Chapter 9
Allan was still half-asleep when he heard Robby’s voice at the gate, low and businesslike, the version he used for work. He couldn’t make out all of it over the fan, just pieces: mangroves, spillway, Sitio Tawog, and then his own name.
By the time Robby reached the porch, Cora already had an opinion ready. “Bring him back in one piece,” she said, not looking up from the seedlings she was repotting. “No medals for drowned staff.”
“Noted, Tita,” Robby said, and turned to Allan like the whole exchange had been entirely routine. “Coastal check. Mangroves, a few houses too close to the riverbank. Not yet a system, just a low-pressure area PAGASA’s watching. I’d rather look now than after.”
“And you need me for this because—”
“Because you’re good with people who don’t want to talk to a guy in a vest,” Robby said. “And because I want you there.”
Allan, unable to argue his way out of it over breakfast—“It’s just driving and asking questions, Allan, you’ve survived worse meetings”—found himself twenty minutes later wedged into the passenger seat of Robby’s beat-up service tricycle, Oryo sprawled proprietarily on the floor mat like he’d been personally deputized.
“I want it on record,” Allan said, “that I quit my job specifically to get away from this kind of thing.”
“You quit your job to get away from a toxic work environment and a bad boss,” Robby said, pulling out onto the coastal road. “This is a good boss. Me.”
“You are not my boss.”
“For today, I am.” Robby glanced sideways, the ghost of a grin. “I’ve seen you with kids. You make storms less scary. A valuable skill.”
The road north looked like it had been drawn by someone with a grudge, potholes appearing like jump scares, Robby taking each one with the unbothered ease of a man who’d been doing this since before he had a license to.
The sky sat low and close, the particular gray that hadn’t committed to rain but clearly hadn’t ruled it out either.
They stopped first at a roadside carinderia, where a tita neither of them knew somehow already knew both their names, fed them fried tilapia they hadn’t ordered, and asked Allan with zero preamble whether he and “the DRRM boy” were “an item yet, or should I start praying about it.” Robby choked on his rice.
Allan did not dignify the question with an answer, which the tita seemed to take as a yes.
Further up the coast, the work turned real. Robby crouched beside a cluster of houses with their waterlines still visible on the concrete, a whole handspan up the wall, last typhoon’s signature, and talked evacuation routes with a barangay tanod.
The tanod’s report wasn’t good. The mangrove buffer that was supposed to slow the water down before it reached these houses had thinned by half since the last survey, eaten away by two seasons of storms nobody had budgeted to replant after.
Robby’s jaw tightened in the specific way Allan had started to recognize, the one that meant he was already redoing math in his head about how much time he didn’t have.
Allan, without quite being asked, ended up crouched in the dirt sketching a grandmother’s hands as she mended a fishing net and a boy of about seven who’d attached himself to Allan’s side and narrated, with total confidence, everything wrong with the drawing.
“Her hands are too big.”
“Her hands are exactly the right size.”
“You drew Kuya Robby’s arms too skinny,” the boy added, examining a different page.
“I did not,” Allan said, closing the sketchbook fast enough that Robby, twenty feet away, looked over just to see what the sudden movement was about.
They were most of the way back to the tricycle, sketchbook safely reburied in Allan’s drybag, when something large crashed through the underbrush ahead of them.
“Did you hear that?” Allan said, stopping dead.
“Probably a goat,” Robby said, though his hand had already found the strap of his bag like he was recalculating.
It was not a goat.
It came out of the tree line at a dead run, bristled, enormous, and deeply, personally offended by their existence, and Robby’s only warning was a flat “Run” before he had Allan’s wrist in his hand and they were both sprinting down the trail, Oryo tearing ahead of them barking with what could generously be called strategic intent and less generously called panic.
“What kind—of field work—is this—” Allan managed between gasping breaths.
“Practical!” Robby shouted back and shoved them both sideways behind a fallen log as the boar thundered past close enough that Allan felt the wind of it against his shin.
They lay there a second, tangled, Allan half on top of Robby’s legs, both of them breathing like they’d personally offended a very large animal, which, to be fair, they had.
“So,” Allan said eventually, into the dirt. “That’s one way to bond.”
Robby laughed, weak and real, a sound Allan hadn’t heard from him yet, the kind that came out before a person remembered to arrange their face. “We’re alive,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
The rain came exactly the way the sky had been threatening all morning: no warning shot, just full commitment.
By the time they’d hauled themselves upright, the drops had gone from suggestion to sideways, and luckily, Robby knew this land the way Allan used to know Manila’s evacuation exits from every conference room he’d sat in.
He led them to the closest shelter at the mouth of the limestone cave system on the ridge above them.
Which, it turned out, was already occupied.
“There you are!” Jake’s voice bounced off the cave walls, delighted, unsurprised, like he’d ordered this specific weather.
He was already mid-legend, a scattering of barangay teenagers arranged around him on the flat rocks, phone flashlights angled up for effect.
“Perfect timing. We’re just getting to the good part. ”
“You knew it would rain,” Allan said, wringing out his shirt.
“I know everything,” Jake said serenely. “Sit. You’re just in time for Oriol.”
“Wait, this counts as a grant deliverable too?” Allan asked, ducking under a low outcrop, Robby’s hand automatically finding the small of his back to steady him over a slick patch of rock, casual, unthinking, the kind of touch that had become quietly, dangerously normal between them over the past week.
“Everything’s a grant deliverable,” Jake said. “‘Cultural heritage documentation.’ I told the munisipyo, ‘story about Oriol, tourism potential, disaster-resilience folklore.’ I used the word ‘resilience’ three times in the proposal. Approved right away.”
“You should run for mayor.”
“No thanks. The pay’s better as a storyteller. Besides, I’m committed to advocating for stories like Oriol. My lola always said this one traveled here with her side of the family, from Albay, the same as half our surnames. It’s not really ours. We just kept it.”
They reached a wide, high-ceilinged chamber where the teenagers settled onto flat rocks with the practiced ease of people who’d clearly done this before, phone flashlights angled up for dramatic effect. Jake climbed onto a boulder like it was a stage he’d been saving.
“Once upon a time,” he began, voice dropping into a register clearly honed over dozens of these performances, “right here, in this very river, lived Oriol. Half goddess, half, well, problem. The old folks all tell it differently, but they agree on this much: she lived in the water, she sang, and she pulled people in.”
“Does she eat them?” one of the teens asked, delighted.
“According to one version, yes,” Jake said. “According to others, it’s sadder than that: she just makes them fall in love with her so much they forget everything else.”
“Then came Handiong,” Jake went on, sweeping an arm toward the shadows. “Warrior. Strong. Official monster-killer. His job: make the land ‘safe.’”
“So, who’s the villain?” Allan asked, genuinely curious now, settling onto a rock beside Robby.
“Depends who you ask,” Jake said. “In one version, they fight, Oriol and Handiong, or they dance, or both. In one version, she betrays her own kind to help him. In another, she betrays his trust just to keep him near her. The ending changes depending on what the storyteller wants you to learn.”
“That’s a very diplomatic legend,” Allan said.
“All the old stories are like that,” Jake said. “They’re not about who’s right. They’re about what’s left standing after.”
Robby had gone quiet beside him, watching the teenagers argue happily about whether Oriol deserved better narrative treatment, and Allan caught him smiling to himself in the dim light, small, private, unguarded in a way he hadn’t quite seen from Robby before the library conversation.
“What?” Allan asked.
“Nothing,” Robby said. “I was just thinking, we’re always taught there’s a villain in every story. Sometimes there really isn’t one. Sometimes it’s just two people, scared, getting things wrong, trying to work it out.”
“That’s suspiciously specific,” Allan said.
“Maybe,” Robby said, and this time he didn’t look away from Allan’s eyes, steady in a way that made Allan’s pulse do something inconvenient. “Maybe I had some inspiration.”
“Very smooth. Folklore as a flirting technique. Bold strategy.”
“I’ve been practicing,” Robby said, and this time his voice didn’t have its usual joke tucked inside it. “Saying things instead of just assuming you already knew them. Turns out it takes practice.”
“That’s annoyingly sincere for where we are.”
“I know,” Robby said simply, and didn’t take it back.
Allan laughed, real, loud enough that one of the teenagers glanced over. Still grinning, he bumped his shoulder against Robby’s, testing, easy, the kind of small contact that had started, over the past few days, to feel less like an accident and more like a choice they were both quietly making.
Jake, from his boulder, watched them with the unmistakable, delighted attention of a man who had once convinced an entire fiesta committee that a stray cat was an engkanto and clearly considered this an equally promising story.