The fourth Acacia was dying, and nobody on campus seemed to care.
I stood in front of it at five o’clock on Monday afternoon with my palm pressed against the bark.
The sun hung low behind the Main Building, and long shadows fell across the lawn.
Students streamed past me toward the gates in groups of three and four, chatting, laughing, and scrolling through their phones.
Some of them glanced at the tree without seeing it.
A girl in a PNU lanyard sat on the roots with her earphones in, her thumb sliding up and down a screen, and her face was empty.
[Anchor 4: Weakening. Ward integrity: 61%.]
The number floated across my vision, and I read it twice.
Sixty-one.
It had been seventy-nine on the evening I first measured it, nearly three weeks ago.
Then seventy-one, then sixty-eight.
Now sixty-one.
The decline wasn’t steady.
It dropped in sudden steps, like a staircase, and each drop came a day or two after the last.
“Come on,” I muttered.
“What’s pulling at you?”
The tree didn’t answer.
Its leaves had gone dry and brittle at the edges.
A few lay scattered at my feet, curled up like old paper.
The bark was damp and cold under my palm, and the pulse inside it was slow and thin.
Lira says it has teeth missing, I thought.
She’d told me on Saturday, across a tray of pandesal in the canteen, in a low urgent voice.
She had described the gaps in the whispering, the silences where names should have been.
Sol had shown me her notebook with the little drawing of a tooth.
I’d listened, and nodded, and said I would look into it.
I hadn’t told them how badly it frightened me.
An Anchor’s strength came from memory.
If something was pulling the names out of this tree one by one, then it was draining a ward and erasing the people who had spoken to it.
It was making them forgotten, a little at a time, in the one place on campus where they should have been safest.
I tightened my fingers on the bark.
Who are you, I thought, and why are you so patient?
* * *
I walked the perimeter slowly.
Sean had asked me to run a full patrol of Anchors Four and Five before dark.
He’d sent a short message to my phone, three lines, with an apology for the hour.
The Council was short-handed.
Pia had been napping in the infirmary since noon, and Dom had a quiz, and Cheska was somewhere with a spreadsheet.
That left me, which was how I preferred it.
I circled the tree three times, reading the ground.
Dry grass.
A broken bench.
A drinking fountain that dripped steadily into a puddle.
A scattering of foil wrappers.
On the far side, a small paved area where students gathered to wait for their rides, and where, I noticed, the air felt colder than it should.
I paused.
It was a strange cold.
It settled on the skin gently and stayed, like damp wool, like the feeling in a hospital waiting room.
A faint, dull heaviness pressed behind my eyes.
I breathed in, and the air tasted flat.
Apathy, I thought, and the word came from a distant corner of memory, from a lesson Ma’am Teddy had given me when I was seventeen.
There are Anchors made of love, and Anchors made of grief.
And there’s a third kind that nobody likes to discuss.
Anchors made of not caring.
Those are the quietest, and the worst.
I looked at the paved waiting area.
Perhaps thirty students stood there.
They stood in clusters along the curb, waiting for jeepneys and rides, bags slung over their shoulders.
Every single one of them was looking down.
A boy in a red jacket was swiping through photos.
A pair of girls were watching a video, sharing one pair of earphones, their faces lit blue by the screen.
A man with a briefcase stared at a text.
Nobody spoke.
The silence among them was thick as syrup.
A jeepney arrived and stopped.
A few of them climbed aboard, still staring at their phones, and the rest stayed where they were.
I looked at all of them.
That’s wrong, I thought.
That’s very wrong.
* * *
The girl collapsed at ten past five.
I saw it happen from thirty feet away.
She stood near the edge of the waiting area, a thin student in a gray cardigan with her bag clutched to her chest.
Her face had gone the color of paper.
She swayed, once, twice, and then her knees folded, and she dropped to the pavement like a puppet with its strings cut.
Her bag hit the ground.
A water bottle rolled out and spun in a circle.
Nobody moved.
I stood at the edge of the tree’s shadow, frozen for a moment, with my hand still lifted.
I watched the crowd.
His eyes slid over the girl on the ground, quick and flat, like a man glancing at a clock.
He looked back at his phone.
The pair of girls with the earphones turned their heads.
One of them whispered something to the other.
They both returned to their screen.
The man with the briefcase checked his watch.
Someone else will help, said a voice in my head.
I jolted.
It was a calm, kind voice, gently reasonable.
It said, Someone else will call the clinic.
Someone closer.
That’s their job.
You’ve been on your feet all day, and you’re tired.
Let them handle it.
The voice was mine.
I recognized the pitch, the rhythm, the faint dry irony.
It had slid into my thoughts so smoothly that I hadn’t noticed it arrive.
I took a step forward, and the cold pressed down on my shoulders like a hand.
It isn’t your problem, said my own voice.
None of this is.
You’ve done enough.
* * *
I thought of three things.
I thought of a plate of garlic rice with an egg and tapa, and a man in a hairnet who said Eat, hijo.
It’s your usual.
I thought of a girl on a wooden chair in a shrunken classroom, saying a seat at the table.
And I thought of a lecture room on the first morning of Syllabus Week, with the sun on the back row, and a girl standing up to say something true, while forty classmates stared at their desks.
It isn’t my problem, the voice said again, softer.
“Yes, it is,” I said out loud.
My own voice sounded rough and strange.
I gritted my teeth.
I started to run.
The cold clawed at my legs like deep water.
Every step felt heavier than the last.
The students at the curb barely registered me.
I pushed between two of them, and one stepped aside with a polite murmur, without looking up.
Another leaned against the signpost, eyes on his screen.
I shoved past a third.
Nobody protested.
Nobody turned.
I dropped to my knees beside the girl.
Up close she was very young.
She couldn’t have been more than seventeen.
Her lips were pale and cracked, and a sheen of sweat glistened on her forehead.
Her pulse fluttered weakly under my fingers.
She had a student ID clipped to her cardigan.
Ysabel Fernandez.
First Year.
BSEd Mathematics.
“Ysabel,” I said.
“Can you hear me?”
Her eyelids fluttered.
A pair of dark eyes opened and drifted toward my face, unfocused.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I didn’t eat breakfast.”
“It’s okay.”
“I felt… dizzy. And I… nobody…” Her voice cracked.
“I thought somebody would ask.”
My chest tightened.
“I’m asking,” I said.
“I’m here.”
“Nobody saw me.”
“I saw you.”
Her lips trembled.
A tear leaked out of the corner of one eye and ran down into her hair.
I slid one arm under her shoulders and the other under her knees and lifted her.
She weighed almost nothing.
Her head lolled against my chest.
I stood up, and the cold hit me again, a hard slow wave, and my legs wobbled.
Put her down, the voice said, almost pleading.
Let someone else.
“No,” I said, between my teeth.
I started to walk.
* * *
The infirmary was four hundred meters away, on the far side of the Main Building.
I covered it slowly.
The crowd parted around me as I went, like a river around a rock.
I carried a girl through the middle of a hundred students and nobody looked up.
A man in a sweater saw me, and his eyes passed over us, and his lip curled slightly in mild irritation, as if I’d stepped on his shadow.
A woman stepped around me, scrolling. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
A group of boys laughed at something on a phone and bumped my shoulder.
“Excuse me,” I said, loud and sharp.
“Excuse me. Emergency.”
Nobody answered.
A boy glanced up, shrugged, and looked away.
I understood then.
I understood, with a cold, creeping horror, how big this was.
This was a field, a heavy invisible blanket thrown over an entire corner of the campus, and everyone beneath it had slowly forgotten how to care.
They had lost the muscle that made them look.
And I almost did too, I thought.
The thought made my stomach turn.
I walked faster.
Past the main steps, along the hedge, around the corner of the old gymnasium.
The apathy thinned as I went, like fog burning off under sun.
By the time I reached the infirmary doors, the weight on my shoulders was gone, and I could breathe again.
I kicked the door open.
“Pia!” I shouted.
“Pia, I need you!”
* * *
She came running from the back room with her hair half-braided and a blanket creased across her cheek.
“What happened?” she said, then saw the girl in my arms, and her face changed.
Pia’s whole body shifted into a different gear.
She snapped her fingers at a cot, pulled a blood pressure cuff off a hook, and stripped the girl’s cardigan with quick, practiced hands.
“Put her down. Gently. Good. How long was she out?”
“A few minutes.”
“Any head injury?”
“I don’t think so. She dropped straight down.”
“Did anyone help you?”
I hesitated.
“No.”
Pia’s eyes lifted to mine, sharp and dark, and held for a second.
She didn’t say anything.
Her hands went on checking, wrist and throat and forehead.
A soft white glow bloomed at her fingertips, and the girl’s breathing steadied.
“Low blood sugar,” Pia said after a moment.
“And dehydration. She’s okay. She just needs fluids and rest.”
“Good.”
“She was lucky you were there.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it.”
Pia glanced at me again.
She dried her hands on her jacket, took a juice box from the shelf above the cot, pressed the straw into the girl’s lips, and began, almost without noticing, to hum.
The tune slid out of her in a soft winding line.
I felt my teeth start to ache.
I looked away, at the window, at the long lines of the evening light.
“Aris,” Pia said gently.
“What?”
“You’re shaking.”
I looked down at my hands.
They were trembling, slow and steady, and I hadn’t noticed.
* * *
I walked out of the infirmary an hour later.
Dusk had settled over the campus.
The lamps were coming on one by one.
In front of the fourth Acacia, the waiting area stood empty.
The students had gone home.
The air above the paving felt only cool now, with none of the damp weight.
I stood at the edge of the path and looked at the tree.
[Anchor 4: Weakening. Ward integrity: 58%.]
Three points in an hour.
Something is feeding, I thought.
And it’s fed well tonight.
I sat down on the broken bench and pulled out my black notebook.
The pen felt cold in my fingers.
I turned to the last page and read the lines I’d written.
I enjoyed a Tuesday.
She made a gold shield on her first attempt.
I told her to make it blue.
I looked at them for a long time.
Then I wrote:
Anchor Four.
Apathy.
A field, not a creature.
It spoke in my voice.
I almost walked past a girl who said nobody saw her.
I didn’t.
I stared at the final two words.
My hand shook, and the ink blurred a little at the end of the line.
After a while, I closed the notebook and sat with it on my knees, and let the dusk come down around me.
Somewhere behind the Main Building, a bell tolled once.
Then, from a long way off, I heard a thin silver echo of the sound, as though another bell, somewhere under the earth, had answered.