PROTECTION
The sun rises in Perth but the curtains are still drawn across the hospital window. Rock's body still operates on Thai time, which meant he woke up in a cold sweat in the earliest hours of the morning.
Between the concussion and the all the travel, there has not been a single moment of rest after he woke in the hospital in Bangkok. He has a massive headache and a numbness like a million pins in his fingers and toes, but that's all fine. He is not the one in a coma.
Through his hospital gown he feels chill of the new day and looks at the dim light of the dawn as it touches Revy's face. Her eyes are closed, and the blanket is drawn up to her chest. She does not move, and there is a tube to her forearm and another that goes up her nose.
He knows what is like when she sleeps, and this is not like that at all. Her body may be here, but her soul is stuck somewhere on the other side of the Black Lagoon as it all came apart in flames. She had covered him, muffled the force of the explosion with her own flesh.
It should have been me, he thinks, barefoot on the linoleum. "It shouldn't have been her, when she had just chosen to live, when she had just begun to dream."
Looking at her, he remembers the last night under the church, the burning warmth of smoke and the light bitterness of beer, and the wild, wild way they had reconciliated.
"Hey, Revy," he says, quiet.
There is no response. Her eyelids remain closed, her chest barely rising with each breath, her arms slack at her sides. This is not the woman that he knows and looking at her makes him feel lost.
"I need a smoke," he tells her, but nothing happens.
"I can help you with that," a voice says from behind him.
"Eda."
He almost does not recognize her in business attire and a pair of glasses. Eda's arms are crossed as she stands in the door.
"You can call me that," she says. "But you should probably know my real name: Edith."
She takes him outside, to a bench out in the sun. It is colder in Australia than it was in Roanapur. Eda gives him a cigarette and a light. Habit takes over and he lets the smoke fill him.
She had abandoned them for two days, with no one but doctors and nurses coming to visit him, and Revy's curtains drawn all the time. At first, he was not able to tell how long he had been unconscious, or where he was, or what his future would be.
"Revy got me out of there," Eda says, ashing her cig over the pavement. "I'll cover the bill, for however long she needs. I owe her that much."
"You owe me something too," Rock says, and shivers as the breeze picks up under his gown.
"What could I possibly owe you?" With no sunglasses, her eyes are the cold blue of ocean ice.
"You owe me an explanation," he says. "Why was Angel there? Is he a CIA agent?"
She considers her obligations in silence before explaining herself. "I would be a shitty spy if my only contacts in Roanapur were a Triad boss and a Japanese businessman. I inherited Angel from a friend. He had a direct line to the heavens long before he stepped on your boat."
A car pulls into the parking lot. Eda waits until the family inside gets through the doors of the hospital before continuing.
"Let's clarify some of our language here: Where I come from, me and Rico are called officers because we work directly for the Company. You and the X-man are called agents because you're hired help. Years ago, you were on the books as a plain old asset."
The organization Eda serves in is just like a church, Rock decides. It has a hierarchy, with its own sacred terminology and impenetrable dogma.
"What is going to happen to me?"
"It depends. Will you stay here in Australia?"
"What if I don't want to?" He wants to know his options.
"We leave you at Narita Airport, no paperwork, no further communication."
She doesn't spell out the real consequence. Rock would then have to explain his disappearance to everyone: the Japanese Government, his old company, his family. That will not be a viable way to go. He would be abandoning Revy there in her hospital bed and truly ending up where he started.
A few seconds silence and then Eda smiles. "Yeah, I thought you wouldn't spring for it. Let's get you dressed and get you to work, then."
Later that day Eda introduces Rock to a team of people who are already set up in a single floor of a nondescript office building in Perth. She calls it 'The Bullpen", host to a stable of people pooled together from around the Pacific. They all seem similar to Rock, not too rough around the edges, but still visibly separate from the normal class of office worker. They're all doing their own little jobs, alone in cubicles with personal document safes. But they seem welcoming, at least.
That night Edith drives him back to the hospital, but she stops him before he steps out of the car, her engine still running.
"You probably want to know what Roanapur is like now. It's been almost a week since we left."
He turns his head back towards the hospital door. He hasn't been thinking about Roanapur much. He would like to be back in his room, if only just to see Revy's sleeping face again. Or maybe she is awake.
"Thanks to Angel, the Nuevo Laredo cartel has been handed most of the Russian half of the city," Eda says. "Officially, everyone works for the Triad now, but it isn't that simple."
"Why?"
"Chang left early for Hong Kong and took the extra men back with him."
Had the war really gone so poorly for Mister Chang? His superiors must have found the war to be too costly by the end. If anyone had gained from the war, it was Angel and Group X. Every other group had lost something. Rock looks to the hospital doors again.
Eda is still focused on Roanapur. "Thanks to you starting it all during tourist season, there's been a pretty big crackdown. Seven countries have reported men gone missing on trips to Thailand. That's bad press, even before considering all of the Thais who got caught in the middle of the fighting. The elections are coming up, and this doesn't make the ruling party any more popular."
He brushes off the political talk. "Do you know who was responsible for the bomb?"
There is something in his tone that makes her stop and look at him for a moment. Her next words are spoken more seriously.
"My first thought was your old crew," she says. "But Benny was nowhere near the Lagoon. He was pinged in Amsterdam a couple of hours after you arrived at the Church."
She lets the sentence trail off as the engine runs. He understands the implication.
"And Dutch?" Rock clears his throat, trying to even out his voice. "Where is he?"
"Gone." Eda rests her wrists up on the steering wheel. "Like a ghost, honestly. Maybe he helped Balalaika set the trap. Maybe he had nothing to do with it."
"You don't know?"
Eda's face is unreadable in the dim interior. "I don't know, and it isn't worth finding out."
Not worth it to her, she means. Roanapur is already in her past. He gets out of the car without another word.
In the hospital, Revy is still unconscious. Rock can only look briefly at her expressionless face for a few seconds before getting into his bed. He tosses and turns and tries to put his thoughts out of his mind. He chases regret through a dozen different pathways in his mind, and each time ends up directly where he began.
He is discharged from the hospital in the morning. As far as the doctors can see, he has no lasting damage from the explosion. When he asks about Revy, his doctor becomes much more serious, and asks whether she had a history of head injuries.
Rock knows of at least two times that Revy took head trauma. Once as a teen in New York, then later in Roanapur, fighting Roberta. Both times had been pretty serious on their own, but Rock knows that there must have been plenty more injuries that he just does not know about.
Each time she got hurt, there had also been a cumulative impact, the doctor informs Rock. Little pieces of trauma adding up over the years, building up a vulnerability for later. The tests are not over yet, he says, but her brain seems intact. It is a matter of healing and waiting for the effects of the blast wave to be undone (if they ever will be). If she is coming back, it could take days, or even weeks.
Under Eda's authority, Rock is assigned a condo and given a credit card with his fake name. He's Yutaro Iwasaki now. He does not know who chose his names, only that their meanings will forever be fuzzy without the specific kanji to define them.
He gets his own cubicle in the bullpen, just one seat among others. His first task is to compile information about rare earth metals in Thailand. He spends his first day ordering print maps and wracking his memory for old contacts and recollections of site visits. Even though his work is for the C.I.A, it does not cover the secretive shadow conflicts of espionage. In a way, it resembles his work for Asahi Heavy Industries in Japan. He tries not to think about that. He tries not to think of Revy as she lays unresponsive and alone. The numbers and the names of businesses and their raw materials are preferable to the madness he had felt in Roanapur.
It is like a fever has subsided. He shares an office with others now, not just an old warehouse or a spare apartment. Australia is fine enough, but it is certainly normal after years on the edge. Rock can feel the boredom settle in, even within a day or two of starting work. Out on the streets, people weren't killing and drinking and fucking and getting high. Australians certainly liked to drink, but it could not rival the Yellow Flag on Friday night. Everything was reasonable. People pursued careers and loves and hobbies with a sedate sense of dissatisfaction. No one looked over their shoulder or stared other people down. People simply lived their lives in a way he forgot existed. It was not Heaven, and it was not Hell. It simply was.
For a few days he is wrapped up in these thoughts, until one day he visits the hospital, and the doctor is there waiting for him. He is grim, standing there solemn, and Rock thinks for a moment that Revy is dead.
That is not the case. She's alive, but she can't move with any of her usual strength and coordination. The doctor doesn't know when things will be normal.
Revy doesn't see him as he enters, too busy struggling with the side rail of the bed. It won't go down, but she pushes and pulls and shakes it. He clears his throat, and she flinches in surprise. Her head turns and the look in her eyes is as sharp as ever.
"Fuck!" She doesn't quite know what to say. But Rock doesn't either.
He sits with his back to the window and they both are still finding their words. He is still adjusting himself, reigning in his sorrow, turning towards the reality of the situation and away from his fears.
"Are you alright?" he asks.
She thinks about it for a while in her usual way, hard-eyed, glancing around the room as if she's chasing her thoughts.
"This fucking sucks," she says at last. "I woke up with a big fucking tube down my nose and my guns missing."
Rock does not know where the guns could have gone. Eda didn't say anything about them. In all likelihood, they were taken in the hospital back in Bangkok. Now that they were foreign residents in Australia, Rock does not think they can be armed again.
"What do you need?" he asks.
"Something to do," she says. "I've been bored out of my mind."
Rock smiles. "How about the crossword?"
She raises her eyebrows. "Alright, hotshot. But I'm talking long term here. What the fuck am I supposed to do tomorrow? And the day after that?"
"I don't know," Rock says, with all of the honesty he can muster.
He does something uncharacteristic of their relationship. He kneels so that he's even with her in the chair and takes her hand in his. She looks at him in confusion.
"I don't know. But I know that I want to be there with you."
At first her only reply is her stare, but her eyes move first, away from his own and off to the side. When she looks back, her eyes look wet.