Chapter 1: Cala
Monday morning, June 25, 2007
Classes had recently started at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Freshmen, those easily lost sixteen-year-olds, were just settling in, exploring the campus grounds that were the last remaining hectares of jungle in Quezon City. They were finding their high school friends and making new ones.
Cala was one of these freshies, but she was only fifteen. She was seemingly made of ribbons and bubbles and Juicy Fruit gum and she was never still. Always fidgeting, always folding cranes from the yellow gum wrappers. Her colorful messenger bag was full of those tiny yellow cranes. A few would spill out whenever she took out a notebook. Nobody seemed to notice the polka dots that travelled along her blouse and bag and the arnis sticks case slung over her shoulder. Spots of color wandered like the blobs inside a lava lamp, sometimes straight as stripes. An effect often mirrored in miniature along the ribbons of her long pigtails. Pigment manipulation. Cala always ignored that rule about not displaying her abilities. But who stops to smell daisies anymore? She always got away with it.
It annoyed Lance, at least. Luis Lance Vidiro, always smoking by the side of Palma Hall where Cala knew to find and pester him. The short, dark, marred young man in the rough black leather jacket was her favorite instructor – and he taught nothing at UP. He was a Fine Arts major, slightly known for his work with a peculiar glass art which had gotten him scholarships and paid for his rent.
In the Group, this young man with pockmarked face and scarred hands was known as Vidiro the Glassbreaker. He was one of the Elite, that special team with the strongest abilities and skills. He and Mina were arnis instructors for Cala and her teammates – of whom, Cala was now the only one left. Most of her team had died Saturday.
Lance’s phone buzzed. He drew the black, scuffed-up little nine-pad Nokia from his jacket pocket and read the text from Mina.
Does she know this isn’t a game?
He looked at Cala. Her pigtails bobbed as she rambled on about nothing in particular. She was talking about Mr. Monster, her nickname for their newest problem. Thankfully, none of the students, professors, or vendors passing by seemed to notice the strange things she mentioned. Everyone at UP was expected to be eccentric somehow, Lance had long ago learned.
“Why do you work for the Group?” he tried asking her.
She grinned widely. “Why not? It’s darn cool and without them, I’d never have learned how to use my powers.” With a sparkle of mischief, she touched the tiny, finished origami crane to Lance’s sleeve. The crane turned black and a yellow spot appeared on his jacket, the colors righting themselves when she pulled the crane away.
He sighed at her response. Another example of the Group’s brainwashing at work. Using telepaths to weave into sleeping minds. Making instant soldiers out of innocent kids. Guaranteeing them a shorter lifespan in exchange for extraordinary adventure… He scanned the twisted black trunks of the century-old acacia trees of the Sunken Garden, brooding. As small brown birds flit past, he followed their trail upwards into the canopy of the tiniest green leaves.
He looked beside him as Cala moved again, this time offering him a yellow crane. He shook his head silently and looked back out. People walked and bicycled along the Academic Oval, movement between him and the steady, majestic trees.
As Lance drew on his cigarette, he wondered how the bubbly teen beside him had survived her teammates’ recent deaths without the faintest spectre of grief. Most of the kids like her had felt somewhat hunted since the recent events. Even the Group was taking this seriously; all teams except Lance’s had been disbanded the night before. Too many telepaths and specials were being killed by what seemed to be a solitary shapeshifter, whom Cala referred to as Mr. Monster for lack of any better name. How many of Lance’s students had it noiselessly but messily dispatched in the last two nights?
Lance winced at the reminder of a killer on the loose, and he looked at Cala again. “How are you not afraid of that monster?”
Cala paused, her fingers still for a moment. She looked up at Lance with big eyes and a wide, confident smile. “I have hope,” she said simply. “You’ll stop Mr. Monster, and everything will be normal again, and I’ll be assigned to a new team.”
Lance was unsettled by her answer. He dropped the cigarette butt and crushed the embers with the toe of his shoe. “I better go help Mina with the research,” he decided.
Cala grinned and waved, “I’m sure you’ll get that Mr. Monster! You guys are the best we’ve got!”
Lance nodded, silent as he turned and went up the steps.
He found Mina poring over books in the Anthropology library on the third floor. The Anthropology library was small compared to the other libraries on campus. It was a single, square room, four walls of dry old books with cracked spines and loose pages; a folding table in center, with chairs all about; a low ceiling, a dim bulb. Mina only had about a dozen Anthropology classmates, and knowing their schedules she knew the room was all hers for the next hour.
Mina, codenamed Mince, was a light-skinned Filipina with Spanish features, a strong nose, dark hair that curled tightly as it rolled past her shoulders – unless she had it pulled back in a painfully tight ponytail as she often preferred. Her makeup was so perfect it looked natural. But her manner of dress was odd. A blue blouse with lace sleeves that stopped just past her wrists, a loose blue skirt, high leather boots – she was comfortable in the airconditioned room but not dressed for either hot or wet season of the Philippine weather. The hot season was nearing its end now. Lance wasn’t in any position to compare, though. He wore all black, his shirt and pants rugged and worn but not threadbare. His scuffed black leather jacket was a sweltering sight that made many wonder if he ever took it off.
They were comfortable in each other’s company, but Mina was too professional to let friendship distract her. Occasionally, Lance would remember that despite having known and worked with her for almost a year, he still didn’t know her family name.
Two massive tomes were spread open on the table, and everything else seemed covered in the tabloids and newspapers she’d asked Lance to buy. She’d been here since the library had opened that morning, poring over books in English and Filipino (the latter with difficulty) to catch up on a childhood of folk tales she’d never heard before, a deficiency owed to a lifetime spent overseas. Monsters such as aswang and tikbalang were much more than simply ‘vampires’ or ‘horse-men’ as her inadequate dictionary uselessly insisted. There were vast differences to the Philippine lore that no western legend or Hollywood daydream could match. But she had no time to rue this lack. She had to find out: why was the shape-shifter mimicking these monsters? And why was he killing people who worked for the Group?
Mina, despite being a veteran of the Group’s projects in North America, could not claim to be part of the Group. She could only say she worked for them. A lot of kids worked for them – mostly teenagers who the telepaths found, sometimes kids as young as twelve if their powers had already manifested. Mina was twenty-one. And she knew that all she had were combat skills, experience, and a terrible, unenviable luck. She was, essentially, normal. Powerless, but elite. And because she had survived so much, she was expected to help these kids survive.
But what was this shape shifter? She still didn’t know if he was something indigenous. The thought of a creature of lore existing was absurd to her. She’d almost never encountered a monster that the Group hadn’t created. But she’d been surprised at the prevalence and sheer number of Philippine folk monsters that were classified as shape-shifting. Every mountain, river, lake, and island seemed to have its own species of lore. Could it be found in the past?
The newsprint screamed of bloody headlines in Taglish – the common mixture of Filipinized English – and every Philippine language and dialect common in Metro Manila. For all but two tabloid rags, the monster murders were their best story for the day. Even the librarian, now out on break, had earlier been surprised. So rarely did all the peso papers cover the same odd story at the same time. A few might have a monster headline once in a blue, but something this time had convinced even the more ‘investigative’ tabloids to follow along.
Mina, however, was getting frustrated with her papery haystack. She pushed away one open tome and looked at the shelf behind her without getting out of her seat. After glaring at the titles briefly, she tugged out another book so old the title had worn off. The yellowing pages revealed illustrations and the occasional photograph. She skimmed the book, growled, and pressed a few fingers against her forehead.
“By his clothes, I’d say he’s ancient,” Mina finally spoke.
Lance looked up from the annotated tabloid he’d been translating for her. “Define ancient,” he asked.
“When were the Spaniards last here?” Mina snapped. Spain had colonized the Philippines for four centuries with more than its share of atrocities before being ‘rudely’ ejected in the late 1800s. In front of her, some of the first photographs ever taken in the Philippines showed the costume of the era: gentlemanly suits of many layers and women in stiff, gauzy dresses.
Lance sighed. “And how he mimics those monsters? Anything else?”
Mina shook her head. The video she’d recorded with her phone during the last encounter was too blurry to reveal much. But she’d recognize that suit anywhere. It was from another time. Would locating the shape-shifter in the past reveal his motives, his origin? Or could it be just a distraction, a false clue the shape shifter had added to his repertoire for some diversion?
“He hunts down his targets fairly quickly,” she summed, fishing out a local map from beneath the mess of tabloids, a map that had been angrily annotated in red sharpie. Clusters of dots with descriptions of murder and victim, connected by a single, zigzagging line that crossed the map a few times. “-and scares a lot of civilians in between.” The sea of newsprint required no mention. Aside from having worked for the Group, the only other thing each red dot since Saturday had in common was that each had died alone. And now, all teams except for Mina and Lance’s had been disbanded. Mina winced. “We were all safer together.”
Lance understood. “At least Cala is on campus with us. We can protect her here.”
Both of their cellphones buzzed just then. Mina’s dark blue Nokia 6670 hung from a blue lanyard around her neck, so she read it first while Lance fished his scuffed phone out of his jacket pocket and clicked it on. Something small and yellow fell from his pocket to the floor. Both read the same message and paled.
I think I c ur mr monstr! He wnt in2 sunkn grdns. Will pursu!
The two grabbed their things, leaving behind only the heavy books and layers of tabloids. The old door slammed against the wall as they burst out, racing down the stairs of Palma Hall, Mina frantically texting as she braced the strap of her arnis case against her shoulder.
DO NOT FOLLOW HIM! CALA! HE’S DANGEROUS!
Elsewhere, Cala typed a response into her cellphone as she carefully made her way down the forgotten, vine-carpeted stone steps that led away from the sidewalk, a pair of arnis sticks in her other hand. The last step was still a steep two feet from the ground, but she didn’t stumble. At the grassy floor, she walked cautiously past the thick stand of bamboo and was surprised to find the strangely clothed, strangely gaunt man had slowed his pace. She shouted to him, pointing the sticks at him with one hand. “Stop right there!”
He stopped and turned to face her.
Lance dashed across the street, but Mina had to let a fast-moving jeepney pass before she could catch up. One tiny yellow crane on the curb, another yellow crane on the sidewalk a few meters away. Breadcrumbs. They ran, easily avoiding collisions with the few strolling students. The last little paper bird led them down the stone steps.
Mina and Lance found her first. She was face down in the grass, surrounded by a pool of those tiny cranes she was always folding. They were all red. In her hand, her cellphone, still lit, read an unsent text.
But u tot me hw 2 hndl dangerus olredi.
