Sometimes, regret looms. Other times, it sneaks up on you, sinking its teeth.
He awoke as soon as the car pulled into the garage. The driver stumbled to wake along with him, grasping his forehead. He opened Bryce’s door. “I hate when they do that.”
The warehouse could have been located in a shipping port in Manila, a warehouse in Quezon City, a mechanics shop in the provinces, or underground. There was nothing indistinguishable about the structure save for the windows painted over with black, the floodlights like upside-down bowls hanging from the ceiling, the shelves empty, and the lack of any presence, human, mechanical, or digital. The air was stale, free of the conditioning required to sustain life. There were no sounds.
They chose this moment to emerge. There were five of them. They were young, each around 20 years old. They all looked to still be in university. Men and women—more like boys and girls. Long and shaggy hair. Glasses. Scarves—of all things—in the Manila heat. They carried messenger bags full of books that could have been Philippine or English literature. Some checked old phones, standing awkwardly like teenagers at proms. None had guns, and Bryce almost felt ashamed bringing his weapon along.
With every following footstep, Bryce dwelled on the apology’s wording. He drummed on the cadence, practiced the intonation, played with turns of phrases, rewinding and replaying the moments in his head. Nothing was enough.
Through hallways and corridors, Bryce discovered the operation. Boys and girls hunched over laptops. People sprawled on couches. There were at least twenty of them. The furniture lay around the room like a San Francisco startup relocated to a warehouse’s dank basement. Neon lights danced around the interiors. A wearable flashed. Keyboards clacked while frantic fingers pounded them into submission. Innovation crushed the air.
A plastic chair was the Information Broker’s throne. They had been turned around. Their hair was just as long, uncut, still the same as when Bryce had left her on the subway.
Janice’s expression was a mix of everything. A disturbed past, a fleeting present, and a future with as little certainty as his own. Janice was the same woman he had left at Ayala Triangle Station that night six months ago, a period he had done his best not to reflect upon. But it turned out that regret served as a chain stronger than any.
Now that she was in front of him, he didn’t know what to do.
He thought of breaking down, rushing over to her and apologizing, dumping all his words like a bountiful harvest, like money that could compensate for his actions. He considered selling his condo, withdrawing his account, taking all his money, and using it to fund whatever operation Janice seemed to orchestrate here. Lord knows she deserved it more than he did.
She nodded to him. “Hello, Bryce.” Her voice—soft and tired at the same time—seemed to belong to a woman twice her age.
Bryce just stared. “Janice.” The words held a strange intonation, like when you’d address your parents by their first names. It wasn’t just the disrespect of impropriety but the audacity to make the point above all other things that could have been said.
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His rehearsals moments before fell flat. He ran out of words. His thoughts had fled. In the face of the woman he left for death, there was nothing but regret.
Her eyes were too calm for the situation. She only stared. She could have ordered them all to cut her down, and she would have had every right to do so. No attempts to explain. No apologies, even. Only an understanding.
Yet they were all young, and around them, machines ran. Printers—paper printers—worked full time. They pointed at laptop screens, flicking through documents, articles, and web forums. They discussed the future.
Janice raised a hand, and two boys, both about 19 years old—probably university sophomores—searched him like airport security. Bryce removed the AUG EMP, placed it on a table, and got a better look at the people assembled around him. He knew he recognized them.
“Journalist majors,” he said. “All of you. You all interviewed President Atienza.” He recalled each of them waiting for their turn to jump into the ring against the leader of the Philippines.
“The crown goes to whoever asks the toughest questions,” uttered a girl with dyed blue hair and thick-rimmed square glasses. She nodded at Janice.
Janice folded her legs. She still looked young. She’d always carry that presence, but now, her presence was solid, backed by the people around her. Bryce’s masculine instincts to tear into her—and the pasts where he had—wrestled with the presence she invoked now. It was as if she had been erected into a statue set in front of him, and he would never touch her again.
The import of the earlier words started to sink in.
He glanced at the laptop screens and saw the posters. There were stylized figures emulating gestures of defiance. Above them hung huge texts in big blocky letters and exclamation marks. Videos played out, too, showing the Mandaluyong riots, capture drones, and corpses in alleyways, surrounded by PNP. President Atienza’s speeches dotted the feeds alongside them, adding color to the rhetoric.
Bryce stepped over to read an article on one of the screens. Janice let him.
**THE GIANT KILLERS IN FORCE**
**FREE MANILA**
**A NEW MANILA FOR ALL**
**ASHES TO ATIENZA**
The third line stuck with Bryce. “New Manila?” He found Janice looking at him and was about to ask her where she had heard that phrase from, but the answer came as swiftly as if he, too, were riding this wave of youthful activism and hope.
The albularyo wasn’t quiet the whole time. She was talking. And one person was listening.
“They don’t call me the Information Broker for nothing,” said Janice. “I heard her entire spiel. And it’s marvelous.”
“Do you even know where she is?”
She smirked. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Not after everything.”
He deserved that and a whole lot more. But even he was human. He deserved forgiveness, didn’t he? “She’s capable of worse things than you think. She’s overreaching.”
He thought about how the drones flew too high, the jet contrails, and their strange fascination with them. These journalism students would be the perfect people to tell and expose not just Metamatics but Atienza, who he guessed now probably knew as well. Malacañang saw all the footage. Chances were, they were turning a blind eye.
In the middle of his thoughts, a littler of pop-up windows appeared on all the laptop’s windows, superimposing themselves over graphic designer apps and code and audio scripting programs. They showed news articles. On one of them was a headline from Rappler. Everyone was reading it.
He was too late.