inception fic: i strive (2/5)
part one
Arthur’s projections are noticeably more physical with him. "Jesus Christ," Dom says, after the sixth shoulder shoved hard into his. "Lighten the fuck up." Dom’s voice isn’t raised, but he doesn’t usually swear. It’s a crude method of communication.
“Feel free to point and shoot,” Arthur says, by way of apology. “Maybe you’ll finally find some catharsis from the life-scarring trauma you endured in our first dream together.”
“Solicitous,” Dom says, but he leaves his weapon holstered. Six marines have been drafted to have their minds act as sites of battle, waves of projections gunned down with army approval, but Dom prefers to keep every bit of the dreamer alive. The best way to forestall unforeseen and unintended consequences is to proceed with caution.
Arthur's had an itchy trigger finger since finding out the projections could die with no immediate consequences. But that is, perhaps, understandable.
Dom keeps sighting Arthur as they move ahead, situating his movements around Arthur’s. Arthur forces a grim composure upon his face and the projections turn away for a moment, only to again bounce glances off of Dom, to walk a little too near.
Arthur scowls, and the pureness of expression almost makes Dom start. He wants to photograph it for Mal. "I'm not going to fall in love with your wife,” Arthur bites out in forced confession. “You’ve wanted to ask for days now. Just do it.”
Dom fights off a bristle. “Now now,” he says, then buttons his lip, pushes ahead and leads the way up the stairs to a building he’d seen in Arthur’s head before, through the door of an elementary school. He takes deep, steady breaths and thinks of the many different ways he appreciates Arthur. There are several, most of them revolving around a deep appreciation for and reliance on his efficacy.
Finally, they stop. Dom stands at a child’s locker, an Apatosaurus sticker affixed to orange paint. Arthur is over his shoulder and Dom can’t keep quiet any longer. "You think I'm jealous," he says. "But if you do fall into unrequited love, it's no skin off my nose."
"Fine," Arthur says.
Dom snorts. He looks up at Arthur's distant profile, annoyed at the distance he sees there. "I'm worried for you,” Dom finally spits out. “Mal would like to have you as a friend, ten years from now. Maybe more." Dom shrugs. “I could stand to see you around then, too.”
Arthur looks down at Dom. He takes his hand off his gun. There might be surprise on his face, if he would bother to let it show. "Let's take it a decade at a time," he says.
Arthur, Dom thinks. Glib underneath all that capability. He pulls away the lock. Secrets Arthur’s kept from himself lying there, written in careful pencil, on wide-ruled paper. "They don’t look like much, do they?”
“Go ahead and read them to me,” Arthur says. “Tell me what I need to know.”
“Me?” Dom holds out the papers. “I’ve seen enough of your mind.”
“Please,” Arthur says. He lifts an eyebrow. “What more could surprise you?”
Dom's curious, he has to admit, and he shrugs his acquiescence, rifles through the papers.
Arthur clears his throat. “While I’m not in love with Mal, I do have eyes and an insistent libido.” He looks away, hands behind his back. “Unrelated. Continue.”
****
He gets sick. Not debilitatingly so but his dreams are a mess, one melting into another, a riot of color, every step a slog through wet sand.
"Desk duty," Mal says.
"Desk duty," Arthur says, but his tone is more satisfied.
Dom flips him off, discreetly.
He transcribes and puts together reports for a week and a half before he feels like he’s going to go out of his mind. “Kill me,” he says to Mal, one night after he wakes up with a particularly splitting headache.
She smoothes a hand over his forehead, helps him to sit up. “I’m sorry, Dominic. This is something you’ll have to suffer through.” She brings a glass of water to his lips. “Now, drink.”
****
Dom returns to work, not well, but able. Mal is with him in every dream-he has a lingering tendency to soften the edges of every world they enter, to leave everything just out-of-focus-and Mal glosses over his weakness with a sheen of diffuse light, or by shifting vistas into landscapes created by brushstrokes.
They’re sitting with Kit, in a field of grass. Under a mosquito net, with the sun low, floating in yellow light. He’d fallen asleep with his head in Mal’s lap, Kit sitting cross-legged in front of them and when he wakes up, he doesn’t open his eyes, listens to the susurrations of their consonants, their vowels.
“It hasn’t been a perfect situation,” Kit says. “I’ve tried to recreate my favorite memories, but-” She laughs. “They always sort of make me blue.”
“I thought I was the only one,” Mal says. “I loved my grandmother’s pied-a-terre as a girl. It wasn’t the loveliest of buildings, but I remember she had this huge four-post bed that took up her bedroom. I could just barely squeeze around it, to read all the letters I’d written her. She’d pinned them to her bedroom wall.” She runs a thumb over Dom’s eyebrow. “But I felt sad as soon as I walked through the door again."
“Nostalgia, maybe?” Kit says.
“Do you think so?” Mal sighs. “I always thought nostalgia was a happier feeling, underneath it all. That I had lived a life wonderful.”
The noise of Kit shifting. “Maybe I wasn’t sad so much as afraid. I spent what felt like days, recreating the details of a particular steakhouse. And then when I sat down, it took all I had to take that first bite of my porterhouse." She laughs. "My hands were shaking."
Mal reaches over him. He's not sure for what reason. He turns his face into her belly. She was reaching for Kit’s hands, maybe.
"I had to change the tablecloth to the wrong color before I could eat." Kit sighs. "It was supposed to be red, the same color as the sweater my younger brother was wearing."
"What color did you change it to?"
"I don't know," Kit says. "White, probably."
"Kit!" Mal says suddenly. "I miss you, sometimes and so much, when I'm awake."
"What's happening up there? I didn't know if I should ask."
Mal seems to relax, settle back, but her thighs are tensed, and she pinches, gently, at Dom's earlobe. "They're pressuring me. Everyone, really. They want more results, and answers to questions that scare me."
"What kind of questions?"
"They want you to go down deeper."
Kit exhales. "I told you; I think that's the logical next-"
"Then they want to wake you up and keep you that way. They want to see how well you retain the memory of skills learned while dreaming. If they could compress years of training into a few good nights' rest. If it truly takes root."
"It's sound."
"Don't pretend like you're comfortable with the suggestion!" Mal says. "You're not."
Kit says nothing for a moment. When she speaks again, her tone is clipped, a formal cadence. "See if you can remember this tip when you wake up. The Department of Defense gets what it wants. Find a way to make the process something you can bear, because the end result is inevitable."
Mal gently extricates herself from under Dom. When he opens his eyes, she's standing, looming over him. The ground is shaking, grass ripped out of the earth, the air filling with blades. "I won't bend," she says.
"What are you looking for here? Your worshippers to rise in rebellion?" Kit asks, a wistful smile on her face. "Sometimes I'm so unsure, if you're real."
****
A flood of supporting evidence rolls in, once Dom has been made aware of the argument. Deadlines that used to have some slack built into them go tight as piano wire. “We requested doors that open outwardly,” Dom is told. “Please do not deviate from the specs as written.”
“Build us a jail, Mr. Cobb,” they tell him. “One that the prisoners won’t recognize for what it is.”
“Would it be possible,” Director Barron asks, a faint smile on his lips, “to make the terrain flatter? No quarter for those who would hide.”
“At this point, they should just ask me to recreate Tartarus and be done with it,” Dom says to Arthur. The conference room is empty; a meeting had been requested for noon and Dom had been frog-marched into place by Arthur fifteen minutes beforehand.
“We’ve entered a delicate phase,” Arthur says. “People more important than you or I-and yes, Dom, such people exist-are sitting up in their seats. They’ve caught wind of the possibility that this billion-dollar project may now be ready to pay dividends and they want to see how much they can squeeze out of us.”
“I don’t like it.” Dom spins in his conference room chair. He watches Arthur shrug off his suit jacket, drape it over his arm. “You seem to have adjusted quickly.”
“Yes,” Arthur says. “That can be credited to the fact that I have five senses which I put to use instead of daydreaming about Zumthor’s baths and my future memoirs. It’s allowed me a two month head start. I’m sure the rude awakening you’re suffering is much shittier.”
“Your chapter’s a bear,” Dom says. “I’m not fair or kind.”
“I look forward to being contacted by your fact-checker,” Arthur says.
“Your suit makes you look like an asshole.”
“My suit forces four star generals to realize that I take myself very seriously. They’ll decide from there whether I’m giving myself too much credit or not.”
“What do my clothes communicate?”
“That you take ease in your privilege.” Arthur looks at him, deadly serious. “Be careful, Cobb.”
****
Arthur’s words eat at him. Dom paces throughout the meeting, only taking a seat when asked to, firmly, for the fourth time. He sneers at the politics of it all, at Arthur’s eminently practical kowtowing.
We will not bend, he thinks.
“Impossible,” he begins to say. “It can’t be done.”
“It’s outside the realm of probability,” he says. “I could build a maze that the subject would never be able to escape, but once he wakes up, the puzzle goes up like so much smoke. The corral of his mind lasts only as long as he sleeps.”
“There could still be use there,” Barron says. He has an easy smile that Dom hates the sight of. “A sense of time is still evident in the dream. If we subject a man to solitary imprisonment long enough, even if it is only in a dream, couldn’t we soften his mind a little? Perhaps create a vulnerability to exploit?”
“He’ll have a flood of projections at his beck and call.”
“We’ll neutralize them.”
Dom raises an eyebrow, skeptical. “Have you used the PASIV before, Director Barron?”
“Twice.”
“Forget the projections for a moment. Yes, there is an awareness of time passing in the dream, but it’s a cognizance we impose upon waking. During the dream itself-time passes in fits and starts. You begin reconstructing the Hanging Gardens and look up to find it ready for seeding. It’s only when I think back on the process that I can feel the minutes slipping by.”
“We can impose a more structured linearity,” Barron muses. “With the right cocktail.” He smiles and Dom controls his instinct to recoil. “You’ve been immensely helpful.”
“Despite my best efforts,” Dom says.
“That,” Barron says, “read more as your true sentiment than as a joke. You may try again, if you like.”
Dom calculates. I could take you apart, he wants to say. Open up all your boxes.
****
“I can’t,” Mal says. “I can’t anymore. We’ll quit tomorrow. Promise me.”
“Could you?” Dom asks. “You’d lose the say you have now.”
“Say!” Mal laughs. “What say? They tell me to jump and I negotiate them down from three feet to two.”
“You keep them from pushing Kit down any more levels of consciousness. You put a leash on Arthur’s otherwise-boundless capacity for destroying projections. You make me ask why exactly they would want me to build an oasis that remains forever just-out-of-reach.”
“Out of fear.” She has circles under her eyes. “All my excitement for the unknown has turned to terror.”
Dom’s stomach hollows. He fights the adrenaline his body releases into his bloodstream, searches for a calm to relay to his wife. “Mallorie,” he says.
“Why did you let me bring you into this?” she demands. Her voice raised. “How could you be so stupid? Tell me ‘no’; or do you have no spine at all?”
He goes to hold her, furious and silent, and she struggles in his grip, shoving at his chest. “Idiot! Why did I marry you? Why?”
“Mallorie,” he says. His fingertips going white on her shoulders and he forces himself to grip her with less force. “Be careful what you say.”
She lets out a low sob. She stares up into his eyes, shaking. “Could you do it?” she asks.
He says nothing.
“This is not the construction of another battleground, or temple, or a prison, Dominic. They are asking you to impose a foreign order upon the mind. They are asking you to create a mandated structure to govern a man’s thoughts. Could you do it?” She shakes her head. “How could anyone?”
“We’ll go. We’ll leave the country if we have to.” He’s grasping at straws. “But if it’s impossible, where’s the harm in trying?”
“There’s harm, Dominic.” She pushes him away, goes to their kitchen counter, her head in her hands. “Everywhere I look, I see harm.”
“You’ll say no when I can’t. If I ever get close.”
She looks into the distance, chewing at her lip, her fingers at the curve of her jaw. “And what if I can’t hold?” she asks. Quiet and dark.
They forgot to turn on the lights.
****
Mal is hard on Arthur. “Your vest is ridiculous,” she says. “And your pants need to be hemmed.”
“I haven’t had time to find a good tailor,” Arthur says. His brow furrows, and he flips a pen between his fingers, so quickly it seems to bend in smooth arcs.
“Stop,” she says, snatching the pen from his fingers. “Please, Arthur. The sight of you in a suit is making me physically ill.”
He stands, stares coolly at her.
“What?” she demands. She raises her chin.
Arthur opens his mouth, but Dom, tucked away in a corner of the room, lifts his neck, scratches at his Adam’s apple. He clears his throat.
Arthur lapses back into stillness.
“If someone doesn’t indulge in my need for a fight in the next ten seconds, I’ll scream,” Mal warns. She kicks off her shoes.
Arthur looks down at his nails. “You’re a fucking mess, Mal,” he says.
“Round one!” says Dom, and Arthur cracks a smile. Mal laughs, too, and only for the slightest bit too long.
****
“We could just turn off the PASIV,” Dom says, a little later, after Arthur’s gone for coffee. “Kit will have to wake up.”
“We don’t know that,” Mal says. “Her mind is so deeply sedated. And we’ve put a clock, effectively, in the compound. Who knows if she will be able to follow the thread back? If she’ll have time, in the seconds after we disconnect her?”
“It’s conjecture, at this point.” Dom cracks his neck. “Hey,” he says, standing. He takes her in his arms. “We’ll bring her back. We’ll go down again, and find her.”
“I know,” Mal says. She turns into his neck, her lips moving against his pulse. She half-forms words.
“It’s not your fault,” he says.
“We introduced too many new elements at once,” Mal finally says. “I could have insisted they separate the trial for the new compound from the dive into a fourth level.”
“You insisted,” Cobb says.
“But I could have thrown a fit.” Mal laughs. “I should have kicked off my shoes then. Wielded a heel.”
They rock, back and forth, her arms around his waist. He kisses her hair. He takes care not to crush her with the weight of him. “Should I recite you your poem?”
She groans.
“I’m starting to think you don’t like it,” he says. He narrows his eyes at her. “Most women would find it extremely romantic, to have a poem written by their husband.”
“Mm.” She shrugs. “Recite it, then.”
He straightens his shoulders, coughs. He squeezes her hard. “Mal,” he intones, “a haiku is // very constrictive, much like // vows. P.S. I do.”
“And to think,” Mal says. “I didn’t swoon right there at the altar when you read those to me.”
He grins.
“Will Arthur go in after her, do you think? If I ask?” she asks suddenly.
“I thought I’d distracted you,” Dom says.
She smiles fondly at his face. He touches the lines, growing there at the corners of her eyes.
****
Arthur wakes up gasping next to Kit. Over and over. The machines monitoring his heart, his breathing, his brain activity reading out in spiking blades. “I’m fine,” he says, immediately, but his eyes are wild and his fingers fly to where the cannula of the PASIV sinks into his veins. Every time.
Mal has been banished from the room. From this floor. A prerequisite for Arthur’s agreement to enter Kit’s dreams. Dom thought it strange, briefly, that she would agree so easily to step away, but there’s been a hesitance about her. He doesn’t know what it is.
The last time, Arthur’s eyes fly open, then smash closed again as he doubles over, keening. “I’m fine,” he pants. “It’s in my head. It’s in my head.”
Dom rolls up his sleeve. “I’m coming with you. I should have been with you from the start.”
****
Sleeping is different with the new compound. He can feel the beat of his heart, a counting-out-rhythm in his fingertips, in the number of breaths he takes.
Kit is nowhere to be seen. Just a flood of projections that have learned to recognize those who are not right. When Dom is crowded off of the edge of this world, there are ten seconds until impact. He thinks of Miles. He didn’t think his father-in-law would be the last face that flashes before his eyes before death, but there it is.
The way Miles had taken off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. The way he pursed his lips. The way he said, “Do not let them change the foundation of who you are. You are a builder. We dream up structures and then we erect them in the sky.”
****
It isn’t until the fifth time under, together, that Arthur and Dom make it to the third level. There, they race down the steps into an underground tunnel, avoid the branching tunnel that leads to an enclosed, unexplainably sunlit garden, and press themselves into a service closet. Arthur wedges a chair against the door.
“That won’t hold,” Cobb says.
“Shut the fuck up,” Arthur says, lugging out the PASIV.
****
The fourth level is a strip of sand, surrounded by nothing. Dom pictures waves lapping at a shore, staining white grains dark and wet, and suddenly there’s a shallow sea, blooming. A limitless expanse at the touch of his mind.
Arthur is shucked down to his boxers. “I hate it here,” he says.
“It’s so quiet,” Dom says.
“What the fuck,” Arthur says.
Wind, Dom thinks, and the water ripples around him. Arthur’s soft, product-less hair waving. His heart is racing. Mal, he thinks. Look. This life is easy.
The bottom gives out from underneath them. Arthur disappears beneath the water, then rises again, cresting; swimming in long, sure pulls.
****
Dom’s been swimming for a long time. His arms are tired. “Keep moving,” Arthur says from next to him, so Dom does.
There’s splashing, faint, behind him. Like someone might be struggling, but Dom is too tired to turn his head. He should reach shore. Mal is waiting. There’s a light, melting until it's pure and white and Dom blinks, blinks, he blinks-
*****
“Dom?” Mal’s nose. Her cheeks and mouth and eyes. “Dom, how do you feel?”
Dom swallows, throat lined in sand, usually pliable tissue like jerky. “Thirsty,” he says, and she brings a paper cup to his mouth, pours water across his lips. She kisses him, after, then goes to Arthur, caresses his forehead, rolls her eyes when Arthur brushes her hand away gently, tells her that he’s fine.
There is no needle in Dom’s arm. It feels strange, to wake and find your veins uninvaded. “Did you-did you unplug us while we were dreaming?” he asks.
“See!” Director Barron is in the room, a fact Dom had overlooked until his voice erupts from the chair on the other side of Kit’s bed. “It was the most obvious solution, and here they are, our sleepers returned. Still sharp, your husband.”
“A word,” Mal says, searingly sweet.
“Kit isn’t awake,” Arthur says. He’s standing at her bedside.
****
“Be reasonable,” the director says.
“Your face means nothing to me,” Mal says. Her heels bring her to a height an inch above his. “I don’t know why you keep bothering me with it.”
The director laughs. Strange, Dom thinks. It is hard to read his face. Even while looking at it, the features seem just beyond familiar. “I’ve pushed you to the far reaches of your self control," the director says. “I didn’t think that would ever happen.”
Mal studies him, removing her jacket. She lies next to Kit, both of them connected to the device. “You sound pleased,” she says, and there’s a threat behind her words, slinking through her tone.
The director says nothing.
“If you pull us from the PASIV, I’ll do more things to bring you joy,” Mal says.
Arthur straightens from where he’s leaning against the wall. “I should come with you.”
Dom stands at her side. “She can do this alone,” he says. He leans down, close to her ear. “Do you want to?” he whispers.
“I should,” Mal says. Her hand is cold when she lays it over his. “I’m scared,” she whispers.
“You’ve done this a million times. It’s the same.”
She nods. She touches every knuckle on his left hand.
****
Dom calls Miles, the instant the director steps out of the room. “Don’t worry,” he tells Miles.
“I’m not worried,” he snaps. “I would have had to be immensely stupid not to prepare myself for at least a digression into a bad spot.”
“She’ll have to adjust to the new compound. They’ve added something to the Somnacin. The time goes by in clicks, now.”
“Why do they insist on making everything so pedestrian?” Miles asks.
“You sound genuinely perplexed,” Dom says.
****
“This is production-wasteful," the director blusters upon his return, a hand reaching for the needle in Kit’s arm.
Arthur brings his elbow back, takes a step and smashes that momentum into the bones of Barron's face, drops the man where he stands. He turns. “Yes,” he says. “There was a time when I was good and kind and brave!”
Dom beams.
****
He sings into Mal’s ear. Something stupid. He can’t really carry a tune.
Kit wakes up. She tries to sit up, pushing with her arms, but her body had already begun to waste away, in this life. Arthur jolts, then is at her side, helping her up. “You’re okay,” he tells her.
“Am I awake?” she asks.
“Yes,” Dom says, voice strangled. He looks back to Mallorie, her closed eyes.
“Jesus,” Kit says. “Are you sure?”
“You’re awake,” Arthur tells her firmly. Dom didn’t know his eyes could look so kind. “Hi, Kit. It’s been a while.”
Kit takes in a shuddering breath. She clutches her hands to her chest as she stares at Arthur. As if she’s terrified of what they could do. “God, Arthur. Arthur. Look at you.”
“I have them cut your hair. Keep it regulation,” Arthur says. Reassuring her of all the things she doesn’t know. That she couldn’t recreate. “I had steak and eggs for breakfast this morning, at the diner off Columbia that opened last week.”
“Is she coming,” Dom demands. “Is she waking up?”
Kit looks him in the eye. “Yes,” she says. “She was behind me. Lighting the path in front of me.”
“Kit,” Dom says. “You look different.” He feels proud of Mal. More pride than he knows what to do with, and it makes his fingers lock, his chest constrict.
****
He whispers, “Love, love, love.” He says it into the palm of her hand. Helping her to catch the words.
Barron wakes up before Mal does. “Don’t dare to leave this room,” he says, then locks the door behind him.
It’s fine. Dom wasn’t going anywhere. Deep between his ribs, he feels the injustice of Barron waking up before his wife lodge uncomfortably.
“I think he’s holding it against me,” Arthur says. “The punch.”
“You hit him?” Kit asks, a satisfied gleam in her eye.
Dom is tracing around the bump of needle under skin when Mal’s eyes fly open, and he says, “Fuck.” Almost tears it out of her in his hurry to pull her from the machine that kept her sleeping. She grabs the front of Dom’s shirt. “We’re done with this,” she says. “We’re done.” and Dom can only process her words halfway, too eager to kiss her, to feel her lips move under his. His hands are shaking.
“We should probably go anyway,” Arthur says. “I have a feeling we won’t want to be here when our asshole-in-chief saunters back in.”
Dom licks his lips. “It’ll be worse if we run, I think.” He holds Mal tight. He will never stop touching her.
Kit nods. “I’ve faced disciplinary hearings before. You keep your head down and plow ahead.”
“No,” Mal says. “I’ve dreamed with him. We’re going. We’re not coming back.”
Dom can’t bring himself to say yes. He remembers what it is to have his acts of creation fettered by brick, by gravity and stone. And to live in a world less lovely, where every inch doesn’t contain something he thinks beautiful…he drops his head, studying the white skin of Mal’s inner arms. It’s too easy to find yourself caged, he thinks. Bars just rising around you.
“I can’t,” Kit says.
“You’re not staying,” Arthur says. You couldn’t break him if you tried.
“We are done with this,” Mal says again. She raises Dom’s face, holds it in both her hands.
“You make it sound easy,” Dom says.
“Please,” she says.
“Hop to it,” Arthur says.
****
The three of them step out of the door, a shaky confidence in their mutual decision, but Dom realizes what will happen too late to stop the door from closing behind them. “Guess who,” he breathes, and Mal leaps. She pounds at the little window.
Kit drags a chair right up against the door. She rests her head against it, and Mal slams the heel of her palm where the top of Kit’s head curves. “Open this door, now,” Mal commands. “You locked it. Did you know you locked it? Open the door, Kit.”
Kit looks up. She looks tired. “You brought me up a level too far,” she says.
"This is not a level." Mal’s lips are white. “I won’t forgive you,” she warns. Dom curls a hand around her wrist.
“I hope-” Kit’s voice grows choked, and wet. “I hope you don’t feel like it was a waste, coming in after me. You are my closest, my closest friend.”
“I won’t go without you.” Mallorie, unsheathed.
There are footsteps coming down the hallway. About to turn the corner, men to rival the projections in Arthur’s mind. Every one with a distinct face.
“We have to go,” Arthur says. He steps between Kit and Mal, hands on either side of Mal’s neck. “Mal. We have to go.”
“Not without her.” She pushes by Arthur, asks Kit, pleading: “How could you ask me to go without you?”
“Mallorie,” says Dom. “Please. I’m begging.” He forces Mal to look him in the eye, throws a quick glance to Kit, who nods at him. He’s torn between panic and anger. A slick knife of envy.
“I couldn’t,” Mal says. “I couldn’t leave you if I wanted to, Kit, I couldn’t just go. I can’t-” She breaks off her search for the right words, sobs with frustration. “I hate the English language!”
“This is the choice I’m making,” Kit says. “You did everything you could to change my mind. But I didn’t and I won’t.” She puts her hand to the window. “Mal. Just say what you want to say. Then go.”
Mal falls against the door, her hand still on the knob. A flood of words in her native tongue, then Mal finally, finally turns away, fury in the way she moves, and relief floods Dom’s body, the nerves in his fingers tingling. He would have carried her out, if he had to.
Arthur follows, then stops. He touches the tips of his fingers to the glass, taps lightly. When Kit looks up from setting the PASIV, he asks, “Why?”
She smiles at him. “I suppose I love this life.” Her voice is muted by composite wood.
“I don’t understand,” Arthur says, and Dom realizes, suddenly, how young Arthur still is. His boyish frame.
“Arthur,” Kit says, fond and desperate and angry and hopeful and a hundred other things at once. She flickers between them. “Run,” she says.
****
They split apart at Arthur’s demand; Dom and Mal slamming out a window, Dom rolling in the air to land underneath her. Dom’s last glimpse of Arthur is of his shadow racing behind him as he skids down a hallway.
They lie there for seconds, Dom searching for breath. Shattered glass scattering sharp-cut light. It’s the afternoon, the sun at its hottest.
He’s sweating, his shirt sticking to his skin, a pain stinging at his forehead, and blood dripping, a thickened heat, down his temple. He wants Mal off of him.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
Listen, he thinks. Our hearts beat the same. The pump of blood through flesh.
“I could,” she’s hyperventilating, “I could feel her-while I was sleeping. I think I could feel her around the edges. I felt like I was leaving someone behind. I kept looking. Oh god.” She moves off of him, pushes to her knees. “We have to go, now. Dom, stand up,” she commands, handling him with strong, competent hands.
“You’re pregnant,” he says. It could be awe in his voice. It could be terror. We are all many things.
Part Three
Arthur’s projections are noticeably more physical with him. "Jesus Christ," Dom says, after the sixth shoulder shoved hard into his. "Lighten the fuck up." Dom’s voice isn’t raised, but he doesn’t usually swear. It’s a crude method of communication.
“Feel free to point and shoot,” Arthur says, by way of apology. “Maybe you’ll finally find some catharsis from the life-scarring trauma you endured in our first dream together.”
“Solicitous,” Dom says, but he leaves his weapon holstered. Six marines have been drafted to have their minds act as sites of battle, waves of projections gunned down with army approval, but Dom prefers to keep every bit of the dreamer alive. The best way to forestall unforeseen and unintended consequences is to proceed with caution.
Arthur's had an itchy trigger finger since finding out the projections could die with no immediate consequences. But that is, perhaps, understandable.
Dom keeps sighting Arthur as they move ahead, situating his movements around Arthur’s. Arthur forces a grim composure upon his face and the projections turn away for a moment, only to again bounce glances off of Dom, to walk a little too near.
Arthur scowls, and the pureness of expression almost makes Dom start. He wants to photograph it for Mal. "I'm not going to fall in love with your wife,” Arthur bites out in forced confession. “You’ve wanted to ask for days now. Just do it.”
Dom fights off a bristle. “Now now,” he says, then buttons his lip, pushes ahead and leads the way up the stairs to a building he’d seen in Arthur’s head before, through the door of an elementary school. He takes deep, steady breaths and thinks of the many different ways he appreciates Arthur. There are several, most of them revolving around a deep appreciation for and reliance on his efficacy.
Finally, they stop. Dom stands at a child’s locker, an Apatosaurus sticker affixed to orange paint. Arthur is over his shoulder and Dom can’t keep quiet any longer. "You think I'm jealous," he says. "But if you do fall into unrequited love, it's no skin off my nose."
"Fine," Arthur says.
Dom snorts. He looks up at Arthur's distant profile, annoyed at the distance he sees there. "I'm worried for you,” Dom finally spits out. “Mal would like to have you as a friend, ten years from now. Maybe more." Dom shrugs. “I could stand to see you around then, too.”
Arthur looks down at Dom. He takes his hand off his gun. There might be surprise on his face, if he would bother to let it show. "Let's take it a decade at a time," he says.
Arthur, Dom thinks. Glib underneath all that capability. He pulls away the lock. Secrets Arthur’s kept from himself lying there, written in careful pencil, on wide-ruled paper. "They don’t look like much, do they?”
“Go ahead and read them to me,” Arthur says. “Tell me what I need to know.”
“Me?” Dom holds out the papers. “I’ve seen enough of your mind.”
“Please,” Arthur says. He lifts an eyebrow. “What more could surprise you?”
Dom's curious, he has to admit, and he shrugs his acquiescence, rifles through the papers.
Arthur clears his throat. “While I’m not in love with Mal, I do have eyes and an insistent libido.” He looks away, hands behind his back. “Unrelated. Continue.”
****
He gets sick. Not debilitatingly so but his dreams are a mess, one melting into another, a riot of color, every step a slog through wet sand.
"Desk duty," Mal says.
"Desk duty," Arthur says, but his tone is more satisfied.
Dom flips him off, discreetly.
He transcribes and puts together reports for a week and a half before he feels like he’s going to go out of his mind. “Kill me,” he says to Mal, one night after he wakes up with a particularly splitting headache.
She smoothes a hand over his forehead, helps him to sit up. “I’m sorry, Dominic. This is something you’ll have to suffer through.” She brings a glass of water to his lips. “Now, drink.”
****
Dom returns to work, not well, but able. Mal is with him in every dream-he has a lingering tendency to soften the edges of every world they enter, to leave everything just out-of-focus-and Mal glosses over his weakness with a sheen of diffuse light, or by shifting vistas into landscapes created by brushstrokes.
They’re sitting with Kit, in a field of grass. Under a mosquito net, with the sun low, floating in yellow light. He’d fallen asleep with his head in Mal’s lap, Kit sitting cross-legged in front of them and when he wakes up, he doesn’t open his eyes, listens to the susurrations of their consonants, their vowels.
“It hasn’t been a perfect situation,” Kit says. “I’ve tried to recreate my favorite memories, but-” She laughs. “They always sort of make me blue.”
“I thought I was the only one,” Mal says. “I loved my grandmother’s pied-a-terre as a girl. It wasn’t the loveliest of buildings, but I remember she had this huge four-post bed that took up her bedroom. I could just barely squeeze around it, to read all the letters I’d written her. She’d pinned them to her bedroom wall.” She runs a thumb over Dom’s eyebrow. “But I felt sad as soon as I walked through the door again."
“Nostalgia, maybe?” Kit says.
“Do you think so?” Mal sighs. “I always thought nostalgia was a happier feeling, underneath it all. That I had lived a life wonderful.”
The noise of Kit shifting. “Maybe I wasn’t sad so much as afraid. I spent what felt like days, recreating the details of a particular steakhouse. And then when I sat down, it took all I had to take that first bite of my porterhouse." She laughs. "My hands were shaking."
Mal reaches over him. He's not sure for what reason. He turns his face into her belly. She was reaching for Kit’s hands, maybe.
"I had to change the tablecloth to the wrong color before I could eat." Kit sighs. "It was supposed to be red, the same color as the sweater my younger brother was wearing."
"What color did you change it to?"
"I don't know," Kit says. "White, probably."
"Kit!" Mal says suddenly. "I miss you, sometimes and so much, when I'm awake."
"What's happening up there? I didn't know if I should ask."
Mal seems to relax, settle back, but her thighs are tensed, and she pinches, gently, at Dom's earlobe. "They're pressuring me. Everyone, really. They want more results, and answers to questions that scare me."
"What kind of questions?"
"They want you to go down deeper."
Kit exhales. "I told you; I think that's the logical next-"
"Then they want to wake you up and keep you that way. They want to see how well you retain the memory of skills learned while dreaming. If they could compress years of training into a few good nights' rest. If it truly takes root."
"It's sound."
"Don't pretend like you're comfortable with the suggestion!" Mal says. "You're not."
Kit says nothing for a moment. When she speaks again, her tone is clipped, a formal cadence. "See if you can remember this tip when you wake up. The Department of Defense gets what it wants. Find a way to make the process something you can bear, because the end result is inevitable."
Mal gently extricates herself from under Dom. When he opens his eyes, she's standing, looming over him. The ground is shaking, grass ripped out of the earth, the air filling with blades. "I won't bend," she says.
"What are you looking for here? Your worshippers to rise in rebellion?" Kit asks, a wistful smile on her face. "Sometimes I'm so unsure, if you're real."
****
A flood of supporting evidence rolls in, once Dom has been made aware of the argument. Deadlines that used to have some slack built into them go tight as piano wire. “We requested doors that open outwardly,” Dom is told. “Please do not deviate from the specs as written.”
“Build us a jail, Mr. Cobb,” they tell him. “One that the prisoners won’t recognize for what it is.”
“Would it be possible,” Director Barron asks, a faint smile on his lips, “to make the terrain flatter? No quarter for those who would hide.”
“At this point, they should just ask me to recreate Tartarus and be done with it,” Dom says to Arthur. The conference room is empty; a meeting had been requested for noon and Dom had been frog-marched into place by Arthur fifteen minutes beforehand.
“We’ve entered a delicate phase,” Arthur says. “People more important than you or I-and yes, Dom, such people exist-are sitting up in their seats. They’ve caught wind of the possibility that this billion-dollar project may now be ready to pay dividends and they want to see how much they can squeeze out of us.”
“I don’t like it.” Dom spins in his conference room chair. He watches Arthur shrug off his suit jacket, drape it over his arm. “You seem to have adjusted quickly.”
“Yes,” Arthur says. “That can be credited to the fact that I have five senses which I put to use instead of daydreaming about Zumthor’s baths and my future memoirs. It’s allowed me a two month head start. I’m sure the rude awakening you’re suffering is much shittier.”
“Your chapter’s a bear,” Dom says. “I’m not fair or kind.”
“I look forward to being contacted by your fact-checker,” Arthur says.
“Your suit makes you look like an asshole.”
“My suit forces four star generals to realize that I take myself very seriously. They’ll decide from there whether I’m giving myself too much credit or not.”
“What do my clothes communicate?”
“That you take ease in your privilege.” Arthur looks at him, deadly serious. “Be careful, Cobb.”
****
Arthur’s words eat at him. Dom paces throughout the meeting, only taking a seat when asked to, firmly, for the fourth time. He sneers at the politics of it all, at Arthur’s eminently practical kowtowing.
We will not bend, he thinks.
“Impossible,” he begins to say. “It can’t be done.”
“It’s outside the realm of probability,” he says. “I could build a maze that the subject would never be able to escape, but once he wakes up, the puzzle goes up like so much smoke. The corral of his mind lasts only as long as he sleeps.”
“There could still be use there,” Barron says. He has an easy smile that Dom hates the sight of. “A sense of time is still evident in the dream. If we subject a man to solitary imprisonment long enough, even if it is only in a dream, couldn’t we soften his mind a little? Perhaps create a vulnerability to exploit?”
“He’ll have a flood of projections at his beck and call.”
“We’ll neutralize them.”
Dom raises an eyebrow, skeptical. “Have you used the PASIV before, Director Barron?”
“Twice.”
“Forget the projections for a moment. Yes, there is an awareness of time passing in the dream, but it’s a cognizance we impose upon waking. During the dream itself-time passes in fits and starts. You begin reconstructing the Hanging Gardens and look up to find it ready for seeding. It’s only when I think back on the process that I can feel the minutes slipping by.”
“We can impose a more structured linearity,” Barron muses. “With the right cocktail.” He smiles and Dom controls his instinct to recoil. “You’ve been immensely helpful.”
“Despite my best efforts,” Dom says.
“That,” Barron says, “read more as your true sentiment than as a joke. You may try again, if you like.”
Dom calculates. I could take you apart, he wants to say. Open up all your boxes.
****
“I can’t,” Mal says. “I can’t anymore. We’ll quit tomorrow. Promise me.”
“Could you?” Dom asks. “You’d lose the say you have now.”
“Say!” Mal laughs. “What say? They tell me to jump and I negotiate them down from three feet to two.”
“You keep them from pushing Kit down any more levels of consciousness. You put a leash on Arthur’s otherwise-boundless capacity for destroying projections. You make me ask why exactly they would want me to build an oasis that remains forever just-out-of-reach.”
“Out of fear.” She has circles under her eyes. “All my excitement for the unknown has turned to terror.”
Dom’s stomach hollows. He fights the adrenaline his body releases into his bloodstream, searches for a calm to relay to his wife. “Mallorie,” he says.
“Why did you let me bring you into this?” she demands. Her voice raised. “How could you be so stupid? Tell me ‘no’; or do you have no spine at all?”
He goes to hold her, furious and silent, and she struggles in his grip, shoving at his chest. “Idiot! Why did I marry you? Why?”
“Mallorie,” he says. His fingertips going white on her shoulders and he forces himself to grip her with less force. “Be careful what you say.”
She lets out a low sob. She stares up into his eyes, shaking. “Could you do it?” she asks.
He says nothing.
“This is not the construction of another battleground, or temple, or a prison, Dominic. They are asking you to impose a foreign order upon the mind. They are asking you to create a mandated structure to govern a man’s thoughts. Could you do it?” She shakes her head. “How could anyone?”
“We’ll go. We’ll leave the country if we have to.” He’s grasping at straws. “But if it’s impossible, where’s the harm in trying?”
“There’s harm, Dominic.” She pushes him away, goes to their kitchen counter, her head in her hands. “Everywhere I look, I see harm.”
“You’ll say no when I can’t. If I ever get close.”
She looks into the distance, chewing at her lip, her fingers at the curve of her jaw. “And what if I can’t hold?” she asks. Quiet and dark.
They forgot to turn on the lights.
****
Mal is hard on Arthur. “Your vest is ridiculous,” she says. “And your pants need to be hemmed.”
“I haven’t had time to find a good tailor,” Arthur says. His brow furrows, and he flips a pen between his fingers, so quickly it seems to bend in smooth arcs.
“Stop,” she says, snatching the pen from his fingers. “Please, Arthur. The sight of you in a suit is making me physically ill.”
He stands, stares coolly at her.
“What?” she demands. She raises her chin.
Arthur opens his mouth, but Dom, tucked away in a corner of the room, lifts his neck, scratches at his Adam’s apple. He clears his throat.
Arthur lapses back into stillness.
“If someone doesn’t indulge in my need for a fight in the next ten seconds, I’ll scream,” Mal warns. She kicks off her shoes.
Arthur looks down at his nails. “You’re a fucking mess, Mal,” he says.
“Round one!” says Dom, and Arthur cracks a smile. Mal laughs, too, and only for the slightest bit too long.
****
“We could just turn off the PASIV,” Dom says, a little later, after Arthur’s gone for coffee. “Kit will have to wake up.”
“We don’t know that,” Mal says. “Her mind is so deeply sedated. And we’ve put a clock, effectively, in the compound. Who knows if she will be able to follow the thread back? If she’ll have time, in the seconds after we disconnect her?”
“It’s conjecture, at this point.” Dom cracks his neck. “Hey,” he says, standing. He takes her in his arms. “We’ll bring her back. We’ll go down again, and find her.”
“I know,” Mal says. She turns into his neck, her lips moving against his pulse. She half-forms words.
“It’s not your fault,” he says.
“We introduced too many new elements at once,” Mal finally says. “I could have insisted they separate the trial for the new compound from the dive into a fourth level.”
“You insisted,” Cobb says.
“But I could have thrown a fit.” Mal laughs. “I should have kicked off my shoes then. Wielded a heel.”
They rock, back and forth, her arms around his waist. He kisses her hair. He takes care not to crush her with the weight of him. “Should I recite you your poem?”
She groans.
“I’m starting to think you don’t like it,” he says. He narrows his eyes at her. “Most women would find it extremely romantic, to have a poem written by their husband.”
“Mm.” She shrugs. “Recite it, then.”
He straightens his shoulders, coughs. He squeezes her hard. “Mal,” he intones, “a haiku is // very constrictive, much like // vows. P.S. I do.”
“And to think,” Mal says. “I didn’t swoon right there at the altar when you read those to me.”
He grins.
“Will Arthur go in after her, do you think? If I ask?” she asks suddenly.
“I thought I’d distracted you,” Dom says.
She smiles fondly at his face. He touches the lines, growing there at the corners of her eyes.
****
Arthur wakes up gasping next to Kit. Over and over. The machines monitoring his heart, his breathing, his brain activity reading out in spiking blades. “I’m fine,” he says, immediately, but his eyes are wild and his fingers fly to where the cannula of the PASIV sinks into his veins. Every time.
Mal has been banished from the room. From this floor. A prerequisite for Arthur’s agreement to enter Kit’s dreams. Dom thought it strange, briefly, that she would agree so easily to step away, but there’s been a hesitance about her. He doesn’t know what it is.
The last time, Arthur’s eyes fly open, then smash closed again as he doubles over, keening. “I’m fine,” he pants. “It’s in my head. It’s in my head.”
Dom rolls up his sleeve. “I’m coming with you. I should have been with you from the start.”
****
Sleeping is different with the new compound. He can feel the beat of his heart, a counting-out-rhythm in his fingertips, in the number of breaths he takes.
Kit is nowhere to be seen. Just a flood of projections that have learned to recognize those who are not right. When Dom is crowded off of the edge of this world, there are ten seconds until impact. He thinks of Miles. He didn’t think his father-in-law would be the last face that flashes before his eyes before death, but there it is.
The way Miles had taken off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. The way he pursed his lips. The way he said, “Do not let them change the foundation of who you are. You are a builder. We dream up structures and then we erect them in the sky.”
****
It isn’t until the fifth time under, together, that Arthur and Dom make it to the third level. There, they race down the steps into an underground tunnel, avoid the branching tunnel that leads to an enclosed, unexplainably sunlit garden, and press themselves into a service closet. Arthur wedges a chair against the door.
“That won’t hold,” Cobb says.
“Shut the fuck up,” Arthur says, lugging out the PASIV.
****
The fourth level is a strip of sand, surrounded by nothing. Dom pictures waves lapping at a shore, staining white grains dark and wet, and suddenly there’s a shallow sea, blooming. A limitless expanse at the touch of his mind.
Arthur is shucked down to his boxers. “I hate it here,” he says.
“It’s so quiet,” Dom says.
“What the fuck,” Arthur says.
Wind, Dom thinks, and the water ripples around him. Arthur’s soft, product-less hair waving. His heart is racing. Mal, he thinks. Look. This life is easy.
The bottom gives out from underneath them. Arthur disappears beneath the water, then rises again, cresting; swimming in long, sure pulls.
****
Dom’s been swimming for a long time. His arms are tired. “Keep moving,” Arthur says from next to him, so Dom does.
There’s splashing, faint, behind him. Like someone might be struggling, but Dom is too tired to turn his head. He should reach shore. Mal is waiting. There’s a light, melting until it's pure and white and Dom blinks, blinks, he blinks-
*****
“Dom?” Mal’s nose. Her cheeks and mouth and eyes. “Dom, how do you feel?”
Dom swallows, throat lined in sand, usually pliable tissue like jerky. “Thirsty,” he says, and she brings a paper cup to his mouth, pours water across his lips. She kisses him, after, then goes to Arthur, caresses his forehead, rolls her eyes when Arthur brushes her hand away gently, tells her that he’s fine.
There is no needle in Dom’s arm. It feels strange, to wake and find your veins uninvaded. “Did you-did you unplug us while we were dreaming?” he asks.
“See!” Director Barron is in the room, a fact Dom had overlooked until his voice erupts from the chair on the other side of Kit’s bed. “It was the most obvious solution, and here they are, our sleepers returned. Still sharp, your husband.”
“A word,” Mal says, searingly sweet.
“Kit isn’t awake,” Arthur says. He’s standing at her bedside.
****
“Be reasonable,” the director says.
“Your face means nothing to me,” Mal says. Her heels bring her to a height an inch above his. “I don’t know why you keep bothering me with it.”
The director laughs. Strange, Dom thinks. It is hard to read his face. Even while looking at it, the features seem just beyond familiar. “I’ve pushed you to the far reaches of your self control," the director says. “I didn’t think that would ever happen.”
Mal studies him, removing her jacket. She lies next to Kit, both of them connected to the device. “You sound pleased,” she says, and there’s a threat behind her words, slinking through her tone.
The director says nothing.
“If you pull us from the PASIV, I’ll do more things to bring you joy,” Mal says.
Arthur straightens from where he’s leaning against the wall. “I should come with you.”
Dom stands at her side. “She can do this alone,” he says. He leans down, close to her ear. “Do you want to?” he whispers.
“I should,” Mal says. Her hand is cold when she lays it over his. “I’m scared,” she whispers.
“You’ve done this a million times. It’s the same.”
She nods. She touches every knuckle on his left hand.
****
Dom calls Miles, the instant the director steps out of the room. “Don’t worry,” he tells Miles.
“I’m not worried,” he snaps. “I would have had to be immensely stupid not to prepare myself for at least a digression into a bad spot.”
“She’ll have to adjust to the new compound. They’ve added something to the Somnacin. The time goes by in clicks, now.”
“Why do they insist on making everything so pedestrian?” Miles asks.
“You sound genuinely perplexed,” Dom says.
****
“This is production-wasteful," the director blusters upon his return, a hand reaching for the needle in Kit’s arm.
Arthur brings his elbow back, takes a step and smashes that momentum into the bones of Barron's face, drops the man where he stands. He turns. “Yes,” he says. “There was a time when I was good and kind and brave!”
Dom beams.
****
He sings into Mal’s ear. Something stupid. He can’t really carry a tune.
Kit wakes up. She tries to sit up, pushing with her arms, but her body had already begun to waste away, in this life. Arthur jolts, then is at her side, helping her up. “You’re okay,” he tells her.
“Am I awake?” she asks.
“Yes,” Dom says, voice strangled. He looks back to Mallorie, her closed eyes.
“Jesus,” Kit says. “Are you sure?”
“You’re awake,” Arthur tells her firmly. Dom didn’t know his eyes could look so kind. “Hi, Kit. It’s been a while.”
Kit takes in a shuddering breath. She clutches her hands to her chest as she stares at Arthur. As if she’s terrified of what they could do. “God, Arthur. Arthur. Look at you.”
“I have them cut your hair. Keep it regulation,” Arthur says. Reassuring her of all the things she doesn’t know. That she couldn’t recreate. “I had steak and eggs for breakfast this morning, at the diner off Columbia that opened last week.”
“Is she coming,” Dom demands. “Is she waking up?”
Kit looks him in the eye. “Yes,” she says. “She was behind me. Lighting the path in front of me.”
“Kit,” Dom says. “You look different.” He feels proud of Mal. More pride than he knows what to do with, and it makes his fingers lock, his chest constrict.
****
He whispers, “Love, love, love.” He says it into the palm of her hand. Helping her to catch the words.
Barron wakes up before Mal does. “Don’t dare to leave this room,” he says, then locks the door behind him.
It’s fine. Dom wasn’t going anywhere. Deep between his ribs, he feels the injustice of Barron waking up before his wife lodge uncomfortably.
“I think he’s holding it against me,” Arthur says. “The punch.”
“You hit him?” Kit asks, a satisfied gleam in her eye.
Dom is tracing around the bump of needle under skin when Mal’s eyes fly open, and he says, “Fuck.” Almost tears it out of her in his hurry to pull her from the machine that kept her sleeping. She grabs the front of Dom’s shirt. “We’re done with this,” she says. “We’re done.” and Dom can only process her words halfway, too eager to kiss her, to feel her lips move under his. His hands are shaking.
“We should probably go anyway,” Arthur says. “I have a feeling we won’t want to be here when our asshole-in-chief saunters back in.”
Dom licks his lips. “It’ll be worse if we run, I think.” He holds Mal tight. He will never stop touching her.
Kit nods. “I’ve faced disciplinary hearings before. You keep your head down and plow ahead.”
“No,” Mal says. “I’ve dreamed with him. We’re going. We’re not coming back.”
Dom can’t bring himself to say yes. He remembers what it is to have his acts of creation fettered by brick, by gravity and stone. And to live in a world less lovely, where every inch doesn’t contain something he thinks beautiful…he drops his head, studying the white skin of Mal’s inner arms. It’s too easy to find yourself caged, he thinks. Bars just rising around you.
“I can’t,” Kit says.
“You’re not staying,” Arthur says. You couldn’t break him if you tried.
“We are done with this,” Mal says again. She raises Dom’s face, holds it in both her hands.
“You make it sound easy,” Dom says.
“Please,” she says.
“Hop to it,” Arthur says.
****
The three of them step out of the door, a shaky confidence in their mutual decision, but Dom realizes what will happen too late to stop the door from closing behind them. “Guess who,” he breathes, and Mal leaps. She pounds at the little window.
Kit drags a chair right up against the door. She rests her head against it, and Mal slams the heel of her palm where the top of Kit’s head curves. “Open this door, now,” Mal commands. “You locked it. Did you know you locked it? Open the door, Kit.”
Kit looks up. She looks tired. “You brought me up a level too far,” she says.
"This is not a level." Mal’s lips are white. “I won’t forgive you,” she warns. Dom curls a hand around her wrist.
“I hope-” Kit’s voice grows choked, and wet. “I hope you don’t feel like it was a waste, coming in after me. You are my closest, my closest friend.”
“I won’t go without you.” Mallorie, unsheathed.
There are footsteps coming down the hallway. About to turn the corner, men to rival the projections in Arthur’s mind. Every one with a distinct face.
“We have to go,” Arthur says. He steps between Kit and Mal, hands on either side of Mal’s neck. “Mal. We have to go.”
“Not without her.” She pushes by Arthur, asks Kit, pleading: “How could you ask me to go without you?”
“Mallorie,” says Dom. “Please. I’m begging.” He forces Mal to look him in the eye, throws a quick glance to Kit, who nods at him. He’s torn between panic and anger. A slick knife of envy.
“I couldn’t,” Mal says. “I couldn’t leave you if I wanted to, Kit, I couldn’t just go. I can’t-” She breaks off her search for the right words, sobs with frustration. “I hate the English language!”
“This is the choice I’m making,” Kit says. “You did everything you could to change my mind. But I didn’t and I won’t.” She puts her hand to the window. “Mal. Just say what you want to say. Then go.”
Mal falls against the door, her hand still on the knob. A flood of words in her native tongue, then Mal finally, finally turns away, fury in the way she moves, and relief floods Dom’s body, the nerves in his fingers tingling. He would have carried her out, if he had to.
Arthur follows, then stops. He touches the tips of his fingers to the glass, taps lightly. When Kit looks up from setting the PASIV, he asks, “Why?”
She smiles at him. “I suppose I love this life.” Her voice is muted by composite wood.
“I don’t understand,” Arthur says, and Dom realizes, suddenly, how young Arthur still is. His boyish frame.
“Arthur,” Kit says, fond and desperate and angry and hopeful and a hundred other things at once. She flickers between them. “Run,” she says.
****
They split apart at Arthur’s demand; Dom and Mal slamming out a window, Dom rolling in the air to land underneath her. Dom’s last glimpse of Arthur is of his shadow racing behind him as he skids down a hallway.
They lie there for seconds, Dom searching for breath. Shattered glass scattering sharp-cut light. It’s the afternoon, the sun at its hottest.
He’s sweating, his shirt sticking to his skin, a pain stinging at his forehead, and blood dripping, a thickened heat, down his temple. He wants Mal off of him.
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
Listen, he thinks. Our hearts beat the same. The pump of blood through flesh.
“I could,” she’s hyperventilating, “I could feel her-while I was sleeping. I think I could feel her around the edges. I felt like I was leaving someone behind. I kept looking. Oh god.” She moves off of him, pushes to her knees. “We have to go, now. Dom, stand up,” she commands, handling him with strong, competent hands.
“You’re pregnant,” he says. It could be awe in his voice. It could be terror. We are all many things.
Part Three