Two: Tonight the Sky is Empty
Madripoor - November 2004
She's dreaming of flying when a fist on the door crushes her wings and pulls her back to Earth.
"Hill." Radley's stern voice from the hallway.
"Sir." She blinks two or three times, staring up at the ceiling of the darkened break room from the couch. She runs a hand through her close-cropped hair which comes away wet. The humidity in the air's so thick she thinks she could cut slices off and toast them for breakfast. "What's the time?"
"Oh-two-thirty."
"I was off until oh-six-hundred, sir."
"Anonymous tipster," says Radley, his tone as close to apologetic as his serious demeanor ever allows. "Says there's an anthrax lab on one of the wrecks out in the harbor. Probably nothing, but O'Riordan and Sergeev still need a third. Suit up."
"You can't send Chang, sir?"
"I cannot, agent," says Radley. "She threw scissors. You shot paper in absentia." She can see his silhouette turn in the door and start walking away. "Boots down at oh-three-hundred."
She glances out the window, an inch-thick slab of bulletproofed glass and steel mesh, as she sits up. Nothing to see through the perimeter lights but rain slamming against the ground. She thought the equatorial sun was bad on its own. They've only gone three days in the last month without rain.
When she shuffles into the locker room, still bleary from her abortive nap, O'Riordan's already half into his riot gear and Sergeev's triple-checking his assault rifle. "You're going out four times in three days," says O'Riordan, continuing to fasten his bulletproof vest. "Trying to break your old record, are you, Hill?"
"You are very unlucky, Sorceress," Sergeev says, not bothering to look away from his examination of the rifle strap to greet her. "But perhaps your magic touch is the missing link of this assignment's great chain."
"Some magic," she says, pulling her locker door open. "I shot paper against Chang's scissors and I wasn't even there to lose in person."
"A better definition of the phrase I have never heard," adds Sergeev, sighting an imaginary round down the barrel.
"Never prepared you for this at the Academy, did they?" O'Riordan sets his helmet on his head. One of the demographically few black men from Northern Ireland, is O'Riordan, and a dedicated weightlifter whose forearms are about as thick as her thighs. "Mission assignments decided through games of chance?"
"They taught me protocol, sir," she says, tugging her tactical vest on over her sweat-stained tanktop. Vanity's the first thing she lost in Madripoor, sheared away with the hair she buzzed nearly to the scalp to ward off the tropic heat. "Then sent me someplace none of that matters. What are the odds this is a real tip?"
"What are the odds we'll find a unicorn chewing oats in the hold?" Sergeev, satisfied that the morbid state of his field equipment hasn't worsened since the last op, finally looks up.
"Shall we go find out, then," says O'Riordan, and slams his locker door.
On the way out, Hill pours a shot of rum into an empty glass sitting on a ledge under a picture of a balding secret agent, then turns out the lights.
Rick Stoner. The last S.H.I.E.L.D. officer who tried to improve Madripoor.
For his foolishness, in his honor, all field agents leave offerings to him before risky missions.
Some weeks, his picture drinks better than they do.
She can hear the monsoon-strength winds howling through the bulkhead, but she can't see through the sweat condensing in her goggles.
It's dark like a black hole below-decks. Humidity makes the simple act of walking down any of the many empty corridors feel like wading through a swamp with fifty pounds of ancient riot gear strapped to her body, and her goggles are fogged over and dripping wet.
There could be twenty hostiles, pointed and ready to shoot, lurking behind every cabin door.
There could be no living soul for half a mile in any direction.
There's definitely anthrax here. Or there was. A stack of empty glass trays, stained red from lamb's blood, that O'Riordan found in a converted cabin on deck two leave no doubt about that much.
Who cultivated it, and where it's been taken, are the questions meant to be answered by the last ninety minutes of crawling through every last black, rusting inch of this floating shitpile.
"Sorceress, Lazaro." The radio built into the helmet crackles after the transmission, a soothing burst of nerve-shredding white noise she briefly mistakes for a firing gun. She spins on her feet, panic making her light and lithe like the gymnast she once wanted to be, and settles only after she doesn't get shot. "Any news?"
"Sure," she says, aiming her light into what was probably a very serviceable middle class cabin forty years ago. "I can't see shit, Lazaro."
"That is not news," says Sergeev.
"We know she's not in the head, at least," says O'Riordan.
"I'm looking through sweat," she says, rounding a corner into what she assumes is another black, empty hallway. She can just about make out the blob of white light being cast by the flashlight taped to her rifle's barrel. If there's actually a firefight, even if she could see, the extra weight throws her aim enough she's probably dead. "If there's anybody looking to put an end to anyone anywhere around here, you can't prove it by me, sir."
"Copy, Sorceress."
"Have we located anything useful, Lazaro?" It's just her and the sound of her footsteps on this deck, the heavy clunk-clunk-clunk of her boots carrying her deeper into the dark.
"That's a big neg," O'Riordan says. "Decks three through five are clear."
"I have found something," says Sergeev from somewhere else on the boat.
"Found what, Nilo?"
"At first," he says, "I believed it to be my dick, as I found it with both hands and a flashlight. Upon closer examination, it turned out to be my rifle."
"If this was supposed to be an ambush," she says, "they're as lost as we are, Lazaro."
"No shit, Sorceress." O'Riordan sighs. "Probably one cell using us to hit the competition, except they called too late."
"I still can't see anything," she repeats, leaning against the half-open door to a rusted-out stateroom. "And I'm sweating my body weight into this vest."
"I'm calling it," says O'Riordan. "Sorceress, Nilo, get your arses back to deck one and prepare for extraction."
Outside, the sky's still black, and the rain still hammers, and the wind still tears.
And nobody dares take off their gear until they're locked into the armored truck. What they didn't find on the ship might still be waiting for them out in the night.
Unlike its neighbors in Singapore, Madripoor does not recognize English as an official language. The road signs, in those neighborhoods rich or organized enough to have road signs, are printed with a combination of Jawi script and hanzi logograms.
Hill can't read either one.
She hasn't driven in six months.
Sometimes, it's Chang, who's even more American than she is but managed to pick some things up along the way. More often, it's O'Riordan, who turns out to be fluent with hanzi because his mother was a U.N. translator, which sometimes took them a long way away from Northern Ireland. She thinks about telling him that her mother's people are from County Derry, sometimes.
But maybe he's fat lad instead of fat dad, so it's Londonderry to him, and if that's so he may regard the Beverlands of Dungiven as violent radicals who tried for long decades to tear his country apart.
"Radley calling Hill, over." The chief's grave voice coming out of the worn-down old police radio mounted to the vinyl dashboard with wood screws and duct tape.
"This is Hill, over," she says into the radio handset.
"Bad news, agent," says Radley. "You got a call."
"A call, sir?"
"Said he was one of your assets." There's a sound of rustling paper as Radley sorts through the massive mound of notes on his desk.
"I don't have any assets, sir."
"Asset Bambang," he says. "Called at oh-four-twenty, begging immediate assistance."
Bambang.
Bambang walked in off the street, cold, one month into her posting. She was still on the front desk because Radley hadn't cleared her for active field duty. Bambang had grown tired of the pirates ruling over his neighborhood with an iron fist, and decided it was time to push back.
She'd worked with him for two weeks, long days and hot under the turning ceiling fans to collate dossiers and mugshots into a workable file. At the end of it, she'd handed him off to Interpol's Singapore office because the Security Council was pretending piracy was somebody else's problem that month and Madripoor's not a place Interpol will keep an office.
She hasn't heard from him since.
"What sort of assistance, sir?" She glances at the green clock on the dashboard. 0445. Shit. O'Riordan, in the driver's seat, turns to look at her with a veteran field op's recognition that a long night just got longer.
"What sort of assistance are we usually called on to provide, Agent Hill?"
She sighs. "Did he say where we can find him, sir?"
More rustling paper. "The Lowlands."
"Shit," she says.
"Your call, agent," says Radley. "Your response. Over and out."
She replaces the handset and swears, a venomous hiss of profanity.
"To the Lowlands, Hill?"
Bambang only wants to make his home a little safer.
Shit.
"To the Lowlands, sir," she finally says.
Some places in Madripoor can't afford road signs. The Lowlands can't afford roads.
Built on the remains of a private beach reclaimed from the Strait of Malacca by a cocaine supplier with more vision than sight, the Lowlands are a warren of cramped, collapsing huts made out of flotsam and jetsam their owners scrounge out of the decades of wreckage littering the island.
There isn't power. There aren't lights. There aren't even the vague mockeries of utilities and services other parts of Madripoor claim to have. No police officer is caught dead here after sunset, or they're not caught alive anywhere else.
S.H.I.E.L.D. agents make runs into the Lowlands once a week, on average.
This is Hill's second trip since Friday, her first at night in three weeks. She puts her helmet on before they make the neighborhood's outer limits, and she keeps her sweating index finger on the rifle's trigger guard. On the not-so-off-hand chance somebody decides to take a shot at them, she wants to be ready.
"This is far as the SUV's going," says O'Riordan as they pull to a top where the cracked pavement gives way to unpaved mud.
"What are we to be looking for this time," Sergeev says.
"Bambang, I guess," says Hill. There's nothing out the windshield but rain and mud, and the cracked sides of swelling huts, illuminated white in the high beams. She opens her door and steps out.
"Michael, my friend," says Sergeev, unbuckling his seatbelt. "Do not stop the engine." He puts his riot helmet back on over his bald head and strokes his goatee before lowering the face shield. "We may have to bolt."
"Wouldn't dream of it, Nikolai," says O'Riordan. "Good luck. God bless."
"Sure," says Hill, and she slams her door. After a moment, Sergeev follows suit.
O'Riordan locks the doors, a small clicking sound nearly swallowed by the white noise hiss of the downpour.
"Which way, Sorceress?"
She looks around, not liking any direction, and turns her flashlight on. The beam's watery and weak, neither tested nor rated for this kind of weather, and she sweeps it across the buildings looking for anything which might be a sign of something. "This way, Nilo," she finally says, and begins trudging forward at random.
After what could be inches, feet, or meters of progress, she turns and looks back at the SUV. All she sees are two small white dots in the faraway darkness, and she knows they're alone.
"Pejuang," shouts a voice, broad and sarcastic, from somewhere in the invisible world surrounding them. Her boots are sticking in the inch-deep mud. She clicks her safety off. It's impossible to tell how long they've been walking, or where they've ended up. "Pejuang, yang keluar dan bermain!"
"Warriors," mutters Sergeev, translating, readying his own rifle. "Warriors, come out and play."
She prepares herself inwardly for the elevated-to-imminent probability bullets will start flying at any time, but she doesn't stop inching forward through the muck, one step at a time.
She can't, or she'll never be able to start again.
Nothing else happens.
Nobody else calls anything.
It's back to them, and the mud, and the rain, and the terrible effort to take a step through both under fifty pounds of riot gear which was already old when she was born.
And the anticipation of violence which may come in two seconds from any direction, or might just be a mind game played by the ganglords of the muck to keep amused on a night too unpleasant even for them to start something.
It's worse than the gunfight would be.
It's not until the sky lightens that they finally find Bambang, at the end of a long body-wide furrow torn into the mud at the farthest edge of the Lowlands.
He went down fighting, or it looks like he did.
He should have sworn his services to better kings, or taken his advice from better counselors.
She looks up to avoid having to look down at the body, and for the first time all night she's grateful for all the riot gear standing between her and a face full of steaming rain.
She looks over at Sergeev. Sergeev looks back at her. The decision is made in silence, and silent is how things remain all the way back home.
They wind up carrying what's left of Bambang all the way back to the SUV, rest him gently on a plastic bag in the back, drive off in silence. They can't leave him there. Nobody else will ever come this far to claim him.
The rain starts to taper off on the drive home.
They're pulling through the gates to the S.H.I.E.L.D. compound, past the poor children sleeping under cardboard on the sidewalk to be first in line for the morning's begging, when a muezzin two blocks over begins the call to fajr prayer.
0532, today.
Her first week in Madripoor, Hill couldn't sleep for hearing the adhan whenever she had the time to think about sleeping. Now, it's just more local color, and the branch office uses the adhan for timekeeping purposes because you can hear the call from anywhere in the city.
"Allahu akbar," the muezzin says, his voice rising and falling and doubling back on itself. The loudspeaker crackles. "Allahu akbar."
Sure, she thinks. Why not? Somebody has to be.
Nobody around here's up to the challenge.
She trudges back to the break room and lies down on the couch, Bambang's face behind her eyes, thinking there's no way she'll sleep right up to the point Steiner nudges her awake at 0700 from a dream of flying.
"And when," she hears Radley say as she approaches his office, voice loud without crossing the line into outright shouting, "does he say I can stop?"
Another male voice, vaguely familiar, responds just quietly enough to be inaudible from the bullpen.
"Five times in three days, agent," says Radley, and this time he is shouting. "Five times. Be six by the end of the day. We're not precision instruments out here, but we still need time to recharge."
Chang has her feet propped up on one of the bullpen's gunmetal grey desks. Steiner, a little redheaded German with a healthy interest in explosives and an unhealthy interest in the box of triggers she keeps under her cot in the barracks, sits at the next desk over.
They're taking turns bouncing a small red ball off the two-redesigns-out-of-date S.H.I.E.L.D. logo stenciled poorly onto one of the grey office walls.
"Eight-six," says Steiner, and passes the ball across the aisle to Chang's waiting hand.
Chang can hit the eagle's head nine times out of ten and it's on the complete other side of the room. "Hey, Hill," Chang says, and tosses the ball. This is the tenth time out of ten, and it bounces wild and smacks into a couch under the west window.
"Eight-six," says Steiner again. Chang stands to retrieve the ball. "The ausländers have arrived, Maria."
"Be still my beating heart," Hill says. "What's it look like?"
"Couple of Albright boys," Chang says, bending at the waist. "They won't last the afternoon before running back to the helipad, begging Big Daddy Fury to fly them far away from here." She straightens, red ball in hand.
"Agent Hill," says Radley in the other room. "My office, please."
Chang chucks the ball at Steiner, who doesn't catch it so much as pluck it out of the air with a steady hand. Steiner tosses the ball at the eagle. A direct hit to the beak. "Eight-seven," she says.
"Good luck with that," says Chang.
"Thanks," says Hill, infusing it with as much scorn as she can muster.
Goddamn scissors.
Inside the office, Radley's seated behind the desk, his perennially worried eyes watching her entrance. "Agent Coulson, Agent Sitwell," he says. "Meet Agent Hill, one of my best and brightest."
Sitwell wears a cheap suit which fits poorly over his shoulders. He nods casually. Coulson still looks like Coulson. She suspects he'd look the same at the methodist church he probably goes to on Sundays, or if he were the last man alive, roaming a nuclear wasteland, foraging for water and canned meat from the bombed-out shells of grocery stores.
"Long time no see, Agent Hill," says Coulson cheerfully, extending a hand for her to shake. She keeps hers behind her back and bows her head, instead, acknowledgment of the fact that, as a Level 2, she's at least three ranks below everybody else in the room.
She appraises Sitwell again. Maybe just two ranks.
"How you holding up," continues Coulson.
"I've had better days, sir," she finally says.
"Hill's just being modest," says Radley, "to spare you the gory details. She had two actions before breakfast."
"Successful actions?" Sitwell sits forward in his chair, pushes his glasses up his nose with his middle finger.
"That depends, sir," she says. "We didn't lose anybody."
Interpol's another story, and she has to remember to call them.
"So it's like a plane crash," says Sitwell. "It's a success so long as you walk away from it."
"I think that's landings, Jasper," says Coulson.
"It applies either way."
Hill says nothing at all.
"Why don't you have a seat," says Radley.
"So," says Coulson as she does. "You're probably wondering why we're here."
"Not really, sir. He's supposed to update the data entry system."
"That covers Agent Sitwell, then. Why am I here?"
"I have a few theories about that, sir."
"I'm sure you do," says Coulson. "Chief Radley here tells me that since you were assigned here, you've helped smash Roche's operations and even taken out the Clan of the… Black Blade?" He turns his head to look at the thin, dark-headed supervisor. "Is that actually their name?"
"A lot of the gangs around here," says Radley, "like their names to be more decorative."
"Seriously, though. The Clan of the Black Blade?"
"Yes, sir," says Hill.
"That's kind of awesome. Don't you think that's awesome, Jasper?"
"I've heard worse gang names," says Sitwell.
"So, how did you take them out?"
"I didn't, sir." She breathes in. She meets Coulson's level gaze. "It was a marginal disruption, at best. Two American women in a bar down the wharf started a punch-up with what turned out to be a Black Blade enforcer. We were there to mop it up."
"'We,' Agent Hill?"
"Agent Steiner and myself, sir."
"There's got to be more to that story than that," says Sitwell. "I've seen the report. It was, like, an inch thick. With footnotes."
"The enforcer was wearing silver armor," she says, "and the bar almost burned down."
"Huh. Is that normal?"
"Around here, sir, it's not totally abnormal."
"Sounds exciting," says Coulson, and he closes the manila folder he's been reading out of. "Why don't we go get something to eat? You know, have Agent Hill here take us out to get painted by some of that local color?" Radley and Hill exchange a look. "What?"
"I'm going to pass, Agent Coulson," says Radley, "but you go right ahead. Agent Hill?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Why don't you bring Agent O'Riordan along on this one?"
"Yes, sir."
"Dismissed."
As she's walking out of the room, she hears Radley explaining to Coulson that in Madripoor, it's always at least two agents out at a time. No exceptions.
She finds O'Riordan in the locker room, sitting in front of his locker, contemplating the scratch marks on his helmet with a rag and some polish.
As they leave, she taps the photo of Stoner on the wall for luck.
It's a few degrees cooler outside today, and since dawn the sun's been making a politician's promise to step out from behind the clouds. So they sit outside of a bánh mì place on the edge of the good part of town which affords a first-class view of Madripoor's most popular and beloved employment destination, a towering mound of girders and drywall gradually stretching towards the heavens.
"The Hotel Sovereign," says Hill like it's a joke. She takes a bite of her lunch, chews it with quick and precise bites like she's trying to minimize contact with her taste buds.
She and O'Riordan sit with their backs to the restaurant wall, just like any agent who's spent longer than six hours on the island.
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
"Just a little bit, sir," she says.
"We're all agents here, Hill," says Coulson. "You can call me Phil."
"Some gangster read an architectural magazine and got a raging case of wallet envy, sir. So now he's building a hundred-floor luxury hotel in the middle of the poorest country in Asia."
"Work's so hard to come by," adds O'Riordan, "people kill each other for spots on the construction crews. And there aren't any safeguards, so once every couple of weeks, you hear about somebody else falling off a beam on the upper levels."
"What's in this sandwich?" Sitwell's spreading the baguette apart and poking at the chunks of meat he's already bitten into. She glares at the top of his head for the change in subject. "It does not taste right."
"Do you really want to know, Agent Sitwell?"
"I ordered what you ordered, Agent Hill," he says. "You looked like you knew what you were doing. I think I'm entitled to know what I paid for."
"It's probably rat," says Hill. She takes another bite, cocks an eyebrow at him over the table as she chews. "Today, anyway."
"Probably?" Sitwell looks green. She swallows. "Is she kidding, Phil?"
"Agent Hill doesn't have any sense of humor I'm aware of, Jasper."
"It's not stringy like cat. Other than that, I can't tell you for sure what it might be, sir," she says.
"You've eaten cat?"
"After a couple of weeks here, you eat a lot of things, sir."
"You just take the protein and hope whatever's on the plate doesn't give you food poisoning," says O'Riordan.
"We don't get paid enough to eat at any restaurant which can afford real meat," says Hill. "Sir."
"What do you plan to do for Thanksgiving," asks Sitwell with what seems like uncharacteristically sincere curiosity.
"If we're lucky," says O'Riordan, "eat more rat."
"And that would be why I'm just drinking a bottled Coke," says Coulson, taking a sip for emphasis. "You can't go wrong with Coca-Cola."
"And how much did the Coke cost you, sir?"
"You can go wrong if you have an ulcer," says Sitwell. "That happened to a friend of mine back at Communications. Drank a whole can of Coke. Spent two days in the hospital."
"Why'd he do a thing like that?" Coulson drinks from his bottle again.
"I bet him twenty bucks he wouldn't."
As her visiting colleagues debate frat-boy stupidity, Hill keeps an eye on the people walking along the sidewalk.
A scrawny old woman, face like tree bark. Burqa flapping in the stiff wind which heralds the return of monsoon rains later that afternoon.
On an island of three million people, the chance any individual person falls victim to violent crime is microscopic, even if the island's Madripoor. Millions of these people are honest. They work for pennies on the dollar, bring bread and meager produce home for spouses and children, and live clean, law-abiding lives.
Two small boys running in circles around a man's legs. He chastises them in what seems to be Malay with what sounds like affection. Maybe a father. Maybe not. Using kids isn't unheard of, but it's been known to paint a target on your head, so most groups avoid it.
Violent crime happens anyway. Piracy by every dictionary definition of the phrase. Terrorist groups climbing over each other's failed doctrines to reach for the stars. Kidnapping for profit's gone out of favor as visitors with enough money to be worthwhile ransoms stop coming to Madripoor, but it's still a popular pastime among broke-down losers taking their first tentative steps into criminal enterprise.
A woman pushing a baby carriage. She bends over and baby-talks to the infant within in what sounds, at this distance and to Hill's mostly-untrained ear, like Mandarin Chinese.
Her second week here, a bomb in a baby carriage cleared out the tent city by the wharf. She and Steiner spent three hours crawling over ground zero, looking for bomb fragments between big wreckage and blown-wide body parts.
An old man, thinned-out hair the dirty white of a used paper towel, taps down the broken sidewalk with a cane.
She doubts you can forget the smell of congealing blood baking under a tropical sun, but she spent hours in the barracks testing the hypothesis, anyway, drinking shot after shot after shot of cheap rum with Steiner until they both passed out. (It didn't work, but it was worth the effort.)
A young woman, soft face prematurely old, in a filthy shawl. She walks, with utmost public propriety, just a few steps behind a similarly young-old man dressed in rags.
"What do you think about that, Hill?" Sitwell's voice brings her back to the table. "Hill?"
"This is ground control to Agent Hill," says Coulson.
"Sorry, sir," she says. "Just thinking."
"I guess that would explain the smoke," says O'Riordan as a truck backfires on a nearby street.
There's a frantic metallic scramble as all four duck and draw their firearms in accordance with careful years of training.
They don't relax until they see the old truck - how did a '71 Chevrolet Blazer make it so far, and how is it still running despite the rust? - round the corner, oozing smoke into the air like the pus from an infected wound.
On the drive back to the compound, Coulson's Coca-Cola finally demonstrates how wrong it can go, and they wind up pulling over on an empty stretch of road halfway between the lowlands and the city so he can relieve himself into the weeds. O'Riordan sticks with him.
Two at a time. Nobody left alone.
O'Riordan's attempts to restart the engine after the unscheduled pit stop prove to be somewhat less than effective. Shooting rock against his paper, Hill ducks her head under the car long enough to confirm the thing's leaking enough oil onto the cracked road they could practically give those oil-spilling pricks at Roxxon a run for their money.
She can hear the muezzin, out in the distance, beginning to call the ẓuhr prayer.
1252.
Allahu akbar.
Sitwell takes her aside while Coulson places a call to base asking for a pick-up, bringing her around to the other side of the vehicle.
"What do you actually do here, Agent Hill?" Sitwell's face shines with sweat under the tropical sun. She'd warn him to rub some lotion on, but the idea of him returning to civilization sunburned to the color of a boiled beet is amusing enough she decides to keep her mouth shut about it.
"As little as possible, Agent Sitwell," she says.
"This section's had more than six strike team operations in the last week," he says. "You've been on all of them. That's not exactly 'little'." He pauses. "And it's pretty impressive."
He technically outranks her. She has to choose her words carefully. "'As possible' being the operative term," she finally says. "If we get a tip somebody's cooking up doomsday-grade anthrax in a freighter, obviously we need to respond." They often don't, of course, but he's an outsider.
He doesn't get to know that.
"Is that likely to happen?"
"It already did, sir," she says.
Sitwell watches her for a second. "Were they?"
"We found six empty trays, sir."
He looks at her for a second over the rim of his round glasses. She, unaccountably, wants to break them over his head. "And the anthrax?"
"Was already gone when we'd arrived, sir."
Hayya ʿala ṣ-ṣsalāt.
Sitwell looks like he has something he wants to say to that.
But then there's a crack, loud but not loud enough, nastier than anybody supposes from years of exposure to Hollywood sound effects.
Something falls.
She hears it hit the ground.
She tries to turn around to look but there's a light in her - no, not a light, a thing. A feeling. Something hot and white which has burned a hole in her back and is blooming, bright and fierce, in her stomach.
She tries to breathe.
She coughs, blood spraying out of her mouth onto Sitwell's suit and she hurts from her ribcage to her hipbones. It feels like something's ripped inside her. She's on her feet just long enough to see his round face go from indifference to surprise before her legs drop out and she's on her back on a broken sidewalk, staring up at the bright, cloudy sky.
Cracking.
Cordite stink.
Shouting.
"Agent down! Agent down!"
Hands pull at her.
Her back aches where it slides along the broken asphalt.
Something wet and warm under the back of her head.
"Oh, God," somebody says in the accent of her mother's people.
"What happened?"
"Hang on, Hill," says the first one.
"She got hit."
She should know them, she really should, she should be concerned about the fact she doesn't or the way she's shivering in the middle of tropical humidity.
But right now she's only sixteen, sitting cross-legged in the grass with Fiona Brennan and Tommy Collins, watching the city celebrate America's independence by blowing up pounds of gunpowder in the sky over Lake Michigan.
Looking up at all the reds and golds and greens which sparkle against the purple-and-orange Chicago night.
It's a good night.
It's worth waiting for The Bastard to check on her, worth listening to him lock her bedroom door to make sure God's Little Abomination couldn't sneak out the front and do anything to jeopardize her begging God for mercy at mass the next morning.
Worth shimmying down the drainpipe, sneaking through the shadows, dashing to the El on Halsted to just barely catch the last train before the display begins.
Even, maybe especially, worth the clumsy teenage kiss she gives Tommy after the show, neither knowing quite how to angle her nose or how open her mouth should be. The way he looks at her after, like she's made of something better than flesh, like she hasn't just grown long and lean but also wide in all the right places?
That look is hers, and she put it on his face, and she'll do it all over again, again and again and again, if only she can.
What a waste of a good memory, she thinks, dimly, back in the present as quickly as she'd left it, hearing the on-going crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons and a distant ringing in her ears.
Why, why now, why is this what I'm thinking of when I'm -
She has, she thinks, three nurses.
Nurse Anong comes in the morning. Forties. Round. Barely speaks a word of English, which makes her a less than ideal aid companion for a woman who can't speak whatever her language is and isn't in her right mind half the time.
Nurse Mongkut takes the evenings. Twenties. Skinny. Always smiling. He speaks a lot of English, not always correctly, similes and metaphors tripping over each other in colorful and inventive ways.
Her favorite nurse, by far, is the 7.5/500mg tablet of percocet they let her swallow with a sip of water every six hours. She makes the red glowing gridlines of pain across Hill's midsection fade to a pale yellow, and draws the warm fog around her like a soft old afghan, and sings to Hill until she sleeps.
Sleeps, and dreams sometimes of visitors.
People she knows from... somewhere. It starts with an M. Mort - no, Mont - no, something.
"You are very lucky, Maria Hill," says one of them, the wiry bald man with the goatee, his hand squeezing the bed's rail so hard the metal creaks. "I think maybe you really must be a Sorceress, no?"
"The warriors came out to play," says one of them, the tall black man with arms like girders.
"They'll never do this again," says a little redhead grimly.
Her favorite nurse makes her gentle rounds.
She slips away into the space between the dreams again.
And once, there's a bald black man with an eyepatch standing silent in the doorway, and when she blinks, he's turned into Nurse Mongkut, smiling again, saying, "Hello, Hill, ready to take your pills like your medicine" in a cheery tone.
And one night, there's her mother, perched by the side of the bed in a plain nightgown Hill had never seen her wear in life. "It's just a door, muirnin," she says in a soft lilt Hill had never heard with her own ears, hand just as gentle against her daughter's wet throat. "It's no trouble at all to walk through."
And then there's a beeping at the edge of her hearing.
When Hill wakes up again, there's warm sun shining through the window and a couple of doctors at the foot of her bed, talking amongst themselves gravely in Thai.
After that, there's no more percocet.
Another day, Coulson sits in a chair by her bed, having a conversation with the air. "Two gangs down in six months, and not so much as a scratch on her until this," he says, low but vehement. "I don't know what else you could possibly want out of this, sir"
"Hello, Phil," she says, loosely.
"Hey, welcome back to the land of the living!" Coulson presses a button on the plastic rectangle in his hand. "At least now we know what it takes to make you use my first name," he says, setting it down on the bedside tray next to a small square wrapped in silver paper. "You know, like normal colleagues do."
"Where am I?"
"Bangkok," he says after a slight delay. She watches him feel his way through proper responses. "You're in Bangkok."
"That's not in Madripoor," she says.
"You noticed that, huh?" He leans forward in the chair, puts an arm on the bed's rail. "They always said you were observant. What do they have you on right now?"
"It starts with a… um… a T?"
"You don't know."
"I liked the other stuff," she says. "I slept a lot. Hospitals are boring."
"I heard you slept a little too much," says Coulson. "Oh, I bought you a little get-well-soon present." He taps the package on the tray. "You probably shouldn't open it yet. I don't think there's anything here you can play it with."
"Is it nice?"
"Well, I hope so," says Coulson. "You're a hard woman to shop for, by the way. I asked around. About all anybody could tell me is that you like musicals. And since you're from Chicago, I thought, you know, I'll get you that one."
"I already have three copies," she says. "But that's nice. That's just really nice of you. That's what that is."
"Can I get you anything? You want some water?"
She shakes her head. "They said I can't have children anymore," she says brightly. "That they had to remove my… uh… you know, that thing. With the babies."
"That's right," he says after a longer pause. "They had to give you a complete hysterectomy, too." He's got a serious look now, and frankly, she doesn't really know why.
"This medicine's great," she says. "I don't feel anything."
"You might want to put a pin in that," he says, "and come back to it once they've tapered you off. You might be surprised how much you'll feel."
"I don't know what that means," she says. "Was it really bad, Phil?"
"I've seen worse," he says after the longest pause yet. She turns it around in her head a few times, but she can't figure out why that's important. The fog's creeping over the land, and soon, it will cover the lighthouse.
It comes to her suddenly that Phil's been talking for a while, and she hasn't heard a thing he's said, and she thinks that's bad, so she really makes an effort to concentrate on him. "The important thing is," he's saying, "that you're alive now. And you can go home soon. You won't have to go back to Madripoor unless you really, really want to."
"That's good," she says. "I didn't like Madripoor. Hey, Phil?"
"What is it, Maria?"
"I think I'm peeing, Phil," she says, drowsy and slow now, like she doesn't really know what the words she's saying mean.
Coulson glances down at the sheet draped over her legs, then back up at her face. "Well," he says, "you've probably got a catheter to take care of that for you. And if not, you still won't have to clean the mess up. That's what we call a win-win situation. More good news, the surgeon says they'll be able to take the, uh, ileostomy bag away in a couple of weeks."
"That's nice." She yawns. "I'm going sleep now, Phil."
Coulson's quiet again. "Sounds like a good idea."
"Thank you for thing," she says, slurring the words.
The last thing she feels before unconsciousness is his hand on her forehead, and she thinks, dad cared enough to visit after all.
Hill, Coulson, Fury, Sitwell, S.H.I.E.L.D., Madripoor, and Steiner ©2014 (and points before and beyond) by Marvel.
Adhan text was copied from the Wikipedia article. "Pejuang, yang keluar dan bermain!" is an internet translation of "Warriors, come out and play" from English into Indonesian. If either – or both – of these are wrong, let me know the correct versions and I'll edit accordingly.