In Violation of Copyright [Part 2 of 2]
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Back to Part 1
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“-colonialist son of a whore!” Yusuf rips the IV out and slaps his hands over his right eye.
“That’s the most original one I’ve heard all day,” Arthur says.
“Tell that to the one I’m insulting, I think he’ll be mighty pleased.” Yusuf snarls and gets out of his chair, goes to the PASIV and checks a few things. Arthur knows that Yusuf is hearing the same as he, counting the beats of Piaf’s anthem on this level, but Yusuf actually counts aloud, four, three, two-
And Eames wakes up laughing.
“You asshole!” Yusuf snarls and hits Eames on the back of the head.
“Careful, you don’t want to kick me out of this one too.” Eames plucks out his own IV and, to Arthur’s surprise, goes to check on Dom’s headphones. “This was faster.”
Arthur winds up the spare PASIV tubes. “Not all according to plan?”
“No, but all on schedule.” Eames pats Arthur on the back and then slides his hand up, one jaunty rub. The touch is strange and oddly reassuring after the fighting in the halls. Arthur just keeps working and counting, turns off Dom’s headphones for now but leaves them on.
“What he means,” Yusuf says, “is that he stabbed me through the eye and probably used that as an excuse for Dom to shoot him.”
“In a coffeehouse?” Arthur asks.
“He’ll try, if he catches up with me. I stole the idea-yes, I have it, unless you’d like to pat me down and check-gave the girl a goose, and ran.”
“She thought Eames’ forge was her character,” Yusuf explains, so Arthur doesn’t have to check.
“And she should be leading our hero on a merry chase through the ruins of a fallen Iron Curtain about now,” Eames says, ruffling Miyu’s hair, by the look in his eyes, threatening to do the same to Yusuf. “It will take more to keep her occupied than any of us anticipated.”
“You’ve left Dom alone in the mind of a writer,” Arthur says.
“I know exactly what I did.” Eames brushes past Arthur to the door. “You’re not the only one who can be trusted with that.”
As if to prove it, he flings open the door and Yusuf shoots the rioter in the shoulder, then, takes one step closer and shoots the next one in the gut.
“He’d better be sedated enough,” Arthur says.
Yusuf isn’t smiling, just breathing a bit heavily and advancing on the hall. “Well, Eames just proved that it’s weak enough that a murderous kick is still an option. Let’s just keep going.”
“Exactly!” Eames is now wearing the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police, complete with chinstrap hat, and carrying a Krag-Jørgensen moose rifle. “What does it matter as long as the job gets done?”
Respect or none, Arthur glares. “If you strain the plausibility of this scenario-”
“String cheese,” Eames says.
Arthur concedes the point, but subconsciously backdates the Mountie uniform to 1933.
-
“I knew it,” Dom says both in and out of character. He holds his arm across Miyu’s chest and keeps her from stepping away from the red brick wall. “They’re after us both. We have to get you out.” He looks in the direction of the shots he fired after Eames’ forge and knows Eames just took care of it himself.
“Who are they? Who are you? What’s going on?”
“It’s not the Russians,” Dom tells her, trying to bring the dream under control. “It’s the yakuza. They know who you work for. It’s okay, I work for him too.” He hears, and disposes of, another two projections. “Remember?” he asks when the assailants stop shooting. “You’ve seen me with Saitoh.”
Miyu gulps in air and clutches her computer tight. “-yeah. Yeah I have.” Her knees are knocking together, the tights almost squeaking.
Good. Good, he can stall with this, run with this, and break out of this when Arthur tells him to. “Remember, Miyu, I know a thing or two about being hunted. So you’re gonna have to stick close to me and do what I say, all right? I’ll get us out of this.”
“How can I trust you?” Miyu is whispering, but it’s urgent enough to go straight into Dom’s ear. “You shot Irina-”
Someone lobs a grenade into the alley. Dom drops his gun, grabs Miyu with one hand and the nearest fire escape ladder with the other. It takes a split-second mental delay of the blast to haul her up to the balcony, but he does it, even if her legs get a little reciprocally singed.
“You can trust me because I want out of this just as much as you,” he says firmly. “Now climb.”
She does. Dom does as well, but he’s building the staircase. And the city, and the yakuza, and the plot. He can give her a story like the one he stole, and maybe she’ll grow a new one out of it.
But if that’s supposed to give him any peace of mind, it fails.
-
Eames can’t say precisely that he enjoys watching Arthur fight. Certainly it gives Eames an immense amount of respect for the man’s competence and Eames won’t deny a not-entirely-aesthetic appreciation for Arthur’s lithe lethality. It’s something that Arthur possessed even when they first crossed paths, and since working with him more consistently Eames is pleased that this continues to be the status quo and not some fluke of dreaming. He watches, as much as he can with more adversarial targets in sight, as Arthur not-quite-callously dispatches one prisoner with a pistol-butt to the skull and then kicks the new corpse into the line of fire meant for Yusuf. (How the prisoners armed themselves, Eames does not care, not now.) Eames knows what Arthur was before he became what he is, and seeing that laid as bare as a shorn sheep is too humbling to enjoy.
But damned if it doesn’t make Eames want to see more, and harder, and worse.
Arthur made and knows the maze, and so he leads; Yusuf, with his pistol and the briefcase, is center, and Eames has the rear. Not that it matters with how fast they’re moving, all of Nottingham’s stray disbelief incarnate and converging on them like a swarm of senseless flies.
“Eames,” Arthur says coolly after he steps on one fallen convict’s body to get a better shot at another, “get into character. It’s this door.”
“As you wish, Darling.” And after clearing himself a path-he likes this moose gun-Eames does. And he forges it clean, because it’s almost always best to hide the carnage.
“Detective Schaunard,” he says once he’s through the door, in Received Pronunciation as crisp as the collar of his robin’s-egg-blue Swiss shirt. “I’m aware you’ve found a certain...Alexander Nottingham?”
“So he says.” The first time Eames showed Ariadne this forge, she shivered hard enough to drop her own. She doesn’t now, but there’s a flicker in her reflection that tells Eames it was a good idea to prime her. Eames makes sure that Nottingham is focusing hard enough on him that it doesn’t matter what Ariadne is projecting.
Yusuf steps in behind Eames, Arthur still running damage control in the hallways. He holds up the briefcase. “Where do you want this, Inspector?”
“On the table,” Eames says. He leans down and gets Nottingham by the eyes. “Do you know what that is?”
“No,” Nottingham says.
“Then it’s fairly certain that you don’t know who I am, either. Or why I’m here, for that matter. Or why you’re here. Am I right?”
Nottingham grimaces and glares. “All I know is that I want my lawyer, and I’m not saying a single goddamn word to you otherwise.”
Eames huffs. “Actually, I think you’re about to tell us a great deal.” He looks over Nottingham’s shoulder, just a glance. “Restrain him.”
Yusuf and Ariadne get Nottingham by the arms-Yusuf’s the more dexterous, and pushes Nottingham’s left sleeve up.
Eames grins. “Sergeant, get in here.”
Arthur hipchecks the door. This is almost certainly because his hands and arms are completely drenched in blood.
Eames smirks so that he doesn’t shiver, or do anything more evocative. “Wash up and prep him.”
Nottingham chokes. “Prep?”
“You said you don’t know what’s in this briefcase,” Eames reminds him, ”a fact of which I am quite glad. That way, you won’t confuse this for anything else.”
Arthur, having wiped his hands on a towelette from the PASIV case, is poised to pierce Nottingham’s hand.
“There’s a glitch in your system, Mr. Nottingham,” Eames says, all sweetness. “You’re remembering several things you oughtn’t, because they’re not true. Not about your name, nor your books, nor even your lawyer. And we’re going to fix that for you. Don’t worry about it any more.” He nods at Arthur, who gets the needle taped down and reaches over to push the PASIV on.
“You can’t do this!” Nottingham struggles, and of course it’s futile, but there’s no point in decrying the effort he makes to get free. “You monsters, I’ll tear you apart-“
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” Eames picks up another needle and lets everyone watch it glint. “You won’t even remember me.”
Nottingham sobs and slumps forward in his chair and their grasp. He’s out. The rest of them work quickly, stepping out of their characters and hooking themselves up to the PASIV.
“Did Professor Miles really used to act like that?” Ariadne asks him. Now that she’s dropped Schaunard’s forge, she looks almost as nervous by comparison as when Eames first met her.
The answer to that question is a qualified yes, but Eames doesn’t give it. Instead, Arthur answers for him, only fitting since he knows from the correct side of the interrogation table. “He doesn’t use Received Pronunciation.”
Ariadne gulps and shakes her head. “Oh my god.”
-
Dom decides they should reach the top of the building, so they do. The roof spreads out before them and so does the city, towering even higher on all sides like a cage. Dom has made it night, nearly full dusk with an absent moon, so that the searchlights of seven helicopters catch on dust as often as concrete and glass. The city is anonymous, without advertisement or landmark, and Dom stops to assemble some weapons and give Miyu time to take it all in.
Miyu is panting, bowed over her laptop like she’d lean on it if it reached the ground. She’s sweat through her makeup, better than crying, and it haloes her eyes like a raccoon’s mask. “All right,” she says, over and over again like a meditative mantra. “All right. Where now?”
The helicopters have gun turrets, Bullets strafe the concrete and Dom grabs Miyu, shoves her down behind a smokestack. The laptop scrapes the roof, the plastic streaked white like a skinned knee. Dom makes sure it doesn’t bleed after that internal comparison.
“Here, quick!” The nearest chopper has a rope ladder down; Dom waits until it’s just in range and shoots the gunner, who falls so fast his tattooed arms leave blue streaks in the searchlight. “Grab the ladder!” he commands, and Miyu does, hugs it close to her chest like a cage over the computer.
He anchors the ladder only long enough for her to start climbing, barely long enough for the helicopter to lift them off the roof entirely.
-
“Your ticket, please.”
The train is speeding through a blood-red void, and Eames mentally thanks Yusuf for the seasonably dry weather. There isn’t a river outside, only hunched crags and cracked earth and the most dastardly sun Eames has seen outside of the Serengeti. He reaches into his pocket for his totem-new concept, that, but not entirely without merit-traces the rough edge, tests the heft. A dream.
Not that Nottingham knows. He hands Eames whatever is in hand without so much as glancing up.
All right then. “Are you so certain you want to give me this?” he says in the voice and with the mien of Miles, poising the ticket puncher over the card. It’s not a ticket, here, it’s Nottingham’s license, the jagged beyblade of the hole-puncher poised on his photograph’s eye. Eames makes sure that Nottingham can see it.
Oh, smashing. He has. And he is pertinently terrified.
Eames makes it click.
Nottingham lunges out of the seat and screams. If he disbelieves, it certainly doesn’t show. Eames lets him try-the fellow is surprisingly strong for a man his age, and Eames allows his Miles to appear physically weak, wrestles him hard enough to make him feel the strain and nothing more. The license, Canadian and expired, glows a faint blue where the savage light hits it. The world rattles. Nottingham breaks free, shoves down the corridor and runs, tripping over the discarded bottles and paper bags that litter the aisle and failing, always, to stay up.
“You’ll never get out!” Eames shouts, lets Miles’ voice ring over the rush of the tracks. “The worst critics are always in your head, Alexander! There’s nowhere to run at all.” He snaps the hole-puncher once, ominously, for good measure. He’s certain Nottingham hears it before he moves to the next car.
-
The hall has crowded so thickly with prisoners that Arthur can hear the corpses being trampled.
Arthur is left with a horde of unmilitarized but armed projections, two PASIV operating at three different levels of sedation, six unconscious bodies, and fourteen minutes maximum on the slowest clock to bring everything together. Arthur counts; seconds, feet, turns, tiles, coils of wire, slits in the gratings, pounds that a PASIV weighs. Seconds, all of it, in the end.
The path between these rooms can be altered, or could if it were clear. Two options, then: clear the path and keep it clear is just as valid as go around. Either could take more time.
Arthur still knows which he prefers.
The riot will have destroyed any room it got into. Arthur can protect these two, perhaps even connect them if he gets the path clear enough. And there are others-other places only he can go, if the ring of keys on his uniform belt means anything. He just has to get there.
It may not be as easily said as done, but Arthur will do it.
(And this time, it would be easier without gravity.)
He pushes the table against the door, lets it be another rattle for the horror in the halls. Four down in this room; Nottingham, Yusuf, Eames, and Ariadne. Yusuf is the dreamer, his proximity comes first. Arthur rigs a loose barricade with the chairs, slides the sleepers out carefully. He props Yusuf up by the file cabinet, head pointing toward the air duct.
He suspects the sound of the halls, that groaning and pummeling and squelching of flesh, is what blood sounds like when it wants to leave a body, what a heart sounds like every time it tries to break out of its chest. No matter what Arthur builds, no matter how stable, it cannot be permanent; the worlds he puts back together always shatter again, even in dreams. Their clocks are the same as his.
By the time Arthur gets the air duct open-predictable, Arthur considers, but definitely inaccessible and inhospitable to the mob-he has already counted a minute for himself, twenty for Dom and Yusuf. In another two he’ll start counting the hours for Eames.
He’d better have arranged this all by then. So he will.
-
Dom strangles the pilot and pries him out of the chair. “Take over!”
Miyu definitely believes in this, all of this-she does, without hesitating, and puts her computer in the control console shaped precisely for it. (Who knew the JASDF ran on Mac?) She takes over the craft almost comfortably enough that Dom wonders if Saitoh has trained her for this sort of thing, and then decides, no. Dom throws the former pilot out the hatch by the scruff of his suit-without-a-shirt.
He’s building so fast, he’d be worried if it wasn’t instinctive, honed after years of constructing and reconstructing life. And he’d be equally concerned if it came to him as easily now as it did then. He was master of his own universe, once. There’s a reason he stopped, and not only because that universe stopped him. The last thing he wants is a freight train dropping out of the sky, a self-made self-defeat.
Mal may be gone, and so may her reason for being here. That doesn’t make Dom’s subconscious, as a thing in and of itself, any less powerful. Miles retired to the real world for reasons that Dom had once considered and is only now beginning to understand. And he is an intruder here, no matter where here is.
It’s exhilarating. He wishes that it weren’t.
The helicopter is already soaring by the time Dom gets to the copilot’s chair and leans over. Miyu is on the console; the laptop, still closed, is glowing, a white seam between the keyboard and screen filling the cockpit with shadows.
“Are we taking them down, or are we escaping?” Miyu doesn’t look away from the readouts.
“Six of them, one of us?” Dom smiles and shakes his head. It sounds like dialog that Miyu would write. “I think we have to do one to manage the other.” He doesn’t ask her, can you fly, to make sure she never doubts it. “Just get me clear shots,” he says, and gets up to climb to the gun turret in the back, straps on, braces his heels, and conjures as genuine and cinematic a wind as this dream deserves.
-
All right, then. Eames gave Nottingham a head start. That ends now.
Once he pulls to his feet and brushes the dust off Miles’ coat, he smiles, cracks his neck to the side, and remembers the thing he enjoys the most about his profession: getting under someone’s skin, in more ways than one, and all at once.
Nottingham ran forward, in relation to the train; Eames stalks slowly, one step at a time. He hangs his arms and jaw slack, spreads his chest, walks straight along the sloped and shadowed aisle.
At the end of this car, with the torrent of wind between the doors, he forges Arthur.
Not just Arthur, insufferable and competent in ties that match the straps: Arthur as Nottingham last saw him, the Sergeant, order soaked to the bone in the chaos of others. The door to the next car snaps shut. Eames makes the keys on Arthur’s police belt jangle louder with each step, thickens the shadows, heats the blood on his arms so it clings and reeks.
Nottingham makes the mistake of turning to look at the monster. He was already running; now he’s barreling, holding the backs of the seats and damn near vaulting over them, choking on his own screams.
Fear, Eames has found, is extremely effective at crippling one’s subconscious.
Eames knows that, somewhere ahead, Ariadne and Yusuf are warping this train car into an endless corridor, seats upon seats, window upon window, bulleting through a brimstone plain. By the time they decide to contrive an end for Nottingham, a proverbial oasis, he’d drink out of it if it was his own blood. It may well be, by the time Eames runs out of ideas.
He holds the extracted one under his watch, against the small of his wrist. He doesn’t dare look at what the USB has become after two shifts; whatever it is, it’s definitely unstable. That burn means it might have teeth.
The train lurches, the walls swell. Whether he reached it or not, Nottingham’s at the end of this car at last, prying at the door. Eames is enough in control of this that he doesn’t let the door open, lets the steel do nothing but scrape and the wind do nothing but bleat. The clang of the keys slices through the air and the void it leaves sucks down every other sound, even Nottingham’s desperate breathing. Eames smiles, and even if he won’t in forge-not in Arthur’s character to enjoy this sort of chase, oh no-it really is an effective nightmare. He reaches out, lets the blood on Arthur’s arms drip onto Nottingham’s shoulder-
-and right on cue, bless that girl, the transition door opens from the outside. Ariadne shouts, “Mr. Nottingham! Hurry!” in her own voice, and pulls him through. The sound the door makes snapping closed in the wind is enough to mask Eames’ laughter.
This car has a conductor’s booth, masked with the simple instructions for emergency procedure. The words are in Arabic but the symbols mean the same things they always do, fire, police, evacuate. Eames steps in, keeps the forge up but lets his voice be his own when he dials Yusuf up front. “How are they?”
“She’s got him,” Yusuf says. “She’s broken out Miss Charles. I kind of wish Dom could see this.”
“It’ll be proof enough when we make this work,” Eames says, though he can’t help feeling proud of the girl as well. “Can you toggle with the intercom so I can get a listen?”
“I can do you one better.” A moment, and a few discreet beeps later, Eames can hear, if not clearly at least competently, that Ariadne is whispering to Nottingham, cradling him and assuring him, it’s not you, Mr. Nottingham, don’t worry, it’s not you. They put something in your head, the last time you went under. Themselves. They want to drive you away from your books and take your life. You know it, don’t you? In the back of your mind where the stories grow? That’s where I’m from, Mr. Nottingham. They kicked me out too.
Eames can’t suppress a shudder. He laughs so Yusuf can hear it. “On second thought, perhaps Mr. Cobb wouldn’t appreciate the rude awakening.”
Yusuf just hisses through his teeth. It’s a distinctive enough sound, through the phone.
“What’s on the clock?”
Yusuf answers after a moment. “Arthur’s not going to signal me until it’s time for the kick. I can’t say we’re behind schedule but we’re definitely off it. If anything, it’s going too fast.”
“Which means we’re actually more at Arthur’s mercy than mine.”
“I think so. You saw how we left things up there. It was like that when we pulled Inception. No matter what you guys were up to, if something went wrong on my level the chain was broken, and I don’t know what you guys were dealing with down there but I didn’t expect to be dodging Gattling fire with six sleepers in the cab.”
“Just like the real world, isn’t it?”
“You racist son of a bitch.”
“Love you too,” Eames says, and kisses the receiver.
It gives him enough space to hear Ariadne again, and Nottingham asking her where do we have to go?
It’s bad, Ariadne tells him, but it’s in you. You think the stories have dried up, right? It’s not that they’re dry. It’s that they’re empty. Stories are like spaces, and you, as the author, fill them and define them. Even if you can’t write, you still have stories, Mr. Nottingham. I’m proof that you still have stories. And I can take you back to where they are. I can’t fill them up myself. That’s something you have to do for me. And then you can get rid of all them, you can let me out-
That’s Eames’ cue, isn’t it. “Yusuf, I’ll be along presently.”
“Get as close to the front of the train as you can,” Yusuf says, not good luck, not be safe. “I’ll time your music with mine. Arthur’s got me and Dom with a minute to go, his time: you’ll hear when I’ve got ten seconds on mine.”
“And ten seconds of yours on my clock is what?”
“Three minutes,” Yusuf says. “Three and a half minutes. Less.”
“So speed is still the name of the game,” Eames says, checking his reflection in the plexiglass window to make sure he still has one. My, but the landscape’s fiery tones must do wonders for Arthur’s complexion.
“You’ll manage,” Yusuf says.
“Count on it.” Eames hangs up, and wipes the blood off the phone. His forge could stand a bit more gore, so he lets it trail, lets Arthur’s shoes leave tracks in it.
He sends the sound of his footsteps ahead, waits for the stertorous buzz of Ariadne’s gasp played through the train intercom. Oh god, she says, the warden’s here, we have to go, now!
Eames opens the doors between the train cars, and kills the lights.
The rest of the dream comes in flashes, in strikes edged with the terror of the scorched earth outside. Ariadne mouthing, no!, Nottingham scuttling back through the filth of the aisle, Arthur’s long shadow, advancing to kill. In the dark, Eames lets go of the idea, wields it like a knife, grabs Nottingham by the skull and drives it down his throat-
Ariadne kicks the PASIV on. Nottingham falls asleep mid-scream.
“Drop it,” Ariadne says, one deep breath in the dark later. “The forge, not Nottingham.”
“You’ll have to see it again down there,” Eames says, but drops it anyway, for her sake. As for Nottingham, he sits the man up in one of the seats, facing wherever this train is bound.
-
Fortunately for Arthur, one of the caches of computer equipment is locked to everyone but him. He can still hear the inmates pounding on the doors, crying out for his blood. Well, he’s washed off all he can of theirs, that’s for certain, and this is delicate work. He slips down from the air duct, props a chair by it so he can get back up, and gathers up all the headphone wires and TRS couplings he can find. He counts feet. There are enough to cover that distance, if he can connect them in time.
Fifty feet through the air ducts from this room to Yusuf; one length of headphone wires, a minute to create it. Less, thirty-eight feet to Dom, and that length of wire goes faster. Fifteen feet grace each line, done, no problems there, and a TRS splitter for the MP3 player that he already had planned for. It’s all here. It’s all justifiably here, and only two and a half minutes gone.
Just in case, Arthur brings all of the wire back up into the air vents with him, and makes the shorter route to Dom first, crawling on his elbows as fast as he can. The officer’s cap scrapes against the roof of the duct, slows him down. He shucks it off somewhere along the way.
He unscrews the duct over Dom and Miyu’s interrogation room, punches it out, and drops down. The very first thing he does is connect Dom’s headphones to the extended wire, and tightens them a notch over Dom’s ears just in case. Dom is starting to twitch-the sedative is wearing off, they have less time than they think they do. With that done, he goes to the door, and listens.
There’s broken glass now, crunching under heels and fists, and the rush of fire. Arthur doesn’t even consider what Eames might be doing to Nottingham down there to incense his subconscious this quickly. Nine minutes on the whiteboard condense down to five at the outside down here, and all Arthur can hope is that they know it. He trusts them to, all four them, more than he’s trusted anyone he’s worked with since taking up with Dom at all.
So he removes one of the screws from the lock on Dom’s door, and the barricade he builds won’t withstand more than a minute of the riot. He climbs up onto the heap of tables and files and wires to get back into the ceiling, and just keep going.
-
Everything in the house is empty. That’s how Ariadne designed it. It’s still painful to actually see, even for Eames, who dreams it for her.
Eames is reminded of a joke, or rather, a riddle. There’s a cabin in the woods, it goes, and all the people in it are dead. Why? The answer to that riddle, of course, is the plane crashed, but in here the riddle’s more pertinent to solve. There’s a cabin, no, a mansion in the woods, and all the boxes and bottles and paraphernalia in it are empty. Why?
It’s not supposed to matter to Eames, at least not in any real sense beyond knowing Nottingham. He can, and does, infer, but too much inference is a whole lot of consequence down here, and the last thing any of them want to leave Nottingham with is a house full of ideas that he didn’t give himself.
But yes, there’s a mansion in the woods, and all the drawers and closets and rooms and panels of the windows are empty, and where there are things at all, they are empty things. Eames nudges open a door without a knob, and it swings on a hinge without a pivot. The floorboards creak and spread, but no mice trundle out, and the holes in the walls only lead to more holes. There are no projections here, and Eames offers Arthur an (empty?) internal thanks for that; only Eames himself, on the highest floor where the monster always ought to be, and Ariadne and Nottingham, in the vacant half-collapsed arch where double doors should be, on the lowest of four stories.
“You remember this, don’t you?” Ariadne asks, and her voice doesn’t so much echo as snake through the halls, creeping up Eames’ spine like a static shock. “I mean, it’s different now, but-”
“Yes,” Nottingham whispers. This actually reverberates, in the very real sense of each room in the house saying just that, yes. Yes. “Yes, I do. I...I didn’t build it. But I added to it. All the things are mine.”
“Were,” Ariadne says. “They were yours.” They step into the hall, living silhouettes darker than shadows. The sky must be as empty as the house. Eames keeps behind a pillar, listens more than looks. “This is what they took from you.”
Nottingham kneels, to pick something up. From up here, Eames can tell it’s a bottle, the kind without a message. The pop of the cork is just as noisy as it would be for a full bottle, but warped, backwards. Once it’s open, Nottingham drops it like it’s burned him.
Ariadne winces. “That one’s used up. You have to find someplace in the house, Mr. Nottingham. It just takes one idea.” She breathes deeply, steps forward into the foyer and spreads her arms, looking up where the sockets hang, bereft of bulbs. “This house used to be filled with ideas, didn’t it? It had to start with one. But the thing about ideas is that they grow. They fill whatever you put them in and create more of themselves, like seeds. And if it’s ivy it climbs, or if it’s a tree the roots shove everything else out of the way, and if it’s not a plant at all it still grows and spreads and takes you over. That’s what it used to be like. And they stopped it. They harvested without sowing.”
“I’m the one who didn’t sow,” Nottingham says.
“Maybe. But they kept you from trying.”
She backs through a door and Nottingham follows, but their voices carry out through every room of the house. They’re out of sight, so Eames stalks down, letting the echoes swallow his footsteps for now and the ringing of Arthur’s forged keys.
“Then what’s to stop them from taking it all again?” Nottingham asks. “What if they just come in here and undo it?”
“You can stop them,” Ariadne says in the dark. “Plant it here, and plant it in the place it’ll grow the fastest. Ideas make you stronger, and the only reason they got in is that you let them start, you let them take it all away.”
“I won’t now,” Nottingham murmurs, and Eames still hears it. “I won’t.”
They walk out of a room on the third floor-ah, good Ariadne, creating a right tangle-on the opposite side of the foyer from Eames. “It might even be strong enough to let us both out together,” she says, and sneaks Eames a glance. The whites of her eyes glint in the dark, like smiles, like fireflies.
Nottingham’s already ahead of her now, “How will I know where?”
“It depends on what kind of an idea it is, doesn’t it?”
“And how do I know that?”
Eames lets them both hear his next step forward. In fact, he cracks a floorboard, like a proper terror should. The house shivers, and Eames knows that the speeding train one level up has hit a swerve in the track, that it’s more than just the tread of the monster.
They see him.
And Ariadne whispers, ”Hurry!”
Eames wonders if Nottingham will ever stop being chased. They aren’t here to fix him after all, and when, if, this succeeds, he will still be an alcoholic writer and possibly (admittedly) a hack. But he’ll be a hack with an idea, and one he gave himself, untraceable both to original source and couriers.
Well, first he has to survive the dream. And Ariadne’s made that difficult and not, with the rooms that lead to one another on opposite halls, opposite floors. Eames breaks glass every time he steps, splits boards, stains frames without pictures. The shelves are loaded with empty candlesticks and blank books, and they scatter and topple with a swipe of Eames’ arm, so empty that they devour the caked blood that peels off Eames’, Arthur’s, arms. But now Nottingham isn’t just running, he’s searching, touching the boxes and drawers and panels in the wall, and his right hand has begun to twitch and key. He leaves things behind now, and Ariadne is his eyes, warning him, no, this way-pretty soon Nottingham’s the one who can tell when they’re close, what paths lead where, and what paths don’t lead to Eames and the menace of the keys.
The house shakes from the ground up. The walls of the dream begin to blare, deep and ominous and regular, and Eames lets his Arthur forge smile. Blood chaps on his lips. He counts. Three minutes.
“We have no time!” Every room is filled with Ariadne shouting over the warped, slowed brass that everyone can hear. “Mr. Nottingham, quick-”
“I know where it is,” he says, “I know where to go, just help me get there.”
“Where?”
“Out,” he says, “out and under the house.”
-
There. Arthur vaults himself back into the air vents and crawls to where he left the MP3 player. From there, it’s just a push of the button, and the auditory afterimage of two distant headsets playing the same song quavers on the metal walls. No, Edith Piaf sings, I regret nothing, and a minute into the song she will be telling the French Foreign Legion that everything is forgotten and all is well, and Arthur will probably kill himself in an air duct because the riot can’t get to him fast enough. He needs to be the first awake. He just has to think of how.
-
Dom almost can’t hear the music under the crash of the fifth helicopter. The debris rains onto their propeller and bounces onto the windshield, leaving chips in the glass.
“We’re not gonna make it, are we?” Miyu asks. They’ve been hit pretty hard, sure, or at least the craft has, and given the amount of time Dom knows they have left he still has to make excuses.
He points with the gun turret. “Can you land us on that building over there?” Just as he says it, the wind throws the craft drastically sideways. The propeller slices into glass, and the shards spray like hail. Dom wraps himself around the gun turret and holds on. “Guess not-”
The laptop computer slides down the hangar, smacking Dom in the heels before freefalling.
Miyu’s reactions are still delayed, it seems; the shock hits her first, the fact hits her after. But it’s slow, slow enough that Dom can see each stretch of her skin to accommodate the muscles getting her up from the pilot’s chair. He knows exactly where she’s going, exactly what she’ll do, and exactly how long he has to pretend to stop her for.
In fact, he lets her jump, so long as he catches her.
The helicopter stutters and quails, spiraling down. Smoke fills the last searchlight and the assault of the city. “I can catch it, I can get it, just let me go-”
And Dom realizes that no, he can’t, because she thinks, correctly, that she can fly.
-
“Yes-yes, that door, Mr. Nottingham, go-”
Eames catches up with Ariadne and yanks her into the shadows, clamps a hand over her mouth. He whispers, into her ear so it doesn’t echo, keep trying to scream. Twenty seconds. She nods, and he can feel her teeth drag on his palm, the froth at the corner of her lips reanimating the dried blood.
But out the door, he sees Nottingham furiously digging, prying up the stairs of the mansion’s porch, clawing at the earth. His hands leave raised tracks at his sides, and there, there is a crushed paper box, like the ones for pre-grown plants, fused open by function if not form. It’s empty, of course, and the house echoes with Nottingham’s ragged exhale.
Nottingham puts his hand in-the one that shakes, the one that on every level up connects him to the PASIV-and shuts the lid.
-
Yusuf derails the train. Dom lets Miyu drag him out of the helicopter. The convicts tear down Arthur’s barricades and descend on the sleepers like hyenas, ripping them apart.
And when up in the air vent, Arthur hears the first real scream-Ariadne’s-he pulls the sharp stripped wires tight around his neck.
-
“You are five minutes early,” Saitoh says when Arthur untangles himself from Eames’ cot, pushes himself to his feet and disconnects himself from the PASIV.
“Closer to six and not on this clock. First one up draws the curtain,” he says, and does just that, building a curtained wall between Nottingham and Miyu’s respective cots. “Get Miyu’s legs taken care of if you haven’t already. Who else is awake?”
“I am,” Yusuf says. And he’s not the only one either, Dom’s up off the floor, and the cushion of Ariadne’s chair squeaks, hisses in air when she gets to her feet.
“That makes all of us,” Eames says, legs already swung off the bed. “And them, it seems.” He disconnects Nottingham with a sharp, unrepentant tug.
Orderlies wheel Miyu out; Saitoh has done as he promised and, between the ambulance ride over and the short time they’ve spent under, Miyu’s legs have been at least cleaned and given first aid. Nottingham stirs-everyone but Saitoh gets out of the room as fast as they can, and down the hospital hall. They split up as soon as they get to the long row of elevators, and by the time Arthur sets his briefcase in the backseat of a cab, he knows he won’t see the others for two days at least.
He has the cab drop him off on 59th street, and pays a hansom driver to take him once around the park. He focuses on the steady trot of the horse’s hooves at the expense of the city, and lets that help him down. When he can count again, he subdivides the beats. Quarter equals one-twenty, eighty, sixty, forty on the turns.
-
“Of course it’s not supposed to matter,” Eames says, several days later. He hands the conductor back the ticket, but ignores that entirely and keeps addressing Arthur, across from him in the facing blue vinyl seats. “None of it is, really. Not even whether we succeeded. The accounts reflect what they should.”
“Then why are we here?” The conductor punched Arthur’s ticket the same time as Eames’, so Arthur is also tucking his away, in a slide of his billfold.
“Closure.” Eames winks at him, doesn’t get the ruffled hackles he’d hoped for. Ah, well. “Obviously we can’t do this again, or advertise this service-inasmuch as we can advertise anything, that is-if we don’t know how effective it is.”
“Fair enough,” Arthur says after a while. “You’re sure he’s on this train?”
“No, Darling, I only wanted to take you on a pleasure trip.”
“Where, Saratoga?”
“The possibility had occurred to me.”
“That’s a little farther north than you think.”
“So we’ll spend a lot of time on trains,” Eames offers, and leans over his knees. “I’m surprised you’re so amenable.”
“I’m surprised you think I wouldn’t be,” Arthur says, insufferably deadpan and without innuendo that Eames can perceive.
“Smashing,” Eames says, and tries to put said innuendo back in where it belongs. “It just didn’t seem within the realm of your precious plausibility.”
“I gamble the same as you, I just play the odds instead of throwing them.” Arthur looks over Eames’ shoulder. “He’s here.”
Eames nods. “What’s he doing?”
“Sitting down,” Arthur says sourly, turning up his palms in a shrug, a well that’s obvious. “Taking out his laptop.” The announcer goes through his motions on the intercom. “Taking a drink of whatever’s in that paper bag. I think it’s a 40. Typing.”
“Well that’s a good sign.” Once the train pulls out into the dark tunnels under Grand Central, Eames turns around and smiles, and shifts his voice into the nondescript New York one. “Oh, ha, I get to do this again! Bradley, come on!”
Arthur mouths, Bradley?, and struggles when Eames tugs him out of the seat, but that’s not standing in Eames’ way dragging him up the aisle.
“Mr. Nottingham?” Eames asks, leaning over with all the enthusiasm he can muster. “Mr. Nottingham, hey! I’m glad you’re out of the hospital. Uh, you signed my book on this train, just a couple of weeks ago?”
Nottingham startles but doesn’t up from his computer, at least not much. “Oh! Oh, right. You’re...Milton?”
“Mervin,” Eames corrects. “This is so awesome. I told you to sign it to both of us, right?” he adds, and slinks an arm around Arthur’s waist to pull him close. “Well, now your biggest fan finally gets to meet you.”
Now Nottingham looks up. It takes him about a second to see, long enough for the train to have one of those requisite blackouts before they surface on the other side of the Hudson. The sheer terror on Nottingham’s face is almost comical, at least to Eames.
“...Hi,” Arthur says, and if the doubt is real, at least it’s effective.
“Wow,” Nottingham says, barely a breath. “Wow. This is...this is something else.” He takes a moment, and then smiles. “This is going in the book.”
“You’re writing?” Eames asks.
“Yeah, and well, I hate to say this but you-Bradley, I mean-your look’s just right for the villain. It just surprised me, that’s all. I don’t mean any offense.”
“None taken,” Arthur says, edging out of the circle of Eames’ arm. “What do you mean, though?”
“Well, it occurred to me the other day. Did you know there used to be a paramilitary organization that specialized in dream infiltration?”
Eames still has his fingertips on Arthur’s back, so he can feel the chill race up Arthur’s already cold spine.
Nottingham goes on, and goes back to typing, “So when the organization broke up years ago, of course they couldn’t get rid of the technology, that never happens. But I found some Japanese sites that advertised the technology for commercial use. But it’s definitely out there. So I’m writing about people who use that technology to steal dreams. Intellectual contraband. Things like that. It’s all a bit hazy, but I think I’ll work it out.”
Arthur has his hand in his pocket. Eames should probably follow his example.
-
Dom begins to rub out the chart, not bothering with the cloth eraser.
“Mr. Nottingham’s representatives are quite pleased with us,” Saitoh is saying. “Are you?”
-
---
-
Credit for credit and blame for blame: This fic would not be possible without lassarina’s editing, lindensphinx’s encouragement, puella_nerdii’s photoshop skills and also love, and pinstripesuit in general.
.
Back to Part 1
-
“-colonialist son of a whore!” Yusuf rips the IV out and slaps his hands over his right eye.
“That’s the most original one I’ve heard all day,” Arthur says.
“Tell that to the one I’m insulting, I think he’ll be mighty pleased.” Yusuf snarls and gets out of his chair, goes to the PASIV and checks a few things. Arthur knows that Yusuf is hearing the same as he, counting the beats of Piaf’s anthem on this level, but Yusuf actually counts aloud, four, three, two-
And Eames wakes up laughing.
“You asshole!” Yusuf snarls and hits Eames on the back of the head.
“Careful, you don’t want to kick me out of this one too.” Eames plucks out his own IV and, to Arthur’s surprise, goes to check on Dom’s headphones. “This was faster.”
Arthur winds up the spare PASIV tubes. “Not all according to plan?”
“No, but all on schedule.” Eames pats Arthur on the back and then slides his hand up, one jaunty rub. The touch is strange and oddly reassuring after the fighting in the halls. Arthur just keeps working and counting, turns off Dom’s headphones for now but leaves them on.
“What he means,” Yusuf says, “is that he stabbed me through the eye and probably used that as an excuse for Dom to shoot him.”
“In a coffeehouse?” Arthur asks.
“He’ll try, if he catches up with me. I stole the idea-yes, I have it, unless you’d like to pat me down and check-gave the girl a goose, and ran.”
“She thought Eames’ forge was her character,” Yusuf explains, so Arthur doesn’t have to check.
“And she should be leading our hero on a merry chase through the ruins of a fallen Iron Curtain about now,” Eames says, ruffling Miyu’s hair, by the look in his eyes, threatening to do the same to Yusuf. “It will take more to keep her occupied than any of us anticipated.”
“You’ve left Dom alone in the mind of a writer,” Arthur says.
“I know exactly what I did.” Eames brushes past Arthur to the door. “You’re not the only one who can be trusted with that.”
As if to prove it, he flings open the door and Yusuf shoots the rioter in the shoulder, then, takes one step closer and shoots the next one in the gut.
“He’d better be sedated enough,” Arthur says.
Yusuf isn’t smiling, just breathing a bit heavily and advancing on the hall. “Well, Eames just proved that it’s weak enough that a murderous kick is still an option. Let’s just keep going.”
“Exactly!” Eames is now wearing the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mountain Police, complete with chinstrap hat, and carrying a Krag-Jørgensen moose rifle. “What does it matter as long as the job gets done?”
Respect or none, Arthur glares. “If you strain the plausibility of this scenario-”
“String cheese,” Eames says.
Arthur concedes the point, but subconsciously backdates the Mountie uniform to 1933.
-
“I knew it,” Dom says both in and out of character. He holds his arm across Miyu’s chest and keeps her from stepping away from the red brick wall. “They’re after us both. We have to get you out.” He looks in the direction of the shots he fired after Eames’ forge and knows Eames just took care of it himself.
“Who are they? Who are you? What’s going on?”
“It’s not the Russians,” Dom tells her, trying to bring the dream under control. “It’s the yakuza. They know who you work for. It’s okay, I work for him too.” He hears, and disposes of, another two projections. “Remember?” he asks when the assailants stop shooting. “You’ve seen me with Saitoh.”
Miyu gulps in air and clutches her computer tight. “-yeah. Yeah I have.” Her knees are knocking together, the tights almost squeaking.
Good. Good, he can stall with this, run with this, and break out of this when Arthur tells him to. “Remember, Miyu, I know a thing or two about being hunted. So you’re gonna have to stick close to me and do what I say, all right? I’ll get us out of this.”
“How can I trust you?” Miyu is whispering, but it’s urgent enough to go straight into Dom’s ear. “You shot Irina-”
Someone lobs a grenade into the alley. Dom drops his gun, grabs Miyu with one hand and the nearest fire escape ladder with the other. It takes a split-second mental delay of the blast to haul her up to the balcony, but he does it, even if her legs get a little reciprocally singed.
“You can trust me because I want out of this just as much as you,” he says firmly. “Now climb.”
She does. Dom does as well, but he’s building the staircase. And the city, and the yakuza, and the plot. He can give her a story like the one he stole, and maybe she’ll grow a new one out of it.
But if that’s supposed to give him any peace of mind, it fails.
-
Eames can’t say precisely that he enjoys watching Arthur fight. Certainly it gives Eames an immense amount of respect for the man’s competence and Eames won’t deny a not-entirely-aesthetic appreciation for Arthur’s lithe lethality. It’s something that Arthur possessed even when they first crossed paths, and since working with him more consistently Eames is pleased that this continues to be the status quo and not some fluke of dreaming. He watches, as much as he can with more adversarial targets in sight, as Arthur not-quite-callously dispatches one prisoner with a pistol-butt to the skull and then kicks the new corpse into the line of fire meant for Yusuf. (How the prisoners armed themselves, Eames does not care, not now.) Eames knows what Arthur was before he became what he is, and seeing that laid as bare as a shorn sheep is too humbling to enjoy.
But damned if it doesn’t make Eames want to see more, and harder, and worse.
Arthur made and knows the maze, and so he leads; Yusuf, with his pistol and the briefcase, is center, and Eames has the rear. Not that it matters with how fast they’re moving, all of Nottingham’s stray disbelief incarnate and converging on them like a swarm of senseless flies.
“Eames,” Arthur says coolly after he steps on one fallen convict’s body to get a better shot at another, “get into character. It’s this door.”
“As you wish, Darling.” And after clearing himself a path-he likes this moose gun-Eames does. And he forges it clean, because it’s almost always best to hide the carnage.
“Detective Schaunard,” he says once he’s through the door, in Received Pronunciation as crisp as the collar of his robin’s-egg-blue Swiss shirt. “I’m aware you’ve found a certain...Alexander Nottingham?”
“So he says.” The first time Eames showed Ariadne this forge, she shivered hard enough to drop her own. She doesn’t now, but there’s a flicker in her reflection that tells Eames it was a good idea to prime her. Eames makes sure that Nottingham is focusing hard enough on him that it doesn’t matter what Ariadne is projecting.
Yusuf steps in behind Eames, Arthur still running damage control in the hallways. He holds up the briefcase. “Where do you want this, Inspector?”
“On the table,” Eames says. He leans down and gets Nottingham by the eyes. “Do you know what that is?”
“No,” Nottingham says.
“Then it’s fairly certain that you don’t know who I am, either. Or why I’m here, for that matter. Or why you’re here. Am I right?”
Nottingham grimaces and glares. “All I know is that I want my lawyer, and I’m not saying a single goddamn word to you otherwise.”
Eames huffs. “Actually, I think you’re about to tell us a great deal.” He looks over Nottingham’s shoulder, just a glance. “Restrain him.”
Yusuf and Ariadne get Nottingham by the arms-Yusuf’s the more dexterous, and pushes Nottingham’s left sleeve up.
Eames grins. “Sergeant, get in here.”
Arthur hipchecks the door. This is almost certainly because his hands and arms are completely drenched in blood.
Eames smirks so that he doesn’t shiver, or do anything more evocative. “Wash up and prep him.”
Nottingham chokes. “Prep?”
“You said you don’t know what’s in this briefcase,” Eames reminds him, ”a fact of which I am quite glad. That way, you won’t confuse this for anything else.”
Arthur, having wiped his hands on a towelette from the PASIV case, is poised to pierce Nottingham’s hand.
“There’s a glitch in your system, Mr. Nottingham,” Eames says, all sweetness. “You’re remembering several things you oughtn’t, because they’re not true. Not about your name, nor your books, nor even your lawyer. And we’re going to fix that for you. Don’t worry about it any more.” He nods at Arthur, who gets the needle taped down and reaches over to push the PASIV on.
“You can’t do this!” Nottingham struggles, and of course it’s futile, but there’s no point in decrying the effort he makes to get free. “You monsters, I’ll tear you apart-“
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” Eames picks up another needle and lets everyone watch it glint. “You won’t even remember me.”
Nottingham sobs and slumps forward in his chair and their grasp. He’s out. The rest of them work quickly, stepping out of their characters and hooking themselves up to the PASIV.
“Did Professor Miles really used to act like that?” Ariadne asks him. Now that she’s dropped Schaunard’s forge, she looks almost as nervous by comparison as when Eames first met her.
The answer to that question is a qualified yes, but Eames doesn’t give it. Instead, Arthur answers for him, only fitting since he knows from the correct side of the interrogation table. “He doesn’t use Received Pronunciation.”
Ariadne gulps and shakes her head. “Oh my god.”
-
Dom decides they should reach the top of the building, so they do. The roof spreads out before them and so does the city, towering even higher on all sides like a cage. Dom has made it night, nearly full dusk with an absent moon, so that the searchlights of seven helicopters catch on dust as often as concrete and glass. The city is anonymous, without advertisement or landmark, and Dom stops to assemble some weapons and give Miyu time to take it all in.
Miyu is panting, bowed over her laptop like she’d lean on it if it reached the ground. She’s sweat through her makeup, better than crying, and it haloes her eyes like a raccoon’s mask. “All right,” she says, over and over again like a meditative mantra. “All right. Where now?”
The helicopters have gun turrets, Bullets strafe the concrete and Dom grabs Miyu, shoves her down behind a smokestack. The laptop scrapes the roof, the plastic streaked white like a skinned knee. Dom makes sure it doesn’t bleed after that internal comparison.
“Here, quick!” The nearest chopper has a rope ladder down; Dom waits until it’s just in range and shoots the gunner, who falls so fast his tattooed arms leave blue streaks in the searchlight. “Grab the ladder!” he commands, and Miyu does, hugs it close to her chest like a cage over the computer.
He anchors the ladder only long enough for her to start climbing, barely long enough for the helicopter to lift them off the roof entirely.
-
“Your ticket, please.”
The train is speeding through a blood-red void, and Eames mentally thanks Yusuf for the seasonably dry weather. There isn’t a river outside, only hunched crags and cracked earth and the most dastardly sun Eames has seen outside of the Serengeti. He reaches into his pocket for his totem-new concept, that, but not entirely without merit-traces the rough edge, tests the heft. A dream.
Not that Nottingham knows. He hands Eames whatever is in hand without so much as glancing up.
All right then. “Are you so certain you want to give me this?” he says in the voice and with the mien of Miles, poising the ticket puncher over the card. It’s not a ticket, here, it’s Nottingham’s license, the jagged beyblade of the hole-puncher poised on his photograph’s eye. Eames makes sure that Nottingham can see it.
Oh, smashing. He has. And he is pertinently terrified.
Eames makes it click.
Nottingham lunges out of the seat and screams. If he disbelieves, it certainly doesn’t show. Eames lets him try-the fellow is surprisingly strong for a man his age, and Eames allows his Miles to appear physically weak, wrestles him hard enough to make him feel the strain and nothing more. The license, Canadian and expired, glows a faint blue where the savage light hits it. The world rattles. Nottingham breaks free, shoves down the corridor and runs, tripping over the discarded bottles and paper bags that litter the aisle and failing, always, to stay up.
“You’ll never get out!” Eames shouts, lets Miles’ voice ring over the rush of the tracks. “The worst critics are always in your head, Alexander! There’s nowhere to run at all.” He snaps the hole-puncher once, ominously, for good measure. He’s certain Nottingham hears it before he moves to the next car.
-
The hall has crowded so thickly with prisoners that Arthur can hear the corpses being trampled.
Arthur is left with a horde of unmilitarized but armed projections, two PASIV operating at three different levels of sedation, six unconscious bodies, and fourteen minutes maximum on the slowest clock to bring everything together. Arthur counts; seconds, feet, turns, tiles, coils of wire, slits in the gratings, pounds that a PASIV weighs. Seconds, all of it, in the end.
The path between these rooms can be altered, or could if it were clear. Two options, then: clear the path and keep it clear is just as valid as go around. Either could take more time.
Arthur still knows which he prefers.
The riot will have destroyed any room it got into. Arthur can protect these two, perhaps even connect them if he gets the path clear enough. And there are others-other places only he can go, if the ring of keys on his uniform belt means anything. He just has to get there.
It may not be as easily said as done, but Arthur will do it.
(And this time, it would be easier without gravity.)
He pushes the table against the door, lets it be another rattle for the horror in the halls. Four down in this room; Nottingham, Yusuf, Eames, and Ariadne. Yusuf is the dreamer, his proximity comes first. Arthur rigs a loose barricade with the chairs, slides the sleepers out carefully. He props Yusuf up by the file cabinet, head pointing toward the air duct.
He suspects the sound of the halls, that groaning and pummeling and squelching of flesh, is what blood sounds like when it wants to leave a body, what a heart sounds like every time it tries to break out of its chest. No matter what Arthur builds, no matter how stable, it cannot be permanent; the worlds he puts back together always shatter again, even in dreams. Their clocks are the same as his.
By the time Arthur gets the air duct open-predictable, Arthur considers, but definitely inaccessible and inhospitable to the mob-he has already counted a minute for himself, twenty for Dom and Yusuf. In another two he’ll start counting the hours for Eames.
He’d better have arranged this all by then. So he will.
-
Dom strangles the pilot and pries him out of the chair. “Take over!”
Miyu definitely believes in this, all of this-she does, without hesitating, and puts her computer in the control console shaped precisely for it. (Who knew the JASDF ran on Mac?) She takes over the craft almost comfortably enough that Dom wonders if Saitoh has trained her for this sort of thing, and then decides, no. Dom throws the former pilot out the hatch by the scruff of his suit-without-a-shirt.
He’s building so fast, he’d be worried if it wasn’t instinctive, honed after years of constructing and reconstructing life. And he’d be equally concerned if it came to him as easily now as it did then. He was master of his own universe, once. There’s a reason he stopped, and not only because that universe stopped him. The last thing he wants is a freight train dropping out of the sky, a self-made self-defeat.
Mal may be gone, and so may her reason for being here. That doesn’t make Dom’s subconscious, as a thing in and of itself, any less powerful. Miles retired to the real world for reasons that Dom had once considered and is only now beginning to understand. And he is an intruder here, no matter where here is.
It’s exhilarating. He wishes that it weren’t.
The helicopter is already soaring by the time Dom gets to the copilot’s chair and leans over. Miyu is on the console; the laptop, still closed, is glowing, a white seam between the keyboard and screen filling the cockpit with shadows.
“Are we taking them down, or are we escaping?” Miyu doesn’t look away from the readouts.
“Six of them, one of us?” Dom smiles and shakes his head. It sounds like dialog that Miyu would write. “I think we have to do one to manage the other.” He doesn’t ask her, can you fly, to make sure she never doubts it. “Just get me clear shots,” he says, and gets up to climb to the gun turret in the back, straps on, braces his heels, and conjures as genuine and cinematic a wind as this dream deserves.
-
All right, then. Eames gave Nottingham a head start. That ends now.
Once he pulls to his feet and brushes the dust off Miles’ coat, he smiles, cracks his neck to the side, and remembers the thing he enjoys the most about his profession: getting under someone’s skin, in more ways than one, and all at once.
Nottingham ran forward, in relation to the train; Eames stalks slowly, one step at a time. He hangs his arms and jaw slack, spreads his chest, walks straight along the sloped and shadowed aisle.
At the end of this car, with the torrent of wind between the doors, he forges Arthur.
Not just Arthur, insufferable and competent in ties that match the straps: Arthur as Nottingham last saw him, the Sergeant, order soaked to the bone in the chaos of others. The door to the next car snaps shut. Eames makes the keys on Arthur’s police belt jangle louder with each step, thickens the shadows, heats the blood on his arms so it clings and reeks.
Nottingham makes the mistake of turning to look at the monster. He was already running; now he’s barreling, holding the backs of the seats and damn near vaulting over them, choking on his own screams.
Fear, Eames has found, is extremely effective at crippling one’s subconscious.
Eames knows that, somewhere ahead, Ariadne and Yusuf are warping this train car into an endless corridor, seats upon seats, window upon window, bulleting through a brimstone plain. By the time they decide to contrive an end for Nottingham, a proverbial oasis, he’d drink out of it if it was his own blood. It may well be, by the time Eames runs out of ideas.
He holds the extracted one under his watch, against the small of his wrist. He doesn’t dare look at what the USB has become after two shifts; whatever it is, it’s definitely unstable. That burn means it might have teeth.
The train lurches, the walls swell. Whether he reached it or not, Nottingham’s at the end of this car at last, prying at the door. Eames is enough in control of this that he doesn’t let the door open, lets the steel do nothing but scrape and the wind do nothing but bleat. The clang of the keys slices through the air and the void it leaves sucks down every other sound, even Nottingham’s desperate breathing. Eames smiles, and even if he won’t in forge-not in Arthur’s character to enjoy this sort of chase, oh no-it really is an effective nightmare. He reaches out, lets the blood on Arthur’s arms drip onto Nottingham’s shoulder-
-and right on cue, bless that girl, the transition door opens from the outside. Ariadne shouts, “Mr. Nottingham! Hurry!” in her own voice, and pulls him through. The sound the door makes snapping closed in the wind is enough to mask Eames’ laughter.
This car has a conductor’s booth, masked with the simple instructions for emergency procedure. The words are in Arabic but the symbols mean the same things they always do, fire, police, evacuate. Eames steps in, keeps the forge up but lets his voice be his own when he dials Yusuf up front. “How are they?”
“She’s got him,” Yusuf says. “She’s broken out Miss Charles. I kind of wish Dom could see this.”
“It’ll be proof enough when we make this work,” Eames says, though he can’t help feeling proud of the girl as well. “Can you toggle with the intercom so I can get a listen?”
“I can do you one better.” A moment, and a few discreet beeps later, Eames can hear, if not clearly at least competently, that Ariadne is whispering to Nottingham, cradling him and assuring him, it’s not you, Mr. Nottingham, don’t worry, it’s not you. They put something in your head, the last time you went under. Themselves. They want to drive you away from your books and take your life. You know it, don’t you? In the back of your mind where the stories grow? That’s where I’m from, Mr. Nottingham. They kicked me out too.
Eames can’t suppress a shudder. He laughs so Yusuf can hear it. “On second thought, perhaps Mr. Cobb wouldn’t appreciate the rude awakening.”
Yusuf just hisses through his teeth. It’s a distinctive enough sound, through the phone.
“What’s on the clock?”
Yusuf answers after a moment. “Arthur’s not going to signal me until it’s time for the kick. I can’t say we’re behind schedule but we’re definitely off it. If anything, it’s going too fast.”
“Which means we’re actually more at Arthur’s mercy than mine.”
“I think so. You saw how we left things up there. It was like that when we pulled Inception. No matter what you guys were up to, if something went wrong on my level the chain was broken, and I don’t know what you guys were dealing with down there but I didn’t expect to be dodging Gattling fire with six sleepers in the cab.”
“Just like the real world, isn’t it?”
“You racist son of a bitch.”
“Love you too,” Eames says, and kisses the receiver.
It gives him enough space to hear Ariadne again, and Nottingham asking her where do we have to go?
It’s bad, Ariadne tells him, but it’s in you. You think the stories have dried up, right? It’s not that they’re dry. It’s that they’re empty. Stories are like spaces, and you, as the author, fill them and define them. Even if you can’t write, you still have stories, Mr. Nottingham. I’m proof that you still have stories. And I can take you back to where they are. I can’t fill them up myself. That’s something you have to do for me. And then you can get rid of all them, you can let me out-
That’s Eames’ cue, isn’t it. “Yusuf, I’ll be along presently.”
“Get as close to the front of the train as you can,” Yusuf says, not good luck, not be safe. “I’ll time your music with mine. Arthur’s got me and Dom with a minute to go, his time: you’ll hear when I’ve got ten seconds on mine.”
“And ten seconds of yours on my clock is what?”
“Three minutes,” Yusuf says. “Three and a half minutes. Less.”
“So speed is still the name of the game,” Eames says, checking his reflection in the plexiglass window to make sure he still has one. My, but the landscape’s fiery tones must do wonders for Arthur’s complexion.
“You’ll manage,” Yusuf says.
“Count on it.” Eames hangs up, and wipes the blood off the phone. His forge could stand a bit more gore, so he lets it trail, lets Arthur’s shoes leave tracks in it.
He sends the sound of his footsteps ahead, waits for the stertorous buzz of Ariadne’s gasp played through the train intercom. Oh god, she says, the warden’s here, we have to go, now!
Eames opens the doors between the train cars, and kills the lights.
The rest of the dream comes in flashes, in strikes edged with the terror of the scorched earth outside. Ariadne mouthing, no!, Nottingham scuttling back through the filth of the aisle, Arthur’s long shadow, advancing to kill. In the dark, Eames lets go of the idea, wields it like a knife, grabs Nottingham by the skull and drives it down his throat-
Ariadne kicks the PASIV on. Nottingham falls asleep mid-scream.
“Drop it,” Ariadne says, one deep breath in the dark later. “The forge, not Nottingham.”
“You’ll have to see it again down there,” Eames says, but drops it anyway, for her sake. As for Nottingham, he sits the man up in one of the seats, facing wherever this train is bound.
-
Fortunately for Arthur, one of the caches of computer equipment is locked to everyone but him. He can still hear the inmates pounding on the doors, crying out for his blood. Well, he’s washed off all he can of theirs, that’s for certain, and this is delicate work. He slips down from the air duct, props a chair by it so he can get back up, and gathers up all the headphone wires and TRS couplings he can find. He counts feet. There are enough to cover that distance, if he can connect them in time.
Fifty feet through the air ducts from this room to Yusuf; one length of headphone wires, a minute to create it. Less, thirty-eight feet to Dom, and that length of wire goes faster. Fifteen feet grace each line, done, no problems there, and a TRS splitter for the MP3 player that he already had planned for. It’s all here. It’s all justifiably here, and only two and a half minutes gone.
Just in case, Arthur brings all of the wire back up into the air vents with him, and makes the shorter route to Dom first, crawling on his elbows as fast as he can. The officer’s cap scrapes against the roof of the duct, slows him down. He shucks it off somewhere along the way.
He unscrews the duct over Dom and Miyu’s interrogation room, punches it out, and drops down. The very first thing he does is connect Dom’s headphones to the extended wire, and tightens them a notch over Dom’s ears just in case. Dom is starting to twitch-the sedative is wearing off, they have less time than they think they do. With that done, he goes to the door, and listens.
There’s broken glass now, crunching under heels and fists, and the rush of fire. Arthur doesn’t even consider what Eames might be doing to Nottingham down there to incense his subconscious this quickly. Nine minutes on the whiteboard condense down to five at the outside down here, and all Arthur can hope is that they know it. He trusts them to, all four them, more than he’s trusted anyone he’s worked with since taking up with Dom at all.
So he removes one of the screws from the lock on Dom’s door, and the barricade he builds won’t withstand more than a minute of the riot. He climbs up onto the heap of tables and files and wires to get back into the ceiling, and just keep going.
-
Everything in the house is empty. That’s how Ariadne designed it. It’s still painful to actually see, even for Eames, who dreams it for her.
Eames is reminded of a joke, or rather, a riddle. There’s a cabin in the woods, it goes, and all the people in it are dead. Why? The answer to that riddle, of course, is the plane crashed, but in here the riddle’s more pertinent to solve. There’s a cabin, no, a mansion in the woods, and all the boxes and bottles and paraphernalia in it are empty. Why?
It’s not supposed to matter to Eames, at least not in any real sense beyond knowing Nottingham. He can, and does, infer, but too much inference is a whole lot of consequence down here, and the last thing any of them want to leave Nottingham with is a house full of ideas that he didn’t give himself.
But yes, there’s a mansion in the woods, and all the drawers and closets and rooms and panels of the windows are empty, and where there are things at all, they are empty things. Eames nudges open a door without a knob, and it swings on a hinge without a pivot. The floorboards creak and spread, but no mice trundle out, and the holes in the walls only lead to more holes. There are no projections here, and Eames offers Arthur an (empty?) internal thanks for that; only Eames himself, on the highest floor where the monster always ought to be, and Ariadne and Nottingham, in the vacant half-collapsed arch where double doors should be, on the lowest of four stories.
“You remember this, don’t you?” Ariadne asks, and her voice doesn’t so much echo as snake through the halls, creeping up Eames’ spine like a static shock. “I mean, it’s different now, but-”
“Yes,” Nottingham whispers. This actually reverberates, in the very real sense of each room in the house saying just that, yes. Yes. “Yes, I do. I...I didn’t build it. But I added to it. All the things are mine.”
“Were,” Ariadne says. “They were yours.” They step into the hall, living silhouettes darker than shadows. The sky must be as empty as the house. Eames keeps behind a pillar, listens more than looks. “This is what they took from you.”
Nottingham kneels, to pick something up. From up here, Eames can tell it’s a bottle, the kind without a message. The pop of the cork is just as noisy as it would be for a full bottle, but warped, backwards. Once it’s open, Nottingham drops it like it’s burned him.
Ariadne winces. “That one’s used up. You have to find someplace in the house, Mr. Nottingham. It just takes one idea.” She breathes deeply, steps forward into the foyer and spreads her arms, looking up where the sockets hang, bereft of bulbs. “This house used to be filled with ideas, didn’t it? It had to start with one. But the thing about ideas is that they grow. They fill whatever you put them in and create more of themselves, like seeds. And if it’s ivy it climbs, or if it’s a tree the roots shove everything else out of the way, and if it’s not a plant at all it still grows and spreads and takes you over. That’s what it used to be like. And they stopped it. They harvested without sowing.”
“I’m the one who didn’t sow,” Nottingham says.
“Maybe. But they kept you from trying.”
She backs through a door and Nottingham follows, but their voices carry out through every room of the house. They’re out of sight, so Eames stalks down, letting the echoes swallow his footsteps for now and the ringing of Arthur’s forged keys.
“Then what’s to stop them from taking it all again?” Nottingham asks. “What if they just come in here and undo it?”
“You can stop them,” Ariadne says in the dark. “Plant it here, and plant it in the place it’ll grow the fastest. Ideas make you stronger, and the only reason they got in is that you let them start, you let them take it all away.”
“I won’t now,” Nottingham murmurs, and Eames still hears it. “I won’t.”
They walk out of a room on the third floor-ah, good Ariadne, creating a right tangle-on the opposite side of the foyer from Eames. “It might even be strong enough to let us both out together,” she says, and sneaks Eames a glance. The whites of her eyes glint in the dark, like smiles, like fireflies.
Nottingham’s already ahead of her now, “How will I know where?”
“It depends on what kind of an idea it is, doesn’t it?”
“And how do I know that?”
Eames lets them both hear his next step forward. In fact, he cracks a floorboard, like a proper terror should. The house shivers, and Eames knows that the speeding train one level up has hit a swerve in the track, that it’s more than just the tread of the monster.
They see him.
And Ariadne whispers, ”Hurry!”
Eames wonders if Nottingham will ever stop being chased. They aren’t here to fix him after all, and when, if, this succeeds, he will still be an alcoholic writer and possibly (admittedly) a hack. But he’ll be a hack with an idea, and one he gave himself, untraceable both to original source and couriers.
Well, first he has to survive the dream. And Ariadne’s made that difficult and not, with the rooms that lead to one another on opposite halls, opposite floors. Eames breaks glass every time he steps, splits boards, stains frames without pictures. The shelves are loaded with empty candlesticks and blank books, and they scatter and topple with a swipe of Eames’ arm, so empty that they devour the caked blood that peels off Eames’, Arthur’s, arms. But now Nottingham isn’t just running, he’s searching, touching the boxes and drawers and panels in the wall, and his right hand has begun to twitch and key. He leaves things behind now, and Ariadne is his eyes, warning him, no, this way-pretty soon Nottingham’s the one who can tell when they’re close, what paths lead where, and what paths don’t lead to Eames and the menace of the keys.
The house shakes from the ground up. The walls of the dream begin to blare, deep and ominous and regular, and Eames lets his Arthur forge smile. Blood chaps on his lips. He counts. Three minutes.
“We have no time!” Every room is filled with Ariadne shouting over the warped, slowed brass that everyone can hear. “Mr. Nottingham, quick-”
“I know where it is,” he says, “I know where to go, just help me get there.”
“Where?”
“Out,” he says, “out and under the house.”
-
There. Arthur vaults himself back into the air vents and crawls to where he left the MP3 player. From there, it’s just a push of the button, and the auditory afterimage of two distant headsets playing the same song quavers on the metal walls. No, Edith Piaf sings, I regret nothing, and a minute into the song she will be telling the French Foreign Legion that everything is forgotten and all is well, and Arthur will probably kill himself in an air duct because the riot can’t get to him fast enough. He needs to be the first awake. He just has to think of how.
-
Dom almost can’t hear the music under the crash of the fifth helicopter. The debris rains onto their propeller and bounces onto the windshield, leaving chips in the glass.
“We’re not gonna make it, are we?” Miyu asks. They’ve been hit pretty hard, sure, or at least the craft has, and given the amount of time Dom knows they have left he still has to make excuses.
He points with the gun turret. “Can you land us on that building over there?” Just as he says it, the wind throws the craft drastically sideways. The propeller slices into glass, and the shards spray like hail. Dom wraps himself around the gun turret and holds on. “Guess not-”
The laptop computer slides down the hangar, smacking Dom in the heels before freefalling.
Miyu’s reactions are still delayed, it seems; the shock hits her first, the fact hits her after. But it’s slow, slow enough that Dom can see each stretch of her skin to accommodate the muscles getting her up from the pilot’s chair. He knows exactly where she’s going, exactly what she’ll do, and exactly how long he has to pretend to stop her for.
In fact, he lets her jump, so long as he catches her.
The helicopter stutters and quails, spiraling down. Smoke fills the last searchlight and the assault of the city. “I can catch it, I can get it, just let me go-”
And Dom realizes that no, he can’t, because she thinks, correctly, that she can fly.
-
“Yes-yes, that door, Mr. Nottingham, go-”
Eames catches up with Ariadne and yanks her into the shadows, clamps a hand over her mouth. He whispers, into her ear so it doesn’t echo, keep trying to scream. Twenty seconds. She nods, and he can feel her teeth drag on his palm, the froth at the corner of her lips reanimating the dried blood.
But out the door, he sees Nottingham furiously digging, prying up the stairs of the mansion’s porch, clawing at the earth. His hands leave raised tracks at his sides, and there, there is a crushed paper box, like the ones for pre-grown plants, fused open by function if not form. It’s empty, of course, and the house echoes with Nottingham’s ragged exhale.
Nottingham puts his hand in-the one that shakes, the one that on every level up connects him to the PASIV-and shuts the lid.
-
Yusuf derails the train. Dom lets Miyu drag him out of the helicopter. The convicts tear down Arthur’s barricades and descend on the sleepers like hyenas, ripping them apart.
And when up in the air vent, Arthur hears the first real scream-Ariadne’s-he pulls the sharp stripped wires tight around his neck.
-
“You are five minutes early,” Saitoh says when Arthur untangles himself from Eames’ cot, pushes himself to his feet and disconnects himself from the PASIV.
“Closer to six and not on this clock. First one up draws the curtain,” he says, and does just that, building a curtained wall between Nottingham and Miyu’s respective cots. “Get Miyu’s legs taken care of if you haven’t already. Who else is awake?”
“I am,” Yusuf says. And he’s not the only one either, Dom’s up off the floor, and the cushion of Ariadne’s chair squeaks, hisses in air when she gets to her feet.
“That makes all of us,” Eames says, legs already swung off the bed. “And them, it seems.” He disconnects Nottingham with a sharp, unrepentant tug.
Orderlies wheel Miyu out; Saitoh has done as he promised and, between the ambulance ride over and the short time they’ve spent under, Miyu’s legs have been at least cleaned and given first aid. Nottingham stirs-everyone but Saitoh gets out of the room as fast as they can, and down the hospital hall. They split up as soon as they get to the long row of elevators, and by the time Arthur sets his briefcase in the backseat of a cab, he knows he won’t see the others for two days at least.
He has the cab drop him off on 59th street, and pays a hansom driver to take him once around the park. He focuses on the steady trot of the horse’s hooves at the expense of the city, and lets that help him down. When he can count again, he subdivides the beats. Quarter equals one-twenty, eighty, sixty, forty on the turns.
-
“Of course it’s not supposed to matter,” Eames says, several days later. He hands the conductor back the ticket, but ignores that entirely and keeps addressing Arthur, across from him in the facing blue vinyl seats. “None of it is, really. Not even whether we succeeded. The accounts reflect what they should.”
“Then why are we here?” The conductor punched Arthur’s ticket the same time as Eames’, so Arthur is also tucking his away, in a slide of his billfold.
“Closure.” Eames winks at him, doesn’t get the ruffled hackles he’d hoped for. Ah, well. “Obviously we can’t do this again, or advertise this service-inasmuch as we can advertise anything, that is-if we don’t know how effective it is.”
“Fair enough,” Arthur says after a while. “You’re sure he’s on this train?”
“No, Darling, I only wanted to take you on a pleasure trip.”
“Where, Saratoga?”
“The possibility had occurred to me.”
“That’s a little farther north than you think.”
“So we’ll spend a lot of time on trains,” Eames offers, and leans over his knees. “I’m surprised you’re so amenable.”
“I’m surprised you think I wouldn’t be,” Arthur says, insufferably deadpan and without innuendo that Eames can perceive.
“Smashing,” Eames says, and tries to put said innuendo back in where it belongs. “It just didn’t seem within the realm of your precious plausibility.”
“I gamble the same as you, I just play the odds instead of throwing them.” Arthur looks over Eames’ shoulder. “He’s here.”
Eames nods. “What’s he doing?”
“Sitting down,” Arthur says sourly, turning up his palms in a shrug, a well that’s obvious. “Taking out his laptop.” The announcer goes through his motions on the intercom. “Taking a drink of whatever’s in that paper bag. I think it’s a 40. Typing.”
“Well that’s a good sign.” Once the train pulls out into the dark tunnels under Grand Central, Eames turns around and smiles, and shifts his voice into the nondescript New York one. “Oh, ha, I get to do this again! Bradley, come on!”
Arthur mouths, Bradley?, and struggles when Eames tugs him out of the seat, but that’s not standing in Eames’ way dragging him up the aisle.
“Mr. Nottingham?” Eames asks, leaning over with all the enthusiasm he can muster. “Mr. Nottingham, hey! I’m glad you’re out of the hospital. Uh, you signed my book on this train, just a couple of weeks ago?”
Nottingham startles but doesn’t up from his computer, at least not much. “Oh! Oh, right. You’re...Milton?”
“Mervin,” Eames corrects. “This is so awesome. I told you to sign it to both of us, right?” he adds, and slinks an arm around Arthur’s waist to pull him close. “Well, now your biggest fan finally gets to meet you.”
Now Nottingham looks up. It takes him about a second to see, long enough for the train to have one of those requisite blackouts before they surface on the other side of the Hudson. The sheer terror on Nottingham’s face is almost comical, at least to Eames.
“...Hi,” Arthur says, and if the doubt is real, at least it’s effective.
“Wow,” Nottingham says, barely a breath. “Wow. This is...this is something else.” He takes a moment, and then smiles. “This is going in the book.”
“You’re writing?” Eames asks.
“Yeah, and well, I hate to say this but you-Bradley, I mean-your look’s just right for the villain. It just surprised me, that’s all. I don’t mean any offense.”
“None taken,” Arthur says, edging out of the circle of Eames’ arm. “What do you mean, though?”
“Well, it occurred to me the other day. Did you know there used to be a paramilitary organization that specialized in dream infiltration?”
Eames still has his fingertips on Arthur’s back, so he can feel the chill race up Arthur’s already cold spine.
Nottingham goes on, and goes back to typing, “So when the organization broke up years ago, of course they couldn’t get rid of the technology, that never happens. But I found some Japanese sites that advertised the technology for commercial use. But it’s definitely out there. So I’m writing about people who use that technology to steal dreams. Intellectual contraband. Things like that. It’s all a bit hazy, but I think I’ll work it out.”
Arthur has his hand in his pocket. Eames should probably follow his example.
-
Dom begins to rub out the chart, not bothering with the cloth eraser.
“Mr. Nottingham’s representatives are quite pleased with us,” Saitoh is saying. “Are you?”
-
---
-
Credit for credit and blame for blame: This fic would not be possible without lassarina’s editing, lindensphinx’s encouragement, puella_nerdii’s photoshop skills and also love, and pinstripesuit in general.
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