LONTAR issue #1 by Jason Erik Lundberg (editor) Read Free Book Online

anticipatory, but Muna wouldn't meet his eyes. She came up and touched his face.
    "Maybe it's a joke. Try your best. Mak and I are behind you."
    Feisal opened his mouth but he didn't speak. His partner was following Muna into the living room.
    She was dressed in a neat blue dress and had a filmy scarf wrapped around her hair. She was not much changed from when he'd last seen her. She had put on some weight; her face was fuller. But her eyes were as amused and her mouth as melancholy as ever.
    "I am sorry," said Xinya without preamble. "I was going to ask, will you take me? But now you don't have a choice."
    Everything seemed to have slowed down, as in a dream or a nightmare. The initial shock of joy was succeeded by confusion. Feisal said helplessly, "But how—?"
    "I didn't have the chance to tell you before," said Xinya. She took Feisal's hand. "My parents are in the administration. That's why they couldn't fire me. They could only give me what I wanted. I heard you were assigned a partner and I told my parents I'd come back if they fixed the assignments."
    Even after everything that had happened, this revelation about the administration shocked Feisal. It ran against everything he'd understood about the way the world worked. Of course the elect were granted privileges, but this was different; this was like corruption .
    He put the thought away. It was too big an idea for him to deal with right then.
    "You should have stayed away," he said, not really knowing what he was saying. He'd spent so much energy working himself up to the betrothal, invested so much in the idea that it would protect him and his family. His plan hadn't accounted for Xinya in his living room, bearing the administration's blessing—and the promise of unknown chaos.
    "It wasn't as good as I thought it'd be," said Xinya distantly. "I guess they're right. The New Federation is the best place after all."
    "How did you know about my application?"
    Xinya didn't seem to hear the question.
    "If you ask me why I came back, I'd have to ask you why you did it," she said. "Maybe both of us shouldn't ask so many questions."
    "But your career," said Feisal. "Won't you suffer?" He thought wildly of scholarships, housing quotas, job prospects, everything people talked about. Admission to the nice restaurants Feisal would never enter. State honours. The way bangsawan greeted each other in the street.
    If you were not of the elect you were not encouraged to have more than one child. The state withdrew special rights from the whole family if you failed to comply. Perhaps Xinya did not like children, but the other things she must care about. Who would sacrifice such privileges for something as slippery and wayward as the heart?
    "You can say you changed your mind," he said, but Xinya laid her fingers on his lips.
    "Let me have this last rebellion," she whispered. "They've left me nothing else."
    She never told him about what it was that had disillusioned her in her time overseas. He never told her about the fear that had moved him to apply for the betrothal: fear that he would lose his job; fear of chaos, and a corresponding longing for the order he'd enjoyed before. Now that she was back, the chaos would be justified—and in any case, there was no way out of it.
    "All right," said Feisal gently.

Philippine Magic: A Course Catalogue
    Paolo Chikiamco

    Paolo Chikiamco (Philippines) runs Rocket Kapre, an imprint and blog (rocketkapre.com) dedicated to publishing and promoting works of the fantastic by Filipino authors.   Once an associate at a top Philippine law firm, he came to realize that while fact is often stranger than fiction, it's not quite as creatively fulfilling. He is the editor of Alternative Alamat (Flipside, 2011), and is a writer for prose and comics. His fiction has been published in venues such as Scheherazade's Façade , Philippine Genre Stories , Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution , Lauriat , and the Philippine Speculative Fiction series.

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