Garlic didn't season; it assaulted, roasted, and sizzled in hot oil while exhaust fumes from a rusted jeepney mixed with the sharp acidic tang of open sewers baking under 37°C heat.
Diesel and coconut oil and the sour-sting of a thousand sweating bodies compressed into a single wall of scent that clung to the skin like a second hide, Manila breathing loud and suffocating and alive.
Jae-min stood on the sidewalk outside Shore Residence 3 with the sun hammering the asphalt and blurring the air into rippling waves, sweat tracing down his spine the second he stepped out of the lobby.
He closed his eyes and let it bake his skin and let it seep into his pores, a deliberate grinding gratitude for warmth that wouldn't last.
'Twenty-one days.' Jae-min counted, a cold anchoring dread settling over him as he opened his eyes.
The world was too bright and too loud, a street vendor hacking a coconut with a machete and kids in flip-flops playing basketball in the narrow alley across the street and a stray dog panting under a rusted tricycle.
'In three weeks, that dog will be a block of ice. Those kids will shatter like glass.' Jae-min recalled, a clinical surgical memory of the dead world surfacing behind his eyes. 'The jeepney will be a frozen tomb on EDSA, buried under ten meters of snow dense as concrete.'
"Oppa." Ji-yoo called, stepping out of the lobby behind him.
She wore a white tank top and denim shorts with her black hair tied in a messy bun and loose strands sticking to the sweat on her neck, dark circles under her eyes that she hadn't slept off yet.
She looped her arm through his and pressed her shoulder into his bicep with her hip bumping against his side, automatic and clinging with a fierce territorial closeness.
"You're staring." Ji-yoo observed, tilting her head up at him.
"I'm memorizing." Jae-min whispered, quiet.
Ji-yoo looked at the street and the vendor and the kids and the dog with a slow assessing sweep.
"It looks the same." Ji-yoo noted, scanning the street.
"It won't." Jae-min breathed, the certainty in his voice like a death sentence.
They walked with no destination, just movement, the sidewalk crowded with workers in hard hats, and women carrying umbrellas against the sun and a man pushing a cart of bottled water.
Jae-min brushed past them all with a cold, methodical detachment, every face a ghost.
"Where are we going?" Ji-yoo asked, her fingers tightening on his arm.
"Hardware store." Jae-min answered, already walking.
"We have contractors for that." Ji-yoo pointed out, falling into step.
"I need specific things. Things I can't put on a receipt." Jae-min murmured, his voice lowering as they turned onto a side street.
Narrower and darker with the buildings leaning close and blocking out the sky, the smell of diesel and damp concrete replacing the garlic.
Ji-yoo's shoulder brushed against a man passing in the opposite direction, and she mumbled an apology, but the man didn't look up and just kept walking.
Jae-min noticed the man's hands, shaking and trembling, not from cold but from hunger. The man's collarbones jutted out sharply against his dirty shirt, his ribs were visible through the fabric, and his skin had a grayish waxy sheen.
'He's starving.' Jae-min recognized, a grim knowing certainty settling over him as the memory surfaced unbidden.
— FLASHBACK —
Day 15.
The hallway of Shore Residence.
A neighbor biting into another man's neck because he hadn't eaten in a week.
The blood was black, frozen the moment it hit the air, crystallizing into dark red snow that crunched underfoot.
The victim's eyes were wide and glassy and already frosting over, his mouth still moving and still screaming but the sound fading as the cold stole the vibration from his vocal cords before the words could form.
— FLASHBACK END —
Jae-min looked away and swallowed the bile with a rigid, controlled revulsion.
"Oppa?" Ji-yoo pressed, her grip on his arm tightening with concern edging her voice.
"I'm fine." Jae-min replied, but the words came out rougher than intended, with his jaw tight.
— • • • —
The hardware store was a cramped shop with rusted corrugated doors and a labyrinth of steel, wire, and dust inside, 35°C with the air thick and metallic, coating the back of Jae-min's throat.
He moved through the aisles with the precision of a logistics manager in his natural habitat, a methodical surgical focus guiding each selection.
"Two rolls of quarter-inch steel cable. Fifty meters each." Jae-min listed, not looking up from the shelf.
"Heavy stuff. What you building?" the owner asked, squinting at him, a fat man in a stained white shirt looking up from a tiny TV.
"A jungle gym." Jae-min drawled, deadpan.
The man grunted and waddled to the back with a dismissive, unbothered shuffle.
Jae-min moved to the next aisle and grabbed duct tape, zip ties, and industrial adhesive, stuffing handfuls into a plastic basket with a rapid mechanical procurement.
Ji-yoo followed in silence and watched with her dark eyes tracking his every move.
"Oppa." Ji-yoo called, tugging his sleeve.
"Yeah?" Jae-min glanced down.
"The man outside. The skinny one." Ji-yoo continued, her voice dropping. "He looked like the people in your face when you look at them."
"What about them?" Jae-min asked, his guard rising.
"You look at them like they're already dead." Ji-yoo whispered, her voice quiet and steady.
Jae-min stopped and looked at her with a sharp caught-off-guard stillness.
"I thought you said you couldn't see my memories." Jae-min declared, caught off-guard.
"I can't. But I see your face." Ji-yoo replied, her dark eyes meeting his. "You look at them like they're already dead."
Jae-min picked up a heavy-duty hacksaw and tested the weight in his hand, cold and solid and real.
"I'm not mourning them." Jae-min breathed, finally. "I'm preparing them for what's coming. In my head, I'm already digging their graves."
Ji-yoo didn't respond, just picked up a box of heavy-duty nails and added it to the basket with a quiet, deliberate solidarity.
They paid in cash, ten thousand pesos, and the owner didn't ask questions but just took the money and turned back to his TV.
— • • • —
They walked three blocks to a large supermarket, the automatic doors slid open, and a blast of artificial cold hit them, 20°C maybe 18°C.
Jae-min froze with a rigid, paralyzing recoil as the cold air from the AC vents brushed his face.
'By Day 3, the temperature outside had dropped to minus twenty.' Jae-min recalled, a cold visceral memory gripping his chest. 'I crawled into the freezer section of a ransacked grocery store just to feel a fraction of warmth.'
"Oppa?" Ji-yoo cut in, her hand squeezing his arm.
He blinked, and the supermarket came back into focus, fluorescent lights and muzak playing softly and a stock boy stacking cereal boxes.
"I'm fine." Jae-min rasped, taking a breath and steadying himself and meeting her eyes with a small deliberate effort to ground himself in the present.
He moved fast and didn't use a cart but used the void, walking down the aisles and touching a box of salt that vanished into the black rift behind his ribs, then a bottle of iodine that vanished, then a crate of instant coffee that vanished.
Bag after bag and box after box, each touch leaving a faint inky ripple in the air that dissolved before anyone could see it.
Ji-yoo walked beside him, carrying a hand basket and loaded it with the physical items they needed to use now, peanut butter and crackers and bottled water, things that wouldn't raise suspicions from the bunker contractors.
She didn't comment on the vanishing items, just walked beside him with her shoulder pressed against his arm.
They turned a corner, and Jae-min stopped.
End of the aisle.
Pharmacy section.
A woman stood there with indigo hair pulled into a loose ponytail that fell past her waist and caught the fluorescent light with a deep violet sheen, blue eyes focused on a bottle of painkillers.
She wore a simple white blouse and black slacks with a stethoscope hanging around her neck like a second spine.
Dr. Alessia Romano Santos, with dark circles under her blue eyes, her shoulders back and her spine aligned, straight-backed despite the exhaustion carved into the angles of her face.
Jae-min's chest tightened with a profound suffocating compression.
'Seven days since I last saw her.' Jae-min realized, a bitter, suffocating grief rising in his throat as he stared at her from three aisles away. 'She opened her door and found me standing in the hallway at six in the morning like a man who had just returned from war.'
The memory hit him like a wave he couldn't stop.
— FLASHBACK —
The hallway conversations at 11 PM.
Alessia's back against the opposite wall, two meters of cold tile between them.
The sinigang Alessia left at his door, Mondays, Wednesdays, sometimes just cut mangoes with no note.
The night Kiara left, when Alessia sat outside his door for twenty minutes without saying a word, then slipped away.
The sticky note on the lid of the sinigang container. You're not too much. Three words. Blue ink. Neat doctor handwriting.
The night Alessia collapsed at his door at midnight, and Jae-min carried her to Unit 1419, and Alessia grabbed his wrist.
"Stay," Alessia whispered. And Jae-min stayed until dawn, and Alessia fell asleep with her fingers tracing through his hair.
The terrible pancakes he made her the next morning. She ate four. Her thumb on his wrist, checking his pulse.
"Your heart rate is elevated." Alessia murmured, a quiet clinical concern softening her voice.
"I know." Jae-min admitted, a raw vulnerability he couldn't hide.
The last conversation, two days before the freeze. Alessia's voice steady but her hands shaking, telling him about the seven-year-old who died on her table.
"Do you ever feel like you're waiting for something?" Alessia searched, a quiet aching hope softening her voice. "Like everything up to now has just been practice?"
"Yeah. Every day." Jae-min breathed, a bitter, honest weight carrying the words.
She smiled. Small. Sad. Real. He should have said the words then. He didn't. Two days later, the world froze.
And then, teeth. Hands. The neighbor from 1412 burying his face into Alessia's stomach.
His thumbs sinking into her eye sockets, popping them, thick gelatinous fluid running down her cheeks like black tears. The wet crunch of her skull cracking open like a boiled egg.
Alessia's hand finding Jae-min's in the freezing dark. Holding on. Even when there was nothing left to hold. Her broken fingers interlaced with his.
Her mangled lips moving. Her thumb tracing a slow circle against his cheekbone. One last touch of warmth.
— FLASHBACK END —
'I never said the words. And now she's three aisles away, alive, and I still can't say them.' Jae-min grieved, a bitter, suffocating weight crushing his chest.
"Oppa?" Ji-yoo noticed his pause and followed his gaze, her face lighting up.
"Ate Alessia!" Ji-yoo cried, explosive joy.
Jae-min flinched with a rigid involuntary recoil.
"Don't." Jae-min whispered, sharp.
But Ji-yoo was already moving fast with her sandals slapping against the linoleum as she practically sprinted down the aisle, throwing both arms around Alessia from behind with a fierce, explosive enthusiasm.
"Ate! I'm back from South Korea!" Ji-yoo cried, squeezing Alessia in a hug that was far too aggressive for a pharmacy aisle.
Alessia laughed with a startled warmth, turning in Ji-yoo's grip to return the hug with a gentleness that contrasted sharply with Ji-yoo's enthusiasm.
"Ji-yoo! I didn't know you were back!" Alessia beamed, her blue eyes softening. "When did you land?"
"Today! Like two hours ago!" Ji-yoo snapped, pulling back and still holding Alessia's hands and bouncing slightly on her heels. "I missed you. Did you miss me? Tell me you missed me."
"I missed you." Alessia confirmed, smiling with genuine affection.
"See?" Ji-yoo declared, turning to Jae-min and pointing at Alessia like she was presenting evidence. "She missed me. That's because I'm lovable. Unlike some people."
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min warned, gently.
"Oppa, stop being rude. Say hi to Ate Alessia." Ji-yoo commanded, waving him forward with her eyes flicking between Jae-min and Alessia with the sharp assessing gleam of a matchmaker who had been waiting for this exact moment.
Jae-min walked over with his face calm and the careful, rigid composure of a man holding too much behind his teeth.
"Dr. Santos." Jae-min murmured, formal, but his eyes lingered on her face a beat too long.
"Jae-min." Alessia murmured, tilting her head, with her blue eyes searching and assessing but warmer now. "Still calling me Dr. Santos? I've told you a hundred times to call me Alessia."
"Dr. Santos." Jae-min repeated, unchanged, but there was something almost apologetic in the way he held the word.
Alessia sighed, but the corner of her mouth twitched with a faint reluctant amusement.
"Oh, my God." Ji-yoo whispered, her voice dropping to a theatrical whisper. "You're doing the thing again."
"What thing?" Jae-min deflected.
"The thing where you pretend to be emotionally constipated whenever Ate Alessia is around." Ji-yoo snapped, folding her arms with her ponytail swishing.
"I'm/He's not pretending." Jae-min and Alessia murmured at the same time.
They looked at each other, and Alessia's blue eyes met Jae-min's black ones for a fraction of a second with something flickering there, small and warm and quickly buried before she looked away.
Ji-yoo caught it, of course she caught it, with a sharp, triumphant detection.
"I swear to God." Ji-yoo groaned, throwing her hands up. "You two are unbearable. You're both smart. You're both single. You're both obviously."
She made a vague frustrated gesture that encompassed the entire awkward space between them.
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min warned, but there was a faint warmth in it.
"What? I'm just saying." Ji-yoo grinned. "Ate Alessia, did you know oppa bought me samgyeopsal for a whole year because I helped him move into our building? He's secretly soft. He just pretends to be a robot."
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min hissed through gritted teeth.
"He also cried during that movie about the old man and the floating house." Ji-yoo continued, pulling out her phone. "The cartoon one. Full tears. I have pictures."
She was absolutely lying but committing to the bit with terrifying conviction.
"Ji-yoo, I will put you in the void." Jae-min threatened, utterly sincere.
"You can't. You love me." Ji-yoo snapped, pocketing her phone with a triumphant smirk.
Alessia laughed, a real laugh that was light and musical, the sound of warmth in a cold room.
The laugh hit Jae-min like a fist to the sternum.
'That laugh doesn't exist anymore. Not in the world I came from.' Jae-min ached, a devastating, suffocating grief gripping his chest as he watched her face.
"Jae-min." Alessia murmured, shifting the painkillers in her hand as her voice settled into something more serious. "I wanted to thank you. For the other morning. When you had that episode. You scared me, but you also woke me up. I was so exhausted I almost collapsed on the way to my car."
"You don't have to thank me for that." Jae-min shook his head slightly. "I should be the one apologizing. I scared you."
"You did scare me." Alessia confirmed, her voice firming. "You looked like you'd seen a ghost."
She tilted her head with those piercing blue eyes searching his face.
"Are you feeling better?" Alessia asked, quiet concern.
"Better." Jae-min answered. "Getting there."
"Good." Alessia said, then paused. "Are you sure? You look a little pale. And you're sweating. It's freezing in here."
"I run hot." Jae-min rasped, a faint attempt at lightness.
Alessia studied him for a moment longer then looked at Ji-yoo with a quiet weighted exchange.
"Take care of your brother, Ji-yoo." Alessia whispered, a gentle instruction.
"I always do." Ji-yoo whispered, her voice softer with the teasing dropping away. "He's just bad at taking care of himself. Always has been."
"I heard that." Jae-min noted, glancing at her with a raised eyebrow.
"You were meant to." Ji-yoo snapped, a grin in her voice.
Alessia tucked a strand of indigo hair behind her ear with a quiet self-conscious gesture.
"I should get going. Long shift tomorrow." Alessia said, gathering her bag with quiet regret.
"Wait." Jae-min said, the word escaping before he could stop it, sharp and almost desperate.
Alessia paused and looked at him with those blue eyes waiting.
"Yes?" Alessia asked, turning back.
Jae-min opened his mouth and closed it with a rigid suffocating paralysis.
'Tell her. Tell her to stock up on food. Tell her to buy blankets. Tell her the world is ending.' Jae-min urged, a desperate crushing need warring against reason. 'But I can't. Not here. Not now.'
"Please be careful." Jae-min said, the words coming out quieter than he intended and rough with concern he couldn't hide. "The streets are getting rough at night. I don't want anything happening to you."
Alessia blinked, surprised by the warning and by the raw earnestness behind it with something flickering in her blue eyes that wasn't suspicion but a quiet deliberate filing-away.
"Thank you, Jae-min. I will." Alessia said, a small smile warm but curious.
She turned to Ji-yoo and squeezed her shoulder with a gentle affectionate farewell.
"It's good to have you back, Ji-yoo." Alessia whispered.
"It's good to be back." Ji-yoo whispered, then dropping her voice to a stage whisper. "I'll come by your unit later this week, okay? We need to catch up. Properly."
Alessia smiled and nodded and walked away with a quiet measured departure.
Jae-min watched her go, the sway of her indigo hair and the curve of her shoulders and the rhythm of her steps measured and confident and alive.
Ji-yoo stepped up beside him and elbowed him hard in the ribs.
"'Please be careful. I don't want anything happening to you.' That's what you've got?" Ji-yoo mocked, mimicking his voice low and flat and deadpan. "That was the most pathetic thing I have ever heard come out of your mouth, and I once watched you try to flirt with a barista by ordering black coffee and staring at her for forty-five seconds."
"I wasn't flirting." Jae-min denied, stiff.
"You ordered five black coffees." Ji-yoo accused, the glee dripping.
"I was tired." Jae-min whispered, weak.
"You went back the next day." Ji-yoo pressed, then quieter and almost to herself. "She's pretty, oppa. Really pretty. Don't mess this up."
"Let's go." Jae-min rasped, turning toward the exit, but his ears had gone warm at her words.
"Oppa, you're so obvious it hurts." Ji-yoo continued, falling into step beside him with her arm relooping through his. "She's perfect for you. Pretty. Smart. Patient. She puts up with your weird stoic thing. God knows she's the only one who can."
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min whispered, a warning, but his voice had softened despite himself.
"I'm just saying." Ji-yoo grinned, but the grin was softer than usual and less predatory and almost gentle. "When the world doesn't end, I'm locking you two in a room until you figure it out."
"There is no room." Jae-min deflected.
"There's my room." Ji-yoo smirked.
"I will put you in the void." Jae-min threatened, the second time more desperate than threatening.
"You won't." Ji-yoo snapped, squeezing his arm with confident warm certainty. "You love me too much."
Jae-min didn't answer and just turned and walked toward the exit with his jaw tight and his eyes forward, but his ears were still warm with a stubborn unadmitted softening.
— • • • —
As he passed the large glass windows at the front of the store, he stopped, 37°C outside with the sun hammering the asphalt.
Across the street, a black SUV with tinted windows and the engine running, and sitting on a bench across from it pretending to read a newspaper was a man in a gray jacket.
He wasn't reading; the newspaper held at the wrong angle, too high and too stiff like a prop, his eyes fixed directly on the supermarket entrance, on Jae-min.
Jae-min's blood turned to ice, not the phantom cold of his memories but real cold, the cold of recognition, the cold of being hunted.
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min seethed, his voice dropping low and controlled.
"Yeah?" Ji-yoo responded, her voice shifting instantly with the teasing gone and replaced by the sharp alert edge of a fighter, her body shifting subtly with her weight dropping to her back foot and her center of gravity settling.
"Don't look. But there's a man outside. Gray jacket. Newspaper. Across the street." Jae-min murmured, barely above a breath.
Ji-yoo didn't turn her head and didn't flinch, her grip on his arm tightening just slightly as the only tell.
"I see him." Ji-yoo confirmed, her voice calm, too calm.
"He wasn't there when we walked in." Jae-min pressed, his jaw tight.
"I know." Ji-yoo snapped, her grip turning iron.
They stood in the frozen food aisle surrounded by ice cream and frozen pizzas with artificial cold blowing on their faces from the open freezer cases.
"Who is he?" Ji-yoo whispered.
"I don't know." Jae-min admitted, and for the first time in this life that answer terrified him.
"Is he one of Kiara's people?" Ji-yoo asked, a flicker of contempt.
"No. Kiara's people are amateurs." Jae-min declared, his eyes locked on the man through the glass. "This guy is different. Professionals don't hold newspapers wrong."
Jae-min stared at the man, and the man didn't move and didn't blink, just watched with eyes steady and patient and unhurried.
Then slowly the man lowered the newspaper and smiled, not a friendly smile and not even a human smile but the smile of a predator who knew its prey was cornered and was savoring the knowledge, slow and deliberate and utterly devoid of warmth.
The man folded the newspaper, stood up, walked away, and disappeared into the crowd without looking back.
Jae-min's hand trembled, not from fear but from rage.
'He smiled because he wanted me to see him.' Jae-min realized, a cold predatory awareness coiling in his chest. 'Someone is hunting me. And they're getting closer.'
He turned from the window with his face calm but his eyes not. "We're done here. Let's go." Jae-min ordered flat.
Ji-yoo matched his pace without a word, and her hand found his arm with her fingers digging in, not fear but fury, a fierce, lethal solidarity.
They walked out of the supermarket and into the heat and into the light and into a city that didn't know it had twenty-one days left.