Picture the worst thing you can think of. Add the smell of shit and vomit, the sound of flies buzzing, hell, even decaying flesh. Now connect that with someone you love: a husband. A brother. A child.

 

The definition of hell, but with full-color pictures.

 

That’s what greeted me when I opened the door to that shack in the Dangkrek mountains. The smells coming from the emaciated body before me were bad enough, but my stupid mind and foolish heart kept telling me that this was Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, a man I’d fought beside and loved to distraction for most of my adult life. Or he had been that man, once.

 

Now he was a pile of bones and filth, a low, moaning thing that huddled against the far wall of his prison, scared of the light from the torches. God, they’d broken him. Shattered me as well.

 

My feet wouldn’t move at first. Nong was watching, waiting, and so I forced myself to move deeper into the darkness of the hut, breathing through my mouth, wishing I’d learned to meditate or disassociate or whatever it is people do when they can’t deal with the horrors before them.

 

“Ollie?” I ask again, and as before, there was no human sound in reply, just a low moan, like something that comes from a dying animal.

 

Nong has followed me in, and she’s lit a lantern, shielding it with her hand. As she steps closer, coming to my side, the light was thrown all over the hut, making me step back a little, take a deep breath. Ollie, barely alive, looking like a Holocaust survivor, so thin I can count his ribs, shuddering with fever. His face, hidden behind a mop of hair thick with grease and filth.

 

I kneel before him, touching his shoulder. He recoils, and I know he’s too sick and dehydrated to recognize me. Nong, sensing something, hands me a half-full canteen. I inch closer, grasp the back of his neck, and lift the canteen to his lips. He drinks, desperately, but the effort’s too much for him and he coughs up most of it, along with some greenish-colored foulness I can’t seem to identify.

 

“BC?”

 

Babs, pulling me back, grounding me in the midst of a nightmare. What she does best.

 

“I’ve got him,” I whisper, trying to push some of the hair out of his eyes. “I…I think.”

 

**********************

 

The next few hours are a bit of a blur. Nong takes charge, dispensing orders. There is a flurry of activity around the shack, reminding me a little of the airport when I first landed in Bangkok. Ollie is wrapped in a blanket and taken to a nearby hut where a fire burns and food is prepared. Water is heated, and I spend the next little while watching as Nong bathes him. He clings to her like an infant, and for the first time I think to catalog his symptoms. He doesn’t appear to have been tortured, beyond the usual deprivations of food, water and medical treatment. But to be in the condition he’s in, half-mad with fever and starvation, Ollie would have had to be here for at least six weeks. Did Jones and his people grab him right off the plane? Did they know Ollie was coming to Thailand?

 

“They took his malaria pills,” Nong explains, standing. She’s finished bathing him and now Ollie slumbers, somewhat peacefully, on a thin cot made soft with blankets and pillows. He’s running a high fever and is clearly delirious, but I think she’s fed him some drugged potion that’s put him to sleep. I’m grateful to her for that, which is why I don’t kill her. Not yet.

 

“Why?” I ask her, keeping my voice low, unable to think of anything else but Ollie, alone and going mad in that dark little shack. “Why did your people do this to him?”

 

“He was already bad when they took him from Jones,” Nong explains, her voice gentle. “They carried him in over the hills. He was very weak. Should have died but didn’t. He is strong.”

 

That just about breaks me. Ignoring everything - my instincts, my respect for life, my status as a god-damn bona fide hero - I drag Nong up against the wall of the hut, my fingers on a pressure-point around her neck. One wrong word from her, and I collapse her trachea.

 

“Why?” I ask again, my voice a snarl as mean and cruel as Nong has been. Nong and her games, with Ollie’s life in the balance. “Why did you keep him?”

 

“Orders,” she replies in that little-girl voice I love and hate so much. “From Big Man.”

 

“Arun?”

 

She tries to laugh, but I twist my ring finger deeper into a nerve cluster and it becomes a strangled scream.

 

“Arun not Big Man,” she croaks. “Maybe here in jungle, but he answer to Big Man in Krung Thep.”

 

Vikhorn, that sharp-eyed police chief I met with Sonchai. I see red. “You tell me everything, now,” I demand, “or you’ll discover what it’s like to have a sonic scream rip your eardrums apart. Makes bar dancing damn difficult.”

 

She nods, her glassy-smooth eyes for once clear and easy to read. Fear clarifies things.

 

“I…I not know everything.”

 

Her English gets worse as her lies disintegrate, I note.

 

“Big Man in Krung Thep not tell everything. Very smart man. But…” she says quickly, noting how impatient I am, “I know Jones and Khmer had competition with yaa baa ring. Payment come in from Hong Kong, Tokyo, even America. Dropped in jungle along border, in Thailand. Pick up yaa baa, go back with drugs to sell. Get more for next payment.”

 

“More what?” I hiss, close to her face. “What’s the payment?”

 

Her eyes don’t meet my own, and for the first time, I can honestly say I think Nong is ashamed of something. “Children. Jones liked children. Took them as payment for his yaa baa. Kept some, sold others to Bang Kwan or Pattaya, maybe to Russian gangs, maybe to Cambodia. Children worth more than yaa baa.”

 

For the second time tonight, my stomach rolls in on itself from nausea and shock. What I thought was an extortion scheme or a drug deal gone wrong was actually a child-sex syndicate, using drugs and stolen US passports and fucking music lessons as a cover. Jones’ ‘niece’, the little girl we saw on the video footage of the night drug drop…she must have been an early payment. Only, how did the Khmer fit into all this madness?

 

I put the question to Nong, and she is only too happy to answer.

 

“We try to stop it,” she declares, pleading with me to believe her. “We attack Jones and his men, plant bombs in front of their houses in Krung Thep, anything.”

 

“Because you want the trade for yourself,” I finish. Nong shakes her head, dark hair smoothing out and over her shoulders.

 

“No, only drug trade. Not children.”

 

I want to laugh at her, at her feeble attempt to convince me that somewhere there’s actually a moral distinction being made by a bunch of murderers like the Khmer Rouge.

 

“I’m here to put an end to all this,” I tell her, plainly. “I’m going back to Krung Thep to confront your Big Man. He’s got a lot to answer for.”

 

Fear has passed from her, and Nong is herself again; self-assured, seductive, eager to please if that gets her what she wants. “He knows you’ll come.”

 

I bet he does, I think, wanting to wring Vikhorn’s neck with my own two hands. The fight drains out of me as Nong leaves, and I listen for a few moments to Ollie’s low, raspy breathing.

 

“O?” I whisper, my voice small and sad in the little hut. “You get any of that?”

 

“I heard it all,” she replies. “I can’t believe…kids. Jesus.”

 

“Yeah,” I reply, kneeling next to Oliver’s bedside, my hand resting on his fevered brow. You don’t bounce back from malaria, even if you’re the kind of guy who survived life on a deserted island for five years, and then came back from death itself. Ollie’s a fighter, but he’s weak now. He needs me. The confrontation with Vikhorn will have to wait.

 

“BC? You okay?”

 

“I’m just…” I pause, feeling incredibly weary. “I just need to get some sleep, O. Put it together for me. I have to be here now, for him. Do what needs to be done.”

 

The Oracle line goes dead, and then there is only the sound of our breathing in the little hut.

 

*********************

 

A soft touch on my cheek wakes me, and I raise my head, blinking a little in the sunlight flooding the hut. Ollie is watching me, his sapphire eyes sharp, focused. So different from last night.

 

“Hello, Pretty Bird.”

 

I don’t know what comes over me then, but as the sound of his raspy, warm voice hits me and I realize that he’s going to be okay I start crying and can’t seem to stop. The shock and disorientation and sheer insanity of the last few weeks in Thailand pour out of me in a flood of tears, and he never lifts his hand from my head, stroking my hair like he would sometimes late at night, after we’d made love. I clench the blankets at his waist so hard the rough fabric leaves lines in my palms for hours afterward.

 

Finally, I discover that I’m all cried out. My face feels puffy and hot, my eyes swollen. I look up, and find his eyes on me again.

 

“You ‘bout done, kiddo?” he asks me, and touches my cheek. I put my hand over his; he’s grown so thin and weak I can feel the bones move beneath my fingertips. But he’s still strong, still Ollie. That creature from the night before is gone now.

 

“I know you’d come,” he tells me, sighing a little. “I thought, if there’s one person in the world crazy enough to take on all of Asia for me…”

 

“I didn’t,” I say, sniffling a little through the last of my tears. “I just followed a path. Lucky for us, it led right to you.”

 

“You’d go through hell for me, babe,” he says, and I know that I would, that I have. And he’d do the same for me. But bravery and sacrifice was never a problem between us; that was always something we had in common. Living with each other, that was a different story.

 

*********************

 

Strings are pulled by an unseen hand. Somehow, after a few dead days of waiting and watching Ollie battle with malaria, we’re whisked out of our little hut in the Dangkrek mountains and shown to a waiting helicopter. Four men carry Ollie down to the grassy field serving as a landing-pad, one of them Arun. As I board the chopper, I feel like I’m in some damn Vietnam war movie, my hair whipping around my face, the rotor blades making the grass bend and weave and look like waves on the ocean. I lean out the side of the bird just as the pilot prepares to take off, and Arun catches my eye. He nods to me, and I wonder why. Nong is nowhere in sight.

 

We end up in a hospital in Bangkok, attended by a staff of doctors. They pump Ollie full of fluids and medications that make him sweat and cry out and sleep a lot. He doesn’t recognize me most of the time, although when he does it’s as heartbreaking as the morning he first saw me and knew my name. I cry a lot.

 

Babs is also hard at work, stringing together the pieces of Jones’ drug ring, tracking down the movements of the children he’d bought and sold for bags of yaa baa. I get the feeling that maybe she’s doing it to distract herself from something happening in Gotham, but I don’t ask and she doesn’t say anything. My world is only as large as Ollie’s hospital room. The third day, Sonchai visits, and then he too becomes a permanent fixture, coaxing me to sleep, encouraging me to eat, and using the baby to distract me.

 

I take long walks, Barbara in my head, and try to feel like I’m part of the world again.

 

Ollie and I talk about the whole murder/drug smuggling ring exactly once, and even then I have to ask him, point-blank, what he was doing in Thailand. Seems he’d been tipped off about Jones’ child-sex trade from one of his informants, and came to Southeast Asia to do what any liberal crime fighter with a longbow would do: break the damn county in two. Ollie has never been good at long-term planning when he’s angry about something.

 

“Kids, Dinah,” he mutters to me in the safety of his room. “I can’t turn a blind eye to that sort of thing. I think of something like that happening to Lian and-”

 

The look in his eye, that righteous anger that burns within all of us hero types, makes me pause and reconsider my decision to point out that he came to Thailand secretly, with no back-up, no plan, and few resources. But that’s Ollie. He leads with his heart.

 

And I, it seems, am led by something in a very different part of my anatomy, a thought that makes me blush and change the subject whenever Sonchai or Oliver ask me about my time marching along the Cambodian border with the Khmer. I feel like I’m lying to these two men, my friends, that I’ve been pretending to be something I’m not.

 

I try to forget about Nong and what happened in the jungle, and hope I don’t have to see her before I confront Vikhorn and leave this place.

 

Oliver is about a day or two away from a discharge when Sonchai stops by for a visit, Nong’s baby boy in his arms. I take the baby right away, cuddling it. Ollie watches, his eyes sad. He wanted to make a baby with me, once. And I refused.

 

Sonchai stays and talks with us politely for a few moments, and then excuses himself, saying he must visit a neighbor in another wing. I think he’s sensed the discomfort the child’s presence has aroused.

 

“Sonchai’s a funny guy,” Ollie told me, trying to eat the hospital-issue food with chopsticks and not looking at either me or the baby. “He’s dull as dirt, but mention rebirth or nirvana or relative truth and he perks right up. That’s what I love about this country,” he grins. “Everyone has a spiritual dimension, even mercenaries. Some of the biggest gangsters and crooks make merit by giving huge sums to the monasteries and donating to the poor. Makes you wonder.”

 

“About what?” I ask.

 

“About what the past five hundred years of Western civilization have been about. If we’d remained medieval we might have be smiling as much as the Thais.” He chuckles at that, and I’m glad, since he doesn’t smile as much as he used to. “Anyway, Di, you should have heard the conversation we just had. It was like Hindu science fiction!”

 

I used to love when he’d get like this, as excited as a little boy. There is something eternally youthful and passionate about Ollie; it’s largely responsible for his immeasurable charm. And so even though I don’t want to know what he and Sonchai were talking about, I encourage him.

 

“I thought he was going to kill me,” Ollie says, a bit sheepishly, shaking his head. “I insulted the Buddha, said that old Gautama was the greatest salesman in history. I was right, too. He was selling nothing. That’s what ‘nirvana’ means: nothing. As a cure for the great cosmic disaster most of us call life, he prescribed a rigorous course of meditation and perfect living over any number of lifetimes, with nothing as a final reward. D’you think anyone on Madison Avenue could sell that? But the whole of the Indian subcontinent bought it at the time. Today there are more than three hundred million Buddhists in the world and growing.”

 

“Well,” I muttered, bouncing the kid on my lap to make him giggle, “I guess you’d know. Did you tell him you were there?”

 

“Where?” Ollie asked, looking up.

 

“Heaven.”

 

He suddenly finds the cold noodles slipping off his chopsticks to be more interesting than my question. “I don’t talk about that much, with anyone.”

 

“But you realized the truth of it, didn’t you? In the end, there’s…nothing.”

 

Ollie shrugs. “I figure, life comes from nothing, from black holes in space, right? So we begin with nothing, as nothing, and then return there. Smoke and mirrors, just like old Gautama said. Magic. Which makes logic the biggest superstition since the virgin birth.”

 

I sigh. Same old Ollie. “I’m surprised Sonchai didn’t kill you.”

 

“Probably thought I was already dead,” Ollie chuckles, rubbing his thin face, the stubble making the movement of his hand sound like sandpaper grating over old paint. His arms look like sticks beneath his paper hospital-issue nightgown. “Can I…can I hold the kid?”

 

I meet his eyes for a moment, then look away. “Sure,” I say, standing and passing the baby over to Ollie, careful not to let the child’s feet get tangled in any of the tubes and IV lines running in and out of Oliver’s body.

 

“Cute little guy,” he says, grinning. The baby laughs, and makes a chubby fist around Oliver’s nose. “What’s gonna happen to him?”

 

I cross my legs, trying to find a more comfortable position on the hard plastic visitor’s chair. “Sonchai has a sister in the country: she’s promised to take care of him.”

 

“Huh,” Ollie grunts, and I know him well enough to know what that sound means. “You didn’t offer up a place?”

 

I’ve always had a temper. My mom used to say it was my greatest fault. But I try to control it, try to force it back down. A week ago, I thought he was dead. And now he’s asking me, yet again, to explain my lack of desire to raise a child?

 

“You know why I didn’t,” I manage, proud of myself. I kept calm.

 

“No orphans, right?” he asks, a little embarrassed. I think for a moment he’d honestly forgotten.

 

“Right.”

 

************************

 

I find myself standing once again before the doors of District Eight, watching as con artists and mercenaries disguised as policemen enter and leave the building. I didn’t tell Sonchai I was coming here today. Vikhorn is something I have to take care of on my own.

 

The station is exactly as I remember it, the paper cascading off desks and onto floors, the line of peasants waiting to pay tribute to their District Chief. Nong’s Big Man. The one who nearly got Ollie killed.

 

I knock on the office door, and am told in Thai to enter. Vikhorn rises a little, the map of crime areas in Bangkok framing his skull. I could kill him right now.

 

“Good afternoon,” he says, his English perfect. Last time I was here, he spoke no English at all. My eyes narrow. “Detective Jipeecheap isn’t here.”

 

“I’m not looking for Sonchai,” I tell him. “I’m looking for you.”

 

Is that fear in his eyes? Or simply anger? I don’t get the chance to find out, because what he says next puts my whole world into a tailspin.

 

“Sonchai’s in charge here, not me.”

 

I find it tough to breathe. And then it hits me: my friend is the Big Man. His fellow cops don’t treat him with disgust, it was respect I’d noticed in the squad room. His English, his worn clothing and monkish manner…it was all a lie. Sonchai is the one who had Jones executed, who kidnapped Ollie, who now controls the yaa baa ring.

 

When I’d asked him about Vikhorn and child prostitution, what had he said? “I do what I can.”

 

Bastard.

 

“I’m sorry you had to discover the truth in this manner,” Vikhorn tells me, his eyes still flashing lust. “You have been very brave, very honest. Very American. But this is not your country, farang,” he warns. “You do not understand the way the world works here.”

 

My palms ache, and I realize it’s because I’ve been clenching my fists so hard.

 

******************

 

Ollie and I are waiting at the airport for our connecting flight to Paris. There’s a six-hour layover, and he insists he’s strong enough to do some sightseeing.

 

“It’s been a long time since we were in Paris together, Pretty Bird,” he says against my hair. And he is better; the long weeks in the Thai hospital have helped him recover some lost weight, and the shadows around his eyes have receded a bit. But the malaria will always be with him, lurking in his blood stream, waiting to strike and weaken him. A souvenir from this country.

 

He hasn’t asked why I’ve been so quiet over the last few days. If he did, I wouldn’t know how to explain. I feel like a fool; Sonchai and his Khmer cronies played me for a fool, turned me into something I’m not. I just want to go back to Gotham and try to forget what happened. But my karma won’t let me, it seems.

 

I catch sight of them far off down the length of the terminal, approaching slowly. Sonchai and the baby, and Nong. I freeze up, and Ollie takes my hand, a question in his eyes that I have no answer for. By the time they reach us, every muscle in my body is tense and aching.

 

“Came to say goodbye,” Nong explains, taking the baby from Sonchai and handing it to me. They both have no problem meeting my eyes. I swallow hard and take the kid into my arms, patting his back.

 

“Who’s this lovely lady?” Ollie, ever the charmer, asks. He kisses Nong’s hand, introducing himself as Oliver Queen, international scoundrel. She giggles girlishly, a move I know she’s used on countless European and American businessmen as they offer to buy her for a night. Ollie seems to know it too, and plays along. He’s always like prostitutes; he says they cut out the bullshit factor. Maybe it’s just in Thailand that they increase it.

 

Sonchai comes closer to speak to me. “Vikhorn said you came to District Eight last week. What did he tell you?”

 

“Everything,” I reply, keeping my eyes open and honest. “I know what you are, now.”

 

“Do you?” he asks quietly, the light from the terminal windows catching his Buddhist necklace, making it glow like a fire against his dark skin. “He told you that you don’t understand the way things work here, Black Canary. And he was right.”

 

“Who is Nong?” I ask, glancing back at her and Ollie and their comfortable flirting.

 

“My sister,” he replies, and I close my eyes. Of course.

 

“Dinah, they just announced our flight,” Ollie says, touching my shoulder. I hand the baby back, kissing the top of his head one last time. I feel like I’m in a dream.

 

I watch as Ollie shakes hands with Sonchai and kisses Nong’s hand, then waits for me to say my final goodbyes. I have no idea what to do. I can’t arrest them, and I certainly don’t want to start a brawl in the middle of the Bangkok airport. I just need some time to think, need to escape from this strange, hot, crowded place. Truthfully, I just want to get to Paris, and get a room at the Hilton with Ollie, and use some of our old magic to burn away the new spell of Thailand.

 

Sonchai catches my hand, and pulls me close enough to whisper in my ear, “Take care of your karma, Dinah. And when you come back, remember that we are friends. That we always have been.”

 

I blink, Ollie takes my hand, and we’re off down the hall towards our gate. My last image of Thailand is the three of them, standing there, Nong and Sonchai making the baby wave ‘goodbye’. 

 

And I know in my heart they’ll be with me always, like every terrible and wonderful thing that’s happened in my life.

 

I’ll be back.

 

THE END