Part I

In the Arms of the Goddesses

He was born half a moon cycle early, at sea, on his father’s karakoa, the formidable double-ended warship the chieftain used to bring his wife home after she visited her relatives across the water. There was no midwife onboard; the child fell from the womb into callused warrior hands. His father, the datu, laughed in delight at the robust and angry bellows emerging from his son’s lungs, and his mother wept because he had been born in the embrace of Magwayen, who was as terrible as the ocean she ruled, who was also the goddess of death. They swaddled him in one of the spare sails, cloth the color of blood, and when they returned to their village the babaylan named him Mapula. Red.

“Why Red?” his father asked.

“Red like blood,” said the babaylan. “Red like war, like fire. He is Magwayen’s, not yours. Always he shall walk in the footsteps of Death. Always he shall sing her song.”

 

~*~

 

She was born a year later, in her family’s hut, under the pale flush of sunrise. She was quiet and blue-lipped, half-strangled by the umbilical cord wound around her neck. The midwife had to slap her twice before she cried and, even then, it was no more than a whimper. The babaylan named her Dampug, Shadow, and proclaimed that she would have the second sight because she straddled the barrier between birth and death, night and day. She was consecrated to Alunsina, goddess of the eastern skies, and she watched the world through dark and enigmatic eyes. Her first word was ocean, and the tribal elders looked to Mapula, who was walking already, who was poking a stick into the dirt and wielding it like a spear.

 

~*~

 

They grew like weeds, always in each other’s orbit but never seeming, somehow, to collide. To her, he was simply the datu’s son, loud and disconcerting; to him, she was the little priestess-in-training, barely there. They stood across from each other when the traders came on canoes laden with gold and silk and mother-of-pearl. They sat across from each other when the tribe celebrated a bountiful harvest. But they didn’t exchange a single word until she was fifteen summers old and he was one summer older.

On that day, they were both on the shoreline. Dampug gathered abalone and folded them into the drapes of her bright tapis skirt. Mapula was trying to catch fish but, more often than not, his spear jabbed only water, and he couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the silent girl was laughing at him behind her cupped palm.

He was just about to snap at her, to tell her to go away, when she suddenly stilled like a deer sensing a hunter’s approach through long grass. The shells dropped from her skirt, dropped back into the water. Frowning, he followed her gaze.

Strange white sails loomed on the horizon, rippling over vessels too big to be canoes, too delicate to be warships. Dampug moved first, wading in deeper to get a closer look, hair like night streaming down her bronze shoulders, the ocean lapping at her knees, the sky framing her in turquoise blue. Mapula’s breath caught in his throat; she looked like his Magwayen, pitiless as a summer storm, ferrying the souls of the dead to the underworld.

“Don’t go too far,” he told her. The water was a greedy thing, snatching eagerly with dark, wet hands.

“No, drowning sounds fun,” she replied in tones of dripping sarcasm, and his frown deepened.

There were three ships in all, chasing one another like fat mayflies across the drifting blue currents. Mapula and Dampug watched until they floated out of sight.

“You’re shaking,” Mapula blurted out.

Dampug’s second sight had crept up on her. The water had turned into blood. She glanced at him, and he, too, was covered in it, scarlet rivers running down his copper skin.

“Your goddess waits for you,” she said.

He cracked a smile. “For us all.”

 

~*~

 

A messenger from another island arrived on a sleekly curving vinta the next day and hurried into the datu’s longhouse. Dusk found Dampug curled up beneath the lazy leaves of a coconut tree, rubbing smooth river pebbles together in her palm. She didn’t put them down when Mapula approached; instead, she just watched him with her wide and careful eyes.

“The boats we saw yesterday have docked on the neighboring island,” Mapula told her. “Their passengers are tall men, men dressed in metal, men with jewel eyes and skins as white as the clouds.”

“Ghosts,” muttered Dampug. “Do they want to trade?”

“No one knows.” Mapula shrugged. “The king across the water has asked my father to remain vigilant.”

“Where do they come from?”

“A land far out to sunset. They boast of buildings as high as the sky.”

She snickered. “The sky is no place for men.”

He didn’t argue. She was Alunsina’s and so the skies were hers. Besides, it would have been foolish to argue with one who could speak to the spirits and trace patterns in the smoke, maiden of gold and darkness, girl who danced with dead things. His bare toes grazed the edges of her skirt, which fell from her folded knees to the warm sand.

As the air dimmed, Mapula and Dampug looked out over the ocean, black now, almost, the fiery clouds turning purple. Ladlaw, blazing with heat, retreated with a sigh, relinquishing his hold on the heavens to Libulan, who covered the world in her silver veils.

 

~*~

 

The king across the water was angry. The pale ghosts had disrespected his position, had tried to make him kneel to their gods. Mapula’s dark eyes lit up when he heard the war drums murmuring over the waves.

“You’re not coming back, you know,” Dampug told him as he sharpened his bolo on the whetstone, sparks flying everywhere.

“Is that what the entrails told you?” he asked mildly.

“Perhaps.”

“Who am I to you, that you should care to look into my future?”

She sniffed. “I was just practicing.”

He sheathed the bolo and touched her cheek with his other hand. “Practice well,” he said. “Pray to Macanduc, that he might give me victory. Pray to Santonilyo, that he might give me grace.”

She stepped back. “I pray to whom I choose.”

 

~*~

 

Dampug watched from beyond the watermark as Mapula boarded his father’s warship, standing tall and proud on the stern in the hot sun. He was the youngest warrior in the company, eager to prove his worth, and she already knew that eagerness would mean unwise moves, a reckless last stand.

“Be gentle,” she said to Magwayen as the currents bore the men away to the neighboring island, to help their brothers. “I know he is yours, not mine, but I am telling you to be gentle.”

The goddess of death laughed in the waves.

 

~*~

 

The warriors returned, fewer in number but triumphant. Dampug saw the fierce pride on the datu’s face before she saw Mapula’s body. The task of preparing him for burial fell to her, and in the darkness of the hut she washed his wounds and smoothed back the soft black hair from his forehead. There was a faint smile on his lips and she wondered what his last moments had been like. Did he see Magwayen stretching out her hands? Was that the reason for the smile? How foolish boys were, to think that there was glory in dying young.

The tribe’s victory celebration was uncharacteristically muted. “The pale ghosts will come again,” said the elders. “We will meet them in battle until our blood runs out, until we are overrun. The world is changing.”

Dampug kept her thoughts to herself, because she knew that the world changed every day. She had watched Ladlaw been born anew with every sunrise; she had heard Lihangin sigh through the coconut trees, carrying strange scents from unknown beaches. She had watched Mapula from the corner of her eyes as he learned to walk, to speak, to fight. The earth would turn and hearts would turn with it and she would watch, always, because that was what she did best.

 

~*~

 

But here was something Dampug did not know, something out of reach from her second sight: Mapula had watched her, too. He had watched as she danced, as her hair grew long, as she learned the chants and rituals. He had watched her as his father’s karakoa carried him away until her slim figure was nothing more than a speck on the far-off sand.

She did not know, will never know, that when the pale ghosts’ swords pierced his sides, he had blinked, through the haze of blood and sweat, and the goddess before him had not been Magwayen. If he had known that it was her who waited for him instead, he would not have fought so long, tried so hard to elude her grasp.

He had said her name with a smile on his lips. “Alunsina.”

And the dawn had smiled back.

 

Part II

Our Lost Eden

Miguel came back from Spain a different man. Gone was the graceless, blushing tremor of adolescent youth, replaced by the cocksure swagger of the ilustrado—that peculiar breed of Philippine son who had left the native shoreline for the prestigious universities of Madrid, who had learned the world in Spanish and Latin, who knew which fork to use, who was at home in tastefully-appointed drawing rooms of mahogany and crystal and lace. He still retained his dazzling southern charm, although this was now tempered by a certain permanent state of wrath, which had taken root in his soul and blossomed and boiled under the Iberian sun, refusing to be extinguished by the monsoon blowing in from Manila Bay.

Dolores, too, had changed, in that languid rain-shower way that all girls did when no one was looking. It was just as well, said her father, that the childhood sweetheart had returned when he did, because she was almost nineteen and youth could not wait forever, especially not a youth as vibrant as hers. She was bold and sly, with lips that curved too easily into a smirk and dark eyes that sparkled too quickly with mischief. In the language of flowers, she was more a bird-of-paradise than the docile makahiya which closed its leaves at the slightest touch.

Dolores received Miguel on the small arbor carved into the side of her family’s twenty-year-old house, which overlooked a narrow cobblestone street on which thundered horse-drawn kalesas and above which swung red Chinese lanterns in the breeze. It was a gray afternoon in early August, and the static-charged currents of the habagat monsoon prickled the humid air inside Intramuros, that jewel of the Spanish Empire in Asia, that magnificent city of walls and moats.

“You stopped writing to me,” she reprimanded him. Beyond the white curtains that shielded them from view but not from earshot, her mother gave a pointed cough, and so Dolores raised the abanico to her chest, unfolding the dainty fan with a flick of her wrist in a delayed attempt at modesty.

“I had so much on my mind,” Miguel carefully explained, one elegant hand slipped into the pocket of his suit. “I was busy writing articles for La Solidaridad and campaigning for Philippine representation in the Cortes Generales.”

“Why would the Spaniards grant us a seat at their Parliament?” she asked, amused as always by his boyhood dreams.

“They won’t,” he admitted with a frown. “Neither do they seem very interested in our countrymen’s abysmal living conditions that we try to highlight in La Solidaridad. The Propaganda Movement is a failure, it would seem, although Rizal says we must be patient—”

“Oh, Rizal!” The abanico thrilled in Dolores’s hand, vibrating with the rapid movements that indicated a lady’s displeasure, the slight breeze it generated rippling the folds of the starched piano shawl wrapped around her shoulders. “He is all you young men talk about these days, especially after that silly book he wrote. I’m sick to death of Rizal this, Rizal that!”

Miguel flushed. “Noli Me Tangere is a thought-provoking depiction of the Spanish colonial government’s abuses and the corruption of the friars—”

“It is silly,” Dolores declared again, “and boring. I would much rather talk about less dreary things.”

Miguel saw his opening, and seized it. “Like our wedding, perhaps?”

He heard her mother’s sharp, delighted intake of breath from beyond the curtains. He watched as she stopped fanning herself, as she snapped the abanico shut and dropped it back to her side, the wide lacework sleeves of her gauzy baro billowing in the monsoon wind.

She studied him for several long seconds with her unflinching obsidian gaze. Finally, she said, “You are serious.”

He shot her the faintest trace of a half-smile. “Yes, querida, I am.”

She bristled. “You cannot waltz in from Europe after all these years and expect me to marry you at the drop of a hat!”

From beyond the curtains, her mother sighed and stomped a foot in exasperation. The couple pretended not to notice.

“I swore to you, did I not?” Miguel said softly. “Before I left, I promised that the next time I saw you, it would be for forever.”

“How charming that you would remember that, but forget to write,” Dolores scoffed. It was, however, devoid of rancor.

“My life in Spain is done,” he continued. “My work here in the Philippines begins. I should be honored to have you by my side.”

Her lips pursed. “Work?” He hesitated, realizing his error, and she frowned into the tense silence. “I will not be a revolutionary’s wife.”

“Not a revolutionary,” he hastened to correct. “A reformist.”

She shrugged. “Revolutionary, reformist, Liberal—it is all the same to me. You and your friends walk on gallows ground.”

“Won’t you light my way?”

She laughed, a harsh and discordant melody, knowing siren-song when she heard it. Had she not kept his scant, terse letters close to her breast all this time? Had not her anxious eyes scanned the Pacific horizon every day for the shadow of the ship that would carry him back to her on the swell of the trade winds? Her fate had been sealed the moment the Spaniards executed Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora in the aftermath of the Cavite mutiny; as the garrote crushed the breath from the three priests’ throats, so had it kindled the flame of discontent in many a Filipino’s eyes—and, with discontent, came rebellion.

“It’s a good thing you’re handsome,” Dolores finally said.

Miguel smirked. “Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

 

~*~

 

The wedding was a sumptuous affair, attended by people from all walks of life. There were the mestizos, the mixed-blood children, striking in their strange beauty; there were the peninsulares, the Spanish expatriates, who sweltered in the tropical heat; there were the criollos, who looked Kastila but had assimilated the mannerisms of this colony in which they had been born; there were the Dominican and Augustinian friars, who, as per custom, discreetly fought over the best seats. This well-dressed crew was waited upon by a silent host of brown-skinned indio servants who fanned the guests in their pews during the ceremony and served food and drink at the reception afterwards.

The newlyweds went home to his family’s house, which had been empty since the demise of his parents. They lit candles and whispered to each other in the gloom as he freed her from her veils and laces, as he shrugged off his embroidered coat, as they moved together in the murky chiaroscuro of a lightning-streaked habagat night.

“Tell me what your precious Rizal wrote,” she murmured underneath him, within the mosquito nets that encircled the four-poster mahogany bed. “Tell me why you love the Noli so.”

“I thought you read it.”

“I am not some foolish ilustrado who would risk being caught with subversive material in my drawers.”

He pressed fierce kisses to the smooth skin of her neck, which was darker than his, because her father was an indio who had managed to work his way up the caste system through a combination of bribery and guile. “Rizal wrote, Could I forget you? The thought of you has ever been with me, and has been a comfort to my soul’s loneliness in foreign lands.” Miguel’s voice was husky and reverent as his hands tangled into the black waves of Dolores’s hair. “In dreams I saw you standing on the shore at Manila, gazing at the far horizon wrapped in the warm light of the early dawn.”

She touched his cheek, mildly annoyed that he could remember all of this, and yet he forgot her birthday every year. But she let him continue, let the golden, lilting cadence of his Spanish drawl wash over her.

“It seemed to me that you were the fairy, the spirit, the poetic incarnation of my fatherland,” he recited, his lips punctuating every phrase with a slow brush over her mouth. “As you unite in your being all that is beautiful and lovely, so indeed the love of you and that of my fatherland have become fused into one.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” she told him. “I know this story—as I said, it is all the rage in parlor conversation—he spoke of Maria Clara, did he not?”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “Maria Clara, his doe-eyed heroine.”

“But where does Maria Clara end and the fatherland—Rizal’s Patria—begin?”

He chuckled into the hollow of her collarbone. “Where are you going with this?”

“I am saying that I should not appreciate being so erased.” There was a hint of entreaty in her tone, just the slightest of hitches, and it made him look up, look into her ink-stain eyes.

“We are a young country,” Miguel reflected. “We cling to what we can keep. Patria is everything. It is you, and the monsoon, and the little dried fishes hanging from their lines.” He kissed her again. “It is the sunset over Laguna de Bay, and it is us, and this.”

Dolores hit him on the shoulder. “Did you just compare me to a dried fish?”

He grabbed the offending hand, lacing their fingers together. “If you’re a dried fish, I’m a dried fish,” he remarked, and she rolled her eyes and tried not to grin.

~*~

 

In the third month of their marriage, Jose Rizal returned to the Philippines, with much fanfare among his fellow ilustrados and much disgruntlement from Manila’s high-ranking Spanish officials. One night, Miguel came home from the wealthy Chinese-Filipino businessman Doroteo Ongjunco’s house in Ilaya Street, his brown eyes sparkling with excitement.

“We have formed with Rizal a new organization,” he told Dolores. “It’s called La Liga Filipina. We aim to involve the masses more actively in the reform movement.”

She hummed a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat, and he raised an eyebrow at her. “Do you not wish for an end to forced labor, to unlawful seizure of land? Do you not wish for the secularization of the clergy and equal rights between Spaniards and Filipinos?” he demanded. He was always more belligerent after nationalist meetings, when her lack of enthusiasm dampened his passion.

“Isn’t this just another kind of Propaganda Movement?” she asked dryly. “If you did not succeed in Spain, I fail to see how you would triumph here.”

“We are closer to the people here,” he said. “We can spur them to take action, unify the archipelago in the quest for égalité.”

“Égalité.” She tested the strange syllables in her mouth. “Is that French?”

“Oui.” He smiled, as quick to charm as he was to anger. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

Liberté sounded dangerously close to libertad. “I hope your little group is not contemplating secession!” Dolores snapped. “The Guardia Civil will shoot you on sight.”

“There are many kinds of freedom,” Miguel countered.

“No, there are only two,” she said, turning her face away. “Freedom to, and freedom from.”

She saw him less and less often. On the few occasions that they dined together, he spoke of all the interesting people he was meeting in La Liga Filipina—in particular, a young man named Andres Bonifacio, who was possessed of quite radical ideas.

“Is Luis embroiled in this nonsense, too?” she asked, referring to his dearest friend.

“It is not nonsense,” Miguel reminded her impatiently. “And, yes, he is. We all are.”

“Burgis boys playing revolutionaries,” Dolores sighed.

“You are burgis, too, señorita,” he teased her.

“My father was a farmhand, and then he collected on a huge gambling debt and married my rich mother,” she said. “I am fake burgis, maybe.”

“You are real enough to me.”

“Flatterer.”

He grinned and ducked his head to concentrate on his food. Stray locks of black hair spilled over his pale brow and the lamplight cast strange shadows on his face, and she had the strangest notion that she’d seen him like this before—in the darkness, already gone.

 

~*~

 

When Dolores looked back on the first week of July 1892, the events were a blur. Manila was a powder-keg waiting for the slightest spark to explode. The day Rizal was arrested, her street was a frantic roil of activity as people disposed of their copies of Noli Me Tangere and what few copies there were of its sequel, El Filibusterismo, which had been published only last year and was not yet widely disseminated throughout the archipelago.

She knelt in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin and prayed the rosary until her husband came home. The moment he burst in through the front door, she chucked the rosary at him.

“Calm down,” Miguel said. “They were only after Rizal.”

“It won’t be long before they go after all of you!” Dolores hissed. “Did I marry you only to become a widow?”

“No,” was his steadfast reply. “You married me because, when we were children, you decided you loved me, and you hate being proven wrong.”

She shuddered. “You are a cruel man.”

“I know.” He sank to his knees beside her and held her hands, as Mother Mary gazed upon them with her benign porcelain eyes. “I am sorry.”

His friends started coming to the house. Their muttered yet heated discussions floated from the parlor to her ears.

“Rizal has been exiled to Dapitan, in Mindanao. We are campaigning for his return, but it seems hopeless…”

“Bonifacio has broken away from La Liga Filipina. He has formed a new group, the Katipunan. They’re calling for revolution…”

“We cannot possibly hope to win a violent uprising against Mother Spain!”

“But our peaceful reforms aren’t doing much good, are they? I don’t know; perhaps it is time to be more radical…”

Dolores no longer asked Miguel where he was going, or how he spent his days. At night she shivered when he held her, when his gaze fell upon her like the piercing silver light of stars, as if he were memorizing every inch of her face. When she woke up in the morning, he was more often than not long gone, but she disliked more the times when he was still there when she opened her eyes, because the dancing sunbeams wreathed his hair like a halo and blazed through his skin until he seemed almost translucent at the edges. These were the moments when he already looked like a ghost.

These were the moments that made her think of the ocean, although she did not know why. They had not been to the beach together since they were children, but something about these moments put the shoreline in her mind. Blue water, golden sand, white sails on the horizon, a sunset so red—

Like blood, like war.

Where had she heard that? Who had said that?

“Well?” Dolores asked Miguel one afternoon, when he had put down his secret copy of El Filibusterismo. “What happened to Maria Clara?”

He shrugged. “She died.”

 

~*~

 

The years passed and her father began scolding her for failing to provide him with an apo, a grandchild. Not God’s will, but mine, Dolores thought mutinously. Her mother remained silent, but gave her an understanding look. What was the use of bringing a child into a world like this, where the friars trampled all over you and the Guardia Civil could beat up an indio in broad daylight without fear of reprisal? Where one wrong move in the wrong direction, one word heard by the wrong ear, could land you in the Muntinlupa prison, from where Filipinos returned gaunt and haunted, or did not return at all?

Andres Bonifacio was now Supremo of the Katipunan, which had grown in unbelievable number. She heard names bandied about in the marketplace: Don Emilio Jacinto, the handsome and cunning college drop-out who had written the society’s primer; Don Pio Valenzuela, the physician who was rumored to be smuggling in weapons from Japan.

One afternoon she heard Luis’ name and a chill went down in her spine. If all this information had reached her ears, then there was no doubt that it could reach that of the Spanish intelligence as well—if it hadn’t already.

“Be careful, be careful,” Dolores muttered to Miguel, in the dining room, in the bedroom, in the sala. They rarely went out for leisurely strolls anymore; the Guardia Civil was on high alert, freely arresting suspected revolutionaries.

And then in the last days of April 1896 their neighbor came to the house and whispered that her parents had been taken to Muntinlupa, had been dragged kicking and screaming into the black carriage.

“But… why?” Dolores asked blankly, as Miguel clenched and unclenched his fists.

“They say a copy of the Kalayaan fell from your father’s pocket,” said the neighbor, referring to the Katipunan’s subversive newspaper. “But I think he was framed. You know your farm in Laguna? The Dominican friar there has been eyeing that property for a long, long time. I would not be surprised if the deed falls into his hands tomorrow.”

It did. A few days later, her husband told her he was going out of town, which in colloquial terms meant heading to the rural provinces. “A business trip,” he said, kissing her on the cheek, although they both knew he was lying. He had always been a bad liar.

 

~*~

 

Miguel did not go out of town, but, rather, to Pasig, a few cities away from Intramuros, accompanied by his friends. They went to the meeting place of the Katipunan, and he took a deep breath before he marched up to Andres Bonifacio, and said, “Supremo.”

Bonifacio chuckled, not unkindly. “Do you ilustrados even know how to fight?”

“We will learn,” was his reply.

On the nineteenth of August, the Spanish authorities confirmed the existence of the Katipunan, which led to hundreds of Filipinos being imprisoned for treason. Dolores and Miguel bolted the doors of their house and drew the curtains shut; she stood in the middle of their bedroom while he embraced her from behind, his face buried in her hair, and they waited statue-still for the Guardia Civil, who never came. But before they could breathe sighs of relief, Luis bustled in with the dawn and informed them that several of their friends had been taken during the night.

“They will not betray us,” Luis told Miguel, “but you and I can no longer stay here.” He inclined his head subtly in Dolores’s direction. It’s not safe for her.

She watched her husband’s Adam’s apple bob in his throat. “Where is Bonifacio?” he asked.

“Eluding a manhunt, on his way to Caloocan,” said Luis.

“Then…” Miguel took a deep breath. “We shall join him there.”

Dolores yelled at her husband as he prepared to leave. She cursed him in Spanish, and then in Tagalog, the phantom tongue of their childhood, which would always be the language of the heart, which comprised the words that they thought in during their unguarded moments, even as Romanic syllables rolled smoothly from their mouths. He yelled back, and, by the end of it all, they were both crying as he smashed his lips against hers, violent and desperate and afraid.

When he pulled away, she said, “I hate you.”

“I know,” he replied. “I am sorry.”

And then he and Luis were strolling out the doorway and down the cobblestone street, trying not to appear suspicious, trying not to glance furtively over their shoulders.

At the close of August, news of the uprising in Caloocan reached Intramuros. Under the leadership of Bonifacio, the Katipunan tore up their cedulas, the community tax certificates, to signify their separation from Spain. The Philippine Revolution had begun.

Liberté. Libertad. Kalayaan.

A few days later, the Guardia Civil came pounding on Dolores’s door.

“Where is your husband?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

In the morning she left for Laguna, to stay with her relatives.

Life in the province passed peacefully enough, although everyone lived in fear as to when the fighting would reach their town. The humid habagat currents gracefully gave way to the amihan, the cooler, dryer northeast wind, which blew over the verdant hills and the flooded rice fields as tenderly as an angel’s breath.

On the thirtieth of December, Jose Rizal was executed by firing squad, by Filipino soldiers who had no choice but to follow the command of the Spanish sergeant. They said the sergeant had to order his men to silence when Rizal marched out, when they began shouting “Viva!” along with the crowd that had gathered. Viva. Long live. Long live Dr. Jose Rizal.

They said that Rizal had refused the customary blindfold, had looked at the sun with tired eyes. They said that the sergeant had insisted Rizal be shot in the back, because he was a traitor to Mother Spain. They said that he had turned to face his executioners at the last minute, in a carefully-choreographed twist that he had practiced years before. He had known even then that there was only one way that his story could end.

They said Rizal’s last words were, Consummatum est. It is finished.

~*~

 

Miguel and his friends—what few of them remained—wept, along with the rest of the Katipunan, when they heard of Rizal’s death. But the Spaniards had made a mistake; they had killed the beloved doctor, the symbol. Vengeance now burned like a bright flame in every Filipino’s chest. The cry of rebellion was raised, was taken up from town to town, spreading like wildfire until the islands rang with it, the red banner of the Katipunan flying over the ramparts, over the tolling church bells.

And one day the revolutionaries charged into Laguna, and the Spanish troops met them there.

 

~*~

 

Dolores had not expected to see Miguel again but, suddenly, he was there, rising up from the smoke and the ash, taking the bullet that had been fired at her by a jumped-up Spanish soldier. He collapsed into her arms, his blood soaking through her blouse, and his name tore itself from her throat, lost in the cacophony of battle. By the time she had dragged him to safety, he was shivering, his lips pale.

We’ve been here before, she found herself thinking. Will we always end up here?

“Tell me what Rizal wrote,” she murmured to him, his head pillowed on her lap as he fought to keep his eyes open, to look at her. She would light his way, then, out of this life and into the life after.

“I die without seeing the dawn brighten over my native land,” he whispered. “You who have it to see, welcome it—and forget not those who have fallen during the night.”

Dolores cradled Miguel in her arms, smoothing back, for the last time, the damp strands of dark hair that clung to his forehead. He left her with barely a sigh. Over the cacophony of screams and cannons, the ocean roared in her ears as her gaze fixed on a red flag waving in the air.

 

Part III

Martyrs

When Mac walked into Dani’s political science class on their first day of college, she had the oddest notion that she’d seen him before.

That was impossible, however. Dani was new to Metro Manila, recently uprooted from Misamis Oriental down south, and she would later find out that Mac was from Bacolod City in the Visayas, which was hacienda country and as far removed from her world as Manila had once been. She didn’t even know his name until their professor called the roll.

But something about the way the morning sunlight filtered in through the classroom’s jalousie windows—something about the way he wore the world—was familiar to her.

It was far from the first time that something like this had happened to Dani. Ever since she was a child, even the smallest, most innocuous things were quite capable of giving her a sense of déjà vu. Rabbitfish, gutted and salted, strung up to dry in the sun. Red flags. The ocean. She went through life thinking that she’d already lived it. Her family liked to tease that she’d been born an old woman.

Still, she resolved to put Mac out of her mind for the time being. He very clearly spelled trouble. Like most sons and daughters of the sugarcane barons, he had fair skin, light hair, a sharp bone structure, and a Spanish last name. His voice, when he spoke, was shaded with the mellifluous accent of his hometown, the languid drawl of the old families who were considered aristocracy—people used to servants and three-hour siestas. Heads turned when he walked down the campus hallways, and his fellow students flocked to hear him speak.

And he spoke a lot. Mac had ideas. He wanted to change the world. And he easily found a captive audience in the majority of the student population of the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

He and Dani couldn’t have been any more different. She’d been born in a rice field, her family too impoverished for her heavily pregnant mother to abstain from joining the harvest, and she was from Mindanao, the third island group that no one ever talked about. The Philippines was Luzon, seat of the government, and the Visayas, playground of the landed and the rich. Mindanao was the Other, the odd one. Classmates and professors eyed her with wary distaste, put off by her heavy accent and her abrasive attitude. She was dark-skinned and curly-haired, the exact kind of girl targeted by all the ads for whitening products and rebonding services that proliferated the market.

Dani had elected to pursue an engineering degree in Manila, because that was where everything was—the best education, the best infrastructure. All roads, as they said, lead to Metro Manila. There was more of a future in this sprawling urban jungle than could ever be found in the hunger-stricken wetlands of her hometown. She was the first girl in her family to get the chance to go to college. She could not afford to squander that, and certainly not for the likes of Mac.

It was just too bad that he was everywhere.

 

~*~

 

In the sixties, Jose Maria Sison’s communist ideology began to take root among the students of U.P. Diliman as a pushback against the economic decline, rampant graft and corruption, and acquiescence to American imperialism that characterized the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos. The little red books were passed around with much excitement and awe. Students regularly dropped out to join the New People’s Army—going underground, it was called. They haven’t been to class in weeks, I think they went underground.

Mac graduated high school in 1971. His parents wanted him to go to college at the Ateneo; U.P., they said, was leftist breeding ground. But Mac was adamant. He had eagerly followed the First Quarter Storm as it made national headlines, his heart pounding with tales of rallies and Molotov cocktails, skirmishes between soldiers and youth groups. He was filled with a burning desire to be at the center of the action—he wanted to make a difference, and he couldn’t do that with the Jesuits watching his every move. No straitlaced Atenean education for him, thank you very much.

His parents grumbled but, because he was their beloved only child, they finally let him go.

“Just don’t embarrass us in Manila,” his father had told him at the airport. “Marcos is a good friend.”

But Mac rarely did as he was told, and a president who had bribed and cheated his way into a second term was no friend of his. Halfway into his first semester, he was already part of the gatherings at Vinzons Hall, discussing oil price hikes and tuition fee increases. He wrote pamphlets, gave speeches, and met with the trade unions. While most of his friends were gradually won over to communism, Mac held fast to the Liberal Party; his Holy Trinity was Roxas, Aquino, and Salonga, the politicians most outspoken about the sins of the Marcos administration and its cronies.

He was seventeen years old, a freshman in college, and well and truly tibak. Aktibista. His parents would die from the shame, if they knew.

 

~*~

 

To Dani, Mac was the annoying loud boy in Pol Sci, whose arguments with the professor dragged out the lecture on a daily basis and forced her to run to her next class, which was practically on the other side of campus. She did not take the ikot, the school jeepney; she had no funds to spare for that small convenience.

One afternoon, she huddled in the back row as usual, trying to ignore the activists yapping away while they waited for the professor to arrive. Mac approached her and waved a pamphlet in her face.

“What’s that?” she asked grumpily.

“Our manifesto,” he announced in a proud tone. “Here we have set down our criticisms, outlined what needs to be changed. Take a look.”

She did, and when she had finished reading his big words and his grandiose schemes, she looked up at him once more, unblinking. “What about property repatriations in Mindanao?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Marcos gave away huge chunks of tribal land to settlers from Luzon and the Visayas,” she informed him, “and, yet, I see you have made no mention of that in your little flyer. In fact, you do not mention Mindanao at all.”

“Hmm.” He studied his own writing for a while, and then nodded. “I shall make the necessary edits. If I could trouble you for your input…?”

“No,” she replied through gritted teeth. “Some of us are actually here to study.” She toyed with the bangles on her wrist and waited for him to go away, until he did.

However, when she snuck a glance at his retreating form, it almost froze her where she sat, the swift and sudden sureness that he would look at her over his shoulder and he would smile, and he would say, I’ll see you when I get back.

But that was ridiculous. Back from where?

Dani shook her head and resumed poring over her notes.

 

~*~

 

A few days later, he caught up with her at the intersection between their respective dormitories. The path was lined with towering fire trees that dropped their red-orange flowers on the concrete, to be crushed under the tennis shoes and rubber slippers of passersby, staining the gray street with bursts of color

“Do I know you from somewhere?” Mac asked.

Dani’s fingers tightened around the strap of her book bag. “We have Pol Sci together.”

“No, not like that. I mean—” He raked a hand through his shaggy brown hair, looking vaguely exasperated. “I feel like we’ve met before.”

“That’s impossible,” she said flatly, wondering if she was trying to convince herself as well. She didn’t know what it was about him, but her instincts were screaming at her that the boy was bad news, that he would be her ruin. “If that’s all—”

She made to keep on walking but he stopped her, darting forward to block her path.

“Listen,” he said, “there’s an anti-Marcos demonstration on the front steps of Palma Hall in an hour. We’d love to have you. You could talk about the situation in Mindanao.”

“Pass.”

Mac’s brow creased. “If we as a nation are to achieve true social reform—”

“I’m not here on behalf of the nation,” Dani interrupted him brusquely. “I’m here to keep my head down and get good grades.”

His eyes flashed. “Don’t you care about what’s happening?”

She stared at him. If the burning in her chest was any indication, she probably looked like she was a beat away from kicking him in the shin and, to give him some credit, he was smart enough to take a cautious step back.

“My father sold our only cow so that I would have travel fare and school supplies,” Dani hissed. “I have already been living everything that’s happening. Long before you were old enough to develop a social conscience, or whatever.” Her voice rose as she warmed to her topic. “So, no, you don’t get to try to make me feel guilty about not protesting. Because people with means can protest, they can turn the world upside down as they please, but at the end of the day it’s dregs like me who have to pick up the pieces.”

I am not your cause, she wanted to shout at him, right in his handsome, bewildered face, without knowing where exactly these unspoken words were coming from. I am not your fatherland. I’m just me, and you walk on gallows ground, and I can’t do this again.

Dani sucked in a sharp breath. A host of memories that felt like they were hers and someone else’s at the same time struggled to rise to the surface, but she fought them down and she turned and fled. She thought that she heard Mac calling her name, but she refused to look back. Nothing good came of looking back.

 

~*~

 

Mac went home for the summer. The plane left Metro Manila’s jumbled metal skyline behind and flew over the sapphire sea. Although he did not consider himself overly sentimental, although he had often bemoaned the slowness of life in the Visayas, something in him keened with anticipation as the island drew nearer. The plane began its descent, and he watched through the porthole, hardly even daring to blink as the sugarcane fields rushed up to meet him.

Berto, the family driver, was waiting for him at the airport, and minutes later Mac was rolling the window down and inhaling the clear smog-free air. The vast expanse of green haciendas and the bright blue sky were a blur of color and movement and light as the car chugged down the long, winding roads. It was lunchtime, and the sakadas—the plantation workers—were resting in the generous shade of the mango trees, some dozing on hammocks, some squatting on the ground and eating rice-cakes.

Mac cleared his throat, full of the newly-heightened social consciousness that college bestowed on all freshmen. “How are things here?” he asked Berto. “Are the farmhands well?”

The driver shrugged. “They’re preparing themselves for tiempo muerto, boss.”

Oh, right, Mac realized with a grimace. It was nearly April, the month that marked the beginning of the off-harvest period that would stretch on until August, when the fields were bare and household budgets were tighter and there was no work to be found for migrant farmworkers. Tiempo muerto, the long sleep. Dead season.

The moment Mac arrived at his family estate and kissed his parents hello, he immediately broached the subject of providing compensation for their sakadas during the upcoming labor-less months. Instead of a happy reunion, his father turned almost purple with rage and ordered him to go to his room. As he went up the polished narra wood staircase, he heard his father mutter to his mother, “I told you we should have sent him to Ateneo. U.P. is nothing but commies and liberals who don’t understand the world.”

 

~*~

 

Later that night, his mother knocked on his bedroom door as he was sulking. Mac let her in reluctantly, and she rested a cool, pale hand on his cheek and smiled softly. His heart twinged—he really had missed his parents, but his year away at school had done something. Had made him see them through new eyes.

“Mama,” he said, his throat dry, hating how oddly vulnerable he sounded, all of a sudden, “why do you support Marcos?”

The hand on his cheek flinched. “He is our president.” His mother leaned forward and began to speak in hushed, urgent tones. “Listen to me. Do not let Aquino fill your head with nonsense. The situation is getting dangerous. You must keep a low profile when you go back to school. Do you understand?”

When Mac didn’t immediately respond, his mother repeated her question—sharper, and, this time, in Spanish.

“Yo sí entiendo,” he muttered. For the first time ever, the language felt off on his tongue. Like it was wrong for him to speak it. He turned his face away from his mother and there was a moment of startling disorientation. He saw spears flashing in the sunlight and he heard the beating of drums.

And he thought of Dani.

 

~*~

 

Dani went home, too. The metal ship forced its way through the ocean and the ocean fought back, unlike the small, sleek vinta boats of the Mindanao tribes that insinuated their way along the currents of the Sulu Sea. The waves lashed furiously at the barge, and the floors of the lower third-class levels became slick with vomit- hers and the other passengers. When they finally docked, after a long, long voyage, she emerged with shaky legs, blinking in the afternoon glare, the solid ground rising and falling beneath her.

She returned to wet eyes and a dead neighbor—the latest civilian casualty of a clash between the Philippine army and rebel groups. “I would have written to you,” her mother said, “but post costs money.” And so Dani simply nodded, and quietly said her goodbyes to the kind man who had carried her on his shoulders when she was a child.

Her neighbor had been Tausug and so, in accordance with the Sunna, his body was bathed and cleansed in the rite known as Sutchihun. They wrapped him in a burial shroud—Saputun—and then chanted the prayers for the dead, the Sambayanganun. Fourth and last came the Hikubul, the burial. An imam lowered himself into the chamber dug in the west side of the grave and prayed the tulkin, to drive away evil spirits. Dani watched as they slid the slabs over her neighbor’s hollow in the earth, the slabs called ding ding hali, which in the Tausug dialect meant “wall of rest,” and more prayers were chanted and the wooden drums beat on in the dusk.

After the funeral, Dani escaped to the cliffside for some peace and quiet. Mindanao was more wilderness than Luzon and the Visayas. Her village lay nestled between the craggy mountains and the Sulu Sea, and after a semester in monotonous concrete Manila, it was a bit disorienting, looking to her left and seeing dense jungles, then looking to her right and seeing pristine sand sloping into blue foam-capped water.

It was her fate to always feel like she was caught between two worlds, it seemed. Between the forest and the sea. Between one life and the other. Between Mindanao and a country that couldn’t accept it. Between the future that she wanted and the fight against Marcos.

~*~

 

Mac and Dani returned to Manila in June 1972, for their sophomore year at U.P. The political mood had not changed—had, in fact, exacerbated. A lot of professors started joining the protests, started gladly giving up the floor to tibaks who roamed the classrooms to rally fellow students to their cause.

At the Vinzons Hall gatherings, Mac noticed a lot of newcomers, but also the absence of familiar faces. “Where’s Baho?” he asked, referring to his loud, burly comrade who had adopted the nickname because, he said, he could cause just as much disturbance as a bad smell.

“Baho’s gone,” someone replied. “He went underground.”

“I told him to wait a little while longer!” Mac snapped in frustration. “The Liberal Party is already preparing for the next election—we have an actual chance this time—” But he quickly subsided, because even he had to admit that if anyone in his circle joined the militant New People’s Army, it would be Baho.

Dani lost friends, too. Some of them had not returned from summer vacation, choosing instead to throw their lot in with Nur Misuari’s National Liberation Front, which sought Mindanao’s secession from the Philippines.

She and Mac were classmates again, this time in a required general science subject, but he rarely showed up. The professor assigned her to tell him he was on the verge of being dropped from the class, and she sought him out at Vinzons Hall.

“How can I allocate time for such a useless class when all this is going on?” Mac seethed. “Tell the prof she can drop me. I don’t care. I don’t want to suffer through lectures by a Nacionalista, anyway.”

“What does our teacher’s political affiliation have to do with anything?” Dani was incredulous. “It’s a biology class. We don’t even talk about politics.”

“We need to talk about it,” Mac insisted. “In bio, in math, in soc sci—everywhere. We need to reach as many people as we can.”

“You do, maybe,” she muttered.

She turned to leave, but he stopped her. “Hey, do you want some kwek-kwek?”

Dani paused, recognizing this offer for the olive branch that it was. She looked into Mac’s eyes and saw the bags under them, and she wondered if there was a part of him that was sick of the fighting that he seemed to live for.

Besides, she was kind of hungry.

“Okay,” she said, and he led her to a nearby vendor’s stall. They ate hard-boiled quail’s eggs coated in bright orange batter and deep-fried in oil, looking out at the acacia trees that shaded the Sunken Garden where some people were playing Frisbee and some were sneaking in a quick nap between classes on the Bermuda grass.

They ate mostly in silence. Every time she glanced at him, he was already looking at her, and she would quickly blush and avert her gaze.

He was different as a sophomore. He was a little harder. A little sadder. Dani didn’t think that the Mac of last year would have paused in the middle of advocacy work to eat kwek-kwek with her. And she didn’t know it then but, years from now, she would remember this moment and think that perhaps he had already guessed the shape of things to come, with his steps that were walking the already familiar path of gallows ground.

“We should do this more often,” Mac remarked once they had thrown their little paper plates in the trash and wiped the oil from their fingers.

I’ll write to you, he’d said before he left for Spain.

Pray for me, he’d said before he boarded his father’s warship.

Dani shivered, banishing these strange thoughts to the ether as usual. She offered Mac a noncommittal shrug.

 

~*~

 

In the cold gray light of an early September morning, Mac and his friends were sitting on the front steps of their dormitory, waiting for the newspapers to arrive. But what rolled into campus instead were military trucks. The moment the students spotted the first vehicle looming in the distance, they scrambled into the lobby of their dorm and peered out from the windows.

“That’s fucking Metrocom,” Mac hissed. “What are they doing here?” As a whole, Marcos’ police force stayed away from U.P. grounds, the university having been granted institutional autonomy ages ago.

“The red books,” someone said, and the next few minutes were spent in a flurry of activity as they stashed all communist literature in the basement. Some argued for burning them altogether, but, as a reasonable voice pointed out, the smoke would only attract the Metrocom’s attention.

They spent the whole morning holed up inside the lobby, fiddling with the radio and producing only static instead of the usual news stations. Aside from the military trucks, there was also an overwhelming number of civilian cars zooming down the streets, until finally one stopped in front of their dormitory and a small, button-nosed woman emerged, eyes hidden behind black designer sunglasses.

Mac’s friend Lito gasped. “Ditse,” he breathed, the Chinese Filipino term for second older sister, and then he was running out of the dorm and down the steps, followed by the rest of the group.

“Pack your things,” his ditse told him. “I’m taking you home.”

“What’s going on?” Lito demanded.

Through the sunglasses, his sister inspected the ragtag group of black-shirted activists, a frown tugging at the corners of her scarlet-lipped mouth. At last, she sighed. “The president has declared Martial Law. Aquino is in jail. They’re not going after students yet, but they will. If I were all of you, I’d get out of Manila now.”

Mac and the others retreated to the lobby once more, giving Lito and his sister some privacy. When Lito went back to them, he was in tears.

“I told her to go,” he said, dabbing at his eyes. “I told her I’m staying. The fight is here.”

We’ve been here before, Mac thought, staring at his friend.

You and I can no longer stay here. Who’d said that? Darkened cobblestone streets, slipping out of sight from soldiers on patrol. Someone who was Lito but not Lito telling him that she would be safer if they left. Revolution.

 

~*~

 

Under Proclamation No. 1081, the writ of habeas corpus was suspended. Demonstrations were banned, as were all anti-government newspapers and broadcasts. A curfew was set in place; anyone caught on the streets after midnight was either arrested, or shot on sight if they tried to run. Suspected activists were snatched by the police in broad daylight, dragged kicking and screaming into the armored vans, never to be heard from again.

There was talk of shutting down the school, but the months went on and such plans never came to fruition as most U.P. administrators kicked up their heels and refused to back down. The protests went on, more violent now. The air on campus started taking on a permanent tang of tear gas.

Mac had stopped coming to class altogether. Dani waited for news of his arrest; it seemed only a matter of time. But, weirdly enough, he continued to elude the nets of the Metrocom, even as the people rallied around him, even as his name fell from everyone’s lips.

His friend Luis was captured in December, but quickly given back, with a bruised eye and a split lip, because the close-knit Chinese Filipino community threatened to shut down the businesses that drove the nation’s economy. Marcos relented, because he could not arrest them all.

It must be nice having powerful friends, Dani thought snidely as the police stopped her on the streets and interrogated her, searching for any ties to the National Liberation Front.

Few people went home for Christmas break. The airports, docks, and bus terminals were heavily guarded, and it just wasn’t worth the hassle anymore.

One night, Dani was enjoying a hot cup of chocolate in the lobby of her dorm, when she heard someone pounding frantically on the heavy glass doors. It was two in the morning—the person had broken curfew. The guard who usually manned the front desk was off making corridor rounds, but the key was placed conspicuously on the table. U.P. was not letting its children go quietly into the night; rumor had it that the campus guards were being secretly instructed to leave the key in plain sight, for situations such as this.

Dani went over to the doors and saw Mac through the glass. Her heart pounded heavily in her chest as police sirens blared in the distance. I can’t go to jail, she thought, looking into his panicked eyes. I have no one to speak for me.

She could let them take him. She could let him be another corpse salvaged out of a ditch weeks from now.

Please, he mouthed to her, his sharp features softened by shadow. And, oh, how young he looked.

She unlocked the doors and she let him in.

 

~*~

 

Dani’s roommate was one of those who’d gone home for the holidays, but her mattress was in storage. She could not in good conscience make Mac sleep on a hard bedframe or on the cold, tiled floor, so they crowded together on her narrow bed, with its thin blanket and its threadbare pillows. They lay side by side in the darkness, hardly daring to breathe as they listened to the sound of sirens and the beam of flashlights from the patrols outside sent ghostly threads of luminescence filtering into the corners of her room.

We’re going to get caught, Dani thought, her mind racing, her heartbeat uneven. Someone had seen them. Any minute now the Metrocom would burst into her room and drag her and Mac out of the campus. She would be tortured, she would be killed, she would just be another name on the long list of missing students, and her family would never know what had become of her.

But nothing happened. One hour crawled slowly into the next with neither her or Mac saying a word. He didn’t tell her what he’d been doing outdoors after curfew and she didn’t ask. It was for her own protection. The less she knew, the better.

However, there was something to be said of his body against hers in the night. The bed was too small for them not to touch, and touch was memory, and so was scent. As she started to drift off into an uneasy slumber, the phantoms of other eras came to life, flitting just slightly out of her reach. Like words on the tip of her tongue.

It was Mac who broke the silence, because he would probably forever be the foolhardier out of the two of them, no matter what times they found themselves in. “You’re starting to remember now, aren’t you?” he asked softly, rolling over onto his side to face her.

Dani stared up at the ceiling, barely awake. “I remember that you carry death in your body,” she murmured, drowsiness lowering that carefully kept guard of hers. “I remember that you always fight, and so I always lose you.”

When he didn’t say anything for several long moments, she prompted, “What about you? What do you remember?”

His fingers brushed against her hair in the dark. “I remember that you’re always worth fighting for.”

 

~*~

 

He stayed in her dorm room until six in the morning, when it was safe to be outside, and, after that night, he sought her out more often. At first, she wondered if it was out of some misplaced sense of gratitude, but then she noticed that his circle was dwindling. More tibaks were going underground, turning communist, having lost faith in the Liberal Party now that its leaders were incarcerated. Dani and Mac fell into a friendship of sorts, uneasy at first, but once they figured out that they needed to abstain from discussing politics, they got to know each other better as the days of Martial Law rolled on.

She continued to attend class and get good grades and he continued to stage protests and fail one subject after another. And she continued to remember him more and more.

There was very little fanfare to realizing that they’d had past lives and they’d known each other in them. It was hardly the most outlandish thing, and it did explain her sense of déjà vu about—well, so many things. Besides, there was so much else to worry about as the situation in Manila grew more and more dire and as the conflict in Mindanao worsened.

One day in February 1973 , Dani passed by Palma Hall just as Mac was giving an impassioned speech. Common sense dictated that she should make herself scarce before the Metrocom arrived on the scene but, today, for some reason, she hung back in the crowd and she watched him. She watched how he rallied his audience and how every eye stayed fixed on him, this golden boy who they would follow anywhere. And she thought about how there would probably always be someone like him at these points in their nation’s fractured history, because that was how a nation was built, on the backs of martyrs. And she thought about how there would always be someone like her, who would have to let him go.

 

~*~

 

“Psst!” someone hissed at Dani on her way to class a few weeks later. When she stopped and turned around, Mac emerged from behind a tree. As he neared her, she caught the unmistakable smell of tear gas that clung to his clothes.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded angrily. “If you just came from a protest, the Metrocom will still be on high alert!”

“I just wanted to see you,” he said, and something inside her snapped because he didn’t get it. She couldn’t be seen talking to an activist.

“Go away!” she yelled. “What do you think you’re doing? First I was your cause, and now you’re making me your escape—I’m sick of it! Why do you do that?”

“Because,” he whispered, “that’s the only way you can be mine. In this life, or in any other.”

She stalked away, leaving him staring after her. Fear gripped at her heart. Unshed tears burned behind her eyes.

 

~*~

 

In early April, his aunt who lived in Manila visited Mac at his dormitory. “Tita,” he greeted, kissing her on the cheek. She looked angry and afraid, and he wondered if his family had been informed that he’d been dropped from nearly all his classes for failure to attend.

“You have to go,” she said in a low voice.

His brow creased. “What do you mean?”

“Your parents have done all they could to keep your name out of the watch lists,” his aunt told him. “But Marcos has had enough. The Metrocom will come for you any day now.” She slipped a piece of paper into his hand. “This is the address of family friends in Cavite. Stay with them. They will protect you. And…” Next, she gave him a thick envelope. “Here. Your father emptied out one of his bank accounts. This should sustain you for a while. There are fake identification papers in there as well. Do not contact us. Do not try to go back to the Visayas. As of today, our family is officially under surveillance.”

“I…” Mac trailed off. He didn’t know what to say. If he should apologize. If she would accept it on his parents’ behalf.

But his aunt merely shook her head. “Just try to make it through this.” Her tone was rife with bitterness and disappointment. “I pray that we will see each other again.”

After she left, Mac numbly packed what belongings he could into a small knapsack. There was no time to find any of his friends and tell them. But as he was heading for the bus station, he saw Dani walking underneath the fire trees. He resisted the urge to go to her, to say goodbye.

You could have been it for me, he thought as he hurried away, with one last glance at her over his shoulder. You could have saved me from dead season.

 

~*~

 

Mac saw a couple of acquaintances on the bus but they avoided one another’s gazes, ever conscious of the proliferation of government spies. Better safe than sorry. He stared at the address in his hands, until finally he tore it into little pieces.

He got off at the next stop, although he was still miles away from Cavite. He hailed a cab, and told the driver to take him to one of the far-flung subdivisions at the edge of Metro Manila. Once he was there, he took a deep breath and set out, on foot, for a private residence that he knew was being used as a safe house by the New People’s Army.

“Do you even know how to fight?”

“We will learn.”

 

~*~

 

“Where is he?” Dani asked Mac’s friends when the next semester came and there was no sign of him.

His friends glanced at one another, and then at her. “He went underground,” one said.

The line of her mouth tightened. “I see.”

 

~*~

 

Dani graduated from college in 1975 and got a job at a small HVAC contractor, sending more than half her paycheck to her family in Mindanao. Martial Law was formally lifted in ’81, for Pope John Paul II’s visit, but still the arrests and torture and salvaging went on. Her co-workers joked about it—when I have a kid and if it’s a girl, they said, I’m going to name her Marsha Lou—and Dani would groan at the bad puns, but she did not begrudge them for it. People did what they could to make life bearable. The New People’s Army and the Philippine forces clashed in the provinces outside Manila and on the streets within it. Bombings became the order of the day. Dani worked, and she ate, and she mailed money to her family, and she searched for any mention of Mac in the mainstream newspapers, not daring to tap into the rebel radio broadcasts, and she prayed for all of it to be over.

In 1983, Aquino returned from exile in the United States, but was assassinated as he disembarked from the plane. Dani watched the footage of Marcos’ greatest political opponent bleeding out on the tarmac and she wondered where Mac was, if he like so many others had wept upon hearing the news—if he was even still alive to hear it.

In ’86, Marcos was declared president once more after a snap election, beating Aquino’s widow, Cory, by an impossibly wide margin. The cheating was blatant, and all fifty opposition members walked out of Parliament in protest. The word began to spread. Enough was enough.

Revolution, revolution.

 

~*~

 

Dani finally gave in and listened to Radio Veritas. The announcer spoke of thousands of unarmed civilians taking to the streets, gathering at Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, calling for Marcos’ abdication, waving protest signs, and forming the letter L with their fingers—L for laban, “fight back,” the symbol of the opposition. The army marched in, and people linked arms together to block their advance; the Catholic nuns knelt in front of the tanks, praying the rosary.

When the news station’s standby transmitter failed, plunging the communication lines into static silence, she released the breath she’d been holding for hours, and she sank to her knees and cried, without knowing what she was crying for.

And then—

Her apartment wasn’t that far from where people had gathered. Almost before Dani knew it, she was running out onto the street, she was joining the crowd, she was marching along with them, marching toward the tanks and the stone-faced soldiers. She was screaming for freedom with tears in her eyes. She screamed for Mac, for lost friends, for dead classmates, for her mother who gave birth in a rice field, for her neighbor within his walls of rest.

And through it all she searched the throng for a familiar flash of light brown hair, for a pale and familiar face, but she already knew that she wouldn’t find Mac. Because he carried death in his body. Because golden boys always burned out in the end. Because a nation could only be dragged out of its long night by those who would not live to see the dawn.

In our next life, Dani thought as her voice became one with the roar of the angry wretched, as she fought back along with the rest of them. In our next life, I’ll have you for longer. In our next life, I’ll have you and we’ll be happier. I swear to you, our next life will be better than this.

 

~*~

 

And perhaps there were certain lines that could not be crossed, perhaps one too many a general had balked at the thought of giving the command to murder thousands of unarmed civilians. Whatever the reason, the soldiers lowered their guns and the military withdrew.

On the 25^th of February, 1986, with most of the Armed Forces having defected, Ferdinand Marcos and his family fled the Philippines in disgrace. Dani stood shell-shocked in the middle of EDSA, her feet aching, her throat scraped raw, her gaze stunned as everyone around her held each other and cheered, and all tears shed were that of joy.

 

~*~

 

Mac had been organizing in one of the far-flung Luzon provinces when the people of Metro Manila took to the streets. He stayed underground after the revolution; even with Marcos gone, there was always more work to be done and more injustice to be corrected. But not a single day went by that he didn’t wonder how Dani was doing. If she’d made it to the brand new world that he would always try to give her in whatever life. If she was happy.

If, sometimes, she thought of him.

 

~*~

 

They saw each other again thirteen years later, just before the turn of the century. Dani was an engineering professor at U.P. Diliman now, and she ran into Mac under the shade of the fire trees.

She stopped in her tracks at the sight of him. He was thinner and older. His hair was cut shorter and there was a scar on his pale cheek, but his eyes were the same.

Mac smirked at the faculty ID hanging from her neck. “Good afternoon, ma’am.”

Dani glanced at his own ID. “You enrolled again?”

He nodded. “I decided that I should probably get around to finishing my degree now that there seems to be no need for anarchy in the immediate future. But—have freshmen always been this annoying?”

“I thought you were dead,” she told him, letting the tone of her voice say what she never could.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to class,” she huffed. “You can walk me, if you like.”

“Great.” His smirk turned into a genuine smile. “I have so many things to tell you.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “I have things to tell you, too.”

He eagerly fell into step beside her. They walked together—over concrete, over cobblestone streets, over a gleaming shoreline. The fire trees shed bright flowers in their wake.