5:45 AM.
Unit 1418.
Jae-min hadn't slept, his body fixed at the dining table like a statue with a glass of water in front of him and a Glock 19 resting beside it, the unit dark except for the faint blue glow of the city bleeding through the curtains.
36°C outside.
March 20.
Twenty-six days left.
The AC hummed its mechanical hymn while the void in his chest pulsed slow and steady, a second heartbeat that belonged to something else.
Three sharp knocks landed on the door, heavy and deliberate, the kind of knock that carried rank.
He got up, walked to the door, and looked through the peephole.
Uncle Rico.
He opened the door, and Rico stood in the hallway, five-foot-five of compressed military history with silver-white cropped hair close enough to the scalp to see the scars underneath and black eyes that had looked at death in Mindanao and Camp Aquino and Villamor Air Base and decided it wasn't worth flinching over.
He wore a faded denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, his forearms corded with the kind of lean muscle that didn't come from gyms but from thirty years of carrying equipment and men and the weight of command, his face weathered and lined with the map of a man who had seen the worst the world had to offer and still had room left for warmth.
But the warmth was surface, and Jae-min could see it in the way Rico stood with his weight slightly forward and his shoulders squared and his eyes scanning the unit behind him in a single one-second sweep, a soldier's stance with a predator's stillness underneath the grandfather's smile.
"You look like hell." Rico observed, a measured concern failing to hide the sharp assessment underneath as he stepped through the doorway.
"Come in." Jae-min replied, a flat, grinding exhaustion making the words come out like spent shell casings.
Rico stepped inside, and his eyes swept the unit: the bare dining table with the glass and the gun, the dark kitchen, the closed bedroom door, the absence of anything that suggested a person actually lived here.
He didn't comment, just took the chair across from Jae-min and sat down.
They sat across from each other with the glass of water between them and the Glock 19 beside it, two Del Rosario men and two instruments of survival on a table at 5:45 in the morning.
"Two million pesos, Jae-min." Rico began, a stern, measured authority carrying the voice of a man who had interrogated soldiers and broken them with patience alone. "Forged signature. Bank fraud. Under a retired colonel's name."
He paused, letting the weight of it settle.
"In any jurisdiction, that's prison." Rico continued, his black eyes fixed on Jae-min. "In a military jurisdiction, that's a court-martial. You want to explain?"
"I'm going to explain everything." Jae-min answered, a calm strategic certainty grounding his voice like a man who had already mapped the conversation to its endpoint. "But you won't believe me. So first, I'm going to show you something. Then I'll explain."
Rico leaned back and crossed his arms, the gesture of a man settling in for a long answer to a short question, patient and military, the kind of patience that had outlasted insurgents and politicians alike.
"Watch the glass." Jae-min instructed, a steady, focused command carrying each word with deliberate weight.
Rico's eyes flicked to the glass of water, then back to Jae-min, skeptical and patient.
Jae-min raised his right hand, and his fingers trembled, barely visible, a micro-tremor that ran from knuckle to tip, and he pointed at the glass while the void in his chest surged, not hungry but obedient, a weapon recognizing its wielder.
The glass vanished.
No sound, no light, no flash; one moment it sat on the table with water catching the faint blue glow from the window, the next moment it was gone, not moved or pushed or fallen but gone as if it had never existed, the table dry without a drop or a ring or a stain, just bare wood where the glass had been.
Rico didn't move, his black eyes staying on the empty space where the glass had been while his jaw tightened on a single muscle, the only tell.
"Where is it?" Rico demanded, a controlled clinical focus refusing to panic because panic was for civilians.
Jae-min lowered his hand, and the tremor was worse now, a white-hot spike driving through his right eye behind the socket into the base of his skull, and he didn't flinch but pointed at the table.
The glass reappeared in the same spot with the same water level and the same condensation on the outside, as if it had never left, as if the universe had simply blinked and forgotten to delete the file.
Rico stared at the glass with his weathered face unreadable, but his hands had gone flat on the table with palms down and fingers spread, the posture of a man physically anchoring himself to reality because reality had just come loose from its moorings.
"Again." Rico ordered, a sharp, controlled demand from a man who needed to see it twice because once wasn't enough to rebuild a shattered worldview.
"Watch the gun." Jae-min said, a steady, grinding focus pushing the words through clenched teeth.
He raised his hand again, and the void surged harder and deeper, and the Glock 19 sat on the table black and heavy and real before it vanished with the same silence and the same absence, the table bare with just the glass and empty wood.
Then Jae-min's right hand closed around the air, and the Glock materialized in his grip, not on the table but in his hand, solid and cold and the weight of it real and absolute.
He set it down on the table, and the metal clicked against the wood.
A thin line of blood ran from his left nostril, and he wiped it with the back of his hand while the white-hot spike behind his eye became a blade turning slowly and grinding bone, his knees buckling as he caught the edge of the table, barely.
Rico was standing, and Jae-min didn't remember him standing up, one moment in the chair and the next at Jae-min's side with one hand on his elbow steadying him and the other pressing a napkin to his nose.
"Breathe." Rico commanded, an urgent anchoring voice carrying the steadiness of a combat medic who had held bleeding men together in the field. "Just breathe."
Jae-min breathed, and the spike receded, not gone but retreated, the blood slowing and his hands still trembling but his legs holding.
"Sit down. Now." Rico ordered, a firm grounding authority leaving no room for argument.
Jae-min sat, and Rico sat across from him with the glass of water between them again and the Glock 19 back on the table and a red smear on the napkin in Rico's hand, the unit humming while the city breathed outside at 36°C with twenty-six days remaining.
"Explain." Rico demanded, a low immovable intensity replacing every pretense of casualness, the focused need of a man who had just seen the impossible and had to understand it before it destroyed him.
"I died, Uncle." Jae-min began, a raw, devastating grief flattening his voice into something mechanical because the alternative was screaming. "Forty-three days into the freeze. Minus seventy degrees Celsius."
He stared at the table.
"The food ran out on day twelve. The water froze on day fifteen." Jae-min continued, his voice hollow and steady. "By day thirty, people were eating each other. By day forty, I was on the menu."
Rico's black eyes didn't blink.
"I was in the corridor outside this unit. Fourteenth floor." Jae-min pressed, the words coming out flat and surgical. "My neighbors, Mrs. Dela Cruz, a child from the tenth floor, a teenager, people I'd shared an elevator with a hundred times, they were eating me alive."
His hand went to his calf, unconsciously, where the fibula had been.
"My fibula shattered in someone's jaws. My wrist was ground to powder." Jae-min recalled, his voice cracking for the first time. "My ribs were cracked open, and my lung tissue was being torn out in mouthfuls. I was crawling toward Alessia."
Rico's jaw shifted, a micro-movement, the name landing.
"Next door. Unit 1419. She was being eaten too." Jae-min continued, a raw grief stripping the words bare. "We held hands while we died. Her fingers interlaced with what was left of mine. And the last thing I felt before my heart stopped was her thumb tracing a circle on my cheekbone."
His voice went quiet.
"Then something ripped open. A void. Black. Absolute." Jae-min finished. "And it pulled me through."
Rico's face didn't move, and his black eyes didn't blink, but something shifted behind them, a flicker that wasn't shock at the cannibalism or horror at the anatomical destruction but something else, something that landed on Alessia's name and stayed there.
"I came back." Jae-min continued, a hollow grinding certainty carrying the voice of a man reciting a timeline he had lived and died on. "I don't know how. I don't know why. I woke up in this unit, in this body, twenty-seven days before the freeze. Twenty-six now."
He met Rico's eyes.
"Everything I'm doing, the money, the food, the weapons, it's not insanity." Jae-min declared, his voice hardening. "It's preparation. I've already lived through the apocalypse once. I know what's coming. I know who survives. I know who doesn't. And I know that in twenty-six days, the temperature is going to drop to minus seventy and this city is going to turn into a mass grave."
Silence filled the unit while the AC hummed and the city breathed and the void pulsed.
"Your mother. Your father. The flight." Rico pieced together, a low, grinding realization, clicking the parts together like a bolt sliding home.
"KE627, Incheon to Manila. Crashes into the Alishan Mountains. No survivors." Jae-min confirmed, a raw, cracking grief splintering the words at the edges. "I called them last night. They don't believe me. Mom thinks I'm having a breakdown. Dad said I love you like a man saying goodbye."
His voice dropped.
"Ji-yoo believes me. She's coming in five days." Jae-min added, quiet.
Rico's jaw clenched, and a tendon stood out in his neck, taut as a bowstring while his black eyes went distant, the way eyes go when they're looking at something that isn't in the room, something far away and hurting.
"Hermano." Rico whispered, a raw, broken grief carrying the single word with the weight of a brother's entire life.
Jae-min's father.
The man who followed Rico into the military and served beside and protected and argued with and loved with the fierce unspoken love of brothers who had survived the same father and the same war.
"He's going to die on that plane." Rico trembled, his composure cracking like ice under pressure while the soldier fell away and the brother broke through. "My brother. The head of the Del Rosario family. He's going to die on a mountain, and I'm supposed to, what? Sit here? Do nothing?"
"That's why I'm telling you." Jae-min urged, a fierce burning desperation carrying the weight of a man who had already failed once and refused to fail again. "That's why I showed you the void. That's why I forged your name, took the money, and didn't ask permission. Because I don't have time to convince people with words. I only have time to show them the truth and hope they believe their eyes."
Rico stood up and turned away with his hand going to his face to cover his eyes, his shoulders shaking once, and twice before stopping, the soldier reassembling himself piece by piece and breath by breath.
When he turned back, his eyes were red-rimmed but dry, and his voice was steady.
"I'm in." Rico declared, a low, devastating certainty spoken with the gravity of a man signing his life over to something he couldn't fully understand but had already decided to follow.
The words landed like a hammer on an anvil, not loud and not dramatic but final, the kind of final that doesn't need a second statement.
"Uncle." Jae-min breathed, a raw trembling gratitude reaching for the word.
"Don't." Rico cut in, a fierce, unbreakable resolve burning the Del Rosario conviction white-hot in every syllable. "Don't thank me. I'm not doing this because I believe in time travel, or the void or any of it. I'm doing this because you're my nephew. Because my brother is getting on a plane that you say is going to crash."
He pointed at the floor.
"And because for thirty years I swore an oath to protect this country and everyone in it." Rico continued, his voice hardening like steel. "And right now the threat isn't coming from Mindanao or the South China Sea. It's coming from the sky. And I'll be damned if I sit this one out."
He sat back down, pulled out his phone, and started scrolling through contacts with the practiced efficiency of a man who had spent decades building networks.
"I have contacts." Rico strategized, a sharp tactical efficiency activating his supply chain. "Villamor Air Base, a quartermaster who owes me from the Mindanao campaigns. He can get military-grade hardware. Camp Aquino, two ex-military private security operators. Reliable. Discreet. They don't ask questions as long as the money's clean."
He looked up from the phone.
"There's also a man in Makati. Runs a gun range. Ex-Marine." Rico added, his voice dropping. "He procures things."
"The gun range. Set up a meeting. Tomorrow." Jae-min ordered, a cold strategic command carrying the weight of a man who had already written the shopping list in his head. "I need hardware. Military grade. No paperwork."
"Two PM. Makati. I'll text you the address." Rico confirmed, a decisive efficiency locking the operation in place.
"Blackbird Fine Dining." Jae-min continued, a flat grinding logistics running through the supply manifest. "The loan I took under your name, I used it to buy food. Long-term storage. Six hundred and twelve meals picked up yesterday. Two hundred already stored in the unit. Eight hundred and twelve total. I need more. A lot more."
"Eight hundred meals." Rico calculated, a sharp assessment running the numbers. "For how many people?"
"Right now? Just me. But not for long." Jae-min answered, his voice flattening. "The freeze doesn't just kill with cold. It kills with hunger. The food runs out in the first two weeks. After that, people start eating each other."
He met Rico's eyes.
"I've seen it." Jae-min stated, hollow. "I've been the thing they eat."
Rico's face went still, and a muscle in his jaw twitched while the red rim around his eyes came back, but he didn't look away, holding Jae-min's gaze like a man holding a live wire and refusing to let go because letting go meant admitting the current was real.
"You're not going to be the thing anyone eats." Rico vowed, a fierce protective conviction drawing a line that would cost him everything to hold. "Not while I'm breathing."
Jae-min's nose bled again, a thin dark line running from his left nostril to his upper lip, and he wiped it with a hand that was shaking, not the micro-tremor from before but a full visible tremor running from his fingers to his wrist.
"The void. It's hurting you." Rico diagnosed, a sharp, observant concern recognizing the symptoms of a field medic.
"Every time I use it." Jae-min admitted, a raw, honest assessment with no bravado and no hiding. "The bigger the object, the worse the toll. Two objects in ten minutes is my limit right now. Any more and I black out. Maybe worse."
"Then you don't use it unless you have to." Rico commanded, a firm instruction carrying the colonel's voice through the uncle's warmth. "No demonstrations. No party tricks. It's a weapon. You don't fire a weapon unless you're prepared to deal with the recoil."
'He's right.' Jae-min acknowledged, a cold strategic acceptance filing the lesson away as he pressed his fingers to his temple. 'Every time I use it, something gets taken from me. I can't afford to use it recklessly. Not when the real fight hasn't started.'
— • • • —
Rico left at 7:30 AM, and the unit was quiet again.
Jae-min stood at the window and watched his uncle's sedan pull out of the parking structure and merge into the early-morning traffic on Macapagal Boulevard while the city was already awake and moving, jeepneys and motorcycles and delivery trucks forming the unkillable bloodstream of Manila pumping through arteries of concrete and exhaust.
He turned away from the window and showered and dressed, the water hot against his skin and the closest thing to comfort he'd felt in two days, standing under it until it turned cold.
8:15 AM. He left the building and the heat hit him like a wall, 36°C and climbing with the sun a white disc punching through the haze, and the streets shimmering.
His phone buzzed, and he checked it while walking.
[Kiara Valdez]: I saw you leave your unit this morning. Where are you going? - K
'She's watching.' Jae-min calculated, a cold tactical precision processing the variables as he pocketed the phone without replying. 'Twelfth floor. Two floors below me. Close enough to watch the entrance. I can't tell her anything yet.'
A black sedan was parked across the street with tinted windows and the engine idling, and he didn't need to see through the glass to know who was inside because he could feel her the same way he could feel the void, a presence at the edge of his awareness, cold and patient and absolutely still.
'Jennifer.' Jae-min assessed, a cold strategic evaluation filing the observation as he walked past the sedan without looking. 'Same floor. Unit 1407. In the first life she didn't matter until it was too late.'
The tinted windows reflected nothing but the morning sun.
— • • • —
9:00 AM.
Blackbird Fine Dining.
The loading dock at the back.
A refrigerated truck waited with the engine running and the driver leaning against the fender smoking a cigarette, and three days after Jae-min had walked into this restaurant and bought every meal they could prepare, he was picking up the second batch.
612 meals, vacuum-sealed and frozen and packed into insulated crates, loaded into the GT-R's trunk and back seat while the pearl white paint gleamed under the loading dock lights, absurd and beautiful against the rust-stained concrete and the smell of diesel.
'Eight hundred and twelve total. Enough for one person for eight months. Enough for a family of four for two.' Jae-min tallied, a cold grinding logistics running the arithmetic of survival on autopilot as he closed the trunk. 'Not enough. Never enough. But it's more than I had in the first life.'
— • • • —
11:30 AM.
Unit 1418.
He locked the door behind him and carried the crates to the storage room and stacked them with the others, the cold air from the AC hitting the frozen meals and fogging while the unit smelled like vacuum-sealed plastic and recycled air.
He walked back to the living room and stopped.
The floor was glowing.
A blue grid, faint and pulsing, projected onto the hardwood from below or from within, lines of light forming a geometric pattern like a topographic map of the building and its surroundings radiating outward from Unit 1418 in concentric rings.
The void's perception, his perception, a system he hadn't asked for and didn't understand and couldn't turn off.
Two red dots on the grid, moving slowly, outside the building near the entrance, not in the parking structure and not in the lobby but at street level, close enough to see the door and close enough to watch.
'Two people. Not Jennifer, she's in the sedan and she doesn't move on foot.' Jae-min realized, a cold sharpening alarm tightening his chest as the red dots shifted one degree. 'Something's already changed.'
The red dots moved slow and deliberate, circling the building without approaching and without retreating, patrolling.
'They're not here for the building.' Jae-min determined, a cold grinding certainty settling into his bones. 'They're here for me.'
He crossed the room and opened the nightstand drawer and the Glock 19 was already in his hand before his conscious mind caught up, the weight familiar and the grip warm while the void pulsed in his chest and the blue grid on the floor pulsed with it, the red dots shifting one degree then another like predators adjusting their angle.
He stood in the dark of Unit 1418 with the Glock in his right hand and the void humming in his chest and two red dots moving on the floor like blood on a radar screen.
Outside, Manila breathed its 36°C breath and twenty-six days bled off the clock, and somewhere on a street corner two people who shouldn't exist were circling his building.
Tomorrow the gun range.
Tomorrow the armory.
But tonight, the red dots and the void and the Glock and the silence of a man who knew that the war hadn't started yet but the enemy was already at the door.