’t implemented it yet,” he urged. “They need time to get their systems up and running. It’s going to take months, apparently.”

That was a relief, at least for tonight. I didn’t want to think how anyone could operate under such surveillance. Maybe my elusive mother would finally be caught.

And me too, with her.

Andrei continued to summarize the article out loud, outlining the backlash President Atienza faced for creating what was essentially a surveillance state. You had to be stupid not to see it.

Surprisingly, there was little reaction to the news, and it made me wonder how complacent people had become under the shadow of the Giants.

“Guys,” Andrei said.

We stopped moving, and so did the Q-96.

The alley opened into a large intersection, where a hidden dry market burst with light from hanging exposed bulbs. Selfie drones whizzed past the Q-96, joining a group of people collecting in front of a wall on the other side of the intersection. The Q-96 lazed in that direction, hovering slowly over the umbrella-roofed stalls, not once turning its focus downward but glued to whatever the people were looking at.

I took Shay’s hand instinctively as the crowd pressed in around us. We moved closer to what was the wall and the object of the Q-96’s attention. Murmurs rose as we approached, shouts of curiosity. People pointed.

The Q-96 we had been following joined twenty more like it. They hovered in a tight clump, barely letting any light through the gaps between them. They aimed their faces at a wall of graffiti, and as I read what it said, I felt a surge of hope—or was it wishful thinking?

I’M SORRY I’M OK.

I froze, reading the text and trying to reconcile it with what I suspected. Could this be real? The implications were enormous.

Andrei and Shay bunched up beside me. Shay was the closest, her hip pressed against my arm. I wanted this moment to last all night.

When I was sure no one would overhear us, I whispered, “I think he’s alive.”

Shay blinked as she processed what I was hinting at. “Reggie? How?”

“He’s good with tech,” I told her and the others. “Maybe Metamatics got to him, but maybe they didn’t kill him.”

Shay studied the graffiti closely. “Grammar’s important, right? He would’ve inserted a comma.”

Andrei pressed forward and shook his head. “Reggie doesn’t know how to draw graffiti. Nah. I know what Jayson is getting at.” He nodded up at the Q-96. “Cheeky bastard even knows we’re looking at him.”

We all peered up at the Q-96 drone that had guided us here and saw it in a new light.

Maybe it was just the hope of seeing our friend alive, but it was a hope we desperately needed.

“I think either way you look at it,” I said, “whether my uncle sent these things or it was Reggie, someone is watching over us now.”

Andrei bowed his head. “Amen to that.”

Shay followed suit.

I sensed the mood as well as anyone else, and I remembered our promise.

Sometimes, partings were slow and overstayed their welcome. Other times, they were brief and over before you knew it. This one was somewhere in the middle.

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I didn’t want them to go, but I knew they needed to. They needed to lay low if they were ever going to escape this life.

As for me? I was too far in.

Like so many nights after we had taken it to the Giants, we met in a square and hugged it out, Shay going first and embracing Andrei while she sniffed and held on a moment longer.

“Come here, little man,” said Andrei, pulling me over in a hug. “If I ever get back home, I’m going to tell them all about you, ya crazy bastard.”

“Just don’t embellish anything,” I told him, slapping his back. As we pulled away, I had to ask him. “Are you really going?”

He nodded. “His parents will want to know more after this. His mom’s very religious, you know. She’s going to think this was divine intervention—God’s hand telling us their son is OK, whether he’s in heaven or not.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way, and it made me forget our friend could be dead but in a better place than here.

Andrei left ahead of Shay and me, not once looking back.

I turned to Shay. “I need to-”

She moved in close, and for a moment, I thought about everything we’d been through together. Instead of letting the moment become something more, I stepped back and held her gaze. We stood there, the weight of everything unsaid hanging between us, until I pulled her into a tight embrace. The comfort of her presence was enough for now. One day, I thought. Just not today.

“You’ll be alright,” I whispered.

“I know I will,” she said, “I just hope you are, too.”

I wanted to ask what she meant by that, but I couldn’t.

I froze, staring across the alleyway to the entrance we had just walked in from, where two men stood. They searched the intersection, pushing through the crowds and vendors until they locked eyes with me.

My heart raced. My gut told me to shove Shay away and run, hoping to clear as much distance between these men and myself as possible.

“Jayson?” Shay asked, muffled by my shoulder.

It was too late. Ernesto and Quin were already here. There was no sense trying to outrun them.

I had to tell her. “She found me,” I whispered.

“Who?”

“My mother.”

Shay held on to me, but I knew she had to let go.

I pulled her up until she was facing me.

Ernesto and Quin were brutes among the crowds but blended in like native Filipinos. Their collared shirts spoke of BPO employees just off their midnight shifts. Their jackets were light, and I couldn’t see their guns, but I knew they were armed. They had to be.

“Easy now,” said Ernesto, too close not now to run from. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he approached. “Stay where you are, Jayson. We’ll get you home safe.”

Home. Mother’s mansion would never be my home. I wanted to be with Papa again, in our poor, dilapidated house in Taguig, the only sanctuary I ever had. Papa would have defended me if he was here.

I pulled Shay close to me, my voice low and urgent. “Remember what we agreed upon?”

She looked down, avoiding my gaze.

“Iloilo,” I continued. “Go there. I’ll meet you there.” I had to resist the urge to shake her, to make sure she understood. “Got it?”

She nodded vigorously and then turned to run. I had assumed Quin wouldn’t go after her.

But I was wrong.

Quin grabbed Shay, yanking her out of my grasp.

She struggled, but I grabbed her hand. “It’s OK,” I told her, though I knew it wouldn’t be. These men would make her disappear.

As soon as I thought it, I lunged at Ernesto, wrapping my hands around his face and trying to push him to the ground. It was futile; he was as big as Andrei and tossed me aside. I crashed into a trash can, spilling half of its contents over me and onto some people passing by.

“Stupid kid!” Ernesto yelled. “Get up! You’re going home.”

His bravado was well-planned—he wanted to look like a father disciplining his recalcitrant child. It worked—some people cleared away, while others laughed at me. I might have laughed at myself, seeing me on the ground covered in dirt, my girlfriend being dragged away.

“Hey!” someone called—some macho guy seeing Quin dragging Shay. “Is she with you?”

“She’s not!” another girl yelled.

“Fucking rapist!” cried a woman.

I saw this all from the side as Ernesto dragged me away from the crowds gathering around Quin. There must have been thirty people.

I stopped moving to my feet and skidded to a halt. Ernesto didn’t like that.

Something cold pressed into the small of my back. “Why do you run?” Ernesto asked, pushing me toward the alley we had entered. “Your mother gives you everything, and you repay her by stirring up trouble, sullying everything she’s worked for.”

I thought about making my move. I could reach for his face, gouge his eyes. If he bit me, I’d dig my fingers in until—

My skin prickled. I was sweating all over. I calculated the range of actions I could take to reach Shay and save her, but there was nothing.

We rounded a corner.

“Hoy!” someone called.

Ernesto stopped pushing me and looked in front of us.

A PNP officer stood with a shotgun hanging over the front of him. He was a pure-blooded Filipino, and on his chest, I saw the name on his badge: Baccay.

Ernesto released me, pulling me to the wall and bowing slightly to the officer. “Evening, sir,” said Ernesto.

The cold metal pressed into my back again—the gun barrel.

The officer named Baccay nodded as he walked past us, two more officers following him. Before he walked off, he turned back to Ernesto. “Take good care of him, alright?”

“You got it, Baccay,” Ernesto replied.

The cops made their way to the intersection, shouting at people to leave while their drones took their places above the market. They made their way over to Quin, and the crowd formed around him.

And Shay.

A bigger question occurred to me: what the hell did Ernesto say to that cop? Did they know each other?

It hit me then—the extent of Mother’s reach. It touched everything, including the PNP.

“Hey!” another officer called, blowing his whistle. The sound seemed to fill the whole district. “Off of her! On the ground!”

Ernesto and I stared, watching the commotion from afar.

The people cleared away, even as more PNP officers rushed past us. I counted at least eight, with two guarding the alley’s mouth where we had first entered.

I could see Quin backed against a wall, an officer holding a gun up.

Still holding Shay, Quin withdrew his gun.

I ran towards them. “No!”

The blast sounded like a boulder had exploded right next to me. Everyone in the alley ducked and ran past the PNP officers and us. Ernesto pressed me against the wall, holding me back, ensuring I wouldn’t escape.

“Gun!” someone cried.

“Oh my god!”

“Let me go!” I shouted in the commotion.

But he just dragged me out of the alley and into a car parked nearby. I recognized it as one of the models Mother kept in the garage, with a line of bulletproof glass separating the front seats from the rear ones.

Two men waited inside—one in the shotgun seat, the other in the rear with me. They both leveled pistols at me.

“If you try to run again,” Ernesto fumed, “we will kill you. That’s not my choice, either. That’s your mother’s order. Do you understand?”

Three guns were trained on me now. I couldn’t go anywhere.

The car didn’t move immediately, the driver waiting for other vehicles to merge into traffic. Fleet mode wasn’t an option; it would make them too easy to track.

I looked back and saw more people leaving the alley and PNP drones fluttering in.

Then it hit me—holy shit.

The gunshot.

Was Shay dead?

I was about to bring my legs up and kick the glass when I saw her with Officer Baccay. Shay was in tears. Baccay put her in the back of his squad car and drove off, not waiting for any other officers.

There,” Ernesto said, “now that you know your little girlfriend is going to die, you can stop thinking about her.” He slammed the glass. “Go! Now!”

We sped off, and I realized the driver had been waiting for me to witness Shay being taken away.

Did they not care she was going to tell them everything?

Of course not.

Once again, Mother’s reach.