“Don’t look. It was us or them.” Stone pushed her ahead of him, forcing her look away. His touch on her shoulder vanished momentarily, and she saw him stoop and scoop up a dropped pistol, and then again, and then he was behind her, propelling her, running with her.
She heard sobs break from her chest, slip through her lips. She clacked her teeth together, silencing herself.
A playground, railings and tube slides and empty benches, waving treetops all around them, soughing in the wind. It was still misting, not quite rain, but everything gleamed slickly wet. Sirens howled, the sirens of authority always too far behind. Shouts, a gunshot.
Wren ran on autopilot, guided by Stone’s hand on her shoulder, turning her this way and that. Lungs and legs burned, but she ran on. Ribs protested, ached, but she ran on. They came to the other side of the circular park, traffic a thick white-light ribbon in the wet midnight darkness.
Another ribbon of cars, now the red of receding tail lights.
“I think that’s Quezon Avenue,” Stone said, more to himself than to Wren. “I think that’ll take us toward the Embassy.”
“Why can’t we just take a taxi?” Wren asked, wondering if it was a stupid question.
Stone hauled her through the traffic, following close behind a man on a bike who seemed entirely unafraid of the rushing cars and trucks. “Same reason we can’t go to a hospital or the police: because those places are too public and Cervantes has informants everywhere. Bus drivers don’t ever really see their passengers, while taxi drivers will. And Cervantes might have enough manpower to question taxi drivers, but not to canvass everyone who rode on a bus.” A bus nosed around the traffic circle and onto Quezon Avenue, stopping a few hundred feet away from Stone and Wren. “Get on that bus!” Stone urged.
Wren ran, pushing her exhausted body as fast as she could go. She stumbled, felt herself lifted onto the bus and then into a seat next to Stone, who was panting, pressing a palm to his side.
“Rest for a minute, baby,” he muttered into Wren’s ear. “We’re safe for the moment.”
She shut her eyes and rested her head on his shoulder. Would they ever be able to stop running? Hard lumps at his waistband prodded at her hip—his confiscated pistols. He tucked her hair behind her ear with his thumb. Sounds faded to a blur, and Stone’s arm around her shoulders was a comforting weight, enough reassurance to let her slip under.
15
Stone didn’t dare close his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he would sleep too, and that would get them killed. He had to be alert. He had to watch. No one on the packed bus seemed suspicious, but you never knew. He scanned each face around him, watched the cityscape pass through the window, tried to plan, to distract himself from the heavy weight of exhaustion.
The exhaustion itself was a distraction, though. It kept him from seeing the faces of the men he’d killed.
He blinked, clearing the blur, fighting the sliding, aching, scratchy burn of his eyelids. To keep himself awake, he thought of Wren, of her dark, soft skin pressed against his. Her sighs and moans in his ear, her fingers on his chest as she rode him to mutual climax.
He shifted in his seat and glanced at her. She seemed so innocent, asleep beside him, rocking as the bus jounced, head lolling against his shoulder.
The bus seemed to get darker, quieter. He blinked hard, rubbed his eyes, pinched himself, but the weight was too much.
Starts and stops filtered through his awareness, but couldn’t penetrate. He felt a strange desperation inside his chest, the swelling of complete unconsciousness rising up. He fought it.
“Banawe stop!” The voice of the driver, muddy and accented and distant.
Time and silence; Stone clawed at the sleep dragging him down. He heard Wren moan beside him.
More time; more silence.
“Cruz! Vicente Cruz stop!”
He managed to get his eyes open, briefly. An old man sat across from him, staring. The old man nodded, but Stone felt his eyelids falling, fought and lost once more.
Danger. The feeling, the instinct flitted through him, churned in his gut.
The bus stopped yet again. “Quiapo! Quiapo stop!”
Sound altered. The noise of the road, the rumble of tires over concrete became a strange hum, layered over something wide and deep and significant. Stone strained for awareness. He had to wake up. He had to wake up. The dim interior lights of the bus blurred, focused, and he twisted awkwardly to look out the window behind him. He saw moonglow filtering through black clouds, refracting and glinting off of water; rods and rails and crossbars and wires: Quezon Bridge, then, going over the Pasig River.
Close, now.
He shook his head to clear the sleep away, a vain gesture, and the old man across from him only watched, then cut his eyes to the side. Stone followed the old man’s gaze to a teenaged boy in rain-soaked cutoff shorts, a clinging yellow tank top and tattered high-top shoes, who was tapping at a cell phone he shouldn’t have been able to afford. The boy’s eyes shifted from his phone to Stone, and then immediately away.
Danger. The instinct was focused on that boy. Skinny arms and legs, clumsily buzzed hair, dirty clothes, rotting teeth, and a too-new piece of technology.
Stone’s brain was sludgy, connecting the dots only with effort.
“Lawton! Lawton stop!” No one moved as the doors whooshed open noisily.
Stone lurched to his feet, bent and lifted Wren in his arms. She moaned, , twitched in his arms. Stone tripped over someone’s foot, caught himself before he dropped Wren, who was shaking her head and whimpering, caught in a dream or a memory. Solid ground underfoot, and away from the bus, away from the boy with cell phone. The bus stop had a bench, and Stone slumped onto the wet seat.
“Wake up, Wren. You gotta wake up.” He shook her gently. “C’mon baby. Wake up for me.”
She murmured, mumbled. “No…no. ‘Member, gotta…no—no more…”
He kissed her lips softly, touched her cheek. “Wren, wake up sweetheart. It’s Stone. You’re with me, babe. Wake up, okay?”
Her eyelids fluttered. “Stone?”
“We gotta move. I think someone snitched on us.”
“Huh?” She wiggled, stretched, accidentally elbowed Stone in the injured side. He gasped in agony, bending over and stifling curses of pain. “Oh my god! I’m so sorry!” She slid off his lap and onto the bench next to him, hovering anxiously.
He waved her off, wincing as he straightened. “It was an accident. It’s fine. We gotta go, though. We gotta move. Someone saw us and reported us to Cervantes.”
“Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “Am I one hundred percent positive that’s what he was doing? No. But I can’t afford to be wrong.”
Another bus came, heading south, and he tugged her to her feet, fishing the fare from his pocket of Filipino currency. The bus stopped, and they got on, riding it to the Ayala Avenue stop, then getting off again and crossing the street into Rizal Park. Another lighted fountain played with spumes of red and blue and green and purple water, dancing to the rhythm of a song Stone didn’t recognize. The fountain was distant, but loud and highly visible even through the trees and buildings in the way. Wren was stumbling beside him, trying to run but not quite able.
Some internal drive was pushing him. There wasn’t any pursuit that he could see, but he felt the need to run anyway. He hauled Wren into a jog.
“Why are we running? Is there someone behind us?” She twisted to look behind.
“We’re close to the embassy, I think,” Stone said. “I have a bad feeling. We need to move.”
Wren didn’t argue, just shook her arm free of his hold and moved under her own power. They jogged side by side through the park, cutting through the circular area surrounding the Sentinel of Freedom monument, then crossing a street before finally reaching the central lagoon with the dancing fountain. The park was well-lit by globular streetlights, and it was packed with tourists and locals coming and going, taking photos and milling around the wide, grassy open space. Flagpoles lined the approach to the Rizal monument, the flags horizontal stripes bicolored red and blue with a triangular wedge of white near the hoist, the white marked by a golden sun: the flag of the Philippines.