Page 20 of Signal No. Us

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.”