Page 1 of Signal No. Us

CHAPTER 1

“What a big cock!”

Allan’s eyes snapped open.

For one confused second, he honestly thought he was back in Manila, trapped in another HR video call that had gone feral. Then the sound registered properly: not a coworker, but a high-pitched voice from his right, cooing like she was talking to a baby. He squinted against the bright sunlight blasting through the ferry’s grimy window.

Face-to-beak, a fighter rooster glared at him.

The bird’s wings were half-cocked, its head tilted, its beady eyes full of murder. Its spurs gleamed. Allan, who had encountered many different kinds of cocks up close in his life (thank you, Grindr), had to admit this one deserved the compliment.

The rooster’s owner, a woman in a worn-out campaign shirt with a corrupt politician’s face fading off the front, cradled it proudly in her lap like it was a newborn.

“Ay, sorry, iho,” she said, shifting the bird away from his face. The rooster blinked slowly, unimpressed, and let out a warning cluck.

“It’s okay, Manang,” Allan muttered, inching to the far end of the wooden bench, gripping his battered duffel like a shield as the ferry rolled over the swells of the open Pacific.

Outside the streaked window, the sea heaved under a sky that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be blue or bruised. Typhoon season. Of course his life would fall apart right when the Pacific started rehearsing its annual theatrics.

He checked his phone. No signal. No Wi-Fi. Just 2% battery, a cracked screen, and an email icon with 99+ unread messages that didn’t matter anymore.

Ten hours ago: Conference Room 4B, fluorescent lights, his manager sliding a four-page performance development plan across the table like it was a peace treaty instead of a breakup letter.

“We just want you to stretch, Allan. You’re such a rockstar, but the organization is realigning.”

Translation: we’re using you for three people’s jobs and blaming you when you crack.

By page three, “focus areas for improvement,” a list that basically said please stop bleeding where we can see it, something in him had snapped, quiet and total, like a fuse finally giving up on a bulb that had been flickering for years.

“No,” he’d said. Calmly. “I resign.”

Everyone had stared at him like he’d misread his line. He’d gone back to his desk, typed exactly three short paragraphs, and hit send before he could think of a single reason not to.

By the time he’d reached Tabaco Port, sweat plastering his button-down to his back, necktie stuffed into his bag, his notifications were already full of damage control. Fifty-eight missed calls. A thread titled Re: Reconsidering Your Options, muted on principle.

And above all of it, the message that had knocked the air clean out of his deliberately staged midlife crisis:

Hello Allan. This is Tita Becky. Your mom just had a stroke. Uwi ka na.

For one breathless second, nothing in him moved. Then his lungs clawed for air. His fingers went cold around the phone.

Of course. Now.

Another wave hit the hull, rattling through his bones. The woman beside him cooed at her rooster, oblivious. Somewhere behind him, a toddler was losing an argument with a bag of chips.

I just quit my job. I can’t afford a plane ticket to panic properly. His thoughts slammed into each other, sharp and useless. Static roared in his ears until the rest of the ferry blurred.

If I don’t go now, I will never forgive myself.

His hand had moved on its own after that. Bus ticket. Port. Ferry. His body remembered the route before his brain caught up, just like it always did with things he’d spent a decade trying to forget.

It had been exactly ten years since he’d last set foot on Catanduanes. Ten years, almost to the week. He’d left three days after his high school graduation, and now here he was, twenty-eight years old, going home with 2% battery and zero dignity.

On the night bus from Manila, anxiety had taken the window seat and spent eight hours listing every unfinished dream he’d left behind. At Tabaco Port, the smell of diesel and grilled fish and someone’s Bluetooth speaker blaring BINI had made him feel like a teenager and an underpaid twenty-something at the same time, which, he supposed, he technically still was, on both counts.

He’d told himself that coming home would be like riding a bike: maybe you wobble, maybe you fall once, but your body remembers. As the ferry chugged closer to Virac, though, his stomach tightened around a quieter truth: he didn’t remember how to ride this particular bike. At all.

“Look. Malapit na tayo,” the woman with the rooster said suddenly, leaning past him to point. “Magayon, ’no? Kita na ‘yung bundok.”