Lola Pacita once told me that people see their whole lives flash by when they are about to die.
She never mentioned that sometimes they see someone else’s.
The white light faded from my eyes slowly, like a lamp turned down by a careful hand.
I knelt on the broken marble of the reading room with glass biting through my jeans, and Aris Valeriano lay across my knees with his head against my arm.
His hoodie was soaked dark from ribs to hip.
His eyelids fluttered.
The blue blade he had carried had melted into nothing, and the hand that had held it lay open on the floor like an empty cup.
“Aris,” I said.
“Aris, look at me.”
His lips moved.
No sound came out.
I pressed both palms against his side.
The blood was warm and impossibly quick, and it welled up between my fingers faster than I could stop it.
I had never seen so much of it.
My ears rang, and the whole silent room seemed to lean over us.
Think, I told myself.
Think, think, think.
I could not think.
I could only feel, and what I felt was his heartbeat, which came through my palms like footsteps walking away down a long hallway.
Each step sounded fainter than the last.
“Eleven breaths,” I whispered.
It was the trick I used when exams terrified me or when the bus climbed the mountain road.
Breathe in for four, hold for two, breathe out for five.
“Please. Eleven breaths. Stay with me for eleven.”
His heartbeat slowed anyway.
Something in my chest answered.
* * *
It started as a hum.
The sound lived somewhere under my ribs, low and steady, like a drum heard through a wall.
I recognized it at once, though I had never heard it in my waking life.
It was the same pulse that had pushed the Hound back, the same warmth that had gathered in my fingertips.
It felt very old, and it felt like mine.
Give, it said.
I did not know how.
Nobody had taught me.
Yet my body had no doubt, and my hands moved first.
I pressed harder against his wound, and the golden glow poured out of my palms in a thin bright thread.
It sank into the dark stain on his hoodie and vanished.
My own heartbeat stumbled.
A pull took hold of me, gentle at first and then insistent, like water finding the low place in a field.
Warmth slid from my arms and chest and the pit of my stomach, flowing down through my wrists.
I understood, in a clear, simple, wordless way, that I was pouring myself into him.
It felt like tipping one cup into another, with the only difference being that the first cup was my life.
The room tilted.
Careful, Lola’s voice said in the back of my mind.
A candle can light a hundred candles, apo, but it cannot light them from an empty wick.
“I know, Lola,” I whispered.
“I only need one.”
The light grew brighter.
[Unregistered transfer detected. Donor: Espiritu, Lira. Recipient: Valeriano, Aris.]
[Temporary link established. Duration: unlisted.]
The words floated at the edge of my sight, cold and tidy, and I ignored them.
Something far more important had just happened.
The pulse under my hands had steadied.
It was faint, and it limped, but it kept coming.
One step, then another.
And then a door opened.
* * *
I did not see it with my eyes.
It opened inside my head, the way a window opens in a house you thought was empty.
A rush of images poured through, and I fell into them with no way to stop.
I stood in a street at night.
The sky above the rooftops glowed orange.
Smoke rolled low across the road in thick gray ribbons, and every breath tasted of burned rubber and hot tin.
Somewhere close, a roof was caving in with a long, grinding groan.
A boy ran through the smoke, tall and thin, with a black school bag on his back.
His shoes slapped against wet asphalt, and I felt, as if it were my own chest, how badly his lungs hurt.
He was seventeen.
I knew it the way you know your own phone number.
His name was Aris, and he was shouting for someone, a word that kept breaking apart in his mouth before it reached the end.
A second set of footsteps ran beside his, light and quick, small shoes on wet pavement.
Then those footsteps were gone.
The boy skidded to a stop.
The smoke swallowed the street.
He stood alone under that burning sky with his hand held out, grasping at nothing.
Stop, I thought, and my own heart cracked.
Please stop.
* * *
A kitchen.
It was small and yellow, with a rice cooker clicking on the counter and a window propped open to let the steam out.
Morning light fell across a table covered in plastic checkered cloth.
A pan of garlic rice sat on the stove, and the air smelled of fried egg and tapa and coffee so sweet that my mouth watered.
A school uniform hung over a chair.
A woman stood at the stove with her back to the room.
She was humming.
I felt the sound before I heard it.
It slid through me like warm water, a gentle winding tune with a lazy rise in the middle and a little dip at the end, as if the singer kept forgetting the last line and smiling about it.
Her shoulders swayed to it.
A wooden spoon tapped against the pan, keeping time.
I wanted to see her face.
I reached for it with everything in me.
The woman turned her head, and where a face should have been I saw only a soft blank blur, as pale as a photograph left in the sun.
A hole in the shape of a mother.
Gone, I understood.
He paid it away.
Yet the humming went on.
It floated through the yellow kitchen with no face attached, patient and warm and endless, and I realized the tune had no name and no words.
It was only a feeling, a hand on the back of a child’s head, a morning that would never come again.
My eyes burned with tears that belonged to someone else.
* * *
“Stop.”
The word came from far away.
I blinked, and the kitchen shivered, and the reading room swam back into view.
Glass, marble, violet dark.
Aris’s eyes had opened a sliver.
They found my face with enormous effort.
“Stop,” he rasped again.
“You are… pouring too much.”
“You are bleeding too much,” I said.
My voice trembled.
“So we are even.”
“Idiot.”
“Rude.”
A tiny, cracked breath of a laugh escaped him.
His eyes unfocused, and for a moment I thought I had lost him.
Then his lips moved again, slow and dreamy, as if he were speaking from underneath water.
“Porch,” he murmured.
I went still.
“There is a porch. A mango tree.” He frowned faintly.
“An old woman peeling sweet potatoes. She cuts them too thick.”
My jaw dropped.
“That is my grandmother.”
“She wastes… half the potato.”
“She does not!”
“Mm.” His eyes drifted shut.
“Tell her.”
A hysterical bubble of laughter rose in my throat and came out as half a sob.
I realized then that the door between us swung both ways.
He had seen my kitchen the same way I had seen his.
My heartbreak had walked through his head while his had walked through mine.
We were two strangers who had met in a lecture room a week ago, and we now knew where the other one hurt.
“I will tell her,” I said, wiping my face with the back of my wrist.
“I promise. She will say that you do not know how to cook.”
“True.”
“Count with me. In for four.”
“Lira.” It was the first time he had said my name.
He said it carefully, like a man testing whether a floorboard would hold.
“Go home.”
“No.”
“You will…”
“Hold. Two.” My voice shook, and I kept going.
“Out for five. Do it, Aris.”
He breathed.
Breath after breath, I counted aloud into the violet silence, and slowly his chest rose and fell in time with my voice.
The thread of gold between us hummed softly.
I felt his heartbeat settle against mine, two drums beating in a single rhythm, and neither of us spoke again.
* * *
The Dead Zone ended with a sound like a sheet being shaken out.
Far overhead, the broken skylight rattled.
The frozen rain beyond the windows burst into motion, falling all at once in silver sheets against the glass.
A clock above the entrance ticked, once, twice, and resumed its steady count.
From somewhere outside came the angry blare of a jeepney horn, ordinary and alive, and I nearly cried again from the sheer relief of hearing it.
Silence followed, and then a soft padding of paws.
I looked up.
A scarred gray cat stood at the edge of the shattered glass, drenched to the skin, with his torn ear flattened and his yellow eyes blazing.
Blue fire flickered along his spine like a pilot light.
He took in the reading room, the pale ash that still drifted from the ceiling, the blood on the marble, the dark shape in my arms.
“Kalasag,” I whispered.
“He is hurt. You have to help.”
The cat’s lip curled back.
He looked at Aris with an expression of pure, offended disgust.
“Please.”
Kalasag let out a long, resentful sigh that seemed to come from deep within his ancient body.
Then he stalked forward, stepped over Aris’s legs with great dignity, and lay down along the wounded side.
His small warm body pressed against the soaked hoodie.
The blue flame along his back dimmed to a faint glow, like an ember kept alive on purpose.
He did not look at me.
He stared at the doorway with the grim face of a guard on duty.
“Thank you,” I breathed.
The cat’s ear twitched, and that was his whole answer.
* * *
Footsteps came next, quick and many, a crowd of sneakers clattering up the library steps.
The reading-room doors burst open.
A group of students poured in, wearing Council jackets, with weapons of blue and silver light in their hands.
The tall one in front had an open, friendly face that I had seen smiling from a dozen Student Council posters.
Sean Ocampo.
A boy with taped forearms skidded to a halt beside him, mouth wide open.
A pale girl with a tablet followed more slowly and swept the room with narrow eyes.
And behind them came a small, thin young woman with a medical bag, running as if the building were on fire.
“Aris!” the girl cried, and the sound was torn straight out of her.
“Aris, no, no, no…”
She dropped to her knees beside us without asking permission.
Her hair was tied back in a hurried knot.
Dark circles shadowed her eyes.
I watched her hands move over his side with practiced speed, parting the cloth, pressing, pulling, and I saw her flinch as if she were the one who had been struck.
“Pia,” Sean said gently.
“Is he…”
“Alive.” Her voice cracked.
“Barely. Somebody has been feeding him. Who…” She looked up and met my eyes.
“You.”
“I only held on,” I said.
My tongue felt thick.
“I did not know what else to do.”
“You did exactly right.” Her hands glowed a soft clean white.
“Let go now. I have him.”
I could not let go.
The thread of gold still ran between my wrists and his heart, and my fingers had cramped around his sleeve.
A hand settled on my shoulder, small and dry and warm.
“Hija,” said a familiar, gravelly voice.
“Breathe out.”
I turned my head.
Ma’am Teddy stood behind me in her lilac cardigan, slippers wet from the rain, her spectacles crooked on her nose.
Her round face held an expression I could not read.
She looked at my golden hands for a long moment, and her mouth trembled before she pressed it into a firm line.
“You may release him,” she said quietly.
“The link is only borrowed. I promise he will keep what you gave.”
I breathed out.
The gold thinned, flickered, and drew back into my palms like a tide going out.
A faint loneliness washed through me as the second heartbeat slipped away.
The drum under my ribs fell silent.
All the strength drained out of my limbs at once, and my body folded sideways.
Ma’am Teddy’s arm caught me before my head hit the floor.
“There,” Pia murmured, and the white glow deepened.
“There. Easy. I have you.”
She began to hum.
The sound was soft, hardly more than a breath, the habit of someone who worked with her hands and let her mind drift.
A gentle winding tune with a lazy rise in the middle and a small dip at the end, as if she kept forgetting the last line and smiling about it.
My blurred vision snapped toward her.
I knew that tune.
I had stood in a yellow kitchen and watched it float through the steam with no face to carry it.
It had no name and no words, and nobody on earth could have taught it to her.
“Pia,” I tried to say.
“That song…”
My lips would not form the rest.
The ceiling spun slowly above me, ringed with drifting ash, and the whole world narrowed to a single circle of light.
The last thing I heard was the humming, soft and sure, carrying on through the dark.