Yuna's POV
The thing about living with Aunt Rosa was that her plans had a way of becoming everyone's plans whether you had been consulted or not.
Saturday morning.
I was still at the stage of being awake where being awake was more of a technical condition than an actual state of functioning.
I had my glass of water.
I was standing in the kitchen.
These were the only confirmed facts about my existence at that moment.
Then Aunt Rosa walked in wearing her good scarf — the bright yellow one she reserved for going out — and carrying her stack of reusable bags like she was suiting up for something, and I immediately understood that my Saturday was no longer my own.
"We're going to the market," she announced, setting the bags down on the counter with the decisive energy of someone for whom this had never been a question.
"Fresh air, fresh ingredients.
Good for the body."
I looked at my water glass.
"All of us?" I said.
"All of us," she confirmed, already checking the bags to make sure she had the right ones.
The tone of it was very clear.
All of us was not an invitation.
All of us was a statement of what was already happening, and the only remaining variable was how quickly I would accept it.
Before I could form any kind of response, Lily came barreling around the corner from the hallway with the specific morning energy she generated on weekends, when there was no school to channel it into and it had to go somewhere.
Her pigtails were slightly uneven the way they always were on days she'd done them herself.
"MARKET!" she announced, like she was reporting breaking news.
"Can I get fishballs?
Ate Yuna, do you like fishballs?
I like the ones with the orange sauce but Mama says the orange sauce is too spicy but it's not that spicy, she's just being dramatic—"
"Lily," Aunt Rosa said, with the patient tone of someone who had been managing this level of energy for years.
"Shoes first."
"SHOES FIRST!" Lily agreed, and reversed course back down the hallway at the same speed.
I looked at my water glass one more time.
Then I put it down and went to get my shoes.
The walk to the market took about fifteen minutes on a normal day, along streets that got gradually more awake the further you went — houses with their gates open and someone sweeping outside, vendors wheeling out their carts, tricycles cutting past in the particular noisy way that tricycles in the province operated, which was loudly and with complete confidence.
Aunt Rosa set the pace like she always did — purposeful, steady, already mentally composing her shopping list.
Lily did not keep pace so much as orbit the general concept of us, ranging ahead to look at something, falling back to ask a question, cutting across to point at a cat sitting on a wall, then rejoining us like she had never left.
I walked and let the morning settle over me, the kind of cool that only existed for an hour or two before the day warmed up properly.
The market came into earshot before it came into view — the layered noise of it, voices and wheels and the clatter of things being set up and moved around, vendors already in full swing even at this hour.
Then it came into view: rows of stalls and tables and improvised displays stretching in every direction, the air dense with the smell of fresh vegetables and raw fish and something frying somewhere nearby and the specific earthy sweetness of fruit piled in open crates.
Aunt Rosa moved into it without breaking stride, navigating the crowd with the ease of someone who had been doing this her whole life.
I fell in behind her, keeping the yellow scarf in my sightline.
Lily immediately got distracted by a display of colorful hair clips at the first stall we passed.
"Ate Yuna, look—"
"Keep moving, Lily," Aunt Rosa called back.
Lily looked at the hair clips for exactly three more seconds with the focus of someone conducting a serious evaluation, then ran to catch up.
For the first ten minutes, it was fine.
I had the yellow scarf.
The yellow scarf had me.
We were a unit.
Then we hit the section where the produce stalls were, which was also the section where apparently every person in San Esteban had decided to do their shopping at the same time this morning, and the crowd thickened considerably.
Aunt Rosa stopped to examine some tomatoes, exchanging a few words with the vendor in the shorthand of people who had been buying from each other for years.
I stopped behind her.
Someone moved past me on the left.
Then a whole group of people cut across from a side alley, heading in the opposite direction, and the crowd reshuffled like a deck of cards, and when it settled I was three feet to the right of where I had been and the yellow scarf was nowhere.
I looked left.
Fruit stand.
I looked right.
More fruit stand.
I looked ahead.
People.
A lot of people, none of them Aunt Rosa, none of them wearing a yellow scarf.
"Aunt Rosa?" I said, at a volume that was probably not loud enough given the ambient noise level.
No response.
"Lily?"
A child squealed somewhere to my left, but it was not Lily's specific squeal, so that didn't help.
I stood there for a second, running through my options.
Option one: stay exactly where I was and wait.
Option two: retrace my steps back to the tomato stall.
Option three: move forward and hope to spot them.
I chose option two, which would have been the smart choice if I had been paying attention to my steps on the way in.
I had not been paying attention to my steps on the way in.
I had been walking on autopilot, thinking about the Ryo job — specifically about whether the opening line I had jotted down the night before actually worked or just sounded like it worked — and my feet had simply followed Aunt Rosa's scarf without registering anything else.
So when I tried to retrace my steps, what I retraced was a vague impression of a direction rather than an actual route.
I ended up at a fish stall.
I was fairly certain we had not come past a fish stall.
I turned around, went a different way, passed a row of vegetables, then a dry goods section, then something that smelled like fried banana, then found myself at what I was becoming increasingly convinced was the same fruit stand I had started at, just from a different angle.
I pulled out my phone.
No signal.
Of course there was no signal.
I was in a covered market in the province and my phone was doing what my phone always did, which was to make itself completely useless at the exact moment I needed it.
I put it back in my pocket and tried to think clearly.
The market had an entrance.
The entrance was near the main road.
If I found the main road, I could find a fixed point.
This was a plan.
I started moving in the direction that felt most likely to lead toward the entrance, which took me past a section selling plastic containers, then one selling what appeared to be an entire stall dedicated to various types of rope, then one with a display of secondhand DVDs that caught my eye for a second before I remembered I was supposed to be doing something.
I had passed the same overpriced apple stand twice when I finally admitted to myself that I was going in a circle.
I stopped in the middle of the walkway.
A woman with a large basket sidestepped me with the practiced patience of someone used to navigating people who stopped suddenly in market traffic.
I stood there and accepted my situation.
I was lost in the market.
Not dangerously lost.
Not tragically lost.
But thoroughly, specifically, undeniably lost in a way that was going to take a while to get out of on my own.
I was just beginning to seriously consider the strategy of just standing still and waiting for Aunt Rosa to eventually notice I was gone — which could take a while given that she was probably deep in her shopping by now — when I heard footsteps slow down somewhere behind me.
And then a voice.
"You're lost again, aren't you."
Not a question.
The tone of someone making an observation they were confident about.
I turned around.
Kai was standing a few feet away, beside a stall selling dried goods, hands relaxed at his sides, looking at me with the same easy expression he always had — like nothing about this scene was particularly surprising to him, like finding me wandering in confused circles was simply a thing that happened sometimes and he was prepared to address it.
He looked exactly as he always did.
Messy dark hair, tan skin, the posture of someone who was completely at home in whatever space he happened to be in.
The market noise moved around him like he was a fixed point in it.
"I'm not lost," I said.
"You've been passing that apple stand on and off for the last fifteen minutes," he said.
I looked at the apple stand.
It was indeed the same one.
"I'm reorienting," I said.
He looked at me with the patience of someone allowing a person to finish saying something they both knew wasn't accurate.
"How long have you been reorienting," he said.
I thought about it.
"A while," I admitted.
He nodded, like this confirmed what he had already worked out.
"Aunt Rosa's probably at the vegetable section on the far side," he said.
"She always goes there last, works her way from the east entrance."
I stared at him.
"You know her shopping route."
"I've been to this market a few times," he said, which answered nothing and everything at the same time.
He tilted his head toward the far end of the market.
"Come on.
I'll take you."
I looked at the apple stand one more time.
Then I fell into step beside him.
Kai moved through the market the way he moved through everything — without fighting it, reading the flow of people and slipping through the gaps in it like he had been doing this his whole life, which he probably had.
I kept up, mostly, though I took a wrong step around a cart and had to correct course, which he noticed without saying anything about.
"You were thinking about something," he said, after a minute of walking.
"When you got separated."
It wasn't an accusation, just an observation.
"A work thing," I said.
"You think about work a lot."
"It's complicated work."
He glanced at me sideways but didn't push it, which was one of the things I had noticed about Kai — he asked just enough to show he was paying attention, and then he stopped, and he never made you feel like you owed him the rest of the answer.
We moved through the dry goods section, around a corner, past a stall selling something that smelled incredible and that I made a mental note to ask about later, and then the crowd thinned slightly and the walkway opened up and I could see the far end of the market ahead.
"So," I said, filling the quiet.
"Do you come here every Saturday?"
"Not every Saturday.
Enough to know it."
"You know everyone here," I said.
"Not everyone."
"You knew Aunt Rosa's shopping route."
"I know a lot of people's routines in this town," he said.
"It's not that big a place."
I thought about that for a second — about what it was like to know somewhere well enough that you knew where people went and when, that nothing about a place surprised you anymore.
I hadn't had that in a while.
Maybe ever.
"Must be nice," I said, not entirely sure what I meant by it.
Kai didn't answer right away.
Then, quietly:
"Yeah.
It is."
We came around the last row of stalls onto the main walkway that ran along the far side of the market, and I spotted the yellow scarf immediately.
Aunt Rosa was at the vegetable stall, exactly where Kai had said she'd be, deep in conversation with the vendor with the focused intensity of someone negotiating something important.
Lily was beside her, inspecting a bunch of kangkong with the thoughtful expression of a small person performing a quality check.
We were almost there — a few more stalls away, maybe thirty feet — when Kai slowed slightly.
I matched his pace automatically.
Then I saw why.
Coming down the center of the walkway toward us, unhurried, with the complete and total confidence of something that had never had reason to doubt its own importance, was a chicken.
Brown.
Medium-sized.
Chest puffed forward.
Walking with its head high and its feet placing themselves on the ground with deliberate authority, like each step was a decision.
The people in the walkway moved around it without slowing down, the way you moved around something you had long since accepted as a permanent fixture of the landscape.
I stopped walking.
Everything went very still for a second in my brain.
I knew that walk.
I had seen that walk before, on a dirt path on my very first day in this town, right before my life had turned into something resembling a slapstick disaster involving mud and a rice field and me sprinting through an unfamiliar neighborhood with this exact bird behind me.
"Kai," I said, very carefully.
"Is that the chicken."
Kai stopped beside me.
Looked at the chicken.
Looked back at me.
"Which chicken," he said, in the tone of someone who already knew exactly which chicken.
"You know which chicken," I said.
"The one from day one.
The one that chased me for three blocks through a neighborhood I had never been to before.
The one I am convinced made the deliberate decision to ruin my life."
Kai looked at the chicken again.
The chicken had stopped in the middle of the walkway and was now surveying the market around it with an expression that could only be described as proprietary — the specific look of something taking stock of what belongs to it.
"Ah," said Kai.
"You know it," I said.
"His name is Dodong," Kai said.
I turned to look at him.
He was completely serious.
"His name," I said.
"Is Dodong."
"Correct."
"The chicken that chased me across half of San Esteban on the day I arrived," I said, laying it out carefully, "has a name, and that name is Dodong."
"He's a local figure," Kai said, with the calm of someone explaining something self-evident.
"He's been doing his rounds on this street for years.
Market, main road, a few of the residential paths.
He has a route.
People know his schedule."
"He has a schedule," I said.
"He's the unofficial guardian of the market street," Kai said.
"Has been since he was young.
People around here respect him."
I looked at Dodong.
Dodong had resumed walking, his pace unhurried and absolute, the crowd parting around him without any negotiation required.
Someone off to the side pointed at him and said something to their companion in a tone that suggested delighted recognition.
Two kids watched him pass with enormous eyes.
"He has fans," Kai said, reading my expression.
"People come specifically to see him do his rounds.
There was a whole thing when he got a minor injury last year — people were asking about him for weeks."
"A whole thing," I said.
"You don't mess with Dodong," Kai said simply.
As if to punctuate this, Dodong stopped again in the middle of the walkway.
He turned his head slowly.
His small dark eyes moved across the market.
Then they landed on me.
I went completely still.
He held the look.
Steady.
Unblinking.
The look of something that remembered things and kept records.
Then, with the supreme unhurriedness of something that had made its point, he looked away, turned forward, and continued walking down the center of the market at exactly the same pace as before, like I had never been there at all.
I exhaled.
"He remembered me," I said.
"His memory is reportedly very good," Kai said, without a trace of reassurance.
"Was that supposed to make me feel better?" I asked.
"No," he said.
We watched Dodong disappear around the far end of the market walkway, chest still puffed, pace still deliberate, completely unbothered by the existence of anything around him.
I stood there for a second longer than necessary.
"I have been in this town for over a month," I said.
"I fell into a rice field on the first day.
A chicken chased me for three blocks.
I have gotten lost in my own school more times than I can count.
I survived a flying cockroach.
And I just now found out that the chicken — the specific chicken that traumatized me on arrival — is a named local legend with a daily route and a fan base and apparently a memory good enough to hold a grudge."
"Welcome to San Esteban," Kai said.
He said it exactly the same way he had said it the very first time, back on that first day, which told me he meant it the same way — not as a joke, not as a greeting, but as a genuine statement of fact.
This is what this place is.
This is how it works.
I looked at him for a second.
Then I started laughing.
Not the polite kind or the tired kind but the actual kind, the kind that came out without asking permission first.
Kai watched me with an expression that was somewhere between amused and fond, which I probably would have found mortifying if I hadn't been too busy losing it over a chicken named Dodong who had fans and a schedule and apparently recognized me from a month ago.
"Okay," I said, when I had gotten most of it out.
"Okay.
Fine.
This town is insane and I accept that."
"That's the spirit," Kai said.
We walked the last stretch to where Aunt Rosa was standing, and she looked up from her vegetable negotiations when she saw us coming.
"Yuna!
There you are.
I was wondering where you wandered off to."
"I got separated," I said.
"Kai found me."
She looked at him with that particular look she had, the one that contained equal parts gratitude and something I hadn't quite worked out yet.
"Thank you, Kai."
"No problem," he said.
Lily looked up from the kangkong she had been inspecting.
"Ate Yuna, Dodong was here!
Did you see Dodong?"
I looked at her.
"I saw Dodong," I said.
"He's amazing, right?" she said, with complete sincerity.
"He's something," I said.
To be continued.