Page 23 of Signal No. Us

“That line sounds familiar.”

“Now it’s for you,” Robby said, and for one long, suspended second, every place they were touching and every place they weren’t became the only two facts Allan’s brain could process. He was abruptly, acutely aware of exactly how little space separated Robby’s mouth from his own and how much of his remaining self-control was currently being spent on not closing it.

“Okay,” Allan said, unsteady. “That’s—that’s a lot of trust exercise for one Tuesday.”

Robby let him go, laughing, and the half-meter of current between them suddenly felt enormous.

They ended up on a flat, sun-warmed rock at the pool’s edge afterward, not touching, but close enough that the heat off Robby’s skin reached Allan across the stone, close enough that every small shift of breath felt like it mattered.

“Thank you,” Robby said, quiet, apropos of nothing. “For today. All of it. The boar included.”

“Especially the boar,” Allan said. “Best part.”

“I mean it,” Robby said, turning his head, serious now. “I keep thinking about what Jake said in the cave. No villain. Just two people, scared, getting it wrong.” A pause, water dripping steadily off his hair onto the rock. “I don’t want to get it wrong again. That’s all. I just wanted to say that somewhere that wasn’t a library, for once. Somewhere that could also just be good.”

Allan looked at him for a long moment: soaked, sunburned at the shoulders already, entirely unguarded in a way the seventeen-year-old varsity captain in his memory had never once managed to be.

“This is good,” Allan said. “Today was good.”

“Two weather systems,” Robby said, half to himself, watching the falls. “You know what happens to two systems that get this close.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Next time,” Robby said and didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.

CHAPTER 10

The barangay’s quarterly evacuation drill fell, with what Jake insisted was cosmic timing, exactly one week after the cave trip, which meant Allan found himself conscripted before he’d even finished his coffee.

“Why am I even part of this?” Allan asked, examining the orange vest someone had thrust into his hands. “I’m not officially from here.”

“Everyone’s official here,” Tita Becky said, adjusting her own vest with the seriousness of a four-star general. “You’re the senior citizens sector advisor now. Congratulations, you’ve been promoted.”

“I don’t remember applying for that.”

“Nobody applies for anything here,” she said. “We just decide.”

The drill, as it turned out, was not a small thing. The whole barangay hall had been converted into a mock command center, with laminated maps taped across every available wall, colored pins marking evacuation routes, shelter capacities, and, Allan noted, with real surprise, individual households flagged for mobility assistance, elderly residents, families with infants, and anyone who’d need extra hands during an actual event.

At the center of it, radio in hand, voice pitched to carry without shouting, was Robby.

“Sector 3, report,” he said into the handset, and waited, patient, while a crackling voice on the other end confirmed the headcount. “Copy. Two senior citizens haven’t transferred yet, you said? Who’s with them?”

Allan watched him work for a solid twenty minutes before Robby even noticed him standing there, watched how he moved through the room correcting small errors without embarrassing anyone, praising a nervous teenage volunteer’s map-reading, and quietly rerouting a family whose assigned shelter had, in the mock scenario, “flooded.”

A junior volunteer approached mid-drill, panicking slightly over a “family” that had, in the mock scenario, been assigned to a shelter already marked full.

“Kuya Robby, what do I do, Sector 2 is already full⁠—”

“Breathe first,” Robby said, calm, steady, crouching to the volunteer’s eye level instead of towering over the panic. “Check the map. There’s still Sector 4, and it’s actually closer to them. Your call wasn’t wrong, you just didn’t have all the information yet. That’s fine, we can fix it.”

The volunteer exhaled, visibly steadied, and hurried off with a new plan and considerably less panic than she’d arrived with.

“You’ve got a whole other face,” Allan said, when Robby finally caught a break, “when you’re working.”

“A different face?”

“More…I don’t know. Serious. But not rigid. Whole, somehow. Like what you gave those kids when you taught them how to tie knots.”