Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

By the time she’s actually at the gate at Kingsford Smith on Tuesday morning, she’s decided: when this is finished, if it’s finished, she’s going to learn to wear a suit like Arthur, tell a lie like Eames, network like Yusuf, and pull perhaps two per cent of Saito’s annual income over her first five years post-doctorate.

Not necessarily because she’ll need it, considering her share and the bonus, but because it’ll demonstrate to the rest of the goddamn planet that she’s earned every cent, licit and otherwise.

From Cobb, she can’t think of a single thing worth keeping that she hasn’t already winkled out. Someone would have introduced her to dreamshare, at some point, so she doesn’t feel any particular sentiment-driven loyalty to him that might last beyond this job. And honestly, you can only get stabbed in the chest with a fucking sword—dagger, letter-opener, katana, it doesn’t really matter when it’s buried three inches between your ribs—so many times by a snarling Frenchwoman before the cachet of an unstable widower on the run from multiple governments who keeps a homicidal French lady in his brain wears thin. The number of times, for her at least, is exactly one, and she blames Miles entirely for the thing where the same woman impugned her assumed romantic experience. Even though she was right. Thanks for that, Cobb.

Although the memory of Cobb’s dead wife behind his squint has its uses. Such as securing her own intercontinental travel arrangements the night the elder Fischer had bit it, and Arthur’s tutelage in the application of handguns over the last highly illuminating weekend in New South Wales. They’d only gotten back to Sydney yesterday, twenty-five hours for turnaround.

Everything this morning has been lowkey, each arranging their own transit to the airport and wending through security theater alone. Granted, now Cobb and Saito are hanging out at the window in view of half the terminal, probably competing to see who can provide the least information in the most abstracted terms and the most portentous intonation, but Saito’s so rich no one can bring themselves to care what he does, or with whom.

Meanwhile, the person who is the girl who is Ariadne Finch is sitting on her own in two months’ rent of white collarless quilt-stitched jacket and patterned silk blouse and black denim and butter-soft knee-high boots, surrounded by actual strangers and rereading a Borges collection (she can’t help herself, they’re such easy jabs, it’s fucking called Labyrinths, but she’s hung the rest of her life on this job and she may as well have her fun in the margins). Every so often, as she comes to the end of a particularly twisty paragraph, she glances up, letting her gaze skitter around the gate, from Saito and Cobb with their backs to the crowd, to Eames people-watching and pretending to do a crossword (probably figuring out which rude words interlock best), to Yusuf, curly head bent over a pharmacology journal, to Arthur’s double-breasted waistcoat and New Yorker and, once, his smile-frown as he catches her looking. She gazes back blankly for a moment, letting her eyes unfocus, before she returns to her book; in her peripheral vision, she notes him shaking his head and smiling for real.

Only six days ago, Arthur had been violently opposed to her being on the SYD–LAX flight—and thus in on the job—at all, although he’d hidden it flawlessly in the workshop the night Maurice Fischer died. As she had carved an Ariadne-shaped cavity labeled necessary element of job into Cobb’s guilty conscience, using Arthur himself as the chisel (but being fucking quiet about it), he’d been only efficient blankness. He’d kept the front as Cobb told Saito to get another seat, as he himself asked Cobb whether he could lock up the warehouse, and then as he casually offered her a ride back to the 14th arrondissement. By modulating his tone only fractionally, he had made it eminently clear that the offer was not optional.

The ride, it turned out, had been cover for Arthur’s true mission of swearing at her. In seven languages, as far as she could tell, before he launched into an English-language tirade on her crime of being a new moving part, a new variable, a new responsibility. His voice rose in volume, flat and over-enunciating, each time she tried to reply, until just as he parked she finally lost it and bellowed, “Eat shit—” which had, to her surprise, made him shut up, and continued stridently, “and vent your beleaguered fucking spleen to Miles,” which had made him stare.

The ensuing conversation was, for purposes of plausible deniability, moved from Arthur’s leased Peugeot to her minuscule apartment. It had been a fascinating verbal coalescence of scattershot data into a beautifully detailed pointillist schematic, probably, for Arthur, and an ever-increasing headache for her. Sometime past midnight, it had finally dwindled to him leaning back on her blanket-swaddled couch and saying, “Fine. Last thing. You ever handled a gun?”

That had almost made her laugh, but a particularly sharp spike of pain behind her eyeballs cut it off before it could start. “No. We’ve been over this. Dramatically.”

He’d ignored that. “So you’re gonna learn.” He looked at the ceiling and drummed his fingers against the sole of his shoe. After ten seconds, she’d given up and gone to the kitchen for ibuprofen. “You’re getting to Sydney on your own, I don’t care how,” he’d finally said, “but you’re doing it in the next thirty-six hours, because—” Arthur had slipped a mini Moleskine out of his trouser pocket, neatly removed one of the perforated pages, and started writing with his little space pen, the one that she’s certain he uses on the go specifically because it’s small enough not to mess up the lines of his suits, no matter how many parts of them he’s wearing. She’d tipped two tablets into her palm and replaced the bottle before he resumed speaking. “This Saturday morning, seven forty-five AM local time, you’re meeting me in Surry Hills, and we’re visiting my friend Dana for the weekend, because I am not covering for you in Yusuf’s head for a week of dreamtime, I don’t care what the professor orders.” He lifted one eyebrow, pinning her with a look. “Clear?”

“Crystal,” she’d said through gritted teeth, and swallowed the two tablets dry without breaking eye contact.

“Good,” he’d replied, and beamed, so suddenly it shook her more than any of his swearing could have. “It’ll be fun. Forward me your itinerary.” He’d stood, slapped the note against the table, checked his pockets, and added, “Drink some water. I don’t know about you but dry-swallowing pills gives me heartburn. ’Night, Ariadne.”

And he’d left, closing the door gently behind him.

The notebook page—7:45 AM SATURDAY. SINGLE O, 60-64 RESERVOIR STREET, SURRY HILLS. BATCH BREW TO GO, which she supposed was no more than she deserved—had a smiley face with devil horns.

She’s only been Ariadne for three months, to Miles and the five men she’s been working with. Three of those six definitely know it’s a front, one because he named it, one because he built it, and one because it’s his job to know things. Saito might know, or could know, but in either case likely doesn’t give a shit because he’s above the maneuverings of the peasants doing things for him. Cobb will never find out, because he has no reason to. Yusuf has no reason to, either, but he and his contacts seem worth cultivating, so she’ll probably let it slip at some point.

If they keep up.

It’s blatantly clear—and would be even to naïve Ariadne—that it’s not protocol for people working a con (listen to her) to become pen pals. Not exactly the kind of relationship where you send each other Christmas newsletters. But they have to remain in touch somehow; they’ve been in each other’s heads, sure, but meatspace still requires speaking, phone calls, email, fucking telegrams for all she knows. Arthur probably manages off memory and burner phones alone; she envisions Eames keeping little tea- and wine- and brandy- and blood-stained stacks of notes in a recipe box, likely in code only he understands. The others—well, she’ll find out.

She fully intends to remain relevant to the circles of dreamshare research and exploitation, once this job is over. Assuming the end result isn’t prison. Or worse.

Dream crime, when it goes wrong and gets noticed, generally ends with worse, which is to say the unraveling of a person’s trail into loose ends and rumors. She’s found a single weblog by someone signing themselves “YungCarlG,” which is so staggeringly obvious the writer is probably a genius, that elaborates more helpfully on “rumors” beyond words like “disappearance” and “missing in action” and “off the map.” It mentions black sites, alphanumeric soups of intelligence operations, high-security prisons, solitary confinement, psychiatric torture. The last chronological post, and thus the first visible, is timestamped eight months ago, although that could mean anything, and it says only, “Ta for now.” When she read it weeks ago in Paris, the skin on the back of her neck crept as she evaluated the odds that she was, herself, falling for a text-based practical joke of Eames’s. However, after she’d dropped a remark about Jung while they were ferrying sandwiches the next day, he’d just asked why on earth the good schools were still teaching that Freudian shite. Then made a dick joke.

Granted, she does want to learn to lie like him.

But until she knows for a fact that they are in the clear—until the money’s in the account under her real name (which Cobb, neatly, thinks is an alias), until the text message clear -v (as in vark, as in aardvark, as in the cartoon, because Arthur—beneath the bespoke tailoring and the unnerving facility with firearms—is among the worst fucking dorks on the planet) appears on her job phone, until Fischer Morrow dissolves and fuck every hipster academic in Paris who’s going to give her shit for her new e-subscriptions to nine different business news web publications—she is operating under the assumption that the worst-case scenario after this flight is life in a forensic psychiatric hospital, consciousness optional.

She feels comfortable with this, for the revised value of “comfortable” she’s felt about everything that’s happened since her mid-March adviser meeting with Dr. Stephen Miles.

***

On a Wednesday ten weeks into term, during a routine catch-up on her independent research toward her doctoral thesis, Miles—an award-winning architect with a legendary portfolio, fantastic credentials, and a whisper-network reputation as a genuinely good guy, and thus rare as hen’s teeth—folds his hands over the folder containing her latest summary and two-week plan and says, “I won’t insult you by extending this pretense in which you need my feedback on the thesis work. So, let’s discuss extracurriculars.”

She dips her chin politely, despite her confusion, and replies, “I’ll appreciate your feedback at any point, regardless, professor. Extracurriculars?”

“You’ve an outstanding portfolio, admirable adaptability, clear facility with self-directed research, a fascinating sense for the edges of physical possibility, and—” He gives the smallest of smiles. “An excellent face for aliases.”

It takes her two tries to say “Pardon?” in the correct language. Smooth.

“Aliases. Noms de guerre. Have you acted?”

“In undergrad,” she says, surprised into verbal laxity, and then catches herself and clears her throat. “I was in some of my university’s productions. Why is this of interest?”

“Your undergraduate. At—?”

“You have my CV,” she says, and nods at the desk, at her own folder. “Left-hand pocket, as usual.” She repeats, hearing the slight chill entering her own tone, “Why is this of interest?”

He smiles again, a neat little curve of his mouth that suggests immense satisfaction. “Right temperament for it as well. I’ll tell you,” he says, when she opens her mouth to ask again, “I just wanted to be sure. I’ve some connections in a field with some very interesting opportunities, but it also happens to be a field where...” For the first time in the conversation—in the ten minutes since she entered his office—he pauses and looks down at his own folded hands, apparently working out his phrasing. “Where it may be wisest to use some obfuscation. Plausible deniability. Some layers between the working face and the actual person.”

She waits, until he goes wry and says it plainly. “A false identity. To avoid attaching criminal enterprise to a perfectly good international record.”

There we go. She lifts her chin to one side, keeping her eyes on his—when she’s had reason to use this posture in conversation with people in her age group, they’ve tended to spill their guts in moments, although she knows she’s not remotely intimidating in any traditional sense of the word. “Architecture where my portfolio quality is relevant doesn’t seem like it would lend itself to criminality,” she says. Illegal construction (shock-doctrine building projects, vast sums and human lives under the table) isn't done by people of Miles's ilk, and the only other things that come to mind are building code contravention and Gehry lawsuits. At Miles's level—which he's suggesting is her level—those are solved problems, too: you just do it right and make that part of your worth.

“It doesn’t seem so, no,” Miles replies, even more drily than usual, and she knows as surely as she knows her name that he’ll give her no further detail. “In one-on-ones and external meetings with me, you’ll be answering to Ariadne.”

That makes her blink. “The spider girl?” She catches her own mistake immediately, shaking her head at herself. “No, of course, that’s Arachne. Dammit, professor, I’m an architect, not a lit major.”

“And a Trekkie?”

“Generational osmosis,” she says vaguely, trying to remember the Bulfinch table of contents. “Ariadne. Ariadne.”

“Theseus. Minotaur in the labyrinth—”

“Oh.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “See, no wonder I got her mixed up. Red thread, spinning.”

“No difficulties at all on the temperament front,” Miles says, apparently to himself, before he adds, “The name suits your background. Classicist father, ah—”

“Literary deconstructionist other father,” she supplies for him. “Hippie surrogate mother.” She loves her dads, and she loves Harmony, but, well, she’s Harmony—and suddenly she catches her breath. “Wait. This—being Ariadne, and whatever follows. What’s the risk to them?”

“Nil,” says Miles immediately, and so firmly—how he imbues a single syllable with that much authority is beyond her—that she trusts the answer before he begins elaborating. “I’ve a gent—for certain interpretations of the term—he’ll spin up Ariadne…hm. I hadn’t considered a surname yet. He’ll build Ariadne out of thin air. Nothing pointing to you or yours.”

“Finch,” she suggests. “As a last name.”

“If you like, certainly—ah, clever.”

She dips her chin again, accepting the compliment. “Is there significance to the myth?”

“Oh, possibly.” Miles waves one hand, like he’s not thinking about it too hard. So he’s definitely thinking about it, but he doesn’t want to make it a thing for her to think about. “It shares the first few syllables of your legal name, which lowers risk. If a classmate recognizes you in the street, the people who know Ariadne will understand why you respond—those in the department mostly call you Ari, I believe?”

Reason enough. Still, after he lets her go—with three packets of printed-and-stapled scans of journal papers, probably more leads for her thesis—she finds one of the softcover dotted-grid notebooks she always buys too many of at the beginning of the semester and writes, on the third page, “LABYRINTHS.” She sticks the notebook in her brown leather satchel, thinking about House of Leaves and cursing herself for a doomed hipster.

***

Later, she’s flipping lazily through the stacks and stacks of used books that her favorite shop hasn’t gotten around to organizing yet. Her fingernail, ragged from an adventure with lugging modeling supplies up to the studios earlier in the week, snags on the jacket of a hardcover book called—in English, which is a little surprising—Art of the Maze. There’s doodling in black marker all over the edges of the pages, a key pattern into something like Celtic knots into spiderweb-like spokes into Voronoi polygons. Someone after her own heart, although she’s trained herself to scribble only on unbound paper and her own notebooks.

She frowns at it, flips through it, and frowns again, considering. Henriette, a woman in her sixties who co-owns the shop, is ten feet away with a laptop and a pad of stickers, pricing new additions. She wanders over and shows her the book; Henriette takes a look at the rips in the jacket, the marked-up page edges, and the 1990 printed price, and just grimaces.

“How much?” she asks anyway.

“I’d pay you to get that out of my shop.”

Henriette has uncommonly strong feelings about books.

“Really?”

“It’s making me sad to look at.”

“I’m going to take you seriously,” she says, and watches Henriette as she opens her satchel—with the LABYRINTHS notebook on top of the reading Miles gave her—and slides Art of the Maze in. When it’s ensconced in brown leather, Henriette’s face goes slack with relief.

“Take it away,” she says, and makes a shooing motion. Ari does, feeling not unlike the protagonist in the first two chapters of a middle-grade fantasy novel, where the normal kid is on the way to finding out she can do magic.

***

In her end-of-day ritual, a bit after ten, she sits on one of the ladder-back chairs at her all-purpose living-area table and empties her bag—the main compartment, anyway, leaving her wallet and cell phone and pens and chap stick in their dedicated secondary pockets—onto the surface. The bag goes on the floor (that phone has survived far worse) while she sorts through the day’s catch.

Her research notes, the hard copies, are in a hard-bound letter-size notebook. She looks them over first, scrawls marginalia in purple ink on what needs synthesis, distillation, expansion, and follow-up, marks the next clean page with a Post-It flag, and sets the notebook on its front cover to her left. Progress report in its blue folder; she ignores her CV, skims the report, circles Miles’ two comments (materials considerations? and projected timeline encouraging; she scowls at the first), and sets it face-down on top of the notebook. Miles’s readings; the first is vintage Elsevier, and its title is Meta-analysis of symbolism and symbolic objects (“Jesus, more?” she mutters) in therapeutic lucid dreamshare.

She’s nearly flipped past when the last four words register.

It was published thirty-eight years ago in Analytical Oneirology, which—it’s not that she has the Elsevier catalog memorized, but she feels certain she’d have heard of this one if it were still operating. Three of the authors were licensed psychiatrists, two with the Mayo Clinic and the third at McLean. The fourth author, Marie Gabriella de Luce-Miles, was a Ph.D. affiliated with the UC Berkeley department of neuroscience.

On the second-to-last page of the packet, before three-quarters of a page of references, are the notes from the authors: M.G.L.-M. thanks Dr. Stephen Miles for his illuminating assistance, discussion, and efforts to provide sustenance.

The next paper, twelve years after the first in the same journal, is Implementations and role-specific ramifications of intentional spatial modifications to dreamscape on participants in lucid dreamshare. Stephen Miles is the fourth of seven authors, listed as a postdoctoral fellow at the École. Finally, a fifteen-year-old article from Oneirological Neurochemistry: Qualitative and quantitative investigation of psychoactive pharmaceutical additives in consciensomnegic agents on internal and external qualia of lucid dreamshare. She doesn’t recognize any of the contributors, but the reference list includes five works co-authored by M.G. de Luce-Miles or S. Miles, including one collaboration.

She starts reading Meta-analysis, purple pen in hand. On the third paragraph, she gets up and retrieves a highlighter from the shelf over her drafting table. Halfway through the second page, she fetches her laptop and moves to the blanket nest on the couch, leaving the rest of the crap on the table.

Around midnight, she makes tea.

At half past two, her browser has forty-seven open tabs.

A little before six, she has three thousand words of notes arranged in a four-level outline in a .txt file.

When the sun rises, she e-mails Miles, subject line Assigned reading from yesterday, message body Came across a thread I’m following independently; I regret that I won’t be on campus today. -A

Fifteen minutes later, he replies: Do remember to eat. My classroom tomorrow 13:00. Cheers

***

When she enters his classroom—his preferred workspace, a smallish lecture hall where he teaches his two groups of undergrads about theory four days a week—she’s nearly vibrating, half caffeine (she did sleep Thursday night, just…not much) and half inquisitiveness. Miles doesn’t even look up. He keeps his eyes on some poor second-year’s paper as he says, “Your investigation will be vastly more cohesive than my pitching anecdotes at you, and I’ve neither patience nor time for it. Courier dropped that for you.” He jabs his pen in the direction of a brown envelope, letter-size, sitting on the corner of his desk nearest the door, and goes back to cutting the second-year down to size.

“Courier,” she repeats absently, as she picks it up. Padded and opaque with clear packing tape across the seal; blank except for a single word in neat, lightly penciled letters above the tape. Finch. She opens her mouth to ask—

“Discretion, et cetera, Miss Finch,” says Miles, dry as dust.

“Of course, professor,” she replies, sticks the envelope in her bag, says, “Thank you,” and leaves.

In her apartment, she naps, first, because the systemic letdown of two days of brain buzz followed by a neat and absolute rebuff by a septuagenarian is a bit much on this little sleep.

When she’s up, she cuts the envelope open and tips its contents onto her bedspread.

On top of the stack is a US passport issued four years ago—and looking it—for Ariadne Josephina Finch, who was born in the state of California (where she’s never set foot) on the sixteenth of June (a Gemini—Harmony would be horrified) going on twenty-one years ago (oh, fuck off, she thinks at Miles’s ‘gent’). It uses the headshot from her own driver’s license, last updated when she was twenty, which—she’s mostly furious because it passes easily for a sixteen-year-old. The first fourteen pages of the passport are stamped, recording yearly travel between the US and France and one-offs to Belgium, Switzerland, the UK, Germany, and Japan.

There’s also Ariadne’s French student visa, US social security card, birth certificate (parents Nicole Penelope Burroughs-Finch and William Joseph Finch), California driver’s license (organ donor; photo from her undergraduate department’s website before she talked them into removing it, which has… interesting implications), and her voter registration card (Democrat, at least). Transcripts from the École (one term in a master’s program, commensurate with Ariadne’s age, assuming she’s a precocious shit; her adviser is the woman who led her first-year master’s extension project) and, before that, from Cornell (she grimaces), and before that, from a public school system outside of San Francisco. A health insurance card, debit card, and credit card, all in Ariadne’s name.

Beneath all the odd-sized stuff, there’s a four-page debrief of account access information and Ariadne’s bullet-point life story: billionaire parents, Montessori school, flutist in the high-school marching band, two boyfriends from undergraduate. Finch is either straight or closeted. She supposes she can work with it.

The final item from the envelope is a surprise. A half-sheet of creamy heavyweight stationery, no letterhead but an embossed frame, swirls of emerald-green cursive. It’s another magical artifact in this double-life fantasy, even with the misspellings.

Little bird,

You’re quite clever I’m aware, but unless you’ve been very very clever indeed, evidents suggests this is your first go. From an old hand to an ingenue: This is not simply taking a name. You embody a PERSON each time you interact with the audiance i.e. world. This person is fundamentally different from you, for all your physical sameness. She exists in different modes. For verysim believablity an unquestionable undoubtable PERSON, THEORY OF MIND matters. As noted, you’re quite clever you’ll be fine.

Just Don’t fuck it up.

On the back:

PS Apartment now under Finch beginning August last, rent records supporting.

PPS Cards lend credence but cash more flexible.

PPPS Safes are good. Healthy paranoia.

PPPPS Keep your sets straight and separate: hers, yours.

VERY LAST PS Dosh in the bank is a favour to the good professor, use at your discretion to kit out MISS FINCH.

It’s unsigned, of course.

She retrieves her laptop from the couch side table and sits back down, cross-legged, on her bed. First, tech crap: partitioning the laptop’s drive, hiding her main account and setting it to boot automatically in Ariadne’s name. Next, getting all of Finch’s accounts in order, which is to say changing all the dummy passwords and checking the profile info (Finch’s checking balance and credit line are two and four orders of magnitude higher than her own, respectively; dosh indeed). Then examining the bank statements, which are fraudulent, of course, but their depth and breadth is astonishing.

As noted by Green Ink, the records of rent payments for her own apartment begin seven months ago. She’s been in the attic-level one-bedroom for four years now, but the building has changed hands—agencies—twice, and she only deals with occasional form e-mails and monthly direct deposits to something that looks rather like a shell corporation. It’s not sketchy, it’s just… impersonal, and it means that she won’t have a nosy landlord showing up at her door demanding explanations.

Ariadne Finch shops at J. Crew, Anthropologie, and the kind of thrift store that markets itself as vintage (she’s subscribed to their newsletters; her email inbox is a treasure trove of twee header designs). She wears jeans from Seven for All Mankind. Her monthly budget for hair care and cosmetics is more than she herself has spent on the same in four years.

Which brings her to her first major undertaking, beyond this preliminary research.

She looks at herself in her bedroom mirror, which mostly exists to remind her, forcibly, of the necessity of changing out of her pajama pants before she leaves the apartment. While her face can read young—as Miles’s green-inking gent so kindly exploited—her current sleep-mussed tied-up hair and under-eye circles stick her near her own age, which won’t do at all. She fusses for half an hour with her very small stash of drugstore makeup and hair-styling products and arrives at something—a look—that puts her squarely at twenty, if not younger. Hair parted a bit to the side to mask her grown-out fringe, smoothed at the top, curl emphasized with a little mousse, fresh-faced with concealer and gloss. Eyes rounded a little with white liner on the waterline and curled lashes, a light hand with brown mascara.

Fine. Next up, wardrobe. Right now, she’s in jeans from the boy’s section at Old Navy, worn thin as paper and soft as pajamas, with an oversized grey henley over a red camisole. Her standby jacket—her beloved greenish-grey leather moto, dug up in a New England thrift store seven years ago—is flung on the couch… and it won’t do at all. Green Ink, regardless of spelling and making her twenty fake years old, makes a decent point: the differences will make Ariadne, will create the distinction between Ariadne and herself and reinforce all of the differences in what each of them knows. Because she’s pretty certain that, even if Miles is making her introductions, she’s not going to be operating as his girl on the ground, not overtly.

Which means her favorite jacket is going into temporary retirement. The weather is just about too warm for her to need it, but she still sighs as she hangs it up properly, gives it a pat, and reviews the rest of her closet.

Twenty is young for grad school, and no matter how rarified her life has been, Ariadne Finch knows that. Finch knows that the deck is stacked against her, as a girl in a field dominated by men in a country where she’s working in a second language. It stands to reason, then, that she’d want her clothes to project… seriousness, at the very least. Not like she’d be in skirt suits for studio, but boy jeans are out.

She goes through her stockpile of interview clothes. Flat-front chinos in greys and browns, a couple skinny but most loose in the thigh and boot-cut. One pair of dark-rinse boot-cut jeans. They’ll do to start, although the brands aren’t what Finch is used to. For shoes, she has a pair of brown lace-up boots with a bit of a heel and thick soles. Not formal, but more polished than her own slip-on sneakers or shitkickers, and she can still ride a bicycle in them. On top… Her crew-neck t-shirts are out. Tanks and scoop necks and button-ups are probably workable, as base layers. The cardigans, the fine-woven ones (not the one she lifted from her grandfather)—they’ll be good.

For everything else, she goes back to her laptop and finds three style blogs, one Parisian, one San Franciscan, and one wherever the photographer happens to be.

In ten more minutes, she’s dressed to take Ariadne Finch shopping, in khakis and those lace-up boots and a windowpane plaid blouse over the red tank. As a finishing touch, she finds the Hermès scarf her dads gave her after she secured her two bachelor’s degrees and loops it around her neck. Accent piece, accent color, the kind of shit someone with Ariadne’s money would care about.

The first errand, of course, isn’t shopping at all. She visits Ariadne’s bank (there’s a branch nearby) and withdraws five hundred euro, then opens a safe-deposit box. To establish the thing, she has her best jewelry, a set of opals—pendant necklace on a white-gold chain, drop earrings, a beautiful little ring that just fits—that her grandmother gave her for her sixteenth birthday. She’s never even worn them, they’re too precious, but they’re a solid item to put in the box—along with Ariadne’s more valuable papers. Birth cert, social security—she’s memorized the nine digits already.

Her first material purchase as Ariadne is a safe, a sturdy little dude, with a really good lock (and she knows from locks). She has it delivered to her apartment directly; it’s only an extra twenty euro (only!). It’ll go on the floor of her closet, as the home for her paperwork while she’s being Ariadne. Among whatever else. The phrase criminal enterprises is delightfully nonspecific.

The fun stuff starts then, as she kits out Ariadne. Tunic tops with interesting seam details, neck scarves and kerchiefs for color, sweater vests and textures and patterns. Ariadne is the daughter of billionaires and has learned to telegraph self-confidence through wearing things that attract attention.

And—she, standing in J. Crew that evening, just can’t resist—she wears red, the stuff that’s already in her wardrobe for layering, plus a long-sleeve button-up (for under the sweater vest) and a fine-knit merino-cashmere blend cardigan, a little cropped in the torso, with lovely long sleeves, that may be the single most expensive item she’s ever purchased with the intent to put on her own body. A jacket, too, scarlet corduroy, structured in the shoulder with crisp lapels.

To emphasize to herself the division of Ariadne from herself, she gets a new wallet, a woman’s one in sunny yellow-dyed leather and the polar opposite of the shitty ripstop nylon bifold she’s been using since undergrad. She stops for a moment in a café’s locked bathroom to move Ariadne’s IDs and cards there, plus the cash, having newly come to understand the idiom money burning a hole in the pocket.

Last, Sephora—duplicates of the stuff in her tiny stash, plus a good primer and setting spray and remover, but they’re upgrades, and actual color matches. She selects from among the cornerstone brands everyone knows by their ad campaigns, and spends possibly a little longer than an accustomed rich girl would just holding the bottles, gazing at the compacts, running her fingers over the packaging, feeling the smooth satisfying weight of materials considerations done right. Aesthetics are aesthetics and she’s a designer; it’s just what she does—but she steers far clear of the really dangerous stuff (that would be the perfume) for her own good and the sake of sticking to a schedule. These establishing purchases go on the credit card, because Ariadne is due for a shopping trip. Her haul isn’t enough to make a blip in Ariadne’s spending habits, but it’s more than her own checking balance, all told.

Which is fine, because she’s Ariadne now. At least, some of the time.

***

Saturday, she wakes up to an email from Miles sent two hours previous, asking her to meet at a café, which is…nonstandard. It’s also for a time about ten minutes after she peels herself out of her research-binge recovery sleep, and the chosen café is a fifteen-minute walk with no convenient Vélib’ station combos, according to Google. She drags on yesterday’s jeans, shoves her sock feet into sneakers, yanks a black sweater over her head without bothering to take off her pajama top, and jets.

She doesn’t even think of Ariadne until she’s actually standing at the outdoor table where he’s camped out, despite the briskness of the day. He has a pot of tea for himself, and he’s ordered a mocha and a croissant for her. She drops her bag and sits. “Sorry for the delay.”

“Not a problem.” He sets his own cup down and folds his hands on the iron tabletop. “I’ve—regarding Miss Finch,” he says, and his face is strange, blank with cautiousness gleaming in his eyes. “On Monday, I’ll be introducing you to a—a—” She’s never heard the man stammer. “Well, to my son-in-law.”

Thus the hesitation. She raises her eyebrows, genuinely surprised.

“If you’re interested, it’s an entrance to the applications of architecture in the subject I had you reading on, in the context we discussed.” She catches the neat avoidance of identifying nouns. Miles sort of smiles then, but it’s utterly without humor. “I would personally appreciate it,” he says, “if you’d accept this. My son-in-law is brilliant, but troubled, and I’m of the opinion he requires… watching. And a knock over the head sometimes.”

It takes her a moment—two or three moments—to reply, as she lines this up and distills it. “You want me to babysit.”

“I do have your CV,” he responds. “The psychology background—that’s an interesting skillset.”

The rush of pre-caffeine anger—skillset, like all the fuckers she met at undergrad parties who went “Oh, so fix me”—is more than she’s prepared for; her field of vision pulses. “You want your son-in-law analyzed? By me?” She sneers, and she knows it’s unprofessional and she keeps her voice down because they’re in public, but for fuck’s sake— “It’s a bachelor’s. In neuro, not even psych. Where’s his wife? Your daughter?”

Anguish crosses Miles’s face, there and gone, but so intense for a moment that her mouth goes dry as her annoyance shatters. “Dead,” he says, flat and heavy as lead, and drops his gaze to his own fingers. “Thus my son-in-law’s troubles.”

“I’m sorry,” she says immediately. “For your loss.” For her attitude, but she thinks he knows that.

“It’s been rather a mess,” he replies, like he’s commenting on Métro maintenance. Then, flicking his gaze back up to meet hers, he says, “Regardless of your additional interests and my presumptions of their applicability, your architectural skills are everything the business could wish for, and it’s a very lucrative opportunity. I’d be introducing you no matter who offered it, if they’d happened to come to me first. I only—” He presses his lips together and goes back to examining the crumbs next to his teapot. “His associates—his main associate, really, is very loyal to him, which is of course excellent in their line of work, but I’ve rather a vested interest in the finer details of his stability.” He makes a little noise, like a sigh melded with a laugh but swallowed before it can become either. “Considering he’s the father of my grandchildren.”

She remembers the framed photos around his actual office—a watchful girl and a little blond boy with a smile that splits his face, two or three years apart; the girl might be seven in the most recent. She swallows. “So, if I accept this—contract?”

“Job.”

“If I accept the job, I do the work he gives me and keep an eye on him. Your son-in-law. For your—”

“Peace of mind.” He watches her now, eyes level. “You’d…watch him. Send me updates. I’d advise, if something came up that required it.”

She likes Miles, and she’s thinking about what her life would have been like without one of her dads, or without Harmony, as she says, “Sir, I’d—” She flounders. “I don’t know if I can—if I’d even—ethically speaking—”

“Ten per cent on top of your share,” he says, without blinking. “I trust you.”

The three words hit her like a punch, if a punch could be reassuring, and if he’s onto talking numbers he means it.

He goes on speaking. “My son-in-law, of course, would not be aware. Nor would the rest of your colleagues—there’ll be some, his associate and another few. Miss Finch would know nothing but that it was a paying job, if that’s within your capacity.”

THEORY OF MIND matters, says Green Ink. “Doable,” she says, and then, “What’s the… share?”

He tells her.

“Twenty per cent,” she replies, mostly to see what happens, and to find out how steadily she can speak while mentally processing the figure. Her voice is smooth and cool and crisp as the fine-woven silk of that Hermès scarf. Miss Finch’s signature.

Miles tongues the inside of his own cheek; he’s trying not to smile, she realizes. “Fifteen.”

“Twenty.” It’s an additional responsibility, after all. One of unknown magnitude, on a job that’s already risky. And she wants to know where this goes.

He sighs without the slightest hint of actual distress as he reaches into his coat pocket. He sets a cell phone on the table, next to her croissant. “Twenty.”

“Done,” she says.

“You noted your background, yes?” Miles says. “Do dress the part Monday, Ariadne.”

“Of course, professor.”

***

A little after noon on Monday, two hours before she’s supposed to meet her adviser’s son-in-law, the phone Miles gave her buzzes with a text: Please come by classroom earliest.

She puts her studio desktop to sleep and stands, attracting the attention of Etienne across the aisle. “Interview?” he says, and she evaluates Ariadne Finch’s clothes in the context of her own peers: dark-rinse jeans, brown boots, henley top and floral-patterned scarf and the structured scarlet corduroy jacket.

“Sort of,” she says. “Testing the waters. First meet later today.” She shrugs at him, he shrugs back, and she goes to Miles.

He’s in his lecture hall, and looks—well, first, he looks her over, slightly bewildered, and says, “Lord, you are taking this seriously, aren’t you.”

“Sir?” she replies, avoiding the bait.

“No, I need you for this. Finch comes later.”

She nods and relaxes, cocking a hip and folding her arms over her chest—Ariadne wouldn’t do the attitude, not in a one-on-one with a superior. “At two, right?”

“Two. I’ve—” He checks his watch. “All right, time. I mentioned… my daughter.”

“That she passed away.”

“It’s—the circumstances were—” He swallows and folds his hands, then spits it out. “Extremely poor, and extremely onerous on my son-in-law. More than I’d understood previously, and his associate provided a… distressing report. I met Dom this morning—that’s my—Dominic Cobb, Mr. Cobb, my daughter’s husband—and—” He pauses, shakes his head minutely, and goes on. “I’m throwing you into a pit of vipers,” he says. “I don’t even know what kinds, necessarily.”

She waits for him to condense, synthesize, convert this meandering into something concrete—and he doesn’t.

So she does it for him. “I like snakes,” she says lightly, and dips her chin, an affirmative to an unasked question. “You have my word. I’ll be there.”

The look then—gratitude of a depth she can’t deserve; she hasn’t done anything yet—knocks the floor out from under her, but she keeps standing, keeps her eyes and voice steady. “Two o’clock. I’ll be there, and afterward.” Humility and caution force her to add, “Assuming he wants to hire me.”

“Safe assumption, unless he’s gotten too stupid to deserve you,” Miles says, and nods her out.

***

Miles’s son-in-law is a blond man in his thirties and dad pants who looks like he needs a week of sleep, and the way Miles is with him in all thirty seconds she sees shoots secondhand anxiety up her spine. It’s like there’s a mile of ice water under whatever fragile bridge they’re standing on now, but they are not her business, and Ariadne doesn’t even know they’re related. She shakes Mr. Cobb’s hand, plays ingenuous, polite, and a little surprised (it’s not the normal way one comes across a recruiter), and agrees to walk and talk.

He tells her, Ariadne—he pronounces it like a fucking operetta, ah-ray-odd-neigh—that the job is not, strictly speaking, legal. It’s almost cute. He speaks with odd emphasis, like he’s trying to make his words fit a certain poetic meter, but she’s willing to bet he’s just not used to dealing with twenty-year-old women. At least, not since he had been a twenty-year-old man.

When he hands her a pen and a spiral-bound graph-paper notebook and says he wants her to design a maze, she’s too distracted feeling self-satisfied (oh, possibly some significance; sure, Miles) to remember her book (which she had gotten to, that weekend) so her first try is amateur hour. On the second, she’s rushing and sloppy.

Cobb looks disappointed and distant, like he’s trying to figure out how to say she’s not good enough for the job, even as he’s giving her shit (going to have to do better than that), and she doesn’t even know what the job is but the payout, the compounded share, is sitting in the front of her mind, that and the desperation in Miles’s eyes, and she can’t tell which is more goading but she glares and snatches the notebook out of his hands, flips it over and starts with a sweeping arc and thinks this time, and finishes with seconds to spare, hands back the notebook and pen before he can tell her to quit.

The circle maze confounds him for the required minute, possibly more, and he’s pleased, although all he does is squint at the paperboard and say something appropriately cryptic for a man trying to recruit a first-year grad student from the straight and narrow onto something not strictly legal.

***

Tuesday morning, there’s an email from Cobb—presumably; it’s from [email protected] and signed DC—in Ariadne’s École inbox. I was impressed with your interview yesterday. I’d like to bring you on site today, whenever is convenient. I can meet you at the college and we’ll go from there.

The domain name points to a site with a minimalist grey-on-grey logo and no content, aside from the copyright notice at the bottom for the previous year. The source code shows nothing of interest, and although she knows that appearances are trivial for someone with experience, it doesn’t seem worth digging into right now. The name itself, meanwhile— Erebos is an alternate spelling of the name of a primordial god of darkness. Dreamshare practitioners do love their Grecian mythology.

For the second day in a row she puts on Ariadne, parting her hair on the left and doing the makeup and pairing black trousers with a grey-blue tunic top that has cool not-quite-princess seam details. Pink-and-grey floral-patterned scarf, brown boots, and that beautiful, beautiful cardigan. She meets Cobb a little after ten, before she sees anyone from the studio, and—she should have done this yesterday, but who can fault a first-year for not carrying copies to class at the end of March?—hands him printouts of her resumé and CV after she shakes his hand.

He barely glances at them, just folds them in quarters and puts them in his pants pocket.

“We’re set up in a workshop in the 16^th near Billancourt; my associate is there now,” he says, as she follows him down to the Métro.

“Associate?” she repeats. It’s the same word Miles used, clinical and distancing.

“My colleague. A friend. You’ll meet him.” His mouth shuts like a trap.

She gets ready for a silent, awkward ride, before he mentions his own architecture schooling in California, undergrad and a master’s. They burn ten minutes talking about undergrad coursework and studio hours and the way things have changed (CAD, mostly). Another ten discussing their favorites in the field, their sticking points and irrational peeves, and where she sees herself going when she’s done with academia, if she’s planning on being done with academia at all (she personally is on the fence, but Ariadne’s bouncing once she’s got her master’s).

For him, he says, something else had come along before he did any real projects, got his name on anything she could walk into. And Ariadne, of course, asks what the something else was, and he shifts his weight and looks at her with significance—he’s so blatant about it; it’d be charming if it weren’t so odd—and she says, “Oh, of course,” as if flustered, and asks how long he’ll be in the city, because everything from his canvas jacket to his pleat-front dad pants screams American, despite how casually he speaks of the neighborhoods and Métro stops.

“That depends on a great deal,” Cobb says, which she thinks is another deflection, but he elaborates. “Our calendar has significant flexibility, because the deadline itself is a moving target. Our client—we’re like a consulting agency—wants time for planning and practice. Our lease on the warehouse—our workshop—is six months, although it’s almost certain we’ll be moving on earlier.”

So we, whoever that is, have money to burn. “Where are you staying?” Ariadne asks, solicitous and curious and unaware that he’s Miles’s kid. Kid’s widower.

“La Défense—my associate chose a good hotel. Convenient for us.” Interesting, but then, just off the thirty seconds she spent in the company of both, it’s not terribly surprising that Miles isn’t falling over himself to host.

She’s almost surprised when Cobb remembers to ask, after too long a pause, “Is the 16th out of your way?”

She shrugs. “No more than the college.”

“Classes?”

“I’m only in a few,” she says smoothly (she hasn’t been in a formal class in sixteen months), “and studio time—I mean, you know about studio time, so I suppose that—”

“If you choose to work with us, we’ll have everything you need at the workshop.”

He interrupts. Rude. And everything you need sounds suspiciously like it’s intended to placate her.

But Ariadne would be amiably placated, so she simply says, “Cool,” and follows him out of the car and up to the street.

The warehouse-workshop isn’t far, a five-minute walk from the Métro station, with heavy paneled doors and gridded glass windows on three sides. Cobb opens one of the doors and heads in, not bothering to hold it for her, which—whatever, it’s just the poorest-run interview process she’s ever had. She lets the door fall closed behind her, which it does with vigor.

A figure at the back of the space (awash with sunlight, painted concrete floor and a weird assortment of furniture, including two incongruous lawn chairs in the middle of everything) looks over his shoulder at the sound. At this distance, she just sees patent-looking hair and his clothes. Far dressier than Cobb or herself; he’s got a dark brown button-up shirt tucked into close-cut grey-brown trousers, the color of a mourning dove’s feathers, and a waistcoat over the top. Vertical stripes down the back, and—as he turns to face the door fully, she sees—a plain front, in the same dove-colored fabric, with a diagonally striped tie that has a sheen like the inside of a shell. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, silver watch on his left wrist. He’s standing by a desk with a sleek-looking laptop and a stack of paper files, holding a Moleskine and a ballpoint pen. “Who’s this?” he says to Cobb, voice carrying easily. She can’t tell how old he is.

“Might be our new architect,” Cobb replies, and goes right to the table behind the lawn chairs to fiddle with a metal-sided briefcase. He unlocks it—it’s not a briefcase but a machine built into one, like an old oscilloscope minus the display—and Ari presses her lips together, trying not to smile. He’s just so bad at being an interviewer. She looks around instead, at the jumbles of stacked tables and dividers shoved against the walls, at decommissioned equipment of unknown purpose or status, at the watery sunlight flooding the room through the thick glass of the gridded windows.

The other guy approaches, shifting his pen to his notebook hand. Up close, his face is incongruously young for the clothes, the hair, the tone in which he says, “Cobb, you could tell me her name, at least,” over his shoulder, the way he clearly doesn’t expect Cobb to answer.

Cobb doesn’t. Instead, the guy gives her a look like he’s apologizing for everything to do with Cobb at once, inviting her to join him in generalized exasperation, and holds out his own hand. “Arthur,” he says.

“Hi,” she says, “um. Ariadne,” and shakes his hand. His grip is strong; she reflexively meets it, then catches herself and follows up with a tentative, “What’s your, uh, role here?”

“This and that,” Arthur replies unhelpfully, but he half-smiles as he says it.

“I have copies of my resumé and my CV,” she says. “Are those—are you part of—”

His half-smile goes wry, which is odd, but whatever. “I’ll have a look.” He skims her resumé, says, “Cornell, huh? I was Columbia,” and slips the papers under the cover of his notebook. Before she can remember whether the two Ivies have any special rivalry she should be posturing about, Arthur turns his head and asks loudly, “Cobb, you taking Ariadne under?” He says the name like a normal person, at least.

“Kind of the point,” Cobb says from across the space; he’s squinting into the machine that is the briefcase, goofing with vials of clear liquid and—medical tubing. IV tubing.

A portable automated Somnacin IV device. A PASIV. Which makes the clear liquid the Somnacin.

In the third chapter of the middle-grade fantasy novel, the protagonist first unequivocally experiences magic.

“Ariadne,” says Arthur, and she looks at him, affecting confusion, because taking her under doesn’t mean anything to the girl they’re interviewing. “Odd question for a first on-site, but how are you with needles?” He has a hint of an accent, Brooklyn-y. “Fainting, anything? It’s part of the job, so better we know now.”

“I’m fine with them,” she says truthfully, before blinking rapidly. Ariadne has no idea what the silver box is. “Why? What—you said under, could you—”

“This way, Ariadne,” Cobb says, having gotten the Somnacin configured to his liking, and he works the shit out of the vowels again. “Demo. Best way to get a feel for it.”

She blinks more, because really, and heads over. “What are you—what’s that?”

“Work equipment.” He has to know how useless that is; he has to know he’s the worst hiring experience anyone could ever have— “We—Arthur and I—the majority of what we do is, you see, in the mind. Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming?”

“Uh, sure,” she says, like she hasn’t spent the last week reading about it. “Like realizing you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming, and then you can do whatever you want.”

“Enough to start. Have a seat.”

She sits gingerly on the lawn chair aligned parallel to the table, feeling like an idiot, and takes off her lovely cashmere cardigan—mostly for something to do with her hands while she figures out whether she’s supposed to be lying down on the chair or sitting up straight or—whatever. She drapes the cardigan over the arm of the chair, drops her satchel on the floor next to it with the shoulder strap in easy reach, and watches as Cobb takes the second chair, perpendicular to her own, facing the table and the PASIV.

“Arthur, if you would.” It’s not even a question; Cobb’s kicking his legs out on the other lawn chair and rolling up the sleeve of his chambray shirt. “I have it set for the usual.”

Without comment, Arthur places a cannula in Cobb’s wrist and attaches the line from the PASIV. She swings her legs up and, slowly, still feeling like an idiot, leans against the back—it’s at least not at much of a recline. Arthur gives her a tight smile, swipes the inside of her wrist with alcohol, then says under his breath, “Little pinch,” exactly like a nurse doing bloodwork, and she wants to laugh at how utterly bizarre all of this is, but she just watches the butterfly needle go in and come out, leaving behind the cannula, and looks up at Cobb. He smiles at her for the first time. It looks like he’s forgotten how.

***

When she realizes, when her spoon rattles against the saucer, she thinks coldly, you fucking idiot. Then Cobb says, “Stay calm,” which goes predictably—fuck’s sake—she’s not scared, she’s furious with herself, and with having to hide it. Another window blows out, shrapnel ricocheting. You read about this, you knew what ‘going under’ meant, you’ve been talking about lucid dreaming and dreamshare for a goddamn hour, you humored his brain-use factoid three minutes ago, so fine, you’re dreaming, it’s a dream, this is a lucid dream now with elevated lucidity—

The explosions slow, and she looks at Cobb. He’s gazing at her with his sad eyes full of something like recognition, commiseration—and new anger surges in her at the tasteless espresso (she’d just thought Café Debussy was cutting corners) and the stereotypy of the street, but it’s not like she knows the 16th that well.

The problem is that she had bullshitted herself with that.

She is exactly the chump in every neurological case study she’s ever read about confabulation and filling-in and how brains fool themselves so goddamn easily, they’re tripping over their spinal cords to provide cohesive narratives, and it doesn’t matter how many papers she’s read about this, she didn’t see it—

—and the café itself explodes, collapses towards their table in an avalanche of brick and a shower of glass from that enormous front window. Cobb is covering his face. She demands why he’s bothering to, since it’s only dreaming, but before she gets the question out the cinderblock connects with a terrible sound and an indescribable feeling as her shoulder and skull give way—

***

She knows and cannot bring herself to care that she’s being a little shit on the second round. She’s babbling, a continuous stream-of-consciousness rant on the differences between virtual reality and projected reality, filled in reality. Keeping ahead of Cobb, letting loose on flip one-liners, cutting him off when he tries to sustain a lecture, because now she knows she’s dreaming, that she is standing in the middle of not-quite-Paris but at the same time she is asleep in the workshop on a lounge chair from someone’s back patio, and being down this rabbit hole is a rush. And Cobb keeps telling her, helpfully, that she’s building the world of the dream.

The word topology lodges in her mind and she stops still, suddenly enough that Cobb nearly bumps into her, and decides to take him at his plodding word.

She fucking builds.

To start, she folds the city in fucking half.

The parts of it she could plausibly see—a stretch of a thousand feet, call it—peel up from the substrate of whatever rests below pseudo-Paris (she sees the mistakes now, or the fudges, or whatever, the over-specificity of the grid patterns of the street). She adds right-angle hinges in two places, nudges the buildings into place so they’ll stack dormer-to-dormer, decides that it’ll be neatest for the direction of gravitation to remain normal to the plane of the street for any given section. It’s easier than orbital mechanics that way, although she gets distracted for a moment thinking about the actual physics of a taco city, but that’s for a procrastinating physicist or a decent computer to model, later.

Now, she has stuff to build, despite Cobb dogging her and the increasingly hostile looks from passersby. Cobb’s projections. His subconscious, personified but not, symbols of his underlying mental processes, and she recalls vaguely that one paper, role-specific ramifications, even as she rolls her eyes at Cobb’s bellyaching, but—a taco city.

She stands at an intersection with a roof set on four columns and decides it could be the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, under the right periodic boundary conditions, so she conjures mirrors and drags them both into place, invokes the uncanny valley of infinite reflection, countless Cobbs fading into greenish glassy distance (she tells the mirror trap that she only reflects once, because the feeling of breaking physics is fizzing in her veins like champagne). As a fuck-you to the exploding café, she holds her palm just away from the mirror in front of her and thinks, when I move closer, you’re going to shatter and you won’t even touch me, and it obeys.

She smiles.

The bridge is just like it is when she walks or bikes to the École, but pseudo-Paris is spread out above her, above the roof of the Bir-Hakeim. She takes off down the bridge, pleased, if “pleased” were any way to describe being God.

Cobb is—unnerved, behind her, his voice rising, about only building anew and never re-building memories, and she snarks the first thing that comes to mind—work with what you know, right? That makes him worse; he says never to use a full place, a real place, just details, a streetlamp or a phone booth, like those aren’t full real places in themselves, and he talks about losing the distinction, slipping from the knife’s-edge knowledge of the experiential doubling, about not being able to remember what’s real versus a dream.

“Is that what happened to you?” she flings at him over her shoulder, and she knows it’s a terrible thing to say, but the shock of Cobb grabbing her by the upper arm, hauling her face within inches of his—that paralyzes her.

“Listen to me,” he hisses, and she can’t even speak, she’s so shaken by the transmuting of his worry into anger, but her own fury is crawling up from the point where his fingers clamp around her arm—when did she ever say it was okay to touch her—cold and liquid, turning her nerves to ice. “This has nothing to do with me, you understand—”

Ariadne wouldn’t hit him, and besides, she has no good angle to. Instead, she lets her mouth twist and torques all of her fear, all of her fury, into sneering something else, something equally unforgiveable: “Is that why you need me to build your dreams?”

His face collapses, as surely as pseudo-Paris had, and she almost wants to apologize but not as much as she wants to shake his grip off her arm.

She does neither, because the projections lose their shit.

As Cobb growls and shoves one away she thinks wildly Converge is right— and then she can’t think anything but fuck, fuck, fuck as the hands close on her, two, five, a dozen, yanking her away from Cobb. He’s yelling something—Mall or Moll and NO—and panic rises in her chest as her voice rises into a shriek. It’s a dream, she’s terrified, she should wake up, it’s a dream and she should wake up right now, but she’s still wrenching uselessly against the hands on her arms, on her shoulders, her sides. The teeming projections split for a woman in a grey trench coat striding toward her like an entire army in one pair of heels and she can’t stop screaming, words ripping out of her throat, wake me up Cobb wake me up, and the woman lifts a fucking sword from her side and levels it.

Even in the shadow of the bridge the blade gleams before it sinks, just under her sternum with pain like—

***

—she flings herself forward, gasping and coughing, but the line is still in her arm and she can’t move farther than that and Arthur is crouching next to her and putting his hands on her, her shoulder and her wrist, saying pointless shit in an even tone, and she can’t fucking hit him, either, because she’s still trying to convince herself and her lungs that she doesn’t have a stab wound in the chest. After the second time he tells her you’re okay, which fuck you, Arthur, even if he’s trying to sound reassuring, she says brokenly, “Why—why wouldn’t I wake up—”

“’Cause there was still some time on the clock,” Arthur replies, removing her cannula like he’s done it thousands of times, “and you can't wake up from within the dream unless you die,” and she might be imagining the I fucking hate this part edge in his voice but it doesn’t matter, because his hands are still on her even though the cannula is out and she wants to deck him. She wants to know what the fuck is wrong with everyone in this room, including herself, and Cobb is surfacing and saying nonsense, she’ll need a token—

She splutters, “What?” as Cobb yanks his line to the PASIV and storms out of sight. Arthur drops his hands, at least, one fewer immediate stressor—

He starts speaking again and she spares half a thought to give him credit for thoughtfulness in trying to ground a freaking-out interviewee. He repeats the word—totem—but she’s busy working up the best yell she can after eighty per cent of a panic attack. “That’s some subconscious you got on you, Cobb,” she shouts—tries to shout—she despises the pitchy shakiness of her voice, the residue of pure fear in her gut. “She’s a real charmer!” Her vowels are flat and Canadian and she’s shrill with terror and anger and she hates herself—

“Ah,” says Arthur. “I see you’ve met Mrs. Cobb.”

That’s his—She wrenches the pronoun around. “She’s his wife?”

Miles, what the fuck have I put myself in—

Concerns. She puts one hand to her face, presses, like that’s going to do anything to block out Arthur, the workshop, the entirety of this fucking job. Troubled. Pit of vipers. I like snakes, she’d said, so lightly. Vested interest in his stability, which—she was just in the man’s brain, and she knows some of the projection activity was basically her fault—the taco city—but the terror in Cobb’s voice as he was screaming at his projection of his dead wife pulling a sword—a dagger, whatever, she’s never been into blades beyond utility knives and multitools—on a kid. Because Ariadne is a kid, all but, and Cobb brought that kid into his subconscious, and he was just as scared of the memory of his dead wife as she herself was—Pit of fucking vipers—

Arthur is still talking, low and calm, describing the properties of a totem—something you can keep in a pocket—and she ventures, “Like a coin?” in an attempt to be Ariadne while she’s staring at the size of this fucking mess against the backs of her eyelids, and Arthur says no, makes her look at a six-sided die with some shit in the middle of its red resin body, says only he knows exactly how it throws.

She needs to talk to Miles. She might like snakes but she needs to—

“I don’t know if you can't see what's going on or if you just don't want to—” she finds herself saying, before she thinks about it, and Arthur stops talking about loaded dice and looks at her, one eyebrow raised and looking fucking done, exhausted, and he hasn't even gotten stabbed today. As far as she knows. “But Cobb has some serious problems—” Get me out— “that he's tried to bury down there and I'm not about to just—” The aftershocks of terror come in handy here. “Just—open my mind to someone like that.”

She jumps up, snatches her cardigan and her bag, and doesn’t so much as blink when she whacks Arthur in the shoulder with both on her way out.

As she heads back to Billancourt, she can’t tell what she’s most upset about, and she doesn’t have time to be confused, so she forces herself to breathe deep, slow her steps, and sort it out. Dreamshare is… not as she expected, and it’s nothing like the journal papers from a decade and more ago. The visceral quality of it, the ugliness—the publications never touched on that, but then, they wouldn’t; they were academic, therapeutic. She’s furious that she was caught so thoroughly off-guard. But behind that, there’s—Jesus, Cobb, his infuriating winding lectures and his sheer terror of his own—his own wife, his dead wife, who he doesn’t see as just a projection, that much was clear from how he addressed her. The piece of his consciousness that he has devoted to remembering his wife has—done something, or he’s done something to it—

A pit of vipers in a poison sea, and she’s armed with the disposable knife of a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience.

She texts Miles on the phone he gave her. Need talk f2f. Where/when

He replies immediately, which is a surprise; it’s eleven-thirty and he teaches on Tuesdays. Office, whenever you get there.

She collapses into a seat on the Métro and holds one hand to her solar plexus, feeling her pulse and her breath, for the entire forty-minute ride.

***

Miles’s office is little and dominated by a desk covered in shit, with wingback chairs on either side of the desk instead of anything more normal. She knocks, enters, and drops into the heavyweight green upholstery with the goose down leaking out of the left-hand throw pillow, and all she thinks at first is god, this is real.

When she looks down from the ceiling she finds him peering at her, like he’s trying to see inside her brain, which she’s honestly had enough of for the day. To make him quit, she starts talking, letting her fingers worry at one of the quills of down trying to sneak through the brocade of the pillow under her hand. “I’m trying to figure out the most reasonable way to tell this,” she says. “Most reasonable and most accurate. It might take me a little.”

“My time is yours,” says Miles simply, and she trusts him, which is the heart and heartache of it all. She trusts him, and he said he trusted her, and she takes him at his word, that he believes that she is capable of keeping his son-in-law—safe, stable, sane. It makes her want to cry.

She looks back at the ceiling so that she won’t. “We did two dreamshare sessions with the PASIV,” she says, gazing at cracked plaster, and is vaguely aware that she’s speaking slowly, precisely, weighted like she’s trying to follow a poetic meter, and she’d slap herself if she could but maybe that measured quality is some way to anchor herself outside shifty dreamspace. “Five minutes, so about an hour in each dream. The first was only me and Cobb—Mr. Cobb, sorry—”

“Whatever’s easiest. Not a bother.”

She nods a thank-you and keeps talking, letting her eyes travel along the crown molding. “I didn’t realize that it was a dream until the end—I don’t know how I know it was the end. I freaked out, not because I was scared but because I was so mad at myself, because I thought I’d be able to tell, but I wasn’t, and the dream fell apart. I got clocked with a cinderblock. But that was also the end of the scheduled session, the end of the Somnacin dose, and when I woke up there was music playing. Edith Piaf?”

Miles’s mouth flattens. “Dom has a habit of that. Uses music—externally—to signal the end of a dream. Arthur was there, I assume?”

“He was.”

“He’d have started the player, then.”

“So dreamers still hear while they’re under—” Fascinating, but she shakes her head at herself. Later. “The second time, though, I knew, so I got to—” The sense rolls back into her chest, the power, folding up not-quite-Paris like it was a piece of origami paper, erecting bridges with a thought, shattering glass and simply deciding she was immune to it. “I got to build. Which was—it was—indescribable. Until—this was in Cobb’s mind. I was the dreamer, he was the subject. His subconscious didn’t like that I was building, or it objected to the scale of what I was doing, I guess, which—” She glances at Dr. Miles. “I mean, you wrote the book on it. Or at least a cornerstone study.”

“Among others.”

“So his projections grabbed me,” she says, and leaves out the panic, “and—” She pauses, because it is important to get this right, it is vital to get it absolutely correct— “One specific projection, a tall woman, dark chin-length hair. Who Arthur informed me, after, was—Cobb’s memory, and subconscious associations, of his wife.”

Miles, who hasn’t so much as blinked, somehow drops deeper into stillness. Then he rouses himself and turns a single framed photo on his desk to face her. “She looked like this,” he says. Not a question.

It’s her, same large eyes and dark curls, but the smile—

“Yes,” she says, and rips her eyes away, back to the ceiling while she collects herself, swallows against the tightness in her throat. “I know—” She looks at him then and keeps her eyes on his, because this is necessary, this is the problem, this distinction. “I know that the projection I saw, that the projection I—interacted with—is only Cobb’s memory of her, conscious and subconscious, and—whatever issues he’s had with her death. I know that the projection wasn’t—” She swallows again. “The projection wasn’t your daughter.”

Very quietly, Miles says, “Tell me what she did.”

She forces herself not to look away. “Stabbed me in the chest with a sword,” she replies, and clamps down on the sudden wild urge to laugh at what she’s saying. “Which—I know, I read your report and I know that’s one manifestation of the subject’s subconscious awareness of an interloper. But Cobb’s reaction to seeing her—he was—talking to her as if she were her, yelling at her not to, yelling her name—I think, it wasn’t clear—like he was trying to get her attention and convince her to do something else, as if she were—were herself. Not a projection.” She tongues at her own teeth, presses her hand against her chest again, looks at the wall. “I’m—you’d mentioned. That he was troubled, that it started when she passed away, which—it’s not a surprise, right? And you asked that I watch him and ask you for advice. I’m just—” She makes herself look back at him and hears her voice rise in pitch, as it shrinks in volume: “Professor, I don’t know what I—what I or you—could possibly do. If he—he’s been doing this, dreamshare, for—”

“A decade, thereabouts,” Miles supplies, distracted.

“So he should know,” she says desperately. “He should know, even with—with someone that emotionally charged, that they’re not real. He and Arthur were talking about totems—”

Something flashes on Miles’s face, like pride mixed with anguish, and he says, “His memory of Mallorie has been…polluted. Possibly the moment she died, I can’t be certain.”

Mallorie. “He called her—Moll?”

“Mal,” Miles says, making it rhyme with “pal” like it should. “Originally. But—lateral thinking, and a fine, mobile mind. She rather liked that the spelling of the short form was French for—”

“Wrong. French for ‘wrong.’”

“And a homophone of moll, as in gangsters. She appreciated layers. Consonances.” He’s sounding sadder and sadder.

“Polluted,” she repeats. “You think that—that Cobb is in danger, from or with his memory of his wife.”

Miles sighs, looking at the surface of his desk, and doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says, “Time for my cards on the table, I believe.” He looks up again, meets her eyes. “Dom is preparing a job for a client with power. Influence. The job…sounds impossible. Dom believes he can do it, and if he does, then I believe he can do it. I said he was brilliant and I meant it. But it will require more people than you and Arthur and Dom himself. And if he succeeds at the job, the client will be able to change his life.”

“Money?” She hears the disgust in her own tone.

“Reunification with his children,” Miles responds, and his voice is so dry that her throat closes; how is she always so wrongfooted? “I—will not disclose further. However. He will do this job, and if he succeeds, he’ll have his life back. But the chance of his own mind sabotaging the job—and thus the entire team, four or five or six of the brightest and best—and when dreams go bad, it’s…psychiatrically traumatizing.”

Reality, unreality, memory, barely controlled hallucination. Psychosis waiting to happen, really. “And you—”

“I am receiving updates from Arthur, although he is…reticent. And I am placing you—I hope—as a dedicated pair of eyes. You may need to deal with… unpleasantness.”

“Like swords in the chest?”

“Like a sword in hers.” As he’s talking about nothing.

She can’t think of a single response.

“I don’t ask you to heal him; I don’t believe that’s possible until he chooses to remember, and to know, that the projection he sees—as you’ve so carefully said—is not, in fact, his wife.” Miles is watching his own fingers, hands laid flat against the desk, gaze flickering between each nail. “I ask you to…observe him. Guide him. Remind him of the importance of the job, remind him of the people at risk who aren’t himself or—or Mallorie. My daughter is beyond danger.”

“Professor,” she says, and he meets her eyes, and there’s a gleam to his that looks like the shine of tears. She wants to cry, she wants to fight something, she wants to erase the misery in Miles’s face. Instead, she swipes at her eyes with her hand and says, “Do you believe—really—that I can do this? That it can be done by anyone? That I can keep him safe? Keep the—keep whoever we work with safe, from Cobb and from whatever’s in his head? That I can lead him right?”

He doesn’t quite smile. “You’re certainly more likely to than a bit of bloody string.”

Chapter Text

Before she can escape the École, Etienne gives her shit for taking one bad interview so hard (aren’t you too old for that?, but Ariadne isn’t, but the problem isn’t a bad interview, it’s getting stabbed in the chest and told by one of your favorite humans you’re not related to that he thinks you can save his grandchildren from living without a father).

In a textbook example of displacement, she suggests that he do something extraordinarily violent and anatomically impossible, snarling with enough venom to keep the tears at bay. Instead of acknowledging the shock on his face, she books it to her apartment, biking faster than she should at this time of day, and if she cries while she’s scrubbing her face clean of makeup, no one’s there to see.

She dresses in her own clothes, her soft jeans and her actual grandpa’s cardigan over a random t-shirt, pulls her hair into a topknot with her overlong fringe going everywhere, and bikes back to the college. This time, she takes the impractical route that she still loves so much, even after four years of Paris being goddamn Paris, through Grenelle and across the Bir-Hakeim and backtracking along the opposite bank of the Seine, through the Place de la Bastille and finally to the École. In the early afternoon, late in March, the trip takes a goddamn age, but by the time she locks up her Vélib’, she’s calm, hands and pulse steady, and the details she’s noted throughout the ride are collected in her mind like pretty pebbles weighing down a pocket. She’s back. Ari is back.

In the studio, she apologizes to Etienne, who just points at her table. There’s a takeout coffee cup, containing a ridiculous three-flavored sugar bomb of a latte, the kind of drink she lets herself order exactly once a month because they’re such a pain for the barista (although she tips nearly double on those occasions). “You,” she says to Etienne, eyes closed after she takes her first sip, “are a hero. A gem.”

“I know,” he replies, turning back to his desktop. “Usually takes effort to get you homicidal. Figured you could use it.” He throws a glance at her, sly and fond. “And while the domestication efforts in that terrible Canadian commune were an obvious failure, I do love you dearly. Get to work, Ari.”

The afternoon slips away; she hits her stride in her thesis research and loses track of time, until Etienne starts throwing balled-up discard sketches at her around eight. After a brisk paper war in the otherwise empty studio, she convinces him to help her nag their friend Ursula, a ceramicist at ENSBA, to come out of her studio for dinner. The three of them end up in a crap bar, eating fries and getting drunk on a weeknight, halfheartedly arguing art theory and devotedly gossiping in whichever languages come to tongue, and she’s home at eleven with four whiskey sodas smearing her nerves into comfort.

On Wednesday morning, hungover, she decides (declares aloud to her empty room) that she won’t change out of her pajamas for love or money. After all, she got stabbed in the chest yesterday. She has no need to set foot outside her apartment for the next twenty-four hours, really, so no one’s going to get all Parisian at her about the rubber ducky-patterned flannel pants.

A little after noon, Ariadne’s inbox pings with an email from [email protected], subject line Re interview. She talks herself down, gets a second cup of coffee, and opens it. Two lines.

If you still want it, the job is yours.

Book recommendation: A. Fisher & G. Gerster, Art of the Maze (1990). -DC

“Way ahead of you,” she mutters, amused—relieved—and leaves the project of replying for later. The original email was scheduled, she finds, the draft written almost as soon as she’d left the workshop yesterday (which is its own point of interest); he’s not going to care if she lags a little in responding.

For the rest of the day she doesn’t move from her couch or her laptop, except to ingest carbs and refill her coffee (herbal tea, after two PM; she has her caffeine addiction on a relatively tight leash). Otherwise, she loses herself in the depths of JSTOR, trawling for dreamshare research. She follows some links out of academia to arXiv, then to Metafilter, scrolling through less official forum-style discussions of the field, both oneirology and the actual space of someone else’s dreams. That’s how they all talk of it, “it” being someone else’s mind, in the field like it’s a battleground or a jungle. The other common terminology is under, down there, versus the topside that is reality.

She rereads essays by Sacks and Ramachandran on perception and reviews her sets of end-of-term notes from her second major. After skimming a few blog posts by exploratory dreamers who tried to word-vomit their sense of reality into place—they read like Erowid experience reports, the bad ones—she thinks about totems. She can’t find any papers on them, but they’re smart. Small objects, ordinary or familiar to the casual observer (casual dreamer), manipulated or modified such that only their maker knows how they should behave, but also mechanically simple enough that their behavior is determined entirely by static physical properties. Later, she lets herself get whimsical. She dives into the Theseus myth, pages through her copy of House of Leaves with an eye out for red font, traces the changes in Somnacin compounding over time.

With the Somnacin predecessors of four decades ago, she learns, she’d have been catatonic—or paradoxically agitated—after her first drink last night. However, they’d figured out that stuff, quashed the synergetic reaction with ethanol if not those with other CNS depressants, before the compound went commercial (for less than a year, before governments worldwide outlawed it—the pharmaceutical company with the patent went dramatically bankrupt, collapsing like a house of cards). She hasn’t even considered drug interactions before now. Shoddy work, Ari.

Most of all, she devours news stories from the last two decades about dreamshare crime—extraction—intellectual property theft taken to the extreme, an illogical-by-definition conclusion and a terribly literal interpretation of the phrase.

When the light is going warm and golden, she sketches in her LABYRINTHS notebook. Her folded-up taco city, a torus city (labeled pun!!!!; she can’t help it), schematics of extradimensional polyhedra and maps of tesseracts, sketches of infinite reflections and trefoil knots and optical illusions.

A little before nine, she replies to Erebos. I appreciate your recommendation and your patience. You’ll have my decision EOD tomorrow. -A

On Thursday, she selects a scarf, does Ariadne’s makeup and hair, and returns to the workshop.

***

It’s half-past eleven, but Cobb isn’t there. Arthur is, elbow-deep in the PASIV (cleaning it?) with his back to the door. She remembers the way the door slammed and holds it until it’s settled against the jamb, and then makes a face at herself, because now she has to either trip (no thanks), scuff audibly (she doesn’t do that to her shoes), or fake-cough to get his attention.

She’s really bad at faking coughs.

When he turns, swiveling on his stool before smoothly getting to his feet, she can’t parse what his raised eyebrows mean, or the tone in which he says, “Cobb said you’d be back.”

But whatever, fine, Ariadne’s line still works—it might make both of them, Cobb and Arthur, feel better about her, Cobb vindicated and Arthur appreciative. She plays reluctance. “Yeah, well…”

Internal turmoil, but, and Arthur surprises her by completing her sentence for her, drawling, “But there’s nothing quite like it.”

“It’s just…” Ariadne, beguiled into openness, casts about for the right phrasing and strikes out, exactly like a twenty-year-old who hasn’t done enough hallucinogens yet. “Pure creation.” It’s a shroom trip where I run the universe, how could I not—

He touches the open cover of the PASIV and looks at her inquiringly, and for the second time in three days, she sits down on a lawn chair—the one farther from the table, this time—and strips off her cardigan to let Arthur do her cannula. “I’m going to have to learn this,” she comments, watching as he places the needle (a few inches up from Tuesday’s site, which is nice of him). “If I’m hired.”

“Part of the job.” He doesn’t acknowledge if; he also doesn’t say anything else until his own cannula is set. “You’re the subject, I’m the dreamer,” he says. “Meaning—” He nods at her, prompting.

“My subconscious, your dreamscape.”

“Quick study,” he says without inflection, and presses the button in the middle of the PASIV.

***

Arthur’s dream is sleek and modern, like the lobby of a corporate headquarters that intends to impress, all blond wood and glass and matte powder-coated metal.

Except corporate HQs don’t have Penrose steps—Escher as executed by Koolhaas. Arthur stands next to her at the edge of the step, abruptly leading to nowhere, as the illusion disintegrates and the twenty-foot drop yawns at her toes.

He says, clearly satisfied, “See? Paradox.”

No shit, she wants to reply, having read Road to Reality in high school, but she’s distracted and besides, she’s only been around this guy for about fifteen minutes of real time, plus ten under (and those occupied by a lecture on paradoxical architecture, which Arthur enunciated like he wanted to eat the phrase). She doesn’t know how Arthur might react to being laughed at, but he looks so severe—hair slicked back from his forehead, tailored grey suit over the dark chocolate-colored V-neck sweater and crisp striped oxford collar and the neat symmetry of his tie knot—that she can’t imagine it going well.

The idea of dreaming the steps is the distraction. Conceptual doubling, knowing that the steps are impossible but holding them anyway, like forcing yourself to see the vase and the almost-kiss at once, see the old and the young woman simultaneously, and then just—dropping the second thread, saying never mind. And the gap opening in space.

That’d be useful, if you were trying to steal something, or to keep yourself safe. Projections with swords wouldn’t have a chance.

She’s absorbed, which means she’s verbally half-assing, riding on the cadence of Arthur’s speech, asking stuff she’s already read about and finishing Arthur’s sentences when they’re obvious. The size of the dreamer’s reach, the structural complexity needed to baffle projections, some filler about her own subconscious seeming chill—she makes him laugh, catches an unexpected dimple on one side of his mouth, although the laugh itself is short and dark. “You wait,” he says, like a threat. “They’ll turn ugly.”

The sense-memory of hands, dozens of them, holding her like a frog on a dissection plate ready for the scalpel of Mal, grips her again and she straightens her spine against it, turns to look out the endless windows at a cityscape, blurred earth tones under a bright white sky. She says, more baldly than she’d intended to, “Cobb can’t build anymore, can he.”

Arthur stops, turning to her—on her? That snatch of laughter is as far away from his expression as if it had never existed, and she hauls her act together in a hurry. “Well, I don’t know if he can’t, but he won’t.” He looks away. “Thinks it’s safer if he doesn’t know the layouts.”

“Why?” She knows—suspects—why. Ariadne, though—Ariadne’s digging. She lets her.

Still looking off into the depths of his dreamscape corridor, Arthur tightens his jaw. “He won’t tell me. But I think it’s Mal.” He uses Cobb’s pronunciation, rounding the vowel, and there’s something in the way his mouth is set—

The pantomime is excruciating.

His ex-wife—not his ex—they’re still together? God, Ariadne—and Arthur’s face falls into helplessness, lostness, beneath his veneer of professional distance. “No, see—” The soft half-wonder when he says it. “No— she’s dead.”

It’s like he still can’t quite believe it himself, the way he sounds. The realization sinks into her gut, heavy as lead—he knew her. Arthur knew Mallorie Miles, knew the fine, mobile mind with its wordplay and layers of references and— “What you see in there,” Arthur is saying, that terrible blank softness, “that’s just his projection of her.”

And, based on Miles’s comments, what Arthur has seen in there, in Cobb’s head on previous jobs, or just on previous jobs but Cobb’s mind is gripping so tightly to Mallorie that she shows up anyway, regardless of his role in a dream.

Arthur knew this woman, with or without Cobb or both, and now sees her—sees a memory wearing her, a memory with a sword—after, but it isn’t her, and that’s—

Because it can’t get worse, she asks him what it was like when it was better, and the skull-like set to his face is—horrible. She feels her expression breaking just looking at him. His voice is low and rough as he tells her, “She was lovely.”

She can’t speak—she doesn’t have the right to—and after a moment, Arthur turns away. He starts walking again, and she sees him shake his head quickly and resettle his shoulders before he calls, “Got a few more tricks down this way.” Ariadne, of course, follows.

There’s a vanishing-point hallway that actually vanishes, narrowing until the walls squeeze around the ribcage; Ariadne says something about trash compactors and startles another bark of a laugh out of Arthur. The hall is a clever thing, although not as mechanistically interesting as the steps. Then a Mobius-strip escalator down to the parking garage, like that one bit in Labyrinth but automated, and she’s in love with it; she wants, suddenly, to play with the dreamscape, but when she tries to fold the concrete panel two inches from her toes, nothing happens. “How does the dreamer-subject thing get—decided?”

“Compounding,” says Arthur, leading her back up an ordinary staircase to the ground floor. “I can’t explain it very well.” He glances around the lobby, smiles at the Penrose steps like they’re a friend, and says, “Anyway, we’ll be back up soon.”

Which brings her to another question. “How do you keep track?”

Arthur glances at her, eyebrow arched, and holds up his left wrist. Dream light from the overcast sky glints off his watch, half-hidden by his sleeve.

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, okay. How does a dreamer make sure the watch works? Even with an analog, if it’s a quartz movement, the dreamer would have to know how it works, and that’s not exactly—”

“You’d give Eames a heart attack,” he says, dry, as if she knows who he’s talking about. “Even more detail-oriented than me. You’re overthinking it. And we’re out of—”

***

Her eyes open in the workshop, and Arthur finishes, “Time. Let’s break.”

She’d dearly like to ask whether he choreographed that shit, but Arthur is pulling out his cannula like it’s nothing. Carefully, she does her own, and is surprised at the simplicity of it. The thin tube barely leaves a mark, despite the blood coating its inner and outer walls; she holds it gingerly by its plastic wings. “What gauge does the PASIV use?”

Arthur’s at the PASIV already, holding his IV line as it retracts onto its spool. “Yours unhooked? Good, thanks.” He presses down on the button for her line’s spool. “Gauge—twenty-four, unless there’s a reason to use larger. The compound works at very low dosing levels—micrograms—so we stick with the smallest we can.”

Pun probably not intended. If the needles were any smaller, they’d be for newborns, which could conceivably raise some eyebrows, for the dreamshare practitioners—extractors, she reminds herself, extraction teams—buying the things in bulk. She wants to ask where the medical supplies come from, how they’re sourced—in general and by Arthur in particular—but Ariadne only says, “Huh. Interesting.” She stands up, holding her own line and watching until there’s only six or so feet of slack left, then follows it to the table so the line doesn’t go whipping around.

“Bio-waste in there,” Arthur says, nodding to a red lidded bin under the table. It’s proper lab equipment, inviting more questions that Ariadne wouldn’t necessarily think to ask. She pitches the cannula, closes the bin, and watches him get the rest of the stuff squared away: Somnacin vials in foam cavities, a rigid plastic cover over the buttons.

As he’s flipping the lid down, Arthur asks, offhand, “So who told you what this thing was called?”

Oh fuck, she thinks, and, “I did some reading,” she replies. THEORY OF MIND—fucking Green Ink.

The case latch snaps to. “Really,” he says. “Reading, Miss Finch.”

The minuscule emphasis on Ariadne’s last name—fuck, she thinks again, but she can’t decide how Ariadne replies before he grabs her arm. Just above the elbow, just below the rolled cuff of her button-up. He doesn’t even look at her.

Ariadne says, affronted, “Excuse me?” Arthur steers her to face him, and if there’s one thing she hates more than people touching her without asking, it’s people moving her. She suppresses the surge of anger, meets his eyes—unreadable—and plays confused for all she’s worth. “What—”

“Drop it,” he says, like he’s bored.

She yanks away—she tries to—and when that fails, she goes to knee him—

What follows is too fast to track and too painful for her to want to try.

She’s prone on the floor, writhing with Arthur’s weight on his knee in her back, his hand pinning both her wrists high between her own shoulder blades and her muscles shrieking at the pretzeling, and she’s swearing nonstop as loud as she can— fuck you fucking shithead asshole goddammit you fucking— when she feels his other hand running down her leg and she freezes.

His fingers and thumb span her thigh and pass all the way down to her ankle, following the lines of her leg beneath her corduroys. Not gripping, not dragging, but—

“What are you doing,” she says, flat with terror, and when he moves his hand to the other leg, she repeats it, voice pitching high. “What are you doing—”

“Huh,” he says, ignoring her; he runs his hand down each of her sides, armpit to hip, cool and detached enough that she can’t tell whether she should panic more or less but it’s irrelevant because she’s paralyzed. Arthur repeats, “Huh.” His hand lifts away from her left hip and doesn’t return. “Not carrying.” He sounds nonplussed.

“Carrying?”

“Unless you’re real creative,” he adds, and his meaning—words, intent behind the motions—dawns on her.

“No shit, I’m unarmed,” she says, and wishes it were a snarl, but she’s too freaked out. “What the fuck do—”

Arthur shifts suddenly, half the weight off her back but all the tension in her arms still there—her left elbow feels like it’s about to tear, and she doesn’t even know what there is to tear in an elbow; she’s never cared about anatomy beyond what she needed for sketching. Her thoughts are scattering, fracturing, skittering off into corners, aside from what the fuck is happening—

“Unarmed is a point in your favor,” Arthur says, voice even. His grip tightens painfully on her wrists.

She jerks, despite the futility of it. “In my favor for what?” she demands.

“For not shooting you right now,” he replies, so coolly that she stops breathing.

He lets her wrists go then, abruptly, and stands, steps over her. She’s still lying flat with her cheek against the concrete, unbreathing, and her arms drop to the floor at her sides without her direction. Because Arthur walks back to the lawn chair with a gun in his hand.

Her mind whites out into static.

His right hand had been empty; he’d used it to frisk her. It’s a handgun, she doesn’t know any more than that—she doesn’t know guns any more than she knows knives—and she can’t move.

Pit of vipers. She never asked Miles what the risk to her would be—

Arthur sits sideways on the lawn chair and deliberately sets the gun down, eight inches from his thigh. He leans his elbows on his knees and lets his hands dangle, loose and empty. But so easily not empty. “Now, we gonna talk like civilized people?”

“Why—why would you sh—shoot me—” Breathless, throat too tight for intonation, barely even audible—

He’s thinking, calculating, brow furrowed and jaw working as he looks at her. “Huh,” he says again. “You’re either real good, or real dumb.” A thought strikes him; she sees it hit. Arthur quirks his head slightly and frowns, considering. “Or for real. I guess. You can move, by the way.”

A phrase from—hell if she knows where, just one of those things, blinks past her awareness. Never aim at someone unless you intend to shoot, and that somehow loosens her throat enough for her to half-sob, “Jesus fuck.”

“Lay off the play-acting, kid.”

“Jesus fuck,” she repeats, anger flickering beneath the fear again (kid), and tries to lever herself up on both arms; her shoulders scream through it and her left elbow folds and drops her once. “What the fuck kind of—” She gets it finally, turns herself over so she’s got her butt on the floor, legs out in front of her for balance, and stares at him, too shattered to continue. She must look like a thrown doll, and there’s a smear of beige on the concrete to her left—half a face of makeup. Some setting spray, she thinks, a burst of irrelevance.

“Fine,” Arthur says, and looks up at the double-height ceiling, all those skylights, like he can’t be bothered to watch her. He can’t, she thinks, he wouldn’t even need to glance, this close it’s impossible not to— “You wanna keep wasting your energy putting on a show, that’s fine.” His accent has been fading in and out; right now it’s strong. “I got stuff to do, so I’ll start the talking—”

“Like civilized people,” she echoes faintly. He looks back at her, eyebrows pinched and mouth turned down at the corners in annoyance at the interruption. She says, because she cannot keep her fucking mouth shut, “You have a goddamn gun and you want us to talk like civilized people.”

Arthur’s frown deepens. “Guns are civilized.”

“Motherfuck,” she breathes.

He ignores that. “I don’t care what your name is. Although I know it. Among other things.” Ice shoots up the back of her neck. “What I care about is this. The number on your resumé is registered to a cell phone purchased thirteen days ago by a Proclus Global admin.”

She stares at him. She hasn’t blinked since she sat up.

He looks back, and after a moment, says, “Explain.”

Proclus Global—her mind races. They make fuel cells. Headquartered in Japan. Turning solid profit, despite their small market share, because the cells are good, the production is clean, and the science is impeccable. Handfuls of her friends from undergrad salivated over Proclus’s cell design and production patents; a favored few even work there now in R&D. They’ve invited her to visit, but she’s never had time for a jaunt to Kyoto, let alone the cash for it. “What does Proclus Global have to do with—”

“Wrong,” Arthur interrupts, sounding bored again. “You’re explaining what they have to do with you.”

“I have no idea,” she says, and his eyes narrow. “No, I sincerely—”

“Ariette Eleanor Vickers.” His voice is toneless, eyes flat like a shark’s. “Parents Kevin Lyall Eckhard and Tomas Philippe Vickers, godmother and surrogate mother Harmony Zephyr Maryfield.”

Her stomach clenches as her breath catches in her throat.

“You’re in the 14^th, few blocks from CIUP, but you know your own address,” he continues, watching her (her eyes are so wide they’re watering) with no particular expression. “They’re a hundred and three miles north of Toronto, give or take.”

She can’t stop herself; she looks at the gun—matte black, the death of light—and then back at him. “They have nothing to do with anything,” she says, her voice shaking.

Arthur jerks his chin to the side, like a negation he can’t be bothered to speak. “I’ll decide their relevance, Ms. Vickers.” Vowels smooth and flat again, rhotics clear, generic American professional— “Tell me why your phone was bought by an assistant of Saito Nobuyasu.”

“Who?” She flinches as soon as it’s out of her mouth, as soon as the pinch reappears between Arthur’s eyebrows.

He leans closer, hands curling slightly. “You gotta stop pretending you’re an idiot.” Pure Brooklyn. It’d be like a good cop/bad cop scenario, Jekyll and Hyde, if both accents weren’t considering shooting her. “We both know he doesn’t work with idiots.”

“I don’t know anything—” The name and two photographs from a celebrity fashion blog—what the fuck—flash into her mind and she interrupts herself and Arthur, before he can tell her to stop lying and she isn’t fucking lying— “No, wait. Saito Nobuyasu—Proclus founder. Shit. Three, four years ago, I forget, he was at the Met Gala with someone, I forget her name, wearing Guo Pei from the Gothic—I mean, she was wearing Guo Pei, she doesn’t do menswear— Is that who—”

He’s staring at her, irritation replaced by…confusion. She forces herself to shut up. Arthur continues staring for a moment, and then says, “Tomas Vickers teaches ancient languages and literature at a liberal arts college. Third-floor office. Picture window. Kevin Eckhard’s dedicated studio space is located—”

“They have nothing to do with anything,” she says, frantic, voice rising. Picture window—Miles, you fuck, you said—

Arthur sighs like she’s being intentionally tiresome and says, “I told you already, Ms. Vickers, I don’t care who they are. I don’t care who you are. I’m just telling you this as motivation. Tell me why you have that phone. You’re twenty-six and you never went to Cornell. Maryfield runs an art gallery and jewelry shop at 4408 East Farling—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” she gabbles, panic making her tongue trip over the words. “I have no idea who bought the phone, I was given it—”

She freezes again, staring at him.

Suddenly she’s the one calculating, or at least trying to; her thoughts keep shaking apart, but for one thread. Miles. Miles, saying her family would be safe. Miles, wanting her, Ari, to be Ariadne alone to everyone he introduced her to in this context, including to Arthur, but best-laid plans— And also, crucially, Miles, father of Mallorie Miles who was wife of Dominic Cobb who works with Arthur, who knew Mallorie, who told a nothing of an interviewee that Mallorie had been lovely.

Arthur, who is still watching her, face like stone.

“Given it,” he prompts, but he’s not saying more of Harmony’s gallery address, and he remembers Mallorie Miles.

She heaves in a breath and thinks I’m sorry, to Miles and her dads and Harmony and Miles.

“I was given it,” she repeats, and keeps her eyes on his, “by Dr. Stephen Miles.”

Arthur straightens.

“You know my ed history,” she continues rapidly. “So you know I’m a doctoral candidate. Professor Miles is my adviser at the college—I’m not listed on the department site, I don’t do— So unless you hacked their—”

“I didn’t. Miles gave you the phone,” he says, flat, and traces a rapid series of circles in the air with his left index finger: get on with it.

His right hand settles on the seat next to the gun.

The sound that tears out of her is involuntary and agonized. “I don’t know,” she says, voice ragged and pleading, “I don’t know where or how he got it, I can’t tell you that because I don’t know, but I know Professor Miles gave it to me on Saturday—what was that, March 27—which was—that was when Miles said he was going to introduce me to Cobb—”

Arthur’s hands—both of them—curl into fists, but his voice is clipped and precise and cold as he asks, “And what else did he say?”

“He said he’s Cobb’s father-in-law—” Oh, fuck, Arthur has the gun, but she is a monster. “I’m sorry, I knew, I’m sorry—that he’s Mallorie’s father, and that Mallorie—”

“Mal,” corrects Arthur, reflexively. Softly, with the rounded vowel.

“Mal. I’m sorry,” she says again. “I’m so sorry, I knew when I asked while we were under, I knew that she—that she’s gone—”

“You knew.” His face is skull-like again, the hollows beneath his cheekbones catching shadow—it’s noon; shadow from where—and he repeats, softly, with almost the same intonation as when he’d told her she’s dead, “You knew.”

“I’m so sorry.” Forcing him through— “Professor Miles wanted—he said he talks to you, but he wanted a second person around Cobb, someone new to him, and he thought I have the head for it—not for Cobb, I mean, for building. He said that he’d have introduced me to anyone who asked but Cobb got there first and he asked me to—work with him, with you,” and her voice is speeding up, the words tumbling, “as a favor, because he’s worried about Cobb, about what Cobb remembers of Mal and how it might mess him up. Him and this job, whatever it is, I don’t even know what it is—”

Arthur rouses and she goes still, watches as he swallows visibly and blinks. His voice scrapes when he asks, “How do you know about the PASIV device?”

“Miles gave me papers,” she answers, immediately and helplessly. “He’d written one of them. He and—and Mal’s mother, if I’m right, Dr. Marie de Luce-Miles. And I went to JSTOR from there, I have—”

“Okay,” Arthur says, and gets up from the lawn chair.

He leaves the gun where it lies.

Ari draws her knees up and shudders, one long shaky gasp of an exhale with her chin tucked against her chest.

There’s a rustle and she glances to her right—she’s not crying, quite, but her eyes are wet—as Arthur, in his suit trousers and V-neck sweater and silk tie, sits down on the concrete. He’s close enough to touch, but only if he reaches, and angled toward her; he mimics her position, knees up with arms around them. His socks are pinstriped, goldenrod on maroon, and his brown leather oxfords shine with polish.

He looks very young, sitting like that, but his tone when he says, “Consider me convinced for the moment, Ms. Vickers,” is as smooth and steady as if he hadn’t just been thinking about killing her. Then he turns and sees her face (she’s got to be a mess, half a face of makeup smeared on the floor and now the tears) and draws back, surprised. “What’s—”

“You had a gun,” she says hoarsely; her throat is raw. “You were gonna shoot me.” Right now, and she sobs for real, finally. Delayed reaction. She drags at the collar of her button-up and buries her face inside the fabric, just for a moment so she can gulp air and let herself cry without the gun in her field of view.

When she drops her collar, Arthur’s eyebrows are furrowed, before they suddenly rise nearly to his hairline. “Oh, fuck,” he mutters, the first time he’s sworn since she’s met him.

She doesn’t reply, because she can’t speak, and because oh, fuck is basically inarguable. Instead, she rests her forehead on her knee and forces herself to count through her breaths.

“You’re a real civilian,” he says. “I’m—oh, fuck.” Arthur sounds nearly as frayed as she feels, despite his fucking tailoring. “You’re not acting, you haven’t been, I’m just—it’s just hitting me, you—you really didn’t—”

She lifts her head as she laughs wildly; there’s an edge of hysteria in it, but if there’s ever been a time for hysterics… “I really didn’t,” she says. “I’ve never been in the same room as a fucking gun.”

“You have been.” Arthur actually winces. “Tuesday.”

My colleague-to-be conceal-carries at all times. “Jesus fucking Christ.” She swipes her arm across her eyes, notes the streak of mascara on her wrist—waterproof, sure—and repeats, “Jesus fucking—”

Arthur moves then, reaches one hand toward her, but he freezes when she snaps, “Don’t touch me.” And might as well— “Don’t ever touch me.”

He meets her eyes and holds them—gaze level, face neutral—as he changes the motion, turns his hand palm-out towards her, fingers spread. “Okay,” he says evenly, almost gently. “Okay. I won’t. I’m not going to. It’s okay.” Like he’s talking to a spooked dog. He digs in his back pocket with his other hand and pulls out a cloth handkerchief. “Here.” He’s careful as he holds it out, making sure his fingers don’t touch hers when she reaches for it, hand shaking.

As she wipes her eyes and blows her nose—smearing more makeup on the fabric—he says meditatively, looking into the middle distance, “I must be losing my touch. You’d have been the second architect in a week to sell us out—”

“I’m not selling anything,” Ari interrupts, too quickly.

He glances at her then, including her in an eyeroll. “Yeah,” he replies. “I know. Now I know.” His accent breaks through again. “Nash—our former architect—he handed us over, me and Cobb, to Proclus, dropped us right in Saito’s lap—”

“Why the hell is Saito—”

“Fucking hell,” he says, wonderingly, “and here I was thinking it’d be less work if you were a plant. You’re not Saito’s, though.”

“Why the hell is—”

“Saito’s our client.” Arthur shrugs. “Pretty sure in a personal capacity, not on behalf of Proclus, but we haven’t had a full pay cycle yet, so it’s not been—”

Pay cycle, thievery and talking about pay cycles. “Why would your client have a—a plant?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Arthur says, one eyebrow arching. He’s still looking off into nowhere, and the gun is still eight feet away, an efficient killing thing lying innocently on the lawn chair. “Dream extraction, everyone’s over everyone’s shoulders, or in someone’s pockets. Shit, you’re completely green, you wouldn’t even know that. But it’d have made sense if you were Saito’s, or even Cobol’s.”

Cobol is one of Proclus’s rivals, and that’s all she knows. “But it doesn’t make sense that—”

“It doesn’t matter what anyone’s real name is. That’s not the problem in extraction,” Arthur continues, and she decides to just let him keep talking. “More pseudonyms than there are people. Everyone keeps multiple IDs. Sure, some of us got a clean start, but we’re all criminals these days. Just part of the game.” He shakes his head, bites the inside of his cheek. “I couldn’t figure your angle, though. That’s what matters, building a team. Ariadne Finch is solid, she’s good work, but I’m better.” He says it without a trace of pride, like it’s just a fact, and looks at her again. “You asked about my role. I’m point.”

She blinks at him, having watched far too many spec-ops movies and participated in far too many type-A-led urban explorations and guerrilla-style public art installations. “Like—scouting?”

Arthur’s mouth quirks, lopsided; he has dimples on both sides of his mouth. “Sort of. I get information and I use it, to make the job come off. By whatever means necessary.” She shivers; he doesn’t notice. “Part of that is researching anyone I might be doing a job with. Your info threw me, because I couldn’t get the angle. So you come in here acting like you’re an actual fucking prospective intern and we go under and I’ll tell you now, I was scared out of my mind—”

“In the dream you were scared?”

He laughs, the same short dark sound he’d made below. “Dreams can get worse than reality. Pain’s in the mind, right?”

She wants to correct him—it’s in the nervous system, which is part of the generalized concept of “the mind,” but “in” isn’t an appropriate preposition—but it’d be nitpicking. Neural firing is neural firing.

“Then I just got confused,” Arthur goes on. “You were convincing on Tuesday—Cobb bought it, I haven’t even told him, he seemed too—” He cuts himself off. “And today,” he says, “your subcon didn’t give a shit I was there, and you could’ve done anything. I was—since you walked in here I’d been waiting.”

“To pull a gun on me.” She marvels again at the things she’s had reason to say since she became Ariadne.

Arthur’s ears redden as he ducks his head. Embarrassed. Arthur is capable of being embarrassed. “With Nash last week and all the fucking backstabbing, it didn’t hit me ’til you kept playing dumb that you might have been—”

“Not fucking playing.”

“No, you were.” He shrugs. “Just not with criminal intent.” Arthur blinks at that and rephrases. “Beyond the obvious, that is. See, though, angles. If you were Cobol’s, you’d be dead.” He says it like he said I’m better, just a fact, and she shivers again. “If you were Saito’s, you’d be a hassle, but we’d work with it. But you’re Miles’s, so—”

“I’m not anyone’s,” she says harshly, and realizes anew that this man is still sitting within lunging distance of a gun that he is fully prepared to turn on her, no matter how red his ears can go. Apparently, the threat of impending death isn’t sufficient for her to stop running her goddamn mouth.

But Arthur seems thoughtful, not annoyed. “Might not be,” he allows. “Wrong phrasing anyway, because Miles doesn’t fuck around with us. He’s… not interested in this.” Criminal enterprise. Extraction. The iciness of his interactions with Cobb… “He just knows nearly everyone in dream extraction because he’s been around since the beginning.” His eyebrow lifts, something like admiration. “And he’s good, he’s solid, and does what he can for people when they need it. There are…” He glances skyward. “Four people I can think of, off the top of my head, who don’t owe him for something or other these days. Me, for one.”

Dr. Stephen Miles, a spider sitting at the center of a web of felons. I’ve a gent…

“So really,” Arthur continues, “it’s inaccurate to say you’re his, because he’s not actually in the game. But you are allied with him. And—” He stops suddenly, and then shakes himself. “Fuck, I am losing it. Shit, Cobb liked you, he’s gonna—”

“Wait,” she interrupts. “Liked? Past tense?”

He presses his lips together. “Well, with me and my paranoia scaring you off.”

“You did not,” Ari counters, indignant, and catches herself, but—it’s true, for some reason.

Arthur’s eyebrows are back near his hairline. “You—you want to stay? I—you’re a civilian, I threatened to shoot you—”

She laughs again, a wild little giggle. “You didn’t actually, though. Just a little misunderstanding. Cobb emailed me, said I’m in if I want to be—or—” she shrugs— “he said the job was mine if I wanted it, but that was doublespeak, right?”

He’s staring. “A misunderstanding,” he repeats slowly.

“Look,” she says, suddenly more irritated than seems proportionate, “this fucking interview process couldn’t actually get worse, and I haven’t fucking run yet.”

In a detached way, she knows she’s in mild shock—the giddiness, the rapid mood changes—and that she’s not going to have her shit together for hours, but her gut and the rush of building and the numbers (those beautiful numbers) are all saying do it. Not to mention her promise to Miles. “Or, fine, it could get worse,” she continues, “if you changed your mind and decided I needed shooting anyway. Are you gonna? Tell me now, before I tell Cobb I’m in. Don’t want to disappoint him by getting murdered.”

The whites are showing around Arthur’s irises. “I—no.”

“Good,” Ari says, knowing she’s freaking him out and failing to care. “Because he told me it was mine, and Miles wants me here, and maybe I’m fucked in the head, but I want me here, too.” She puts one hand to the floor to push herself up; her shoulder fails to cooperate, and she subsides. “My cell’s in the front right pocket of my bag. Throw it to me, yeah? I feel like spaghetti.”

There’s a moment when she thinks he’s going to refuse, but then Arthur stands up slowly and walks sideways over to the lounge chair where her cardigan and bag are. He takes his time about it, moving smoothly and keeping his front turned to her, leaving both hands visible. Reassurance, of the kind he can offer. He doesn’t actually dig for her phone, just lifts both sweater and satchel and comes back, sets them on the floor next to her. “You’re serious,” he says, voice back to professionalism. “You want to be part of the team.”

“Unless you have objections.” Ari cuts her eyes at him as she opens the pocket holding her phone. “I’d have thought you wouldn’t take nearly shooting an interviewee so hard.” She giggles again, two octaves above her normal pitch; she forces herself to swallow it, clears her throat, and rearranges her legs, crossing them and cracking her neck as she does. “Fuck,” she says on an exhale. “I am emotionally compromised and absolutely should not be making major decisions. Yet here I am. Tell me your Erebos email. I’ll copy you on my note accepting.”

Arthur’s still standing—distant enough that he’s not looming, which is thoughtful of him, but she’s beginning to notice he’s rarely unthoughtful. Even with someone he was recently considering killing. “Hang on,” he says, and she whips her head to the side and glares. “No—I’m not going to talk you out of it.” He sounds exasperated. “I don’t want to waste time hunting our third architect in a goddamn week. We’re on a schedule. Cobb thinks you’re heaven-sent, and if you’re not gonna run screaming—” He holds his hands out, palms flat, when she narrows her eyes again. “Let me finish.”

She draws herself up, sets her phone on her knee, and sighs, then looks back up at him with a pleasant smile and a tiny go-ahead gesture.

“Lunch,” Arthur says, which is unexpected. “Because I haven’t had to shoot anyone yet today, thank you, and because Cobb’s in Africa until Tuesday. He can wait for an email. Lunch on me. I owe you that much, at least. We get out of here, we get some food, and then you make whatever decisions you want, after we both settle down—I do take my mistakes seriously, especially when they might have involved bullets.” He arches an eyebrow. “Murder is a logistical nightmare.”

It’s the first joke Arthur has voiced to her. Ari mulls over his suggestion, tonguing at her teeth. Food does, actually, sound like a good idea. And free food, as known by grad students the world over, is always good. And, says the detached part of her that’s monitoring things, she could use time to process and unwind, without a gun in her line of sight. She sighs again, theatrical, and says, “All right, twist my arm.” As she finally gets herself to stand—it takes both hands on the floor in front of her, and even then she does most of the work with her legs—everything from neck to elbow protests violently. She grimaces as she straightens. “Actually, don’t. That fucking hurt.”

“Yeah, definitely lunch,” Arthur says, half to himself. “And a drink or seven.”

***

Before they go anywhere, Ari visits the workshop’s bathroom, which is surprisingly nice for being in a random industrial warehouse. Her makeup is, as predicted, a fucking mess, as is her shirt (mostly from the makeup). The cosmetics are a lost cause—she doesn’t carry a touch-up kit, although that’s clearly going to have to change, although she doesn’t intend to spend her time as Ariadne crying her face off. She washes her face clean and uses the inside of her button-up to pat her skin dry (better than the paper towels and their wet-cardboard smell).

The shirt, fortunately, was layered over one of her half-dozen indestructible black tank tops; she balls up the button-up and shoves it into her satchel. Her hair isn’t at its best, but she does carry a brush, and that plus a little water gets it smooth and shiny again. With the top three buttons of her cardigan done up over the tank and today’s black-and-gold scarf loosened a little to cover its lower neckline, she looks put-together enough that business lunch is nearly plausible. Nearly.

While she’s thinking of it, she digs up her LABYRINTHS book and notes her to-dos: start carrying compact/multipurpose concealer, get makeup remover wipes, A/B test setting sprays/powders, shell out for mascara. Learning experiences.

***

Arthur actually double-takes when she comes back into the main room. “You are twenty-six.”

She furrows her eyebrows. “Should I be offended?”

“Sorry,” he says immediately. “I’m not—whatever. Do I call you Ariette now, or—”

“Ari,” she says. “Until Cobb’s back. Tuesday, you said?”

Arthur shrugs. “That’s the plan,” he says, “but shit happens. Ari, huh. It works.”

“And Cobb’s not going to know about any of this,” she adds, ignoring whatever feelings Arthur is having about her name.

“God, no,” replies Arthur, eyes widening. “He’s going to know you came back and that you took the offer, once I explained it. I’m not burdening him with more than—” He cuts himself off and looks at her sharply.

“Hey, I got briefed,” she says. “I know Miles is worried about him. And his projection of Mal stabbed me in the chest on Tuesday.”

Arthur relaxes, although she can’t say he looks visibly relieved. “She shot me in the knee the other week,” he replies, like he’s offering sympathy, and Ari huffs out a breath in shock. Your dead friend shooting you in a dream… “Two levels down. Architect sold us out after that one. In fucking Kyoto. Entire thing was bad business.”

“But this is better?”

“Well, at least I know you’re not selling us out. Come on—I called ahead. My car’s just outside.”

The restaurant is nicer than anywhere she’s ever been. Arthur speaks to the maître d’ in flawless French, smiling pleasantly; she hangs back the least bit, knowing she’s underdressed for the place, until Arthur says—he’s talking to the man like he knows him— “My cousin, Ari,” and glances at her, lifts his hand behind her back (he doesn’t touch her) and guides her forward. She returns the glance and smiles gamely. “May we have the table in the back?” Arthur asks. “Since that one’s being cleared—”

“Of course, of course,” the maître d’ says, waving his hand. “Whatever you like.”

“Come here often?” she mutters.

“I like Paris,” Arthur replies, which is not an answer.

Once they have menus and water, Ari murmurs, “Thanks for taking me out, cousin.”

“So we don’t have to fuck around with the business crap,” says Arthur, barely moving his lips and looking absorbed in the menu. “We weren’t followed, but the whole point here is relaxing. For both of us. I’m not just babying you.”

She looks him over, now that he’s not speaking or sitting next to a gun (it had been gone when she got out of the bathroom; probably back in whatever holster he has under his sweater, at his back or side). At rest, when he’s not delivering a threat or a lecture, when he’s not suppressing grief, with his eyes elsewhere, he looks Etienne’s age. She subtracts two years, which she suspects the gelled hair and the clothes are adding—that and the hardness around his mouth, the darkness around his eyes. “Good,” she says, and sips at her water. “Wouldn’t do. You only got a year on me. So no calling me ‘kid,’ either.”

Arthur glances up at her. She knows she’s right even before his smile breaks, lopsided and almost lazy. “Quick study.”

***

Having eaten extraordinarily well, drunk not at all (“It’d hit me like a ton of bricks, I know it would, terrible idea,” she’d said, looking at the wine list with no small degree of longing, “you’ll have to make it up later,” to which Arthur agreed easily), and talked about where and when Arthur learned French, why Ari’s in school in Paris, their surprising shared taste for Gothic architecture despite Arthur’s Scandinavian lobby dreamscape, and, from there, the works of Victor Hugo and other dead windbags, they’re approaching Arthur’s dark green Peugeot sedan when his cell phone rings (default tone). He slides it out of his coat pocket and doesn’t even glance at the screen, just says, “Gotta take this—”

Ari waves one arm—go right ahead—and leans her back against the passenger-side door, kicking one boot up on the curb. She’s far steadier now, with a full stomach and an hour-plus of learning that Arthur laughs like a real person when given reason to. Her arms still ache, now that she’s thinking about it, but that’s really all that’s left. She stretches carefully, extending her left arm across her own chest and pulling inward with her right forearm, held perpendicular. Hold for ten, then switch. She doesn’t make any particular effort to listen in on Arthur’s conversation, but based on his pitch he’s not worrying about being overheard.

For good reason, because he says absolutely nothing of interest to an unrelated listener. In the same way Miles avoided identifying nouns, but even more circumspect, without actually sounding like it— a learned skill, probably.

“Everything okay?” he says as soon as he picks up. “All right, good.” Beat. “Of course he did,” as if stifling annoyance. Longer pause. “Really,” drawled. “So you’re—” Pause; Arthur looks up at the linden trees lining the street. “Okay. Yeah, of course.” He glances at Ari during the next pause. “I have. She said she’d be in touch.” Pause. “I’ll circle back with you on that.” Pause. “Okay. To summarize—Wednesday, four stations, equipped. Anything else?” Beat. “All right. Will do. Take care.”

He ends the call and jerks his head at the car; Ari lets herself in and settles on the passenger seat. Getting her seatbelt fastened—reaching for it and pulling it across—is less of a fucking ordeal this time, although she’s probably going to be sore for another day. Nothing ibuprofen and heat packs can’t fix, until then.

Arthur slides behind the wheel, closes the door, and says, “Cobb’s gonna be out of the country another day. He’s been busy and getting busier.” He glances at her after he shifts the car into drive; it’s an automatic transmission, but he keeps his hand on the gearshift anyway. “We got the guy he went to Kenya for, so that’s… as it will be. And a chemist, apparently. In this context, that means—”

“Someone to compound the Somnacin,” Ari finishes for him, and Arthur glances at her again, a little surprised. “I wasn’t lying about the reading,” she says. “Have you worked with either of them?”

“Not the chemist. But the first one—Eames, he was the reason for Cobb flying out—he vouches for him. Eames is… Well, whatever. But he’s one of the best. Our client, meanwhile, Mr. Saito—he met Cobb in Mombasa, which I’m sure has a fascinating story behind it—” He sounds like he’s gritting his teeth. “He’s coming. On the job. Which supports your veracity, but it’s also—god.” He sighs heavily.

Ari makes a vague sympathetic noise, ignoring the veracity remark, and says nothing. It works beautifully; after a moment, Arthur starts talking again, a stream of words like her not-response has opened a tap. “So I, in Paris, have to get the workshop set up for six people within the next week, not four, and one’s a chemist, so that means lab equipment. And the chemist is coming Monday. I have leads, but nothing like what we’re gonna need, not on short notice, unless we go way over budget, and it’s way too early for that to fly. And Cobb wants me working with you, overseeing your designing mazes in dreamspace. Which wouldn’t be a problem, if I’d only had the two extra workstations to set up—yours and Eames’s—but with four…Cobb doesn’t think, is the problem.” Arthur hits the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “Rather, he still thinks like an academic. One with DARPA wrapped around his little finger. Just—issues orders and expects everything to fall into place. He wants me to do an entire book of maze crap with you, this thing called—”

“Art of the Maze?” she asks, on the off chance—

“What—yes? How did—”

“He recommended it,” Ari says. “In email. I have a copy on me, actually. I’ve read it. Back to front. Uh, a few times.”

“Thank fuck,” says Arthur, hitting the steering wheel again. “That helps. More time for the office stuff, the workstations—”

“Like—desks, chairs, computers?”

“Plus whiteboards, easels, chalkboards… I can order the lab stuff; my McMaster shell is clean and they love me, so they’ll ship to the workshop.” Pieces of Arthur’s personality are starting to slide into place, outlining someone of widespread competence and the capacity for instilling gut-deep terror alongside a very odd sense of humor. “Tech is similar; I get an order in wherever before five PM today, they’ll get it out by this time tomorrow. But the office stuff, furniture and shit, while maintaining a low profile—”

“Uni loading docks?” Ari says.

“What?”

“Universities,” she repeats. “Their discards. Usually leave ’em in big garages underground for trucks to take away. ENSBA maybe not so much, but if you got time to rent a truck and take a trip to Palaiseau, I could hook you up with some grad students at EP. Could get them to look for specifics, if you need. Give them beer and they won’t ask questions.” They wouldn’t dare; the two she’s got in mind are sweethearts, but they’ve also lived in terror of her since they were frosh and she was an overworked short-tempered (shorter-tempered) junior in undergraduate.

Arthur blinks; they’re at a light, and he looks at her. “Loading docks,” he says.

“Decommissioned shit,” she elaborates. “Won’t be the nicest, but whiteboards and chalkboards—I mean, they’re kind of difficult to fuck up too much to use. Desks won’t be pretty, and you’re not getting Aeron office chairs out of there, but— Hey. Green light.”

Arthur stops staring at her and accelerates smoothly, just before the Citroen behind them honks. “You,” he says, thoughtful, “are useful.”

***

Before they go back to the workshop, Arthur stops at a pharmacy. “Supplies,” he says. “Saw you stretching your arms—” He grimaces, but he has the sense not to voice anything. “Grab whatever you need. I’ll get snacks. Unless you need to be somewhere, that is.”

It’s a little after one-thirty, and Ari has nowhere to be except the studio tomorrow. “I’m free,” she says.

“Good.”

She buys her ibuprofen and heat wraps; Arthur gets chips, popcorn, a giant bag of mixed chocolates, two liters of Coke, and a bottle of good tonic water. She finds herself raising an eyebrow at the last, possibly mimicking his expression. “I don’t do gin neat,” he says. “Unless it’s the stuff we can’t budget for yet.”

Yet, she notes. “No complaints,” she replies, and gets back in the car.

In the workshop, Arthur orders her to sit on the lawn chair next to the PASIV table and brings her a cup—red Solo; she briefly feels like she’s back in undergrad—of water. “You’re just—sitting, okay,” he says, like he’s nervous she’s going to object. “I’m dumb muscle when I gotta be,” he continues, stripping off his suit jacket, sweater, and tie, “and I gotta be right now, but I’m not making you do shit today. Not menial labor, anyway.” He drapes the suit jacket over the back of the other lawn chair, folds his sweater neatly and places it on the seat, and rolls his tie—his tie—and deposits that on top the sweater. He is, in fact, wearing a back holster. “You go over that book, pick a maze, and get ready to build it for me under. Don’t show me the design, just have it memorized and put something in there for me to find. I don’t care what. Just me, no projections. You’ll have, I don’t know, however long it takes me to get bored playing pack mule. Call it an hour.”

She salutes sloppily—Arthur eyes her, an odd half-smirk tugging at his mouth, and she slots another Arthur Fact (assumed) into place—and gets her book and her laptop out of her bag. The laptop is, after all, just a laptop, but the freeware CAD programs on it are sufficient for rendering a maze with ten-foot walls. Before she plugs in the laptop—there’s an outlet at the base of the PASIV table’s nearest leg—she swallows two ibuprofen and applies her heat wraps, one at the back of her neck onto her shoulders, and the other two around her upper arms.

Then she puts her headphones on, cranks a dance-punk playlist, and gets to work. She goes off-book, not like Arthur’s going to be able to tell—she recreates the maze design she’d done for Cobb, the one that got her here, although she hadn’t quite envisioned the intervening events. Now she refines it, adds four extra layers and myriad turns and dead ends. All of that is just sketching, in the CAD way of “sketching,” before she builds it out into three dimensions and adds surface textures. Flipping between floor and wall textures and colors feels like playing with the settings of an early Windows screensaver.

Arthur, meanwhile, is dragging stuff around the place. Those dividers, groups of six or eight or ten, get put in clusters. He unstacks some of the chairs, decides a few live up to whatever his standards are, and deposits them near Ari. Two of the desks get the same treatment. Arthur’s station is already set up—a big desk behind the PASIV table, with his Macbook and a rather nice-looking leather chair on casters. Everything he doesn’t care about gets shoved further back against the walls, dividers dragged out to hide them. He sets up room-sized spaces—three dividers by three dividers, outlining a hundred-odd square feet each, and leaving gaps for “doors.” Two in each corner by the doors—one of those is larger, four dividers by three—one next to the bathroom, another two on the opposite side. That leaves a chunk of free space in the middle, in addition to room-sized notches between each sectioned-off divider room. He sets up two rooms with desks and chairs, then starts dragging extra tables into the big one nearest the door; each of the tables goes against the fake-walls until it’s lined with them.

He hasn’t even broken a sweat by the time he comes back and sits on the second lawn chair. “All right,” he says, and Ari looks up, pauses her dance-punk, and pulls off her headphones so they hang around her neck. “That one—” he points, to the room with all the tables— “is yours. Tables for models and building. We’ll order your computer in a bit. How are you coming along?”

“Ready when you are,” she replies, and then remembers. “Wait—I have to email Cobb.” She opens Ariadne’s inbox. “Tell me your Erebos ID.”

“Vark. Like it sounds. V-A-R-K.”

She CCs him and types, I’m excited for this opportunity and appreciate your granting me the chance. I’ll begin working as soon as possible; V (copied) says he’ll assist with onboarding process. Pleased to get started! Thank you! -A

Arthur’s phone pings (default alert); he checks it, skims the email, and says, “Onboarding.”

“Yeah, like how you’re gonna circle back with Cobb,” she replies, quoting him. He looks at her, eyebrow raised, and she rolls her eyes. “You know my ed history. Comp sci minor. My ex is a pioneer in infosec. I know the founders of the—”

“Yeah, yeah, okay—”

“By name,” she says, implacable. “They arranged my bar crawl for my twenty-first birthday. You are not gonna catch me being sloppy on the Internet. Sure, you know my info, but you didn’t get any of it from me. Bet you five euro.”

His jaw works, before Arthur shakes his head. “No bet,” he says, and sighs through his nose. “Now I think of it. Although we’ll get you set with an Erebos ID and everything from there is end-to-end. Tomorrow or Saturday. Ready to go?”

She doesn’t quite manage to contain her impatience as she says, “I said.”

Arthur shakes his head again, but he’s smiling this time, a wry sort of thing. “Cobb said reality wasn’t gonna be enough for you.”

“Reality’s plenty for me,” she says, just for the sake of it. “But why limit myself?”

***

It takes him half an hour to find the teddy bear—hidden in a dead end, behind a one-way mirror. “Good start,” he says, hauling out the bear after kicking in the glass, “but half an hour—”

“Sure,” says Ari, cutting him off. In the dream, she’s wearing the same outfit she was wearing in the restaurant, cardigan over tank top, while Arthur’s in his full suit. Arthur is the subject, so his subconscious dressed us— “But can you get out?”

He grins, suddenly, surprisingly, and Ari realizes, for the first time, that she might have been a little screwed if she were remotely interested in men.

“All right,” Arthur says. “Let’s see if I can.”

He can’t.

Just before time’s up—there’s rising noise in the background, she can’t figure out what, too rhythmic to be natural—he says, “I’m so glad I didn’t shoot you.”

***

The noise, it turns out, was Arthur’s MP3 player hooked to surprisingly powerful speakers, playing Soundgarden—an unexpected hue in the evolving portrait that is Arthur.

She shoulder-surfs while Arthur buys computers—the list of specs she hands over for hers is a duplicate of her studio setup, down to the software licenses. “As long as those are within budget—I mean, I could use cracked, but—”

“Nope,” he says, clicking through the spec menus for her desktop. “Budget includes the real stuff for architects. Hard line of Cobb’s. And, uh, word to the wise—if this comes off, the machine is yours. Perk.”

Instantly she says, “Scroll back up. Gonna need the upgraded graphics card. And bigger monitors.”

In addition to her box, he orders six identical high-performance laptops; when she asks about the number, Arthur just says, “Contingencies.” While the website (hardware and built-in OSes only; her modeling software comes from several elsewheres) is processing ten thousand euro of tech, Arthur says casually, eyes fixed on the don’t click away from this page! message, “Earlier you’d noted you disliked being touched. Obviously a no-brainer topside.”

She doesn’t say anything, just waits.

“I remember it seemed you were all right with shaking hands. That and the cannulas—but I can teach you how to do yours. If that’s okay.”

“That would be preferable,” she says carefully.

“Good. The thing I’m trying to—” Arthur shakes his head. “I’m shit at this. While we’re under, it’s—it’s not that simple, necessarily. Even in practice, if someone’s got an itchy trigger finger—fuck, sorry, I—”

“Shut up,” says Ari without heat. “It’s not a big deal. I’m serious,” she says, when he opens his mouth to protest. “You’re trying to get around to saying people’s projections are gonna grab me,” she goes on, looking away and glancing around the workshop. It’s a little before four; the light through the glass is beautiful. “If someone’s unsettled or whatever. Or something happens in the dream, I don’t know, and I need to get moved out of the way before something falls on me, or whatever. I deal. If it’s necessary, life or death—or life or excruciating pain, whatever—I’ll deal. Warn me first.”

Arthur nods. “All right. Just wanted to make sure.”

Ari smiles at him. “Topside, though, anyone on this job gets handsy, I’ll rip their balls out through their nostrils.”

“All right,” he says; his facial expression doesn’t so much as flicker. “Just wanted to make sure.”

By the time she heads home—after six—he’s ordered another ten thousand euro of modeling software and arranged a meeting with a local sales agent for a third suite. They’ve run another three mazes, each larger than its predecessor despite the shorter design times. Arthur never brings in his projections. He explains in an utterly unsatisfactory way: his first step in any dream, he says, aside from specific training applications (like what like what like what), is to close the space of the dream away from his own subconscious, and that is the most interesting thing she’s heard all day.

On the third maze (this one two levels), he took three hours of dreamtime to find the treasure—a proper pirate’s hoard, because she could. When they surfaced, he’d beamed.

***

She spends half an hour that evening rooting around digitally; she surfaces, with only a little illicit flexing, with lessee information for the warehouse. Arthur Williams, the naming equivalent of blaaaaah, listed as COO of Erebos LLC, with a phone number registered in the States.

In case she’s wrong, she sends the message through several proxies tied to a burner number (not even associated with a phone), and it’s as stripped as she can make it: Forgot to mention. Will not be available tomorrow. Saturday AM? -A

Ten minutes later, the burner account pings her; she tabs over from those Met Gala photos (Saito Nobuyasu can wear the hell out of a tux, as one of the wealthiest people on the planet) and smiles.

POINT MADE. Do NOT use this number again.

Her work phone trills its tiny text-alert bell; the number is linked to [email protected]. If you need to be in touch use this number ONLY. Saturday 9 AM.

***

“Hey, Etienne,” she says on Friday morning, and sets a takeout macchiato on his desk. “You know that group I was interviewing with this week?”

“How could I forget,” he replies drily, but reaches for the coffee.

“Hired.” Ari grins as he freezes, cup halfway to his mouth. “I know, I didn’t really expect it either. But the boss was having an off day, I guess—their COO really liked me, so it’s a done deal.”

Etienne recovers and sips. “That’s…good,” he says, tentative. “And you’ll be doing…?”

“It’s kind of weird,” replies Ari. “It’s almost game design? VR, but for a completely new place—thus the architecture angle, right. For this dude with more money than God, I don’t even know. Everything past that—” She winces, apologetic. “NDAs, you know how it is.”

He grimaces in sympathy. “Don’t I just.”

“But basically, I get to hang out building shit for bank ’til they wrap, sometime this summer.”

“Fucking good,” Etienne says. “You’re nuts when you’re just researching. How are you gonna—”

“I’ll see Miles next week and figure it out.” She grins again, irrepressibly. “I’m just psyched. Had to tell you.”

***

On Saturday she does Ariadne’s hair and makeup, wears one of Ariadne’s tunics, but puts on her own jeans and sneakers. When she gets to the workshop three minutes before the hour, she finds Arthur—charcoal suit trousers, pale blue shirt, and no tie, his only concession to the weekend—and a wealth of cardboard boxes, arranged in three piles.

“That one,” he says, pointing to the leftmost pile, “is yours. With the monitors. Extension cords and power strips in the middle somewhere. How do you take your coffee? Unless you—”

She’s halfway to her stack. “Biggest they’ve got, leave room, six packets sugar and fill it up with light cream,” she rattles off, and lifts the first of the monitor boxes off the pile.

“That’s disgusting,” Arthur says.

“You asked.” She grabs the second monitor, stacks it on the first, and starts pushing them both across the floor with her foot, into the sectioned-off area he’d said was hers on Thursday. “Did I fucking—yes!” She pulls her multitool out of her bag before she drops the bag on the desk and heads back out, flipping out the long straight blade, to start knifing apart the other boxes.

Arthur makes a noise like he’s trying not to laugh—or trying not to retch, it could go either way—and leaves. A minute or so later, she goes to the speakers from Thursday on the PASIV table and hooks up her own non-job phone, starts playing her dance-punk, and happily immerses herself in destroying packaging material.

Three tracks in, she hears the door slam shut (it’s loud, especially echoing off the emptiness of the warehouse), and an unfamiliar voice says, “Bloody hell—”

“Bonjour,” she calls from her office, tossing polystyrene shells onto the floor, and adds in English, “Who’s that?”

“Ehm, I may have the wrong address, just a tick—” British; Ari’s ability for accent placement is pretty terrible at any resolution above country level. “Oh, hello there, Arthur. Never mind, I am in the right place.”

“You are not,” says Arthur, unmistakably, as the door slams again. Ari leaves her office, curious. “You’re supposed to be in Sydney.”

Arthur has two coffees—he holds one out to Ari as she approaches—and a deeper frown than she’s ever seen on him.

“I think not,” the other man says. He’s an inch taller than Arthur and about twice as broad in the shoulders; hair midway between blond and brown, parted severely on one side. When he sees Ari, he smiles easily at her with a wide, mobile mouth, but his eyes are cool, direct yet distant, piercing for all the cheer in his expression. He’s wearing a blue-and-lavender paisley shirt with a wide, soft collar (open to the third button) and pleat-front khakis, with two-tone wingtips. Over one shoulder he’s carrying a shapeless duffel. “I was there exactly as long as I needed to be, which was not at all. The preliminaries can be done anywhere, you know that, and Paris in springtime is even lovelier when you’re in it.”

Ari takes a sip of her coffee, which is precisely as she asked for, regardless of Arthur’s opinions.

“Really,” Arthur says, voice dry. “My estimation of the place just dropped a few points, oddly enough. How did you think you were in the wrong place? I don’t mess up addresses, not even for you, but hell if I can remember why—”

“The pleasure of your company is worth crossing continents for,” the man interrupts, turning his smile on Arthur, whose frown deepens. “I was only a bit confused, you see. I’d gotten used to your musical preferences for inaccessible howling, and I’m unfamiliar with your colleague here—” He glances at her again, and the leftover warmth—if only familiarity—from talking to Arthur disappears from his eyes. “I’m not getting that wrong, am I, now?”

“You’re not,” Ari says before Arthur can speak, and realizes she’s still holding her knife in one hand and her coffee in the other. She deposits the knife on a box pile and holds out her hand. “I’m the architect,” she says. “Ariadne.”

His eyes flicker, the tiniest flash. “Eames,” he says, and shakes—his hand is twice the size of hers, and while he’s blatantly flirting with—or perhaps flirting at—Arthur, he’s only professional with her. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I don’t believe I’ve heard your name before?”

“New to the business,” she replies, drinks more coffee, and retrieves her knife. “I’ll be setting up—”

“Actually,” Eames says, at the same time that Arthur says, “Hang on—”

She turns, holding the knife, and watches as they glare at each other. Well, Arthur glares; Eames glows. Finally, Arthur jerks his shoulders—something like a shrug at triple speed—and goes to the PASIV table. Her dance-punk is silenced with a pop from the speakers.

In the sudden quiet, Eames says, “Well, Ariadne, new to the business, as an old hand—” The phrasing catches in her head; she files it away for later. “I have conditions before I sign on for a job. Time with you, as a new colleague, is one. Two hours dreamtime; you’re the dreamer, I’m the subject. Yes?”

She surprises herself by grinning. “Absolutely, sir.”

“Sir, none of that, I’m Eames or nothing. Are you terribly busy with stabbing things and caffeinating, or may I—”

“The stabbing and caffeinating can wait ten minutes,” she replies. “You say that like it’s typical.”

He raises his voice fractionally as he says, “Well, I have worked with Arthur before.”

Arthur responds without looking away from the PASIV. “Mr. Eames, I will—”

“Yes, yes, violence upon my person, the threatening of which is your single creative outlet, and I am loath to take that from you, but—”

“Come on,” Ari says, after another two gulps of coffee. “Before this gets cold.” She goes to the lawn chair opposite the PASIV and sets her knife and cup on the floor, then grabs an alcohol wipe from the table and swabs her arm. “Arthur, can you—?”

He surprises her by smiling. “Of course. IV training after you’re set up, as long as Mr. Eames is in. You can practice on him once you’re done with stabbing bananas. He’s got good veins.”

“Goodness, Arthur,” says Eames, dropping the duffel next to the second lawn chair. “Complimenting my physical assets, I may swoon—”

“Shut up, Mr. Eames.” But Arthur’s still smiling as he does her cannula—Eames sets his own in about two seconds. “Timer for ten minutes. Ari, if you’re ready—”

“Plenty.”

***

She uses the layout for an FPS level, but overhauls everything—a mix of a pirate ship and a treehouse. Multiple deck levels, odd connecting staircases and rope ladders, palm trees growing through the floors and ceilings, hatches and piles of gold and a maze, of sorts, in case any of Eames’s projections are packing swords (cutlasses?). Some of the hatches are one-way; some of the ladders are one-way; some of the stairs are Mobius loops and she gives the place a central throne room/stronghold with Penrose steps of rope and wood, just for the hell of it, and to see if she can.

“Oh, lovely,” says Eames, like he’s just tasted something delicious—something about his manner just suggests indiscriminate hedonism—as he looks around, then goes to the nearest railing and looks over the edge. They’re on a tiny sugar-sand island in turquoise ocean, the island a riot of flowering plants and trees, parrots flitting around and flying fish clearing the waves every so often. “Oh, absolutely lovely, I can just—I’ve been in Mombasa for donkey’s years, and lord, I love it, but—goodness, this is beautiful. All yours?” He glances at Ari, and for all his effusiveness (which she thinks is sincere), he still goes sharp and calculating when he meets her eyes.

She doesn’t quite shrug, because Ariadne wouldn’t. “Approximately,” she says instead, slowly. “It’s—well, it’s based on a videogame level. With some twists. But the game is one of those darker-and-grimier things, and French Polynesia is…” She gives a little laugh, a rich warm spill that sounds nothing like herself. “A little more visually appealing, to me. And I’ve never outgrown pirates.” The last a little rueful, awareness that it’s a childish thing. She fidgets for effect and glances back at Eames. “Is Eames your first or—”

“It’s my name, is what it is,” he says, but pleasantly. “You’ll note I haven’t asked you such a thing.”

“Well, mine would be stupid as a last name,” Ari counters. “Finch. But, like I said, I’m new, so you wouldn’t—”

“Really, now.” He looks like he’s suppressing glee. “Ariadne Finch. Lovely name, that.”

A suspicion dawns, as she places an old hand, but she just shrugs minutely and says, “May I ask—what’s your, um, role? In extraction, I mean.”

Eames grins then, wolfish if a wolf were rolling, perhaps. “I am so glad you asked, Miss Finch.”

They walk around the treehouse, avoiding the Mobius ladders, as Eames demonstrates the interpretation of forging used in dreams. He’s Cobb, one time she looks, down to the squint and the measured way he says, “The important thing, in the dream, is to work off the feel of a person; a perfect recreation feels wrong, but flaws bring across realism, which is the paradox of perception.”

The next time, he’s a blond woman wearing what looks like Hervé Léger. In a cool drawl of an American-nowhere accent, she says, “I’m not saying I don’t like the scenery, but next time, you might want to think about how a girl crosses a rope bridge in her Manolos.”

“Sounds like a personal problem,” Ari replies, without thinking, but Eames just blinks back to himself (she never sees him change; he just is changed), laughing like it’s the best joke in the world.

He’s on his ninth persona when he—she? As a twentysomething black woman with thick glasses, dreads in a topknot, and a flowing purple dress, Eames says in richly accented French, “It’s marvelous to see an ingenue flourishing, little bird.”

“Knew it,” Ari mutters, and Eames laughs, liltingly, a flash of teeth. “So—Arthur knows, we talked—”

“I’m sure you did,” murmurs Eames.

“But Cobb only knows Ariadne Finch. As should everyone else, whoever that ends up being. The chemist and Saito. That’s the deal. Which—based on how you acted topside, that’s—”

“Child’s play.”

Ari remembers then and bites her lip. “That is—the trial run,” she says. “I shouldn’t have assumed. Are you—I don’t know—”

“Well—” Eames is himself again, eyebrows furrowed and ticking off names on his fingers. “Cobb’s mad, but a genius, and our patron may be an unknown quantity, but the money’s real. I trust our chemist—you’ll meet him soon—and Arthur’s the best in the world at what he does.” He sounds surprisingly serious, considering how they were above, but—whatever. “And you—you’ve got chops,” he says, and gestures at the decks, at a projection in a bandanna stuck on a Mobius ladder, at another two projections puzzling over a one-way hatch. “You’re going to be well worth knowing, if this comes off. So yes, I’d say I’ve got what I want.”

“Glad to hear,” Ari says. “So you’re—forging isn’t just your dream occupation.”

“Oh, far from,” Eames replies. “We’ve an hour left on the clock. We could hang about, but you’d your coffee and stabbing things—”

She feels her eyebrows furrow. “Is there a way to shorten the dream? From inside?”

“Oh, you are new. There is. I shoot you in the head.”

Ari blinks at him, at the gun suddenly in his hand. Arthur’s words, You can’t wake up from within the dream unless— “Oh.” She shrugs. “All right, I guess.”

“I’ll be gentle.”

“You’ll be shooting me in the—”

***

She opens her eyes and then blinks. It felt like nothing, although she has a headache now, but that could be her delay in caffeine intake. In any case, Arthur is standing nearby with his Moleskine and raised eyebrows.

“Wrapped early,” she says, a little slow, as she feels her head. “Eames, uh—”

Eames comes awake on the other lawn chair. “This one’s a treasure, Arthur,” he says, nodding at Ari. “Decided early, so we shot out—”

Arthur mutters, “Shit,” and Ari looks at him sharply as she pulls out her cannula.

“You,” she says, “stop that.” She gets up, retrieves her coffee, gulps at it—still hot; good—and throws out her bio-waste. When she glances at Arthur again, he’s looking at her like he’s not sure what to do with his face, but he nods at her.

Eames bins his own cannula and says, “Arthur, the funniest thing down there—” He glances at Ari; the distance is gone, and he just looks gleeful.

“It’s an excellent coincidence,” she agrees.

“Oh God,” Arthur says, and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Remember how you said on Thursday?” she asks him. “That Ariadne Finch—” Arthur whips his head over, glares at her, and she laughs. “You said ‘Ariadne Finch is solid, she’s good work’—”

“Did he really?” from Eames, delightedly.

“She’s his work.”

Arthur turns his glare on Eames. “Asshole,” he says, hard and flat, but for all that he’s loose in the shoulders, not a hint of actual tension in him. “I nearly shot her, you could have told—”

“Could I have, now,” says Eames, folding his arms behind his head and smiling broadly. “Arthur, you only had to ask how my work was getting along. You do have my contact information, unless I’m very desperately mistaken.”

“I don’t care how your work is—”

“And it wouldn’t have helped, even if you did, I suppose,” he goes on thoughtfully. “That work was off the books—no, off the off-the-books books, I mean. Oh, Arthur, don’t look at me like that, you know I’m—”

Arthur slugs coffee and says, “You’re a petty thief.”

“And you’re a grand felon, because that’s a distinction worth half a fart—”

“I’m not a—”

“Darling, you’re wanted in how many countries—”

“Half as many as you, under twice as many names—”

“And who made you those names, may I remind you—”

The laugh bubbles out of her before she even realizes it’s building, and both men stop and turn to her—Arthur glaring but relaxed, Eames louche with his legs crossed at the ankle, showing off socks with a pattern of ladybugs. “What,” Arthur says, but there’s a smile tugging at his mouth.

“Nothing at all,” Ari says happily. “I’m going to build my computer. Don’t bug me.”

Chapter Text

Ari takes off her headphones, having configured her beautiful new desktop exactly how she wants it and express-ordered a new 3D mouse on Ariadne’s credit card (to her own apartment, using an encrypted browser), and notes that the workshop is silent, nearly, aside from keyboard clicking and the rustle of paper. She had listened with half an ear to Arthur and Eames verbally swatting at each other for five minutes before she got distracted by cord organization. There’s an entire carton of clips and wires and smart little bundling doohickeys, half of them with labels, in the pile of boxes of power strips and extension cords and other electronics wrangling apparatus. She’s beginning to respect Arthur a great deal.

An hour has passed since she last registered conversation between the other two. She leans out of her doorway and sees Eames behind the desk of the neighboring fake-walled office. He’s working on one of the interchangeable laptops, surrounded by an assortment of papers—varied sizes, colors, weights—plus a legal pad and a spill of pens. Ari leaves her own office for the open area around the PASIV table. Arthur’s on his Macbook, Moleskine open, pen in one hand and mouse in the other—ambidextrous, or he’s trained himself to mouse with his non-dominant hand. She’d believe either one, she realizes.

He glances up as she drops sideways on one of the lawn chairs and says, “Loading docks.”

Ari kicks back and raises her eyebrows.

“You been in touch with your EP contacts?”

It takes her a moment to map this properly: he means Matt and Sam. Contacts seems disproportionately cloak-and-dagger for a couple grad students, particularly these grad students, assisting with some minor misappropriation of uni discards. “I can be,” she says, and gets up to grab her personal phone.

“Let me know what they got,” Arthur says as she heads back to her office.

Ten minutes later, Sam sends her eight photos; they’ve never been one to waste words. She walks back to the lawn chair as she thumbs through the pictures. “As of right now,” she says, settling on the chair, “there’s a chalkboard and three whiteboards, probably four by eight—feet, not meters—all on casters. Five more wall-mount whiteboards, varying sizes. All kinda grungy but nothing isopropanol can’t fix. Mmmm… a few dozen task chairs. A really ugly couch, wow. Couple dozen flat-screens, probably too screen-burned or too many dead pixels to use. Four CRT displays, looks like, but those are only good for vacuum tube explosions anymore—” Her phone pings again; she checks the message and laughs. “And they say they’ll cover me for, and I quote, ‘office shit out the ass,’ for a liter of Balvenie 17.”

“Cover you how, exactly?” calls Eames.

“Requisition forms,” she replies, turning her head toward his office. “Good RA position in a busy lab—no one’s gonna ask why the department needs shit.”

“Useful. Eames,” says Arthur, “how’s your jetlag?”

“Negligible. Why, have we got—”

“Good thing you didn’t go to Sydney,” is all Arthur says, turning back to his screen.

Eames gets up then and joins Ari, spinning one of the upright chairs and straddling it backwards. “Arthur, you’ve such a way for making one feel wanted. It’s quite going to turn my head.”

Arthur ignores him.

“What’s he on about?” Eames stage-whispers to Ari. “And what’s this about the EP? Contacts? Explosions? Balvenie? Sounds terribly exciting.”

“Office supplies,” Ari replies, deadpan.

“Oh. No wonder he’s pleased.”

She looks back at Arthur; absolutely nothing about his expression or body language indicates pleasure as he closes his laptop and stands. “We have a twelve-foot box truck for tonight into tomorrow, beginning six o’clock.” He slings his bag—cognac leather messenger—over his shoulder. “Ari, get a maze ready while I’m out. Eames, keep doing… whatever the hell you’re doing.”

Eames sighs, cushioning his cheek in one hand. “It’s so flattering when you take an interest, Arthur. And you’ll be where?”

“Scotch won’t buy itself,” says Arthur, mouth just quirking into a hint of a smile as he breezes past.

“Hang the fuck on,” Ari snaps, before she realizes she’s going to speak.

Arthur stops, halfway across the workshop already, and turns, eyebrows raised.

She wishes she could say she sits up smoothly; it’s more of a scramble. “I learned recently that people in extraction are both able and willing to kill someone like me,” she says, and her voice is hard and clear despite the sickening clench in her stomach, the tightness in her chest like a band of iron around her ribs. “I’ve known this one—” She jerks her head at Eames, unable to look at him; Arthur’s eyebrows are still up, but his mouth has fallen from that faint smile into a thin, flat line. “—less than two hours. I don’t know what he’s—” Too many endings to that sentence, each worse than the last, and she stops, swallows, keeps her gaze straight on Arthur. “I have no reason to trust him, aside from your word.”

When she’s finished, his face has gone skull-like, and Eames is frozen in her peripheral vision. He’s still within arm’s reach but she can’t make herself move as she stares at Arthur. Her fingers are cramping around her phone, she notes, from a great distance. She sees Arthur’s throat work. “My oversight. I trust Eames with my life.” He smiles weakly. “Not with my money, but…”

Ari forces herself to focus on something that isn’t the panic clawing up her scalp. She narrows her eyes at him, tightens her mouth, and says, mimicking Cobb’s intonation, “Gonna need to do better than that. You could be working together.”

Eames doesn’t move, not so much as a blink, as far as she can tell. Arthur’s mouth twists with something ugly, but he presses his lips together more firmly against it and nods, one sharp motion of his chin. “You make a valid point,” he says, voice neutral. “Eames stayed with Cobb’s kids in Pasadena for three days this fall when Marie de Luce-Miles was sick. Dr. Miles was here.”

Independently falsifiable. The details she could get from Miles would either lock it into truth or blast apart the lie—

But Miles trusts Arthur. And furthermore, he trusts him with Cobb.

And Miles’s trust is why she’s here.

She grits her teeth and says, “Fine.”

Arthur nods again, eyes fixed on her. “I apologize,” he says, and his face and voice both soften. “You’re—to the best of my ability, you’ll be safe with this team. That’s my job.”

Before he says anything else, before she dissolves and shows that she’s losing her shit and not just performing due diligence, Ari jumps to her feet and snarls, “Then go buy the goddamn scotch.”

She marches into her office without another word, without so much as glancing at Eames. Behind her, Arthur says something indistinct (sounds are going muffled, her vision is tunneling, she hates herself); Eames replies, baritone to Arthur’s tenor. Ari drops her personal phone, removes a pill case and her work phone from her satchel, dry-swallows a tiny tablet of Ativan (her first in four months), levers herself up onto the tabletop in the corner of her office that’s farthest from everything, and finally lets herself start shaking.

She is so fucking fragile.

***

She’s counted out her breathing, run her hands over her arms and legs, and felt her pulse in as many points as she could remember, then done all of it all over again. Still shaky, tremors running through her, but her vision is back and her hearing is nearly normal. As the meds start to permeate her blood–brain barrier she composes the necessary text to Miles: Gentleman who sent me the parcel c/o you. Has he met your grandchildren? Predictive text and Swype even make it legible. She sends it.

Within twenty seconds, he replies. He watched them in November whilst their grandmother was recovering from the flu. Attended each of their first birthday parties. There’s a photo attached. Eames, unmistakably, despite the devolution of the scruff into a full beard and the extra couple inches of sandy hair in a mess of cowlicks, sitting on a dark hardwood floor next to—her breath catches—Mallorie Miles. A little wide-eyed girl in a green-and-yellow dress is leaning against his side opposite Mal, head resting on his shoulder, and a blond baby is beaming toothlessly in his lap. The baby’s wearing a bib that says BIRTHDAY BOY! Eames’s head is turned, although his eyes are directed at the camera; he’s speaking to Mal, who’s glowing as she laughs at him.

She’s trying to decide whether to add anything to “Thanks”—the photo is arresting, and it’s far more than she needed—when the phone buzzes in her hand and another text bubble blinks into existence. You’re safe as houses.

“Godfuckingdammit,” she mutters, before yet another text appears. I’ll be in touch. You’ve good instincts. Her chest tightens again as it sinks in: Arthur told on her. So Miles knows she’s—

She replies with the insufficient Thanks, drops the phone with a clatter, and leans her head against the cinderblock behind her, staring at nothing. Perspective, she thinks, and clamps down on everything else. The most she knows right now is that Arthur contacted Miles about her request—okay, demand—for credentials. Which, really, is a favorable reflection of Arthur’s understanding of her; he’d assumed she, as someone with healthy paranoia, was going to check his story. Meanwhile, Miles, being Miles, being responsible for her presence here, wants to provide reassurance. He doesn’t necessarily know that she’s freaking.

But she’s still freaking.

Intellectually, with the fraction of a per cent of her that remains a dispassionate observer regardless of her circumstances, Ari knows the panic attack itself is a delayed reaction—not in that she forced it to hold off before it closed around her, but in that she was acting, thanks to her good instincts, to fix the problem before the full scale of the problem even registered in her. Said problem being the unknown variable of Eames. Arthur’s invoking Miles at least defined that variable, within acceptable parameters, and in that distant detached corner of herself, she is aware that she was assured of her safety before she fully understood the potential risk. She feels ridiculous, irrational, miserably unmoored from logic, being stuck in a panic quagmire now. Her third, over three total visits to the workshop.

Those are bad odds, and she damages them further with each outburst. Each one pushes her toward becoming more of a burden than she is an asset, and when she inevitably tips that balance…

She lifts her head and lets it fall again, a dull thud and a duller pain.

***

Footsteps scuff along the concrete floor, and then pause.

“You can come in, Mr. Eames,” she says, because she may as well be polite.

He does, moving slowly and deliberately with both hands visible—like Arthur had two days ago. He has his sleeves pushed up to the elbow and the second he can see her face he meets her eyes, direct and neutral and careful. It grates on her like a fingernail on unglazed ceramic. “You’re doing all right?” He inflects the question in that particular British way, emphasis on the verb and a falling tone afterward, with a sort of pitch flip at the very end.

Ariadne, she realizes, wouldn’t be sitting like deadweight. She pushes herself away from the wall and lets her legs dangle off the edge of the table, resting her weight on her hands placed flat on either side of her hips. This has the bonus of suppressing the shakes. “I’m—” She twists her mouth, a little embarrassed flinch, and ducks her head, breaking eye contact. “Sorry I implied what I did, um—”

“Please don’t,” he says rapidly; she looks up. “Don’t be sorry and don’t be Finch. I’d prefer to speak with you.”

Ari drops the facial expression but holds the posture, because there’s no point in moving.

He keeps his eyes on hers and adds, voice low, “If that’s all right.”

“Fine.” Her voice lacks all inflection, just flat grey nothing, and Ariadne would never say this: “I’m not sorry, anyway.”

Eames leans against the tables on the opposite side of the office, crosses his ankles, and folds his arms. “Mm.”

She knows that move. Instead of responding to the prompt, she watches him, eyes half-shut, face still. The silence stretches until he says, “What are you, then?”

Ari sits up straight and puts her hands in her lap before she tips her head toward one shoulder, stretching her neck. Her trapezius and occipital muscles are bad enough from tech-neck; the tension load of a panic attack doesn’t exactly help. After she holds the stretch for five seconds, she swaps sides. “You’re going to dig, aren’t you,” she says. “’Cause Arthur told you to or ’cause you’re nosy.”

He fakes offense, drawing his head up and back. “I take a professional interest in understanding human behavior.”

“Like I said.”

His laugh is short but rich as he watches her; she’s tipping her chin toward her chest until she feels the stretch at the base of her skull. Holding eye contact is a bit of a strain, but the table’s height helps. “Arthur did ask me to look in on you and have a word,” Eames says, “but I’d already decided I would. Because I’m nosy. And yes, I’ll dig. Not exactly the kind of experience one wants to build a working relationship on, and the air needs clearing.” One corner of his mouth lifts. “If that requires me to make an annoyance of myself, I’ve heard I’m quite skilled in that.”

She cracks her neck; it pops three times, loud. Ariadne would never. “I contacted Dr. Miles,” she says, and repeats the crack to the other side. Two pops. “I have no issue with you. It’s a solved problem.”

His tiny smile widens. “A solved problem, is it?”

On principle alone, Ari doesn’t answer rhetorical questions. She stretches her neck again, cycling through the different directions.

“All right,” Eames says easily, after another fifteen seconds of quiet. She knows because she’s counting, both her breath and each stretch. “Why did you imitate Cobb while speaking to Arthur?”

It’s an interesting angle, an interesting thing for him to focus on, but she’s not certain she can talk about it yet. She settles once she’s done with the exercise and says, with what she recognizes is an absurdly adolescent sneer, “Because I’m obnoxious.”

She catches the flicker across his eyes, despite the amusement in his smile as he says, “Liar.” He waves one hand, almost airy. “That is, you might be obnoxious; I wouldn’t know yet. But that was cover. You’ve known them less than a week. Why the imitation?”

Fine. “Distraction.”

“Arthur’s or yours?” The question comes immediately; his gaze is level.

System check: Her pulse is still high, but not as bad as it was; she’s breathing at a regular rate without counting each inhale; she’s probably shaky but it’s not going to be obvious until she moves. “Mine.” Eames opens his mouth and she lifts one hand; he subsides. “To keep myself together. Because that woulda been three for three on me losing my shit when I come here—” Her throat tightens and she pauses, watching her own hand. Her fingers are trembling; she flexes them and balls her hand into a fist, drops it on her thigh, lets her nails dig into her palm.

Eames doesn’t speak. When she looks at him again, he flicks his gaze up from her hand. “I do not intend,” she says, enunciating carefully, “to come off as such a coddled infant, despite being twenty—” She lets herself glare. “That I can’t manage working with people who conceal-carry. Or that I can’t handle when shit happens under.” Ari grits her teeth against the memory of her pointless screaming, Cobb’s subconscious holding her, wake me up let me go wake me up— “I will do this. Without people treating me like I’m glass. Which means I stop panicking in front of my fucking colleagues.” Her voice shreds on the last phrase and she presses her lips together, keeping her gaze on Eames. She’s not going to cry. That’s not a fact yet, but it will be.

He blinks first, puts one hand to his chin. “And doing Cobb’s mannerisms—a bit spookily, I’ll tell you—that helped you?”

“As something to think about,” she replies, when she’s certain her voice will be steady. “Something beyond ‘I’m a shrimpy twenty-six-year-old unarmed woman in a warehouse with two men I don’t know, and at least one of them has a gun.’” God, the things she’s had reason to say. She almost laughs; it comes out through her nose like a soft snort. “You tell me how well it worked.”

Eames shifts his weight, eyes suddenly faraway; he’s thinking about it. “How well,” he repeats, slowly. “I don’t imagine you’re asking whether the impression was good—although it was—but rather whether it succeeded as a distraction. For us as observers, in reading your true state of mind, and for you, in obscuring same. Am I on the right track?”

“Close enough.” The Ativan is really making itself known; she has none of the tolerance she used to, which is good, but fucking inconvenient. She wants to slouch—scratch that, she wants to curl up and pass out right here on the table—but instead she draws herself up again, straightening her spine.

He pauses again, tips his head to one side. “It was clear that you were distressed,” he says finally. “But the subject matter itself was distressing. Regarding proportionality, I wouldn’t be the best to judge—”

“Because you’re one of the two men who may or may not have a gun.”

Eames shrugs, a tiny motion. “There’s that. I don’t, for the record. Having come straight from de Gaulle. However, the issue at hand—I was actually rather too distracted by Arthur’s behavior to consider yours.”

That interests her, through the lassitude and lingering sullenness, and she leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “Why?”

There’s a moment’s hesitation before Eames says, “He is… ungracious in response to criticism,” almost delicately. “Or correction. Unless it’s Cobb doing the correcting. He can get quite nasty, really. But you, and please excuse my repeating your description, as a shrimpy rookie—you call him on basic security and team members’ responsibilities towards each other, quite rightfully, and then you mimic Cobb himself at him while poking holes in his first fix. And he—I rather thought he was going to start shouting, he got that look. But no, he went all reassuring. Far from his style.”

She finds herself smiling, or doing something with the same facial muscles, at least—it doesn’t feel like a pleasant expression. “Well, he’d been around for the first two,” she drawls.

Eames shakes his head immediately. “No, that’s not it. The last job we did together, we’d a second thief. She’d caught that Arthur’s numbers weren’t quite right, once, and the second time afterward that she asked for a double-check, he shouted her right out of a dream. Took two of us a bloody hour topside to get her to agree to continue with the job, with Cobb talking Arthur down under, getting him to agree to a truce. The one before that, we had a little twentysomething shite of a client who came into the field during prep, went all soggy and had a crisis every time he woke up—I tell you, Arthur got that look and teleported right out. He couldn’t, once, and yelled ’til Cobb got properly in his face. Devil’s own work to keep the client after that.” Eames smiles then, a little evilly. “Yours truly as the devil, in that case.”

Ari ignores the postscript, because the anecdotes have given her enough to think over. The pair of them rule out gender, age, experience, role, dream versus waking, frequency of upset, cause of upset—

Eames sees it in her face, which means the drugs really are working. “So, you see why I was a little boggled. He’s not often… taken that way, is Arthur. So quickly mentally categorizing you as a trusted team member, it’s nearly a compliment—”

“Bullshit,” she says, without heat. “He had a gun on me on Thursday. I mean, he never aimed, but still. It was out. He was thinking of shooting me.”

“Which would put out anyone with sense. So that was visit two.” He tips his head in her direction, prompting.

She just wants this over with, so she plays into it this time. “The first time I’d just gotten stabbed out of a dream.”

“Stabbed— Hang on, you’d said you hadn’t died out of a dream before.”

“No, I’d asked if there was a way to shorten a dream from the inside by intention,” she corrects. “I got stabbed by a projection, my second time under. First visit here. Tuesday.”

“You—” Eames blinks and stares. “Wild guess. Cobb’s subcon.”

Ari nods.

“And you came back?”

“There’s nothing quite like it,” she says, Arthur’s intonation, and she’d laugh, but she’s fucking tired.

Eames catches the tone switch, though, and looks her over before he says, “You know, I don’t think your relative courage is going to be an issue. Considering your last week.”

“You’re a guy,” she says dismissively. “Bias right there. For people to consider me competent, I can’t show weakness. You just don’t have any. So you come in here showing off how unarmed you are—”

“That’s just manners,” he says, looking so affronted that she believes him. “You are new.”

“I don’t care. I’m not fucking fragile.”

“No one’s said such.” He sounds a little exasperated, but that’s better than the bubble-wrap caution at the beginning of the conversation. “You’re merely…new.”

“You sound like him,” she says, and half-laughs again. “Like Arthur. ’Cept he won’t let go of me being a civilian. And, whatever. So you’re not a civilian. You’re not gonna fuck with me, either. Miles sent me a picture. Kids hanging off you—it’s a good look.” She yawns and her jaw cracks mightily.

“How do your bones make such dreadful—” Eames shakes his head. “But no, little bird. I’m not going to fuck with you. That’s just manners, as well. It’d also be counterintuitive and strategically stupid, since you’re building these places where our minds are going to run loose. I’ve the sense you’d be awfully creative about retaliation.”

She actually smiles at that. It’s wry and twisted, but it’s a smile, and she evaluates again: she feels okay. Somewhat like she got hit by a truck, but maybe that’s what your first five days in dreamshare do to you, and it’s also consistent with the benzo dose. “I might be. You should—when I go back to being Ariadne, I’d like your…whatever. Feedback.”

He smiles, pleased. “Excellent. I’d be giving it anyway.”

She’s saved from replying to her own standards of coherence or cleverness by Arthur himself returning. The door slams and he curses (not in English), mutters the actual words “Note to self, fix the fucking door,” and then calls, “Ari? Eames?”

“Yeah,” Ari replies, raising her voice only slightly. He turns the corner and stops just inside the doorway of her office, taking them in: Ari sitting on one table, slumping exactly like she’d told herself she wasn’t going to and trailing a smile; Eames leaning against the table opposite like a lord who got dressed in the dark. She watches Arthur’s eyes flick from her to Eames and back.

“Balvenie 17, one liter,” he says. “Well, two. One for us.”

“I don’t have a maze ready,” says Ari.

“What—” Arthur looks briefly confused, and then shocked, and then irritated. “Come on, with that— I wasn’t expecting you to—”

“I don’t care what you were expecting,” she interrupts, beyond caring about politeness or Ariadne or what Arthur’s actual mood is. “I have shit to learn.”

Arthur opens his mouth, then closes it, and shrugs, accepting the point.

“However,” she says, “I’m metabolizing a milligram of lorazepam and I don’t know its drug interactions with the… stuff.” She feels heavy and soft as lead, with fog blurring her thoughts. “This fucker—” she tips her head at Eames— “wanted to clear the air. It’s cleared once I sleep this off. Pass me my sweater, please. And I’m going with you to the EP tonight. They’re expecting me, not random assholes.”

As she speaks, Arthur’s face relaxes; he doesn’t say anything, but he looks—satisfied, somehow. He pulls a folded sweater out of his own bag, then gets Ari’s cardigan, and hands them both to her. “We’ll get a decent couch in here,” he says, and then, “Mr. Eames, work to do.” Eames nods and follows him out.

Ari stretches out on her stomach, cushioning her head and arms on the two sweaters. Outside, Eames says, in his idea of a tactfully lowered voice, “She’s going to be quite good, I think.”

“If she doesn’t run,” replies Arthur at the same volume, rueful.

“Not happening, jackass,” she yells, without moving. It’s like they can’t remember the walls don’t go higher than eight feet. Which is stupid, because the walls are right there. During the shocked silence that follows, she falls asleep.

***

The day passes easily, surprisingly so, once Ari wakes up. No PASIV dreaming for her, because the three chemists Arthur’s talked to have all said fuck no upon hearing the hypothetical condition of the hypothetical dreamer. Instead, she camps out on the lawn chair near the PASIV and expands her pirate ship treehouse in CAD freeware on her laptop (since the desktop isn’t going to get its software until next week). After, she puts together maps, then renderings, of four different city-mazes of different sizes. “At least one of the levels—probably topmost, something for preliminaries and giving us more time—is going to be one of these,” says Arthur, as he looks over her shoulder at her rendering of the second one. “Driving, not walking, and we only use a few of the buildings. Urban planning rather than architecture, but the same principles for the maze design. Traffic control for barriers and bottlenecks. As bizarre as you want it to be. And traps all over the buildings we plan to use.”

Eames brings pizza for lunch. They break at around five, agreeing to return to the warehouse no later than seven o’clock, dressed for moving furniture.

Ari leaves her jeans and sneakers as they are, but she swaps Ariadne’s tunic for a t-shirt and hoodie with stupid undergraduate in-jokes on them and scrubs off her makeup before pulling her hair into a ponytail. At the workshop, Arthur’s wearing digi-camo cargo pants—the kind of thing she wore from army surplus in her would-be punk teens, but she suspects his might be actual military issue—and a long-sleeved black t-shirt, which just looks odd on him. Eames is in jeans, running shoes, and a zip sweatshirt with the Misfits skull on the back. Neither has any product in their hair; they both look about five years younger than they had previously.

The truck is an eleven-foot mover, low-slung. Arthur drives, Ari coordinates via text with Matt and Sam—Matt has the ID to let them into the loading dock, but Sam has the office storeroom access—and Eames, seated in the middle of the truck cab, chooses music. He settles on a satellite radio station featuring hair metal and arena rock, which is worth it just for the disgusted faces Arthur makes for the entire twenty-minute drive.

Matt is there next to the entrance, just like he said he would be, and swipes them in using the credentials on his student ID. The dock space is an odd subterranean half-finished sort of place, like a parking garage level that couldn’t be fucked to actually hold cars; instead, it holds junk, all lit sickly pale with deep shadows cast by the flickery fluorescents high overhead. A sort of concrete stage has all the actual truck loading docks; they park on the asphalt below.

Ari jumps out of the cab first and hugs Matt, because she’s known him since he was a tiny seventeen-year-old nerd and he’s the opposite of a threat. Plus, he doesn’t cling. “What’s the gig?” he asks, and nods to Arthur and Eames, who’ve come to stand nearby.

“Nondisclosure, sorry,” she replies with a shrug. “But, you know. Startup, shoestring budget until we get investors—”

“Where’s the architecting come in?”

She fake-scowls. “I do other shit, too. In case you forgot. Where’s Sam?”

“Right here,” they say, ten feet behind her, and she turns and grins. Their hair is purple now. “Introduce your coworkers. Professional situation. God, Ari.”

Arthur and Eames introduce themselves as themselves, which, granted, provides very little actual information, and they get moving.

The whiteboards (and the chalkboard) are trivial, as are a dozen task chairs and three more incongruous lawn chairs (“Some people keep using this place for their personal garbage,” mutters Sam, disgusted; “wait, are you taking them—oh, good”), but the couch sparks a passionate argument—Eames for, Arthur against.

“It’s horrifying,” Arthur insists. “Look at it. Jesus, don’t touch it—”

“It has character! You said we’d get a decent sofa.”

“That thing is not decent. It’s probably colonized with about forty species of mold. It belongs in an incinerator.”

“You’d doom how many millions of life-forms—”

“Rather than put my ass on them, yes—”

“How often do you end up sleeping at the office?” Sam says, very reasonably. “That’s the only relevant question.”

“Point,” says Ari. “I’m not sleeping on the table again.”

“Arthur, you needn’t sit on it,” Eames says, “but we’re taking the damn couch.”

They take the damn couch. Arthur refuses to touch it.

When they get to the office storeroom—Matt peels off at this point, muttering something about checking an experiment, but Sam’s the one with the department hookup—Arthur becomes so efficient and exacting that it’s clear he’s over the moon.

They leave before midnight. Sam accepts the Balvenie from Arthur with a grave nod before Ari gives them a last hug and a kiss on the cheek for good measure (they’re Sam; they return both and mutter, “Be good; be careful”). Maneuvering shit around the warehouse is boring, but it’s simple, and by two AM Arthur looks around and says, “Think we’re set. Now, break ’til Monday. Unless we’re drinking.”

“We owe our architect rather a bit, don’t we,” says Eames, eyeing her.

Ari shrugs. “We’re drinking.”

Around five AM, halfway through the scotch, Arthur admits that the couch is better than decent to the side of Eames’s head; Eames pats him gently on the knee (he misses the first time) and says, “Knew you’d come around, darling.”

Ari steals both their glasses (since when did the workshop have glassware?) and downs their contents before Arthur remembers to tell Eames to fuck off. The stolen whiskeys are the first actual drinks she’s had that weren’t sips spaced out by liters of water, and they hit her pleasantly. Five minutes before the Métro is scheduled to start running, she slips out—the men, both well asleep, will deal with themselves, she figures; they’re grown—and heads back to her apartment, smiling to herself.

***

Ari spends Sunday napping, puttering, getting crepes with Ursula, and doing her schedule for the week, interrupted only by a text from Arthur: Tell me when you’re leaving next time. I don’t care how smashed I am, I don’t like waking up with missing team members.

She smirks and replies, Noted, if there’s a next time.

And then Eames, who she didn’t even realize had her number—but it makes sense, with Arthur’s developing intranet: Arthur’s gone all gloomy again. You’ve not decided to leave us?

She half-snarls, half-laughs at that, and copies Arthur on her response. I’M NOT GOING ANYWHERE. If I do I’ll fucking SAY SO, christ

In the evening, she receives an email from Miles—an invitation to meet in his office at any time during the week, which she needs to do anyway, and a second invitation for meeting at his own flat for dinner, every other Sunday. More for me than for you, if I’m to be honest. Although it may be useful for you as well. If you agree, we’ll begin next weekend.

That’s easy enough; she replies with a note saying she’ll be in on Tuesday morning, first thing (nine), and that she’d love to meet him for dinner the following Sunday. It feels like a good arrangement.

Then she fucks around reading about three-dimensional optical illusions and building their equivalents—as near as—in CAD, which she does until words stop making sense. She falls asleep early and easily.

***

Yusuf Kotadia arrives at the workshop at ten AM on Monday; the door closes silently behind him (Arthur having fixed the fucking thing sometime Sunday). He’s a pleasant, mannered scholarly type with an easy, open smile and several enormous packing cases of glassware and pharmaceutical compounds. While he’s bantering about cat-sitters with Eames (they live in the same city, or were in the same city when Cobb found Eames, at least), he drops a highly distinctive phrase from her reading, and Ari has to pull off Ariadne’s introduction as the architect and then keep her head for two hours going over her own mazes and double-checking her realization in secondary and tertiary browser tabs before Arthur finally stabs her with a needle and takes her under (having missed their opportunities for IV training over the weekend).

While Arthur is still glancing around at the scenery, looking absurdly out of place and sublimely unruffled about it in his grey pinstriped waistcoat and trousers among tropical greenery—a particularly friendly scarlet macaw lands on his shoulder and he says to it, laconic, “Hey.”—she’s literally bouncing on her toes in front of him.

Arthur narrows his eyes at her. “What.”

“Yusuf is Yusuf Sanghani,” she says. “He co-authored like forty of the major papers on Somnacin compounding while he was doing his doctorate, he’s a goddamn genius, he’s practically a fucking celebrity in neuroscience—”

“Huh.” He doesn’t even blink, just strokes one of the parrot’s talons with a finger as he says, “Doesn’t fit with how he’s running an illegal dream den in Kenya.”

Ari physically sags, leaning on one of her own dreamed walls for support. “That’s because the entire field of dream science as a legitimate branch of neurochem collapsed. A decade ago, when the EU and the US both outlawed the materials aside from military research institutions. He didn’t even get to finish his doctorate; Sanghani is a—”

“Name we’re not using. Ever again,” Arthur says, glaring at her. The parrot takes a break from running its beak through Arthur’s pomaded hair to stare at her in tandem. “He’s here as Kotadia.”

“You have no appreciation for art,” she replies. “I despair, I really do—”

“I really don’t need two of Eames on this job,” he mutters. “Although you’re at least quieter. Mostly. Get your overeducated rock-star crush under control while I figure out this maze.”

A little meanly, she dreams a simple concealed-pit trap five feet from the tips of Arthur’s beautifully polished shoes. It’s cheap, hacky, Looney Toons-style slapstick, but it works like a charm.

“That,” she says, the moment he crashes through it and finishes swearing—the parrot squawks a laugh and flies off— “is for implying my admiration of good science is anything approaching something so utterly unprofessional as a crush.”

“Okay,” he says, scowling, in a way that she’s coming to suspect actually means he’s trying not to laugh. “Fine, okay, you made your point. Now gimme a hand.”

She rolls her eyes. “No.” Instead, she lifts the floor of the trap. Same effect, different mechanism, and one that doesn’t involve a five-foot-nothing woman trying to lend a hand to someone a head taller. Arthur’s glare melts into something between surprise and admiration.

“You’re really picking this up,” he says, as the floor clicks into place.

She doesn’t dignify that with a response.

***

The first thing Miles says on Tuesday, before Ari even sits down in the wingback, is, “I could kick myself.”

Some small but crucial barrier explodes in her head and she snaps, “Don’t even fucking start.”

He peers at her as she stammers, “I mean—with—with all due respect, I—” while working out exactly how she’s going to phrase her torrent of apologies and whether she’ll do so on her knees, and then he throws his head back and laughs, like she’s never seen.

“You’re handling it, then,” he says finally, with a grin. “Despite the doom and gloom Arthur’s been exuding—and the guns, and the very existence of Eames…”

“I like Eames,” says Ari, shrugging. “And Arthur. The gun thing was just… startling. And Yusuf is a neuropharmacological legend, although neither of them seems to care. I’m handling it, yes, and I’m gonna see it through. Which—” She bites her lip. “It’d be…nice if the bureaucratic stuff shook out, for ENSAP. If this—if I could get it on record as a work placement, or external research, or whatever, through the end of this term? Would you be—I know it’s nonstandard, but would you sign off on—well, I’ve been telling people it’s a project under nondisclosure agreements, if you think that’s—”

“Just come back, Ms. Vickers,” he says, unexpectedly, his face going suddenly solemn. “That’s all I can ask. It’s an…engrossing field, certainly, and it’ll pay any variety of bills, but—I rather think, personally, that you’re too bright for me to like you to disappear into the underworld without the degree. I’ll do anything within reason that makes it more likely for you to come back and see the program through. I can’t and won’t make you promise—ethically—but…please, do come back.”

She swallows, something warm settling in her chest. “I’m not walking away from three years’ research based on a three-month project,” she replies, as gently and matter-of-fact as she can. “I wouldn’t. I don’t know if I could.”

“Then that’s settled,” says Miles. “I’ll inform the department—it sounds like you’ve established your cover for your peers—and you’ll get along with your doings. I look forward to Sunday.”

Ari nods. “I do too, sir.”

***

She spends that day in the warehouse learning how to place cannulas. Angles of approach versus angle of insertion in the vein, finding veins at all, tricks for coaxing them out, the realization that she’s one of those people who tastes intravenous saline. Although the PASIV insists it’s self-sterilizing and self-flushing and self-whatevering, so they generally skip the saline flush, says Arthur, despite best practices. She practices on bananas, absurdly, and then on Eames, Arthur, and Yusuf in turn, before finally doing her own; hers goes perfectly, not least because her veins, according to Yusuf, are the answer to some poor phlebotomist’s most fervent prayers. Once it’s placed, she runs four mazes, the last with all three of the men and Eames and Yusuf populating the dreamspace with projections; they need five hours in the dream to solve it, between the three of them. Afterward, topside, Yusuf beams at her. Eames smiles like a well-fed cat, and Arthur meets her eyes and gives her one deep nod.

***

Three hours before Cobb and the mysterious Saito are scheduled to arrive at the workshop on Thursday, Ari’s lounging in one of the lawn chairs, headphones on and skimming a chapter from an urban planning textbook regarding traffic regulations when she glances up to find Eames staring at her. She tugs the headphones down without bothering to pause her music and says, “Yeah?”

He watches for another moment before he mutters, “No, won’t do.”

“What—”

“Miss Finch. Your employer and your client will be arriving today.”

Ari blinks. Then, thinking, she closes out of her music player entirely and removes the headphones from around her neck before she sits up and swings her legs sideways, placing her feet—in Ariadne’s brown boots—on the floor. She keeps her laptop where it is but tips its lid closed, then places her folded hands on the warm rubberized plastic. “I—yeah,” she says, and quirks her mouth at herself, somewhere between annoyed and amused. “You’re right, I guess. I’d forgot. Thanks.”

“There you are,” says Eames pleasantly. “Everyone in extraction’s a bit of an actor, but the good ones tend to last longer. Don’t let me catch you slip, little bird.”

***

For a man with the net worth of Oceania, Saito is… approximately as Ari expected, although Ariadne doesn’t know what to do with him aside from be polite and speak when spoken to. Saito seems amused by Ariadne, for some reason, an odd flickering quarter-smile chasing across his lips as he passes her his card. Cobb looks even more tired than he was when he left, but he still calls all of them together for the first team meeting.

“The Fischers are a private family,” he says—there’s no intro, no nothing, just the six of them in the center of the room, in front of the PASIV table, with an easel displaying a blown-up photograph of two men. One is old, the other young; both are in suits. “With their security, it’s not worth trying to enter their homes. Not in Sydney, not in LA, not in New York, not in Morocco. Unless Mr. Saito—”

“They keep loyal retainers,” says Saito. He speaks like he’s issuing decrees or reciting epics, rather than making declarative statements. “They will not be accessible.”

“That means our levels will be impersonal,” Cobb says, nodding to Ariadne. “No recreation of family memories—”

Before she can remind him that he said never to recreate memories, Eames interrupts, “No family memories worth recreating, unless I’m reading all of the gossip quite backwards.”

Arthur mutters, “Wouldn’t put it past you.”

“Thank you, Arthur; my literacy is—”

“Enough,” says Cobb heavily. “Impersonal spaces, Ariadne.” He does his thing with the vowels and looks at her hard. “Anonymous, populated, public or semi-public spaces. Arthur?”

“The subject’s projections will take on roles reflecting the purpose of each space.” Arthur taps his pen against his leg. “If we’re in a hotel, there’ll be staff and other guests. In an office, there’ll be other employees—”

“The Fischer Morrow offices are architecturally distinctive,” Saito puts in. “Rumor suggests part of the Sydney headquarters has been renovated temporarily for Maurice Fischer’s care.”

Jesus, Ari thinks. Ariadne says nothing, only tips her head.

“Well, I’ll be seeing for myself and letting you all know next week,” says Eames, brisk. “Contracts signed and notarized as of yesterday local time. Those references came in handy.” He nods, eyebrows raised, to Saito, who gazes back inscrutably.

“We’re going in three levels.” Cobb looks around at all of them. Levels, Ari thinks, like a video game with a Matryoshka topology— “It’s been done, but not at this scale. Three dreamers, three locations. Yusuf will be the first level’s dreamer. We need his compounding to establish a two-level dream within the first level, and his watch while we’re under. Second—Arthur, I’d like you holding that one, running interference on the mark’s projections. Third, Eames. That leaves me free to work with situational changes. Mr. Saito will be with me throughout. Ariadne is designing the levels and teaching them to the dreamers; she will not be participating in the job itself, so the levels will be fixed before the job starts. Questions.”

Ari bristles a little at Cobb’s hard limits on her nonparticipation; after the last week and a half, she feels like she has skin in the game, for lack of a better phrase. But Ariadne merely glances around at the others; no one speaks up.

Then, “Tell me your confidence in success, Mr. Cobb.” Saito’s eyes look like stones.

Cobb’s expression doesn’t change; he just says, “We’ll get it done.”

They dream with Saito afterward, in pairs and groups; when he dies for the first time in a dream, at the hands of Yusuf’s subconscious—he’d dreamed a portal, Yusuf relates later, a floor tile that covered a hundred feet of dreamspace in one step, which the projections sincerely disliked—he vomits on his bespoke suit topside and vanishes for the rest of the day.

Arthur claims Ari for an absolutely unnecessary coffee run and says, “See, comparatively, you were composed. And Saito’s had a colorful life.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

He side-eyes her, but one side of his mouth is dimpling. “Not a chance.”

***

Eames’s surveillance in Sydney starts the Monday after Saito arrives. It takes him just that week and a half, between his and Saito’s arrivals in Paris, to establish his persona’s history as a corporate attorney and gain the attention of Fischer Morrow for a role as a consulting attorney on several cases Peter Browning, right-hand man of Maurice Fischer and head of the conglomerate’s legal team, is overseeing. The lawyer—Eric Amesbury-Scott, which is a ballsy Hiro Protagonist sort of a pseudonym, if it’s not just fucking idiotic (again, recalling Hiro Protagonist)—is a veteran of multiple honored academic institutions, fitted out with glowing recommendations, and tied to an extensive record of small but meaningful contributions to small but meaningful cases regarding intricacies of—stuff. Partnerships, mergers, acquisitions, subcontracts. Business law.

He invites Ari out for lunch the Saturday before he first flies out. Eames attends in his lawyer’s persona (age 31, Oxford graduate, in a suit to rival Arthur’s weekday wear) while she acts Ariadne Finch, wearing a new silk blouse and her Hermès scarf. Ariadne, being a pleasant and professional young woman, expresses only polite interest, with occasional requests for clarification; Ari is utterly lost. Eric Amesbury-Scott, meanwhile, is so dedicated to his explanations of details of case law that it’s easy to miss how closely he’s observing everything else (another part of the unscheduled mini-mission). Afterward, they compare notes—they’d met at a Métro stop, because neither drives in Paris, and adjourned to a park—and find that Eric’s recall remains rather better than Ari’s.

“And it wasn’t even a fair comparison,” she muses, “in my favor—Ariadne would’ve been mentally doing her shopping list while smiling and nodding, but Eric was actually generating coherent speech. Or pseudo-coherent, but I’m assuming you’re not phoning the content in while you’re in character. If it had been me, I’d have walked out after five minutes.”

“Oh, little bird.” Eames puts one hand to his chest. “You wound me.”

“No, I wound Eric. I’d be happy to listen to you bullshit for an hour and a half.”

Eames goes dry at that, in Eric’s slick tailored suit and slick hair and smooth shave. “If this business isn’t to your taste, you and Arthur could produce those terrible greeting cards you Americans love so much. All of them just backhanded compliments.”

***

The days settle into a rhythm of sorts. Eames’s schedule, such as it is, works out to about twelve days in Sydney, then four in Paris, in cycles. He routes his observations to Arthur, who feeds the salient bits to Cobb, who distills them into directives for Ariadne. Cobb never takes her, or anyone else, under on their own; they review Ariadne’s preliminary designs with one of the level dreamers, or with Saito. Because the landscapes are static, based on Ari’s memorized layouts as established while she slips into the dream, there’s nothing to change. The only possible irritant to the subject’s projections is the presence of other minds, and they’re never down for long enough for that to become a major issue. Usually the trips are set for an hour, sometimes two, but often Cobb will have some criticism of an element that he wants Ariadne to fix immediately, or a comment he wants to relay to the rest of the team, or they just finish the review or practice run early.

As the first of Eames’s Sydney trips passes, Ari becomes—accustomed, strangely, to the men saying things like, “Well, that’s all, I guess,” and pointing guns at her head. Every single one, even Saito, can dream a pistol or a handgun (she still doesn’t know the difference; it hasn’t seemed relevant) into existence in an eyeblink. Usually the barrel settles right against her temple, “To avoid mistakes,” says Arthur, grimly; sometimes it goes between her eyes, or Arthur’s feeling rushed and aims for her forehead from across a dreamed room or lobby. The bullets never feel like anything, although she wakes with headaches.

She wants in on the goddamn job.

***

Compared to what she’s read about Somnacin effects, hers are nothing, so she ignores them until Miles asks, during her second Sunday dinner with him. They’re in his lovely Grenelle flat, eating, of all things, grilled cheese and tomato soup, because Miles has no illusions regarding his own cookery, he says.

“How have you been sleeping?” he asks, as he scatters Goldfish crackers into his soup. “I remember dreamwork doing a number on my eight hours.”

She tips her head from side to side, equivocating. “Difficult to say. I’ve never been—I mean, my dad—one of my dads, Kevin, starting when I was, wow, four? We’d meet up in the den a couple hours after my bedtime, because I just didn’t sleep. We’d draw together, or we’d read, or play checkers.” Ari smiles, remembering. “Chess, once I could remember how all the pieces moved. That was our thing ’til I left for uni. I kicked ass in high-school chess club. But I mean—my point is, I can’t say for sure if my sleep patterns have changed because of dreamwork, because there weren’t really any patterns to begin with.”

Miles nods. “Fair enough. Do you often remember your dreams? Your natural dreams, that is. I apologize for the scattershot questions, I simply—well, the compounds were much less stable when I was active in dreamwork, but I do still hear about side effects.”

“I—generally,” she says, thinking about it. “They’ve been… I guess, this last couple weeks, they’ve gotten more vivid, with clearer narratives. A lot of mazes.” Wryly, she adds, “Usually with someone following me around saying I got something wrong.” She shakes her head, self-deprecating, but when she catches the worry in Miles’s face she stops. “Professor?”

He waves one hand. “I’m being a worrywart,” he says. “Only—you did mention totems, once.”

She blinks. Something small, preferably heavy, that you can keep in a pocket, no, not a coin— “Yes, I remember.”

“Do you have one?” he asks, casual, but the worry is still in his eyes.

“Not—no,” Ari replies. “Since I’m not going along on the dream—” She almost manages to say it without bitterness. “I didn’t think…” She trails off.

Miles tongues at his teeth and says, “Right. I’d like you to make one. They’re—not infallible, despite the core of the idea, but they’re useful, and in case… Well, in case. Would you humor an old man’s whims?”

She can’t bring herself to say anything but “Of course, Professor.”

When they’ve finished eating and done the dishes, Miles brings out a chess set. “I’ve not played in years,” he says, “and the pieces are only collecting dust. Since you mentioned, with your father… One of the pieces might do, to start. It helps when they’ve some personal significance, not just a bit of tat.”

Ari looks over the pieces. Instead of black and white, they’re antiqued bronze and brushed nickel, a little bit undersized but each surprisingly and satisfyingly hefty, even the pawns. She runs her fingers over the major and minor pieces, ignoring the king and queen—even in this set, they’re a bit much to put in a pocket. The geometry of the piece is the main thing, she thinks; it should be sufficiently symmetrical, which rules out the knight. Between the rook and the bishop—

A spill of clerical terminology unfurls in her head and she grins, suddenly, and picks up one of the nickel bishops. “I’m going to screw it up,” she says to Miles. “Are you sure it’s—”

“Please, Ms. Vickers, it’s all yours.”

Vickers, vicars. In a diocese, a vicar is the agent of the bishop. And she’s always liked how the bishop slants across the board. “Thank you, sir.”

***

Part of her office is a shop table; she’s fitted it out with a tabletop vise and a good Dremel tool, in addition to the handfuls of craft knives and glues and putties she uses for models. She waits, that Monday, until after everyone’s left the workshop—she’s building the central level’s labyrinth and taking her time about it (she’s not certain about the complexity of the labyrinth, still toying with making it a two- or three-story affair instead of a single floor), so she has a reason to stay late. When Arthur finally leaves, she takes the bishop piece out of the pocket of Ariadne’s khakis and looks at it.

When she sets it flat on the tabletop and tips it over, it falls and rolls in a circle, unimpeded by the slot cut into the bishop’s hat. That could be something to work with; for instance, if it fell and just stayed still. She carefully marks the exact center of the bottom of the piece, scratching an X into the nickel alloy with a diamond bit—and thanking her stars the set wasn’t steel, which is a bitch to machine without a real machine shop. Then she lines up a piece of cardstock with the center of the bishop’s “face,” assuming that the hat is facing forward. She scratches a faint mark into the edge of the base of the piece exactly in line with the bishop’s imaginary nose, then flips the piece over again, aligns the card stock between the two marks she’s made, and scratches a line along the centerline opposite the face side—toward the bishop’s back.

Then she sets the little dude in her vise and gets to the fun part. With a routing bit, she establishes a decent-sized conical hollow in the base of the piece. Once it’s set, she uses a finer bit to remove more material in another cone, this one aimed toward the back; she’s careful to keep it focused, broader at the base but still deep into the piece to make a reasonable—and asymmetrical—hollow within the envelope of the bishop. She ditches her nickel alloy chips, takes off her gloves and safety glasses, and polishes the hollow with a soft Dremel head, then frees the bishop and sets him flat on the table.

She crouches, eyes level with the bishop’s face, and uses one finger to tip him.

He lands flat on his stupid little brushed-nickel face, without rolling. Perfect.

The sound of a retracting reel rattles through the empty warehouse—she’d thought empty, in any case—and she gets to her feet, puzzled. She leaves the Dremel for cleanup later and grips the bishop, smooth metal with a weight only she knows, as she checks the workshop.

Cobb’s there, bending over a second PASIV case—a second one?—as a single stretch of line coils back around its spool. He’s off to one side, at one desk with a single chair next to it, in the meager light of one desk lamp—

“Were you going under on your own?” she asks, curious, and immediately shakes herself as Cobb straightens. Get with it, Finch. Because she’s Ariadne now. Fortunately, her tone had been deferential—

“No, no—” Cobb puts his hands in his pockets immediately, rocks back on his heels. “I was just, ah, just… running some experiments, uh…” He is so obviously lying—everyone in extraction’s a bit of an actor, sure, Eames— “Uh, I didn’t realize anyone was here, so…”

“Yeah,” Ariadne says, recognizing her boss’s awkwardness and wanting to smooth it over, even if she doesn’t understand its cause. “I was just, uh. I was just working on my… totem, actually.” She holds it up, look, I’m for real, and tips her head a little. Still not super comfortable with the terminology—

“Oh, here—” Cobb steps toward her, holding out one hand. “Lemme take a look.”

She straightens, drawing her hand close to her chest—she doesn’t quite shake her head, and she definitely doesn’t say, Look with your eyes, not with your hands, the way Ari wants to.

Cobb stops, tips his head back, watches her. “So you’re learning, huh.”

No shit. Ariadne is more expressive. “An—elegant solution,” she says, “for keeping track of reality.” And then, because there’s nothing about totems anywhere in the published literature or unofficial records, “Was—was it your idea?”

“No, no,” says Cobb again, but he looks—somewhere between nostalgic and sad, a little rueful. “It was, ah. It was Mal’s idea. This—” He digs in his pocket and pulls out a shape, a top—oddly shaped, two concave cones of different heights, joined at their bases. “This one was hers. In the dream it would never topple…”

Ari can’t help narrowing her eyes at that. It would never—it would spin continuously. As a hypothesis, it sucks. It’s not falsifiable; how do you ensure never, without watching it for the rest of your life? Unless it has a specific and repeatable spin time topside, but that would be a headache and a half to work out geometrically—

Cobb’s just holding the top, his smile going pained. “Just…spin and spin.”

“Arthur told me she passed away,” Ariadne says, as gently as she knows how.

He goes still. Then he shoves the top back into his pocket and asks, “How are the mazes coming along?”

It’s so transparently deflective— But she plays along, leading Cobb through her office. She explains how she’s thinking of tying each layer—each level—to the part of the mark’s subconscious that the team (not including her, to her increasing irritation) wants to fuck with, although really she’s only gotten as far as designating the third level as a hospital. “So that Fischer will bring his father. I—you know, actually, I have a question about this layout—” She lifts the model, now that its adhesives are dried—

“Nonono—” Cobb actually jerks away, like he’s been burned. “Don’t—don’t show me the specifics. Only the dreamer should know the layout.”

That strikes her—both her and Ariadne, as she sets the third level down. In the run-throughs, Cobb hasn’t said a thing about her pointing out shortcuts to whoever isn’t dreaming the maze. “Why is that so important?”

Cobb sits in one of the task chairs and doesn’t look at her as he says, “In case one of us brings in our projections—we don't want them knowing the details of the maze.”

That strikes her in the same way a sword—dagger, whatever—did, going on four weeks ago. “You mean in case you bring Mal in.” She’s careful to use his pronunciation, rounding the vowel. Arthur still locks up his own subconscious in practice dreams, which means it can be done— “You can’t keep her out, can you.”

He swallows, tries to say it casually: “Right.”

“You can’t build...” Ariadne is putting this together for the first time; Ari is only a step ahead. “Because if you know the maze, then she knows it.” She can’t suppress the dryness in her voice. “Well. She'd sabotage the whole operation.” His eyes flash, and she suddenly feels like she’s navigating black ice. “Cobb… do the others know?” About Mal, she means, about your shadow, about the knives—

“No,” he says, “no, they don’t.”

Ari watches him, and Ariadne says, “You gotta warn them. If this is getting worse.”

“No one said it’s getting worse,” Cobb snaps, and she flinches. Arthur said. Arthur said she shot him in the knee— “I need to get home,” he continues, voice low and soft and pleading, like he’s trying to make up for snapping. “That’s—” He half-laughs, choked and dark, and meets her eyes finally. “That’s all I care about right now.”

She holds his gaze as something in her twists and pulses, curiosity and anger writhing together, the idea that he’s exposing the team to Mal with her smiles and blades. “Why can’t you go home?” she asks, so coldly she clenches her teeth against saying anything else. Ariadne can’t be that cold, wouldn’t be—

Cobb doesn’t look away. “Because they think I killed her.”

It’s all she can do not to step backward, but she’d just hit the table behind her, and holy shit. Holy shit. Pit of vipers. Fucking—

“Thank you,” Cobb says, hard and fragile as glass, as he stands.

She’s so shaken she can barely say, “For what?”

“For not asking whether I did,” he replies, and leaves.

She stands, frozen, feeling her hands shake at her sides—the smooth metal of the bishop warm against the fingers of her right hand—as his footsteps cross the warehouse. The PASIV case snaps shut; the light dims further as the desk lamp clicks off; Cobb’s steps come closer again, but not toward her office—he goes past, pushes the door open and lets it fall shut silently on its new hinges and damper.

Ari breathes in, then out, long and slow through her mouth, and sets her totem on the table behind her. She turns and tips it; it lands on its face with a flat little click, no rolling. She almost laughs. Instead, she takes out her work phone and texts Arthur, ignoring that he left the workshop three hours ago and that it’s on the wrong side of ten PM, well past business hours.

Spoke w/ DC re M. You need to

She deletes the last three words and tries again. She sends: Spoke w/ DC re M. Will you tell me the whole thing?

A moment later, she adds: I’m sorry

Within seconds the phone buzzes against her hand. Where are you & C?

I’m at workshop. C left

There in 10. Don’t be tired.

For another thirty seconds she counts breaths, in and out, forcing the tension—they think I killed her—out of her shoulders and neck. Not asking whether I did. Then she straightens up her shop table, cleans the Dremel bits and slots them all back into their case, wipes down the work surface and the Dremel tool itself. Ari checks the hospital layout—she still doesn’t know if it’s complex enough; the way Arthur says, things get worse as you go in, and Cobb didn’t actually answer her—and presses her lips together, dissatisfied. She shuts down her desktop properly, instead of letting it hibernate until morning, and then drags the Cornell hoodie Ariadne had ordered a week and a half ago over her head. It has the right colors, at least.

Arthur comes in as she’s finger-combing her hair. He stops in the doorway of her office—he’s lost the day’s waistcoat and suit jacket, wearing a lightweight overcoat against the April night chill, hair still slicked back with the comb marks visible. “You okay?”

“Hadn’t realized I was working for a murder suspect, is all,” she says, and Arthur’s face empties so quickly and thoroughly it’s like she punched him. “Fuck, I’m sorry—”

He shakes himself, mouth twisted in a horrible parody of a smile. “You’re not wrong, though,” says Arthur, bitter. “But if I’m gonna—” He grimaces. “Come on. Bar.”

***

He nurses a pint while Ari devours a sandwich, and only once her empty plate is replaced with a double scotch, neat, does Arthur start talking, voice low and dark and clear. “She killed herself. I know she did, she—called me, that night, burner phone to one of mine, off the grid, no record—that taught me—it must’ve been three minutes, no more, before Cobb showed. She was completely lucid, is the thing, except for—I mean. She thanked me for being her friend here, which—I didn’t think about, I was trying to figure out what was—and then said she’d see me above and hung up, and I couldn’t get her back on that number—” He clears his throat. “She jumped. Ten-story window. Nine minutes after she hung up.” Arthur is staring fixedly at the tabletop. “I was across the street, sidewalk level.”

Ari can’t speak, can’t move, can’t breathe, until Arthur blinks and meets her eyes; he looks like he’s drowning, but he’s too proud or something to ask for a lifesaver. She lifts one hand from the table then and—has no idea what to do with it. After a moment, she reaches across the table and tentatively lays her palm on his arm, just touching the striped fabric of his shirtsleeve a couple inches above the cuff. He’s still wearing his cufflinks. Ari swallows, hard, and watches him.

“You don’t forget some shit,” he says, voice ragged, and he lifts his other hand and brushes his knuckles against hers. Just for a second, an acknowledgment, before he sets his palm flat against the table with his fingers spread. Ari pulls back and puts both her hands in her lap. “She—framed him. Him, Cobb. Records with their lawyers, stuff about… about him threatening her. It was bullshit, all of it, but she was—fuck. The thing, Mal, the thing with her—she was—I can’t say how smart she was, people say Cobb’s a genius and next to her, he looked like a… I don’t know, a kid who happened to know his multiplication table a little early. People talk about playing two steps ahead; she was onto the next fucking game. She had backup, is the thing, legally, doctors’ declarations and witnesses to shit that she’d fabricated, or twisted, stuff that was nothing unless you stood right in one spot and tilted your head at the right angle and under one light it’d look like a… a threat. She had everything. To frame him, suggest he’d killed her and threatened the kids, and you know, suspicious death of a spouse, the first suspect is always…”

He stops speaking, and his voice has gotten so uneven it seems like it’s because he can’t anymore. Ari lays her own hands flat on the table, palms down and fingers spread, and stares at the spaces between them.

“So,” Arthur says, after something like a minute, “he’s wanted in the States for first-degree murder, plus a few other charges, all related.” He says it as smoothly as if he’s delivering the day’s task list. “Marie de Luce-Miles is the kids’ legal guardian. I’m not implicated—she said—she said she wouldn’t do that to me, although I didn’t know what she meant. So I visit, every six months. I’m—you’ll laugh—I’m Philippa’s godfather. Eames is James’s. And I know you only have my word on this, but Cobb never in his life—”

“I believe you,” says Ari immediately, looking up at him again. She does, in her gut. “I believe you,” she repeats, as clearly and steadily as she can.

His shoulders lift and fall as he sighs, hugely and silently; he lets his eyes close for a moment, before he looks at her and raises his still-full pint. “To faith,” he says, mouth twisting with something horrible.

Ari picks up her double scotch and touches the rim of the glass to his. “To faith,” she echoes, and downs the entire thing.

***

The levels start to take shape: the city, the hotel, the hospital. The hospital remains fucked-up, in Ari’s opinion, if only because the projected narrative at that point is just strange—a mission, militaristic with their mark at its head, to rescue or retrieve or contact his father, somehow. The building ends up less like a hospital and more like a fortress, one that happens to have medical facilities, set in rough terrain. On Eames’s second long weekend back in Paris, he runs the level with Ari and dreams it as a snowbound mountainscape.

“What,” he says, the first time he goes under with Ari and she finds herself bundled to the eyelashes, feet strapped to skis; she turns to him, mouth open to ask what the fuck he’s doing. “It’s all very James Bond. Or can’t you ski?”

She rolls her eyes before she sets her goggles in place. “Canadian,” she reminds him. “Never ask me such a stupid question again.”

“I am so very glad we’ve kept you, little bird,” he murmurs.

In the fortress itself, the maze (labyrinth/maze hybrid; it’s got multiple paths and some dead ends) is corridor after corridor of diamond-treaded flooring and white walls, nonsense symbols painted at each corner, plates of glass on the outer walls. “It’s good,” Eames says, “it’s all quite—but I wonder.”

Ari unzips her parka—she’s getting hot under all her dream-layers—and drawls, “I can’t work with I wonder.”

“Well—I know I’m being a prick, I’m sorry, it’s only that I’ve had too many dreams run up against… limits, that we couldn’t have seen, for any reason.” He’s looking around at the hall, not meeting her eyes, so he doesn’t catch when she shifts her weight and gives him a look like get the fuck on with it. Probably intentionally. “Time limits, for instance. I’d like a straight path, in case we need it. No, two straight paths. Corner to corner, passing through diagonally. Not on this level, but perhaps—”

“Ducts,” she suggests. “I haven’t messed around with HVAC, but someplace like this—especially in your Arctic getaway—it’d need a ton of space to move air around, vents to the outside, that kind of shit. I could do ductwork. Heating below, cooling above, entrances to both from the outside.”

Eames thinks about it and nods. “That’d do quite well. You think you could do it soon?”

“Before you leave,” she replies. “Let’s get out of here.”

He shoots her out with a gun that she’s learned is a Beretta, official sidearm of the US military; he dreams that or a compact semiautomatic H&K, depending on how many people are in the dream. Ari’s starting to figure she’s going to have to do some reading about guns.

***

In their discussion circles, as the dream takes shape, their dynamic flexes and settles. When Eames speaks, Arthur watches him like a cat at a mousehole; when Arthur speaks, Eames watches him like a really stoned cat in front of a fish tank. Yusuf is polite and specific; Arthur finds holes in things and needles Eames; Eames is sublimely unruffled and has a talent for synthesizing an hour’s discussion into a single clear sentence. Cobb watches and thinks and prods; he doesn’t lead conversation, or dangle ideas, but guides others into inspiration. Saito just… watches. Ariadne keeps her head the hell down, because she’s not on the fucking job.

Cobb signs off on the public spaces of the hotel that Arthur’s dreaming as the second level. It’s not truly finalized, but the rest of the quirks—paradoxes, traps—are things in the non-public areas of the hotel, places where only Arthur expects to be, things that only Arthur will know; Ari’s just come back from the fourth emergency-exit stairwell with him as Saito begins to expound on the utility of the Sydney-to-Los-Angeles flight that Robert Fischer takes every two weeks.

Arthur stabs about forty holes into the idea, logistical traps regarding maintenance and 747 layouts and the necessity of bribing flight attendants, and Ari thinks the sketch of a plan is about to lose its entire shape when Saito crystallizes it with a single sentence. “I bought the airline.”

Cobb tells her she’s done a great job; Arthur glances at her, like yeah, but don’t get comfy, and the dream ends. She makes an excuse about…something…and disappears to her office to glower at things and rip up paper. She’s done a fantastic job, but it’s not the job.

***

Yusuf is a pleasure to work with on the city level; he’s quick, clear, and easily amused, which is a glory after countless over-serious design students who earnestly invoke energy and synergy and organic flow without thinking about what words mean. Granted, it helps that he’s talking about a city, a mix of New York and LA with a hint of Tokyo about the edges—there’s not much organic flow there.

He invites her out for dinner the night after Eames flies back to Sydney for his third leg, while the rest of the team is still wigging about their first-class flight whenever this job actually goes off. Ariadne Finch wouldn’t turn down an offer to socialize with a friendly colleague, and no grad student with blood in their veins would turn down free food. Since he’s twice Ariadne’s on-paper age, she assumes—correctly—that he has no romantic designs whatsoever; he just says, “I’ve always found jobs go better when we actually like each other, and of course, I’d like to thank you for your patience in testing the compounds.”

It turns out, though, that he’s getting her away from the team—from Cobb and Arthur, that is, since Eames is tailing Browning in Australia and Saito is off doing whatever the unimaginably wealthy do—with an ulterior motive.

“See, me, I’m a paranoid bastard,” he confides, just low enough that she can hear him but no one else can, after a waiter has set their plates in front of them and vanished. They’re at a quietly expensive little traditional-French-cuisine place; Ariadne Finch can afford it, although she never could. “That’s the main thing. Well, there’s two main things. I’m paranoid and I’m shite at building. So, I know the city level is pretty fill-in-the-blank, but I want to know there’s recourse. And I want to know where, and how good its security is.”

She narrows her eyes. The cityscape doesn’t have secure spaces, aside from the warehouses; it doesn’t have spaces, period. If Yusuf is asking for more—and she has no idea what he means by recourse, although security is an indicator. “If you could be a little more specific?” she says, without touching her food, although it smells delicious (blood sausage—she’s never had it—and new potatoes in crème fraiche). Instead, she sips at her water, keeping her gaze on him.

“You’re a bit much like Arthur for comfort, did you know?” he says, offhand. “I want a bunker.”

That surprises her. The crew—not her—will be in the first level for a week or so of dreamtime, yes, but it’s a city. It’s safe, to the degree that guns keep one safe, and she’s been shot out of enough dreamscapes at this point to know that each of them is more than handy with a surprising number of guns. “A bunker,” she repeats.

He nods, despite the flatness of her tone. “Preferably near the river. Enough room for the five of us. Provisions for a week. Space to kip. A loo, shower—probably just one. Stuff to do. And hidden.”

“Provisions,” she repeats, and realizes she’s turning into an echo. “Is food even necessary? Since you’ll all know you’re dreaming?”

“Bodies and brains get odd,” Yusuf says, as if this is sufficient explanation. “Plus, it’s something to do. Keeps the mind occupied, adds mental structure. You put a lucid dreamer somewhere for a subjective week with nothing to do but tweak about getting slaughtered by projections, they’ll come out of it a babbling mess topside. Which we can’t afford. So yeah, a provisioned bunker. Like those Y2K freaks, you remember? You might be too young.”

Too young— She tilts her chin up and to the side. “And you couldn’t place this on your own,” she says, allowing her irritation to surface in her tone.

“Nope,” he replies cheerfully, either oblivious or choosing to overlook her curtness; she’d bet Ariadne’s good money on the second. “First, I’m shite with spatial whatever-you-call-it; second, still busy refining things on my own plate; last, I’ve no knowledge to go on, but for the Y2K freaks, and that’s from a couple news spots. It’s just—” The affability is modulated now, tension in the set of his mouth and an odd gleam in his eyes, and he leans his elbows on the table, voice flattening and dropping another notch in volume. “Look, in case things go tits-up. I need to know there’s a safe space, for the team, for the duration. The compound—there’s variables enough, right? I want something nailed down. To ensure the stability of the dream. And I need to get it nailed soon. I’m shite with this.”

“Did Cobb request this?” she asks, lightly—it’s just curiosity, but his face goes masklike.

“No, no, he didn’t. And I’d like to—keep it—you know. Quiet,” he replies, sounding as strained as he looks. “Trick up the sleeve, you know.” He tries a smile; it looks like a grimace.

She doesn’t have reason not to do it, and from a design perspective, he’s not asking for much. “All right,” Ariadne says, with a little shrug and a what-the-hell expression. “Give me ’til Friday.”

“Cheers,” he says, but the relief is enormous. “And bon appetit.”

“Mange,” she replies sternly.

They spend the rest of the meal discussing football and comics, of all things. She does like Yusuf.

***

The day after, she hears Cobb ask Yusuf if he’ll stay behind for an hour or so. “I ran some experiments on my own, yesterday,” he says, “and wanted to see how they went with your latest version of the sedative.”

While she’s fucking around, tweaking some paradoxes Arthur wants in the second level, she realizes Yusuf hadn’t established anything about the bunker’s location relative to the street. She packs her stuff up, thinking about the relative values of somewhere high up versus ground-level versus basement, and heads out into the main space to see if she can work out an excuse to ask Yusuf something without Cobb overhearing.

Instead, she finds Yusuf sitting in a chair in front of the side area with the second PASIV machine. Cobb is out, alone, and Yusuf turns when he hears her, lifts his reading glasses, and says, “Good night,” in a tone that brooks no negotiation.

She nods to him, barely, and books it.

DC was under on his own. Research recommends against this? she sends to Miles on her job phone, as she’s headed to Billancourt.

The next minute, the phone rings in her hand. Alarmed, Ari stops—she’s beneath a streetlight—and picks up. “Professor?”

“On his own,” Miles says, without a hello. “Is this the first time he’s done it?”

Running some experiments, Cobb had said, so blatantly lying. “No,” she says. “No, third, at least. Unless he’s actually helping with—but we always do tests in daylight, with—He’s not doing tests, no. He’s just… under on his own.”

A moment passes before Miles says anything. “My dear,” he says, finally, “I’m afraid I’m going to ask rather a lot of you. Dom has said you won’t be on the job. On the flight. I’m going to ask you to find a way to be. Or, rather, I’m going to put you on that flight, and then ask you to find an excuse as to why.”

She blinks. He’s asking rather a lot and it’s everything she wants: Being in—on—under—there are too many prepositions. Being on the flight, in the job, under in Yusuf’s variables enough-containing dreamspace. Getting from France to Australia, and Australia to the West Coast of the US—Ariadne’s home state, she remembers, and just stops herself from giggling wildly. “I—sir, if you think it’s necessary—”

“I rather do,” Miles interrupts, and there’s something grim about his tone. “I’ll get that squared away with Mr. Saito. Do keep your wits about you.”

He hangs up without another word. Ari tucks her phone away and makes a mental note to figure out what billionaires’ kids wear when they’re on first-class commercial flights. And a second mental note, to fish out the connection between Miles and Saito, of all pairs of people in the world.

Then, because the sidewalk is empty, she hisses, “Yesssssssss,” and punches the air twice.

She’s on the fucking job.

***

For the next two days, when she’s not at the warehouse, she works at her apartment drafting table with her updated map of the first-level city, photos of military barracks and mid-scale dormitory spaces, a few Wikipedia pages on survivalists, and a sketchpad spread out in front of her; on Thursday, she switches to CAD. She loses some sleep to the side project, mainly for her own deadline, but she can sleep when she’s rich. Some hours into Friday, she’s got the thing planned, dimensions in three axes and a nice digital rendering; she’s even textured it. One long narrow basement-level room, with a bathroom at the end. It’s got two sinks, counter space—first aid, she thinks, or whatever—and a roomy shower.

There are three bunk beds—she intends to defend the “extra” bed with “Tell me you wouldn’t have a slapfight over who got the single. Every. Night.”—and two couches. A stretch of counter and cabinets, with room for supplies—she leaves the specifics to Yusuf. An electric kettle and a microwave. A few tables of varying height; nothing fancier than mass-produced college dorm shit. Enough clearance to move around all the furniture easily, and enough space that six people could get away from each other, for a certain value of “away.” She doesn’t bother with electronics, aside from the kettle and microwave; any playback media would be memory-based, and therefore shitty. (She’s tried, in snatched moments in dreamtime, to make herself books, movies, music; all of it has been fragmentary and repetitive, senseless, unless it’s something she knows cold, in which case there’s no pleasure to be had from repeating it. If anyone disagrees, they can make their own while they’re under.)

At three A.M. on Friday, she texts Yusuf on her job phone: Done. Get my coffee in the morning. Triple shot latte, flavor at will but NOT raspberry.

She drops a flash drive on Yusuf’s desk six hours later—on four hours of sleep—and says, “Coffee.”

“You’re a love, Ariadne. Help me run it later?” He hands her the latte.

It’s chocolate-hazelnut; she hums in appreciation. “Yeah, whenever.”

They run it and refine it, easy little trips when no one else is on the PASIV, popping under for five minutes (an hour) to check how well Yusuf can stock the place—food, water, stuff to do in the form of chess and checkers and Mancala boards and packs on packs of cards, plus two kickballs, apparently at random.

He does well, as far as she can tell, but when he fucks up, he takes it hard.

“I have to get this down,” he says the following Monday, hands in his hair, after she points out that the kitchen appliances are missing, and notes that he’ll need to remember soap and toilet paper, if those bodily functions carry over to dreamtime. Apparently, they do, based on the amount of white showing around his irises. “I’ve got to.”

She looks at him, then glances around the bunker. It’s grim, just concrete and fluorescent lighting, despite the textiles—surprisingly rich damasks and paisleys in a palette of jewel tones. All of that is Yusuf. “You said it was backup.” She tries to sound gentle, reassuring, like sweet even-tempered Ariadne.

“We don’t know how long the job’s going to take below,” he says. “But we’ll be here for a week. A week. You know what it’s like, when people don’t know where their food’s coming from for a week?”

“You can shoot yourselves out,” she says, careful on the pronouns, and marvels at how coolly she says it, but then again, she’s been getting shot out of walkthroughs for weeks now. Not to mention the stabbing.

“Look,” Yusuf says, rounding on her suddenly. “The thing—the thing is, this three-level dream? Levels two and three will be stable as long as they need to be stable, which is a bloody week here, but that’s at cost. With the mix. I’m working on it, but I can’t guarantee—”

“What’s the cost?” she interrupts.

“Dying won’t send us up,” he says, sounding wild. “Side effect. It’ll send us down.” She has no idea what he’s talking about, but she’s alarmed by Yusuf, steady good-natured Yusuf, being so worked up. And at the concept in general, not being able to get out of the dream— “I want my brain after this,” he goes on, each word faster and louder than the last. “We need this, because it’ll keep us from—whatever shit the mark’s got, anyone would get antsy with someone else in their head for ten bloody hours topside, the projections will go—” He cuts himself off, shuts his eyes and breathes deep, in and out, before finishing, a shake in his voice. “This bunker and the supplies, they’re survival.”

He’s freaking out, and Ariadne would be patient. “All right, I see. You need to get the supplies right. Okay,” she says, slow and gentle. “For your peace of mind. You can get it right. I’d say make a list. Write out what you know you need, then add an extra person’s worth, for good measure. Itemize everything. You can memorize the list. You can do this.”

Yusuf breathes out again, hard. “Itemize,” he repeats levelly, eyes on the corner of the “kitchen” counter. “List. Memorize.” He flicks a glance at her, cracking a smile. “You really are like Arthur. Without the scary bits. Mostly.”

“Sure.” She lets herself roll her eyes this time. “Get me out of here.”

He lifts his SIG Sauer—she’s been reading, a little, when she remembers to—to her temple and pulls the trigger. It feels like nothing.

The next day, he has the bunker nailed.

For six, not five.

Chapter Text

On the first day of June, they finalize the kicks. Ariadne is calm and brisk and helpful; she has no reason to be otherwise, because the design of the kicks is all dreamwork theory, not architecture or paradoxical structures, and practicing them is just a dozen extra PASIV sessions for her. With Eames, she ensures that the fortress–hospital collapses into rubble with a dozen plugs of high-yield plastic explosives, placed within an average of four minutes. With Arthur, she watches the hotel room floor go when it’s told—I-beams are nothing to Semtex, particularly since Arthur ensures that the target rooms are separated by I-beams weakened by twenty per cent. Enough to hold up the furnishings and the room’s occupants, but easier to fuck up.

With the entire goddamn team, Yusuf as the dreamer, she watches the river from the elevated section of the drawbridge—except she’s standing on the goddamn bridge while they’re in the van, because Ariadne won’t be there, as the van accelerates backwards into thin air and then falls into the river. There are oxygen tanks in there, three, each fitted with half-masks and one-way valves for breathing as the extraction team escapes the sunken van, one for each pair onboard (including Fischer, not including Ariadne, because Ariadne isn’t going). She’s only there to watch the sensor readouts, checking the times in case they miss the downward pull of falling off the bridge and need the second upward pull from hitting the water.

She could scream, really, just turn all her bottled-up anxiety into one long shriek as the five heads bob in the choppy greenish water forty-something meters below, but Ariadne has nothing to worry about, so she just watches. The men swim toward the pebbly shore; the readouts for the van sensors are up here with Ari, on the center section of the drawbridge.

Arthur swims like he does everything, fast and efficient; Saito is nearly as quick about it, which she should stop being surprised by; and Eames does a great deal of splashing but he’s not far behind. Cobb manages a breast stroke that looks like he’s in pain, while Yusuf treads water, leisurely, because he (and everyone else, but of course it turns into a race; they’re dudes) knows that only one person (Ariadne) needs to see the readouts, with Arthur as a check, and because they’re only here for half an hour total, ninety seconds topside on Yusuf’s accelerated compound. Eighty-two subjective seconds after he reaches the shore, Arthur hits the top of the bridge, having swarmed up forty meters of the structure’s maintenance ladders like a gecko in sodden Savile Row. He’s not even breathing hard, the fucker, and he says only, “Difference?”

“Fifth decimal place,” she replies. The left-hand display, showing the readout from a sensor encased in titanium and duct-taped to the back bumper of the van (showcasing the fuck-it-good-enough philosophy of most engineers—Yusuf lacked the patience to dream a GTAW setup, and the rest of the team couldn’t be fucked to argue the point too heavily, and Ariadne has no reason to know anything about welding, although Ari knows far more than enough for her selected degree program, but duct tape really is a surprisingly decent substitute, with enough of it), reads 9.03428; the right-hand, from the van’s front sensor, gives 9.03435. The units are seconds.

The numbers aren’t the time of the fall itself, which is two and a half seconds, because that’s how gravity works (and fucking with gravity enough to slow the fall significantly would be a pretty severe tipoff to the mark’s subconscious that something was rotten in this state of sort-of onetime New Amsterdam). They’re approximately the time elapsed while the van displaces thirty-six cubic meters of water, and while whatever accompanying structural damage occurs, considering that the vehicle hits the river’s surface at a speed of about ninety klicks per hour. They give the time at which the upward buoyant force acting on the van cancels out the downward momentum. And while the buoyant force is decreasing continuously, because the van’s windows shatter on impact and let the river pour in, there’s still a moment when the vertical velocity of the van zeroes out; that’s the time shown by each of the two sensors, the zero-velocity points for the front and the back bumpers. According to Cobb, the second slightly larger value is the maximum time they’ll have after the first kick, when the van backs off the bridge and starts falling.

Arthur glares at the two displays—clunky red LED things, weird eighties throwbacks—and says, “That’ll have to be good enough for Cobb.”

Desperately and abidingly Ari wants to yell that all this bullshit is bullshit, based on bullshit; the entire experiential concept of the kick thing is based on hypnic jerks, which don’t even happen in true REM sleep. None of the vocabulary is correct; they—dream workers in general, extraction teams in particular—have no idea how it works and it’s just some fucking magical thinking repurposing the terminology describing one phenomenon for a second completely different one that just happens to wake someone in a Somnacin-induced lucid dream, and she wants to rip someone’s throat out at the sheer sloppiness of all of it.

But Ariadne knows nothing about hypnagogic states or myoclonus, because she’s a going-on-twenty-one-year-old architect, and only an architect, albeit a good one with a good head, thus her being along to check the numbers. So Ari herself stands there with her arms crossed over her red cardigan, allowing herself to hunch into the sweater because she’s fucking terrified and the wind up here, forty meters and change above the river, is cold as hell, and stares at the toes of her boots against the gridded metal.

The music starts, and Ari braces herself pointlessly before—

***

Arthur, being Arthur, is on his feet writing the two numbers on the whiteboard, dry-erase marker squeaking faintly, before Ari can sit up, and then her personal phone rings.

It’s twenty past seven o’clock in the evening local time. The screen reads DAD & PÈRE.

As the field team begins to debate the significance of the difference in the fifth decimal place—seventy microseconds on the first level, which works out to a little less than thirty milliseconds on the third—Ariadne murmurs, “Excuse me for a moment,” and fumbles her cannula out.

Yusuf only glances at her and waves a hand before he demands of the rest of the men if they could please consider the wisdom of oxygen tanks in a van intended to fall off a bridge. Cobb talks over him, insisting that the difference in times is vital to the success of the operation. He speaks too loudly and heavily, repeating that he and Arthur will have fractionally more time on the second level than Saito, who’ll have fractionally more than Eames and Fischer, so if they need to use the second kick cycle, then—

Arthur, gaze rapidly becoming a glare at Cobb, will probably demonstrate using actual math that the blip is absolutely fucking nothing in terms of statistical significance, even for the third level running four hundred times faster than the first (on the third level, the time is enough for a finger to twitch, and that’s about it); Eames will mutter about hating maths; Saito will lean back in his chair, fingers steepled, and possibly move one eyebrow by a statistically significant amount. Cobb will argue, and Yusuf will try to defuse the tension by making a joke, and it won’t work—

Ari accepts the call before it can go to voicemail, says, “Hi—one second,” presses the entire phone to her sweater front to damp their fucking predictable useless terrifying conversation, ditches her cannula, and absolutely does not run outside. She merely walks extremely quickly.

“—still at work?” Kevin is saying, when she puts the phone back to her ear, once the door shuts behind her. “Hope you’re getting that sweet overtime.”

“Dad, hi, oh my god—” She wants to cry; she chokes it down and buries it in excitement at hearing Kevin.

“We figured you’d be busy this spring, but we didn’t think you’d disappear!”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and has to say it again because she’s overwhelmed and freaking out. She’s still fixated on the first-level kick; she hates deep water, she can swim but she’s never trained for anything like the kick— “I’m so sorry, I miss you all so much! I’m still—it’s been wild lately, our client’s been getting antsy—”

Emergency care personnel had filtered out of Maurice Fischer’s office building at Sydney HQ eight hours ago, seven PM AEDT; time is running out, and she has no reason to be on the flight yet, and the goddamn first level relies on falling into a goddamn river.

“Clients. Who needs ’em, huh?”

Tomas puts in, gently, “Well, they do have the money.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean—”

“He’s not the problem at all, actually,” Ari interrupts. “The client is great. He’s interesting to work with. Work for. I mean, kind of both.” She giggles and checks her own tone; a little frazzled, a bit too loud, but that’s just excitement, of course, not overcompensation for feeling pulled in forty directions, thirty of them awful— “Listen, there’s actually—I’m going to be traveling with the crew, it’s kind of weirdly—I’m not allowed to talk about it, like, I can’t tell you where, which I know sounds really sketchy, and we don’t even know when exactly yet, but it’s all aboveboard and everything’s okay—”

“They paying?” Kevin, of course, always practical, watching the bottom line.

“Yeah—he’s shelling out for—” She shakes her head, knowing they can’t see, still in disbelief. “First-class flights and all that. It’s really kind of ridiculous, but like, hey, take what I can get, right? I—hell—sorry, I need to—I’m really sorry this is all so weird, I miss you both so much, and Harmony—I’ll visit once I’m done? Can I visit once this is wrapped?”

“Of course,” and Tomas sounds affronted she’s even asking, but tender underneath. “Of course, our lovely. Just tell us when.”

“I will, Père,” she says as her eyes fill, and she’s so glad she made it outside before she started talking, just so the men don’t see her weeping over simply talking to her dads. “I’m so sorry,” she adds again, still thinking about the kick, possible excuses to get Yusuf to agree to a trial run with her, “there’s this thing—we hit this problem and we’re all staying late on it—I can’t talk long, I know seven on a—what day is it?”

Tomas supplies, “Tuesday, sweetheart.”

“Right—like, weird time to still be working—It’s, what, one-thirty there?”

“Just finished lunch, lovely.”

Ari finds herself asking, “Anything good?”

She can hear Tomas smiling. “Only Kev’s leftovers scramble. We might go over to Leelee’s; opening day, after all.” A tiny, tiny ice cream shop, run out of a neighbor’s kitchen window, with a neat countertop–sill that her wife built for her, open from the first of June to the first of September, two to six PM only, flavors whatever Leelee decides, at least two alcoholic, and Ari suddenly misses summer in Ontario so much she’s going to cry again.

“Tell her hi for me, Père?” Someone in the warehouse—she’s wandered a bit, but they’ve all got lungs on them—yells incoherently and she jerks. “Shoot. I have to—I’m really sorry, I gotta wrap up, you know I wish I could talk longer—”

“Of course, lovely,” Kevin says, gruff. “We just miss you.”

“I miss you too—”

They do their goodbye ritual, which involves lyrics from the Sound of Music but in French and it’s cheesy as all hell and she loves it so deeply, and she still breaks script to say, “Dad, Père, I love you both, please give Harmony a hug—I will myself, later, I just—”

“Honey, everything’s okay? You’d tell us if it weren’t?”

Nothing is okay, especially not having to survive a fall in a van into a river in a dream while on a plane (over the Pacific, which is even more water, and this entire thing is a fractal death trap and she wanted to be on it; she could punch herself from last week, and she doesn’t even have an excuse to be on the plane yet). “Of course I would!” Liar, says Eames’s voice.

“We know you often get… immersed in projects,” Tomas says, delicately, and he can’t know that immersion is the last thing she wants to think about. “You’re taking good care of yourself?”

Saito steps out from the eaves of the building next over, where she’s wandered, and she does not jump. She just says, “I’m doing the best I can, I promise. I’m sorry, I have to go, they need me for—I’ll catch up with you soonest, promise. Love you both.” And ends the call.

She looks up at Saito, putting her phone in her sweater pocket. He’s unnerving. “Sir,” she says, and if it’s not as cold and distant as she wants it to be it’s because Ariadne is unnerved, not because Ari is suffering severe emotional whiplash. “Was there something you—”

“After Los Angeles,” he interrupts, in his grand way, “you will have transportation wherever you wish. The closeness of family is irreplaceable.”

Shit. Frantically she reviews her last few sentences on the call, and they’re wrong, they’re fantastically wrong, they don’t match up with Ariadne Finch’s profile at all— And what does he mean, after Los Angeles, he doesn’t know— except Miles had said—

“Your talent is formidable and your courage… underestimated,” he continues. “It will be my pleasure to have your company on the flight.” Well, that answers— “Please do ensure that the formalities are completed with Mr. Cobb. It has been instructive to learn to dream with you, Miss Finch.”

She blinks.

Saito nods deeply and glides past her, toward and then into the warehouse.

She would happily swear on a stack of assorted religious texts that everyone on this fucking job is doing their level best to destroy her faith in the ability of human language to convey information.

***

Ari is the last at the workshop every night the rest of that week, which means that Cobb—isn’t. He doesn’t go under, alone or in groups; he gives her nothing to work with. Topside, he’s increasingly curt with everyone, but there’s no material there.

Every day, she goes down individually with Arthur and Eames and Yusuf. Arthur stalks around the Penrose traps in the emergency stairwells—he’s got a weakness for them; she wants to tease him about predictability but she’s pretty sure he’d kill her—and investigates the elevator workings, pushes at drop-ceiling panels and climbs among the cables and tests packets of explosives, and only mutters “Contingencies” when she asks, so she stops goddamn asking, just follows like a good little shadow intern. Eames tweaks and fiddles and worries at the ducts—the cut-through routes are nearly good, he says, but they could be so much better with a hatch here and a ladder or three here and here and here, and what about something other than bolt cutters for the grilles? The first time he unzips his snow-camo rucksack to show off a heap of grenades—fucking grenades—he smiles like a kid let loose in a candy shop.

Yusuf just jogs with her along the streets of the first-level city into the bunker, counts everything, makes it all disappear, leaves, comes back down the stairs, and recounts everything, for entire hours of dreamtime.

Her only success that week is convincing Yusuf to expand the bunker inventory. Clothes, mostly drawstring loose-fitting stuff of varying weights in cotton fabric and neutral colors, extras of socks and underwear for everyone, in every size, including extra smalls, because Ariadne, of course, can’t and won’t speculate regarding anyone’s preferences for how tight they wear their underpants, and because Ari doesn’t care to spend a week swimming in superfluous fabric if she doesn’t have to. She doubles the number of blankets, throws in a carton of clothespins; a ball of twine; hammer, nails, duct tape. Spare sheets. In case they want to divide up the space for any reason, visually if not aurally. Obligingly, Yusuf doesn’t question a single one of her suggestions, with ten successful full stock runs that Thursday, and fifteen (consecutive, even) on Friday.

So really, her staying late each night is just fishing for loose ends out of which she can spin herself a reason to become necessary to the job, and trying to work out how she’s ever going to get a chance to practice the underwater escape from the van, because Saito knows she’s going—he and Miles have something going on—but no one else does.

On neither front is it anything like useful.

That weekend, she makes herself go out shopping, rather than staying home with her head under a pillow for forty-eight hours straight like she’d been considering on Friday evening. She’s been skimming style blogs for airport posts, and Ariadne hasn’t bought anything new in a few months, so she makes up the difference now. Leather boots, knee-high; skinny denim from Seven for All Mankind in dark and light washes; silk blouses for the flights themselves. Ariadne splurges on a pair of absurd Prada sunglasses frames, these curly baroque semi-monstrosities that look goddamn awesome, that she’s only buying because Ari knows she’ll hate herself for the rest of her life, minimum, if she doesn’t make rich-girl Ariadne with her rich-girl confidence wear the hell out of them. (But not around her team. She is, after all, a professional young woman.)

It’s late fall in Australia, so she gets two thick tunic-length sweaters (cotton, not wool, because for fuck’s sake, it’s still not going to be any worse than an average October night in Toronto, and while she’s been in Paris for four years, she hasn’t lost her baseline disdain for other people’s ideas of “cold weather”). She figures she’ll wear them with leggings or skinny jeans and the new knee-high boots. That’s a look, especially with a scarf, doubly so with the sunglasses. And luggage: a neat Samsonite rolling case and a rich-girl shabby-chic military surplus duffel bag and a sleek carry-on, because who knows which she’ll need when. A black leather tote-style bag that matches the boots, for Ariadne’s in-flight necessities, which are the same as Ari’s but nicer.

She visits the pool at a twenty-four-hour gym near her apartment both nights that weekend, late, and practices holding her breath underwater. It might be stupid, and she hates every second she spends in the deep end, but it helps her sleep. Or it would if anything ever helped her to sleep. On Sunday night, she stares at the phosphenes on the inside of her eyelids and holds her breath for twenty, then thirty, then forty, then fifty seconds. In the middle of counting to sixty, sometime long after midnight but hours before the sky starts paling, she slips into sleep.

***

Underslept, tense, and furious with herself, Ari takes the unseasonable cold dampness of the first full week of June as a personal insult. On Monday and Tuesday, Cobb dismisses her, tells her flatly to leave at eight o’clock, after the others have all gone. Wednesday, she pulls on a long-sleeved red ribbed top and the grey sweater vest she’d bought back in March, adding a yellow cotton bandanna around her neck like a visual attempt at a laugh. She certainly feels enough like a joke.

The workshop is miserable that day, once she gets in at nearly two o’clock—she’s been such a fucking mess the last few days she’s stopped caring about appearances, and maybe Ariadne’s in a summer seminar or some shit. They’re just waiting, waiting, fucking waiting like the vultures Eames invoked in one of his dramatized verbal syntheses of the entire plan. All of them, just waiting for Maurice Fischer to die.

Eames himself left for Sydney on Saturday, because the elder Fischer’s situation is so delicate, and because they need eyes on the ground—she hates hearing herself think anymore, all the spy-ops jargon—even though his lawyer persona has wrapped his short-term consulting gig with Fischer Morrow. Eric Amesbury-Scott is now simply vacationing. His absence shouldn’t be so sharply apparent in the workshop, but Yusuf’s customary cheerfulness is muted, Arthur looks about as well-rested as she is, Cobb is an asshole when he dares to speak at all, and Saito is silent as death. Ariadne is supposed to just be on hand today, and for the duration, for last-minute layout tweaks and checks, so she sits in her office with a view of the rest of the workshop and sketches quietly, while reciting the Fibonacci sequence until she hits six-digit numbers, then running meditation exercises, then doodling a few extraordinarily violent cartoons. She pencils the darkness of pooling blood with layer on layer of graphite, until the paper has gone thin and shining.

If Eames were on the right goddamn continent, he’d be wandering around putting his nose in things and providing running commentary, somehow wheedling all of them into something like an actual team. Quiet little nudges that shake a laugh out of Ari, a scowl-smile from Arthur, a nod or a verbal check from Cobb, a dirty joke from Yusuf, one of Saito’s gnomic utterances.

Instead, Yusuf cleans glassware that’s already sterilized and sparkling, Cobb glowers at nothing, Saito looks inscrutably into the middle distance and occasionally makes a series of spare, elegant gestures at his personal tablet, and Arthur clenches his jaw visibly (but not audibly—no bruxism on that one; night guards would not coordinate with his silk pajamas, the idea of which Ari at least finds entertaining for a moment). At five o’clock, one of Saito’s innumerable employees arrives with two catering trays of vegetarian sushi—Arthur has a strict no-fish food policy for the warehouse, which Eames says is one of his hard lines for any job’s workspace. No one speaks as they eat; there’s only the hollow clack and scrape of chopsticks against each other and on the plastic plates, the muted sounds of chewing and swallowing.

Finally, at half-past eight, Arthur stands from his laptop and says, voice raised, “Ari. Let’s do level two.”

She looks at the other three; Cobb makes a sharp dismissive little wave, Yusuf shrugs, and Saito blinks, once, slowly, rather like a lizard sunning himself. Ari closes her sketchbook on her most recent private gore-fest, gets up, and heads to the PASIV table.

Setting her own cannula is almost second nature now. Arthur sets the timer for ten minutes (three hours and a bit in dreamtime), sits on the lawn chair nearest her (the terrible rubber-strapped one she’d been on when Mal stabbed her, the one Arthur himself had sat on with his gun out), depresses the central button, and lies back—there’s just enough saline before the Somnacin drip starts that—

***

“The rest of us, I get it. But I don’t understand,” says Arthur, as they walk up the grand full-width steps of the terraced hotel lobby towards the elevator bank, “why you’re losing sleep.”

“Excuse me?” Ari’s already annoyed, because the dreamer dresses you, and for some fucking goddamn reason Arthur puts her in a skirt suit that doesn’t fucking fit, not comfortably, in wishy-washy pale grey tartan, and pointy heels and pantyhose and a French twist that only works for someone with about half as much forehead as she personally possesses, and she has absolutely no plausible excuse to request time to fix her hair on a practice run. Especially when Arthur thinks it’s just his practice run. “You don’t understand why the person who designed the thing—”

“You’re not on the job,” he says, like all the implications of this are immediately obvious. “Your work is done. And done well,” almost grudgingly, like he’d prefer not to say it. “It’s just us, here on out. But you’re twitchy and you look like shit—”

She glares and yanks at her skirt. “Well, if you’d pay any goddamn attention to womenswear—”

“Not clothes, Ari, I mean the rest of you.”

“Oh, thanks,” she snarls, as their elevator rises toward an unnumbered level. The panel only has three buttons—lobby, floor with the target room, and floor with the room-below-target-room—but in the real thing, Arthur will use whatever they get on the first level to fill in floors and numbers and buttons to reinforce the realism.

Arthur’s ears are going red. “Fuck off,” he says, in the tired way that means he’s annoyed at himself, rather than at whoever he’s being unnecessarily aggressive toward. “I’m not—it’s not personal, you—I figured you’d be aware you’re, you’re—objectively aesthetically appealing.” He says the phrase like a clinical diagnosis. “You just aren’t—”

“A dude.”

He rounds on her, expression set and forbidding. “I never said—”

“I never asked,” Ari snaps back, and steps out of the elevator. Arthur follows, spluttering. The target floor is just like it has been for the last forty runs. “I just pay the fuck attention. Look. You think I don’t know my share depends on you fuckers not messing it up in there? You think I fucking trust any of you?” Her voice is rising, pitch and volume simultaneously, and Arthur has gone silent, staring at her— “Say this doesn’t go off—that’s five men with underworld connections, don’t fucking pretend otherwise, and axes to grind, with a handy rookie architect to pin their shit on, and you think I shouldn’t care anymore? You supercilious fucking snob—” She’s yelling now and she can’t even see Arthur properly, she’s too angry. “You want to talk about how I shouldn’t be invested in this, just fucking tell me you think I’m a fucking idiot without two fucking brain cells to rub together—”

Of course, right as she’s hitting her stride in releasing the screaming frustration that’s been stewing in her head for a week and a half, she bursts into tears. The first sob hits her like a punch and she turns to lean her head against the nearest doorframe, arms up to hide her face. Precisely, she thinks, like a fucking idiot without two brain cells to rub together.

Arthur is—silent. She can’t look at him but she hears him, over her own ragged breaths, the scuff of his shoes against the carpet as he turns away, then his footsteps as he paces the length of the hall at her back.

She forces the fit down and away, counting breaths over and over until she’s quiet. Not done, probably, but quiet for now. Ari wipes her face on her stupid tartan jacket sleeve and turns again, leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded, weight on one leg and the other kicked against the frame, the sensible little heel (she only likes heels if she can plausibly kill someone with them) digging into the molding. Arthur is near the opposite end of the hall; when he turns, he sees her, and for the barest moment his facial features go slack with relief.

Then it’s all business, of course. He marches up to her, holding out a handkerchief. “I forget you’re not twenty,” he says drily. “You’re—god, I hate this shit, it’s like Eames when he’s practicing a forge. You’re Ariadne so convincingly. Until you tell me the shit I should know you’re more than smart enough to have worked out. And rigorous enough to have researched. If this doesn’t come off—”

“Orange isn’t my color,” Ari replies, snippy and dismissive—more for her pride than anything else—as she takes the handkerchief. “Straitjackets—worse than this shit.” She waves the hand that isn’t busy blowing her nose at her current outfit. “And I don’t feel very much like spending the rest of my life in max security.”

Arthur doesn’t deny any of it, not even the dig about the clothes, just nods and looks at his own shoes. “That’s at best,” he says, hands in his pockets, leaning back on his heels. “And at the mark’s hands, if we get made by Fischer.”

“Get made,” mutters Ari, disgusted; when Arthur glances at her, she grimaces. “You’re all so stereotypical. I’m starting to think in—in modern thieves’ cant.”

His mouth quirks, but no dimples. “It happens. But. Subject at hand. If something else gets fucked—the idea doesn’t take, whatever—it’s not just the payout. Saito could decide he’ll send his best for us. And his best are…” Arthur looks up at the ceiling then, blows out a breath, and finishes, “Worrying.”

The underlying context, according to the few locked dreamwork forums she’s weaseled her way into, is as follows: Arthur is the single most well-equipped person in extraction to arrange the escape of multiple team members from messes involving displeased clients with functionally unlimited resources. Therefore, if Arthur is worrying, someone with Ari’s background should be prepping her will. As of last month.

Ariadne Finch wouldn’t matter in the least in such a case, with no actual rich white parents to kick up a fuss when she turns up missing.

The silence lengthens; Ari lets it, and then she says, light and acidic, “So, you see why I might not be feeling fresh as a daisy.”

He sighs, one of those where he looks like he feels about two decades older than he is. “Yeah.” Arthur shakes his head, then looks up at her. “Okay. I don’t give a fuck about the hotel. I have it cold. Let’s just… fuck around until the clock’s up. You can build freely—”

“Hell yes,” she interrupts, and takes over. The scenery changes drastically and suddenly, leaving Ari in her favorite leather and boy jeans and Arthur in his hotel suit, both standing on a white marble of a miniature planet, set in a starry violet sky. She’s leaning against a little hill of stone, in the same attitude she’d been holding in the hotel hallway; that hill is the only deviation of the planetoid’s surface from a perfect sphere, before she directs the ground near Arthur’s feet to rise into a waist-height hummock with a dip in it, just the size to grip with one hand. “Hold onto that,” she says, nodding at it, and goes to work.

She takes her time with the Klein bottle, as well as the usual bullshitting about gravity—she just decrees that it’s Earth-level gravitational force in the direction normal to the ground (approximately normal, in as many points as possible). Ari investigates it—she’d say “inside and out,” but that’d be an oxymoron—and returns to where she left Arthur. “Like it?”

Arthur’s knuckles are white on the grip, she notices, and his face is absolutely unreadable. “What the fuck,” he says, and his voice actually shakes, “is this.”

“A non-orientable surface,” Ari replies. “Come on, it’s stable.”

“What is it—”

“A Klein bottle.”

He stares at her.

“Like a Mobius strip but no edges.”

He stares at her, now with more apparent confusion.

Ari actually stamps her foot, frustrated. “It’s a math thing. Okay? It’s a geeky math thing. But, look, that bit up there—” she points— “is gonna be good for sledding. I fucked with its coefficient of friction. Come on.”

When the music starts, Arthur shakes his head and says, suddenly and unexpectedly and so warmly it barely sounds like him, “Mal would have loved this.”

***

Arthur jets almost immediately after they wake; she doesn’t have time to ask him to elaborate—not that she would, not in front of Cobb. So Ari goes to her office, back into the corner that people can’t see from outside, and fusses with things. She tidies her supplies, reviews the models, and removes all the preliminary outlines from their easels, just because she’s sick of looking at stuff from so long ago; it feels like she’s been refining the city, hotel, and hospital for years, not weeks. As she works, she hears Yusuf say he’s heading out. An hour later, while she’s putting the outlines in chronological order by level into file folders, Saito leaves.

Ari has been moving as quietly as she can around her office, but she gives up the pretense and stops fiddling with paper once she hears the door sigh shut behind Saito. Instead, she paces silently in the darkness—she hadn’t bothered to turn on her own task lamps or overhead as the sun set; the light from the overheads in the other offices had been sufficient—and listens hard.

Twenty minutes after Saito leaves, based on her phone’s clock—she has the screen dimmed—she hears the rustle of fabric and a series of clicks as Cobb rises and sets the second metal case on his own desk. He shoots the latches, and soon there’s the sound of the spool unraveling, and then there’s nothing but the mechanical wheezing of the PASIV device.

She weighs her options as she approaches his desk, illuminated by a single lamp; he’s dead to the world in a task chair, timer ticking down from three minutes. An hour of dreamtime, using Yusuf’s mix. A second chair—the one Yusuf had been in, the one time she saw him in here—is sitting kitty-corner to Cobb’s.

Ari places her bag on the floor next to that chair, does her cannula without bothering to swab the site—living dangerously, but desperate times, et cetera—and follows him down.

***

The moment Mal—Cobb’s projection of Mal—meets her eyes, Ari’s mouth goes dry. This woman, the memory of this woman, the part of Cobb’s subconscious devoted entirely to his wife—she holds Cobb’s sanity in her elegant hands, and Ari barely hears Cobb as she stares at her. At Mal, who would have loved math tricks, who adored puns, who laughed so delightedly at Eames holding her children, who hit the pavement across the street from Arthur—

“Just wanted to see what kind of tests you’re doing on you own every night,” Ari mutters to Cobb, hearing her own voice shake, as he slams the button for the top floor in the elevator. It’s a rickety old-fashioned thing with a scrollwork front, like the gate to a park—gate to a graveyard.

He snarls about privacy and she snaps back, irritation exacerbated by terror, and a beach comes into view, just sand and waves and sunlight. And Mal, and the two children, Philippa and James, and Cobb goes out to meet them—

“Why do you do this to yourself?” she asks, borderline mocking—and mentally slaps herself. Ariadne. She’s Ariadne, she’s Ariadne, Ariadne wouldn’t—

Cobb answers, though, as he turns away from the beach and his family—Mal is holding Ari’s gaze, too distant to read—and it hits her with a jolt, like missing a step that isn’t there. This is his life. He’s recreated moments—built memories—from life and stacked them up here in his mind and relives them at his leisure to—to get more time with her, with his projection of her—Ari’s stomach flips—and oh, god, he’s so far gone—

He snatches her hand away from the button panel and she shakes herself, back into Ariadne and away from him. Simultaneously: the basement. That’s the key. Cobb punches another button, some other level where he tortures himself by pretending his wife isn’t dead, informs her that there’s only one thing she needs to know, which is a goddamn lie, and when the elevator stops she barely listens, glances at the dark wood floor and the neatly spaced artwork and the sun-filled kitchen and interrupts. “Where is she?”

“She’s already gone,” Cobb replies, and Ari dawdles then, hanging back, as Cobb goes on about his children, narrating regret, guilt, regret, panic—

She backs, backs, then spins and runs for it. Basement.

The blast of air and light and noise disorients her; she’s barely identified it—a train, shooting past at speed on its tracks—when the elevator stops. Through the curling lattice of the door, she sees—luxury, ruined. Creamy carpeting, gossamer ivory drapes, lilies. Broken glass, toppled lamps, an absolutely wrecked bed—She steps out of the elevator, flinching at the noise of its gate, and stares around, trying to place her surroundings. Like a hotel after a hurricane had been through—

The wineglass rings, a perfect clear chime under her boot as it breaks, and Mal turns to face her.

From the elevator, she’d been hidden by an untouched floral arrangement on a high table. She’s sitting on one of the sofas, and she’s gorgeous, lethal, eyes huge in her sculpted face, hair a tumble of dark cropped curls, poured into a black dress that glimmers like fine mail. She’s like a panther, a force of nature, the hurricane itself, and she’s imperious and regal as she says, accent like incense smoke against the silence, “What are you doing here?”

Ari is frozen, terror rooting her to the carpet, sliding cold fingers up her spine, clutching her lungs—she can’t get air; she’s barely audible as she tries to say something, anything—

“I know who you are,” Mal says, cutting her off, and Ari’s muscles turn to stone as she realizes she nearly said her name, nearly told Cobb’s subconscious—she repeats that to herself, a mantra, I’m in Cobb’s head I’m in Cobb’s head—that she wasn’t Ariadne at all. Mal rises, one smooth movement, all the muscles bared by the slim straps of her dress sliding under her skin. “What are you doing here?” she repeats, and clears the end of the sofa.

Ari stammers, voice broken (Cobb’s head Cobb’s head Cobb’s head), “I’m just—just trying to—understand—”

“How could you understand?” Mal prowls towards her, heels silent in the pile of the carpet, and Ari can’t move. “Do you know what it is,” Mal murmurs as she circles Ari, inches away, warmth and the scent of sandalwood rising from her skin, arching her neck gracefully to keep her eyes locked on Ari’s, “to be a lover? To be half of a whole?”

A very quiet voice in the back of Ari’s head mutters straight romance is so fucked up and all she can say is “No—”

Mal is in front of her again, holds her eyes, and Ari has never felt so small. “I’ll tell you a riddle.” Or I’ll tell you, Ariette.

She knows, Ari thinks wildly, but that’s impossible—Cobb’s head, Cobb’s head—

“You’re waiting for a train,” she says, words measured. The one just above— “A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you…” There’s a cadence to her speech, a pattern of emphasis, a poetic meter. She’s turning her back to Ari, keeping her head turned over her shoulder, pinning Ari in place with her eyes. “But you don’t know for sure. But it doesn’t matter.” Mal is standing next to the side table by the sofa; she turns, a liquid movement, and bends like the stem of a flower, reaching with one hand toward the tabletop— “How can it not matter to you,” she asks, words slow as honey, and her fingers close around the stem of another shattered wineglass; Ari twitches, an abortive warding gesture— “where the train will take you?”

“Because you’ll be together,” Cobb says behind her, and Ari feels herself jerk again as she turns.

“How could you bring her here, Dom?” asks Mal, accusing, cold.

Ari somehow manages to ask Cobb what the room is, where it is. “Hotel suite,” he answers. “Where we used to spend our anniversaries.”

“What happened here—” Jesus, Arthur said—

Mal lunges, a tidal wave in the form of a woman, and Cobb grabs Ari, shoves her hard, and she goes flying, stumbling against the back of the elevator, Cobb on her heels, and Mal is howling— “You promised, you promised, you said we’d be together—”

Cobb slams the elevator door shut, yelling— “Please, I need you to stay here, just for now—”

“You said we’d grow old together—” Mal grips the bars, white-knuckled, wrenching at them; if anyone could rip apart wrought iron, it’s Mal, this Mal in Cobb’s head—

Cobb hits one of the buttons—Ari doesn’t know which one, doesn’t think Cobb even knows; all of his attention is on Mal. He’s staring at her, devouring her with his eyes as the elevator lurches away from the floor, and he gasps, “I’ll come back for you—I promise—”

She screams, animalistic and anguished, and Ari peels herself away from the back of the box and forces herself to look down, to meet Mal’s eyes, the eyes of Cobb’s memory of his wife, a part of Cobb’s subconscious that he keeps in a palace of moments and hours and days, a part that—

***

Ari’s fingers slip off her own arm as she opens her eyes and stares at the ceiling, rolling her neck as she tries to orient herself. She pulls out the cannula and holds it by its tiny wings; she’ll deal with it later, she’s—

Cobb believes that his projection of Mal is Mal. He doesn’t even question it. He keeps her—he thinks she is a her, separate, her own person—in his head and he visits her every night, or every few nights, and makes promises to her, promises to stay in his own head to steal more time with—with his own head— And she, or that part of his mind that is her, doesn’t fucking stay put, because how could it, how could she? It’s Cobb’s mind; wherever he goes, there she is, because he is her beginning and end, because Mallorie Miles is dead, and Cobb’s own grief and memory is stabbing and shooting his colleagues, is actively sabotaging Cobb’s dreamwork, because—because Cobb honestly wants to be sabotaged, on some level, he would love to be, would love to spend his life locked in a forensic psychiatry ward and lost in his own head, where a demon in the shape of his wife is still alive—

He lurches, eyes flickering open. He doesn’t look at Ari.

Ari is—sick. With fury, terror, misery—at him, for him, for him and Mal— “Do you think,” she hears herself say, low and burning and almost hiding the shakiness of her own voice, too sickened to care whether Ariadne would or wouldn’t, “you can just—build a prison of memories to—” Cobb believes she’s real. Therefore— Her stomach rolls. “—to lock her in? Do you really think that’s going to… contain her?”

Cobb won’t look at her.

He doesn’t think it will; he doesn’t want it to.

The warehouse door swings open and Ari jumps, her gorge rising. Saito strides toward them, still fully dressed, and announces, “It’s time.” Arthur, brown twill trench swinging over his tan waistcoat and white shirt and gold silk tie, flicks on the overhead lights. “Maurice Fischer just died,” Saito continues, “in Sydney.”

Fucking— She swallows hard, twice, forces the sickness down.

“When’s the funeral?” says Cobb, even; he hasn’t made eye contact with her—

“Thursday.” Saito comes to a stop a few yards from the desk, eyeing the pair of them; his gaze lands on Ari and stays there. “In Los Angeles.”

Arthur picks up the thread. “Robert should accompany the body no later than Tuesday. We should move.” There’s something—concern, confusion—in the set of his eyebrows.

“All right,” Cobb mutters, and strips out his own cannula, standing to start putting the PASIV device back in order.

Now or never— “Cobb, I’m coming with you,” Ari says, barely above a whisper, and spares a glance for Arthur—he’s flipping a Moleskine open, twenty feet away. Cobb looks at her then, finally, misery in every line of his face—for himself, for her? She can’t tell—and he protests. He promised Miles, he says, that she wouldn’t come into the dream, and she wants to laugh, sob, scream, just fucking punch him out; this is so beyond—

She forces all of that down and compacts it into Ariadne, sweet attentive Ariadne who’s worried for her boss. Saito watches her and she wants to throw up. “The team needs someone who understands what you're struggling with,” she murmurs, and the urge to laugh rises again at the sheer inadequacy of the description. “And—and it doesn't have to be me, but then—” She considers. Arthur, standing at the door, who knew Mal and loved her and who’s been following Cobb around the planet since she died. “You have to show Arthur what I just saw.”

Cobb looks over his shoulder, glancing at Saito and Arthur, probably running the same evaluation she just did, and comes to the same conclusion: despite trusting Arthur with his life, despite running with Arthur for his life, he would never let Arthur see what he’s done to Mal, even a memory of her, because Arthur would kill him for it, without a moment’s hesitation.

To Saito, Cobb says, as calmly as if he’s ordering coffee, “Get us another seat on the plane.”

Ari stands then and reels in her own line, then gets the hell out of the way, away from Cobb. Saito is still watching her; he gives her a single minute nod, eyes gleaming, as he pulls his phone from his pocket. She feels too fragile to return it, too horrified to take any pride in what she just did. Arthur says, “Another—Cobb, you—”

“Ariadne’s in,” says Cobb, so firmly that Arthur doesn’t argue. Saito’s on his phone, unnecessarily (she’s been in) but he nods, once, to Arthur. Standing to the side, Ari checks the time—it’s after eleven. Her hand is shaking. She’d be shaking all over if she weren’t holding herself so tightly—

“Okay.” Arthur’s tone is pleasant, almost. “You can lock up?”

“Yeah.” Cobb sounds empty.

“The lease here is good for another three months, and I’m monitoring the security system. We can scrub when we’re done.” Arthur is only efficiency. “Ariadne,” he says, turning to her, and she almost jumps again when she looks at him—his face is neutral, but the set of his mouth— “I’ll give you a ride back to the fourteenth. Car’s around the corner.”

It is not a suggestion.

“Thanks,” Ariadne says, ducking her head and clutching at her bag. She bins her cannula and keeps her eyes on the toes of her boots.

Saito ends his call and says, “Miss Finch. I will contact you later in the evening for your travel arrangements.”

“Let’s go.” Arthur turns; she follows, steps slow, wrestling with the horror and the anger and the sickness of this fucking job.

***

Arthur strides along the sidewalk like he has a personal grudge against it; Ari lags, because she’s reeling, and the silence stretches and goes glassy, like hot sugar syrup being pulled into candy. By the time she opens the passenger door of the Peugeot, Arthur is already buckled behind the wheel and glaring out the windshield; she sits, feeling like she’s about to break, pulls the door closed, and clicks her seatbelt into place. Then she inhales. “Look—”

“So all that I was saying about you not being on the job is moot, I guess,” says Arthur, harsh and sardonic, as he kicks the ignition. “I can’t believe him, you’re not even—”

“It was—”

“We’re on in six days and we’re retooling the job for a seventh—as if I can fucking—”

“Arthur—”

“Don’t even start,” he snaps. “This fucking shit job is going straight to hell, it always has been, it was a fucking terrible idea from the word go and it doesn’t fucking matter what I do, I could fucking—” He loses coherence then, slips from language to language and profanity to obscenity, most of the Romance family plus Russian and Japanese and either Mandarin or Cantonese, then Farsi and Hindi and something she can’t identify, possibly Klingon, although she’d figured Arthur for more of a Tolkien guy. They cross the Seine and half the fifteenth before he falls back into English. “You just get shoved on me as another fucking variable. I can’t goddamn work with dead weight, this is—”

The sickness is migrating into her head as a dull ache, and the anger is morphing into a new shape. She retorts, “I’m not dead weight—”

“Another moving part, another goddamn responsibility, six days, I could fucking kill him—and you needling your way in, what are you even thinking—”

Across the street from her apartment building, he parallel parks with expert neatness, still snarling as he throws the gearstick, “Like you could possibly do a goddamn tenth of what you have to just to break even—”

Fury rushes through her temples as the ache grows in her head. “I’ve been on every single—”

“Practice run? You wanna tell me how practice runs have a fucking—”

“Eat shit,” she yells, bellows, full-voiced, from the diaphragm the way she learned to when corralling idiot undergrads; the car echoes with it and Arthur goes silent— “and vent your beleaguered fucking spleen to Miles.” She glares at him, daring him to say a goddamn word, and the pain in her head is really kind of astonishing, but if Arthur is going to be such a jackass—

“Miles,” Arthur repeats, very quietly, eyes wide and unseeing. Then he blinks. “We’re going to talk. Now. You’re inviting me up.”

“Is that so,” she says, icy.

He ignores her. “Cover story. We’re coworkers, just had a beer night, you drank too much, I said I’d get you home, you’re too smashed to get up the stairs without help. I’m gonna have to touch you. Play along.”

“I fucking hate you,” says Ari, unbuckling her seatbelt, and then she shoves her door open and says loudly, slurring, “I’m fine, fuck’s sake.”

Arthur’s on her side of the car in seconds, offering a hand, which she ignores. “You don’t have to walk me up, I’m not a fucking co-ed,” she scoffs, and stumbles out of the car. Arthur has to dive for her before she hits the asphalt and slings an arm around her waist. She flinches but quashes it, endures her entire side touching his from rib to knee—

“No, come on, it’s not a big deal,” he says, cajoling, exactly like a somewhat put-upon good-guy colleague. “You got your bag? Keys?”

“I got ev-er-y-thing,” Ari nearly sings, because if Arthur fucking wants cover, he’s getting cover. She slumps, exactly the dead weight he’d accused her of being, and lets him half-usher, half-drag her toward the building. Two advantages there—as dead weight, she doesn’t stay flush against him, and second, it’s probably annoying as fuck. “I got my keys, my phone, my wallet—shit, I got my wallet, right? No, I do, Melissa made sure. Isn’t she such a bitch? I mean, like, I’m totally a feminist and I don’t shit-talk other girls for cred, that’s so gross, right, but like, she’s such a bitch, and then she’s all oh, I’m so going to take care of you, I’m such a good mom friend, and it’s just because she wants to lord it over you later—”

Arthur wants to scowl; it’s yanking at his mouth. “Yeah, I know,” he says consolingly. “She’s a pain in the ass. But at least she made sure you had your wallet.”

“She’s like you but you’re even fucking worse,” Ari goes on; she digs her keys out of her jeans pocket and fumbles them on purpose, drops them, makes Arthur dive for them without dropping her. “You actually mean it, that you’re going to fucking take care of everything, like you even have to, like the rest of us can’t figure shit out—” She picks out the right key for the front door and hands the ring back to him. “I mean, like, I know the work’s complex, and none of you, like, let me forget I’m just the fucking intern—” Arthur gets the door open and hauls her in.

“But like, honestly, I fucking pay attention,” says Ari, stage-whispering now, because sober Ari who is pretending to be drunk Ari knows that drunk Ari would recognize the need for inside voices in her apartment lobby. “It’s my job to take notes and watch the rest of you, like, observation is like eighty-five per cent of what I’m getting paid for, and if I need to remind you, I’m getting paid out the ass, so I’m getting a lot of detail.”

She shoves Arthur in the direction of the tiny elevator, because fuck if she’s going to do five flights stumbling fake-drunk. That takes another key, which sober-drunk-Ari manages heroically, before she punches the button for the sixth floor. “Like,” she continues, a bit above the stage-whisper, “I could probably do eighty-five per cent of your jobs. Aside from the—”

“I know, I know,” Arthur says—he might be picking up on the pantomime, in which case all to the better— “but there’s a lot of specialized stuff that you only get with experience.” He sounds patient, long-suffering.

“Okay, so what, I have to be experienced before y’all will even let me get experience?” Drunk Ari uses y’all, having never set foot south of Washington, DC, in the States. “Like, hello, fucking paradox—isn’t that like the definition of a Catch-22? I know you read that, it’s your fucking thing, like, all over the place—” The elevator stops on the sixth-floor landing, leaving just half a flight of stairs that Ari all but crawls up, Arthur following. She hands the right key to him and he opens her flat’s door, then drags her through it.

The second he shuts the door behind her, she snatches the keys from his hand and leaps out of reach. “Okay, talk,” she orders. The headache feels like a thundercloud.

Arthur, of course, has to have a feeling instead of being efficient, now of all times. He just stands there, completely out of place in her flat—her flat—looking a little awed. “You seriously could give Eames a run for his money.”

“Yeah, because counterfeit’s worth shit,” she snarls. “Talk.”

He shakes his head and looks around. “Where can I sit?”

“I don’t fucking care. The goddamn counter.”

Instead, Arthur walks over to her couch—aluminum legs and pilling purple upholstery and six different afghans and throws and full-sized blankets flung on it. He sets his messenger bag on the floor, shrugs off his trench, and sits down. Ari yanks a ladderback chair out from under the kitchen/dining/everything-except-drafting table and then says, “Thirty seconds. Then we talk like you so dearly needed to.”

She doesn’t wait for a reply, just stalks into her bedroom—to the extent that she can ever stalk anywhere; being two inches over five feet in chunky boots doesn’t really lend itself to stalking. Ari yanks the door shut and strips out of her goddamn sweater vest and the red ribbed top, steps out of her boots, shimmies out of the skinny dark-rinse jeans, and yanks on her rubber ducky PJ pants and a black hoodie that says NO. on the front. She pulls her hair into a ponytail and slip-slides in her socks on the hardwood floor back to the main room, where she sits on the ladderback chair and folds her legs under her. Then she glares at Arthur.

“You said Miles.” His tone is as smooth and composed as if he hadn’t just spent a twelve-minute drive swearing at her and another five minutes pretending he gave a fuck about a pretend-drunk colleague he’s known for ten weeks. Notably, he does not comment on the duckies. “Suggesting that Miles is more involved with the job than just getting you into—”

“I told you I’m reporting to him.”

“Sure; that’s not the point. You explicitly implied—”

Ari is too mad to stop herself from interrupting, Eamesian, “Is that a thing now? An explicit implication?”

He glowers; she really should be more cautious, considering what she’s seen him do to other people’s projections in practice runs. “You suggested,” he grits out, “that you’re on the job by Miles’s—whatever, by his maneuvering. Is that the case?”

Ari tips her chin up and to the side, considering. “In a simplistic sense,” she replies coolly. “I believe Miles is also advising Saito. Regarding Cobb.”

Arthur leans back on the couch, his muted neutrals and gold tones contrasting delightfully with the pastel rainbow throw that Harmony crocheted for Ari when she was seven. “Miles,” he repeats, looking up at the exposed rafters of her ceiling. “And… Saito.”

“I think you know them.” Her guard is just gone, her brain-to-mouth filter shot; she is so fucking—messed up. From Cobb’s head, from— “Correct me if I’m—”

His eyes flick toward hers. “Fuck off,” he says, sounding exhausted.

“You invited yourself up here,” she snaps. “You fuck off.”

Arthur sits up at that, shaking himself and straightening his waistcoat. “Okay. Please explain what’s up with Miles and Saito, so I can get out of your hair.”

“God, I fucking wish.” But she wants him out, too. “Shut up until I’m done. I think—look, Saito’s not an idiot, right? This is a major investment for him. I think he checked out Cobb, background checks and shit. Those pointed him to Miles, who told him Cobb’s good but that he’s going through some shit—where he was just repeating what you said—and so Saito wanted someone on Cobb-watch. For lack of a better phrase. Miles thought I’d be a good bet, for some fucking reason, and, I don’t know, six weeks ago, Cobb started dreaming on his own—”

“He what?” Arthur’s face is almost grey. “He— when?”

“Late at night. After all of you left. I caught him at it, or just before he was going to, I don’t know, and he laughed it off like he was doing experiments, which—I guess the researchers used to do single-person dreams, but it got really stupid really fast, so…”

“That’s—an understatement.”

Ari eyes him; he looks like he’s going to be sick, kind of like how she felt until all of it turned into a headache and a towering rage. “If you throw up on my couch after all this shit, I will tell Eames and every forum where I have posting privileges that you jack off to Bob Ross videos,” she says.

He shakes himself and glares.

“Anyway,” Ari continues. “He laughed it off, told me the US feds think he killed Mal, that was that time, and that was kind of a fucking distraction for awhile, and…what was it, four weeks ago I saw him again. Yusuf watching him, as if that helps. I just told Miles, because it—I don’t know, enough of the reports said solo dreamers got fucked up, got caught up in their own heads—it didn’t feel right.” Her head hurts fiercely, pressure building in a band across her forehead.

“It’s not right,” says Arthur, staring at a corner of the coffee table. “It’s… it’s not right.”

“Yeah, you know, I kind of figured that,” she drawls. “When, you know, Miles blew a gasket and told me to figure out an excuse to get on the flight. He wants me on Cobb watch during the job. And he told Saito that he… strongly encouraged my involvement.” Ari shrugs then. “Saito agreed. The night we fixed the kicks, what, last week, Saito mentioned it, just told me to get my shit straight with Cobb.” The headache is starting to pulse, a sort of rhythmic throb around her eye sockets.

“And so you got your shit straight with Cobb.” It’s not quite a prompt.

Ari presses the heels of her palms to her eyes. “Okay, yes, I did. He—he was under alone tonight and I followed him. It…” The horror washes back, nearly overwhelming, and she drops her hands. “It’s bad. Arthur, it’s—it’s fucking bad. With Mal—I can’t—I don’t even—”

He shakes his head, a quick tiny motion, looking miserable and ill and exactly like she feels. “Please don’t,” he says, like it hurts him. “I—to maintain my focus. I have to—I—okay, I understand why Saito wanted… someone else. With distance.”

She almost laughs at that. “I wish there were distance. I just—holy shit, this is going to suck.” She kind of wants to vent about it, the degree of—everything, everything that happened in Cobb’s head, but she sees Arthur’s point. If he, too, is fully cognizant of the razor’s edge Cobb’s sanity is resting on, he’ll be distracted on the job, and his roles don’t allow for distraction. Ari, meanwhile, is there specifically and explicitly to monitor Cobb, keep him on this side, keep him from the siren song of his own fucked-up head, and buffer the rest of them from it; it is therefore her responsibility to keep her counsel, hold the memory-elevator close to the chest, bluff to the rest of the team that she knows no more than they do.

It’s just going to suck.

Pit of vipers.

They’re quiet for a bit, Ari rubbing uselessly at her aching head and Arthur staring into space. Finally, Arthur rouses and says, “Okay. Logistics. I wasn’t kidding about those. We need to know where you’re going to be in the dreams. This would ordinarily be a team effort but I’m going to make some executive decisions and the team can deal. You have to—”

“Hang on,” she says, holding up one hand. “First. Establishing thing. I know the entire plan, back to front, and whatever other orders you like. So we’re not starting tabula rasa.”

He leans back, crossing his arms, and jerks his chin at her. “Demonstrate. Outline it for me.”

Ari sighs heavily and does it, recites each step of the dream. First level: the kidnapping. Eames goes in as Browning, also kidnapped (“kidnapped”), to work on Fischer, suggesting that Fischer’s father had wanted to give him the option to break up the conglomerate. The van setup, with Yusuf on watch, into the second level. Eames as Browning reveals he’s working against the Fischers and only cares about the preservation of Fischer Morrow. Fischer freaks and (hopefully) starts thinking that he could do better than just cling to this moldering Frankenstein’s monster of a company, but before he can do anything, Browning (Eames) takes him out and puts him under for extraction, to take that choice from him. Arthur holds the second level, Eames dreams the third, and he, Cobb, Fischer, and Saito turn the plot around, scheme to take control of the extraction—which is under their control the entire time, of course, but Fischer doesn’t know that. Instead, Fischer meets his dying father—his dead father—and comes to the ultimately synthetic understanding that his father believes Robert is his own man, that his father has only ever wanted him to create on his own.

With luck.

“Then,” Ari says, actively clutching at her skull now, “the hospital gets demolished, you blow out the floor of the target room for the kick out of the third level, and the van backs off the bridge in the city for the kick out of the second. And then you—or we, I guess—get Fischer squared away and shoot ourselves out of the first level, or whatever. Wait for air turbulence to kick us out. Something.”

Arthur is watching her, leaning his elbows on his knees, eyebrows together. “Okay. Good enough. So, where do you belong, as our fresh-faced intern?”

“I sincerely fucking hate you,” she says, toneless. “First level: doesn’t matter. Fischer only interacts directly with you, Eames, and Saito when you’re all in the cab. Only with you and Cobb, in masks, in the warehouse. I hang out with Yusuf and stay out of the way and—” She sighs. “Que sera, sera. Second level—”

“Second level doesn’t matter either,” says Arthur, thinking it over. “We’re all just running interference on projections, except for Eames, before you all go under. You stick with me. We’ll be fine.”

“Third, same deal,” she says. She rubs her forehead and looks at the microwave clock; it’s after midnight. “Fischer will think we’re his teammates, so one extra—and I can ski—isn’t going to matter. And look. I built the levels. I’ve been—fuck, I see them when I blink. Okay? It’s not—I’m not dead weight, and I can—”

He nods heavily, tiredly. “I know. I know. Look, it’s just… it’s a lot of shit.”

“It’s a fuckton of shit.” Ari rolls her neck, hearing it pop half a dozen times.

“The kick on the first level,” he says, thoughtful. “You haven’t had reason to—I could—hm. No, actually, that’s—”

She sighs again. “Share with the class.”

“Just thinking,” says Arthur, glancing up like he’d forgotten she was there. “But instructors for contained air-supply swimming—snorkeling, scuba, whatever—they’re all over the place in Sydney, along the beaches. Might have to be there to figure out…” He goes vague, then shakes his head. “Whatever. One way or another, you’ll get the same sketchy training Yusuf has, minimum, before Tuesday morning. I’ll work it out.”

Ari twists her mouth at sketchy, but then again, Yusuf has been fine in the run-throughs. “Fine.”

“Fine.” Arthur leans back again. “Last thing. You ever handled a gun?”

“Jesus,” she mutters, wanting to laugh, but the spike through her eyeballs isn’t letting her. “No. We’ve been over this. Dramatically.” In case you forgot.

Arthur starts digging for a notebook and planning out loud and doodling and making grand ultimatums and Ari doesn’t give a shit, she just doesn’t, and he’s writing it up anyway, so she gets up and dry-swallows two ibuprofen. The same bottle she bought the day Arthur had a gun on her. And now he’s in her living room describing where and when in Australia he is going to teach her how to shoot a gun.

Usable life skills. For certain varieties of life.

“It’ll be fun,” he says. “Forward me your itinerary.” He gets up, pulls on his trench, picks up his bag, and checks all his pockets. “Hey, drink some water. I don’t know about you, but dry-swallowing pills gives me heartburn. ’Night, Ariadne.”

***

She’s had exactly enough time to drink a glass of water—irritatingly, Arthur is right about the heartburn thing, although she thinks it’s more of a reflux thing in her case—while doing some preliminary research (the coffee shop Arthur named on the Post-It on her table; the astronomical cost, even to Ariadne’s healthy budget, even flying coach, of a commercial flight to Sydney from Paris right now) when her job phone rings, still in her bag. Ari yelps and scrabbles for it.

Unknown number, but Saito had said he’d be in touch—she accepts the call and says, in Ariadne’s most polite tone, only a little breathless, “Yes, hello?”

“Good evening,” says the caller, a rich-voiced woman with perfect received pronunciation. “Do I have the pleasure of speaking with Miss Ariadne Finch?”

“Yes, that’s me—”

“My name is Pradnaya. I’m calling on behalf of Mr. Saito. I understand it’s rather late, so I’ll be as brief as I can. Mr. Saito offers you the use of a private jet from Paris to Sydney, Australia.”

Ari blinks and glances at her laptop screen. “That’s—um, that’s very kind of—”

“The jet will be departing from the Paris–Le Bourget airport at nine o’clock local time this morning,” the woman interrupts smoothly. “There will be two stops for refueling, with a total estimated flight time of twenty-one hours; the scheduled arrival time at the Bankstown Aerodrome is therefore two o’clock in the afternoon, Australian EDT, this Friday.”

More by reflex than anything, Ari manages to say, “That’s excellent.”

“Your suite at the Establishment Hotel has been booked under your name.” At her everything-except-drafting table, Ari gapes. “In addition, Mr. Saito has also extended an offer for a training session on Friday evening, with your colleague Mr. Eames and a diving instructor. If you agree, a driver will arrive at your residence at eight this morning. Another driver will meet you at Bankstown. Is that satisfactory?”

Saito doesn’t fuck around about arrangements. “Yes, absolutely,” says Ari. “I—thank you—”

“Mr. Saito will be flying with you,” Pradnaya says. “May I ask if you have any specific requests for the flight, Miss Finch? Food preferences, or perhaps entertainment?”

“No.” Ari shakes herself. “I mean—yes, of course, you may ask, but I—um, I can’t think of anything—”

“If you do, please feel free to contact me at this number. Good night and safe travels, Miss Finch.”

How is this her life— “Um, have a good night. Or day, or, um—”

Pradnaya ends the call in the middle of her stammering.

Ari stares at the phone in her hand. Forward me your itinerary—

She composes a text to Arthur; it’s not her most coherent. landing 2PM Friday, pvt courtesy saito, staying @ Establishment. & saito doing scuba sth w/ e so first lvl set

His reply, seconds later—she’s unsurprised he’s still awake—is just 10-4.

She makes a pot of coffee and starts cutting the price tags off her new luggage, wondering what the fuck twenty-year-old rich girls wear on private jets for twenty-plus-hour flights.

***

While doing everything but sleeping that strange night, she keeps her phone on her; it buzzes twice.

From Eames: a little bird aka a prat in a 3pc suit told me the NICE little bird aka u is along for the ride. dont fuck it up u’v been doing so well. c u soon x

And Yusuf: Requests for the hideaway? She replies none, don’t want to stress you out; he sends back a rude emoji.

Near seven, assuming her dads are asleep, she emails them from her personal account to let them know that the travel thing is actually happening, and that at least she’ll be on the same continent as them within a week.

***

She doesn’t know if the outfit is right, but she’s wearing black stretch jeans, her new boots, a silk top in deep pine green, the Hermès scarf, and a cute blazer when the driver arrives. Ari has slept exactly forty-seven minutes, but her apartment is clean, the coffee pot is on the drying rack, the succulents and epiphytes she keeps are fed and watered for something like three weeks if necessary, she’s eaten the last bread in the house with a smear of peanut butter, her teeth are brushed, and she knows she’s not missing anything vital, thanks to a spreadsheet she composed sometime around 2AM.

The driver is a brunette woman who introduces herself as Gretchen; the moment Ari hits the front door, Gretchen is scooping up her Samsonite and her carry-on like they’re made of feathers, leaving Ari with just her purse. The ride is quick and quiet; Gretchen plays classical music.

The airport, which apparently specializes in private flights, is utterly surreal; there’s nothing resembling security, and she just… gets on the jet, a sleek Cessna, where an attendant immediately greets her as Miss Finch and asks whether she’d like a coffee or a Continental breakfast or, perhaps, an omelet, with her selection of fillings. She demurs, having had her fill of peanut butter-laden sourdough, but asks for water, which she’s served in a fucking crystal glass after she’s guided to one of the four passenger seats for takeoff.

Saito arrives a moment later and nods to her. “I congratulate you, Miss Finch,” he says. “You have made a deep impression indeed upon Mr. Cobb.”

“I—um, thank you, sir.”

He seats himself, accepts his own crystal glass of water (sparkling, with ice and a wedge of lime), and says nothing else.

As soon as the pilot announces it’s safe to move around, Ariadne says, tentative, “Um, Mr. Saito, I was—um, hoping to get some sleep, considering… yesterday. Would you—”

“Rest well, Miss Finch.” Saito flips a page of his book; it’s a mass-market edition of a recent Nebula winner, which is completely at odds with her understanding of Saito as a person, yet somehow endearing.

She goes to the jet’s bathroom—an actual room—and changes into pajama pants (they’re just plaid; Ariadne takes herself too seriously for the duckies) and a t-shirt. The attendant takes her boots and her outfit and… disappears them, into a closet or something, probably on dedicated no-snag hangers; Ari returns to the main cabin in her sock feet.

Her seat has been transformed into a flat platform nearly the size of a twin bed, with ivory sheets of thread counts in the thousands and two pillows and a puffy deep blue duvet. A curtain in the same blue fabric hangs half-closed around the entire thing. Ari blinks at the new layout, then sits at the edge of the bed—the stand where she’d placed her water now works as a bedside table—and finds her best noise-canceling earbuds and a bottle of Benadryl. She pops three (to be absolutely sure), drains her water, and draws the curtain all the way around the bed. It’s a blackout drape; when she turns off the lights over her seat, the darkness is almost complete. She curls up on her side under the covers and shuffles the pillows around, the firm one under her head and the soft one under her arm.

She wakes once—or at least, the attendant says her name until she hears it and then guides her to sit somewhere upright while they land for the first refueling stop. Heavy-limbed and foggy, she drowses until she’s allowed to lie down again. Half an hour before the next refueling stop—fourteen hours in, just about—she wakes on her own, runs some calculations, and requests her real-person clothes (on flocked hangers, as she’d guessed). Saito is asleep, or perhaps just plugged into an energy dock, behind another curtain across the aisle.

Ari changes, fixes her makeup, asks for coffee while they’re refueling (tons of sugar, tons of cream), and spends the rest of the flight sketching, reading stuff on her laptop—in particular, the briefs on Robert Fischer; she hasn’t been paying sufficient attention to him—and generally fucking around in a low-energy sort of way. The attendant conjures a truly fantastic egg sandwich on brioche with Hollandaise (on a jet) and bacon and cheese with her second cup of magnificently adulterated coffee. If she’s done her math right, she’s just about started a decent sixteen-hour day, although she won’t be surprised if jetlag snipes her later.

She can’t remember dreaming at any point during her Benadryl-assisted crash, but she assumes she’ll have more than enough of that in the next week.

Chapter Text

Her job phone buzzes just after they land, and she’s distracted for a moment by Dr. Miles’s text message. I’ll be at LAX international arrivals Tuesday morning. Won’t be in touch otherwise. All the best til you no longer need it and then some extra for good measure.

Miles believes he’ll meet his son-in-law at the airport.

And there’s no telling whether he’ll actually see Cobb taken away in cuffs.

Ari exhales, short and sharp and silent, as she tucks the phone back in her purse, and turns her gaze to the window.

Bankstown Airport—Aerodrome, whatever—is another bizarre little place; three runways, a single terminal, focusing on charter flights and private jets and aviation schools and helicopter schools and things that one doesn’t think about when one thinks the word airport. The jet taxis to a section of tarmac that looks like all the others, and Ari simply follows Saito down the steps of the Cessna. She’s only got her tote and she’s ready to keep following Saito into a waiting limo—not a stretch, but clearly a fucking limo—when he stops moving rather abruptly. For Saito, at least, who tends to move as if he’s on low-friction casters.

“Mr. Eames,” he says, in a manner that suggests he would sound surprised if he were a lesser being. “I was expecting to meet you at the property.”

Because there’s Eames, leaning against the rear door of a second limo, in the middle of lighting a cigarette. The driver is next to him, a Japanese man in a pink oxford who stiffens on meeting Saito’s gaze; Eames mutters something to him and he relaxes fractionally.

“My apologies, Mr. Saito,” says Eames, brisk and cheerful. “I’d hoped to borrow our Ariadne for a little, so I’m afraid I persuaded the good Mr. Sugimoto to take a detour. Do you mind terribly?” He looks at Ari and nods, smiles like it’s just for her—he’s good at those—and asks, as if she’s the only person in sight, “What do you say, little bird?”

She glances at Saito, who raises one eyebrow but nods at Sugimoto, Eames’s driver. The man actually salutes in reply as he stamps out his cigarette, looking hopelessly relieved. “Well, if we’re all going to the same place,” Ariadne says, deferential, “as long as it’s all right with you, sir.”

“Certainly, Miss Finch. The drive is forty-five minutes.” Saito nods to her and strides to the first limo.

Ari grabs her carry-on, which has her swimsuit—since it’s supposedly a training session, on whatever property Saito’s referring to—before another of Saito’s people, a skirt-suited Southeast Asian woman with a clipboard, says, “Miss Finch, your luggage will be waiting at the Establishment when you arrive tonight. Do have a pleasant afternoon.”

She murmurs something appropriate and Eames is suddenly at her side, his cigarette down to the filter already. He’s wearing a good navy-blue V-neck sweater, lightweight enough for the weather, and flat-front khakis—Eric Amesbury-Scott’s wardrobe, which even Arthur might approve. He stubs the cigarette out on the sole of his own shoe (brown leather loafer), sticks the butt into an empty mint tin that just appears in one hand before he tucks it into his pocket—it’s not even slightly a surprise that Eames has prestidigitation in his bag of tricks—and puts out a hand near, but not on, the small of her back. “Well, little bird, shall we?”

“I believe we shall,” she says, and lets him usher her into the car.

***

They’ve established that it’s Ariadne’s first time in Australia, that her flight was spent passed the fuck out for fourteen hours (she doesn’t swear, of course; Ariadne wouldn’t) and reading up on Robert Fischer for seven, and that Eric Amesbury-Scott has decided to learn to surf and sucks at it so far before Eames says abruptly, “We’re not bugged, I swept the car myself, and Yoshiki has obliged me by disabling the intercom. So.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees in the space between the two bench seats, and asks, voice light, “Why the bloody fuck are you on this job, Ariette Vickers, and how fucked am I with you on it?”

Ari blinks and puts Ariadne aside, all her mannerisms and diminutions and suppression.

Eames’s face is bland, pleasant, and his eyes are ice-cold, as distant and calculating as they were when she first met him. She narrows her eyes and mirrors his posture, getting as much in his face, in his personal space, as he’s trying to be in hers, although their size disparity makes it distinctly a showdown of wills rather than one of physical presence. “I’m on this job,” she replies coolly, “because Saito agrees that Cobb requires at least one person’s undivided attention while we’re under.”

“Agrees with whom?”

“Dr. Miles.” Eames’s expression morphs unreadably and settles again, and she continues, “Arthur will corroborate I’m here by Miles’s recommendation to Saito.”

He says, not a question, “This is regarding Mal.”

“Regarding Cobb’s memory of Mal,” she says, not a correction. Just—reinforcing, to herself and maybe to Eames—not that he needs it—the distinction, the one that Cobb’s holding so precariously. “Saito told me two weeks ago I was in, that it was just a matter of getting Cobb to think it was his idea to invite me—”

“Ah. Explains your prickliness since the beginning of the month.”

It’s pointless to argue, and it’s pointless to express surprise that Eames noticed. Ari just nods and leans back against her seat. “That’s your first question. I’m on the job to keep Cobb’s brain from fucking us over. Or to try to, anyway.”

He clucks, disapproving. “Optimism, now, little bird.”

“Sure,” she says, with half a laugh. “I’ll try. For the second question, I’ve been over the logistics with Arthur, and we have a—”

“Fuck logistics,” says Eames, not unkindly.

She raises one eyebrow. “Then you’ll have to clarify your meaning.”

He shifts, leaning his chin on one hand, and regards her, still measuring but not as cold. “Well,” he says. “You’ve done an excellent job being unobjectionable in training—all those projections of tasteful palettes of perfectly ordinary dream populaces. However, the subconscious becomes… fractious, under stressful conditions. Those, perhaps, of a week in the mind of a stranger, waiting for one’s boss’s merry murderess of a memory to come out to play.” He looks out the back windshield. “You’ll understand that I’d like to know what I’m getting into with you.”

It takes her much longer than it should to work out his actual question (she may be reflecting slightly too much on his talent for off-the-cuff alliteration), but then again, what he’s suggesting— “Wait. You—you think I have a Mal situation going on? With who?”

Eames glances back at her, eyebrows raised. “I’ll remind you it’s my job to fill in the blanks.” After a moment, he adds, tone softening, “You can tell me. I understand if you don’t, of course.”

“What are my blanks?” she asks, curious. “Tell you what?”

He blows out a sigh, but he doesn’t look impatient—instead, oddly sad. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you’re trying to spin it—”

Ari feels her brow furrow. “Spin what?”

“Lord.” Eames presses one hand to his forehead. “All right. Interrupt whenever you’re ready. You’ve issued explicit instructions via our stalwart point man that no one is to touch you unnecessarily without warning.” He looks at her, eyebrows raised; she says nothing. “You’ve not dated since you came to Paris.”

She shakes her head minutely, baffled—he’s right, but what it has to do with anything is beyond her. Eames sighs again. “You slip into playing a deferential pliant no-trouble-here yes-woman like it’s your second job—not flawlessly, but the instincts are there—and you’ve prescription anxiolytics in your bag. Need I really—”

She bursts into laughter, and the look on his face— “Jesus, Eames—oh, god, I read that much like a broken bird? Or—” Ari bites her lip and straightens, actually considering it, the case he’s lined up and the evidence for it, because she owes him that much basic respect as a colleague. “No, okay, I can see it. When you lay it out like that.” With his interpretation, he’s been tactful, gentle even, and that’d be worth gold, if she’d needed it. “But—no, dude. Wrong end of the stick. Wrong stick completely, actually. Wrong forest.”

Eames is peering at her. “I’m going to have to ask you to elaborate,” he says, slowly. “Professional lookout.”

“And because you’re nosy,” Ari reminds him, trying a smile, but it feels wrong—it’s a hard topic, even if it’s not hers, and she shakes herself. “No, I’m sorry—I’m taking this seriously, I promise, and I truly appreciate your concern, but—” She shakes her head again, trying to phrase it right. “No one’s ever hurt me like that.” Ari meets his eyes, holds them, and repeats firmly, “Ever.”

He keeps his eyes on hers for another moment before he nods, a concession he’s relieved to grant. “Glad of it,” he says. “You don’t owe me an explanation—”

“Oh, whatever,” says Ari. “It’s not a big deal. I’m—you know. Nothing diagnosable, in terms of anxiety disorders, just—I think too much and it goes badly sometimes. I’ve been doing workarounds for it for as long as I can remember. Keep myself grounded, not spiraling in the middle of something. Distractions, like counting exercises and imitating people and running lines—that helped with acting, or vice versa, hard to say. Had a stress break in undergrad, just—overwork, not recognizing when I was hitting my limits, which is when I started meds for full panic attacks. When I need them.”

He’s nodding, thoughtful. “All right,” Eames says. “So that’s the role acceptance and the anxiolytics. The hangup regarding touch—”

She interrupts, “Were you under five feet tall in high school? Let alone college?”

Eames blinks. “Pardon?”

“I don’t recommend it,” says Ari, very seriously, in hopes that he’ll take the hint and lighten up. “People just decide that since you look portable, you should be okay with being picked up and carried around. Put places you don’t want to be.” She scowls. “And when I started kicking anyone who tried they acted like I was the problem.”

He laughs then, finally. “Bloody unfair, that is.”

“So that’s half of it,” she says, smiling back. “The other half’s…” Ari sighs. “Okay, it’s not funny. Again. It’s just… being a woman. In academia, in tech, around men, in the world. I’ve been—lucky, but… it shouldn’t take luck.” She stares at the floor of the limo, where there are ordinarily bumps and bits of chassis and whatever.

Eames doesn’t argue; he only murmurs “It shouldn’t, no. Never,” and goes silent, until Ari looks up and shrugs, her lips tight. Then he says, “So your friend at the EP—I forget, just the purple hair—”

“Sam,” she fills in immediately. “I’ve known them since they were a frosh. They’re—I trust them, and I hug my friends. I’m not a robot. But coworkers—it doesn’t matter what we’re doing or how well we get along, I have to have my shit together, and if I were to be on hugging terms with any of you, it’d be this whole—” She gestures. “Thing.”

“You’d be surprised, actually,” says Eames. “We’re in each other’s heads, we have each other’s bloodwork, half the time we’re sleeping next to each other—it gets downright cuddly sometimes, dreamshare.”

 “Okay, but that’s a generalization. Applying to people who’ve known the word ‘dreamshare’ longer than three months,” Ari says, a little impatient. “I’m new, as you all keep pointing out, and I’m a woman, and I’m half the size of any one of you, excepting Arthur, and he could kill me nine different ways unarmed—”

“Don’t underestimate that one. At least two dozen.”

“And,” she continues, ignoring him, “everything I have to do to convince this team of five men that I’m pulling my weight and doing my job and not being a resource sink is about a hundred times more important than usual, because someone made my cover a fucking twenty-year-old.”

He has the good grace to look chagrined at that. “Truly, I just picked a number, I didn’t—well, it’s rather obvious I didn’t think. You—” Eames goes pensive, looking back out the windshield. “You’re an education. And you shouldn’t have to be.”

Ari opens her mouth to reply and can’t think of anything to say. She shakes her head instead, shrugs.

“Which just leaves the dating question. I hate to pry—”

Back on firm ground. “No, you don’t,” she says, smirking. “You will hate my answer. You’re gonna say it’s too glib, I’m not taking it seriously, it’s got to be more cover, and you’re gonna dig, and all you’re gonna find is me being a stubborn little shit with bad time management and nerd priorities. I don’t date because the Ph.D. is a time-suck. And French girls are intimidating.”

He laughs again, folding his arms. “Hell, but you’re right on that. I haven’t the least idea how Cobb ever landed Mademoiselle Miles.”

Something must change in her face—she barely suppresses the shudder as Mal’s voice whispers a half of a whole in her head—because Eames goes serious, instantly. “For the job,” he says. “For your job, specifically. You—” He stops, tilts his head, watches her. “Now’s not entirely the best time for one to go reminiscing about the bad old days, is it.”

Ari feels a surge of gratitude for Eames, for getting it. “No, it’s not. It’s—” She grasps for words, comes up empty, and shakes her head. “It’s bad. That’s—I think that’s all I can say, really, without—” She blows out a hard breath. “Especially because you knew her. And I need to be—I think part of why Dr. Miles wanted me is because I don’t. Because I only met her when she killed me, my second time under.”

“It’s been rather a trial by fire for you, hasn’t it,” says Eames wryly. “Will continue being, in fact. But if you stick in the field, after—you’ll be a legend. Cutting your teeth on inception.”

She doesn’t say assuming there’s an after, because she’s trying to be optimistic.

***

The property, it turns out, is a lake house.

With its own goddamn lake.

When Ariadne tentatively and quietly asks the housekeeper Ted where she might change into her swimsuit, Ted—a six-and-a-half-foot-tall sandy-haired man in livery, although very modern and sleek livery it is—laughs and says, “No need, miss,” and hands her a shopping bag containing a wetsuit, tags still on, and diving boots, which are apparently something that exist. Then points her to a bathroom done entirely in gold-veined black marble, or something synthetic that looks even better.

The wetsuit and boots fit as if they were made for her. When she goes out to the lake—the instructor, a wiry blonde named Cass with beautiful upper-body musculature, is having an animated conversation with Eames, who’s dressed just as Ari is—she looks sharply at Saito. Who, of course, notices. A ghost of a smile slides across his face and he says, “Miss Finch, I hope you don’t mind the presumption.”

Shit. Ariadne. “I’m just—I don’t recall, um, telling you my sizes,” she mutters, a little flustered.

He laughs, the first time she’s seen him do so. “You didn’t,” he replies, and says nothing else. Cryptic asshole.

Then again, Ariadne’s credit card has been paid off, every month, the instant the bank opens after each of the last three closing dates—paid before she could see the email alerts about her statement availability. Miles had shrugged when she first mentioned it, said, “Probably your good employer.” Which means Saito has access to her shopping receipts, which—well, from there, it’d be just a matter of a couple phone calls to get specific breakdowns of each purchase. And wetsuits are stretchy.

She can’t tell if she’s flattered or annoyed. Perhaps both.

***

Over the next two hours, Ari reaffirms that she will never understand why the fuck people voluntarily interact with deep water for fun.

They start with diving off a stationary speedboat (Saito’s, one of a small fleet, and of course Saito’s private lake has a private fucking fleet of assorted watercraft). Cass reminds her, again and again, to propel herself down, keep her eyes open, despite the dark and the pressure and the dark and—

“You’re holding up, then, little bird?” asks Eames as he treads water a few feet away.

Ari grits her teeth. “I’m fine—”

“Cass—would a break be all right?” Eames calls. “Long flights, you know.”

Cass is ten yards off in the boat. “Yeah, no worries. Ship or shore?”

“Ari?”

“Don’t fucking coddle me,” snarls Ari, low. “Shore,” she yells to Cass, and twists so she can backstroke to the pebbly beach nearest Saito’s lake house.

Cass calls back, “Whenever you’re ready. I’ll get the lights set.”

Lights. Because it’s only going to get darker, of course. Because it’s nearly winter in this hemisphere.

She feels like overcooked noodle once she gets her feet back under her, but she doesn’t let herself sag. Saito’s housekeeper Ted has set up a station on the beach, with piles of clothes and towels and food. Ari grabs a jacket—it’s oversized, hitting her mid-thigh, but there are four of the things and none of them are any smaller—and a towel, a bottle of water, and an energy bar of some kind. Ted himself says, “Try the fire pit if you want a bit of warm,” and jerks his head to his right, further up the beach. Ari nods, too tightly wound to manage a polite verbal reply, and trudges off.

The heat of the fire is actually welcome. She slumps on the bench on one side of the pit and sets the water bottle next to her, gnawing off another bite of protein-bar paste—it’s one of those hyper-engineered things that looks like extruded rubber, rather than anything edible, and it’s pretending very hard to be peanut butter-flavored.

“I don’t, as a rule, fucking coddle,” Eames says mildly, and she jumps. For someone built like—like Eames, he moves silently, on gravel and whatever else, in his own goddamn diving boots, and then he goes and replicates her intonation and accent when he’s quoting her. He sits to her left on the bench, enough room for another person between them. “Apologies for the fright. I don’t coddle, though. I’m bloody tired.”

Ari glares at him as she swallows her mouthful of peanut-butter lie. “Eric Amesbury-Scott is a licensed scuba diver with an Instagram devoted to snorkeling photos from the Great Barrier Reef,” she says, crisp. Then adds, “You lying fuck.”

He grins. “Glad to know you’re doing your research.” And, much lower, “Although you’re breaking character.”

Shit.

“No—don’t worry, please,” he adds quickly. “Our glorious patron is elsewhere, and I don’t think he much cares who you are in any case, as long as you’re doing your job. Speaking of,” Eames goes on, still just loud enough for her alone to hear, “you’re bloody tired and you hate it out there.”

“I never said that,” she says without thinking, and then feels like an idiot as Eames eyes her. But he doesn’t say anything; a small gift.

“You’d mentioned an uneasy relationship with limits, earlier,” Eames says after a moment, looking away. “And you looked like you were going to be sick. I’d rather not risk a teammate’s wellbeing this close to a job, and I won’t apologize for that.”

Ari shakes her head, because he’s shot down every argument she could have in three neat sentences. Instead, she looks at the protein bar, and says, “This—the texture’s like plastic explosive. How do people manage to make food that so isn’t food?” She makes a face, trying to get the taste off her tongue, and looks around for a trash bin, then realizes there’s no way she’s going to stand up this soon.

Eames holds his hand out. “I’ve got it,” he says. “And—I don’t coddle, you little twerp. But if the diving is that bad—”

“It’s goddamn terrible.” She shudders and hates herself for it and can’t even make herself care about the twerp remark, particularly because she’s being one. “It’s fucking dark and do you know how much water weighs? And it’s slimy, and everything more than ten feet down is so heavy and dark and I fucking—” Ari drops the protein bar on the ground, utterly ignoring Eames’s hand—he puts it down without a word—and folds her legs up towards her chest, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I am a fucking embarrassment of a would-be dream thief,” she says, enunciating very clearly, and rests her head on her left knee.

There’s an odd, waiting silence, just the crackling of the fire; it feels like Eames is holding himself absolutely still, before he says quietly, “I’d say you’re doing rather well for week eleven, but you’d tell me I’m being soft.” Before she can think of a reply, he goes on, “And as far as embarrassments go—look. The last five rookies I’ve worked with—five—before you and Saito, they made it to their third dream sessions before swearing off fieldwork for the rest of their days. And they showed promise.”

“Yeah, and,” grumbles Ari to her kneecap. “Wide-eyed little—”

“They were ex-MI6,” he says blandly. “Not in paper-pushing.”

She sighs, a deep shaking thing that emphasizes the shivery anxiety she’s been trying to ignore, and lifts her head. “Okay,” she says. “You—okay. You made your point.” She can’t look at him; she stares at the embers of the fire. “Look, just—I’m—I don’t like being bad at shit, or scared—”

“Few do, really,” he says, light and irreverent.

“Shut up.” There’s no heat in it. “I’m coming to terms with dreamshare professionality here.” She glances over.

Eames blinks. “Well—take all the time you need.”

“Just—” Ari swallows and spits it out. “Could I lean on you a minute? A few minutes. No more than five—okay, ten. I—look, I could use the oxytocin—”

“You are distressingly similar to Arthur, honestly.” Eames lifts his arm and rests it along the top of the bench, turning a bit towards her. He doesn’t move otherwise.

She sighs. “Yusuf said that, too,” she mutters, scowling, and scoots over, closes the person’s worth of remaining distance, and rests her head on Eames’s shoulder.

It’s not a hangup, she tells herself, still scowling. It’s professionalism, which means not going to older male colleagues—the forums are fuzzy on it, but she thinks Eames is just about thirty, so “older” is barely meaningful, but still—and asking them for a goddamn hug. Except desperate times, et cetera, and she’s established that Eames isn’t going to kill her or try to mess with her, and he sees things, and she’s going to be in someone else’s brain for a week of subjective time—two hundred hours, based on the sedative, so really it’s eight days and change—with him and four other men, and she might as well—

“I can hear your brain whirling along,” says Eames, a little wonderingly. “Really, the resemblance is uncanny.”

Ari huffs out a breath, annoyed and amused, and forces herself to relax, muscle group by muscle group. “Can’t tell if you consider that an insult or a compliment.”

“Neither can I,” Eames replies, cheerful. “But you watch. You’ll be wearing Zegna before the year’s out.”

“I plan to,” she says. Ari, and whatever iteration she needs of Ariadne later—she wants to be able to wear a suit the way Arthur does, she realizes, like it’s a second skin and armor at the same time, like she doesn’t even have to think about it. Womenswear is shit anyway. “I’ll make him take me shopping. Introduce me to his favorite tailor in Paris.”

“He would, you realize. He’s quite fond of you.”

She laughs. “And you’re going to teach me how to lie so easily. He spent twelve minutes cussing me out Wednesday, once I got in on the job.”

“Poor example you’ve chosen there.” Eames laughs, a low little rumble in his chest. “One of his tells. The more annoyed he acts, the more he actually likes you. It’s when he gets all closemouthed and pleasant that you start keeping an eye on his gun hand.” He pauses. “Both of them.”

Ari doesn’t say he must adore you, then. “Guns,” she says instead, and settles herself again, a little more comfortably; Eames is warm and solid and very unlike anything underwater. “He’s going to teach me to shoot this weekend. With a friend of his—Dana?”

“Dana,” he says, sounding delighted. “You’ll love her, she’s terrifying. About five hundred klicks out of the city, which is to say the middle of bloody nowhere. She’s in the business, taking a break at the mo’. You’ll hate Arthur by tomorrow night.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

Eames snorts. “He’ll tell you himself. He’s not an easy teacher, and he knows it.”

She makes an ambivalent sort of noise and closes her eyes, watches the flickering green afterimage of the flames on the insides of her eyelids. Eames is silent, chest rising and falling; his arm is still above her on the back of the bench, not an inch closer, and she’s grateful again in a warm surge for his quiet, steady ease, beneath all the Eamesian double entendres and dramatics. Ari counts to two hundred in multiples of four and then moves, scoots away and stands. “All right,” she says, retrieving the plastic-explosive protein bar from where she’d dropped it. “Recovered and ready to go. Let’s get this done.”

“Lying lessons at a date to be determined, hm?”

Smiling a little, Ariadne glances down at the sand. “Feels like I got a head start,” she says, as she looks up at Eames; a breeze blows up the embers into brightness and she squints a bit against it, letting her nose wrinkle. “Like, in March.”

***

They leave—Eames and Ari leave, in Sugimoto’s car—hours later, and Ari doesn’t hate water any less, but she can dive, she’s gotten used to keeping her eyes open underwater—Cass, aided by Saito’s assorted personnel, dropped fucking beacons right into the lake, enormous LED arrays running off car batteries in waterproofed casing, with more hung off the sides of the boat—and she knows how to get more than enough air out of one of the oxygen tanks and breathing masks Yusuf will have in the van, as vetted by Eames.

The ride back is quiet, which is good, because Ari is wiped. Just before Sugimoto pulls up outside Eames’s flat, Eames says, “Tell Dana I’ll make it up to her for Dnipro. She’ll know what I mean.” He grins and touches his forehead as he gets out of the car. “’Til Tuesday, little bird.”

Sugimoto parks outside the hotel and follows Ariadne Finch, re-dressed in her silk shirt and designer jeans and riding boots and blazer, to the front desk, carrying her second bag. Ari checks in without a hitch, retrieves her Samsonite as promised, and is shown to a heart-stoppingly beautiful suite. She orders room service, draws a bath, packs for a weekend in the middle of nowhere—a mix of Ariadne’s clothes and her own, her laptop, charging cables, toothbrush—and, as she’d guessed might happen, utterly fails to sleep, despite the fogginess of a Benadryl.

She gives up, unpacks her laptop and reads. There’s the dreamshare forums, where she checks the gossip, seeing if there’s anything about them, Cobb and company. A single sentence might point to them, but it’s too vague to tell for certain, and it’s attracted minimal attention. (sounds like a weird crew in paris, powerhouses & nobodies, post what you know here; the only replies are You missed the turn for TMZ, jreemher0. and who tf u think u can call a nobody, ur a fckn nobody).

Then her typical blend of news sites and art news sites and celebrity fashion blogs; on two of her regular haunts, vulturish posts show the same set of pap photos of Robert Fischer getting into the backseat of a limo, shortly after his father passed. He looks like a potato with cheekbones, she thinks, and mentally slaps herself for unnecessary cruelty; he truly looks miserable, red around the eyes and too skinny, despite the good suit (although Arthur’s are better). She spends half an hour reading obituaries for Maurice Fischer and business articles about Fischer Morrow stock as karmic punishment, even if that’s not remotely how it works.

There’s not much chance Ariadne will be interacting with Robert in the dream, but… Contingencies, says Arthur in her head. Ari swears at him and plays Tetris until the pieces start glitching in her visual field, finally falling into an uneasy catnap sometime after four.

***

On her first full day in Australia, Ariadne Finch, billionaire’s daughter, dressed in windowpane plaid and her red cardigan and indigo stretch denim and brown leather boots, duffel slung over her shoulder with her black tote, checks out of the hotel at twenty after seven. She chats easily with the concierge, a lovely woman named Miranda, about her regret that she can’t stay for breakfast, considering how gorgeous the room was. With genuine pleasure, she confirms with her that she’ll be back on Monday for another night (different suite, but who’s counting?), when she’ll retrieve her repacked luggage from the hotel’s storage, before leaving for good (or for evil) on Tuesday.

Beneath her carefully applied luxury-brand concealer (she wholeheartedly understands and supports Finch’s Sephora budget by now—the difference between Lancôme and Covergirl is far more than price point), Ari feels unmoored and hazy, taut with sleep deprivation, like the fourteen-hour Benadryl crash on the jet had never happened. Furthermore, she hurts; her muscles are tired and complaining from all the swimming yesterday. But she’s going to ignore it, all of it, because she has places to be. Specifically, Single O in Surry Hills, where the cab that Miranda has called for her drops her off just as they open.

Ari orders two batch-brew coffees to go—again, to her regret; the breakfast menu is beautiful—and a kilo of whole beans in a roast called Paradox, which is just too good to pass up for the name alone. The bag goes in her tote for Dana. She doctors one of the coffees—after tasting it, because she’s not a total heathen, and it’s good, but she has caloric needs—with tablespoons of cream; the other she leaves black, on pain of Arthur.

When she steps out of the café, the man himself is walking towards her, dressed way down. Dark-rinse jeans, black T-shirt, and a cognac-brown leather jacket that she covets immediately (although she’d never abandon her favorite olive-grey leather), a black ballistic nylon soft-sided carry-on slung over his shoulder—Arthur looks more like a college student than she does, his hair loose and curling at the ends, and he smiles at her easily, more openly than he had at any point in Paris, dimples in full view. “Ari. All good?”

Once again, she’s struck by how screwed presumed-straight Ariadne would be. “All good,” she replies, handing him the black coffee and matching his stride; he’s not in a hurry. “Decent trip?”

“Yeah, all on schedule.” Which, knowing Arthur, means everything is on schedule. He gestures to their right at the corner. “Up the block, then left across the street to get the car. The drive’s pretty good, once we’re out of the city.”

“Eames said Dana’s about five hundred kilometers out?”

“We’ll be there by eleven.” He says it like Saito describing airline purchases and then takes a sip of coffee. He sighs after he swallows, smiling again. “God, these guys make the flights worth it.”

“They ship worldwide, you know.”

“Not the same,” he says, like the hipster he is.

“Good thing you got a gopher.” She doesn’t lift her own cup yet, the better to watch his response. He nearly agrees, reflexively—he does a half-nod, dimples on one side of his mouth, then swallows the smile as his eyebrows angle inward. He drops his gaze to the toes of his black-and-white Converses. Arthur in Chucks. High-tops, even. Wonders may never cease.

Finally, he glances over at her, smiling again—a wry thing, resigned but conspiratorial. “Look, this is the most fun I’m gonna have on this job,” he tells her in an undertone.

He sounds like a college student.

“I’m glad,” she says, smiling despite herself.

“Mostly,” says Arthur, looking back at the sidewalk. “There’s going to be—ah, some of it’ll be difficult. If—well, there are options.”

“I can handle difficult.”

His features are back to cool inscrutability when he glances at her again, but he doesn’t say anything else, aside from, “How was diving?”

“Fucking godawful,” she replies. “But I learned.”

“Not your kind of thing?” The car—however Arthur arranged it; it’s just parked in a paid secure lot, no one in sight—is a little black BMW hatchback, dusty and dented, but he smiles at it like it’s a well-executed Penrose staircase and pops the left (passenger-side—because Australia) headlight housing, removes a Mylar-coated packet the size of a pack of gum that holds the key fob, and neatly re-seats the housing with a click. “Can’t say I’m much of a fan, either. Surfing, though—”

“You surf?” Ari demands, delighted by the image. “Does Armani do rash guards? I guess you are the entire market for that ridiculous Alexander Wang collab—”

Arthur scoffs and rolls his eyes, not even trying to suppress his smile as he kicks the tires. “Like I’d compromise technical performance for branding.”

“Eames is trying to learn,” she says. “You could talk shop.”

“He’d be the asshole with the lux-brand board, no shame whatsoever—”

They banter until Arthur has swept the car, which he accomplishes while putting their bags in the excuse of a backseat, taking just a little longer than typical for such a thing. He gives her a nod accompanying a remark about Eamesian dilettantism, and Ari settles in the low-slung passenger seat next to the manual gearshift. She knows how to drive stick, but she hasn’t driven regularly since she moved to Paris, and she’s content to let Arthur do his thing.

He is positively cheerful, humming to himself as he adjusts the driver’s seat and the steering wheel, checks the mirrors, and kicks the engine. “Music?” he asks, offering her an ancient iPod. “Adapter’s in my bag, front left pocket. The player’s got—”

She’s halfway through its contents. “Eighty per cent of alt-rock radio between 1990 and 2007, looks like,” she says, toneless and scrolling, “Jimmy Eat World, Matchbox 20, Nine Inch Nails—complete discog, all of Ghosts—more alt-rock, post-grunge, and… the Scissor Sisters. Under the, not S.”

Arthur is staring, clearly with no idea what to do with his face, when she looks up at him, keeping her own expression blank. “Unexpected tastes, Arthur, darling,” she says, in her best Eames voice.

He bursts into unrestrained laughter, and she grins to herself as she retrieves the adapter.

With the first track of the second half of The Fragile playing, because the first half might be great but it’s still crap driving music, Arthur recovers and says, shifting into drive, “If I left you and Eames together for a week, I don’t know what I’d get back.”

“Sweet fuckall,” she replies immediately. “We’d vanish after day two.”

“Somehow I don’t doubt it.” He pays the electronic meter with a slip from his jacket pocket and a battered-looking MasterCard embossed with the name Michael Chesterton.

Ari works on her coffee and queues a spill of nostalgia—Eve 6, Third Eye Blind, old Green Day, Garbage, Soundgarden. The playlist ends up a little over four hours long; one way to keep Arthur on his suspiciously short clock. She’s interested in seeing how he’s going to pull it off, considering that it’s another twenty-five klicks until they’re out of the city.

But then they are out of the city, on a nearly empty highway, and before she notices the BMW is gliding along forty klicks per hour over the highway limit for New South Wales—and then fifty over. She looks at him sharply.

“You’re not as expected, either,” Arthur says, apparently in reply to the movement of her head, like he’s picking up where they left off conversation forty klicks and an album ago, and offhand like he isn’t shredding the speed limit into pieces. “I wasn’t… enthused, you know, you being on board.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” she replies drily.

“It was a hard day, okay? But you’re quick and you don’t ask stupid questions.”

“What would be a stupid question?” she asks, and immediately winces. That, for one.

He doesn’t take the easy hit, though; one of the reasons she likes him. “Your typical newbies in dreamshare, they all get stuck on why they can’t just dream they know everything, end of. They wanna dream that they’re expert acrobats, or fluent in Mandarin, or that the mark thinks they’re best friends without a forger. You haven’t even tried to dream yourself a pistol. Despite how often you could have used one.”

“Because I have nothing to work with,” she says, a little stung. Haven’t even tried—is he getting on her case for lacking creativity? After the Klein bottle? “I’m from lefty liberal-arts hippie-land. I hadn’t even been in the same room as a gun before you guys.”

“So? It’s a dream.” He waits—he’s prompting. Teaching, while driving at—she peeks at the speedometer—about half as much again as the rural limit for New South Wales. “I love Beemers,” he says, apparently at random, and then prompts again, “So, why can’t you dream a gun?”

Right. “I’d have to—” She leans her head back, thinking aloud. “Have to dream that everyone else in the dream thinks I can shoot, while convincing myself that I can, and if the bullet moved wrong, or if I did, that’d be a tipoff if the mark knew how to shoot, and I wouldn’t necessarily know whether they could. I’d have to dream that I know about—” Scenes from heist movies and procedural novels bloom and fade in her head. “About recoil, kickback, about loading the thing. It’s not like it’s a hammer.” She considers. “Although hammers could be useful. Shit, I should have—”

“People don’t get that, though,” Arthur replies, interrupting her vision of taking a nice sledgehammer to Cobb’s projections and their fucking katanas. “Not even the researchers, at first. All the military applications, they were creaming their pants—I didn’t say that, by the way—”

“Of course not. Consummate professional,” she mutters, looking out her own window; the landscape is just a smear of beige and grey.

“Thanks. I mentioned, your first day—accelerated learning, doing basic in dreamtime. But it was more than that; they thought they could make super-soldiers who’d never picked up a rifle.” He speaks like a lecturer with a good lesson plan, and that’s a hell of a thought. “The materials savings alone would have been astronomical, which was really why they were interested. And they did fine with unarmed hand-to-hand, or knife work, plus languages, mission briefings, dossiers—verbal or written stuff. But anytime they tried to teach ballistic weapons underneath, they’d just get a bunch of trainees stuck in a collapse—”

“Nothing that involves more than a sufficiently simple machine,” she says, as it dawns on her. “Because holding the rules of the tool as well as— But proprioception is in the CNS and it’s universal—I mean, sufficiently universal—”

“See, most architects don’t know what proprioception is.”

She tosses her head and says dismissively, “I’m not most architects.”

“You aren’t,” Arthur agrees, grinning out the windshield and shifting into a higher gear. “And it’s great.”

They don’t speak substantively for the rest of the drive—she sleeps, actually, despite the coffee and the music and the way Arthur pushes two hundred kph on straightaways. Midway through Horrorscope, Arthur parks the BMW alongside a battered pickup truck outside a tiny low-roofed white house in—true to Eames’s description—the middle of goddamn nowhere. There are hay bales visible fifty yards behind the house—not from anywhere local, as far as she can tell. When Arthur kills the engine, Ari says, “Three minutes past eleven. Arthur, I am impressed.”

He doesn’t comment on her own mimic of him, just smiles sideways as he reaches into the back seat for his bag.

***

Dana is a trim woman with a waist-length braid of black hair; she greets them by crowing, “Arthur, it’s been too long!” and kissing him on the cheek, then directing a gorgeous smile at Ari as she says, “And hello to you.” Then she narrows her eyes for a moment, stands back, puts one hand to her own chin, and declares, “Architect. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Ari narrows her eyes back. “Not wrong. You’re…hm. Extractor, but architect as well. Or, no…” She tilts her chin up and to the side. “Set designer. Non-built spaces. But— currently on hiatus with an artist's grant in 3D animation.”

Dana watches her as she speaks, smile growing slowly. Arthur is staring at her, nonplussed.

She adds guilelessly, “Am I right?”

Abruptly, Dana turns and swats Arthur on the arm. “Get that look off your face; she’s on the forums and not just the job postings like the rest of us with half a brain and wifi, you’re really missing out— You’ve been in long? No, you haven’t, otherwise Arthur wouldn’t have you out here to shoot things—oh, where are my manners. I’m Dana, it’s a pleasure—” She holds out her hand.

“Ariadne,” she says, shaking, although she’s already blown a bit of Ariadne’s schtick—but then again, she’s here to shoot things. “Thank you for hosting. I really appreciate it.” Ari passes over the kilo of coffee.

“Is this a joke?” Dana demands as she takes it, grin going wider. “Are you mocking Arthur? Arthur, did you see what your—”

“What—”

“The description sounded good,” says Ariadne, all innocence, to Arthur’s smile-scowl. “Also, Eames said to tell you he remembers Dnipro.”

“He better. Owes me a new motorcycle and a clean Latvian ID.” Dana scoffs. “Plus that beaded Givenchy, but I suppose it’d be rather impossible to recover. And that, my dears, is why you never wear archival couture when you haven’t a tertiary clean getaway plan.” She sighs wistfully and then claps her hands together. “Logistics. I ate already. Help yourselves to whatever you want in the kitchen, except the lasagna in the fridge if you want to eat tonight. Dinner’s at nine. Ariadne, you’re down the hall to the right, the one that’s not the bathroom. Arthur, couch. If you manage to get lost in this house, points for creativity. Everything’s all set in the back and there’s no neighbors for at least five miles any direction. Anything else, kick me; I won’t hear you otherwise.”

She snaps a huge pair of professional headphones over her ears and folds herself into a massive rolling chair in front of her dual-monitor desktop, six feet from the futon where Arthur’s sleeping. Ari grins and takes her bag to the guest room.

***

While Arthur puts together sandwiches, Ari sheds Ariadne’s layers and scarf in favor of one of her own t-shirts; it’s still nicely warm out, even though it’s the last week of autumn down here. They eat, fill two Nalgenes with ice cubes and water, and head outside.

Over five hours topside, no dreamwork, Ari learns to assemble, load, unload, reload, and fire a Glock 17 (“Cliché, but they get that way for a reason. And my favorite,” says Arthur, “so I have a spare.”). She shoots circular paper targets on the hay bales, standing, kneeling, walking, and running (her legs complain at first; she tells them to fucking deal). By four o’clock, she can hit a two-foot-wide target from a distance of twenty yards at a success rate that meets Arthur’s standards. She can reload in less than five seconds while sprinting flat-out, although she still has to take a knee for a decent target shot. Dust is ground irrevocably into the weave of Ariadne’s expensive skinny jeans.

“Okay,” says Arthur at half-past four, walking towards her and clicking the safety on his own gun; she does the same for hers and hands it to him when he gestures for it. “Decent start. Could do dreamwork now, but—” He stops to yawn; it’s contagious, and Ari’s jaw cracks sharply. “Jesus. Was that your head?”

“Temporomandibular joint,” she corrects.

“Pedant.” He grins at her when she sticks her tongue out. “Break for naps, some food. Then topside runs—test your muscle memory—and then dreamwork.”

Ari sets her phone alarm for two hours and wakes on the twin bed in the guest room after sunset, disoriented as hell. But it’s not worse than a tight week in the studio, not really. She pulls on her fucking Cornell hoodie, stretches her legs as well as she can, and fishes her totem out of the inner pocket of her tote bag.

The day after Arthur had told her what had happened to Mal, Ari had gotten Ursula’s girlfriend Syd, a metal sculptor, to braze a neat circle of nickel-alloy shim stock to the bishop’s base, hiding the cavity Ari had hollowed out. Syd had then milled down the brazement into a smooth rounded edge and brush-finished the new base. It looks untouched now, in the absence of its mate for comparison—the shim stock adds the least bit of height—but the weight is still exactly as wrong as it should be. She tucks it into her hoodie pocket and leaves her room.

Arthur and Dana are gossiping in the kitchen—a little U-shaped roomlet, stove-sink-fridge with white laminate countertops, cupboards painted apple-red—about people she’s never heard of. There’s an open bag of pita bread and a tub of hummus on the counter and half a pot of still-hot coffee, so Ari’s happy enough to graze and re-caffeinate while she observes this version of Arthur. He’s added a heavily cabled ivory sweater over his T-shirt, wearing it as well as he does his waistcoats.

Gossip isn’t something she’d ever mentally associated with Arthur in the last eleven weeks, but Dana’s been on her break, and so he fills her in on what seems to be the last six or so months of dreamshare that he knows about—which is frighteningly comprehensive, based on Ari’s forum lurking. Dana interrupts frequently, clarifying who fucked up what and demanding exact wording when applicable and asking whatever happened to that one Icelandic chemist, and the up-and-coming forger from where-was-it-again, and the extractor who had all that shit with the FBI, and no, she didn’t mean Cobb.

In Paris, Arthur had always shown irritation when interrupted, meeting or one-on-one or anything, waiting with his eyebrows pointedly raised or pressing his lips together or, if it were Eames, saying flatly, “If you’re finished yet.” Here, he rolls with it, laughs, ribs Dana about her memory of the forger’s undercut and three eyebrow piercings, but not her home country. It’s fascinating. The entire concept of the dreamshare community is fascinating—an underworld of people with ridiculous brainpower and access to barely credible hundred-thousand-dollar tech, half of them with doctorates in something or other, all of them criminals. And Ari could be one of them, nearly is—

“All right, padawan,” Arthur says finally, turning to her, and Ari nearly chokes on her mouthful of pita as Dana breaks into gales of laughter. “Refresher topside, then we go under. Dana, we’ll be—”

“Can you imagine,” Dana asks of Ari, “this one on Dagobah, getting snitty with Luke fucking Skywalker for—for getting swamp slime on his—” She giggles. “His bespoke fucking lapels—” She dissolves, folding over on the counter to laugh; Ari grins.

Arthur says, exasperated, “You’re hopeless,” but he’s smiling. “Ari. Come on.”

***

They run the basics again over an hour as the night deepens—there are floodlights at the back of the house, so the dark isn’t really relevant. Assembly, loading, target practice, until Arthur’s satisfied Ari is actually retaining something. Then Arthur switches off the floodlights, depending on the illumination from the lamp hanging from the rafters of the roofed patio at the back of Dana’s house. A heavy utility table is set against the siding, with two lawn chairs that actually belong outside in front. Arthur retrieves the PASIV device from his luggage, yelling to Dana that he doesn’t give a fuck whether Han shot first or what as he shuts the sliding door, and sets it up; Ari does her own cannula. She has the Glock, too, next to her thigh—it’s unloaded, meant as a teaching tool. A magazine of bullets lies on her other side.

Arthur settles, leaning back in the other chair, and says, “You’re gonna hate my guts before we’re done.”

“Eames said you’d say that.” She grips her totem inside her hoodie pocket; Arthur’s mouth twitches at the corners, not really a smile, and he presses the button.

***

He dreams them into a clean sunlit cityscape, like New York minus fossil fuels, with no projections in sight. “Locked up,” he says when she asks, still refusing to explain how. “We’re still on basics here. Dream the gun.”

It takes seven tries—he shakes his head, says what’s wrong with what she makes, and shoots her out, then waits while she scrutinizes the gun and the magazine in her lap through her splitting headache—before she gets them both right, Glock and ammo. The first time she does, he examines both of them minutely, nods, and tosses them behind him. They don’t land; they just vanish, and she squawks before he says, toneless, “Again.”

She juts her jaw and does it again, dreaming the gun and the magazine, one in each hand, waiting until she feels like their weights are right, swapping them between hands and flipping them around. When she’s satisfied, she hands them over and watches Arthur evaluate them. He’s just as careful, before he nods and throws them—overarm pitches this time, disappearing as they hit the tops of their respective arcs. “Again. I want you down to three seconds.”

“Jackass,” she says; he quirks one eyebrow, mouth turned downward. Ari grits her teeth and dreams the Glock and magazine again, hands them over, watches them disappear—he stops the throwing trick, just drops his hands and they’re gone—seventeen more times before she has them in three seconds, and then another dozen, maintaining the pace.

“All right, shoot out,” he says, and hands back the thirty-first gun. “Temple. Go.”

It’s—unnerving, suddenly, the weight of the Glock in her own hand, and she flinches when she touches the cold metal to her skin. Her heart rate skyrockets as she stares at Arthur. Just waking up, she reminds herself, but she can’t make herself—just one twitch of her index finger—but if she’s wrong— Unease roils in her stomach.

“Totem,” she spits. “Need it.” It sounds ragged; Arthur just nods and looks up, away, as she drops the gun to her side, crouches on the pavement, and sets her bishop down. She knocks it over and it rolls in a circle, rattling on the slight unevenness of the asphalt. Ari blows out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, picks up the bishop, puts the gun to her head again without standing, and pulls the trigger.

***

“Fuck,” she says, right hand going to her head and left hand still clutching her totem in her hoodie pocket. Arthur’s waking next to her; the bishop is lighter than it was in Arthur’s cityscape, but she tightens her grip on it until she feels the bones in her hand creak, repeating, “Fuck, fuck, fuck—”

“Okay?”

She shudders. “Fuck, that’s fucking weird.” But her head’s in one piece, unmarred, and her bishop is in her hand; she sits up and hunches over her lap to hide what she’s doing as she sets the bishop on his base on the seat of the lounge chair—it’s an Adirondack-style thing, flat wood panels—and knocks him over. Thock. Right on his face, motionless. She sighs.

Arthur repeats, “You’re okay?”

“I’m—” Ari inhales, exhales, and tucks her bishop into her pocket again as she lies back. “Yeah. I’m okay. Now what?”

“Now we keep going,” says Arthur, and hits the button.

***

He has her dream the gun and the magazine, then more magazines, the number increasing in a Fibonacci sequence—how very Arthur—that maxes out at twenty-one. That’s as much as she can comfortably carry in her hoodie pocket; he grants her three seconds per additional magazine. They drill in one-hour allotments, three minutes of real time, the two of them walking and jogging and running through the city with Ari firing at whatever targets and landmarks Arthur indicates. Topside, in between, they stretch and take mouthfuls of water.

Just before the fifth or sixth round ends, Ari notices it: her pulse is steady and slow, her breathing easy, and there’s no burn in her muscles, although they must have covered a few miles along the streets in the last hour. “I’m not hurting,” she says aloud, wondering.

“You want to?” says Arthur dryly.

“Fuck off. I mean I don’t feel like I just spent an hour running down here.”

“Dream perk,” replies Arthur. He hasn’t broken a sweat, which she remembers having been so irritating when they were practicing the bridge kick—but neither has she, now that she’s thinking about it. “Physiologically you have no reason to. Lactic acid buildup, all that—not happening.” He shrugs. “If someone else punches you down here, it’s gonna hurt. Getting shot hurts, when it’s not immediately fatal. But you could climb stairs for hours. Another reason the super-soldier thing didn’t work out; they still needed physical conditioning, so—”

***

“—what’s the point?” Arthur finishes, topside. “Speaking of. You ever figure out the watch thing? Telling time?”

Ari presses her lips together, still annoyed with the non-mechanism. “It’s—dream logic. You as the dreamer just decide, clocks are going to tell subjective time, and you’re good to go. It’s got no ab initio mechanics, just… idiom. It’s… hand-wavy. Slippery. I don’t like it.”

“Ab initio,” mutters Arthur, smiling slightly. “Ready to go?”

“Whenever you are.”

***

Arthur dreams the empty city in sunlight, in thick clouds, darkness but for streetlights, darkness but for moonlight, just darkness with each source of light a target. In fog, rain, sleet, blizzards, a fucking hurricane—

The first time she gets beaned with a golf ball-sized hailstone, she ducks, yells, “Fuck you, asshole!” and runs for cover—but Arthur’s face is suddenly inches from hers, teeth bared white in the darkness and breath hot on her skin, despite the driving rain. He’s forcing her upright, fingers digging into her upper arms like claws, and shouting back, straight into her face, so loudly that she’d cringe away if she weren’t paralyzed with terror, “Shut up and FUCKING COPE, FINCH—”

Pure anger, unexpected but welcome, surges over the fear, and she goes so coldly furious that she bites down on the inside of her cheek until she tastes metal and fucking copes, dreaming herself a broad conical hat over her drenched hair, composite wovens in lightweight plastic. She shoves the Glock and the first magazine against Arthur’s chest and he releases her shoulders to take them, as lighting strikes one of the skyscrapers. Her arms are peppered with hail; by the time the thunder fades, she has gauntlets in the same material.

When Arthur returns the gun and the magazine, she’s got a jointed torso guard with a belly bag. Loading the gun without thinking, she dreams the rest of her body armor piecewise: shoulder covers, elbow guards, a backplate, shin guards against hailstones that might bounce off the asphalt. As she goes, she dreams magazines into her hand and drops each new one into the belly bag until she’s counted off another twenty; it takes less than a minute.

Keeping her mouth shut on the taste of blood, she shoots the glowing targets that Arthur indicates; he barks out their numbers in a tone like a drill sergeant’s. They’re set at varying distances and elevations, some just hanging in space, and she walks and jogs back and forth and left and right along a forty-yard stretch of asphalt encased in fiber-reinforced polymer composite and icy fury and silence, punctuated only by Arthur’s instructions and gunfire and the flat clack of hail on her armor. Finally, he strides to her and orders, “Hat. Give it.”

“Cut the fucking hail.” He’s only three feet away and she has to yell to hear herself over the storm.

Which stops, just like that. He raises one eyebrow as the dream-sun breaks through the clouds.

Ari takes off the hat—it’s got an elastic chin strap—and simply drops it; Arthur lunges, fast enough to catch it, and eyes her like he’s saying nice try. She glares back.

He tests it as he backs away from her—raps against it, tries to flex it, whacks it hard against a concrete Jersey barrier, and finally holds it out to his right. “Shoot.”

Five yards away, a foot-wide target. Ari aims carefully and fires.

A ding appears to the left of center with an odd hollow noise, but it’s drowned out by Arthur yelling, sharp and short and wordless. He drops the hat and crumples against the Jersey barrier. The clouds break up and pale sunlight washes over him, the red smear of his shoulder.

“Fuck—” She’s kneeling next to Arthur before she can think; the sleeve of his T-shirt is saturated with blood. “Fucking hell fuck—”

Arthur is breathing hard and far too fast, eyes squeezed shut, before he suddenly opens them and looks at her. “Ricochet,” he says, strained, and—he’s smiling. “Fuck, I’m stupid.”

“I didn’t think.” Ari realizes she’s holding one hand out in space, halfway toward Arthur’s mangled shoulder; it’s shaking like a leaf. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, what can I do—”

He’s still fucking smiling—weakly, but his dimples are visible, and he says, “No arteries,” and pants. “We’re up in five, but this—” The fucker laughs. “Teachable moment. Your turn.”

Blank incomprehension whites out her mind before she says, “Fuck off. You’re serious?”

“Do it.” He’s nearly grey, sweat-sheened, and with each moment his smile tightens with pain. Getting shot hurts, when it’s not immediately fatal. “The dream—it’ll collapse. So follow me out quick.” He raises his hand then, makes that rapid little hurry it up gesture. “Come on—”

Exhaling sharply, she raises her gun, rests it against Arthur’s temple—and if it had been weird holding it against her own head, it’s twice as fucked-up holding it to his—and pulls the trigger. Holds it down, two shots, to make sure.

She’s flinching even as she flexes her index finger, but there are no chunks of meat, no spills of brain, barely even any blood—a dark circular hole at his temple, that’s it, and his body sags.

And then the ground quakes, then heaves, and, staring at Arthur’s still-open eyes, she shoots herself—

—click—

The magazine is empty. The city is falling, skyscrapers collapsing as a crack goes through the clearing sky like reverse lightning. The pavement gives beneath her and she falls onto Arthur’s body—warm, yielding, absolutely goddamn terrifying. She shrieks, then swears as she lurches upright and fumbles for her last magazine, loads it into the Glock. As the asphalt crumbles into void under her and she starts to fall, she touches the hot barrel to her skull and squeezes—

***

Arthur is sitting up, feet on the concrete, rubbing at his shoulder. “Fucking ricochet. The hell did you make that out of?”

She can’t speak; her throat is dry as dust and she’s shaking so hard she knocks over her water bottle. It spills and falls off the table, rolling across the concrete. Ari jerks, tries to stand, fails completely—

“Hey—” Arthur gets up, grabs his own Nalgene, and kneels next to her chair. “Ari, you’re—”

Ari coughs out, “Tell me I’m okay and I’ll fucking hit you, I swear to—” The words pile up and she chokes on them, burying her face in her hands.

 “Okay. I’m okay. Hey. Hey, could you look at me?”

The question snaps her away from the brink of panic. She lets her hands fall. Arthur’s sitting back on the heels of his Chucks, unscrewing the cap of her water bottle and holding it up for her to drink from, like she's a fucking infant, but he only looks worried, not pitying, not dismissive— There aren’t any holes in his head and his right shoulder is clean and whole and the world isn’t falling apart, so she gulps from the Nalgene three times and turns her head away. She swipes at her mouth, then her eyes (watering); her totem is in her hand, hell if she can remember grabbing it. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she says on an exhale, and turns back to face him. “Shit. That’s fucked up.”

Arthur relaxes, recaps the water and puts it back on the table. He smiles, lopsided. “Yeah. I was going to save it for tomorrow, but—”

“Teachable moment,” she interrupts, and covers her eyes again. “Hell. You’re a fucking—” There is a distinct possibility that the word accurately describing Arthur just doesn’t exist in any language ever known to humankind; she gives up and laughs, and it’s shaky but she’s okay. “Teachable fucking moment.”

“Look,” Arthur says, and she looks; he smiles helplessly. “Dreamwork—we laugh, because otherwise we get fucked up about it. Yeah?”

She nods. “Yeah.” And shakes her head. “The fucking hail. Asshole.”

He gets up and retreats to his chair. “It usually takes people like that. Thought you were gonna shoot me on your own steam for a minute. But—look, if you’re ever—I mean, shooting people out of the dream, that has to happen, in training or for real, sometimes. You did great. To the extent that head shots are ever—” Arthur shakes his head at himself. “Whatever. Like I said, laughing for sanity’s sake. Tell me what you used for the armor.”

“Uh.” Answering him requires rerouting eighty per cent of the energy she’d been using to freak out; points to Arthur. “Carbon fiber and Kevlar, woven arrays, alternating at zero and 45 degrees. In a matrix of, um. ABS, I think. Kind of surprised it was actually…” She winces. “You know. That impact-resistant.”

“Which is why I had you shoot it.” Arthur grins suddenly. “You know, most people try force fields.”

 Ari snorts. “That’d be a tipoff,” she says. “And more electrostatics than I can remember. Look, can we—if we do another run, I’ll chill out, and then—god, what time is it?”

“Dinnertime, minus five minutes. You sure?”

“Yes, asshole. But if it’s hail again I will shoot you.” She has no idea whether she actually means it.

It isn’t hail, just fog, and three minutes—a subjective hour—later, they pull out their cannulas and wad them in paper towels to burn later. Ari hands the Glock and the magazine to Arthur, who puts both in a nylon carry case. They get the PASIV machine set to rights, which takes very little time, and Arthur brings it inside, where Dana is pulling a lasagna out of the oven in the little kitchen.

“There you are,” she says, smiling widely. “Everything good?”

Arthur smiles back and replies, “She’s a natural.”

“I mean,” says Ariadne to Dana, wincing again, “I shot him.”

“Yeah, well, he needs it sometimes. Arthur, set the table, yeah?”

And that’s that.

They eat—more talking about dreamshare, but Ari’s almost too tired to track the conversation, and when Dana asks her about her degree she blows it completely, gets halfway through the word doctorate and freezes. Arthur just smiles at her, though, and says to Dana, “No one actually names their kids Ariadne. In case you were wondering.”

“Oh, was that—oh, whatever.” Dana waves it away. “I don’t gossip about that shit; it’s important. But Arthur, that’s a shit excuse, I mean, consider Eames’s Christian name—”

“Okay, valid.”

“Anyway, after the Cobol thing, scuttlebutt is that Nash…”

Ari takes a few bits of her lasagna—it’s very good, but she’s not really hungry, and she just pokes at it, drifting. That is, until Arthur grabs her upper arm, immediately pulling away with a muttered apology, and Dana says, “Ari, hey, not on your plate—”

“No, yeah, I’m—bed,” she says, words feeling heavy and cottony in her mouth. She gets up and staggers immediately, every muscle protesting.

Arthur’s on his feet guiding her back to sit before she can blink, one palm laid against her forehead, then shading her eyes from the overhead light. “No fever. Pupils responding normally,” he says, fast and low and even. “Follow my finger motion; don’t move your head. Tell me where you are.”

“Australia.”

“Vision tracking fine,” he notes, voice tight, and adds to her, “Specificity.”

“New South Wales. Dana’s kitchen,” she says, confused. “What’s—”

“Tell me your name. Names. Dana—”

“On it.” Dana is standing too, holding two fingers against Ari’s wrist and staring at the clock hanging in the kitchen.

“Ariadne Josephina Finch. Ariette Eleanor Vickers. But not to Cobb. Why—”

“Pulse is fine,” Dana says. “No tremors, breathing even, color’s good. That’s all the flags for Somnacin reactions, isn’t it?”

She understands suddenly. “No, shit,” says Ari, shaking her head against the fog. “No, I—I—diving yesterday, and running around today, and I slept, like, six hours in, in blocks. I’m just tired. My everything’s tired.”

Arthur’s entire body relaxes; she hadn’t realized he was so freaked. “Reactions can hit by surprise,” he says, like he’s reciting from a textbook, “particularly after long sessions, or several in a short period. So I—”

“Glad we tested before Tuesday, then,” she says, trying a smile. “Goodnight, Dana.” Of course, she tries to get up and fucks it up again. “Hell. Arthur, could you—”

He helps her up and walks her—shuffles her; she feels like her skeleton has all the structural integrity of soggy cornflakes—all fifteen feet to the guest room, one arm around her shoulders. At the doorway he says, “If you need anything, I’m right—”

“’M good,” she replies muzzily, and shuts the door before he can finish. In the dark she stumbles, holds herself up against the wall, and manages to get her boots and jeans off; she pitches forward onto the bed without bothering with pajamas and falls asleep within moments.

***

She wakes up at eleven the next morning and swears, dresses hastily in her own jeans—her favorite pair, faded and worn to hell—and a fresh T-shirt and sneakers, brushes her teeth, and goes to the kitchen. Arthur’s at the table with his laptop; Dana’s at her desk, headphones on.

“Sorry I slept so—”

“No,” Arthur says immediately. “Counting dreamtime, you had, what, a thirty-hour day, on top of the physical load, on minimal sleep. You needed it. Today’s just a few walking drills topside, then dreamwork.” He starts pointing at stuff on the counter. “Tylenol, coffee’s still hot, bread, toaster—”

Ari picks up the jar. “And... Vegemite.”

“Hey, it’s good.”

She looks at him dubiously as she pours herself coffee, and keeps the look on while she adds cream and sugar, tosses back two Tylenol, and puts three slices of bread in the toaster.

Arthur finally looks back up from his laptop and furrows his eyebrows at her when her toast pops up. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Vegemite.”

“Spread it really thin. Try it with honey, too.”

She does. It’s… unexpected. And it works really well with the honey.

After real-world drills—they feel like second nature, and Arthur makes only one adjustment to her stance and grip—Arthur gets the PASIV machine, this time with additions: liter bags of IV saline, two flow meters, and sixteen-gauge cannulas. “Because it’s gonna be a while,” he says, “and it’s not going to be pretty, once we start on people. So we keep hydrated, electrolytes up, all that.”

It’s reasonable enough. Arthur sets her cannula, at her elbow and in her right arm—they’ve swapped chairs and arms. He attaches a short length of tubing with a connector at the top and tapes that to her arm, then covers the entire cannula itself with a clear plastic bandage. They can just wipe down the connectors with alcohol and hook back in—smart.

The first three rounds are like yesterday, just target practice in clean, empty New York, before Arthur says, “Okay. People now. I mentioned that trick. Keeps projections out.”

“Except in specific training applications?” she prompts, almost excitedly.

He smiles, but it’s grim. “This is one of those.” He hits the button.

***

“It’s not going to be pretty,” he warns her, standing at the edge of the third level of a parking garage, and the projections flood in.

There are hordes of them, from all sides, rushing down every street she can see, and every eye is fixed on her. They’re silent, eerily so, aside from the tide of footsteps. Ari dreams herself a Glock and ten magazines in thirty seconds of dreamtime and Arthur says, eyes flickering over the scene, “You have six minutes until they reach this level. Five fifty-five. Start shooting.” He drops back, stands just out of view. “Five forty-five.”

She breathes out hard, aims at a projection’s head, and fires; it goes down, a tiny eddy in the flood of them; the rest are running straight over its body. Ari tears her eyes away and takes shot after shot, reloading without thinking, until Arthur says, loud, panicked, “Shoot out. Out, Ari, now—”

Confused, she turns. Projections, closing in, and she has a snatch of a breath before the nearest leaps on her, a flying tackle that lifts her off her feet and crashes them both down on the concrete, the Glock jarred out of her hand, pain cracking hard and dull at the back of her skull, and she’s yelling and there are teeth at her throat and a wet tearing and they’re snapping closed on tendons and fat and muscle and pulling and she’s still yelling, or she thinks she is, but it’s just a ragged damp drag, blood-slicked—

***

She lurches upright, gasping, hands at her neck, and Arthur follows half a second later. He takes a knee next to her, hands hovering but not touching until she grabs one of them and clings, white-knuckled, until her pulse and respiratory rate drop to somewhere near normal. Then she looks at him and rasps, “Again.”

“You can rest—”

“Again,” she growls, and twists her head to the opposite side and spits, exorcising the last of the sense-memory of the blunted scalloped pressure of incisors, of the skin of her throat ripping. She lets go of Arthur’s hand—it takes effort—and swipes the back of her wrist roughly across her eyes, then her mouth.

“Okay,” Arthur says, shaking out his fingers, “again.”

**

The second time, she starts shooting the moment she’s got the gun and the first magazine, and Arthur warns her in time; she turns to see the projections fifty feet away and shoots herself out, calm.

***

“Hundred and five,” he says topside; she hadn’t realized he was counting. “I want you at one-eighty or more. They’re within fifty feet six minutes after they...arrive.”

She blinks at him. “You said I had six minutes forty seconds in, the first time.”

Arthur flicks his eyes away and breathes out, sharp, through his nose. “I was working off outdated information,” he says, toneless.

She wants to ask what the fuck is up with his brain, but that’s not—something you can ask someone. “Oh.”

“One every three seconds,” Arthur continues mechanically. “Counting hits, not necessarily kills. Disabled is as good as dead.” He glances at her, sees the question in her face. “I’m naturally sensitive to—intrusion. By anyone.”

She would very much like to say something to make Arthur have a facial expression again. Finally, she says, “At least they don’t have swords.”

He looks back at her—assessing beneath his cultivated blankness. After what feels like an eternity but is probably two seconds, he says slowly, “Do you prefer having your carotid chewed through?”

“Personal touch,” she replies, and shrugs.

Arthur—laughs. It’s short, dark, but it’s a laugh. “You’re about the right kind of fucked-up for this job.”

“There’s wrong kinds?”

On her thirty-seventh run, she hits one-eighty. After she shoots herself out of her forty-seventh, after her tenth run over the benchmark—one-eighty-six on average—Arthur says, topside, “All right.” He’s already fiddling with the lines—stopping the IV flow meters, unscrewing both their feeds from the connectors. “Let’s walk. Stretch out.”

Ari gets up, her legs stiff but willing to carry her, and follows him out into Dana’s backyard.

Around the first of the hay bales, Arthur says, “So there’s a choice here.” He doesn’t look at her. “I’m satisfied with your ability to shoot your way out of any trouble we fall into on this job. We could just keep drilling.”

“Or,” Ari prompts after five seconds.

He sighs. “Or we go through stuff you could fall into on other jobs. If you… think you’ll take other jobs. In the field.”

The silence stretches for a moment, before she says, “Specificity.”

He doesn’t smile at the recall; he doesn’t frown, either. He opens his mouth and closes it.

“Okay,” says Ari, “is it worse than the carotid chew toy?” She remembers again the list of absolutely absurd shit she’s had perfectly good reason to say since March.

Another moment passes, and then Arthur heaves out a breath. “Probably, yeah,” he says. “Stuff gets… messy. Say things go to shit. Say someone on your team turns coat and wants you to hurt. Or wants you to spill. Or someone unexpected comes down and wants the same.” He exhales again, hard. “If you want to, if you want training on what to do in those cases, assuming you want to keep doing field work, I would—I’d see that you’re not surprised. And that you can get out.”

She swallows. “You’re talking torture.”

“It—” Arthur grimaces, and then a shutter closes beneath his expression and his voice goes smooth and empty, like a recording. “Anticipation of an unknown can be worse than the event itself. The training would remove that variable. In training, you’d know who was doing it and why, which can make it easier to take, and it establishes the experience in your mind as something you’ve dealt with, which cuts down on fear in the event you get unlucky, which gives you back some freedom and control. You don’t have to decide now,” he adds hastily.

Ari thinks, watching her sneakers. Pain is in the mind. A lot of pain, potentially. The projection that got to her—that was worse than she’d ever experienced. And that was a reflex, practically; it wasn’t—precision. Arthur’s subconscious wasn’t looking to make her suffer; it was trying to take her out.

But other jobs, future jobs—those could go differently.

And she knows, in her bones, that she will be on other jobs.

“I’m in,” she says, three minutes later.

Arthur looks sideways at her then, resignation in every line of his face. “Knew you’d say so.” He motions with one hand—turn around, back to the house.

“And you still offered.” She sort of smiles, not really feeling it. “Better the devil you know?” she suggests.

He sighs, facing forward again, and his own mouth quirks. “Something along those lines.”

***

Four topside hours later, she’s not sure she’ll ever be surprised again.

She knows exactly what it feels like to be shot in the foot, shoulder, knee, hand, elbow, hip, upper gut, lower gut, heart, jaw, and skull—four different locations for the last one, grazes on up to the last four minutes of Fight Club, which of course is her point of reference, but less obviously is Arthur’s, although his perspective is wrong for it. She knows a simple versus a compound fracture versus a crushed bone, or bones; she knows the pain of non-fatal stabbing, eventually fatal stabbing, limb removal by machete, extremity removal by combat knife, removal of assorted organs with a scalpel and no anesthesia but endorphins, and cauterization, along with a handful of things involving pipe wrenches. She knows the cold heaviness that comes with bleeding out; she knows a collapsed lung from a punctured one; she experiences the—she’d thought figurative—phenomenon of a sucking chest wound.

In a series of drills, she learns to locate and sever her own arteries—femoral, brachial, the already tested carotid. She works until she can do it in less than a second, with a blade edge dreamed after she’s been shot (or had her arm cut off, both hands crushed, gut stabbed with a triangular blade, eyes gouged out, pelvis shattered). She dreams up X Acto blades, either in her fingers or embedded in whatever’s nearest her—walls, floors, the bark of trees. Then how to best cut out—or through—her own tongue, how to fuck up her vocal chords enough that she can’t speak. Second goal after death, in case of capture: render herself incapable of transferring information.

Arthur dreams himself wearing hoods, like a burglar’s or an executioner’s, hiding most of his face, but she can always see his eyes.

Between each snippet of time under, Arthur talks to her, asks her to talk to him, and she knows it’s at least as much for his benefit as for hers. So she runs her hands over whatever got destroyed and moves it however it’s supposed to move, as she looks Arthur in the eye and volunteers some fact about herself. Her dads’ fostering of retired racing hounds. The existence of Leelee’s, the ice cream shop. Her favorite lines from The Fifth Element. The colors, down to specific retail names, that she had dyed her hair in undergraduate. Why Ariadne Finch wears red. The conversation with Eames about touch. Then, when she hears that her voice isn’t shaking anymore and Arthur’s eyebrows have smoothed out, she says, “Okay. Next.”

In the last series of drills, she learns, with a degree of pain that she only wishes she could describe truthfully as heart-stopping, the difference between a lethal fall and one that just smears her across pavement. Arthur places them on platforms at descending heights, from a sure bet on downward in increments of ten feet, and has her fall in four attitudes from each height—head down in a swan dive, prone, supine, and upright, jumping like she’s skipping rope.

By the end, her grip on herself is fraying, even topside. She feels tension all through her like hot wire wound at the joints, like all her tendons are rusting, bones eroding; there’s an ache in her head like a pickaxe. As he’s detaching her line, Arthur brushes the back of his hand against her stomach—

—and she breaks, vision going spotted, scrabbling backwards off the chair away from him—the cannula dislodges sickeningly from her elbow, tearing the bandage along with it, blood spilling in warm gouts. She slaps her hand over the site through her own t-shirt as she scrambles to her feet, yelling, screaming really, invective and threats and swearing, sick psychotic fucking rat bastard you fucking touch me again I’ll fucking kill you sociopath I’ll rip your fucking heart out fucking creep until the words choke her.

Then she starts crying.

Arthur doesn’t touch her, doesn’t speak, just waits until she’s cried out in a heap on the patio floor, then goes to get water. While he’s inside, she fumbles one-handed for her totem and casts it, watches it click down on its face, stares at the red smears on the nickel until he comes back. The pain in her arm is almost welcome, because it’s real—as demonstrated—and because she inflicted it.

Silently, Arthur kneels and helps her clean and wrap her arm, putting pressure on the ruined IV site (it’s going to bruise like a motherfucker; the vein is extremely unhappy). When it’s done, gauze under a triple layer of self-adhesive medical tape, he says, without looking at her, “Please tell me if you’re okay.” His voice breaks on the last word.

“I—” Ari examines him, sits and really looks, and he’s—as bad as she feels, his face greenish-white, tightness around his eyes and mouth. “Hey.”

“You don’t need to be.”

Screw professionalism. She gets to her knees herself and hugs him, quick and hard, and mutters fiercely, “I’m fine—okay, they were dreams, they weren’t real, you’re helping me—I’m okay.” Arthur shudders once and folds his own arms around her for a second; she sits back, holding his shoulders. “Really. I’m okay. Look at me?”

Finally he meets her eyes. “Who the hell’s been teaching you?” he says, the words dry and scraping, but he smiles weakly.

“Some jackass. He’s a good guy, though, even when the subject is fucked up.” Ari lets go of his shoulders. “Let’s— let’s have a picnic.”

His eyebrows go up. “A picnic,” he repeats.

“Moving around,” she says, feeling not a little bit like an idiot. “You know. Real world. And food.” She retrieves her totem and goes to wipe it on her shirt, but she’d forgotten it’s a stiffening crime-scene splatter. There are a few more splashes on her jeans; Ariadne Finch would care, but she doesn’t. “I’ll—change. You’re in charge of the food part. If—if you want.”

Arthur nods slowly. “I think—yeah. Yeah. Good idea.” He stands, offering a hand; she hauls herself up with her non-injured arm, and they head inside.

Dana glances at the two of them, takes in the state of Ari’s t-shirt and the bandage, and looks back at her face. She nods once—something like camaraderie.

By the time Ari has located and put on a clean shirt—she’s going to have to burn the first; no great loss, since it was old-as-hell career-fair swag—Arthur has a shopping bag of cling-wrapped sandwiches and the two Nalgenes of ice water. They set off in a straight line out from the back of the house. She keeps her head down, watching her limbs move, her arms counterswinging against each step, noting each slight motion of her body with wonder, appreciating the simple privilege of things working. Arthur is quiet at first, but then starts telling stupid stories from dreamshare, repeating bad jokes, faking Eames’s accent, until she’s with it enough to reply in kind.

They sit in the middle of nowhere, Dana’s place barely visible as a jumble of pale dots (the hay bales and the actual house), to eat their sandwiches—tomato and cheese is the most normal, but there are also Vegemite with sliced cucumber and roast chicken with potato chips; for dessert, sandwiches of buttered white bread with thick layers of rainbow sprinkles, which Arthur insists is an Australian thing. They draw in the dirt with their fingers, sloppy Penrose steps and stick figures falling down them. Arthur labels one at the “top” as himself, and the falling one as Cobb.

Ari explains that donuts and coffee mugs are topological equivalents; Arthur stares at her like she’s arguing for the existence of unicorns. Then they walk back, ambling and easy. They do a last twenty-minute PASIV hookup, a new site on her forearm and seven hours under, each of them able to build, just fucking around—silly stuff, life-size sandcastles and a Mobius-strip avenue lined by trees that have soap bubbles instead of leaves. To fuck with him, she pulls the dreamscape planet—a little thing; it breaks physics, but it’s her dream, so physics are what she says they are—into a toroid, then deforms it into a mug shape, Arthur sinking to the bottom while she stands on the lip. She smiles sweetly when he starts muttering furiously about overeducated full-of-it architects.

“You’re supposed to know things,” she chides. “Isn’t that your job?”

Arthur dreams a hyperlocalized rainstorm directly over her head in response.

When they surface, she’s calm. They relax until dinner, watching a nature documentary while Dana works, oblivious. The three of them talk about huntsman spiders and the collective hallucination–performance art piece that is drop bears and the phenomenon of sprinkle sandwiches over the reheated lasagna, which is still excellent. She and Arthur go out again in the dark for another round of target practice, gratifying in its simplicity; they set a little fire to burn her t-shirt and the cannulas (she suggests it; with surprised admiration he says, “You’re better at this than you should be.”), stamp it out, watch junk TV with Dana for an hour or so, and call it a night.

Hypothetically.

Ari can’t sleep worth a damn. She’ll get comfortable in the twin bed in Dana’s guest room, close her eyes, start to drift, and suddenly she’ll snap alert, gasping in a cold sweat, pressing her fingers along her ribs, her long bones, pulse points, her fucking tongue, over and over and over.

After a dozen cycles of the same shit, she gives up, somewhere between fear and fury and frustration. She strips off her PJ pants (she made it that far tonight, at least), hands shaking, and jerks her bloodstained jeans—they’re hers, not Ariadne Finch’s—over her hips, fumbling the button and abandoning it as a lost cause before yanking the fucking Cornell hoodie over her head and the tank top she changed into for sleep; she’s only sweated in it, but she doesn’t have the coordination or the patience to find a different top. She slips out the door without checking the futon, assuming Arthur’s crashed out.

He’s not.

He’s sitting in the short, dry grass in front of Dana’s house, still fully dressed with his cabled sweater, smoking; he’s got his back to the door and knees to his chest. He doesn’t turn at the sound of the door latch, or in the minute after while she stands still as if rooted. Ari feels herself shaking, shudders rippling over her skin, needles crawling up her scalp. His masked face flashes in her mind’s eye, behind a smoking gun, beside a bloodied knife, saying, “Brachial. Go,” saying, “This one’s worse,” saying, “Look, we can quit,” saying, “You sure?”

Crouching over the gory wreck of her after that most disastrous fall, the streaky white of her own ribs visible at the bottom of her tunneling visual field, his eyes full of misery beneath the mask. The only sound aside from his voice (cool, from a great distance: “Not immediately fatal, but you can’t communicate...”) the faint bubble of her own breath, because she didn’t have the tracheal structure to whimper, let alone beg him to shoot.

Finally, she grits her teeth, fixes the button of her jeans, sets her bishop piece on the palm of her hand, and tips it very deliberately. It falls on its face without rocking. She is awake, and this is real, and she is in exactly one piece. So she puts her totem back in her pocket, takes eight steps, sits down next to Arthur, and says, “Share.”

“Smoking kills,” he says absently.

“Dropping from a height of thirty feet in an upright vertical position onto flat asphalt doesn’t.” Her voice is even. The things she’s had reason to say—

Arthur glances at her, eyes crinkling, and breathes a tiny ripple of something that might be a laugh. “You don’t smoke.”

“I do when I want to,” she replies. “So can I bum a cig?”

He goes cross-legged to get the pack—Lucky Strikes—out of his back pocket, then leans in to light her cigarette off the end of his own. As she draws her first lungful, he says, “I keep seeing it,” quietly enough that she almost thinks it’s her own thought, before she understands. It means you, herself, body broken, by him, unable to ask for the bullet, or under his knife, or under his projections, or— “It’s fucked. Ten years in and it’s never less fucked.”

She breathes out, considers the idea in her head from all angles as she watches the smoke dissipate, takes another drag, and decides, because really, fuck professionalism. “I can stay on the futon with you?” she says, speaking faster than her lungful of smoke can take shape out of her mouth, and either the order of words or the inflection is wrong but she doesn’t care.

Arthur nods, saying—if she’s not imagining things, with relief— “That’d help.”

“Okay.”

He lights a second cigarette off the butt of his first, offers her one to do the same, and leaves the pack on the grass at their knees. Then he stops moving, like someone hit his pause button, and he says, “Is it—I don’t want to make you uncomfortable—is it okay if I—”

In response, she shifts until her thigh touches his. They’re both sitting cross-legged, their adjacent knees forming the apex of an oblique angle. “Okay?” asks Ari, and nudges his arm with her shoulder.

“Yeah.”

“Oxytocin,” she mutters.

“Yup.”

They chain-smoke through the rest of the pack—four each; not terrible—in silence.

Inside, neither of them bothers with pajamas or blankets; they flop sideways onto the futon in their jeans, facing each other. Ari’s scooched down with her head under Arthur’s chin, her arm around his waist, and Arthur grips a handful of her sweatshirt at the small of her back.

“You’re tiny,” Arthur murmurs, after a moment.

“Though I be but little, I am fierce,” says Ari, and pokes him in the side; he jerks. Ticklish. Who’d have thought.

“Shakespeare.” He snorts softly. “You and Eames, I swear.”

“You both compare me to each other,” she says, contemplative. “What’s that say about you?”

“More concerned with what it says about you.”

“I contain multitudes.”

She can feel Arthur’s heartbeat, and simply knowing that he’s there, hearing and feeling her breathe with her real working lungs in her whole and working body, is better than any totem.

Which might be fucked-up, considering he’d been the one butchering her in dreamtime, but she’ll take it over night terrors.

Chapter Text

She wakes when Arthur does; the digital clock on Dana’s desk says it’s 5:03 A.M., but she feels pretty all right for only four hours of sleep. Ari sits up and cracks her neck to both sides, eliciting a series of pops that makes Arthur pause to grimace while he’s shoving clothes around in his carry-on, making room for the PASIV case. Other than his distaste for audible spinal-cord carbon dioxide release, he seems okay, relaxed—no lines on his forehead, and the set of his mouth is easy.

“Sleep all right?” she asks, croakier than normal. Cigarettes. She doesn’t smoke much, but if anything’s a good reason to indulge, dying six dozen times in a day is one.

Arthur smiles, just a little; she has the distinct impression his ears are going red, even if she can’t see them. “Yeah. Uh—” He swallows and looks back down at his bag. “I, um. Thanks. I mean—it’s not—you didn’t have to—”

“Don’t strain something,” she says as she gets to her feet and stretches. “And yeah, I did. Stupid for two of us to lose sleep when it’s preventable, this close to the job. I’m gonna start coffee.”

Twenty minutes past the hour, Dana emerges from her room. Arthur starts to apologize for waking her so early, but she flaps a hand at him. “Shut it. I have a deadline. And I’m wise to you, mister. You’re not getting away with sneaking out so you won’t have an emotion in front of me. Jesus, you ate all my Vegemite again—”

When they leave, each holding a travel thermos of coffee, Dana makes Arthur promise to either visit her continent or drag her off it within the next eight months. “And,” she says, “if you drive away this architect before I can play with her—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ari interrupts, because why do people keep suggesting this, and Dana grins at her.

“You’re a good one to know,” she says. “I can tell. Don’t fuck up, now.”

The drive back is similar to the one out, except now Ari knows how to die. And kill.

She puts the Scissor Sisters on loop and Arthur sings every single word, with an impressive falsetto.

***

After spending most of her day shopping for the novelty of it—it’s astonishing, how differently people act when you look like you can afford shit—Ari returns to her hotel at a quarter to five. Her job phone has two text messages; the first is from Arthur to the team with an address, time (eight P.M.), and Party name Erebos. The address is giving Ari pause, because what the fuck does a twenty-year-old wear to a Monday night business meeting at a five-star hotel? Every one of those phrases is a new complication.

The second is from Yusuf, asking if she’d like him to meet her for a meal before the meeting, which is much easier to handle; she replies Sure! 5:30 ok? Where?

They settle on meeting at her hotel—it’s closer to the meeting site than Yusuf’s—and she goes back to trying to envision Ariadne Finch’s wardrobe decisions for a final pre-heist check-in with a bunch of extraordinarily intelligent criminals. However, there are only so many variations on trousers–layered shirts–boots–blazer–scarf a girl can manage out of two pieces of luggage packed for opposing hemispheres near a solstice. Her blouse is scarlet with a delicate floral motif in ivory; Ari isn’t sure she’ll be able to wear red after this job without reflexively going all precocious.

Assuming there’s an after.

Yusuf is in the lobby when she heads down, wearing a sport coat over a linen shirt; he beams when he sees her and proposes a nearby Thai spot for dinner. She’s perfectly Ariadne for the entire thing, but she manages to establish a layperson’s interest in neuroscience via references to that one guy who did the book, the man who thought his wife was a hat?, which inspires Yusuf to disclose a great deal about his neurochemistry work before his department got shuttered, even without his real name or where he was working. He name-drops without realizing he’s doing it—he knows everyone in dream chemistry, it seems like, and more pharmacologists and neurologists than she could have imagined, describing their quirks at conferences and reciting their Erdős numbers and finally laying out their side lines in recreational psychopharmaceuticals, for fuck’s sake. It’s wonderful.

“You mean to tell me,” she says, making sure her voice is low, “that there were off-record trials for dreamsharing on acid? In people’s living rooms?” Ariadne doesn’t know whether to be delighted or horrified, although Ari is absolutely certain which side she’s on. (She’s read about a dozen blog posts on the subject, four by people Yusuf has already named.)

“Oh, there were all kinds of off-record things, back before the crackdowns,” Yusuf says cheerfully. “Glorious time to be in the field. Not all rainbows and sunflowers, mind you, and certainly not all or even mostly scientifically productive, but for curiosity’s sake alone… You’d be surprised, how many in the cognitive sciences have… colorful psychotropic histories.”

She is, technically speaking, one of those many. “Do they?” demands Ariadne, a little shocked.

“There was a time I found myself in the home of an Othmer Gold winner who was in possession of a great quantity of a hallucinogen synthesized by a Pauling award winner in the company of an entire pack of Ig Nobel nominees,” says Yusuf, sounding nostalgic. “Bloody ridiculous party, that. Before some brilliant sod brought out the PASIV.”

And the conversation keeps rolling, ludicrously, until they’ve each finished their mango sticky rice, split the bill, and set off for the hotel.

***

It’s fucking weird, Ari thinks, looking around the rented meeting room, how much they look like a legitimate corporate group. She’s in one of the six chairs around the conference table, between Cobb (slate-blue suit jacket, white shirt, silver-grey tie) and Eames (khaki sport coat, splayed-collar striped purple shirt). Yusuf is on Cobb’s other side, Saito is to Eames’s left (three-piece charcoal suit, black shirt, deep blue tie), and Arthur’s Chucks may as well have never existed; he stands next to the whiteboard, hair pomaded into place, in a buff two-piece suit with a subtle check pattern, maroon shirt, and gold-and-white tie. Each member of the team has a glass of water and whatever note-taking system they use in front of them. Arthur’s holding his full-size Moleskine like a weapon. He could probably use it as one.

The conversation, of course, is balls-to-the-wall nuts, but in the same vocabulary she’s fallen into since the end of March.

“We’re quite sure this room is unmonitored?” says Eames.

“My people have checked,” Saito replies.

Based on Eames’s tiny startle, he was expecting Arthur to answer, which Arthur at least finds amusing—he’s got half a smile as he says, “First order of business should be an easy one. You should all be checked in for the flight. Boarding passes, luggage crap, security pre-checks if applicable. With the correct identification, Mr. Eames.”

Eames rolls his eyes and turns his face heavenward. “My god, man, one time. Yes, I’ve got my bloody documentation.”

“Then we’ll proceed,” says Arthur, and they do.

The content isn’t anything new to her; it’s the plan, outlined verbally (sure, the whiteboard is there, but why leave evidence?), now including Ariadne’s location during each phase. She’ll be in Cobb’s car while Arthur, Saito, and Eames kidnap Fischer. Yusuf will be fetching the van and deflecting the attention of any unexpectedly nosy projections from the warehouse, by the simple expedient of setting up a bunch of orange cones outside the non-vehicular entrances.

They’ll hold Fischer for three days while Eames works on him in the warehouse, ensuring that Fischer comes to terms with his own agency, accepts that his father’s will isn’t a life sentence. Arthur reiterates the location of the warehouse’s stash of camping mats and sleeping bags. At that, Saito lifts a finger—just one—and says he’s not certain Miss Finch would wish to endure two nights on concrete among a bunch of kidnappers.

Ari suspects he’s raising the issue for form’s sake rather than out of any actual worries for her virtue or sense of moral propriety. Regardless, Ariadne would be helpful about it, so she suggests diffidently, “I could, um, sleep in one of the cars.”

“You’ll have enough room, little bird?” Eames says, tone dripping earnestness.

Ariadne glances at Eames with a reassuring little nod, eyes wide with appreciation for his considerate question. “Yeah, definitely.” One day, it will stop mattering that she’s small, because one day, she will be small and rich.

“That is satisfactory,” says Saito.

Arthur’s mouth is doing that thing where he’s trying not to smirk. “So that’s the warehouse. Eames as Browning gets us material to contextualize the inception on the lower levels, while priming the mark for the plant. Day three, we take Fischer for a ride. Yusuf?”

“I drive about while you lot catch up on your beauty sleep, stick headphones on Arthur, and then send us flying off a bridge. Yes?”

“About the size of it,” Eames mutters.

Arthur half-scowls to prevent the smile this time. “And the rest of us go to the second level. We’re there for two days, subjective time, as Cobb, Eames, and Mr. Saito push Fischer to realize and enumerate his options beyond upholding his father’s legacy; we plant suspicion of Browning as a threat to Fischer’s freedom. Ariadne will be with me in the daytime and in the room adjacent to mine overnight; exact numbers will be determined in the dream. No one’s roles have changed since our last dry run. We stage Browning’s extraction of Fischer, I hold the second level, and the rest of you—Eames.”

“Third level, we work fast,” Eames says, glancing around the table, meeting everyone’s eyes in turn. “Not because we doubt Yusuf’s chemistry—”

“Cheers, mate.”

“—But to avoid destabilization. We’ll be moving things along as quickly as possible. The plot incentivizes speed, which helps.” Eames usually sounds like he’s acting, putting on a show, but all that’s stripped away now; there’s just crisp, cool efficiency. “We move as one, escorting Fischer in the rescue mission-slash-sabotage of Browning’s supposed extraction effort. We guide Fischer toward the realization that his father hoped for him to create his own accomplishments, rather than succumbing to the inertia of the conglomerate and the conflicting interests of those who would exploit it and him. As we’ve already suggested that his father’s wishes for him differed substantially from what Maurice Fischer voiced in his lifetime, and as we’re driving Fischer to act on his own, his meeting with his father will elicit Fischer’s renewed grasp on his own agency and his plan to disaffiliate himself, respectfully, from the albatross of his father’s legacy.”

Okay, maybe Eames is still a ham.

“We destroy the hospital to drive home Fischer’s victory over his own future,” he concludes.

“I’ll have the second-level kick synchronized with the hospital demolition, using the musical cue,” says Arthur. It’s odd, or perhaps it isn’t, that Arthur and Eames have been ragging on each other for the last three months, and now they’re slotting together as neatly as puzzle pieces. “We’ll wake in the van on level one, as it hits the river. Fischer and Eames escape, Eames as Browning, from the rear doors of the van, which Yusuf will have rigged to open on impact. The rest of us surface with the help of the oxygen tanks—if anyone’s missed this, Ariadne has received the appropriate training—then collect at the foot of the bridge. The PASIV goes down with the van. Ariadne?”

“The terrain—the banks are just, ah, nearly flat, pretty empty, dirt, some vegetation,” she says, glancing around the table. “Near the bridge, it’s a little rocky, but not dangerous. The boulders at the bases of the pylons are climbable, and they’re both sheltered from road view. They’re—um, about a hundred meters from the city’s nearest parallel roadway. Yusuf, does that sound right?”

“Just about,” says Yusuf.

Arthur nods to her. “From the pylons on the eastern side of the river, we make our way back to the warehouse on foot, where we’ll rendezvous with Eames once he’s ensured that Fischer is settled and content in the dream. This stage is tricky, as the van’s fall will have attracted attention and Fischer will expect to report the kidnapping. However—Yusuf.”

“The compound I’ve made for Fischer in the first level includes a delayed-onset tranquilizing agent with very mild dissociative properties. Activates with drastic changes, increase or decrease, in adrenaline and cortisol levels,” says Yusuf. “Once ashore and calm, Fischer will experience difficulty remembering or caring about the kidnapping. Eames—”

“I’ll get him settled.”

Arthur goes on. “Once we rendezvous, we move carefully in pairs. Ariadne with Cobb, Eames with Yusuf, and, Mr. Saito, you’ll be with me. We lie low for the remainder of the dream. If any of us runs into Fischer, we do so as projections and end the interaction as quickly as possible. Questions.”

Yusuf is watching Ari; she dips her chin slightly in acknowledgment. The bunker’s existence remains unofficial unless they turn out to actually need somewhere bomb-proof in the dream. Almost a shame, after Yusuf’s put so much dreamtime into stocking it.

Arthur waits for ten seconds, then goes on. “Topside, we wake ten minutes before Robert Fischer’s drip ends and secure the PASIV. Depending on Fischer’s sensitivity to the sedative, he may or may not sleep longer. He’ll be monitored by a nurse practitioner Mr. Saito has hired as one of the first-class attendants. Two hours later, give or take, the plane lands at LAX. From there, we disperse, according to individual itinerary.”

For one of them, that’s either seeing his children for the first time in years or immediate arrest.

“Contact will be only via double-encrypted text,” says Arthur. He lifts a padded envelope off the empty chair in front of him and starts passing out blocky little cell phones, skidding them across the table like air-hockey pucks. His aim is perfect. “Using these, which you will not turn on at any point before each of you has arrived at your accommodations in Los Angeles. Don’t even charge them until you’re checked into your respective hotels. Don’t accept any communication from any number not in their memory. The only exception to this rule is communication via routes Mr. Saito has access to. Again, questions.”

Silence, aside from phones going in bags or pockets.

“I’ll be in touch within twenty-four hours after landing,” Arthur continues, “with a status report. Upon the word clear, signed with my Erebos ID, normal contact protocol resumes. It’s my understanding that Mr. Saito has direct intel from the Fischer Morrow conglomerate—” He looks at Saito, who nods regally. “Between his word and Fischer’s activity, we’ll determine the overall success of the operation.”

“Twenty per cent of the agreed-upon compensation will arrive via your predetermined routes when I have left the airport,” says Saito. “The remainder arrives with the dissolution of the conglomerate. Fifty per cent of the remainder, in the event that Fischer proves… inflexible. In the intervening time, expect calls from my people on your personal phones.” He turns his head slowly, gaze flickering until it comes to rest on Ari. Transportation wherever you wish.

She’s already built a paper trail, one-way coach tickets from Paris to Toronto in two legs, on her personal credit card. Ariette Vickers was a no-show on those flights, but Arthur implied that a connection of his had adjusted that record with both the airline and Canadian immigration. She’ll be effectively stuck in Ariadne Finch’s designer boots until she’s at her dads’ place. Her real IDs have been couriered (on Ariadne’s dime—it’s all getting a little silly) for pickup at her leisure and P.O. box, the one she’s kept since she was ten. In LA, Ariadne has a suite reserved at the Omni for three days; after that, everything’s up in the air.

Arthur says, “Last order of business. When Ariadne returns to Paris some weeks from now—” Ari glances at Saito. Tattletale. “—I’ll be going overseas as well, to scrub the workshop. Our lease is good for another ten weeks. Anyone who chooses is welcome to join, assuming your Erebos-related national ID remains clean.” He directs a pointed glance at Eames, who raises his eyebrows and mouths who, me?

“Because it is a necessary component of the job,” Saito says, “transportation to Paris for this purpose will be arranged by my people. You may contact me directly or speak to Arthur.”

She envisions armies of Saito’s people. He probably has one. An army, that is, and not just enough personal employees to form one.

“So that’s everything, then?” says Eames.

Arthur closes his Moleskine. “That is everything, Mr. Eames. Unless you have last-minute adjustments.” When Eames doesn’t reply, Arthur arches an eyebrow. “First time for everything,” he mutters.

“Heard that.”

“Then,” Cobb says, the first time he’s spoken since they convened, “I’ll see you at the airport.” He gets up and walks out stiffly; Ari tenses until she sees two different people in Saito’s livery (a uniformed army) step away from either side of the door and follow him.

Saito stands. “Arthur, Mr. Eames, Mr. Kotadia, Miss Finch,” he says, in his royal-decree voice, “it has been an honor to watch you work, and it will be an honor to work alongside you all. Until morning.”

They all mutter—good night, sir and oh, likewise, of course and be seeing you and thank you. Ari wants to laugh as Saito follows Cobb out; they’re so much like a bunch of teenagers trying to have social graces around superiors. The moment the door closes, Eames says, “Bloody tourist.”

“I don’t know, I rather like him,” Yusuf replies, shrugging.

“You like everyone.”

“He’ll pull weight,” Arthur says firmly, and starts packing his messenger bag. “You’ve seen him under. He’s competent.”

“Which we all know,” Eames stage-whispers to Ari, “is the one true way to our point man’s heart.” Ariadne looks at him wide-eyed, uncertain whether it’s okay to laugh at Arthur’s expense, since Yusuf is there.

From his messenger bag, Arthur dispenses four spray bottles of isopropanol and stacks of paper napkins. They wipe down the table, chairs, water glasses, whiteboard—they wipe down the fucking doorknob, inside and out, then toss the napkins back into Arthur’s bag. Once they’re in the hall, Yusuf says, “Right, I’m off—evening, all,” and ambles away.

Arthur points at Eames, the tip of his finger an inch from Eames’s sternum. “You,” he says, “are about to suggest we take our architect to a bar and get smashed.”

“You know how I hate to disappoint,” says Eames, “but I’m actually rather done in. My adventurous youth may catch up with me yet.” Arthur peers at him; Eames returns the look, and while he’s got a trace of a smile, it’s nowhere near his eyes.

“Happens to the worst of us,” Arthur says, bland and skeptical. “Or so I hear.”

“Rain check, though,” says Eames. “LA and environs. Vegas isn’t terribly far off; Amesbury-Scott’s never been.”

Arthur sighs heavily. “Rain check for the walking cliché. Ari, you in?”

Ari glances between them; they’re speaking casually enough, but it’s like a pantomime of normal, fragile as glass.

Cobb’s life rides on this. The lives of Arthur’s goddaughter and Eames’s godson ride on this.

They’re just… avoiding saying so, and it’s nowhere near her place to violate the unstated rule of the game, so she shrugs and says, “Yeah, why not.”

“Assuming we don’t fuck it up entirely and end up at the tender mercies of multiple governments.” Eames’s empty smile broadens.

She punches him in the shoulder. “Optimism, now, Mr. Eames,” she says sternly, which surprises a real smile out of him and a bark of a laugh from Arthur, at least. At the very, very least.

***

After a surprisingly decent night of sleep, Ari dresses in Ariadne’s armor. Black denim, riding boots, the most expensive white crew-neck T-shirt she’s ever owned, silk blouse with an abstract floral pattern. The shirt, compared to the rest of Ariadne’s wardrobe (and her own), is riotous, white and green and yellow and crimson and blue on a black field. Finally, a quilted-front collarless linen jacket, bright white; it reminds her of literal armor, the padded gambeson that a knight wears under her plate. No scarf; it’d fuss up the sharp color contrast, and Finch needs as many sources of sharpness as she can scrape together. She brushes her hair until it shines, applies her makeup expertly, and triple-checks her suite to make sure Ariadne Finch leaves nothing behind.

Kingsford Smith, early on a Tuesday, is as airports are, although the sheer amount of shit that accompanies a first-class ticket is a revelation. Ari skips the first-class lounge and her usual pre-flight snacking; she sits at the gate, reads Borges, glances around at her fellow passengers, runs counting exercises between stories to distract from the sick flutter in her chest and the tingles running up her spine. She feels like she should feel ridiculous about the nerves; she’s dreamed for three months now, and she knows the plan forward and back, where she’ll be and when. But the variables, not just Cobb—

Robert Fischer appears at the gate, alone and looking terribly young, despite his double-breasted suit and cutaway collar. He’s her age.

He’s her age, and his father’s corpse is in the cargo hold of the 747.

And she’s about to waltz into his head with a team of con artists and help fuck it up.

She swallows hard and doesn’t look his way again.

***

In the first-class cabin, Ari settles cross-legged in her (enormous) seat and ignores the men around her, studying the safety brochure to see if there are any variations whatsoever from the ones they stock in coach (there aren’t). An attendant offers drinks; she demurs and finds her book again, props her feet up on the seat (because who’s going to tell her not to?) and supports the paperback on her knees, so she can look around at the others without being totally obvious. The seat’s angled, ensuring she has leg room—because that’s going to be a problem, ever—and letting her scan the cabin’s occupants easily.

They’re all settled, jackets off—Fischer is wearing suspenders, braces, whatever, with little bitty flowers on them. Across the aisle and one seat back, Eames passes something up to Cobb—a passport.

Cobb himself seems sharper, clearer, more alert than he’s been in a month, glancing from attendants to the passport to Fischer without apparently moving. She watches him lean forward in his seat to get Fischer’s attention—Excuse me, sir, all mild embarrassment at the necessary contravention of first-class flight etiquette—and Fischer’s nonplussed reaction; the passport is his, and Cobb suggests that he’d dropped it. A weird touch, she thinks, attracting the mark’s attention—what if Fischer’s got a memory for faces?

She watches Cobb dose Fischer’s ice water with the short-acting sedative Yusuf supplied, a barbiturate derivative that he uses in his Somnacin compounds—avoiding drug interaction issues—and she sees Eames wince at how clumsy Cobb is about it. But Fischer doesn’t notice, wouldn’t notice; he’s well buried in his own head.

Cobb murmurs, still with that mildly stilted so-sorry-to-be-a-bother self-effacement, “…happen to be related to the Maurice Fischer, would you?”

Fischer gapes like a fish—Jesus, Ari; she digs her thumbnail into her palm to suppress the face she wants to make at herself—before replying. “Yes, he, uh. He was my father.”

“Well, he was a very inspiring figure. I’m sorry for your loss,” says Cobb, voice steady, pitch-perfect in the level of sympathy he’s offering to a virtual stranger.

Very inspiring—

Ari understands, all at once, Cobb’s reputation as a genius, a magician of extraction. He’s playing it here, in real time, setting the groundwork. If Fischer remembers Cobb’s face while they’re under, drawing him into thinking about his father, he’ll chalk it up to that guy on the plane talking to him about his father. “Hey,” Cobb says, again with that gentle sympathy, and lifts his glass. “To your father. May he rest in peace.”

Fischer’s asleep before takeoff.

In the period before the fasten-seatbelt sign turns off, Ari shucks her jacket and boots—an attendant takes them wordlessly—and digs up her sketchbook. She draws fractals until the width of her pen’s tip matches the length scale of the details, counts prime numbers until she hits somewhere north of 300, and finally, unable to suppress the tic, cracks every one of her knuckles in turn. Arthur leans forward—he’s in the seat behind her, immaculate in his double-breasted waistcoat and striped shirt and wine-colored dot-patterned tie—and mutters, “You sound like those shitty fireworks.”

“I’m extremely high-quality fireworks, thanks,” she murmurs back; her voice is tight.

He touches her shoulder lightly, two fingers on the back ridge of her scapula. “Hey. We got this,” he says. “Probably.”

The seatbelt sign vanishes and the cabin bursts into a flurry of hushed activity. Ari untucks her shirts and pushes up both layers of sleeves, ensuring that the giant splashy five-colored bruise inside her right elbow stays covered. She helps unspool IV lines until the PASIV looks like a weird attenuated mechanical octopus. Just before she rips open the packaging on her cannula, after she’s finished doing Saito’s, Eames catches her in a one-armed hug.

She stiffens automatically, then relaxes. Eames mutters, “It’ll all go, and then it’ll be done. Whatever happens.”

Ari huffs out a breath and leans her head against his shoulder for a moment, which is nice, but would be far nicer if Eames weren’t using the opportunity to say against her hair, “Just don’t fuck it up, little bird.”

***

She herself doesn’t fuck it up, but the freight train on top of the Hyundai suggests that her action, or lack thereof, was never going to matter.

“This wasn’t in the design,” she says, moronically, and Cobb is just staring, transfixed, at the train, and while it’s a bizarre sight, it—

—was on the ground floor of Cobb’s stack of memories, just above the suite where Mal had jumped—

“Cobb,” she says, high and shaky over the grinding of the train against the driver’s side of the Hyundai. There are no tracks; it’s chewing right through the asphalt, knocking cars out of their lanes like bowling pins. Cobb won’t look away, eyes like saucers, like he’s seen a ghost, and maybe he has. “Cobb—”

***

The plan falls to shreds and Cobb collects the shreds and spins a new plan, again and again and again, until he doesn’t, until it shatters, and then Ari scrapes up the fragments and the half-dozen dead forum threads she can remember about Limbo, and then—

—and then, Ari earns her fucking share.

***

—she throws herself backward, hundreds of meters above the crumbling streets, into the teeth of the storm, wind screaming in her ears, and she falls forever until—

***

—she opens her eyes to clouds of ash, pulverized concrete acrid in her mouth, frigid air against her face, and the floor cracks beneath her and she falls forever until—

***

—she opens her eyes to showers of sparks, feels the ridges of hairpins against her scalp, the pinch of the suit jacket at her armpits, and she falls forever until—

***

—she wakes, seatbelt still buckled, and gravity is wrong and she sucks in air and holds the breath in the instant before the window of the van shatters and the river comes through to meet her. For a terrifying moment she has no idea which way is up, everything’s just white turbulence and noise, and then things settle in the way that they do underwater, even in a river in dreamtime, and her bishop is pressing into her thigh in the pocket of the jeans Yusuf dreamed her in. Ari undoes the seatbelt, the odd slow weightlessness that she hates so much turning her movements syrupy—it’s like she doesn’t have physical permission to panic, much as she wants to—and Arthur comes into focus, puts a hand at her back and levers her forward, offers her the breathing valve. He nods at it, gestures to her. Her turn, apparently.

She blows out her half-lungful as a stream of bubbles around the valve and inhales as deeply as she can, pure oxygen, before pulling it away and passing it back. He meets her eyes, double-checking, and she nods, trying to be reassuring. He looks ridiculous, all of his hair floating dark and feathery around his head like a halo of ink, but then she’s probably looking ludicrous herself, and Arthur fills his lungs and turns to Cobb.

Cobb’s not moving.

Because Cobb’s not coming.

Arthur is shaking him; she tries to grab his shoulder but misses and then he’s wasting air on two useless yells but turning away. Ari forces her legs to kick, propelling herself out the window on the opposite side of the van. Saito’s still in the very back, passenger side, in front of the forced-open rear doors—there are no bubbles from his mouth and his eyes are open and staring and the stain on the chest of his shirt has spread, a shock of red in the green-blue— She knew it, knew from the moment she saw him sweating on the floor of the hospital, but it still hits hard, and she half-chokes, forces herself not to breathe—

The van is still sinking; she kicks up, away from it, keeping her eyes open, and after a moment the gradient of light becomes a little clearer. Arthur emerges from the van window; he’s by far the stronger swimmer but he’s hanging back, comes even with her and paces her, before he apparently gets bored, grabs her wrist, and frog-kicks up. They break the surface twenty meters from shore, only a little distance from the bridge’s shadow, and she gasps for breath and treads water a moment in the rain. It’s silvery-grey up here, ripples from the raindrops making bizarre interference patterns, the city a dark mass in the distance.

After a little, for lack of anything else to do, she starts swimming properly over to the east pylon, following Arthur’s jerk of the head. It isn’t any worse than swimming usually is, and Ari hauls herself up onto the rocks beneath the pylon a few moments later, exhausted beyond the physical—dream perks—but she won’t let herself wilt. Not yet.

Arthur scrambles up next to her. “What happened?”

She swallows. “Cobb stayed.”

“With Mal?” Like he knows the answer, just waiting for the axe to fall—

“No,” she says, and Arthur looks at her, but she’s done jumping when people look. “To find Saito.”

He doesn’t tell her she’s crazy, but the way his face goes still as he looks out at the river— “He’ll be lost,” he says, like his world’s ending.

Ari watched Cobb tell his memory that it was only his memory, that his memory could never be his wife, before his memory stabbed him with a chef’s knife. Does this feel real—

“No, he’ll be all right.” She sounds as tired as she is, and rather more convinced than she is, because actual conviction requires resources she just doesn’t have. She feels like her bones are sugar cubes, slowly dissolving now that she’s soaked to the skin for the third time in—in—

Arthur just looks at her, then looks back at the river like he can’t stand to see her, but there’s nothing else to see, and he stares at her again, disbelieving, grieving already—no, not already, because he never stopped grieving after Mal.

She swallows again and pants for breath and stares back and wants everything to just stop, just for a goddamn minute. “I’m not telling it twice,” she says, and her voice frays. “Don’t make me t-tell it—” The stutter is what makes her realize she’s shaking, from her core, despite the dream perks. Past the shadow of the bridge, there are confusing shafts of sunlight, the light going sickly and diffuse and yellow-grey, and her teeth chatter before she clenches them together hard.

Arthur slings one arm over her shoulders. She considers protesting and doesn’t, because as he says, “It’ll keep,” she finds that he’s shaking as much as she is, so Ari twists and presses against his side, arms around his waist with one beneath his jacket, which is just as drenched as the rest of him, but he’s warm and breathing and not in Limbo.

***

“There’s Yusuf,” Arthur says, a little later; Ari lifts her head and starts disentangling herself, but Arthur somehow makes his arm heavier, the one holding her against him. She subsides, but not completely; she keeps her head up and supports her elbow on her own thigh, so she at least doesn’t feel like she’s clinging like a limpet. Yusuf is just about in the middle of the channel. “Did he go the wrong way?” Arthur mutters, eyes narrowing.

“Might’ve,” says Ari. “It’s—I didn’t know which way was up. East, fuck. How did you—”

“Compass on my watch,” Arthur says, and in another universe she’d exaggerate her lack of surprise, because of course his watch has a compass.

They watch Yusuf swim closer, slow and steady, and when he’s finally on the rocks he says, “The others?”

“Limbo.” It’s the first time the word has been said out loud since the warehouse, and Arthur inflects it like a curse.

“Cobb’s getting Saito,” Ari says, because if she says it enough maybe it’ll be true. “In Limbo. So—” Shit, she’s Ariadne. “So, here, they’re, um.”

Yusuf shakes his head like a dog, sprays of water going everywhere, and then sighs heavily and says, “Right, so they’re safely buckled in at the bottom of that.” He gestures at the river. “Fischer dragged Eames up out the back.”

Arthur nods. “Saw that. Good job on the doors.”

The tension coalesces out of nothing; Ari feels Arthur’s spine go stiff and Yusuf stills. “You—”

“Hang on,” Ari says, before Yusuf can dig himself anywhere and before Arthur can start tearing him apart. “Before either of you—whatever. We have a contingency.”

He looks at her blankly. “Contingency.”

Yusuf lets out a sigh. “Shelter,” he says. “If the sub-security is still mad, we’ve only got to get—”

“Wherever it is, whatever it is, we got to get there on foot,” Arthur interrupts, and his voice hardens with every word. “On foot, soaked head to toe, on the run from sub-sec and whatever law enforcement Fischer thinks belongs down here—”

Ari shoves at him—weakly; she has no leverage whatsoever, but the zipper up the right sleeve of her jacket digs into his back and he straightens away from it, doing this et tu, Brute? face at her and looking almost like himself for a moment. “Stop it. It’s still raining. Wet is wet.” She speaks far more sharply than Ariadne would, but—fuck, whatever. “You don’t get to blame Yusuf for everything. It’s Cobb’s fucking fault.”

Yusuf actually leans away as he blinks at her in surprise; next to her, Arthur goes still as stone. For a moment terror grips her—she’s talking like Cobb’s coming back, Arthur could send her after him in half a breath—and then he slumps, leaning on her, and says, drained, “All right. Fucking—fine. Okay. You’re right. It’s—Yusuf, you…” He gives up on the sentence and shakes his head. “Fuck it. I don’t—fuck. Fuck.”

“Articulate as always, Arthur,” says a familiar voice, and all three of them jump and turn.

Eames is standing in his sodden suit, hair plastered flat against his head in the rain. He has his hands in his pockets, leaning sideways against the concrete base of the pylon, shoes set in half an inch of mud at the top of the bank. He nods to her.

The last thing he’d said in her hearing was I am gone, with or without you.

“You’re all right, then, little bird?”

She doesn’t think she’s going to know the answer to that for another week. Real time, not subjective. “Where’s Fischer?” she asks, instead of answering, and flinches, because the last time someone told her where Fischer was, it was Mal doing the telling, her barter for Cobb (Cobb’s brain’s barter for Cobb). And Ari had gone to Fischer and felt for his pulse and ripped the gag out of his mouth and held his face between her hands and asked if he was okay and looked in his eyes as he answered and then she had put her boot in his face and kicked him off a skyscraper—

“Funny thing, that,” Eames replies, and his tone—light, lighter than it’s been since she can remember, although that’s not terribly long at the moment—shakes her out of the horror. “Browning offered to call the police, and Fischer said he would himself, so Browning said he’d wait with him for the police instead.” He’s smiling faintly. “And our boy came over a bit vague for a moment before he said, calm as you please, that actually, he thought he’d get a coffee instead, and no, Browning needn’t accompany him, because he was certainly busy enough as it was. Then he just got up and walked off, as if he’s kidnapped and flung into rivers every day before lunch.” At that, Eames frowns, thoughtful. “Or breakfast, or tea, or whatever bloody time it is here. I tailed him, of course, but lost him in an office building—looked rather like the Sydney HQ. Iris-scan and thumbprint security that I couldn’t scam, so here I am. So, Yusuf, that whatsit you put in his mix…”

“Ah, bugger,” says Yusuf, exasperated. “I didn’t—sod it, I’d not thought about his last week. Grief and stress—if he’s not been eating, he certainly looked peaky enough topside—probably a good three kilos less than I’d estimated—”

“Fascinating.” Eames straightens, turns, and kicks at the wall. “Don’t suppose that’d explain the rest of the bloody city.”

“What’s happening?” Arthur asks, jerking upright. He shoots Ari an apologetic look and unloops himself, stands, and starts climbing up the rocks. She eases herself upright and follows him up to the concrete, then along the wall of the pylon.

“Nothing I can explain,” says Eames. “All rather odd. Might—might be the inception taking, I wouldn’t know, it’s not as if I’ve seen one. Little bird—Cobb—?”

“Limbo.”

He just nods and turns away, looking at the stretch of the river. After a moment, he shakes his head and says, as if to himself, “So that’s a fine extractor and our glorious patron good as dead. Shame, I’d—”

“No,” she says, as firmly as she can manage, and Eames looks around at her. “Cobb’s getting Saito.”

For a moment, he quirks one skeptical eyebrow, and then his expression melts into pity. “I know I said to try optimism, but really—”

“He is,” she insists. “I know he is, I—” She thinks about it, now that it’s the four of them, about vomiting up the entire thing right here, and—she can’t. “I’ll explain later.”

“Later, then,” says Eames gently. “Once we determine where later will be.”

“It’s four blocks south of the bridge, three east from the first parallel,” says Yusuf as he stands and steps up onto the bank. “There’s a bunker.”

Eames’s face smooths into bland emptiness, eyes flat and dark, and Ari thinks, oh, fuck.

“Is there really?” he says, tone all light and flashing like the glare off the blade of a knife. “And I’m to take your word—”

“It’s there,” says Ari, before he can get going. “I built it.”

His eyes dart to her. Arthur turns his head, staring.

For a moment there’s no sound but the rain.

Then Arthur says—Arthur, with the same disbelieving terrible softness, that horrific shade of wonder that he’d had when he told her Mal was dead—Arthur says, “You were in on this.”

Yusuf says immediately, “She wasn’t,” as Ari looks at Arthur, as his face goes shuttered. He believes it. He believes she turned coat, and he has no reason not to, and it’s worse than a knife to the gut. As determined empirically.

“I asked her,” Yusuf goes on. “Never said—I never told her why, not in so many—”

“And now’s the first we hear of it,” says Eames, tone adjacent to pleasantness. Her breath stops in her throat when she tears her gaze from Arthur and finds his eyes locked on her. “Why’s that, I wonder?” He arches his eyebrow again. “Perhaps Cobb asked that you keep it quiet? What was your price, then?”

“Cobb didn’t know,” Yusuf answers instantly.

But he sounds very, very far away, and she is going to fucking claw Eames’s eyes out.

She’s in his face before she realizes she’s moved, on her toes and teeth bared. “You shut your fucking mouth,” she snarls. “Scum-sucking bastard, you fucking—you were ready to leave us, you were gonna watch Saito die and just fucking waltz off, and you fucking dare—”

He might lean away from her; she can’t tell if he’s actually farther away or if her vision’s warping, and then Arthur says, “Might as well check.”

When she glances at him, he’s holding an assault rifle. He looks back, meeting her eyes, and there’s—he’s still closed off, but the skull-like set of his face has relaxed. “Eames,” he says, “you take point.”

For a moment there’s tense, waiting silence, before— “If you insist,” Eames replies on half a sigh, turns his back to the river, and hoists his fucking grenade launcher.

***

The hundred meters to the city streets are agonizing. No cover aside from some scrub and a few skinny trees, and the four of them sodden and muddy and armed, blatantly, Yusuf carrying his SIG Sauer and Ari with a Glock. They’re in the middle, as both the least trustworthy and the least useful in a firefight.

The rapid-fire switch from exhaustion to misery at Arthur believing she’d sell them out to murderous rage at Eames to the creeping anxiety of these hundred meters—Ari’s nearly dizzy with it at first, but she can’t afford to be anything but clear right now. She digs her fingernails into the palm of her left hand, the one not holding the gun, until the pain chases away the last trace of unsteadiness.

When they reach the roadway it’s still raining, a faint drizzle (and whatever that implies about the state of Yusuf’s bladder, she will determine later), but the light has been going…cleaner, tingeing toward blue, and it’s lost the sick grey-yellow wash it had by the river. Eames waves them across the first parallel street—low traffic, as the main road onto the bridge is on an overpass.

A block in, they hit the real grid, although it’s not a busy section. The street is empty, both directions; parked cars, sure, but no one driving. As they cover the second block, the rain stops.

She notices then, in the absence of its faint patter, the silence. The massive, unbroken silence.

It holds, across the second parallel, and now they’re three blocks in, a commercial district, real city, where the traffic is heavy. There are dozens of cars at the intersection.

And they’re still. Stopped. Parked, engines off.

Coupes, minivans, cabs, SUVs, eighteen-wheelers—all neatly arrayed in their lanes, motionless. Whenever it had happened, the east-west street had had the green light; cars are spaced out in the middle of the box, two each in the turning lanes stopped at odd angles.

At the driver’s-side door of every last vehicle, a projection stands. Other projections are at some of the other respective doors for some of them, but by necessity, every car has at least a driver. They stand with the doors open, keys and fobs in one hand or the other, a sea of varied humanity and automobiles.

Every single projection stands with their feet planted and their head flung back, eyes fixed on the sky.

Eames moves casually, as if he weren’t walking around in a muddy suit with a grenade launcher. No one in the street moves, even as he gets among them—Arthur makes an abortive grasping motion and goes still again, just watches Eames weave among the cars.

The traffic lights cycle, blinking green to yellow to red.

The projections don’t so much as twitch.

Across the intersection—diagonally across, tending south—Eames spreads his hands. See? The grenade launcher is gone; he’s holding his H&K.

Yusuf follows. Ari glances at Arthur; he nods to her, eyes narrowed and otherwise expressionless. She steps onto the asphalt and eases along, past a silver sedan and a deep blue sports car and the front bumper of a Mack truck. When she reaches the curb on the other side, Arthur is just behind her, turned to face the street; she hasn’t heard his footsteps.

They keep going, four blocks south now. It’s clearing up—she checks every ten steps, sees the clouds break up into puffy cumulus heaps against aquamarine sky. They’re still moving slowly, crossing intersections individually—except Arthur keeps close to her—but bit by bit, they cover the ground.

The stairs down to the basement-level entry are just as she remembers, and Yusuf passes the key to Eames with no hesitation. Eames listens at the door for thirty seconds before he slides the key into the lock, gesturing all of them out of line of sight, and only after he sweeps the place does he flip the lights on and wave them all in.

***

Eames shuts the door behind Arthur and locks it, flips the three deadbolts, and then turns, leans against the door, and crosses his arms. His eyes are distant, icy, flicking from her to Yusuf as he says, “So. Now we’ve—”

“Hang on,” Arthur interrupts, holding up one hand. “Windows.” There’s a row of them high along the front wall at the level of the street, the view chopped into squares by gridded grilles.

“Three-inch-thick one-way bulletproof glass,” says Ari, enunciating crisply. Now that she’s free of the surreal tension of the silent city, the rage is resurfacing, hot and reassuring under her skin despite the clamminess of rain and river water in her clothes. She steps backward, safeties the Glock, and sets it on the nearest table as she continues, without turning away; all three are watching her. “Tinted and reflective on the outside. Grilles are tungsten carbide anchored full-shaft in eighteen inches of concrete. If the projections do anything, I have a topological fold ready to seal this space off.”

Arthur nods once—professional approval, if nothing else. Eames keeps his eyes on her, still flat, and his voice is deceptively light when he says, “Anything else you’d like to share regarding our accommodations?”

“There’s hot water and plumbing.” She sounds distant and cold, dismissive, which is what she needs to be, if he really pushes this particular line of bullshit. “Bathroom’s past the kitchenette. Shower and first aid. Bottled water for drinking and double the food necessary for six men over eight days.”

“Quite the hideaway,” says Eames, “now that you’ve so graciously allowed us to use it.”

Something in her breaks. Rather, whatever snapped in her at the riverbank has held its shape until now, when it flares and falls to ash.

“Look,” she growls. She barely recognizes her own voice. “You wanna rip into me for your fucking paranoid bullshit. Fine. I’ll use small words to explain what a fucking blithering idiot you are. But I’m putting on dry clothes first—”

“Dry clothes,” Eames doesn’t quite mutter, and he manages to fit so much disgust in two syllables— “Dry clothes—”

“Yes, dry clothes!” It comes out as a yell; she sees Yusuf jump. “Remember talking limits the other day? You know what mine is? Right now? My limit is wet underwear crawling up my ass after I kick some poor little rich boy off a roof—” She’s yelling every word now, and why stop? “—and shoot Cobb’s dead wife after she stabs him and fucking throw myself off the same fucking roof and through two dreams into a fucking river, while you’re calling me a fucking traitor! That—that, you slimy fucking grandstanding mercenary sack of shit—that’s my fucking limit!”

Ari pivots on her heel—she registers, vaguely, that Yusuf’s jaw has dropped, and that Arthur is watching Eames like a hawk, and that Eames is staring at her—and storms to the nearest dresser, conveniently the one with Ari-sized clothes. As she goes, she strips off the jacket and the fucking scarf and then both her top layers at once, dropping everything on the floor and kicking the bundle under the bunk bed to her right.

They all discover their delicate sensibilities at once and start fluttering like appalled Regency matrons in three-part harmony. While they’re in each other’s heads, for fuck’s sake— “Fucking puritans,” she spits. She yanks an extra-large black t-shirt out of the top drawer and over her head, kicks off her boots and peels off her jeans (she palms her totem; it lacks the faint texture left by the brazing) and underwear and socks, then steps into clean, dry extra-small boxer briefs from the middle drawer.

Abruptly, she’s too done to negotiate further articles of clothing. Remembering how none of the projections gave a shit when Eames swapped his grenade launcher for a handgun, she pulls the shirt’s hem down and tells the entire thing to reshape, narrower in the torso and longer, until it hits a couple inches above her knees. It feels better, and it’ll save the men from the apparently terrifying knowledge that Ari, too, wears underwear.

She pulls a fleece blanket out of the bottom drawer and swirls it around herself like a cape. Before she leaves the relative privacy of the dresser nestled between two of the bunks, she retrieves the black leather jacket Yusuf dreamed for her from the floor. It’s a nice one, although nothing to her grey—which she’d had, in Limbo; her subconscious had put her in it, as if it knew she needed it, and— Ari shuts down that line of thought, holding the jacket by its collar.

Eames and Arthur are at the other dressers—the wrong ones for their respective sizes, but they’re muttering to each other and passing clothes back and forth. Yusuf hangs back, but she supposes that’s not terribly surprising; Eames and Arthur had looked similarly homicidal at the bridge, and she supposes her own display just now may have been a little off-putting. Still, on her way to the wall hooks next the door, she stops next to Yusuf and murmurs, “Might as well be comfortable. You did what you could.”

He sighs almost soundlessly and gives her the tiniest trace of a smile. “Might as well,” he mutters back, and adds, “You’re nowhere near twenty, are you?”

Deadpan, she replies, “Yeah, fifteen next month.”

His smile broadens as he shakes his head before he goes to the last dresser. Which does have the right sizes for him.

She hangs up the jacket and sweeps past the bunks and dressers, right to the two couches. For politeness’s sake, she bundles her blanket-shrouded self into the corner of the one facing away from the bunks, giving the guys her back. Before she does anything else, she closes her eyes and forces herself to relax physically, muscle group by muscle group; she catalogs the exact feeling of the cotton t-shirt and the fleece blanket against her skin; she rejoices silently in the non-act of sitting on a couch with no one to kidnap and no bullet wounds to treat and no skirt suits to wear and no mountains to ski down and no one to shoot and no sunken van to escape.

Then Ari dreams a fine-toothed comb into her hand and gets to work on the rat’s nest of her hair, awaiting judgment.

***

If she wanted, she thinks, she could just dream herself dry, dream her hair combed and neat, but she feels all fucked up and not a little fragile. Honestly, she’s a little shocked—pleasantly—that she didn’t start crying either of the times she went off on Eames. Every nerve of her is still on high alert, despite the dry clothes. And despite the two looks she’s taken out the windows, standing on the low table between the couches to see properly. The view of unmoving layers of car tires and underbeds and people’s shoes is… better than a view of, say, armed projections in tactical armor storming the bunker, but it’s unnerving.

The point being that she needs something to do, to con herself into calm by focusing minutely on some arbitrary task, and hair detangling seems like a good option. She holds the comb in one hand and her bishop tucked in the other palm, last two fingers curled around it, and works slowly and patiently, one narrow section of hair at a time, starting at the tips. It’s almost meditative, trance-like at this degree of focus, which is why she yelps when Arthur comes around the edge of the couch.

Definitely not because she’s still not certain whether Arthur believes she contributed directly and intentionally to the intersection of every possible worst-case scenario that was this job.

He doesn’t comment on her squeaking, just drops onto the cushion next to her. After a moment, he says, very low, “I’m sorry.”

Ari lowers both hands into her lap, wary. “For?”

He’s barefoot, wearing a white t-shirt and grey sweatpants, hair drying in a curly mop; he could be half a decade younger than she is, if it weren’t for the exhaustion, the misery in every line of his expression. “For thinking you were—part of it. Part of conning the team into doing the job.”

 A wave of relief washes through her before she realizes how odd that is, Arthur changing his stance without complete hold of the available facts. “I haven’t explained,” she says, carefully uninflected.

The corner of his mouth twitches upward, the tiniest smirk, as he glances at her. “Well, you were ready to rip Eames’s lungs out at the implication.”

“Eyes, actually,” she says, and cringes at herself. Yeah, convince your teammate you didn’t fuck everyone over by telling him how you’d maim another teammate. Good one, Ari.

He ignores it, though. “Few factors in play here,” says Arthur, and starts ticking off points on his fingers. “He’s twice your size. You know he’s good with weapons. You probably don’t know he’s just as capable of killing barehanded, but that’s easy enough to extrapolate. Performing that kind of outrage—not worth the risk of Limbo.” This time, he actually looks at her, smirk going a little more pronounced. “Only remaining explanation is you were so legitimately angry that you forgot he could and would snap your neck.”

Her chest goes tight. Except panicking retroactively requires energy, and she’s fresh out. Ari breathes deeply to shake it off as she resumes detangling the elflock she’s working on. “I did,” she says quietly. “Forget. Situational awareness—first thing to go.”

“Plus,” says Arthur, “he backed off.”

So she hadn’t hallucinated that. “How does that support my case?”

He starts to reply but stops when Eames himself saunters past them in a blue sweatshirt, hands in the pockets of his plaid flannel pajama pants. “I can tell from lying, if you’d forgotten.” He stops and turns, near the other couch, but doesn’t sit; he looks at her and adds, “You’re a scary little thing when you want to be, anyone ever told you?”

People have, in fact, but she doesn’t say so.

Yusuf scuffs over, wearing green-and-navy striped pajamas and bunny slippers—bunny slippers—and drops onto the other couch. His forehead is furrowed. Dread of the combined wrath of Eames and Arthur, probably.

“Well,” says Eames, rocking back on his heels. “Gang’s all here. Shall we begin determining what the hell just happened?”

“Debriefing,” Arthur says to him. “That’s called debriefing.”

“Oh, fuck off,” says Eames good-naturedly, and for a moment it feels like the Paris workshop, the two of them needling each other while Ari and Yusuf watch the entertainment. “First thing, though. What bloody time is it, and how long have we been in?”

“Twenty minutes to four. Four hours and forty minutes since we came down, subjective time.” Arthur looks up at the ceiling, thinking. “So that’s, uh…”

“Fourteen minutes topside,” Ari says. Jesus.

Eames raises his eyebrows. “Wonderful. Second, but first in my heart: Has this place got tea?”

“Loads. Second cabinet over from the fridge,” says Yusuf. “You drink PG Tips Assam, yeah? Bunch of others.”

“Oh, excellent. You may actually break even on this one, just for that.”

***

When they’re all set up with mugs of tea—except Arthur, who has hot chocolate with marshmallows—Eames says, “I rather think you owe us some disclosure, Yusuf.”

Yusuf nods, resigned, and starts talking. His private meeting with Cobb sometime in April, about the strength of the sedative necessary to keep a three-level dream stable and how he’d keep working on it, but he couldn’t guarantee that they’d be able to wake themselves up. Cobb’s insistence that inception was possible three levels in and that Limbo wasn’t much of a risk. Negotiating for Cobb’s monetary share, planning the backup shelter in the meantime. Ariadne’s designing it, no questions asked (that’s right; she’s still Ariadne to Yusuf)—aside from why aren’t you doing it yourself? Having the space established as part of the dreamscape from the word go meant fewer drastic changes during the dream itself, thus minimizing attention from Fischer’s projections. He reiterates, again and again, that he hadn’t thought it’d be necessary until Saito was shot.

“Well, I’m not sure I’d voluntarily go into the field with you again,” says Eames, “but…”

“I’m not coming in again! Are you mad?”

“It’s been suggested.” Eames looks reflective. “So it ended up a perfect storm, rather. Incomplete information all around. Yusuf wasn’t telling about the mix, Ariadne wasn’t telling about Mal—”

Yusuf’s eyebrows draw together. “Mal?”

“—Cobb wasn’t telling about either, and Arthur missed the sub-sec.” He shakes his head slowly. “Lord, when I’m the only one who’s done my job properly—”

“Fuck you,” says Arthur, sounding tired.

“I just mean to say, honor among thieves and all—”

“Eames, shut up.” There’s an edge to Arthur’s voice this time. Eames shuts up. “Yusuf, Eames just mentioned Ari’s secondary purpose on the job after building the levels. She was placed by Saito—we’re pretty sure—as a check on Cobb. His wife Mal—” He swallows but continues speaking smoothly. “Eames and I both knew her. She committed suicide two—going on three years ago. The US feds suspected Cobb of murder. We’ve been… avoiding notice since. His projection of her started sabotaging jobs earlier this year, and he’s been…” Arthur tongues at his teeth, staring at the edge of the table in front of him, and then says, “Fuck it. Losing his shit. Derealization. Thinking the projection’s actually Mal.”

Yusuf blinks at that and then sighs, “Well, shit.” He looks at her and says flatly, “You’re not twenty.”

“Twenty-six,” she replies. “I’m doing my doctorate with Stephen Miles.” Yusuf straightens in recognition, which makes sense, considering that half his academic papers cited Miles’s research. “Yeah. He’s Mal’s father. Been advising Saito, we think.”

He just nods, taking it in stride—what else is he going to do?—and starts describing the drive, defending them from projections, the van flipping—Arthur drawls, “I figured,” and Eames says, “Ah, that may explain the avalanche.” Yusuf getting back on the road and onto the drawbridge, making the executive decision to trigger the kick a bit early because the sub-sec wasn’t letting up, and then the kick itself.

“You’ve all been up since. What was it like on the lower levels? Did the Mr. Charles bit work?”

“Still a shit ploy,” Arthur grumbles. “Cobb pulled it off. Don’t ask me how. We got Fischer to agree to go under to fuck up Browning. But—” He sounds faintly admiring. “Effectively, he was helping us break into his own subconscious. Hotel flipped when the van did. After everyone went under, at least. Killed every projection I saw—when the hallway went vertical, a few fell and ate shit, which helped—and then lost gravity when we missed the planned kick. Made some instead.”

He stops talking, and it’s clear that he isn’t planning to start again, until Eames shifts in his seat. “Do tell,” he says. “Some specificity, perhaps.”

Arthur half-rolls his eyes, as if he’s too tired to glare. “I put all of you and the PASIV in an elevator car, cut the coupling with some of the explosives, and used the rest to make the car accelerate in one direction.” His voice is empty. “Then it would hit the ceiling—pointless designation in zero G, but it was the ceiling relative to the way I had you all facing—and rebound in the opposite direction, which your inner ears would register as a fall.”

Eames blinks at him, eyes round. “Arthur, that’s—that’s brilliant.”

“It was a pain in the ass,” Arthur says flatly. “Avalanche.”

“That, yes.” Eames settles backward, kicking his feet up on the coffee table; his socks are patterned with teddy bears. “Heard Fischer bitching over radio that someone should have dreamed a beach. I had to keep security busy, so Saito guided him in. Cobb and Ari— well, they started making their way to a watchtower, but the music for the kick went and Cobb just insisted we’d speed things up to make it. Not sure what happened after. I was blowing up projections ’til I got distracted by the bloody avalanche.” He looks at Ari, eyebrows raised.

She sighs. “The musical cue meant we had to get Fischer to his father in less time than he could have gotten through the maze.” And after all that agonizing about the degree of complexity. “Cobb tried to raise you on radio about shortcuts so you could explain them to Saito and Fischer, but you were… busy, so he started on me. Told him it’d bite him in the ass, but I caved when he started yelling and explained the duct route to Saito over radio. Should’ve made Cobb plug his ears.”

Eames is nodding. “Then the avalanche as we missed the kick. Then what? Next I knew, you were issuing orders.”

“We were in the south tower,” she says. “Cobb picking off projections. I was—” She shakes her head. “I’m getting long-range weapons training before I take another field job. But he had the rifle, so I figured it was a good time to nag him about dream theory. Asked if he was actually killing parts of Fischer’s mind. He said no, they were just projections. Which was promising, but then his projection of Mal dropped out of a ceiling vent, and he had a reality crisis and wouldn’t shoot, asked how I knew if she was real or not. She shot Fischer point-blank. Then Cobb killed the projection.”

“Motherfucker,” says Arthur, leaning his head back and looking at the ceiling.

Eames slumps further on the couch. “So then Ari took over as commander while Cobb was having his crisis. Yelled over radio for me to get to Fischer. Saito was dying next to the duct entrance, and the second he and Ari made it in Cobb wrote the job off as a loss because Fischer was in Limbo already. Rather a letdown. Until, that is, our architect argued that she and Cobb could go fetch him. And that the time thing would work in their favor, and that they’d improvise a kick out of Limbo and back up through the layers.”

Ari allows herself to interrupt, looking at Arthur and asking him brightly, “Remember when you called me dead weight?”

He flips her off without taking his eyes off Eames.

“So they went under and I placed the charges,” Eames continues, “during which Saito kicked it but not before he did some magic with a grenade—took out about eight soldiers in the duct in one go, looked like. Then I defibbed Fischer until he woke, and don’t ask me how that works; last I checked defibs are useless for bullet wounds. Pushed Fischer into that bloody strong room and my god, I swear I’ve never seen a man move so slowly in all my days, I wanted a damn cattle prod. But he got to his father and opened the safe and pulled out a pinwheel, from that photo in Fischer’s wallet, and went to bits. Catharsis if I’ve ever seen it. So I hit the detonator and that was that. Now, Ari, how did you get Fischer back?”

She’s working on a new knot in her hair, which consumes enough of her attention that she can speak evenly. “I’m going to start further back,” she says. “Bear with me. First—”

First, Mal stabbing her, and then Cobb dreaming alone, and following him down to the twisted memory-stack. On the first level, realizing that the freight train in the intersection had come from there—

“He hates trains,” Arthur mutters.

She glares. “I still didn’t fucking put it there.”

“I know, Jesus.”

The deliberate dip into Limbo— “That’s another thing,” she says, still stung that both Arthur and Eames had thought she’d had a part in concealing Cobb’s shitty risk analysis. “The forum threads about Limbo, they’re all psychobabble and circular logic and biblical allusions. I thought Limbo was a fucking urban legend until Cobb said it while we were in the warehouse.”

“And yet,” says Eames, tipping his head to one side, “you made and executed a plan relying on its very nature in about half a minute.”

Ari cuts her eyes at him. “I work well under pressure,” she says sharply.

“Go on,” says Arthur.

So she goes on. The fucking ocean. The crumbling city, Cobb going all nostalgic and leading her to a skyscraper with a house occupying the top floor, meeting Mal—“Cobb’s projection of Mal,” she corrects herself furiously—and watching Cobb’s brain try to argue to him that he didn’t believe in anything but his own brain. Cobb telling her and telling Mal—his projection of Mal—about his first inception.

The door of the microwave in their kitchen had turned into a display screen, and neither Mal nor Cobb had noticed. It showed Mal locking her quiescent totem in a safe, in a dollhouse, in the recreation of her childhood home that she’d built in Limbo. And then it showed Cobb finding that safe, breaking into it, and setting the top spinning. And then it showed Cobb and Mal lying on the train tracks, facing each other, Cobb reciting their riddle, and the two of them waking up topside. And Mal jumping.

Arthur’s face is greyish; Eames is wearing a terrible twisted non-smile.

There’s not much left. She describes Mal insisting to Cobb—Cobb’s brain insisting to Cobb—that he could make up for unwittingly sabotaging his wife’s sanity by simply denying that it had happened at all and staying locked in his own head for the rest of his natural life, for an infinity with his personified guilt. Ari seeing the first crack of lightning, and Cobb asking Mal to trade—if he stayed, Ari could take Fischer, who was gagged and trussed on the porch that was the top of a skyscraper. Cobb’s breakthrough—realizing, vocalizing, that the Mal he carried around with him was nothing like his actual wife.

Mal knifing Cobb in the stomach.

Ari shooting Mal in the shoulder with the gun Cobb had handed to her.

Ari kicking Fischer into the canyon between the skyscrapers.

Cobb howling that she had to leave.

Ari screaming orders—don’t lose yourself. Find Saito. Bring him back. And Cobb’s assurance, and Ari throwing herself backward after Fischer and falling back up through two dreams and then down into the river.

“And so,” she says, “I think he’s done projecting, and I think he’s got his memory of Mal categorized properly as a memory, not a—not her. I think he’ll pull through. And I think he’ll find Saito. Also, pretty sure that’s why Cobb hates trains.”

Arthur blows out a breath. “Jesus.”

“Shit,” says Yusuf.

“Knew I should’ve negotiated half up front,” Eames mutters.

Arthur throws a tennis ball that didn’t exist a moment before; it hits Eames in the forehead. “Asshole,” he says harshly. “He’s more likely than any of us to manage Limbo without losing it. Even without training. You saw him work.”

Immediately Eames says, “Poor taste. I’m sorry.”

“What happens if you die in Limbo but can’t wake up?” Ari asks, and answers herself. “You’d just—respawn, or whatever, wake up there again, wouldn’t you.”

Eames, still rubbing his forehead, peers at her. “Why?”

“The stab wound Cobb took,” she replies, trying to remember where exactly it had been in his midsection. “I mean, a ten-inch knife, and if it penetrated any of his digestive tract, that’s sepsis. But he’ll just wake up in Limbo again.”

“If he dies down there, it’ll be harder for him to remember on the second round,” says Arthur. “Planned versus spontaneous arrival—you didn’t forget Limbo was a dream.”

“But I was only there for…” She grasps for a number and can’t; there isn’t one. “As much time as I needed. It—the light never changed. I have no idea how long it was.”

“There’s a good score of oneirological neuroscience papers in here,” Yusuf says.

“Except there’s no oneirological neuroscience field.”

Yusuf shrugs affably. “Well, true.”

***

They disband, although Ari keeps her spot at the end of the couch. Yusuf retreats to one of the beds and Arthur paces the bunker with a legal pad and a ballpoint pen (once Yusuf tells him where they are), conducting a full inventory, kitchen cupboards and storage cabinets and the weapons closet. He’s pretty pleased about the last one.

Eames takes everyone’s mugs to the kitchenette. Some time later, he comes back to the couches with two refills; he sets them on the table and settles in Arthur’s vacated seat.

Ari keeps working on her hair.

“I owe you several apologies,” he says, after a moment. “Regarding my scum-sucking mercenary bastardry.”

She makes a noncommittal noise, but kind of ruins her own impression of someone who cares not at all about whether a dreamshare criminal thinks she’s a backstabber when the comb sticks and she hisses, “Shit,” as her hair yanks at her scalp. “Ow.”

“Here, give us the comb.” Quickly, he adds, “If you don’t mind, that is.”

“Why—”

“I’m fairly good with tangles. Kept my hair about your length in my dissolute youth.”

“So you got a haircut before you left Kenya,” she says, and when he smiles—it looks like relief—she hands him the comb.

Which is how Ari finds herself in a bunker, drinking sweet milky tea, while a man who could and would kill her unarmed if he felt he had reason to gently works the knots out of her hair. They’re both quiet; the entire bunker is quiet, with just the hum of the refrigerator as background noise. No traffic sounds, or any other types of sounds, from outside. It’d be eerie, but Ari’s too drained to appreciate eeriness.

It’s probably the single most bizarre incident of hair-combing she’ll ever experience, not like there are any major competitors for that superlative.

She’s drunk a third of the contents of her mug when Eames says quietly, “I really am sorry. For the accusation. And—I haven’t said this properly—I’m—that you’re not stuck down there—it’s—that—” Eames being at a loss for words feels like a historic occasion. “It’s an indescribable relief,” he finishes finally. “I know what I said before you went under, and I did mean it—I couldn’t have followed, not with the charges set and Fischer to deal with—”

“Yeah,” she says, wry; she’s thought that one through. “Anything else would’ve been logistically impossible. Not to mention blowing the job. Just—that being the last thing to hear before going in.”

“And I’m sorry for that, too. But really, little bird, if you hadn’t made the kick—”

“I did, though,” she says, because she can’t think about what-ifs right now.

“You did. And—look, I often don’t—I try not to—” Eames sighs and shakes his head as she glances at him sidelong. “I was worried sick ’til I saw you with Arthur and Yusuf up here. It’s not often I find myself that way.”

She feels herself starting to smile. “Mr. Eames, do you consider me a friend?”

“I may do,” he says offhandedly.

Really grinning now, Ari says, “Sap.”

“Oh, get that look off your face,” he grumbles. “You’re as bad as Arthur.”

Which is its own confirmation, but she doesn’t feel particularly bad about making him say it plainly. “So you don’t believe I was knowingly part of the Limbo trap.”

“No, I don’t,” says Eames as he puts the comb down. “All done. No, you’re far too smart to go backstabbing on your first run in the business. And after you saved the job—”

“Job’s not saved until Saito’s back,” she replies automatically. “And you did the heavy lifting on the third level, getting Fischer in to his father.”

“I’d say kicking the grieving owner of a multinational off a skyscraper counts as heavy lifting. ’Specially since that had to happen before I got him in for family time.” Eames starts to stand, then sits right back down and twists to look at her, face open and a little sad and a lot hopeful, and says, “Truly, little bird, I—”

Ari drives her elbow into his stomach. “Shut up, Eames.”

“Never.” He loops an arm over her shoulders and pulls her in for a quick hug, like the one a lifetime and sixteen topside minutes ago. “You should know that by now.”

***

The projections don’t move, even as the sky darkens to urban-light-pollution orange-brown.

“It could be the inception,” Yusuf muses, looking out at the rows of tires and shoes, now lit by streetlights. The two projections nearest the windows are a suited thirtysomething Asian man and a teenage girl with a hot pink streak in her hair and glitter-covered combat boots, so specific and so unlike the rest of the dream’s inhabitants that she’s almost certainly a memory of some schoolmate of Fischer’s. They stand in exactly the same attitude, feet shoulder-width apart, heads thrown back. The suited guy’s mouth is half-open. Glitter Combat Boots has her eyes narrowed. “The degree of turmoil happening in Fischer’s mind right now, having received the data he did—it’s conceivable that that’s occupying the vast majority of his subconscious attention. Maybe this is what that looks like.”

“If they’re still like this when it’s light again, might be worth scouting out,” says Arthur. “See how far it spreads in the cityscape. Ari, remind me, what’s the area of this level?”

“Theoretically infinite with the periodic boundary conditions,” she says absently, and all three of them turn to look at her. Yusuf looks intrigued, Arthur like he suspects another Klein bottle, and Eames lost. “But the unit cell is four square miles.”

“The unit what?”

Before she can answer Eames, Yusuf says, “Very clever,” to her, and explains. “Like a tile pattern. The basis is one shape, one element with a pattern, and that’s just repeated in all directions. So if we went due south two miles, we’d be right here again.”

“Not really,” says Ari quickly as Eames’s confusion becomes more pronounced. “The projections would be different. Probably the names of things, too, the way language works in dreams. Just—the streets and buildings would have the same layout. No interruptions at the boundaries between repeats.”

“Who worked that out, do you know?” Yusuf asks her, eager. “I mean, I dreamed it as just the two-by-two grid, so the tiling must be—”

“I worked it out.” She sounds a little defensive, and, okay, she is; she dislikes the assumption that it must have been someone else’s idea. “Tested the technique on a walkthrough in…I don’t know, mid-April, I think. It’s not necessary, but it’s an easy way to expand the level. I’m doing the topology, like the safeguard on the bunker.”

Yusuf nods. “Bloody clever. Either of you ever heard of anything like this?” he asks Eames and Arthur; Eames shakes his head.

“It’s got some interesting implications,” Arthur says, brow furrowed. “I mean, there are mirror tricks, but those are perceptual illusions, not… Yeah, Ari, this is a new one.”

She shrugs, quietly pleased.

***

Since he had a nap, Yusuf takes the first two-hour watch that night, starting at ten o’clock subjective time. Then Arthur, then Eames, then Eames will wake Ari at four.

The only issue with this perfectly sensible plan is the supposition that she’ll be asleep at four.

On the top bunk nearest the door—it has the prettiest bedspread; Arthur’s on the lower one—Ari curls on her side. She’s mentally and emotionally exhausted, if not physically so, and sinks quickly into a sort of twilight sleep.

At some point, though, she must shift and stretch out, lying on her back, because she feels herself falling, falling, supine, wind whistling past her ears and snatching at her clothes, and she’s been falling for forever until forever ends and she’s still falling—

She bolts upright in a cold sweat, gasping. Her totem, under her pillow, is useless; it’s a solution for a different problem. The moment she realizes its pointlessness, she shoves it back under the pillow, before she drops it off the bunk or something stupid. But it’s okay, she’s safe, she’s fine—she counts breaths until she feels steady and then lies back down, on her stomach this time.

It happens again, the endless fall—infinite, terminal velocity, weakening in her old age as she falls and falls and falls—until she sits straight up, panting. It takes longer for her to talk herself down this time, but she does it, and eventually curls into the fetal position with her arms locked around her own knees under the bedspread.

The third time, she wakes up hyperventilating and, in the tiny portion of her awareness that remains lucid and observing, decides she’s done with this shit.

She half-climbs, half-falls down from the bunk and staggers to the bathroom, where she sits on the tile and counts, counts, counts, counts, until her breathing is steady. She drinks ice-cold water straight from the faucet, then sticks her entire head under the tap.

Yusuf is on one of the couches, playing solitaire; she picks up the blanket she’d left on the other couch earlier, wraps it around herself, and collapses. He looks up. “Ari. Are y—” He takes in her dripping hair and the rest of her—in the bathroom mirror, she’d been paper-white, sweat darkening her hairline. “What can I do?”

“Cards,” she says. “Can—give me a pack? I’m too—”

He nods and gets up. When he returns, he’s got a new deck of cards and Arthur. “Changing of the guard,” Yusuf explains as he hands her the deck. “Hope you’re feeling better soon.”

Arthur looks at her, puzzled and then worried. “What happened?”

She manages a truly terrible excuse for a smile. “Falling dreams,” she replies. “Not like—not full dreams. Like—like extended hypnic jerks. You know how if you’ve been on a plane all day you sometimes still feel like you’re in the air? When you try to go to sleep? That. But falling. I—whatever.”

Without speaking, Arthur gets her a glass of water.

She spends the rest of the night playing two-deck War with Arthur, then with Eames. As four A.M. rolls around, she’s steady enough to start building card houses, which occupies her until the sun’s up. As the guys wake and start making or finding breakfast, hitting the bathroom, whatever, she reflects that she still doesn’t quite feel tired. She has three cups of tea and talks to Yusuf about dream pharmacology—how does caffeine work in a dream? Does alcohol work? Why? How? He starts a bunch of answers with, “Well, that’s really more of a philosophical or ontological quibble, but…” before launching into his theories. Most of them rely on shitty dream logic, although he also mentions the holographic principle and multiverse theory, which she supposes are better than nothing. 

Thus ends the first twenty-four hours of the dream.

The first hour and twelve minutes, topside.

***

The projections remain frozen; shortly after noon, Arthur and Yusuf head out on their scouting expedition. They don’t intend to get further than a mile in any direction from the bunker, and they both dream themselves into Kevlar before they go, but Ari finds herself drawn tight with secondhand nerves and—okay—tiredness.

“You look a bit peaky,” Eames says, half an hour after they leave. She’s fucking around in a sketchbook and Eames is practicing card-shuffling tricks—or just showing them off; she’s not sure. “You’ve not slept, have you?”

Ari shrugs. “I'm sleeping topside."

***

“Nothing,” says Arthur, the moment he and Yusuf are back inside with the door triple-locked. “Just—this, this same thing. Cars everywhere, none of them moving. Projections all watching the sky. We covered a good square mile, and it was just… more of this.”

“That school bus we passed,” Yusuf says. “That was a sight. Forty little kids lined up all down the side, all like this—” He flings his own head back, mouth open.

Ari narrows her eyes. “There’s no school in the city.”

“Fischer thinks there is,” Arthur replies. “So there is.”

Sloppy shitty dream logic.

***

When she tries sleeping—she swaps bunks with Arthur, in case she needs to get up and move; he’s pointed out that her falling six feet onto the concrete floor wouldn’t be pleasant, considering their generally limited capacity to treat more than minor injuries—she goes hypervigilant, against the possibility that she might resettle on her back and start falling again. She lies there for two hours, curled on her side and staring at the wall. When Yusuf comes to wake Arthur for his watch, she resigns herself to sleeplessness and gets up. Instead of cards, Arthur sets up one of the chessboards; she wins three out of five against him, two out of five against Eames. During her own watch, she plays against herself.

***

Sometime in the middle of the third day, halfway through her fifth cup of caffeine and while Eames and Yusuf are patrolling, Ari is struck by the view out the windows. The material hasn’t changed—unmoving cars, unmoving projections—but the light is different. Things look faintly luminous. Asphalt, sidewalk, paint on the cars, hubcaps, the pink streak in Glitter Combat Boots’s hair, all slightly more saturated, with faint halos around them. “Hey,” she says to Arthur. “Does outside look funny to you?”

He gives the view a cursory glance and says, “Funny how?”

“Like—like the beginning of an acid trip.”

He peers at her, brow furrowed, and then gets up and goes to the windows, looks more carefully. “Could you describe what you mean qualitatively?” he asks.

“It’s…brighter,” she replies, but uncertainly; after all, she hasn’t slept in something like fifty subjective hours. “And there’s sort of halos around lights and reflections.”

Ari is starting to worry she’s losing it when Arthur says, after a long silence, “It does look weird.”

Eames and Yusuf have nothing new to report, but Eames does say the sunlight was awfully bright.

She doesn’t even pretend to go to bed; she’s drunk nothing but black tea all day.

***

When the sun comes up that morning, there’s a haze on everything outside the bulletproof glass. Dreamlike, softened, the brightness nudged up again.

At eight A.M., the first projection vanishes. Just—there, and then gone. Ari yelps when she sees it.

“The—the skinny redheaded one in the stupid hoodie—he was the front-seat passenger in the black Honda,” she says, when the other three look at her. “He—he’s gone.”

“What was stupid about his hoodie?” Eames asks, as he goes to the window.

“It was stupid,” she replies.

Eames glances at her like he’s doubting her sanity—pushing seventy-two hours of sleeplessness; it’s no wonder—but says, “Bloody hell,” at the same time that Arthur mutters, “What?” and Yusuf says, “Hm.”

“Suit guy just disappeared,” says Arthur to her over his shoulder.

She’s not crazy.

He and Yusuf go scouting again—really, Ari should be scouting, too, but whenever she says so, the guys get all concerned. She showers while they’re gone and changes into clean clothes, then goes back to her blanket on the couch.

“Little bird,” Eames says from the kitchenette, and she glances up and realizes she has absolutely no idea how long she’d been sitting there. “You were tipping,” he says, sitting down at the opposite end of the couch. “Idea for you. On the sofa, if you’re on your side facing out, you can’t roll onto your back.”

“Holy shit,” says Ari. “You’re a genius. Holy shit, Eames.”

“I hardly think—”

“No, shut up, you’re a genius.” She dreams that the pillow from the top bunk where she’d not slept the first night is next to her, and then it is; Ari pushes it along the couch until it’s against Eames’s leg, then lies down on her side, curled under her blanket and the couch cushion firm against her back. “You’re brilliant,” she says, and Eames might start to reply, but she’s asleep before he does.

***

By sunset that day, half the projections are gone.

By morning the day after, half the cars are gone.

That afternoon, the last of the projections in sight vanishes.

Just before sunset the fifth day, the street is empty of cars.

Arthur looks out the window and says, “I’ve never seen—” Then he stops and shakes his head.

“Could be Fischer’s slipping into deeper sleep, past REM,” says Yusuf musingly. “Considering his stress state—he honestly may be simply too tired to populate the dream.”

“But is he still here?” asks Eames.

“Maybe, maybe not. We’d have to go looking, and that—well, you know the risks.” Yusuf has the grace to look sheepish.

“We’ll monitor from here,” says Arthur firmly. No one argues.

The night of day six, they stop with the watches; the morning of day seven, the world is simply watercolor mist outside the grilles.

***

She tries sleeping on a bed the seventh night.

She shouldn’t have. Eames notices, talks her down, helps count breaths. Then he guides her to the couch, lets her use his leg as a pillow, and strokes her hair until she falls asleep.

***

No one sleeps on the eighth night, although “night” has become a fuzzy concept because there’s no longer a sun. They play poker instead. Ari is horrible at it.

Five minutes before seven in the evening on the ninth day, two hundred hours in, they all sit down on the couches—Ari in her blanket, which she’s going to miss deeply—and wait.

At seven precisely, Arthur blinks out of existence. A minute later, Yusuf; thirty seconds after, Eames. Ari starts counting and reaches nineteen—

***

Yusuf bolts to the lavatory the second he’s got his line out. Ari does Saito’s, while Arthur gets Cobb’s and the nurse/flight attendant carefully removes Fischer’s.

The PASIV disappears. An hour later, Fischer wakes up, looking no more or less disoriented than could be expected on a flight passing the international date line, and calmly requests a cup of coffee. He drinks it black.

Ari is twitchy and frazzled, although she knows she looks perfectly Ariadne; she can’t settle to anything, reading or sketching or doing a stupid crossword puzzle, and ends up staring out the window, in between glances at Cobb. She’s furious with him, furious with herself for being furious with him—grief fucks people up—and desperately worried, despite everything, despite his sneaking them into the Limbo trap and his dad pants and his improvisation and his litanies of just one thing you need to know and his cryptic bullshit and his speech cadence like a hack poet.

She wants him to wake up. She wants his kids to grow up with a father.

She wants to punch him, more than a little.

The situation with Saito is far simpler. She wants him awake, alert, freakishly competent, and paying her. And possibly arranging her free private jet to Ontario.

Twenty-two minutes before their scheduled arrival, Cobb’s eyes snap open. Behind her, Ari hears Arthur exhale sharply through his nose—a laugh. Cobb looks back at him, white showing all the way around his irises, then at her.

And then Saito shifts in his seat, picks up his phone, and places a call.

Chapter Text

Ariadne Finch, as she leaves the first-class cabin, is all shiny hair and crisp linen and refreshed makeup hiding an absolute motherfucker of a tension headache. It takes seeing the crowd of travelers at the gate clutching paper cups for Ari to identify the headache, belatedly, as caffeine withdrawal—not that she’s not tense, but it’s her second seven A.M. since she left the hotel in Sydney, and she’d been too nervous for breakfast before the flight. With some surprise, she notes that she’s also fucking starving.

However, she can get coffee and feed herself whenever and wherever she wants, later.

Cobb getting through immigration is a one-time event.

If he does.

If Saito actually came through.

It’s odd that he was immediately on the phone after he woke—and yes, she’d told the other three in the bunker, repeatedly, that she thought Cobb would remember to do what he said he would, as his not-wife died in his arms of the bullet she herself had put in the projection’s chest, but recognizing the support for a desperate hope is entirely different from having that hope proven right. Then again, she thinks, maybe the immediate post-Limbo phone call wasn’t odd. It’s Saito, after all; he might have just remembered he wanted to buy a new lake house, including lake.

The point that Ari’s dream-addled brain is trying to get around to is that Saito hasn’t had any chance, so far, to learn whether the inception was actually completed. The only indicator of success (really, a contraindicator for catastrophic failure) available to him has been all six fellow first-class passengers being alive and peaceful when he woke—that, and the fact that he woke at all. But the deal, the agreement, was success. Completion of the job, in exchange for the disappearance of the charges against Cobb. That was the arrangement that Saito and Cobb had had an entire cryptic-bullshit argument about on the first level, even as Saito was working on dying of his bullet to the chest.

She has to know. She has to see it through—see Cobb stamped through, or see Cobb cuffed.

Outside the gate, she checks the pockets of her jeans (her totem, slightly textured at the base, just the wrong weight) and her bag (Ariadne’s wallet and passport), dawdling; Eames passes her without acknowledgment, playing with change and poker chips and whatever else in one of his pockets. When Cobb emerges from the jet bridge and moves out into the main terminal, walking slowly and deliberately like he’s reminding himself how his body works—or like he’s committing it to memory, step by measured step, through his last half-hour as a free man—she tails him. At a discreet distance, of course, but they’re heading to the same place anyway.

Ariadne looks around the terminal to reacquaint herself with LAX; Ari looks for the team. Eames is nearest on her right (well, it’s not me that doesn’t get back to my family). Arthur’s to her left, a little ahead, checking one of probably at least four cell phones on his person—not that she has room to criticize, considering she’s got two on her and a third in her checked suitcase. Yusuf ambles along behind. Saito paces steadily, impassive, but there’s a strange set to his face.

Robert Fischer strides right through their scraggly formation with clear purpose; within ten seconds he overtakes Cobb. Encouraging, Ari thinks, for a guy who’s been kicked off a skyscraper recently. Then again, there’s Yusuf’s theory about Fischer’s slip into deeper sleep. If that’s the case, his lucidity in the dream wore off a little under four topside hours after the drip started; Fischer may just feel good after his nice nap.

No way to know. She hates not knowing.

The lines at immigration are long for this hour, but they’re moving smoothly. Ari joins the line to the left of the one Cobb’s sleepwalked into and mentally kicks herself when she realizes that she’ll have her back to Cobb while he presents his passport. Amateur. Eames, in the line on Cobb’s right like a smart tail, is looking at her, face blank but eyebrows raised, because he’s an asshole. On the other hand, for her first con—

She smiles at herself. Her first.

“Pleasant trip?” asks the officer as she hands over the booklet.

“Gave me lots to think about,” Ariadne replies quietly, still smiling, and Ari’s telling the truth. Six feet behind her, a stamp thuds onto the desk.

As she turns, casual, just shifting position after a long flight, she hears the official who just approved Dominic Cobb’s arrival in the States say, “Welcome home, Mr. Cobb.”

The lines at the corners of his eyes look—for the first time—like they might be there from laughter, as Cobb says, “Thank you, sir.” He takes his passport and glances past the officer, meets her eyes. Gaze direct and clear, he gives her a tiny nod, then moves off to baggage claim.

Saito came through.

Saito came through, simply because he woke up.

The second she has her passport back, she turns on her job phone—that is, the one from Miles, not the burner Arthur handed out last night (last night, Jesus). Just after she collects her Samsonite (Arthur and Eames have both grabbed luggage carts; what the hell did they even pack?), the phone buzzes.

From Miles: I seem to have regained my son-in-law. My eternal thanks. Will be in touch

Ari smiles all the way through customs.

***

Halfway to the shuttle for the taxi stand, Saito himself appears at her side, matching her pace. “Miss Finch,” he says. “Perhaps I—if—that is—”

Saito, uncertain. Because today hasn’t been weird enough. And there are sixteen-plus hours of it left to get weirder, now that she’s on this side of the planet.

She looks up at him; his eyebrows are angled in a way she hasn’t seen before. “Sir?”

He glances at her sidelong—similarly uncharacteristic, but his expression is blank again, and when he speaks, his words are smooth. “There is much I wish to discuss with you. Yet it seems an imposition, perhaps, to request the pleasure of your company immediately following such… extensive travel.”

She thinks about that. He fell to Limbo within ten minutes, topside, and surfaced more than twelve hours later; she can’t even estimate a conversion rate. Slowly, carefully, Ari says, “From what I understand, your journey was a lot longer than mine.”

“Clarification of which,” he replies, “is among what I seek. But it was a very long flight in the normal way of things, and if you wish to rest—”

A laugh rises in her throat; she coughs instead but can’t stop the smile as she says, “Sorry, I know this is a little, um, flippant, but—sir, if you’re in a mood to socialize, I have no excuses.”

Saito smiles back.

“And I’ll admit—” Ariadne glances down at the toes of her boots, then back up. “I’m a little curious. About your trip.”

“Breakfast, then, perhaps.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

Even more wonderful: Saito’s limo in this country includes coffee service.

***

“It is incongruous, I am aware,” Saito says in the car, as Ari downs her first cup of coffee as quickly as she can while avoiding scalding herself and slurping audibly, “but trans-oceanic flights to America instill in me a craving for blueberry pancakes.”

She blinks.

“Unfailingly,” he adds, and the corner of his mouth lifts; he’s looking out the window. His suit jacket is hanging off one of those little hooks no one ever uses unless they have a suit to hang up. “I am relieved to find that this holds true.”

Okay, valid. “That does seem reassuring.”

“Nearly a totem.” Saito glances at her then—gauging her response? “Except, in Limbo, I still wanted them.” He shakes his head once, one back-and-forth motion of his chin, and says solemnly, “Over one hundred years without a satisfactory blueberry pancake.”

The laugh bubbles out of her before the words fully register, and she swallows it fast. “A—a hundred?”

“On the third day of the seventh week of my hundred and fourteenth year, a man with a pistol and a child’s spinning top washed up on the western shores of my compound.” Saito watches her for a moment, grave, and says, “But I did not begin counting until night first came. Which required—” He stops.

After a moment, Ari says, “You might remember I was—down there. For… as long as I needed to be. The light never changed, until the storm kicked up.”

“As long as you needed to be,” Saito repeats, and looks back out the window. “If one were to believe in a just world, in a universe that recognizes and meets the necessities for the nurturing of the soul. But I cannot see the need for one hundred and fourteen years.”

She sips her coffee. Fifty years, as estimated by Cobb, when he was with Mal, sounded enough like torture—even if you knew where you were, even if you were with the love of your life, if loves of one’s life exist, on which matter Ari is a firm skeptic. The eight days in the bunker were bad enough, and not just for the sleeplessness and the tension and the first hour or so of uncertainty regarding whether Eames was about to actually kill her. The wear of it, the stuff that made it untenable for longer than absolutely necessary, was the way nothing had a smell, and how things only tasted right if they were straight salt (ramen) or sugar (Pop-Tarts) or bitter (over-steeped tea), and how even textures weren’t definite. Every piece of fabric in the place had a certain and limited resolution; if she examined the knit of a shirt too closely it started feeling like an extruded thing, plastic, an uncanny-valley approximation of cotton jersey. She supposes that, with sufficient time, one could learn to dream smells, and therefore flavors, but—god, how much time? And half of it would have to be topside, comparison…

The Pevensie children come to mind. Adults, political powerhouses in Narnia with two decades of life under their jeweled belts, falling back into the wardrobe and their child-sized bodies in an instant. Psychosis waiting to happen, just like dreamshare—

“I did make use of the time,” says Saito, as offhand as he can ever sound, and she shakes herself out of the reverie. “By the twentieth year I had built my palace, and by the fiftieth I had conquered the land.”

“What land?” she asks. Not Narnia.

He nearly smiles again. “I ask myself that now. Ah,” he says, and begins rolling his left sleeve up to his elbow. “We will arrive shortly, Ms. Vickers.”

Ari freezes.

It had been a distinct possibility. She had calculated the odds of it in Sydney. Saito has people; it stands to reason that one of those people would be an Arthur, a point, the person whose job is to know things.

“I apologize for having startled you.” Saito works on his other cuff, folding it over on itself with meticulous attention. “It seemed the most expedient manner to dispose of the pretense.”

“Oh, it’s—it’s fine.” Expedient, for fuck’s sake. I bought the airline. She swallows again and looks outside—it’s sunny, warm, early summer in southern California. Ari eases out of her own jacket and untucks her shirts, pushes their sleeves up; she can always duck into a bathroom and take off the inner layer. This idle line of planning for a hypothetical situation helps her say, very honestly, “I should warn you, sir, I’m not very much like Ariadne Finch. At all.”

“I depend on it,” he replies, and the limo pulls into the parking lot of an honest-to-god IHOP.

Ari resigns herself, finally, to the knowledge that every time she decides she’s finished with being surprised, she’ll be proven wrong.

***

Over Saito’s blueberry pancakes (the look on his face as he chews the first forkful—although she imagines she looks similar throughout the meal; flavors, after a week of first-order approximations, are flat-out astonishing) and Ari’s combo involving a little of everything in a respectable diner breakfast, she summarizes all that happened after—during and after—Saito’s death on the third level. He remembers her sketchily outlining the plan for deliberately entering Limbo, and her and Eames bullying Cobb into actually doing it.

And, afterward, Eames tasking him with watching Fischer’s body, protecting it from the projections, and Saito giving him shit as blood bubbled in his lungs.

“The memory remained with me throughout,” he says, and sips his coffee. “At varying levels of detail. During the worst times, I only remembered that there was a man to whom I had an obligation.”

“But other times you recalled more?”

“In better times, I remembered that the man’s name was Cobb, and that a young woman whose manner I trusted had once planned a feasible extraction—a rescue, although ‘extraction’ was the word that came to mind most frequently—of a man from… an in-between place. It is difficult to explain—or perhaps not.” His eyebrows furrow. “In natural dreams, those that we remember, our roles are immediately obvious to us. The context is established without establishment. Perhaps the same holds for Limbo. For those who fall into it, that is, as opposed to entering deliberately.”

In her last natural dreams, she had simply known that she had constructed a maze, and that someone wanted to tell her she was doing it wrong. “And your context—”

“A would-be emperor of a land from which I was exiled. It was logical to claim this new land as mine.”

She tips her head, suppressing a smile, and then remembers she’s not Ariadne anymore. “No disrespect, sir, but—that’s really not a surprise.”

Saito laughs, actually throws his head back and laughs from his belly, and Ari finds herself grinning as she forks up more strawberry-decorated French toast.

When he speaks again, he says, “You mentioned several things of interest in the warehouse below.”

Before Yusuf had sent them down to the second level, Ari had designated herself as Saito’s ad-hoc caretaker. She helped Eames with cleaning and bandaging the bullet wound, before Eames had to start prepping his forge of Browning. After, she had nothing in particular to do, when she wasn’t coaxing information word by tortuous word out of Cobb and suppressing the desire to just punch him until he cried. The most useful she could be, she figured, was by just hanging out with Saito, helping him move when he wanted to, talking to him when he was more lucid. Now, eight days later—oh, whatever—she can’t immediately recall anything she said to him alone, only his improvisational cryptic-bullshit call-and-answer with Cobb. “Like what?”

“Having had the same sort of wound.” An eventually fatal shot to the chest, that’s right. From there to dream deaths, realizing that their first ones—where they actually woke up from lucid dreams, knowing that they’d died—were each via masonry to the head; Saito’s was during the extraction attempt that had made him choose Cobb for the inception, two levels deep. “It is an odd position in which we find ourselves,” Saito continues, “with such experiences in living memory.”

“I think it’s odder that we’re both new to the industry,” says Ari, “and yet we’ve also both had similarly, um, dramatic introductions to it. Odder in a good way, I mean,” she says quickly. “I—I mean…” Quick: figure out a way to say ‘Arthur killed me about a hundred different ways five days ago’ in public. “I did two days of training with Arthur, which is when I had that experience, and while he was obviously sympathetic, it was also—obvious that he’s used to it.” Laughing at her, laughing at himself, with a bullet embedded in his shoulder. His casual proficiency with a sort of impressive and mostly just terrifying assortment of bladed weapons. It doesn’t get any less fucked up, yes, but… “I hadn’t anticipated being able to speak to someone about it who hasn’t been in the field for years.”

Saito says, “We are lucky.”

“We’re really lucky.”

“One of the reasons I ensured Mr. Cobb would be welcomed here.” Saito’s plate is empty; he dabs at his mouth with a paper napkin. “That is, the realization, within a moment of waking, that still knowing the names of my fellow passengers was entirely because of who my fellow passengers were. Your quickness and your kindness, Mr. Cobb’s persistence, Arthur’s rigor and expertise, Mr. Kotadia’s knowledge, although that was… misapplied. Even Mr. Fischer’s admirable courage. And, of course, Mr. Eames’s unique skills and, eventually, his trust, hard-earned though it was.”

“Eames was very impressed with your work on the third level, sir.”

He smiles at that. “So,” he says, “you may understand, when you have a moment to check, my decision to increase your fee by some percentage. It is my appreciation, and my acknowledgment of your superlative skills.” Thoughtful, he adds, “Although I may have given Mr. Kotadia’s bonus to Mr. Cobb. For his children.”

“You know, after that whole… I don’t think Yusuf would have any problem with that.”

“Good,” Saito says darkly. And starts laughing again, like he’s told the funniest joke in the world.

***

Following Arthur’s instructions, she plugs the burner phone in to charge and turns it on only once she’s in her suite, two hours after she’s left the airport. She showers, dresses—Ariadne’s light-wash bootcut jeans, her Justice t-shirt—and considers what to do with her day that doesn’t involve sleeping. Then the burner phone buzzes; it turns out to be the third text message in half an hour (showering with things that smell nice—she’d let herself linger).

Arthur, to her, sent thirty seconds after she booted the burner phone: Saw you just checked in. Doing OK?

Eames, to her and Arthur: how botu that raincheck

Arthur, to her and Eames: It’s not even noon. Why am I not surprised? But I’m in. A?

She smiles at the thread and replies: I should be sick of you both but yeah where

To Arthur alone: doing fine, technocreep. had breakfast w S

A couple minutes afterward, while she’s checking her personal email for the first time in four days—her dads were overjoyed to know she was traveling—Eames sends, little bird :( on 2nd thought rather b out n moving, its lovely here. darling find us something nice

Arthur: No.

Three minutes after that, Arthur sends an address.

Half an hour later—she walks over in her own sneakers, taking her time, because she can, because she’s in the real world (bishop in her pocket) and no one’s mental subprocesses are trying to kill her—she drops her bag next to Arthur’s messenger and stands, hands on hips, over its owner, who’s lying on the grass with his arms behind his head and eyes closed. He’s wearing shitty faded-to-hell jeans with holes in the knees and a shirt with the Nine Inch Nails logo. The Chucks are back; the pomade is gone.

“You’re in my sunlight, jackass,” Arthur says, half-scowling. When he opens his eyes after she fails to move, he laughs. “Shit. Thought you were Eames.”

“Different jackass,” she replies, shrugging. “Guess where I went with Saito.”

He narrows his eyes. “One of those two-fifty-a-head tasting-menu-only molecular gastronomy shitshows.” He considers, and adds, “Chef and waitstaff paid quintuple rate for off-menu breakfast stuff eight hours before opening.”

“We went to IHOP,” she says, and Arthur’s eyes narrow further. “Saito told me the one thing he missed the most while he was away was blueberry pancakes.”

“Blueberry—you’re full of it.”

“Am not. Check the microchip you planted in my job phone.”

His eyes widen immediately. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Your soldering needs work. Nice shirt.” Remembering his MP3 collection, she smirks. “You’re not one of those superfans who calls them halos, are you?”

He opens his mouth, says nothing, and closes it.

“You are, oh my god—” She’s grinning. “You totally are, you have the whole collection, you have them categorized by number, you have a—a fucking shrine to Trent Reznor in your house—apartment, whatever, I don’t even know, but you totally do—”

“I don’t know how you manage, but you’re even more of an asshole than Eames.” But he’s grinning back up at her upside-down. And he doesn’t deny it.

“Arthur, you flatterer,” says Eames, walking up with his hands in the pockets of his khakis. His shirt is dark red, short-sleeved, open to the second button, and tucked in. Standing a little downhill, at Arthur’s feet, he glances down at himself, then between the two of them. “Did I miss a memo? Was there a dress code?”

“Nah, you’re just a fucking square,” Arthur replies easily. His smile goes more than a little evil. “Happens when you hit thirty, I hear.”

“Remind me again,” says Eames, looking skyward, “why I’ve decided to hang about with you lot. I could be anywhere I wish—”

“But who else will put up with you?” says Ari in Ariadne’s sweet earnest way.

He puffs up in dramatized indignation and then all he actually says is, “I’m shocked, Ari, really; you haven’t mentioned professionalism yet today and here you are in a techno shirt.”

“Professionalism can go fuck itself.”

Eames looks genuinely delighted to hear it. “Progress, little bird! I’m—”

“And Justice is electrohouse.”

“I’m sure that means something, I’ve just not the least idea—”

Ari can’t, just can’t make herself care about correcting Eames’s understanding of electronic dance music. Instead, she nudges Arthur’s shoulder with the toe of her sneaker. When he looks back up at her, she ensures her expression is perfectly neutral before she says, “Tag.”

He blinks.

Solemn, she informs him, “You’re it.” When she takes off sprinting—because, really, fuck professionalism for the rest of this stupid eternal day—Eames’s shout of a laugh drowns out Arthur’s swearing.

***

After they’ve played tag like a group of kindergarteners and wandered through a couple sculpture gardens, they argue (more accurately, Ari watches Eames and Arthur argue) about where they should go to eat. They end up at a dive bar—but it’s LA, Arthur mutters to her, which means it’s actually a freaking nice bar that’s playing the role of a dive bar, which you can tell because of the fucking price point, but she’s taking a week-long vacation from giving a shit about budgeting, because, in case she needs to remind herself, she’s got an account with her legal name on it and a seven-figure balance. Eames is starting to bitch about the lost art of the proper pint when Ari stills.

Her bag (Ariadne’s, but the black leather is versatile; it’s going to become part of her regular rotation) is in her lap, and Ariadne’s yellow wallet is in her hand, and she just remembered Ariadne Finch’s age.

And, more importantly, her birthday.

To make absolutely sure, because the International Date Line has messed up her internal calendar, she opens the wallet and checks Ariadne’s California driver’s license. Then the burner phone, to confirm the actual date.

“Ari?” says Arthur. “What’s up?”

She smiles pleasantly at him. “I have something to ask Mr. Eames.”

Eames looks around from one of the TVs. “What—hang on, little bird, what did you do to your arm?”

“IV incident,” Ari replies dismissively; she notes the flash in Arthur’s eyes as they drop to her elbow, the bruise currently at that stage where the blue is starting to fade to green and the red parts at the edges are going purple. “Pretty, right? That’s not my question, though. Remember today’s date?”

“June fifteenth,” says Arthur immediately, eyebrows furrowing. “What’s the problem?”

“Eames,” she says, in Ariadne’s upper register, “do you happen to remember my birthday?”

He touches his chin, thinking. “Let me… oh, it’s the sixteenth!” He beams. “Darling, we could have a party for our little bird’s birthday!”

“My twenty-first,” says Ari, still light. “Remember what country we’re in?”

The concern on Arthur’s face flips to amusement, then keeps going right into hilarity. “I’d say it was nice knowing you,” he says to Eames, fighting a grin, “but—”

Eames’s eyes go round when he puts it together. “Oh, shit.”

She puts her head down on the table and laughs herself stupid.

Ari is made of money now. Specifically, she’s made of money because she’s just helped pull off the greatest con in the history of dreamshare. But, because she’s tied her dreamshare ID to documents carefully forged by a Brit picking random numbers, she can’t buy herself a fucking drink to celebrate surviving with her sanity intact. At least, not for another nine hours.

A waiter stops at the table and says, “Party staring early, huh?”

She lifts her head and pulls herself together in record time. “You might say that,” Ari answers before either of them can reply, and orders a soda with aplomb.

***

“No, fuck off,” she says, the third time that Eames repeats his invitation for her to visit his hotel specifically to clean out his minibar (“and watch some terrible movie, I’m sure Arthur can find something horrendous with lots of quips and explosions—”). “I mean, thank you, of course, but fuck off. Amesbury-Scott’s gotta go to Vegas, right? You’ll make it up.”

Arthur hasn’t stopped grinning like an idiot; he’s managed to eat two burgers without losing the goddamn smile, but she’s in essentially the same state. “We’re in Pasadena for the day tomorrow—and any other time, Ari, I’d just tell Cobb you’re coming, but—”

“No, no.” Ari shakes her head. “The kids don’t need to meet someone new when they just got their dad back. But you guys— Both of you, get pictures.” Miles has sent her one already—Cobb, unaware of the camera, smiling his damn head off at Philippa, who he’s got one arm around, while James laughs in his lap. She’d almost gotten misty when she’d opened it, earlier in the day; Eames had muttered something cynical, but he’d also asked her to forward it to him.

Arthur’s grin softens, sweetens, as he says, “I’ll make sure we do.” Then it’s back to normal. “We’ll get you for dinner once we’re back tomorrow. For business, I gotta be in town Thursday, but I’ll get a car and we’ll head out Friday. Do the weekend. We’ll be cliché morons for Ariadne’s twenty-first.”

“Goddamn right, we will,” says Ari. “She’s gonna have a great time.”

“Lord, what have I wrought,” Eames asks, softly and rhetorically.

***

Despite everything—glee, relief, cabin fever, reality fever, Ariadne Finch’s impending ability to legally purchase alcohol in the United States of America—they split up before seven. At least, Ari goes back to the Omni by herself; Eames seems very serious about watching quip-explosions with Arthur.

It’s been the weirdest and absolutely the longest day of her life, and she’s actually physically tired from playing tag like a six-year-old and walking around the sculpture gardens and, in a nice way, from laughing, whether with Saito or Eames and Arthur. No dream perks, and the fatigue is a goddamn relief. She swaps her jeans for pajama pants, reads a bunch of Borges, and finally turns off her light after ten.

And fumbles to turn it back on, twenty minutes later, because she fell again.

To re-create the couch trick, she sets up a barrier of pillows and blankets and settles with her back to it. Which fails, because pillows are really shitty building materials.

She gets up then. “This is fucking stupid,” she says to the whirring of the air conditioner, and then considers the bed. It’s king-size—wider than she is tall, by a significant amount; her nascent idea would work with a queen, but less comfortably. The crucial part is that the bed has an actual headboard, not the typical screwed-to-the-wall crap. So she drags the blankets around, jettisons all but one of the pillows, and sets herself up perpendicular to the actual sleeping direction expected for beds, back to the headboard and the one pillow under her head.

And it’s useless. Too much space in front of her; she rolls and falls, and falls, and falls—

When she snaps awake this time, she escapes to the easy chair. She can’t even sleep just sitting in it like a normal person; it’s still too close to lying on her back. Curled sideways against the backrest, legs against her chest, she scrapes up about five hours of shitty uncertain cat-napping. The crick in her neck when she wakes is colossal.

***

After getting Arthur’s six A.M. text to the team (Update—All settled smoothly. F. at home. Service 2PM Thurs.), she showers, dresses in Ariadne-wear of trousers, boots, a lightweight button-down with the sleeves rolled, but no scarf, gets breakfast, and then spends her day at LACMA, sketching and re-caffeinating at intervals. She’s tired, sure, but it’s not bad, and dinner with Eames and Arthur is fantastic—a good restaurant, their stories about the afternoon with Cobb and his children (“And Miles, of course—he says hi”), and Ariadne Finch’s first drink in the US, a fancified version of a gin and tonic that involves lavender syrup. Then, because Eames is fucking Eames, the waitstaff bring out individual lava cakes; because the restaurant is nice, no one fucking sings. Especially not Eames, after Arthur kicks him (unless Ari is very, very mistaken).

She’s back at the Omni after two, middling drunk and pleasantly exhausted, and tucks herself into bed without thinking. That lasts something like forty-five entire minutes of a hazy nap before the falling starts.

Ari doesn’t bother with the bullshit experimentation this time; she retreats to the easy chair the second she can breathe normally. This time, she pads herself a little better—a full-sized pillow at the small of her back against the chair’s arm, a smaller decorative one at her shoulder, between her cheek and the chair’s back. She drags the entire king-size comforter over herself.

She’s still up before six, and it was still shitty sleep. It’d be pathetic to go whining to someone, and she’s not going to risk waking anyone to ask them to meet her for breakfast—besides, Yusuf was planning on being in Seattle by now—so she showers angrily, puts on Ariadne-wear, and brings Borges out for coffee. Camping out in the café until she’s finished the collection occupies her until half-past ten, when Miles texts the phone he gave her, asking if she’d like to have lunch with him in half an hour.

He picks her up in a blue Civic, and it’s so odd to see him out of the context of Paris that she’s almost shy before he starts demanding details from her. “I’m overjoyed, of course, that Dom’s making the most of it with the children, and he’s said nothing regarding the whole business, which is his decision, of course, but I may be going a little mad with curiosity—”

The restaurant he’s picked isn’t busy, and it has a little terrace in the back; they’re the only ones outside, so she gives him the full breakdown, from Yusuf’s bullshit to Cobb’s bullshit shooting Fischer to her idea for Limbo, and, because it seems related, what Saito said about his own experience. By the end of it, Miles is shaking his head, marveling. “Took to it like a duck to water, didn’t you. Despite the pit of vipers.” He sounds a little wistful, like he’s anticipating her disappearance into the underworld.

“I will finish my doctorate,” she says firmly, and Miles gives her a sharp look. “The work is interesting, yes, but it’s—it’ll be there, if I want it, later. I finish what I start.”

He nods, wistfulness replaced by growing approval. “You do. You will.”

Ari grills him for research on Limbo, because the forums are still useless about all of it. He provides author names, six of them, which should do nicely to start. Maybe some will even help with the stupid falling shit.

“Actually,” says Miles, “I recant my complaint regarding Dom saying nothing. He’s spoken of you.”

Ari blinks, sips her water, and says, “Really.”

“Mentioned you to the children last night, in fact, after the boys had left—” Arthur and Eames being the boys to anyone makes her smile. “Said you were a friend of theirs, and also someone who’d been very kind to him and helped him to see how he could come back. He seemed very careful about that phrasing.”

It feels like a candleflame in her chest, hearing that.

***

On Friday, Arthur texts after she’s been awake for five hours. Another night in the armchair—she tried propping herself upright on the bed and it wasn’t good enough, still too close to supine. Got a car. Pick you up at 11? Bring your luggage if you’ll be moving on.

It’s ten now. She can pack easily, but— wtf do people wear in vegas

He replies, You’re a millionaire. It’s capitalism central. Convert cash to wearables.

“Well,” she says softly to her room, “there’s that.”

Is she moving on? She decides she is, and texts Saito to take him up on his offer—repeated and detailed at some point over his pancakes—to arrange her transit from any major city to Ontario. The Muskoka Airport, specifically. From Vegas, she says, leaving Monday, if it could be done? But it’s Saito; it can be done. So she emails her dads and says that the job’s all wrapped and that she’ll be home in four days, details once she has them, and by the time she’s done sending the email, she has the details: she’ll catch a private jet from Northtown, late Monday morning, then land five hours later, within half an hour of her dads’ home. She forwards the itinerary.

Then the call with her dads while she’s packing— “A private jet? Honey, who you been working with?”

“Some really rich people,” she replies, grinning. “As it turns out.”

“And they’re sharing the wealth,” Tomas says. You have no idea. “We’ll pick you up there, lovely.”

“Can’t wait to see you both. And Harmony.”

At five minutes to the hour, Ariadne Finch checks out of the Omni, wearing dark-rinse denim and one of her silk shirts. She’s just starting to head outside to wait when Eames walks into the lobby.

“There you are,” he says cheerfully, and then, as he takes her Samsonite (she lets him, because why wouldn’t she?), he peers at her. “You’ve been sleeping a bit funny, little bird.”

The understatement is absurd, enough that she can get away with giving him a look like duh, we were dreaming for a week, without immediately being called on deflecting. Then she shrugs. “I always sleep weird.”

The touch between her shoulders is light; she glances back at him and is a little shocked by the concern in the set of his eyebrows. “There’s weird and there’s worrying, little bird, and this might be worrying, if it’s the same as it was below.”

Ari rolls her eyes. “Might,” she repeats. “Gonna need something a little better than might.”

He catches it, but instead of smiling or anything he just sighs through his nose. “Suppose there’s no chance you’ll agree to speak further of it.”

“None,” says Ari, and smiles at him as they stop at the back of a black sedan. “You’re learning.”

***

The drive is stupid, hilarious—there’s a pitched battle for control of the satellite radio before Ari and Arthur gang up on Eames, promising that if he touches the 90s alternative playlist he’ll have both of them to deal with. Arthur shatters speed limits into little sparkly fragments the whole way.

Vegas is delightfully overwhelming, tacky and glittery and utterly unapologetic about it. They check into the same hotel (in different rooms, on different floors, but Arthur is under a name attached to a UCLA grad student who met Ariadne Finch three days ago at the sculpture garden—photos and everything to corroborate—and Eames is under one who’s been the UCLA grad student’s Facebook friend for two years) and split, planning to meet for dinner in a few hours. Ariadne takes herself and her budget shopping for distinctly un-Ariadne cocktail dresses and cool heels.

After dinner, it turns out that Ari just doesn’t enjoy gambling that much—too much probability theory, she suspects. Fortunately, she really enjoys people-watching and drinking nice cocktails and wearing the hell out of the emerald-green sheath she found. She’s thoroughly entertained as she hangs with Eames, following him from blackjack to roulette to baccarat to craps. Every so often she goes to check out Arthur’s poker game, which is goddamn fascinating. When they’d played in the bunker, he’d been subdued—all of them had—but here he’s an entirely different person, one who wears the same waistcoat and tie but transforms all his crisp collected efficiency into charm. His Brooklyn accent comes out and he rolls his sleeves up to his elbows and cracks jokes and small-talks with the other players, gets into it with one about French film directors, and spins stories out of nothing. He’s a hell of a player, too.

Just one game, though. He takes his chips, wishes everyone a good evening, and cashes in. “This way,” he murmurs to Ari on their way to the bar, “they don’t get mad at me. House or humans.”

Which is reasonable enough, she supposes.

When they get back to the hotel, it’s closer to dawn than anything else and she’s both buzzed and tired enough to hope she’ll sleep, for fuck’s sake, especially because the room’s small and it doesn’t have decent secondary seating options.

She lies down and within ten minutes she’s punching the mattress as she talks herself down; half an hour after wedging herself against the headboard she’s staring off into space, hypervigilant. Ari gives up and takes out her laptop and starts searching the names Miles gave her. She dedicates a browser tab to each of the eleven papers that were published about Limbo and starts reading.

They’re uniformly shit.

Postulation and theory and sloppy analogies. None of them, none of the authors, had been there; they’d all just been theorizing about the most essential dream state, which seems like an oxymoron without another century or so of developments in neuroscience. General searches about recurring dreams are even worse, all wanting to talk about the symbolism of teeth and animals and invoking nine disparate mythologies per noun.

Regardless, it’s something to do, something to think about, until she apparently falls asleep sometime while sitting cross-legged on the armless desk chair, computer in her lap. Her burner phone buzzes against the dresser at half-past nine, and she jerks awake, catching the laptop just before it falls; Eames is inviting her to breakfast.

She tells him to give her twenty minutes, showers off her irritation with academia and the pins and needles in her legs, throws on a black scoop-neck t-shirt and jeans, and skips Ariadne’s makeup. Which was, evidently, a strategical error, because both Eames and Arthur are waiting for her outside the hotel’s restaurant. While they each cover up their immediate reactions with admirable speed, they look at her like she’s a bomb that requires defusing.

“Did you sleep at all?” asks Eames, just after the waiter’s brought out coffee.

She reaches for the sugar. “Yeah, couple hours.”

“And were those anywhere near a bed?”

Ari looks at him stonily and doesn’t answer, sugar dispenser upended over her coffee cup.

“Unspoken rule in the business,” Arthur says, a little more gently. “We look after our own.”

Setting down the sugar, she eyes him. “I’m not your own.”

“You’re a colleague,” says Eames. “As far as I care, we’re still on the job until Saito pays up. So, little bird, we’re perfectly justified in digging, no matter how much you hate it.”

“How long’s it been happening?” Arthur asks, and Ari glares at Eames. The shameless tattletale looks back, expressionless, and Arthur’s got that intent look she can’t bullshit through.

She sighs. “You were there for the start,” she tells Arthur.

His eyebrows go up. “Okay,” he says, “no. That’s—nope.” There’s an odd urgency in his tone. “Next time it wakes you up, you come to one of us. Rooms—”

“I’m not going to bug you just because I have a stupid brainworm,” she replies, exasperated. “You’re worrying for nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, is the thing.” Eames is playing offhanded, casual, but he’s watching her carefully. “There’ve been more than enough incidents. I’d rather your brain does its job by staying well in your head.”

That makes her blink. “As opposed to—”

“Figuratively?” Eames waves one hand. “Oh, off in orbit, somewhere past the asteroid belt.” He glances at Arthur.

Arthur returns the look and nods once, mouth pressed into a grim line. Then he settles back in his chair, faces her, and drawls, “In the more literal cases, they get splattered across walls.” He holds her gaze, face straight and still, as she swallows. “Contact me, or contact Eames, or just show up. 446 or 214.” A little softer, he adds, “Please.”

Shaken—she has absolutely no doubt he’s telling the truth—she has to clear her throat before she can say, “Okay.”

“Thank you,” says Eames. “Now, until the sun goes down…”

***

Ari falls straight back into full panicking consciousness at three o’clock that night, less than an hour after she’d changed out of her second cool cocktail dress. It’s one of the worst yet—feeling her muscles attenuate from disuse, her clothes wearing into fragments, while still fucking falling, air whistling past her ears. The leftover horror—the worst kind of resignation, knowing there would be no end, exactly like it had been in Limbo before she had slammed into her body on the floor of the crumbling hospital—has her shaking too hard to speak, so she skips anything like a call and just texts them both, once she’s convinced herself to breathe again. fell agn

She doesn’t have the coordination to change into jeans and just leaves her plaid pajama pants on, but she fumbles the fucking Cornell hoodie over her head. The last time she’d worn the sweatshirt was the second night at Dana’s house, a week ago, although it feels like a month, and the fabric still smells like cigarette smoke.

The burner phone buzzes as she gets lost in the stupid hoodie for a moment. Arthur. My room’s closer than E’s. Or I’ll come to you.

That—nope. need out, she replies. omw

Barefoot, clutching room key and totem in her hoodie pocket, she takes the elevator. Which is another terrible needles-up-the-spine moment of recall, but she can’t see herself managing stairs right now, even just two flights, as the rigidity she needs just to stand is nearly more than she can manage.

When she knocks at 446, Eames—not Arthur—opens the door about half a second later; he’s still wearing his suit trousers, although he’s down to his undershirt and barefoot. He looks pleased for an instant when he sees her, before she stumbles across the threshold and all but falls on him. Eames catches her before she faceplants and he must feel her muscles jumping under his hands because he just holds her up and murmurs, “Easy, easy,” until Arthur comes around the corner.

“Ari—”

“It’s bad,” Eames says to Arthur over his own shoulder.

She can’t even manage rolling her eyes at him. No shit, it’s bad.

Arthur nods, looking at her closely, and then goes to the minifridge. Eames says, “Here, come on,” and half-walks, half-drags her to the couch in the suite’s seating area, keeping one arm around her shoulders. A moment later, Arthur walks over holding out a glass of water for her, but the hand she extends to take it is jittering like a shitty old projected film. Arthur just nods, sits down next to her, and holds the glass for her to drink out of. After three swallows, he puts the glass on the end table.

“Can you say what it’s like?” he says. He’s still in shirt and slacks, but similarly barefoot. “Below you said hypnic jerks—”

“Shitty analogy.” Ari doesn’t know where to look so she just closes her eyes, pulls her legs up so she’s sitting cross-legged between the two of them. Her back is tight; if she doesn’t hold herself perfectly straight she’ll go to pieces. She swallows again, clearing her throat. “Look. Limbo—I don’t know if it was—if it’s just like that, but when I went off the roof, it wasn’t—I fell for forever. I don’t mean it felt like a long time, I mean it was endless, like—I got old while I fell, and I only didn’t starve to death because I couldn’t die, just—there was just falling, forever, for the rest of my life and past that, for—” Her voice is shaking out of comprehensibility and she stops herself, sits tense and still and panting for breath.

Arthur’s still quiet. “You woke up, though. You woke up on the third level.”

She tries to laugh; it turns into a cough. “Yeah. And fell more. I didn’t—that was—I can’t—” The words nearly choke her and she stops again.

“But in Limbo, it wasn’t a kick,” says Eames. “It was—death, but not immediately.”

“The opposite of immediately. Fuck—” Something new hits her. “What if Fischer’s going through—”

Arthur says, “He’s not. Intel says he’s doing fine.” Lucky little shit. He touches her wrist; reflexively she grabs his hand. “But you fall.”

“I resume falling,” she corrects, and opens her eyes to glance at him. “It’s—it’s like something in my head is still in Limbo and still in freefall, and I don’t—I can’t—it—fuck.” She lets her eyes close again and tips her head back, resting on Eames’s arm. “It won’t fucking stop. It won’t stop. I don’t know…”

Arthur taps his fingers on the back of her hand; she can’t tell if it’s a pattern. “It will stop,” he says, and sounds at least as murderous as he ever did in the dream.

“It’s gravity,” she snaps, eyes still closed. “You can’t shoot it.”

“Bet I could.” His tone is mutinous.

“Arthur, wonderful though that idea may be, let’s try practicality a moment.” Eames runs his hand along her arm. “Topside physical reassurances. To remind you your body can’t be falling. Train yourself out of it.”

“You think I haven’t tried—”

“I think you’ve tried by yourself, which isn’t terribly useful,” he says. “External verification is often necessary. So—you’ll remember, possibly, dreamshare professionality.”

Ari opens her eyes specifically to glare at him. “You’re trying to get me in bed with you.” She can’t tell if she’s joking, or about what, but if he’s suggesting—

Arthur moves on her other side. “For sleeping, idiot,” he says; she turns to glare at him, too. “You’re a mess. We can—”

“Jesus.” She scrambles to her feet, suddenly furious, embarrassed and hating herself and small and terrified and that’s pissing her off more than anything else, being this fucking scared. “I’m not—fuck, if I’d known you were going to get fucking—I’m not like this,” she insists. “I don’t need this shit, I don’t need sleep buddies—”

“Get this through your stubborn fucking skull,” Arthur snaps, and she’s so surprised she actually stops and stares at him. “You got nothing left to prove.” He’s leaning forward, glaring, fists clenched. “Not to us. You got this far, you’re good for the rest of your life, if you let people help you have one, and help’s the only way you’re gonna.”

He’s serious. And angry, or scared, or—she can’t parse the look on his face, not completely, and then it goes soft and miserable as he watches all the fight go out of her at once. She’d slump right onto the floor if Eames weren’t holding her up; she doesn’t know when he stood. Ari swallows and stares at Arthur and feels her lower lip tremble, then catches it in her teeth and bites until it bleeds. “There’s always something to prove,” she says raggedly. “There’s always—and you’re just—” She shakes her head. “You have no fucking idea.”

Eames moves closer, arms wrapping around her. “You’ve none either, you little twerp,” he says, so gently that she doesn’t understand him at first, the words so at odds with his tone. “People in the business—people have seen all the worst-case scenarios. And developed ways to avoid them, or survive them. And yes, a great number involve relying on teammates, or third parties who know the score. Perspective and grounding, or just checks on dangerous or destructive tics. This is part of the job, too. Arthur’s got a shit way of saying it—”

“Hey.” He just sounds tired; it’s protesting for form’s sake.

“—But it’s rather necessary,” says Eames, “that you get through it. And as you’ve got two perfectly good teammates right here—”

Ari drops her head forward, defeat settling on her like lead. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Just—I just want to sleep.” Her voice breaks.

“I know, little bird.” Eames strokes her hair once. “Arthur? Be kind. Back in two shakes.”

Wearily, Arthur smiles at that, gets up from the couch, and takes her from Eames, who flips back the covers of the bed and leaves. She lets herself sag against Arthur, tremors running beneath her skin, and he draws her to sit at the edge of the mattress. “I’m sorry,” he says, almost pleadingly. “I suck at this. The—talking, when it’s like this. You smell like Lucky Strikes.”

Ari feels obligated to protest. “They were yours.”

“Doesn’t mean I want my bed to smell like them,” he replies immediately.

“Know what? You’re right. You suck at talking.” She pulls off the hoodie—Arthur has to help her get a grip on the back collar—and rescues her totem from the pocket before Arthur chucks the sweatshirt onto the couch. He slings one arm over her then, holding her against his side like on the boulders under the bridge, letting her cling until the shakes finally dissipate. He stays quiet, chin on the top of her head and running one hand down her arm. When Eames comes back in jersey pants and his undershirt, holding a paperback that looks like a police procedural, Arthur pats her shoulder and gets up.

“You, little bird, lie down,” says Eames. “When you wake—” He doesn’t say if. “—We’ll both be here, and you will not try to stoic your way through. All right?”

“All right, all right, god, I get it—” But Ari lies down, curling onto her side. She tucks her bishop under her pillow—the bed is broad enough for three across, so she won’t be inconveniencing either of the others if she needs it. Before she can start wrestling with the covers, Eames pulls them up over her like she’s a little kid; as Ari starts to protest, he sits and leans back on the headboard, one hand smoothing her hair, and she gives up.

“This isn’t weakness, contrary to what you’ve concluded,” he says. “Had a month a couple years ago where I had a friend take all my ammunition every night so I wouldn’t shoot anything while I was still in the grip of it. You’ve been playing with fire for months on end and it’s only logic something in your head would get a little scorched eventually.”

“Psychosis waiting to happen,” she mutters.

“Well, it’ll have to keep waiting, then, won’t it.”

After Arthur comes back from the bathroom, he says, “Eames, you’re staying up?”

“’Til I’m done reading for the night, I figured.”

Arthur doesn’t say anything (he probably nods, but he’s behind her and she doesn’t care enough to move) and gets under the covers. If it is possible to be matter-of-fact about spooning, Arthur is—of course he is—looping his arm over her waist and scooting close without hesitation. “You’re okay?” he says, very quiet; she feels it more than she hears it. “And, really, I’m sorry—”

“I’m okay.” She’s fucking exhausted, is what she is, of sleep deprivation and panicking and falling and arguing, and if there’s any chance this ridiculous arrangement will actually let her rest… Her eyelids are heavy. “And shut up, all right?”

“Shutting up.”

Eames cracks his book and says, again, “If you wake, we’re here. Rather have an odd night’s sleep than see you going dotty.”

“Mr. Eames,” she replies, as sternly as she can, “I have never been dotty in my life.”

“Excellent. Wouldn’t want you starting now.”

She’s asleep before he turns his next page.

***

She does wake, several times. The first time, Ari elbows Arthur hard in the solar plexus; Eames catches her as she thrashes and talks her down, tells her to shut up when she starts gabbling apologies because it’s not like she’s shot anyone—which silences her in a hurry—until Arthur gets his breath back. “Had worse. Decent form, too,” Arthur says, and then resettles like nothing’s happened. Whenever she jolts awake, gasping, there’s one or the other or both of them, touching her hands or shoulders or hair, talking her through it until she’s out again.

Much, much, much later, Ari wakes naturally and Arthur’s the only one there, leaning against the headboard with his laptop in front of him. Far from the silk pajamas she’d envisioned however many weeks ago, he’s wearing a ratty t-shirt with a stretched-out collar and sweatpants. He’s resting one arm on her pillow and typing one-handed, nearly as quickly as he touch-types. “What time—”

“Little before noon,” he replies.

“Eames?”

“Getting coffee. You all right?”

She twists and settles on her back just to see what happens. Nothing does. “Yeah. I think.”

Arthur looks at her. “You slept three hours straight just now.”

That makes her blink, mostly because it means she spent the preceding six being a nightmare. “Shit. I’m—”

“If you say ‘sorry’ I’ll make Eames put every single one of your future fake IDs down as Ivy League alumni.”

She peers up at him. “My future ones, huh?”

Before he can do anything but look startled, the door clicks and Eames walks in with a take-out tray of coffee. “Ah, little bird. How are things?”

“Okay,” Ari replies, and sits up as Eames hands a cup to Arthur. “Arthur’s threatening me with fake ID logistics.”

He snorts as he sits at the end of the bed, at her feet. “One of his favorites. If it’s any traceable pattern, don’t worry; I haven’t gotten to be a good forger by leaving trails. Coffee?”

Ari reaches for the cup he holds out. Too much sugar, too much cream, exactly as she likes. She doesn’t understand why this weirdness is so not weird, why it seems so okay to be hanging out in a hotel room with Arthur in pajamas, having shared a bed with colleagues—but whatever. “Eames, you’re better than a forger,” she says. “Like, at least a five-ger.”

Eames stares at her, then folds over on himself laughing. Arthur lets his head fall back against the wall with an audible thunk. “Jesus Christ.” But he’s smiling. “Ari, that was the worst.”

“See, doesn’t matter where the pseudonyms went to school,” she says, “because they’ll all do puns. I was holding back on this job. Still want me to stay in the business?”

His smile broadens to a grin, and there might be a shade of relief in it as he replies, “Absolutely.”

***

It’s not as easy as all that; she ends up back in Arthur’s room that night with both of them. But each time she wakes it takes her less time to settle, and they’re both unfailingly patient. It helps that she doesn’t hit anyone this time.

She flies out the next day, five hours in another Cessna; she’s the only passenger. Her dads and Harmony meet her and she lets herself cry with relief at seeing them, at not having anything to do for the next two weeks but hang around and get ice cream. She gets her IDs and ships Ariadne Finch’s wardrobe back to Paris, scarves and silks and slacks.

That night, Monday night, she puts herself to bed in her old room—redecorated, but still her old twin-size bed. Ari jolts awake, breathing hard and already reaching for her totem, muttering to herself I’m okay, I’m safe, on solid ground, until she sleeps again. Rinse and repeat, a dozen times, but it’s not the horror it was in Vegas or in the bunker. Passage of time, or just becoming acclimated, or the right neurochemistry finally clicking, or whatever.

The point is, she wakes, lets her inner ear come to grips with her actual surroundings, and slips back into sleep; within three days in her dads’ home it’s routine.

She shops a bit. Just a bit—there’s a surprising amount of strategy in not letting on to her dads that she’s suddenly a few orders of magnitude wealthier. She keeps an eye on the news, refreshes business sites multiple times per day. On the second Thursday after the job, one week after Maurice Fischer was buried, Arthur sends the clear message, indicating that he’s certain Fischer doesn’t suspect he’s been the subject of a dream con.

On the second Monday, Fischer holds a press conference, Peter Browning at his side, to outline the dissolution of Fischer Morrow into its component businesses over the next three months. Robert Fischer looks good, healthier than he did on the flight, suit pristine down to the pocket square and drive in every motion he makes.

“When’d you start paying attention to that kinda crap?” Kevin says, glancing over Ari’s shoulder at her laptop screen. “Big business, multinationals, corporate whatever—”

“Well, maybe some of the component businesses are going to want HQ redesigns,” she replies, a little vaguely. “Opportunities, you know?”

The rest of her share arrives in her bank account ten minutes later; it’s both the remainder of her fee from Saito and the bonus she’d bargained with Professor Miles, all in one lump sum. Which answers a few of the remaining practical questions regarding that partnership.

She sleeps through the night, eight solid hours, three times in a row before she flies back to Paris.

***

“You think the EP’s gonna want their shit?” says Arthur, looking around the warehouse with his hands on his hips. It’s July and the warehouse is baking with trapped heat, but he’s wearing trim light-colored slacks and a narrow-striped chocolate-and-ivory shirt. After all, he’s on the job again.

“No way in hell,” Ari answers. Boy jeans and a slogan T-shirt for her. “Sam would kill me if they ever see it again.”

“So I can just arrange dumpsters,” he says, half under his breath. “Then we wipe the computers—except for your desktop. I’ll drive it over tonight. Yusuf will be…”

Eames and Yusuf arrive the next day via Istanbul. They have a quiet week, Ari wiping hard drives and prepping tech, Yusuf packing up his glassware and equipment, and Eames and Arthur (and later Ari) hauling larger furniture outside and into dumpsters. By the last day, all the laptops and cables and peripherals are donated to ENSBA (Arthur does the donating), Yusuf’s labware is en route to Mombasa, and he himself is on a plane following it. Every piece of newspaper is ripped from the windows; the only things left are the dividers and the furniture and equipment that had been there when they started.

Finally, the three of them swab every remaining surface, horizontal or vertical, with isopropanol, all wearing clean-room shoe covers. “So, little bird,” says Eames, pulling off his shoe covers outside and tossing them into the garbage bag Arthur’s holding open. “Your first job, done and dusted. How’s it feel?”

She looks around the warehouse from the propped doors, gaze lingering on the two inexplicable lawn chairs. It looks well and truly abandoned, like no one’s been there in years.

Like inception never happened.

But Fischer Morrow is breaking up, and Ari’s got a seven-figure bank account balance, and she’s built topological impossibilities and taco cities and planetoids and infinity bridges and mirror traps and Penrose steps. She’s spun through the minds of six other people, building and exploring and shooting as needed. She’s died hundreds of times and lived thousands more hours than she’s actually experienced topside.

She’s put a family back together, saved the sanity of three separate people, dipped into Limbo, lived to tell it.

Ari smiles. “Feels like I’m just getting started.”

Chapter Text

The thing about getting started, though, is that Ari is determined to start right, which, at her estimate, is going to take about a year.

Not just because she’s got her doctorate to finish, although that’s a fairly significant part of it.

In the weeks before Miles comes back to Paris and she has to return to the studio, she gets the groundwork set.

The day after Arthur flies to JFK (twelve hours after he tied off the last garbage bag and four hours after he, Ari, and Eames killed a fifth of Macallan) and Eames departs for Chisinau, Ari exchanges emails with four of Saito’s people and a friend who owes her a favor. The day after that, she arranges the integration of the cash from the job into her everyday established accounts, in amounts and under information that won’t raise flags. It takes her, one of Saito’s accountants, and her friend six hours in a booked hotel room to get the details hammered out. The friend, a web security expert she’s known since undergraduate, swears afterward, with thirty-odd bar patrons as witnesses, that she will never owe Ari a favor ever again.

The six hours include what to do with all of the money, although that’s halfway a solved problem. She sets it up so that half, exactly, gets split into bundles of twenty thousand a piece, each donated as soon as it’s accreted (now with legitimate paper trail) to one of a rotating score of organizations that plan to see the bitter end of fossil fuels and the halt—or at least the dramatic slowing—of anthropogenic warming. Clean energy development, off-grid power generation and water purification tech, charities and groups that work in disaster relief, legal funds that fight Big Ag and defend environmental protestors and all that good shit. It goes some way, though not far enough, toward mitigating her absolutely shameful carbon footprint in the month of June.

The other half, which remains sizeable—well, student loans come first, of course, but magically paying them all off in the blink of an eye would invite a lot of interesting questions. Instead, she schedules payments so that, one year after her thesis defense, she’ll be debt-free. Then she grabs a couple thousand euro for some really nice useful things she’s thought about budgeting for in the last three years, because she can, at the drop of a card, and because hoarding cash is pointless, stupid, and one of the main reasons the world’s as fucked as it is.

Ari gets a good haircut and a little bit of a wardrobe upgrade and not a single damn thing in it is red.

Now that Ariadne Finch exists as an entity with a passport who has spent a fair amount of money (and now that Saito is no longer directly footing Finch’s bills), she requires scheduled maintenance. Finch doesn’t do social media, because she doesn’t like tabloid coverage, but Ari sets herself weekly reminders to check Ariadne’s phone, which otherwise stays firmly in the safe in her closet. On top of that, there’s a monthly alert to drop a couple hundred euro on clothes or makeup (moving from the classic establishment shit to brands she knows are eco-friendly—who says Ariadne can’t have a tree-hugging revelation?) and update Finch’s Ecole records, thanks, again, to her hacker friend who will never ever request a favor of Ari ever again as long as she lives. Ariadne’s grades will remain excellent, although her studio leaders may note that she’s not big on group participation.

There’s also all of the shit she needs to learn, to set herself up in the business as a useful architect and field practitioner. The forums are littered with threads about non-useful architects, deadweight who stay topside and complain about artistic visions or people hired from agencies and kept ignorant.

Ari refuses to be one of them.

She wants to build dreamscapes, sure; she wouldn’t be pursuing a doctorate if she didn’t enjoy the process. The topological experiments she ran in her own time in the workshop have made her hungry, too. She wants to keep fucking around, folding space, wrapping it into itself, playing with exit points and shortcuts and wormholes. Hell, she wants to terraform, expand the dreamscape to planet-size and fucking geoengineer it. All of that is really just theory and staying hooked up with people who have access to PASIV devices, though, even for her more ambitious goals.

The major part of being useful is being worth taking under, as an assistant to a proper extractor or an on-the-fly escape artist or just an extra body running interference on projections. Which means she has to be able to hold her own against projections. And that means that, within a week of the warehouse scrub, she’s enrolled in two different martial arts classes at the gym near her apartment and become a member of a gun club, with weekly lessons alternating between handguns and rifles—sport shooting, target practice. She collects her paper targets after every session.

And she’s finally doing the level of organized research she’d really desperately wanted to get to the entire time she was making do with occasional JSTOR binges and forum rabbit-holes. Yusuf, the wonderful man, has hooked her up with chemists. Not as an active practitioner—she made that very clear to him—but as a bystander with no small interest in the science underlying dreamshare. About half a dozen neuroscientists and three pharmacologists, including Yusuf, have put their heads together and given her a proper curriculum of study. It’s goddamn glorious.

Plus, she finds Dana on the forums towards the end of July and promptly messages her to ask if the hay bales ever recovered, and to apologize in case Ari had bled on her floor (she doesn’t think she did, but she acknowledges her attention to detail was somewhat compromised at the time). That kicks off a whole thread of swapping screencaps and animated files of dreamspace architecture, interspersed with talking shop about design and mazes and geometry and, occasionally, weapons. Dana understands from the beginning that neither Ari nor Ariadne Finch is available for jobs; she’s sharp like that.

Really, considering all of that, it’s sort of a miracle Ari has her dissertation outlined by the time Dr. Miles calls her to his office in late August. Through her personal École email, she’d established that, now that she’s writing the damn thing, she will be doing all her twice-monthly meetings, plus some. At the end of the first face-to-face, she notes the tinge of relief in his ordinary tiny smile.

“I told you I’d come back, and I told you I’d finish,” she says as she packs up her messenger (a new one, black-on-black weatherproofed nylon, with cool hardware and a lifetime warranty). “If you’re still worried—”

“Not as such,” says Miles. “Not that you’ll abandon the program, no. But the prospect of a more… physically improbable application of your education using enough of your time that you have to lengthen your coursework here—I’ll admit I’m a little concerned.” He smiles, dreamily, and that is the only word that actually fits. “I do remember, you know. If the option—the technology—had been about when I was doing my own schooling, I don’t know that I’d have held course.”

Ari clips her bag shut and holds it in her lap. “I, um. Took some precautions, on that front, actually.”

He folds his hands on his desk and leans forward. “Really. Do tell.”

“Well.” She fidgets, zipping and unzipping the front pocket of her bag. “I’m not available to the business. Which I established by, um, telling one of my colleagues from the spring job that if they passed on my name—either name—or information to anyone else within the business before next June, I’d… take measures.”

Miles’s eyebrows go up. “Measures,” he repeats.

“Their fault they gave me the material.” Ari stands and shoulders her bag; she hears Miles laughing softly as she closes the door to his lecture hall.

***

The email from Cobb is in her Erebos inbox the next time she checks Ariadne’s phone, sent three days prior, the day she talked to Miles. He’s retiring, he says, and will be giving his PASIV—only one, she notes, but it’s fully possible she’d gotten mixed up in the tension of the last weeks at the workshop—to Arthur. He understands, considering the unexpected turmoil of her tenure with Erebos (a neat way to paraphrase it), if Ariadne chooses not to acknowledge the message, or any other overture from those involved in the field. He wishes her the best in any endeavor she undertakes. He extends the offer of acting as a reference, character-wise or technically as a prior employer, for any purpose, at any time, without expiration date.

He thanks her, thanks Ariadne, for his children. From his children, for getting their dad back, but also for his children.

In Cobb’s consideration, therefore, Ariadne had engineered—as surely as Saito did—his ability to return to them as a sane and whole man.

Ari sets the phone back in the safe and stays there, sitting on the floor of her bedroom, silent, for nearly half an hour before she can make herself move.

When she does, she picks up the phone again and works on a reply. Nothing, not a single approach or couching of language or arrangement of doublespeak, is right; finally, she settles on undiluted honesty, which has…surprising results. Even to her. Although, if she’s really being honest with herself, she stopped actually wanting to punch him the second Miles had sent her that photo, the day they landed at LAX.

Dom,
I truly don’t know what to say. When I figure it out, I hope I’ll be able to get in touch.

I hope that Philippa and James had one of many good summers to come with their father.
Sincerely,
Ari

The truncated signature isn’t a confession—merely a lessening of formality, now that she’s no longer his employee. But it might be setting the stage for one. She figures it’s worth considering.

The week after, he’s sent her his civilian email address. No expiration date.

***

In early September, she realizes with a start—another indicator of how busy she’s been—that she’s heard from neither Arthur nor Eames since they scrubbed the warehouse.

An email from Yusuf arrives in her real personal account (they got that straightened out pretty quickly) while she’s still considering how to ask him about them without sounding like either an entitled jackass or a clingy baby.

Hi Ari - heard from E by bloody telegram, the blessed idiot. Had some trouble in Georgia (country not state) and only just arranged his way to who bloody knows where for 3 mo noncontact. Had a msg for little bird, which gave ME pause, because sure as fuck isn’t anyone in our mutual acquaintance, before I remembered you. Says he’ll be in touch w/ you in December. Best, Y

PS new preprint on arXiv—Y. Zhou et al., spatial reasoning manipulation in dreams—straight neuro, no dreamshare, but interesting fMRI data

Which explains Eames, as much as he can ever be explained.

Ari takes matters into her own hands the next week and emails Arthur’s Erebos ID, something about hearing he’s inheriting Cobb’s equipment and asking how he’s doing. Four days later, Ariadne Finch’s Erebos inbox receives a system email saying the Erebos accounts will be deleted by the end of the month. And, sent five minutes after that one, a reply from Arthur’s ID: Yes, C giving equipment to me. All well.

And nothing else.

She wants to invent a way to hit him through the Internet. Instead, using her slowly growing network of connections, she messages Dana with a new GIF of a perception/distance trick she’s been working out, and appends a PS. hey just wondering - does A get weird after jobs? he’s not talking

Dana replies almost instantly, despite the fact that it’s about three AM in Australia: shorter to answer what A doesn’t get weird about. Probably convinced himself he’s ruined your life and you’ll never want to speak to him again. If you don’t get a reply to ping before April I’ll slug him. She follows that with a devil emoji.

Nice as it is to envision Dana sucker-punching the guy, Ari has a suit to buy, for fuck’s sake. But she also doesn’t have any line of communication with Arthur that isn’t specifically related to the job. She sends what she knows is a doomed effort—glad you’re okay! my thesis is shaping up all right & I’m working on rifles—and only feels a sort of deflation, like a collapsing souffle, when, at the end of the month, Erebos is wiped from the greater accessible Internet without a response from Arthur.

Ari supposes she could ask Saito. Or she could get creative with the number she’d found six months ago from that experiment with the warehouse lease. Or she could trawl the job postings and gossip on the forums, sifting through dross until she gets a bead on him—but, really, her calendar is pretty fucking packed these days, between shooting lessons and sparring classes and her goddamn dissertation.

She decides it’s better, for now, to focus on things that aren’t going to get all weird about her wanting to interact with them.

***

Dr. Marie de Luce-Miles arrives in Paris in the middle of November, and immediately insists to Professor Miles that they resume every-other-Sunday dinners with Ari. On the third Sunday of the month, then, Ari finds herself standing at the door of the Grenelle flat, offering a pot of succulents and a bottle of wine to a woman with Mal’s cheekbones and wide dark eyes, but her hair is steel-colored and drawn into a smooth chignon. Dr. de Luce-Miles accepts the gifts and says, “You are Ms. Vickers, then.” Her accent is stronger than Mal’s, and her voice is high-pitched and as sharp as her gaze. “My husband and my son-in-law speak highly of you indeed.”

“Welcome back to France,” Ari says, feeling very glad she has the minor defense of having dressed somewhat well—slacks, Ariadne’s boots, and a good V-neck cabled sweater with a classic trench, rather than her leather biker. “I really admire your contributions to neurosci—”

“Bah, brains.” Dr. de Luce-Miles waves one hand dismissively, grandly. “Tell me about your father—Kevin Eckhard, that is. His books are jewels, I’ve never understood the reviewers who think anything else…”

Miles merely hides a laugh and leaves Ari to his wife’s interrogation. The first time she addresses her as “doctor,” she says again, “Bah. Call me Marie. I am Marie at home, and I am finally home to enjoy it.”

It’s a lovely night, all told. Marie is, in fact, a far better cook than Miles. Over dinner, in between asking Ari about her dads’ work in teaching classics and writing incomprehensible (but apparently wondrous) things, she tells both of them all about Cobb and how he’s settling into full-time stay-at-home fatherhood like he was born for it. Marie talks about how the children are doing, and says she knew she was safe to leave when Arthur had come to Pasadena in October to take the PASIV. That’s the only explicit reference to the existence of dreamshare the entire evening, which is fine with Ari.

It’s also the most she’s heard of Arthur since July, which is slightly less fine, but at least she’s got a kickass Australian extractor–architect offering delayed gratification.

***

On the first day of December, Ari receives a text from an unknown number with an unmistakable style on her personal phone: hullo dear little bird will b in city of lites dec 8-11 wld u like 2 have dinner x

The Friday afterward, she heads into the bar Eames suggested, dressed against the weather in a wool overcoat and a classed-up hoodie. He’s at the bar proper, hair about four shades darker than it had been in the summer and cropped too short to hold a part, wearing a fisherman sweater and, she sees as she hops onto the stool next to his, engrossed in a magazine article. So much so that he jumps noticeably when she orders a St. Germain. “Fuck—”

Ari eyes him as he throws down the magazine. “I’m not that late, am I?”

Eames gets right off his stool and hugs her hard enough that she nearly falls off hers, too surprised to realize that she hasn’t even tried to stiffen away from him until he’s saying against her hair, “Bloody hell, love, I’d no idea whether you’d even show.” Ari regains her balance by gripping the bar with one hand and flinging her other arm around his waist. Despite the bulky sweater, it’s evident he’s lost weight since the summer.

“Come on,” she mutters back, “like I’d give up a good chance to give you shit.” In all honesty, she’s a little surprised; no idea? About her coming for dinner? “Hey,” she says, when Eames lets her go. Now that she’s looking properly, she realizes she was wrong about his hair; it’s the same color, but he’s significantly paler. “Let’s get a table, yeah? And food.”

“Yes, brilliant.” There are lines across his forehead, his eyes too wide. “I just—bloody hell, it’s good to—”

“Shh.” She keeps her arm around him as she takes her drink; in Ariadne’s sweet tone of command, she tells the bartender they’ll be moving to one of the booths and asks her to send over a server with menus when she’s got a chance.

In the booth, Eames puts his hands in his hair and stares down at the table. He apparently decides the background noise level is sufficient, because he says right out, “If you ever come to visit the shadowy side of things again, don’t go within a mile of dynastic criminals. Inbred and mad as pants, the whole lot.”

“Solid advice,” says Ari, and—as gently as she can— “You really thought I wouldn’t show?”

He looks up. “Well, I did just finish three months playing dead to convince the Kutaisi clan that that ID was.”

Ari tips her head. “And?”

Eames narrows his eyes. “Not precisely a sterling connection to maintain,” he says drily, evaluating her reaction. “Is it, little bird?”

She holds up her index finger. “But you’re not dead, and if they think otherwise, you’re obviously smart enough to keep around. And am I still little bird? I mean, I’m on my real name here.”

He blinks at her, and then begins smiling, finally. It’s a slow thing, one side of his mouth lifting before it morphs into a proper grin, as he says, “I’d rather forgotten how you share our mutual acquaintance’s occasionally bullheaded practicality, did you know? You are so very alike.”

“Answer the question, Mr. Eames,” she says sternly. Which lets her avoid saying anything about Arthur, if only because she’s not sure if she’ll be able to phrase it correctly.

“I’m afraid the nickname’s become rather engrained, although I could try—”

She waves one hand. “We’ll reverse-engineer something,” she says, turns to the approaching waiter, and orders steak frites with as many fries as they’ll give her in one serving.

It’s easy from there, wonderfully so, like picking up where they’d left off but with less scotch. Eames spills poetic apologies for having disappeared so thoroughly for so long, describes the Finnish safe house where he’d gone to ground with nothing to do but read and draw for three months (thus explaining the paleness), and demands to know what she’s been doing with herself. He’s surprised but pleased at her ad-hoc dream-science correspondence course per Yusuf, delighted that she’s in regular contact with Dana, a bit shocked but excited about the rifle classes, quietly relieved she’s fond of Marie, and, finally, impatient to know about “our darling point—has he been—”

“He has not,” Ari says, and smiles blandly. “Whatever the end of that sentence was gonna be. Or if he has, I wouldn’t know about it.”

Now Eames tips his head, leaning his cheek on his hand. “Is that so,” he says, sounding—well, not surprised. “What’s the last you’ve heard of him?”

She sighs. “Well, Marie said he’d come to Pasadena in October to pick up Cobb’s work equipment. Since Cobb’s retiring.”

“Is he.”

“Said Cobb, late August. But regarding—” It feels like the conversation will shatter if she says his name. “—our point man, I emailed him mid-September. Got a… brusque reply. Erebos systems were deactivated two weeks later.” She smiles again, feels its brittleness. “Nothing since.”

Eames knocks back the rest of his gin and tonic and sets the glass down. He’s smiling too, a twisted little thing. “If I may speculate,” he says.

She gestures for him to go ahead and sits back.

“The establishing information. He—gets that way. Possibly as a… symptom, let’s call it, of the main point where you differ.” He twists the glass, watching the scatter of light through it on the table. “You, little bird—it seems, from here at least, that you see the possible outcomes of a scenario, choose your favorite, work towards that, and hold yourself ready to adapt for the rest. Would you agree?”

“I…” Ari considers it. “Well, I try.”

“Which is sufficient. Arthur, now—” Eames sighs enormously. “In the same scenario, he sees the possible outcomes, decides the worst will happen, and refuses to hear otherwise until it’s in the past. It’s like fatalism and self-sabotage in one—”

“Well, he did Cobb’s work for years.” She’s surprised at how bitter she sounds; Ari thought she’d squared herself with not wanting to enact violence on her former boss.

He nods to her, though, as if accepting the point. “So—and I base this on knowing the stubborn git for the better part of a decade—here’s my speculation. Our Arthur thought you’d want your space, from dreamshare, the underworld in general, and the team in particular.”

“For five months?” Her voice is smaller than she wants it to be; she sounds pathetic.

Eames sits back, then seems to reconsider and leans forward, eyes on her—and it’s not a pitying sort of look. “I’ll give him this—in the normal way of things, it is best practice to leave a rookie to themselves for a bit after their first job. A couple weeks, a month. The first go in the field is…” He shakes his head. “It’s ontological breakdown. Mucks up everything you think you know about the world. It’s bloody colossal, even for those with the head for it, and it’s just the done thing to give a bit of breathing room. And your debut, little bird, was far, far from the normal way of things.”

Ari exhales hard as she thinks that over. The reading she’d done before she first went under—it gave her the feeling of being prepared, but that feeling disappeared when she blew up her first dream. The existential, philosophical, what-is-reality questions—well, she’d back-burnered them as irrelevant, as has been her practice with that kind of crap since she first smoked up with a bunch of physics majors who envisioned themselves as philosophers. Throughout the job, her purpose had boiled down to preventing Cobb’s brain from killing him—as good as killing him—by any means possible. But if she hadn’t had that specific problem to focus on, she thinks now, if she’d just been building and then wandering around Fischer’s subconscious trying to plant things—

“Okay,” she says. “I get that. To let them ground themselves, or get a handle on it, or have their delayed-onset existential crisis in relative peace—that makes sense. But… you—all of you, and Miles—you spent three months telling me I—” She grimaces. “I wanna punch myself for saying this, god. But you all kept saying I wasn’t a typical rookie.”

He shrugs. “Higher the flight, harder the fall, or some shite. It seemed—still seems, really—you’ve about the right combination of brains and priorities and a little fundamental madness to take to the field, if you like.” For a moment, he considers. “Actually, that may be another of Arthur’s concerns—if he thought you would be sticking around.”

Ari blinks.

“Well, you’ve a near-infinite list of reasons never to come within spitting distance of any of us,” he says, matter-of-fact. “The job—well, we managed, but it was a horrifying cock-up, and—” Eames shrugs again, what are you gonna do. “I’ve blacklisted people with far longer histories than mine for far less.”

She looks down at the tabletop, considering that angle. It has its points, but—the job went off, the reputations of the people she worked with are near-legendary, and she’d be stupid to write them all off for a crisis of poor management and misinformation and psychoemotional messes. Finally, she looks back up at Eames. Quietly, she says, “Thanks for—giving me the chance to have a say.” She lets her mouth twist. “In whether I would or wouldn’t.”

“Whereas Arthur probably thought it basic respect to simply disappear himself. He’s a bit of an idiot like that, sometimes.” Eames grins suddenly, although it’s still a little wry. “Plus, he’s shite at goodbyes. Always has been. You should hear him trying to leave voicemail.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says, distracted. “Look—are you in touch with him?”

“Will be soon, I’m sure. He’s shown the annoying habit, every few months, of divining whatever absolutely unlisted contact information I’ve scrounged together and ringing me up. I don’t know how, hacking government databases or tarot or dowsing rods or— Perhaps he’s just had me microchipped.”

Eames sounds a little unnervingly sanguine about that possibility—and it is a slight one, she acknowledges, skirting the realm of shit she believes Arthur could be capable of—but Ari puts that aside for the moment. “Next time you speak with him, or write or whatever,” she says, still thinking, “would you mind passing on a message?”

He holds up a finger. “Ah. Is that for before or after I’ve told him to get his head out his arse and look you up? Afraid I’ve already decided to stick my nose in and irritate him about that.”

Ari lets herself laugh. “Either. If you wouldn’t mind—”

“Not at all, little bird. As long as it’s short, you know, me and my hopeless memory.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, sure, your hopeless memory, including my personal number, which you last had reason to look up, what, eight and a half months ago? Just—” She shakes her head, suddenly tired and sad and a little overwhelmed at the prospect of synthesizing five months of shit into a sentence or two. “Actually, know what, just tell him I asked him to get his head out of his ass, too. I think that kind of covers it.”

Eames goes a little soft around the eyes, which would be obnoxiously patronizing if it were anyone but Eames. “I’ll do that, little bird.”

Before she leaves—she has a lesson with her rifle instructor the next morning—Eames hugs her again and asks, “You’ve been sleeping all right again? No falling?”

Ari nods into his sweater and says, “Dream-gravity got beat. Just—took some time. Stay out of trouble, you.”

He laughs. “Never. Should know that by now.”

***

Her dads visit Paris for the holidays, which is ridiculous and wonderful. It’s also a reckoning, confronting how much of herself she needs to—not necessarily hide, but downplay and carefully misrepresent, to them. Yeah, she’s gotten into target shooting; it’s an interesting interplay of focus and physics. That job had paid very well, which is why she’s dressing better (not that she’s given up her favorite pair of boy jeans, even with their blood spatters, but they’re the only pair she has left from that era). Twenty-six seemed like a good age to start caring about her long-term health, thus the gym memberships and the general toning and sharpening and the precipitous loss of baby fat. And all those neuroscience books and papers—well, it had been her secondary major, after all, and after she’s been in the studio or on her laptop (or her sweet desktop rig at home) glaring at her dissertation for ten hours straight, she wants to read anything but architecture.

They buy it, at least, although she’s fairly certain she’s going to figure out some way to tell them what the hell she’s actually been up to, sometime. Not necessarily the criminal applications—they’re anti-state leftists, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have morals. Ari herself is still wrestling with the ethics of dreamshare, particularly inception, in jobs that wouldn’t necessarily involve global economics and people with more money than they know what to do with. But dreamshare itself, as an extant thing—she thinks Kevin would be entranced, and Tomas would share at least some of his enthusiasm.

Still, that’s for later. Much later. Like, after she submits her fucking dissertation.

***

In early February, after she’s seen Eames another two times (he does manage to stay out of trouble; he just prefers the southern hemisphere this time of year), Yusuf three, and Saito five (he invites Ari to breakfasts when he’s in the city—it seems like his idea of an inside joke, and he’s a fascinating sort of person to talk with, so she’s happy to accept), Ari wakes up to find an email from a_vark at a private domain. Sent to her own École account six hours ago, from an unknown time zone.

Will be overnight in Paris next Wednesday. If timing works, message [number redacted]. -A.V.

It’s so spare she kind of wants to punch it, but that’d mean putting her fist through her own laptop screen, and she doesn’t have the wherewithal for anything but slight awe that he thought she needed this long. Two-thirds of a year— But whatever.

She puts the number in her personal phone under the letter V and isn’t surprised when it shows up as registered with the encrypted messaging app she uses. Her response is simple: I’ll get out of studio around 8:30-9 wed if that’s okay

She receives precisely nothing in reply.

On the Wednesday in question, she glares at her phone and dresses in black—skinny jeans, collared button-up, pullover, and shitkicker boots, geek-goth, livened up only marginally with the olive-grey biker and deep red cashmere scarf and gloves. She works her ass off in the studio, headphones on and industrial-electronica blasting into her ears. It starts off just redoing the graphics to support one section of her dissertation, but that turns up a mistake in one of her renderings, which means digging back into the models and figuring out where she went wrong. But that leads to the sudden realization that the entire section would make fantastically more sense if she just rewrote the entire thing like this, and she doesn’t look up even when Etienne drops off a granola bar and a coffee at her desk, sometime around two.

Awhile after sunset, and long, long after the coffee, Etienne starts chucking paper at her. She’s nowhere near done with the rewrite and she yanks her headphones down to tell him so, when she hears her phone’s text alert and sees that it’s a quarter to nine.

“That’s the second time your phone’s gone,” says Etienne. “You have plans?”

Arthur: Outside your building.

Two minutes later: If you’re still free?

The phone buzzes in her hand as the third message arrives. If you’re busy I’ll get going.

“You motherfucker,” she snarls at the screen, jabbing out FUCKIGN DO NOT GO ANYWHERE. She looks up to find Etienne staring at her and quickly schools her expression. “Apparently I have plans,” she tells him with a shrug, puts her desktop to sleep, and starts packing up. Etienne mimics her and she protests, “You don’t have to—”

He rolls his eyes at her. “Someone has to check your homicidal bullshit. Especially with the guns thing now—”

“It’s not like I carry yet,” she retorts, stung, and is flung back ten months—lying on painted concrete, Arthur’s knee in her back, the mild surprise in his tone as he noted, Not carrying. Ari laughs, a little wildly. “But fine, okay, okay, come on.” She flings on her jacket, grabs her scarf and gloves, and slings the messenger over her shoulder, then leads the charge down the stairs, swapping her phone between hands as she pulls on the gloves. The phone remains silent, which—could go either way, now that Arthur’s apparently acquired both Cobb’s PASIV and his cryptic-bullshit habit.

And yet, when they burst out into the cold night air—really, she should be wearing something heavier than the biker—there’s a man standing side-on to the doors next to a lamppost, comb marks in his pomaded hair thrown into sharp relief by the streetlight. He’s in a knee-length double-breasted overcoat and spectator shoes, smoking a cigarette.

“Is this the motherfucker?” Etienne says, only a little bit too loudly, and Arthur turns to face them.

Ari marches up to him, Etienne at her shoulder, and demands, “What the fuck?” once she’s just outside arm’s reach.

Serenely ignoring her, Arthur reaches out one gloved hand to Etienne. “Hey. I’m Arthur. From the startup last spring.”

“I’m discouraging my friend from killing people in public,” says Etienne, without offering his name, but he shakes hands, at least, before he turns to her. “Hey, want me to do the morning coffee run?”

Which is code, from when they were both masters’ students with time for poorly researched and possibly ill-advised app-arranged dates. He’s asking if she wants him to check on her in a couple hours. “Nah, I’ll be in late,” Ari says easily, which means no cause for concern whatsoever, because—even though Arthur’s being weird, even though she knows at least a hundred ways in which he’s dangerous—she trusts him. “July, you bastard. I’ve been agonizing.”

“She hasn’t, not noticeably,” Etienne stage-whispers to Arthur, whose eyebrows are up, the rest of his face carefully neutral. “See you tomorrow, Ari. Hey, Arthur, don’t piss her off any more, all right? She—”

“Yeah, I been there,” Arthur drawls, eyes on her, and it’s so dry and familiar and stupid—she’s shot him; he’s chopped her arms off; the slot of dreamtime on the first level when she didn’t know whether he actually believed she’d sold out the team ranks among the worst individual hours of her life—that she finds herself swearing and stepping in to hug him as hard as she can.

Somewhere in her awareness, she registers Etienne’s jaw dropping before he says, “Uh, ’night!” and heads off to the Metro. Arthur is laughing, the asshole, but he folds his arms around her, at least for a moment.

“Eight months, you fucking—”

“Let’s eat,” says Arthur.

***

Arthur picks a place and asks how her dissertation is going, and she goes off about the chapter she just tore to pieces, and it’s only when they’re settled with sandwiches and liquor that she realizes he’s said nothing of substance. And when he does say something, it’s, “How’s the rifle work coming?”

Instead of answering properly, she digs the folder of training-session paper targets out of her messenger and passes it over. The folder is organized by rifle model, shooting distance, and date. Arthur—deep brown waistcoat, cream shirt with a gold pinstripe, blue-patterned tie beneath the camel wool of his overcoat—flips through it, nods with the same frown of approval he gave to Eames’s grenade launcher in the warehouse on the first level, and passes it back. “Decent,” he says, and then, all at once, “Okay, I’m a paranoid avoidant asshole with trust issues and I felt like a fucking monster for having gotten you into this shit in the first place.”

Ari blinks. “Cobb got me into it,” she says blankly. “Or—technically speaking, Miles—”

“I also feel disproportionately responsible for everything.”

She leans back in her chair and folds her arms, peering at him. “Did you have a job on a psychotherapist, or what?”

Arthur attempts a scowl, but he looks sheepish, of all things, eyebrows curved upward in the middle and a tiny suggestion of a sad smile, just enough to bring out one dimple. “Uh. Eames, actually.”

Just to see what happens— “You had a job on Eames?”

“No,” he says, eyes going wide in shock. “No, never. He just—talked to me.”

Ari tips her chin up and to the side, and repeats, “Talked to you.”

The sigh Arthur emits could probably kick up a decent hurricane. “Okay. He showed up at—somewhere he shouldn’t have even known about—”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” she interrupts, waving one hand, “you and Eames one-up each other on shit the other shouldn’t be able to find out, I get it. Go on.”

He leans one elbow on the table and presses his hand against his face. “I forgot,” he says, “you’re just as irritating as him.”

Really, she probably deserves some credit for not sniping back at that one; instead, she swallows some of her scotch and soda and waits for Arthur to get the fuck on with it.

“So,” he says, getting on with it, “he called me about twenty kinds of dipshit. Using some of that vocab—he’s a dick, but some of the psychology crap is legit. And so, on his advice, and that of a friend—” He glances up at her, a flash of uncertainty— “I got my head out of my ass. I think.”

“Which means you’re going to stop giving me space I don’t need and—”

“I’m not giving you jobs,” says Arthur quickly.

“Fuck’s sake, I don’t want jobs,” she replies; it comes out needle-sharp. “I’m not available for jobs. Not ’til after my defense, and then some.” She glares. “Which you’d know if you’d given me a chance to say.”

The air between them goes porcelain-brittle as Arthur opens his mouth to snap back—and then he exhales again, shoulders slumping, and all the tension vanishes. “Which I should have,” he says, defeated, and there’s misery in the way his mouth twists. “I’m just—look. Cobb followed Mal, and I followed Cobb, and I couldn’t—if you’d decided to follow me—” His voice breaks off, his eyes going unfocused.

She watches him, thinking about that. The very real possibility that, if Cobb hadn’t escaped the event horizon of his own guilt, Arthur would have gotten sucked right after him, and the sheer amount of shit Arthur’s had to be responsible for since Mal woke up one day, one afternoon in California, certain that she was dreaming.

And then, as gently as she can, Ari says, “I’m a rookie, not a duckling.” Arthur looks at her properly, confused. “Not—not imprinting on you, or Eames, or any of the rest of you fuckers,” she explains. “Even with the high-stress short-turnaround job with heightened emotional load. All those stressors setting the stage for pseudo-attachments. Not at this point. I’d like to think,” and her tone goes dry, “that I can tell when someone’s actually worth knowing, rather than just part of a situation that makes them look like it.”

Expressionless, toneless, Arthur says, “Did a shit job of looking like it.”

“Which really just reinforces my conclusion,” she replies, “that I’m correct in thinking you’re well worth knowing. You and Eames and Yusuf.” Ari shrugs, casual and careful, as she says, “I don’t know about Cobb, still. And Saito wasn’t a fuckup to begin with. But you three—you’re good.”

“In your opinion.”

“I have excellent opinions.”

Arthur starts to smile then.

After an hour of proper talking—Arthur’s jobs, his visits to the Cobbs every three months, photos from a holiday dance recital Philippa was in (she was dressed as a snowflake), Ari’s dream-science catchup study and dinners with the doctors Miles and the hilarity of having her dads in town for Christmas—she says, “Hey, question. How long does it take to get a bespoke suit done?”

“Two to four weeks if the tailor’s local, six-ish if they’re not,” he answers immediately. “Why?”

Ari leans in and raises one eyebrow, conspiratorial. “Thesis defense. May. And I got this cash, you know, and I know a guy who wears good shit, so I was thinking…”

He grins outright. “So you were thinking. What are you doing weekend after next?”

“Visiting your favorite atelier.” She raises both eyebrows now, a question. “With you along for your expert advice?”

“Milan all right for you?”

She’d miss her pistol class, but— “If the tailor speaks English, and if you’re good with my shitty Italian. They’re not gonna be weird about me being not a guy?”

One of Arthur’s eyebrows arches as he smirks at her. “Well, you got this cash, I hear.”

***

In mid-May, Ariette Eleanor Vickers, dressed head-to-toe in Zegna—aside from the cufflinks, which she commissioned from Ursula’s now-fiancée Syd—defends her doctoral thesis. Successfully, of course; she’s known since the end of March that it’s solid.

The small audience watching her defense, aside from the committee of professors (Miles at one end of their row), includes her dads, Harmony, Etienne, Ursula, and Syd. And, behind them, Saito Nobuyasu, Yusuf Kotadia-for-now, Eames, Marie, and Arthur.

She leaves while the committee deliberates, with just enough time to introduce everyone around—“from the project last spring” works well enough to explain the team, although her dad Kevin immediately starts glaring around asking which of them is responsible for keeping his daughter in the office past sunset. Saito says, “I am afraid that would be me, Mr. Eckhard. I have a great admiration for your work. There are echoes of it—new resonances, perhaps—in Ms. Vickers’s flexibility in her approach to her own field.”

Kevin immediately decides Saito is his new best friend, and Ursula grabs Ari’s arm, demanding how she could have hidden that her father is that Kevin Eckhard for four years, before wedging herself into the conversation.

Syd’s about to follow when she checks out Harmony’s necklace of wire-caged glass beads and asks whether she made it, which of course she did, and that attracts Eames’s attention as a fellow artist (of sorts). Marie attacks Yusuf with neurochemistry questions, and it seems like Tomas is half-listening to them slipping between French and English until he’s distracted by Etienne ribbing Arthur about taking Ari clothes-shopping every other weekend for two months—Arthur giving as good as he’s getting, and Etienne grinning his head off.

Somehow, by the time they call her back in, her family and her friends and her other friends are all chattering along, enormously pleased with each other, and the swell of sheer happiness at that carries her back into the lecture hall (Miles’s, of course) like she’s barely touching the ground.

Miles stands, a tiny smile curving his mouth, and extends a hand. “Congratulations are in order, Dr. Vickers.”

That sends her straight to the ceiling, it feels like, but she manages to keep her grin to a reasonable level until the other committee members leave, nodding to Miles and to her.

“Did what I said I would,” says Ari. Despite dreams, despite Limbo, despite the pits of vipers—

Miles lays a hand on her shoulder, the first time he’s ever touched her aside from a handshake. “You have indeed,” he says, and if his tone is a little gruff, if his eyes are a little overbright—well, they both know he’s not talking about the degree.

***

On the fifteenth of June, a year to the day after inception, she emails Cobb—the address he’d offered nearly ten months ago—from Ariadne Finch’s École account. For the last time, because she’s sending the email to tell him that she’s Ariette Vickers. And that she still hasn’t figured out what to say, but that she’s been glad to hear how he and Philippa and James have been doing, through various sources. And that, by the way, she’s a doctor now. Of architecture. Of the philosophical science of architecture. And that Saito Nobuyasu has commissioned her for the rebuilding of his Sydney-adjacent lake house—from the ground up (or in, she’s thinking, maybe), a completely green, zero-carbon, zero-net-energy home entirely from local and salvaged sources, riffing on Japanese and Scandinavian design. (His timeline—hers, now—is years out.)

Cobb’s reply, sent within hours to Ari’s own account, is funny. Overwhelmingly pleased, and even a little dry—really? A detail he hadn’t noticed, on the Fischer job, where he’d been a paragon of focus and good management practices?

It’s not catharsis, but the relief of it is more than she expected.

***

In July, on a routine check of Finch’s phone, she finds a six-hour-old email from Arthur to Finch’s non-École address. The subject is just Sufficient ‘and then some?’

She frowns at that for a moment before she remembers, mid-February, glaring as she spelled it out. I’m not available ’til after my defense, and then some.

And Ari grins.

The email outlines a job. A corporate extraction, although the client isn’t a corporation per se; it’s an organization fighting oil-field exploitation. They want the hard data, numbers, regarding yet another fracking proposal by one of the few lumbering fossil giants hanging around, and the scientist attached to the proposal won’t be bought. (Which, Arthur notes, suggests that the org has tried, which suggests that their funding is way better than typical for enviro-warriors, but then, stuff like this has been popping up with increasing frequency in the last three months or so; Ari, on the floor of her bedroom in her Paris flat, does the mental math and cackles, delighted.) The oil company is located on the US east coast, with the scientist living a hundred-odd miles south of DC. The proposal goes public in eight weeks; the org wants their counter-campaign ready in six.

E extracting & otherwise. Y providing material. Point is (I hope) obvious. C consulting remotely as necessary. Architect: you in?

She hits reply, grinning. Fucking hell yes I’m in.

Before she’s drawn breath after sending it, the phone buzzes.

Eames.

welcome aboard, little bird x