The morning after the storm, the streets of Puntos smelled of salt and wet concrete.
Rainwater pooled in the cracks of the road, reflecting the tangled web of power lines above. A dog barked somewhere near the pier, and the sound carried — thin, lonely, endless.
Manuel Reyes walked to the bus stop with his head down, his shoes sinking slightly into the mud. The wind was thick with humidity, the kind that made the shirt cling to his back before the day even began.
He clutched his worn briefcase — the same one he'd carried for twenty years — as if it were a part of his body. Inside were graded papers, half of them smudged with ink, and a single folded sheet: the latest salary adjustment notice.
No increase. Again.
He waited for the bus under a faded Coca-Cola tarp that fluttered in the wind.
Beside him, two men from the pier were talking about the rising price of fuel. One of them laughed, saying,
"Maybe the government will make gold out of seawater next."
Mano smiled faintly to himself. If they gave me a proper lab, maybe I could.
---
The university gates of San Ildefonso were still slick from the rain.
Students moved through them like restless currents — noisy, careless, alive.
Inside the chemistry lab, Mano wiped the damp from his sleeves before switching on the exhaust fan. It groaned to life, rattling like a broken lung. The air carried the faint scent of acetone and rust.
He placed a small flask on the table and stared at it for a moment — that perfect, simple piece of glass.
He used to believe glass was the most honest material in the world: clear, fragile, but capable of holding reactions that could change everything.
Now, it was just another thing gathering dust in a forgotten lab.
---
At noon, he sat in the faculty office, trying to fix a broken burette stand with a strip of tape.
Cabrera, the same young colleague from before, leaned against the doorway, chewing gum.
"Sir Reyes," he said, "you heard about the new program? Robotics elective. They're giving them the lab extension next semester."
Mano looked up slowly. "The robotics club? They don't even have safety training."
Cabrera shrugged. "They don't need it. They're getting sponsorship from a tech company in Manila."
Mano's jaw tightened. "So they fund toys, not fundamentals."
"Sir, it's the future," Cabrera said, half-apologetic.
"No," Mano said sharply. "It's distraction with circuits. You can build machines all you want — but without chemistry, you'll never understand what keeps them alive."
Cabrera said nothing. He looked at Mano — a man who still wrote equations on the board with chalk while everyone else used PowerPoint — and left quietly.
---
The next day, after classes, Mano took a detour through the industrial quarter of San Ildefonso.
It used to be the town's pride — a ring of small factories that produced everything from paint thinners to fertilizers.
Now, half the warehouses were shuttered, the walls streaked with rust and graffiti.
He passed by one still running — Delgado Chemical Works — and paused when he saw the workers hauling drums marked Methylamine.
The label caught his eye.
He knew that compound. He knew its value. He knew exactly what it could become in the right hands.
He stood there for a while, the sound of forklifts and the smell of ammonia mixing in the air.
A part of his brain — the part that used to calculate reaction yields and volatility — flickered awake.
He wasn't thinking of money yet. Not fully.
It was something else — a curiosity he hadn't felt in years.
A reminder that he still knew things the world had forgotten to respect.
---
That evening, Maria was sitting by the window, watching the sea fade into darkness.
Her cough had worsened — softer, but more frequent.
"Hospital tomorrow," he said, almost to himself.
She shook her head. "Just the clinic, Mano. It's cheaper."
He looked at her, the curve of her shoulders in the dim light, the quiet resignation that had crept into her eyes.
"I'll take you," he said simply.
"You have classes."
"They can wait," he said, a bit too sharply.
From the bedroom, Annika's voice came — "Mama, can I borrow your scissors?" — bright and untroubled.
Mano turned away before Maria could see the look on his face.
He went to his small study, shut the door, and opened his old notebook again.
The page from last night was still there — that same line underlined twice:
"Purity is just perfection at the wrong time."
He added another line below it, almost unconsciously:
"But what if the time has come?"
Outside, thunder rumbled again, far over the Pacific.
He stared at the empty beaker on his shelf — clean, perfect, waiting.
For the first time in years, his hands itched not to teach chemistry… but to use it.
---