Chapter 1: The Scent of Rust

Chapter 1: The Scent of Rust

Fifteen years. Fifteen years and the air in San Isidro still tasted of sugarcane and secrets.

Detective Anya Reyes felt the humidity cling to her skin like a shroud, a heavy, unwelcome embrace. It was different from the city's stifling pollution. This was the damp, breathing heat of the earth, of things growing and rotting in equal measure. She stared out the window of the rattling police SUV, watching the endless green of rice paddies blur into the familiar, menacing silhouette of Mount Arayat in the distance.

“You sure you’re okay, Reyes?” Marco Cruz, her partner, asked from the driver’s seat. He loosened his collar, his city-slicker polo shirt already showing dark patches of sweat. “You’ve been quiet since we passed the provincial marker.”

Anya didn't turn. “Just getting my bearings, Cruz.” She tapped the manila folder on her lap. “Reading the preliminary report again.”

Inside the folder was a picture of a smiling, gap-toothed boy named Leo. Eight years old. He had vanished two days ago from his own backyard. The local police had done a grid search, questioned the handful of neighbors, and come up with nothing. No witnesses, no ransom note, no signs of a struggle. Just a void where a child used to be.

It was the location that had flagged the case for the regional office. San Isidro had a history. A history Anya had spent the last fifteen years trying to outrun.

Leo was eight. The same age as Joshua.

He’d vanished near the edge of a cogon grass field. The same field.

Anya felt a phantom metallic tang at the back of her throat, a memory point so sharp it was almost a taste. She swallowed it down, forcing her focus back to the present. “It’s a standard missing persons case until we find evidence to the contrary,” she said, her voice clipped and professional.

Marco shot her a concerned look. “Right. Standard.” He knew a fraction of her story—the part she allowed people to know. That she was from here. That something bad had happened. He was a good cop, pragmatic and loyal, and he didn't pry. He just watched her, as if afraid the ghosts of this place might swallow her whole.

The missing boy’s home was a small, unpainted bungalow at the end of a dusty track, a stone’s throw from the whispering, shoulder-high cogon grass that bordered the village. A single, weak bulb flickered over the porch where Leo’s father, a gaunt farmer with hollowed-out eyes, sat staring at nothing. The boy’s mother met them at the door, her face a mask of sleepless grief.

“Any news?” she asked, her voice a raw whisper.

Anya’s heart clenched. She’d seen this look on a hundred faces, but here, in this place, it felt like looking in a mirror that reflected the past. “We’re here to help you find him, Mrs. Santos,” Anya said, her Tagalog flowing out of her, smoother and more natural than the English she used in the city.

The house smelled of day-old adobo and despair. A pair of small, muddy slippers sat by the door, waiting for feet that might never return. Anya moved through the small living room with a practiced eye, her gaze sweeping over family photos, a worn-out sofa, a small altar in the corner with a wilting flower. Everything was painfully normal, a diorama of a life shattered.

“He just went out to play,” Mrs. Santos sobbed, twisting a corner of her daster in her hands. “With the other kids… they make statues… by the cogon field. He was only gone for a minute.”

The cogon field. The words hung in the air, heavy and suffocating. Marco began his routine questions—any strangers in the area, any family disputes, any unusual phone calls—but Anya’s attention was snagged by the mother’s words. They make statues.

She remembered. Stick figures, draped in scraps of cloth and leaves. An innocent game to ward off snakes and bad spirits. A game she and Joshua used to play.

The afternoon bled away into a fruitless series of interviews. The other children were too scared to say much, offering only wide-eyed stories of a strange sound, like a broken generator, before they ran home. The sun began to dip below the horizon, painting the sky in violent streaks of orange and purple. The cicadas started their deafening evening chorus.

“We’ll set up a temporary command post at the barangay hall,” Marco said, wiping his brow. “Let’s head back, get some rest.”

“No,” Anya said, her voice firm. “You go. I’m staying here.”

Marco stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Staying here? In the house? Reyes, that’s not procedure. The family needs space.”

“The family is staying with relatives tonight. They can’t bear to be here,” Anya countered, her gaze fixed on the small, open door to Leo’s bedroom. “I want to get a feel for the victim’s environment. See things from his perspective. I’ll be fine.”

“This is some kind of method acting, isn’t it?” he sighed, but he knew the argument was lost. The determined set of her jaw was as immovable as the mountain itself. “Fine. But you call me if you so much as hear a gecko fart, you understand?”

“Understood, Cruz.”

After he left, a profound silence descended on the house, broken only by the chirping of crickets and the frantic buzz of a moth against a lightbulb. Anya walked into Leo’s room. It was a child’s sanctuary. The walls were covered in crayon drawings of superheroes with lopsided muscles. A plastic robot, its arm broken, lay on its side next to a stack of well-loved comic books.

She sat on the edge of the small bed, the springs groaning in protest. As she ran her hand over the boy’s pillow, her sleeve rode up, exposing the long, thin scar that snaked up her forearm. A pale, silvery line against her brown skin. She could almost feel the rough bark of the coconut tree under her fingernails, the frantic scrambling, the desperate escape fifteen years ago. She had climbed. Joshua had not.

She would not fail another child in this town. She would stay here, in the heart of the boy's life, and wait. She didn't know what for, but she knew the sterile environment of a barangay hall would offer no answers. The answers were here, in the silence, in the place where he was last safe.

Hours passed. The moonless night pressed in on the small house, an oppressive, inky blackness that seemed to swallow sound. Anya sat in the dark, her service weapon resting on the bedside table, her senses on high alert. The exhaustion of the day was a physical weight, but adrenaline and old fear were a potent stimulant.

Then, she heard it.

It started subtly, a sound that didn't belong with the night’s natural symphony. It was a faint, rhythmic sound from the direction of the cogon field.

Clink… scrape… clink…

It was the sound of metal dragging over stone. A heavy, uneven gait. Anya’s blood ran cold. She pushed herself off the bed, her movements silent, and crept towards the open window, her hand hovering over the grip of her pistol.

She peered into the absolute darkness, seeing nothing but the vague shapes of trees. The clinking stopped. The silence that followed was somehow more terrifying than the noise had been.

And then it came.

A scent, slithering through the open window on the humid air. It wasn't the smell of sugarcane, or damp earth, or night-blooming jasmine. It was acrid and chemical, the sharp, unmistakable smell of oxidation. Not the clean smell of new steel, but the damp, foul stench of decay.

The scent of rust.

The same scent that had clung to the air the night Joshua was taken. The same smell she sometimes caught in her nightmares, waking her in a cold sweat. It wasn't a memory anymore. It was real. It was outside.

Anya froze, her breath caught in her lungs. Every muscle in her body screamed at her to run, to flee just as she had all those years ago. But she wasn't a child anymore. She was a detective. And the monster from her past had just become the prime suspect in her present. Her hand closed around the cold steel of her gun. She wasn't running this time.