Andrei, Shay, and I had plenty of time to talk on our way to Manila, but we didn’t. Not really. There were only two people in the small electric plane besides the three of us: a pilot about Uncle Nestor’s age with a frown that wouldn’t leave his face and that PNP officer named Baccay, the one that had met me outside Mother’s mansion. He was also the same one who took Shay away from the shooting after Uncle Nestor, and I took me back to my mother. That was before everything went to shit—and before I freed myself.
We landed in a private airport a few hours east of Metro Manila, somewhere in Tanay, Rizal. While the plane charged, Baccay handed us the keys to an Infusion Motors Pathmaker, which appeared to be the SUV version of a Tesla Cybertruck from the 2020s with the same metallic exterior.
“Is it bulletproof, too?” I asked as a joke.
Baccay nodded and smiled, not answering the question. “I’ll go on ahead. Some of these gangs recognize cops, even out of uniform. Let me know what happens.” He opened up the door to a sedan—also from Infusion Motors—and drove off.
We checked the bags in the back of the Pathmaker and found the usual duffel bags Uncle Nestor handed out. The insides contained many more supplies than I was used to. The typical clothes, food, cash, and burner phone were there, but on top of those, I found a medical kit, boots, a tent, a sleeping bag, and a filter straw.
“You’d think we would be climbing a mountain or something,” Shay said.
Andrei waited until we were inside the Pathmaker—him taking the passenger seat and Shay reading in the back—before he spoke. “Maybe we are. Maybe Metamatics has Reggie in some secret bunker in the province.”
The thought of Reggie being bait sent a chill down my spine. Evidently, it was already working.
I checked my phone before we left and found a text message from Uncle Nestor.
[Quezon City. The back of a restaurant named Josie’s. 3:45 AM. Tell them “Kapre.”]
The allusion to Papa was not lost on me. I read his words that night when Andrei, Shay, and I salvaged one of the Metamatics capture drones, causing us to go dark. I wondered if the mention was on purpose.
The province was a different place at night. The roads were dark and winding, lit only by our headlights and the occasional honking trike, moped, or bus. If this were the weekend, the lights in the huts in front of each home would have been on, as people drank and laughed and sang. That day, however, it seemed the entire countryside slept. I had to stifle the urge to roll the window down and take in the air.
Up ahead, a constellation of lights danced several feet above the road. They searched the front steps of homes and sari-sari stores, all dormant. When we passed underneath them, the lights turned to us and followed. I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “They have surveillance now,” I told my friends, and they didn’t move. They knew it, too.
A few minutes later, the drones lost interest. It had been months since I’d seen one, and I would be happy if I never saw one again. Still, they reminded me of Reggie.
“You have to let me do the talking,” Andrei told us shortly after the capture drones had left us alone.
I nodded, hoping this was the chance to open up and finally ask Andrei about his past. “Do they know you?”
Shay turned a page of her book in the backseat, the only sound over the air conditioning. I took that as her signal that she was listening.
“Probably,” Andrei muttered, staring off.
I could have stopped asking, but curiosity gnawed at me. “You… worked with them?”
“Probably not these guys.”
I turned a corner, taking it easy so as not to let my annoyance show in my driving. But I couldn’t help it. “Look, man, we’re going to need to know as much as we can about these people if we’re going to help you.”
Andrei shuffled in his seat, looking back to Shay, then me, and shaking his head. “I didn’t ask you to come along, you know. You could have just stayed back there.”
“And let you run off?” asked Shay.
I tried to maintain a steady speed, even as Andrei looked back at her again. “What?”
“And. Let. You. Run. Off. I know you want to. You’re not going back to Iloilo. I hope you know that. So, what? You’re just going to fuck off?”
“Easy,” I breathed.
“Fuck,” Andrei sighed. “You actually thought I was going to leave?”
“You haven’t exactly been happy with our current situation,” I put in, intending to rescue Shay from the conversation. Turns out, she had it under control the whole time.
Andrei peered out the window, holding his head up with his hand. “We all have… pasts, you know. A lot has happened.”
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I can imagine, I thought but didn’t say. Shay also didn’t utter a word.
Andrei continued. “It was a while ago—when I was younger. Like… 15? 16? I was only a Rust for a few years.” He scratched his tattoo before letting his fingers settle there as if covering it up. He couldn’t escape that part of his past, though. He’d carry that mark of the Kalawang Clan with him forever. “I only needed money, you know. I was young.”
I wanted to remind him that we were not even in our thirties yet, but I just nodded, letting him continue.
“We’ve all done things for money,” Shay uttered, still staring at the pages in her book. I wasn’t sure if she was reading or not.
“At first, it was all simple stuff,” Andrei said. “Shoplifting. Dealing. Sometimes car-jacking from some rich fucks who didn’t need them anyway. We even had protection rackets for businesses in Manila. You’d be surprised how much these little stores will pay to stay safe.” He smirked as if nostalgic for childhood memories. “Then, things got… more involved.”
I glanced at my rearview mirror and saw Shay close her book and place it on her lap.
“We started getting offers,” Andrei went on. “We didn’t know who sent them, but they came with retainers. Big sums, too. Huge. I bought my mom a car. She asked, ‘How did you afford this, anak?’ and I said, ‘I work hard, Mamang. For you.’” He clenched his teeth as he looked outside. “They told us the targets were bad people. Like rapists, fraudsters, and drug users. Lots of drug users.”
I didn’t want to mention the contradiction that Andrei had admitted to dealing drugs. Even more, I didn’t ask what it meant for someone to be a “target.”
“They did bad things, you know,” Andrei continued as if trying to reassure Shay and me. “Real drugs. It wasn’t stuff like Black Fire, which is just TV. This was real. Narcotics. Psychedelics.” He blinked, staring at the dash. He started to laugh, but his eyes were blank. “Thankfully, I got out as soon as that stuff started up. And not a moment too soon.”
I swallowed as I sifted through Andrei’s words. “Why was it a ‘moment too soon?’” I found myself asking. I could tell Andrei was talking around a point, but this was already way more information than he ever told us. I didn’t want to upset him, but at the same time, I didn’t want to waste an opportunity to learn more about his past. I needed to be prepared for tonight’s meeting.
“Things went bad, yeah. They…” the word hung as Andrei thought of what to say, “… they all got caught. Everyone I knew. They’re rotting in jail now, and I haven’t heard from them since. I think they think I’m in some prison somewhere, too.”
Shay and I didn’t say anything for a minute while trying to process that. So much was left unsaid. “And so, none of these people tonight know about all that?” I asked.
“Oh, they’ll know about it. Everyone knows about it. To them, I’m lucky. To the guys inside, they’re probably envious as hell.”
“Envious” might have been an understatement.
“So…” Shay ventured, “what should we expect?”
Andrei shook his head. “As I said before, just let me do the talking. I should know the guys that we’re going to meet. At least they’ll know me. Don’t worry.”
His assurances sounded hollow.
----------------------------------------
It was past 4 AM when we arrived at Josie’s in Quezon City, and our correspondents were already waiting for us. I parked the Pathmaker across the lot from a van with two people leaning on the hood. Andrei stared at them, his gaze steady and blank. They squinted back, then smirked, probably at the Pathmaker’s strange design.
Their smiles left them when Andrei stepped out.
“Stay here,” Andrei said, closing the door.
After it closed, I turned to Shay. “Fuck that, right?”
“Yup,” she said before we stepped out.
I heard Andrei utter, “Hey, Kapre,” as he greeted the correspondents. One was a girl about Shay’s age, with buzz-cut hair and a piercing on her septum. The other guy was tall and lean, about ten years older than the rest of us. They probably carried guns, but I didn’t see them.
Shay and I kept our distance, making it clear we didn’t intend to interrupt the conversation.
At some point during their talk, the girl had pulled Andrei close, staring at his neck. “Holy shit,” she said, “you are old. They won’t let us put them on our necks anymore.” She opened her shirt a bit, revealing her collarbone and the tattoo of a broken gear. I was too far away to pick out any other details. “But your artist did a good job. If that guy didn’t tell me you were Rust, I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“That guy” must have been Uncle Nestor. Speaking of which, I checked my phone just as the tall guy brought out his. It turns out that I had four unread texts from my uncle.
[Are you at the meeting now, Jayson?]
[Jayson?]
[Are you there?]
[I’m gonna pull the plug if you don’t respond.]
I texted back immediately, telling him we had arrived late but were with the correspondents now. I got a reply immediately.
[OK. I’m sending the retainer over.]
A few seconds later, the taller man rechecked his phone. He looked up from his screen to me and nodded. “We’re good,” he rasped. “Enough small talk. We gotta get going.”
The girl smirked, checking her own phone. “Wow. I thought this was all a big joke for a second.” She pocketed it and nodded to Shay and me. “Who are your friends?”
“Friends,” Andrei grumbled. “They’re not coming on the extraction.”
“Good. I don’t want them.” She waved as if we didn’t hear her. “We got plenty here, anyway.”
“Plenty?” Shay asked, looking around. “Three’s not plenty.”
I paused, gauging how the man kept looking back at the van. As I peered closer, I traced the shadow of someone sitting in the van’s driver’s seat.
The doors to the van slid open.
Andrei perked up, putting a hand on his waist next to his pistol. He didn’t pull the weapon out, however. He didn’t move at all.
The door to the van creaked open, and a man emerged from the vehicle. He appeared to be near our age, smiling as he walked over to Andrei and stopped before him.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. I was ready to pull Shay away and duck behind the van. But just as I was about to, the new arrival threw his arms around Andrei. Andrei, I saw, wasn’t smiling.
Before he released Andrei, I caught the broken gear tattoos not on his chest but on his neck.