The invoice sat on the rickety plywood table, a single sheet of cream-colored cardstock that weighed more than the building itself.
For the first twenty-four hours, Yanna treated it like a radioactive isotope. She didn't touch it. She barely breathed in its direction. She lay on her thin mattress, staring at the water stains on the ceiling, feeling the object's presence radiating from the table. It was a black hole, sitting there in the humid silence of her room, bending the light and gravity of her life toward its crushing center.
₱850,000.00.
The number wasn't money. Money was a crumpled twenty-peso bill for a jeepney ride; money was the jingle of coins for a kilo of rice. This was something else. This was time. This was blood. This was a calculation of a human life, and the invoice was telling Yanna that hers was already forfeit.
On the second night, her phone buzzed.
It vibrated against the bedside table, a harsh, insectile sound in the dark. The screen lit up, casting a sickly blue glow across the peeling paint of the walls.
Nanay calling.
Yanna stared at the name. Her hand twitched, a phantom reflex to answer, to perform the role of the dutiful daughter, to put on the bright, lying voice she wore like armor. I'm fine, 'Nay. Eating well. Studying hard.
But she couldn't do it.
The lie had turned to ash in her throat. How could she speak to the woman who was praying for her success, when Yanna held the death warrant of their future in her room? To answer would be to contaminate her mother with this ruin.
So she watched. She watched the name flash. She watched the phone vibrate, dancing slowly toward the edge of the table. She listened to the cheerful, tinny ringtone—a pop song from three summers ago—until it choked off into silence.
The screen went dark. The silence that followed was heavier than any scream. It was a physical weight, pressing Yanna down into the mattress, pressing the air from her lungs. She curled onto her side, pulling her knees to her chest, and for the first time in years, she didn't pray. She just waited for the roof to cave in.
On the third day, the dread drove her out.
The internet café was two blocks away, a glass-fronted box sandwiched between a vulcanizing shop and a bakery. It smelled of stale compelling sweat, burnt coffee, and the ozone tang of overheated electronics.
Yanna paid for an hour with a handful of coins that felt greasy in her palm. She sat at a terminal in the back, flanked by two teenage boys screaming profanities at a tactical shooter game. The noise was deafening, a chaotic wall of sound that usually comforted her. Today, it felt distant, as if she were underwater.
She didn't search for lawyers. She didn't search for "debt collection rights." She knew, with the fatalism of the poor, that the law was a language she couldn't speak and couldn't afford to learn.
Instead, she opened a spreadsheet.
The grid of empty white cells stared back at her like a field of unmarked graves. Yanna's fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling slightly, before she began to type.
Rate: ₱57.00 / hour.
Hours per week: 20.
Monthly Net: ₱4,560.
She stared at the number. It was pathetic. She added a hypothetical second job. She added a hypothetical post-graduation salary, assuming she even graduated, assuming she got hired immediately.
She typed in the principal amount: 850,000.
She created a formula. She divided the debt by her maximum potential savings.
The cursor blinked. The spreadsheet calculated.
Years to repayment: 42.5.
Yanna sat back, the cheap plastic chair digging into her spine. Forty-two years. If she didn't eat. If she didn't pay rent. If she didn't buy medicine for her sister. If she stopped existing as a human being and became nothing but a machine for generating currency, she would be free when she was sixty-four years old.
The boy next to her slammed his fist on the desk, shouting in triumph. "Headshot! Did you see that? Dead!"
Yanna looked at the screen. The number didn't change. It wasn't a debt. It was an ownership title. Camille Navarro didn't just want money. She had effectively purchased Yanna's entire timeline.
She made the call on the thirtieth day.
The voice on the other end was synthetic, clipped, and terrifyingly efficient. No questions asked. No invoice number needed. They had been waiting.
"Tomorrow. 10:00 AM. Navarro Tower, BGC."
"Yes," Yanna whispered.
"The Penthouse. Do not be late."
The transition from Quezon City to Bonifacio Global City was a journey between planets.
Yanna took two jeepneys and a bus. She stood pressed against the glass, watching the city change. The chaos of the slums, the tangled wires, the gray smog, and the shouting vendors slowly gave way to wide, tree-lined avenues and manicured silence. The air in BGC was different. It didn't smell of diesel and frying garlic; it smelled of nothing. It was filtered, sterile, moneyed air.
Yanna walked the last three blocks. She was wearing her best clothes—a white blouse that had been washed so many times it was almost translucent, and black slacks that were slightly too short. In QC, she looked respectable. Here, reflecting in the towering glass facades of the skyscrapers, she looked like a smudge of dirt on a pristine lens.
The Navarro Tower was not a building; it was a monolith. A shard of black glass tearing a hole in the sky.
Yanna pushed through the heavy revolving doors. The lobby was a cathedral of intimidation. The ceiling soared three stories high, supported by pillars of black marble. There was no seating area. No art. Just a vast, echoing expanse of polished stone that amplified the click-clack of her cheap shoes, announcing her poverty with every step.
The receptionist sat behind a slab of basalt that looked like an altar. She was beautiful in the way a scalpel is beautiful—sharp, cold, and silver.
"Yanna Rivera," Yanna said, her voice sounding thin and reedy in the cavernous space. "I have an appointment."
The woman didn't look up immediately. She finished typing a sentence, hit enter, and then slowly raised her eyes. She scanned Yanna from her frayed collar to her scuffed shoes. There was no sneer, no judgment. Just a complete lack of recognition, as if Yanna were a delivery drone.
"Private elevator. End of the hall."
Yanna walked. The elevator doors were seamless black metal. They slid open before she touched them.
Inside, there were no buttons. No floor numbers. No emergency call box. Just a panel of dark wood and a soft, ambient hum. The doors sealed shut, cutting off the lobby. Yanna felt the floor lurch beneath her. The ascent was silent and terrifyingly fast. Her ears popped. She was being lifted out of the world she knew, pulled up into the stratosphere, sealed in a luxurious coffin.
She gripped the handrail, her knuckles white. She thought of the bruise on her wrist, now faded to a sickly yellow. She pressed her thumb into it, hard, needing the spike of pain to tether her to reality.
The doors opened directly into the apartment.
There was no hallway. One moment, she was in the box; the next, she was standing in an expanse of white and gray that seemed to stretch for miles.
The penthouse was less a home and more a gallery of emptiness. The floors were poured concrete, polished to a mirror shine. The walls were stark white. The entire far wall, perhaps fifty feet long, was a single sheet of glass overlooking the sprawl of Manila. From this height, the city's chaos was reduced to a silent, twinkling circuit board. The poverty, the noise, the heat—it was all abstract from up here.
"Ms. Rivera."
Yanna jumped. An assistant—not the receptionist, but someone even more severe—stood by a minimalist desk.
"Ms. Navarro will see you now. Wait there."
The assistant gestured to the center of the room and then vanished down a corridor, her footsteps making no sound.
Yanna stood alone. The silence was absolute. It pressed against her ears, a heavy, suffocating blanket. It was the silence of a vacuum. She felt conscious of her own biology—the erratic thumping of her heart, the shallow rasp of her breath, the dampness of her palms. She felt like a biological contaminant in a sterile lab.
Then, she heard it.
Huh.
A sound. Rhythmic. Wet. Physical.
It was a sharp exhale, followed by a soft, metallic creak. It was coming from behind a freestanding structural pillar near the window wall.
Yanna knew she should stay still. She should stand like a good statue and wait to be addressed. But the sound was visceral, a heartbeat in the dead room. It pulled at her.
She took a step. Then another. She moved around the pillar.
The air shifted. The sterile, filtered scent of the penthouse was suddenly cut with something sharp, metallic, and undeniably human.
Sweat.
Fresh, hot sweat.
Camille Navarro was hanging from a steel pull-up bar mounted directly into the concrete ceiling.
She wasn't wearing the silk suit. She wasn't wearing the armor of the heiress. She was wearing black compression shorts and a black sports bra that looked painted onto her skin.
Yanna froze, her breath catching in a painful hitch.
Camille's back was to her. It was a landscape of terrifying anatomical perfection. She hung for a moment at the bottom of the movement, her arms fully extended, the intricate, serpentine tattoos on her skin dormant.
Then, she moved.
It wasn't a struggle. It was a hydraulic actuation.
The muscles of her back—the latissimus dorsi—flared outward like the hood of a cobra. The trapezius bunched into hard, diamond-shaped knots of power. The rhomboids shifted and slid beneath the skin like tectonic plates. Yanna watched, mesmerized, as the dark ink of the dragon tattoo on Camille's ribs writhed and stretched, the beast seemingly breathing with her.
Camille pulled herself up, chin clearing the bar with a terrifying, controlled slowness. She held the position. A drop of sweat traced a line down her spine, glistening in the harsh recessed lighting. The veins in her forearms roped and bulged against the strain.
She lowered herself. One.
She pulled again. Two.
The sound of her breathing was the only thing in the world. Hhhuuh. Hhhuuh.
Yanna couldn't look away. This was violence controlled. This was power stripped of its social currency and reduced to its rawest, most biological form. It was terrifying. It was hypnotic. In the gallery, Camille had been a statue of wealth. Here, she was an engine.
Camille finished the set. She didn't drop; she lowered herself until her toes touched the floor, then released the bar with a wet slap of skin against metal.
She turned.
She was glistening. Her chest heaved with deep, rhythmic breaths. Her skin was flushed, a sheen of perspiration coating her collarbones and the deep valley between her abdominal muscles. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, strands sticking to her wet neck.
She saw Yanna.
She didn't startle. She didn't cover herself. She simply walked over to a leather bench, picked up a black towel, and wiped her face. The movement was slow, deliberate. She wiped her neck, her chest, her eyes never leaving Yanna.
The smell of her—hot, copper, musk—drifted across the gap between them, assaulting Yanna's senses, overriding the sterile chill of the room. It was the smell of a predator that had just finished a hunt.
Camille tossed the towel aside. She walked toward Yanna, closing the distance until she was just out of reach. She looked Yanna up and down, taking in the cheap blouse, the scuffed shoes, the trembling hands.
A faint, cold smile touched her lips. It wasn't mocking. It was clinical.
"You're shaking," Camille observed, her voice low, still rough from the exertion.
She took a step closer, invading Yanna's personal space, radiating heat like a furnace.
"Is that fear?" Camille asked softly, tilting her head. "Or is it just the realization that you've finally walked into the only room in Manila where your poverty doesn't matter... because you have nothing left to lose?