I fell asleep standing up once, during a patrol in the middle of a Dead Zone.
That was the day I realized how tired I had become.
A Hollow lunged at my throat, and my body cut it down before my mind had finished waking.
I stood there with the black dust drifting across my boots and thought, calmly, that I would not mind if the next one reached me.
That was three years ago.
Since then, I had learned to sleep anywhere.
[Subject: Valeriano, Aris. Rank: Tier-1. Rest hours this week: eleven.]
The notice floated across my vision, the way it always did when I opened my eyes after a bad night.
I dismissed it with a blink.
The System liked to remind me about numbers.
It seemed to believe that numbers made a person feel managed instead of used.
I lay on my back on the roof of the bell tower.
The sky was still dark, and a thin line of gray was sliding up behind the Manila skyline.
Rain from the night before had pooled in the cracks of the old stone, and the cold water had soaked through my hoodie.
Somewhere below me, the Acacia trees breathed in the damp air.
My ribs hurt.
I pressed two fingers against the left side and found a long bruise, still warm.
The Hound I had cut down near Intramuros in the early hours had clipped me before it died.
A small injury.
I had carried worse into class.
“Rise and shine,” I muttered to the sky.
The sky ignored me.
* * *
I kept a small notebook in the inner pocket of my hoodie.
It had a black cover and a bent spine, and the corners were soft from years of handling.
I pulled it out and flipped to the last page with writing.
The entries ran down in my own cramped handwriting, line after line, each one a single sentence.
My mother hummed while she cooked.
I cannot recall the song.
There was a green door at the old house.
I liked a teacher in grade four.
Name unknown.
Birthday: unknown.
Zodiac: unknown.
These were the Footnotes I had paid.
Every time I used my power, the Board took a memory in exchange, and the memory vanished from my head as cleanly as a name from a list.
When I first Awakened, I had believed that I could choose which memory to give.
Reality taught me otherwise.
The Board decided by its own system, and it always seemed to select the ones I would miss.
To keep track, I wrote down the shape of each loss as soon as I noticed it.
The act gave me a record, the way a ledger gives a debtor a list of what he owes.
I took out a pen and stared at the page.
The night patrol had gone smoothly.
Two Hounds, a handful of Hollows, and a narrow stretch of the old wall where the memory of the war lay thick as smoke.
I had used three techniques.
Three techniques meant three Footnotes.
I closed my eyes and searched my mind for the gap.
That was the unpleasant part of this routine.
A Footnote left no pain, so I had to hunt for the hole, like a man feeling for a missing tooth with his tongue.
Two gaps appeared quickly.
The first was the name of the street where I grew up.
The second was the color of my father’s shirt in the one photograph I had memorized.
Both hurt in a dull, distant way.
The third gap took longer.
I went through my days from the beginning.
School.
A bus.
A bridge in the evening.
A friend who laughed too loudly in the cafeteria.
Then, after a long search, I found a blank spot shaped like a sound.
I had once heard a girl laughing in the rain.
It was only a flash.
A bright, startled laugh, on a muddy road, with a dog barking in the background.
The laugh ended on a breath, a small quick intake of air, the kind a person takes when she is counting.
I could not recall who she was, or why the sound had stayed with me for so many years.
Yet I understood from the emptiness that the memory had mattered a great deal.
[Footnote deducted: Laughter on a Rainy Road.]
[Remaining reserve: 41%.]
The System delivered the confirmation a moment too late, as usual.
I wrote the line in the notebook and underlined it once.
I once heard a girl laugh in the rain.
It ended on a breath, as if she were counting.
Everything else about it is gone.
Then I shut the book and put it back in my pocket.
* * *
The sun rose over Taft Avenue at six-ten.
Traffic woke with it, and the first jeepneys honked their way down the road.
Students began to trickle through the gate, yawning and checking their phones.
I climbed down the tower stairs, washed my face in the second-floor restroom, and shoved my wet hoodie into my bag.
Nobody noticed me.
That was one of my talents.
I had spent years practicing how to look like furniture.
My first class started at seven-thirty.
I arrived at seven-twenty-eight, chose the corner seat in the last row, and put my head on my arms.
The room smelled of chalk dust and old varnish.
Someone dropped a ruler.
A girl giggled.
My eyelids drooped, and the noise around me slid into a comfortable gray fog.
Sleep, the part of me said that had been tired for a decade.
Just sleep.
Nothing will happen here.
I let it have its way.
Yet sleep never fully claimed me.
A thin slice of my attention always stayed awake and listened.
Over the years I had trained that slice to hear every word the professors said, and to store each one away.
Students believed I snored through my lectures, while I had read every assigned book twice before the semester began.
There was no great mystery to it.
Reading was the only part of my life that I had kept for myself.
The Board owned my power, my time, and a growing share of my memories.
Yet nobody had ever found a way to charge me for sentences on a page.
I devoured them in the library at dawn and in the stairwells at midnight, in secondhand paperbacks and brittle pamphlets and anything with a cover.
Books were the one place where the loss did not follow me.
A line read today stayed with me forever.
Or so I told myself.
* * *
The professor droned on.
His bow tie bobbed with every syllable.
I drifted in and out of the fog, hearing about the Spanish colonial period, the galleon trade, and the grand story of how a country learned to remember itself.
Then I heard a new voice.
“Because teachers decide which stories the next generation hears, sir.”
The sentence was clear and steady, and it sounded as if it had been polished by many nights of thought.
I did not move.
I kept my face against my sleeve and my breathing slow.
“History lives inside the people who remember it, so a teacher holds that memory in trust.”
Something inside my chest went still.
I had heard a hundred students answer this professor over the years.
Most recited the textbook.
A few tried to impress him.
This one spoke the way a person speaks when the words have been waiting inside her for a long time.
The corner of my mouth lifted before I could stop it.
My body wanted to look.
I refused.
Looking would have been foolish.
Archivists who looked at strangers learned things about them, and learning things led to attachments, and attachments were a luxury I had cut away long ago.
Yet my senses had already done the looking for me.
A new presence had entered the room.
It sat in the middle rows, small and bright, like a candle someone had lit in a long dark hallway.
I could not describe its shape.
I only knew that it pulled gently at the edge of my power, the way a magnet pulls at iron.
I opened one eye the width of a thread.
She stood near the center of the room, a girl with a plain tote bag and a notebook pressed against her chest.
Her hair was tied back loosely, and a few damp strands clung to her neck.
She was blushing hard under the attention of forty classmates.
Beside her, Marisol Dimaculangan from Normal Hall gave her an enormous grin.
A transferee, I thought.
Enrolled yesterday.
Room 212, with Sol.
I knew the details because Sean had briefed me on new dormitory admissions.
The Council tracked every fresh face on campus.
It was routine.
It was also the reason my pulse had begun to hum.
The girl sat back down, and a faint blue thread of light wavered in the air above her shoulder.
The thread was thin as spider silk and visible only to those who had Awakened.
It curled toward me across the room before it snapped.
I closed my eye again.
Interesting, said the voice in my mind that I used for talking to myself.
Very interesting.
A dormant Degree.
And a loud one.
I would have to report it to the Dean.
That was the protocol.
The Board required every new signature to be logged within twenty-four hours.
I did not move.
I lay there with my head on my arms, listening to the professor resume his lecture, and for three whole minutes I made no decision at all.
* * *
By noon I had earned the right to ignore the whole matter.
The canteen was crowded and loud.
I stopped in the doorway to scan the room, a habit from years of patrols, and my eyes found the window table at the back before I could redirect them.
The transferee sat there with her roommate, a plate of siomai between them and an iced tea in her hand.
On the windowsill beside her, Kalasag held perfectly still.
Her fingers hovered an inch above his scarred head.
Then the cat leaned forward and bumped his forehead against her knuckles.
My heart missed a beat.
That cat had refused every living person for six years, myself included.
I had once seen it chase a Tier-2 Archivist halfway across the quadrangle for touching its tail.
Now it pressed into the hand of a stranger, with a look in its eyes that I recognized from old stories, the look of a guardian meeting the one it was sworn to protect.
Lineage, I thought.
The word surfaced slowly, rusty with age.
It remembers her bloodline.
[Alert: Unregistered Degree detected near Familiar K-7.]
[Reporting window: 23 hours, 41 minutes.]
I rubbed my face with both hands, joined the line, bought rice and black coffee, and carried my tray to the corner table by the wall.
It was my usual seat.
A small ward-stone that Jek had hidden behind the tile warmed my back, and the corner gave me a clear line of sight to the door.
I rested my forehead on the table and counted my breaths.
One.
Two.
Three.
A low growl rumbled from the far side of the room.
I did not need to look.
The sound carried a very specific flavor of contempt, the sort only one creature in Manila could deliver.
I lifted two fingers lazily off the table and waved them in the general direction of the noise.
Yes, yes.
I know.
Leave me alone.
Kalasag hissed.
The cat had disliked me for six years and never explained why.
It appeared on windowsills, rooftops, and the steps of the library, glaring with those ancient yellow eyes and radiating a steady disapproval.
On certain nights I felt something close to affection for it.
Somebody in this city cared enough about my conduct to hold an opinion.
I lifted my head and let my thoughts return to the choice in front of me.
A sensible man would walk to Room 404 right now and hand the Dean a name.
That was the correct action.
That was the safe action.
Alcantara would reward me, the Board would send a handler, and the girl would be trained, or wiped, or sent to the front line, depending on what the Board decided she was worth.
I knew exactly how the process ended.
I had watched it end for thirty-eight students.
I pushed my coffee aside and stared at the black surface.
Across the room, a small, bright laugh floated up above the noise.
The girl had said something that made her roommate choke on her siomai.
It was quick and startled and entirely unguarded.
The sound struck me like a hand on the shoulder.
For a moment I thought I had heard it before.
I thought it had belonged to a muddy road and a barking dog and a wet afternoon far behind me.
I reached for the memory with every muscle in my mind.
My hand closed on empty air.
Of course, I thought.
That memory is already gone.
I did not know why the thought hurt.
* * *
That night I returned to the bell tower and lay down on the cold stone.
The city glittered below me, and the Acacia trees murmured in the dark.
I took out my notebook and turned to the last page.
Under my line about the laughing girl, I added a short entry in smaller handwriting.
New transferee.
Room 212.
The cat likes her.
Do not report her yet.
I stared at the sentence for a long time.
Then, very slowly, I wrote one more line.
Her laugh sounds like the one I lost.
[Warning: Subject has withheld a mandatory report.]
[Penalty review scheduled: 24 hours.]
I closed the notebook, folded my arms over my chest, and looked up at the sky.
For the first time in years, I did not feel like sleeping.