Anabasis: Part III: 8
Title: Anabasis
Author: coldthermistor
Artist: ellegen
Rating: R just in case, mostly for violence. There is no porn.
Word count: 80,617 words
Warnings: A little violence (possibly graphic), implied torture, and swearing.
Pairings: Cobb/Mal, Arthur/Cobb
Summary: Dominic Cobb is a man on the run. He's on the run from a marriage slowly falling apart, from being framed for a crime he didn't commit...and on the run from the memories of a betrayal that haunts him still. He remembers little of the night except for one thing, burned into his mind: Arthur betrayed him. Arthur cannot be trusted. Now, a business man, Saito has come forward: with what seems to be Cobb's best hope of learning the truth about that night so many years ago...and with Cobb's best hope of clearing his name. In return, he only wants an impossible job performed. Inception. There is no room for failure. The stakes are too high. But there is an enemy haunting Cobb's footsteps...an enemy wearing the face of a man that Cobb knows only too well: Cobb's former point man, Arthur...
-
Yusuf gritted his teeth, reached over with his free hand and grabbed the projection’s arm around the wrist and pulled, leaning in as much as he could. He couldn’t let go, couldn’t give the projection time to produce the shotgun or to use it. Rain streaked in through the rolled down windows, and part of his clothing was getting more than just unpleasantly damp and clinging to his skin.
The projection tried to pull away. Yusuf pulled back, tried not to let go, and sped up at the same time. They struggled for control of the steering wheel when Yusuf’s hold was broken and the van suddenly swerved into the next lane, almost hitting the car behind them which braked sharply and honked at him.
Yusuf muttered an apology and sped up again, as fast as the van would allow, shoving the projection’s arm away. The rider hadn’t been able to keep up on his motorcycle and when the van sped up, he fell, tumbling to the wet road. Yusuf grunted in satisfaction. He didn’t glance back to see if the projection was going to stay put, just sped up and tried to outstrip the rest of the motorcycles.
He didn’t see the black SUV until it was too late. The collision had been glancing but deliberate and the impact shook the van and shouldered it aside. The van skidded across the wet surface of the road, swerving sharply. Yusuf cursed and tried to right it but the barricade was approaching, too fast. He might have managed it, there and then, but the black SUV came in again, and this time, Yusuf swore he felt the shuddering jolt deep in bone and muscle.
The van crashed through the barricade and began to slide, tumbling down a slope, rubber finding no purchase on fine gravel slick with rain.
-
Eames had known pursuit was close. But when he’d slipped out from the turning, he’d opened himself right for a quick grab to his wrist. The projection twisted his arm about: Eames was forced to follow obligingly as his arm protested the unnatural angle. Somewhere along the way, his fingers opened and the H&K fell and they must have been reasonably lucky because it didn’t go off. He went with the flow, because the projection had the momentum and none of that was with him.
He thought he’d caught a glimpse of the man’s buddy somewhere down the hallway, gun trained on him and figured that meant he was royally screwed the moment he put any kind of distance between himself and the projection that slammed him into the wall. Well, Eames thought sardonically as pain bloomed in his back, and he obligingly turned, allowing the projection control over his arms and aimed a curving knee strike, up and in.
He made contact with something soft, probably the stomach, and his attacker grunted in pain, and his grip slackened. Eames broke out of it, tried to slip out to the side and succeeded. He delivered a series of quick jabs, just to keep the projection off balance and to force the man back. The first connected, the projection accepted the second so he could hit Eames with a heavy right. Eames swore, took the blow across his ribs and drove two elbow strikes in rapid succession, but found himself tumbling, he’d completely missed -
What?
The hell, Eames thought, as the world tilted and spun and he realised it wasn’t because the blow to his ribs had hurt, it was because the world really was swinging around and what he took to be the floor was the door of a room, complete with numbers: 552, he read.
One of the projections had been flung against a door and the gun had skittered from his grasp. The other one - Eames didn’t know where the hell he’d gone and didn’t bother.
Before the disarmed projection could recover, he raced down the corridor, trying to keep his balance as the walls shifted and rotated beneath his feet and the floor became the ceiling and then the floor again then a line of doors. He stumbled, recovered and slammed right into the man with a cobra punch that hit him on the cheek, but the projection was already turning, already reducing the force of the blow so Eames snapped out a left hook. It would have connected with the projection’s chin, except that he was foiled again by the rotation of the corridor, probably because of whatever was going on with the van up there.
The entire corridor spun again and Eames was slammed against the ceiling though the projection hadn’t fared better. He advanced more cautiously this time, and the projection carefully backed up. They’d probably given each other enough cause for concern and Eames dodged a punch, countered with swift jabs that were easily turned aside. Conservative, he thought. They were all playing conservative right now, especially because the gravity kept shifting, kept turning the tables on them.
Eames decided he needed to get this projection out of the way fast before his partner came back with someone’s gun.
He went in for it again, with a knee strike to the projection’s thigh, and then an elbow to his chin but caught the full impact of a right cross straight to his abdomen. Pain flared - Eames blinked, gasping, but the breath left him, and he was saved only by the shifting gravity. He was slammed back first into a door which gave way, except the collision didn’t do much good for Eames’ back.
Hell, Eames thought, blinking his bleary eyes back into focus. The next thing he hit was the wall, and hard enough to completely knock the wind out of him. He just lay on his back for a moment, breathed, and then intercepted the falling projection with his foot and a certain satisfaction.
The gun slipped into the room, and Eames lunged for it - and missed. The room tilted and the gun slid again, past him and closer to the projection who was moving for it -
Eames charged in, intercepting the man with a low diagonal kick to the thigh. He winced at the knife-hand strike to his much-abused ribs and snapped out two quick palm strikes, both to the hinge of the projection’s jaw. They tangled and tumbled. The gun slid away.
They both struggled and grappled for advantage. A quick throw had Eames slamming into the wall right above the bed and then crashing onto the bed as the axis swapped yet again. At least the mattress absorbed the impact. He’d taken enough of a battering today from collisions all over the bloody place.
Eames tried to right himself and then found fingers going for his throat, trying to grab him in a chokehold. Fuck it, he thought, and kicked out, his leg snapping with explosive power into the projection’s groin. Not quite. His foot connected just above the groin but the hold relaxed and immediately, Eames thrust himself away, trying to put some distance between him and the projection.
He rolled off the bed, hit the other side of the room with a bit more force than necessary and swore but he was lucky. The gun slid out from under the bed and right into his grasp. Eames caught it just as the projection realised he was screwed and launched himself in a tackle right at Eames.
Without a pause, Eames fired right at the projection.
The gun went off and Eames scrambled out of the way on his knees as the projection hit the ground, slid, crashed into the wall and the room righted itself, all at once. Still holding the gun, he prodded the body once with his foot, and then flipped it over.
He’d shot the projection in the head, almost right between the eyes. Fucking lucky, Eames thought, not even savouring his victory. He checked the gun, was disgusted to find it was empty, and dropped it on the floor without a second glance.
He sucked in a deep breath of air into his bruised lungs and just enjoyed being alive for a few moments before he headed out of the room to go find the other projection.
-
The van righted itself, and then slid backwards. Yusuf desperately hit the brakes, trying for some kind of control - and then breathed a huge sigh of relief as the bumper smacked into the barricade at the bottom of the gravel slope and the barricade held. The van ground to a complete halt and Yusuf slumped back into his seat.
He was sure there was going to be a bruise where his head had slammed against the windscreen, but no matter how he took stock, the conclusion was the same. They’d survived a suicidal tumble off the road and down a slope, and he was still alive.
The laughter came, weak and hysterical. “Did you see that?” he demanded, turning around to glance at the van’s occupants.
He was greeted by complete silence and the part of Yusuf’s brain that was finally functioning again after the adrenaline overload told him that it wouldn’t have been a good thing if he’d gotten any kind of answer.
He shrugged, just a little deflated and started the van again, heading for the nearest gap in the barricade and the road again. He thought he’d recognised where they’d been thrown off the main road, and if he was right, it would take a few turns at the right intersection to get back on track and headed for the bridge.
-
It took them maybe ten minutes to negotiate the descent from the cliff towards the terraces, even when they were skiing down the slope. Ariadne led the way. She was far more familiar with the geography of the dream than Cobb was.
They spent most of the way in silence. Cobb pushed them, as fast as he could. Ariadne shot him the occasional glance, and he could all but tell that there was a question on the tip of her tongue. She didn’t ask it though, and Cobb didn’t think he’d have answered her even if she did. He didn’t even want to know what it was, although he had some idea, and he deliberately glanced ahead, focused on the task of reaching the rendenzvous point.
He caught sight of the figures ahead, waiting, and slowed down to a stop. Arthur nodded to him, and said nothing. Saito was a silent presence to the other side of Robert, who glanced at him with - was that some kind of relief?
Cobb didn’t want to think too hard on that. He didn’t try.
He motioned to Arthur to follow him, and pulled him out of earshot. Robert made a tentative attempt to follow, but Ariadne noticed, and headed him off. “I need you to draw security away from the complex,” he said, keeping it quiet to minimise the chances of Robert overhearing them.
Arthur nodded slowly. “I can’t do that without knowing enough about what this level’s like,” he replied, his voice equally soft. “You know that.”
Cobb hesitated. There was that. But there were only so many options. He could draw security off himself, but he didn’t know enough about the route, not the way Ariadne did. Ariadne wasn’t an option. She was a quick study, but this was something more than playing around with the physics of a dream. She’d willingly joined in and while Cobb couldn’t deny that a large part of it was probably due to her fascination with dreamsharing, he also couldn’t deny that she was making the job easier on him. He owed it to Miles at least to keep her out of as much trouble as he could. She could handle herself fine. Eames had taught her how to use a semi-automatic anyway, but facing armed and militarised projections was something else entirely.
And there was Arthur.
It all boiled down, Cobb thought, to whether he trusted Arthur. Whether he could trust Arthur. He studied Arthur’s features, willing himself to find some trace of deception, some sign of Arthur’s intentions, but he found nothing. Arthur met his gaze, serious, waiting, strangely honest and yet opaque at the same time.
He never saw the deception until it came. Had never seen it. And likely never would.
In the end, Cobb made the decision. It really fell back to between the two of them: he or Arthur, and no matter how he thought about it, he didn’t know if he could -
He knew he couldn’t trust Arthur.
Instincts born from years of friendship and working together said he wanted to.
“I’ll get her to tell you the route,” Cobb said slowly. If Ariadne briefed Arthur on the route but left anything about the interior of the hospital untouched, it might buy them enough time. It seemed like the only solution that came to mind.
Arthur shrugged, “Okay.”
“Thanks,” Cobb said. He was only mildly surprised to discover that he meant it. He missed Arthur’s reply as he caught Ariadne’s eye and motioned and she came over to where they were. “What is it?” she asked.
“I need you to brief Arthur on the area surrounding the complex,” Cobb said, very carefully. Ariadne frowned and raised her eyebrows at his wording.
Not the complex? She mouthed. Arthur studiously looked away. And then, oh. She understood.
“Cobb,” she called out quietly, putting out a hand to restrain him. “Are you sure about this?”
“Everyone’s been asking me that since I first got Arthur on that van,” Cobb replied. “We make the best choices with what we’ve got, right?”
She studied him for a few long moments, lips pursed. “You know,” she said, slowly, “I think that even if it wasn’t the best choice, you’d still have taken him along.”
Cobb’s eyes flicked to Arthur and back. “Tell him the route,” he said brusquely, and strode off to a safe distance where he couldn’t possibly hear what information was passing between the two of them. It was more reflex than any kind of caution. The only information Arthur would have to work with was what Cobb knew - and what Ariadne told him. Listening in wouldn’t have changed anything, but Cobb found himself moving away, before he’d thought things through, putting some distance between himself and the pair before he paused and looked back at them.
Arthur nodded briefly at occasional intervals as Ariadne said something. He bent and scrawled a crude diagram into the snow and Ariadne looked over it and said something else. Cobb’s breath caught for a moment. It was something familiar, all of those details he’d never known his mind had picked up on and preserved until he’d seen them embodied in his projection. Their voices carried just a little and Cobb’s feet took him back in the direction of Saito and Robert, instead of picking up on what Arthur and Ariadne were saying.
“What’s going on?” Robert asked, a little uncertain.
“I’m briefing my team, Mr Fischer,” Cobb half-lied. “One of them will create a distraction and draw the men away from the complex so that you won’t have difficulty penetrating it.”
“You won’t be coming in?” Robert wanted to know.
Cobb took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “You have to do this on your own. The truth about your father’s in there. You just need to get right in there, and find it.”
Robert nodded, just once, and in that uncertainty, Cobb saw something else: the tentative signs of a very familiar determination, and he swallowed bitterly and almost turned away. “Keep this live,” he said, with a light tap to the radio mike peeping out from the lapel of Fischer’s jacket. “I’ll be listening in the whole time. The windows on the upper floor are big enough for me to cover you from that south tower. You see it?” He’d caught sight of it when he had been scanning the complex through the scope. For what he was going to do, he’d thought back then, it would suit very nicely.
Robert’s eyes followed the direction Cobb was pointing in. He nodded. “Okay, I see it.”
“Great,” Cobb said. He moved over to speak to Saito. “I need someone to take Fischer into the complex…” he began.
“I can do it,” Saito replied immediately. He looked at Cobb, his gaze steady and unwavering. “That is why you asked me?”
Cobb nodded, relieved. “Yes,” he said, slowly. “I can’t take Fischer in, and I need Ariadne with me…”
“And Arthur?”
“Drawing away Fischer’s security,” Cobb clarified.
Saito coughed for a moment, bending forward and when he straightened up, Cobb frowned as he saw spots of blood, dark red on the white snow. Whatever time they had was quickly running out. He ignored the quiet voice that told him that no matter how fast they moved right now, they wouldn’t be able to get Saito out before the sedative wore off. Unless the idea took. Fischer’s subconscious security might be less agitated then. It might be possible to try to stabilise Saito…
Cobb dismissed the thought. It was wishful thinking and he knew it. Ariadne finished briefing Arthur and he set her to briefing Saito about the route to the complex. While she did so, he pointed Saito out to Robert, told him Saito would guide him in, and then walked out, away from the group.
Arthur followed him.
Cobb tensed, and then forced himself to relax when Arthur paused behind him. It always came back to that: two different sets of memories, telling him two completely different things. Arthur spoke up eventually. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Cobb said. He didn’t elaborate. Ariadne was partly right, he thought. The further they went down, the closer he went to all his doubts, all his misgivings. The knotted tangle that his memories had become, his growing uncertainty.
“Sure sounds like it,” Arthur said with an ironic lift of his shoulders. He came up beside Cobb, joined him in glancing down the terraces at the facility that lay below, bristling with armed menace. “Fischer’s security’s going to be a tough one.”
“That’s why I need you to tie them up,” Cobb agreed.
“I’d need my own private army,” Arthur scoffed, studying the complex.
Cobb almost smiled at that. “Sorry, Arthur,” he said, “You don’t get any backup for this one.”
“Pity. I’d think this is more Eames’ sort of thing.”
“Not even a little grudging?”
“Alright, just a bit,” Arthur admitted. Cobb hid the smile that threatened to break out. “He’s better at this kind of thing. And given the conditions…”
“I trust you,” Cobb said in a low voice, surprising himself with his vehemence. “You’ll manage.”
Arthur turned to glance at him. He smiled, sadly and knowingly. There was an almost tired slump to his shoulders but he shook that off and straightened up. “No, you don’t,” he corrected gently. “Not really. Guess I can’t blame you.”
He turned to leave, and Cobb waited for a few more moments, took one last long look at the hospital complex. “Good luck!” he called after Arthur’s retreating back. “You’re going to need it.”
Arthur paused, turned on his heels. “Yeah,” he said. “You too.”
-
Eames came almost face-to-face with the other projection when he walked out of the hotel room, door swinging shut behind him. They both started: Eames swore and snapped out a low kick, turning at the same time to disarm the man with a grip of his wrist. The kick didn’t land - it was more a distraction than anything. He twisted the projection’s wrist about, forcing him into the same position that the man had gotten Eames into earlier.
Numb fingers popped open and a gun fell free. Eames knew better than to lunge for it, not when he was hampered by his opponent. He managed a grip on the projection’s biceps with his free arm and then yanked him in, moving at the same time to introduce the point of the projection’s chin to Eames’ forehead at something that must have felt like terminal velocity to the unlucky bastard. They met with a sharp crack.
The struggling projection went limp in Eames’ grip for a moment, and Eames hit him once more with a solid left hook. There was nowhere to move, no block, and more importantly, no gravity shifts to deny Eames the power he needed to put behind the blow and this time, the projection took it straight on and dropped like a stone.
Eames picked up the gun. It was his, and he checked it. It took only one shot to make sure that projection wasn’t going to bother him again.
A glance at his watch showed that they had a while more before it was time for Yusuf to set up the kick on his end, but Eames figured he’d better make sure there hadn’t been any tampering with the charges he’d set.
He pushed open the two sets of heavy doors and headed down the stairs.
-
Cobb gave Arthur about seven minutes to get to work on that distraction. Arthur had taken about five before they saw the red-orange burst of the flare, stark against the almost colourless grey of the sky. “That’ll be him,” Cobb confirmed, in answer to the unasked question from Ariadne standing beside him. “He’s started.”
“He won’t cross paths with Saito and Fischer,” Ariadne said. “I made sure of it.”
He was going to ask her how, and then remembered she’d briefed both Arthur and Saito on the routes. It was likely she’d given them information about different sections of the dream level and just withheld the rest. “Good thinking,” he said approvingly.
“I thought you might want to be safe,” she replied quietly, “And not let Arthur know about…the important things.”
“Yes,” he said, offering her a slightly impressed look. “Good work.”
The complex looked like an anthill that had been kicked over. They were too far to hear the shouting, to catch more than distant, frenetic activity and the shape of snowmobiles heading out to search for the source of the disturbance. Projections spread out in several directions: they didn’t seem too sure about exactly where to go, or they had the numbers to conduct a systematic, sector by sector search.
Cobb checked again. Not all of them had left. There were still sentries patrolling the walls, but the important bit was that Arthur had pulled away a significant portion of Fischer’s projections. If things went their way, Saito and Fischer would get in and get out again without a hitch. Then, they could worry about setting off the kick to synchronise with Eames.
For a moment longer, he hesitated, trying to see if he could make out the sight of a lone white figure, skiing down the slopes, with Fischer’s projections in hot pursuit. It was pointless, Cobb thought. They had to start moving now, before they encountered any of the projections sweeping the area for Arthur. They’d need every second of the time Arthur was buying them. He shouldered his rifle, slipped back into his skis and nodded to Ariadne.
“Let’s move,” he said quietly, and they headed on downwards, towards the silent, lonely hospital below.
-
The first thoughts that he might not make the timing entered Yusuf’s head when he glanced at his watch and grimaced. He was headed for the bridge too soon, but he didn’t have much of a choice about it. The black SUV was right on their tail again, and he’d tried but failed to shake the vehicle off. Not without encountering a flurry of motorcycles again.
He briefly wondered where the other one was and dismissed it. Not now. He had too many things to worry about right now. He made the bridge, right before the barrier came up. The SUV was not so lucky: Yusuf heard the collision and when he checked the rearview mirror, he saw that the entire rear axle of the SUV must have been yanked off. The large vehicle spun about, out of control, before scraping to a complete halt.
Yusuf sped up the van and tried to head off the other end of the bridge but he was too late. The barriers on the other end of the bridge had already been raised, too high for the van to attempt to cross. He backed up again, thinking fast. They were trapped on the bridge with the SUV, and he was heavily outnumbered and probably outgunned too, and none of it added up to anything good.
“Bugger,” he said aloud, and then the shooting started.
-
Eames came out through the door and saw immediately that he was right. Two more security projections were outside 491. They clearly knew there was something important in that room - they just didn’t know what. Eames put two bullets into the head of the first projection, and then another two into the torso of the second. At the same time he was moving, trying to make himself a more difficult target.
He threw himself backwards, shouldering the second door open, and letting the first one swing shut. He didn’t think the heavy wooden doors would provide any sort of decent protection and waited to the side of the doorway, counting off in his head again.
He was sure the first one must have been killed, but he’d had the advantage of surprise then. Eames was sure he’d missed the second at least once, and he wasn’t sure if any of the shots had stopped the man.
He waited a few more moments and then swung open the doors again. The security projection was ready for him and Eames felt a flash of sharp pain - splinters of wood jabbed at him as bullets tore into the wood of the fire escape door behind him.
He wasn’t so much sighting now as shooting from instinct and the shots he squeezed off should have missed, but he got a lucky one at the projection’s thigh - not that he’d even been aiming for it, but Eames figured he’d take the credit all the same.
He retreated behind the door again, and as he moved, he thought he heard the projection trying to shoot at him again. He grimaced as he felt something wet trickle down his cheek and knew it was probably blood. Must have been the splinters, Eames thought. They’d laid his cheek open. He started counting off again to when he’d break cover and try to get a finishing shot in. This time, Eames changed the count. Didn’t make sense to make offing him ridiculously easy for the projection.
-
Sod it, Yusuf thought. He’d made a valiant enough effort to fend off the projections. He was painfully aware of how the open windows of the van provided no protection at all from bullets - not that glass would have been much better.
The projection Yusuf could see at the moment was persistent, doggedly trying to get him and ducking behind the body of his crippled SUV for protection the moment Yusuf tried to retaliate in kind. Sod it. He’d never been too much good in a firefight anyway, and he was in over his head. It wouldn’t take long before more projections started swarming the van and one of them got killed, and at that moment, Yusuf was certain that ‘one of them’ would be him.
He bent down as far forward as possible to keep his head from banging against the ceiling and clambered to the back of the van. He checked the MP3 player, and slipped the headphones over Eames’ ears and then hit the play button to start the music cue. “I hope you’re ready,” he said aloud, and then moved over to check briefly on Saito.
Checking on Saito, the first thing Yusuf saw was a growing bloodstain. Saito was bleeding, straight through the bandages. He shook his head. It wasn’t good, but there was nothing Yusuf could do about it now.
He made his way back to the driver’s seat as fast as he could and then backed the van up, sticking his head outside of the window for an instant to make sure he’d lined the van up properly with the barrier.
Without a pause, the moment Yusuf got the van in position, he reversed, hard and fast, slamming the van into the barrier. The barrier broke, beneath the momentum of the van, and they hurtled backwards, off the edge…
And downwards, plummeting towards where the distant river glittered in the sunlight.
-
Eames heard it then, and blinked, faltering in his count. He hissed a curse under his breath in mild annoyance, and started out the door again. The projection had gone almost still, but Eames put one in his head just to be sure.
Self-preservation had him dashing down the corridor first, to make sure the man was dead. He was. And then, Eames frowned, glancing upwards - except of course, the sound wasn’t literally coming from the fifth floor.
It was the music cue, he realised, slowed because this was one layer down. Eames frowned and checked his watch. It wasn’t time yet. It was too soon, way too soon for the kick. What the hell was going on up there?
He started for the fifth floor anyway, moving at a brisk jog because one way or another, Yusuf was going to be delivering a kick, and Eames didn’t fancy being around to have to figure out how to perform a kick in zero-g.
-
“Cobb, did you hear that?”
“What was it?” Ariadne asked, frowning. She’d picked up on something too.
Cobb held up a hand for silence and replied over the radio. “Yeah, I heard it.”
“It’s the kick, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Cobb said, distractedly. “Damnit. It’s too soon.”
“Plan?”
“We move fast.”
“That was Plan A.”
“We move faster,” Cobb corrected. “Saito, did you copy?”
There was silence for a few moments, and Cobb wasn’t sure if Saito had heard them, but then Saito came back over the radio, calm and unruffled.
“We’re going as fast as we can.”
Cobb frowned, trying to think it through. “It’s the kick,” he explained to Ariadne. “The music cue. It’s slowed down, through the layers, probably because we’re hearing the music from Eames’ cue, which means he hasn’t gotten around to starting yours.”
“How long do they have?” Ariadne asked quietly.
“Yusuf’s about sixty seconds from the jump,” Cobb said slowly, “Which gives Eames about three minutes, which gives us about…”
“Sixty minutes,” Ariadne said, doing the math.
“Can they make the route you gave them in under an hour?”
Ariadne considered it, but then shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said, “They’ve still got to climb down to the middle terrace before they make the approach.”
“Then they need a new route,” Cobb retorted, impatiently. “A direct route.”
“The whole building’s designed as a labyrinth,” Ariadne pointed out.
“There must be access routes that cut through the maze,” Cobb said. “Any architect always adds a back door into their design. You changed the maze, didn’t you?”
Ariadne hesitated. “If Arthur knows…”
Cobb switched off the radio mike clipped to the lapel of his coat. “We don’t have time for this now,” he snapped, urgently. “Is there a back door?”
Finally, Ariadne nodded. “An air duct system,” she said, breathlessly. “There’s an air duct system that cuts through the maze. It heads straight from the walls to the - “
“I don’t need to know any more,” Cobb said, cutting in roughly. “Explain it to them. Use only Saito’s channel.”
“Alright,” Ariadne said. She reached for the radio hooked to her belt and swapped the channels. She spoke quietly, trusting that the mike would pick up on her words, and walked a short distance away from Cobb to do so.
Cobb switched the mike back on, and waited. Finally, Ariadne turned back. “Done?” he asked.
She nodded in assent.
“Then let’s keep going. We’ve got to move faster.”
Then, the world shook and half the mountainside came loose with a thunderous white roar.
-
Eames had been sprinting down the corridor to 528 when he first felt the collision with the barrier. The entire dream jolted and shuddered, like a bell that had been struck with a hammer. Eames’ feet found no purchase on the ground and he was flung through the air, down the corridor.
He reached up, and managed to snag a ceiling lamp as he passed and then came to an abrupt halt with a sudden impulse that Eames swore he could feel all the way in his abused arms.
Fuck, he thought. Not good.
-
Saito heard the rumble in the distance first and glanced up and then realised what he’d heard about. There was an avalanche, higher up, thundering down the mountainside in a flood of unstoppable snow. They were doomed if it caught them while they were dangling on the ropes, Saito knew. Falling to their deaths would be the last of their worries. They were far more likely to be smothered, or to die of hypothermia, or even struck by debris that the snow concealed.
While another man in his position might have hesitated, caught between two equally undesirable choices, Saito did not hesitate. He made a decision quickly and called out a warning to Fischer.
Fischer glanced up, puzzled -
As Saito gathered the rope in his free hand and cut through it with the utility knife.
He had barely time to protest, to make any kind of sound as they fell, faster and faster. Maybe he was yelling - he couldn’t hear it over the sound of the wind in his ears. He glanced up for a moment and watched the avalanche pour over the edge of the cliff, massive, torrential and unstoppable force.
For a moment, it looked like the avalanche would catch them, and bury them alive in thick layers of snow and debris, but then they cleared the path of the avalanche. Saito hit the sloping terrace at an angle, half-rolled and half-slid down most of its length and sank into the snow at the very bottom. He lay there for a moment, tasting dust and ice and the dull copper of blood in his mouth and sucking chilly air into his lungs.
They’d made it.
Saito was no fool, and no stranger to the dangers that avalanches presented, and he knew that they were terribly lucky to have been alive. He lay back a few more moments, but then a weak cough shook him, and he felt the taste of blood flood his mouth again. He turned and spat it out on the snow, watching the red seep into white with a morbid kind of fascination.
He pushed himself painfully to his feet. He was battered, bruised, and half-frozen from their long slide down the cold slope, but at least he was alive. He brushed some of them off and ignored the rest. “Fischer?” he called out, glancing around. For a moment, his blood ran cold at the thought that his companion might not have survived their immensely risky fall.
And then he heard it, a muffled groan and then part of what Saito had taken to be nothing more than snow shifted. He held out a hand to help Fischer to his feet but Fischer shook his head and managed to get up on his own. He wasn’t a much better sight. Ice had been compressed all over his goggles and as he moved, it flaked off.
“What was that?” he gasped. “Couldn’t someone have dreamed of a godamned beach?”
Saito said nothing about the hazard of tsunamis as they made their slow and painful way, towards the base of the complex that loomed, large and towering in the distance. At least their dangerous descent had saved them time; time they’d have spent negotiating the journey downwards with a great deal more caution.
-
“Cobb! Did we miss it?” Arthur sounded out of breath.
“Yeah, we missed it,” Cobb said, scowling at the devastation the avalanche had wreaked in its wake, and he hoped that Saito and Fischer had managed to get out of the way.
“What’s the plan now?”
“Finish the job before the next kick,” Cobb responded.
“What next kick?”
“When the van hits the water. Eames should have a couple of minutes. We’ve got about twenty. Keep tying those projections up. We should be done soon.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Arthur said, wryly. “Shaking them off will be the difficult part.”
“It always is,” Cobb said, but got no response. He wasn’t expecting one.
“What was that?” Ariadne asked, shocked. She was still glancing at the cloud of dust and ice that lingered along the path the avalanche had taken.
“The kick,” Cobb explained. “From the van hitting the barricade.” He stared at the ice cloud, thinking. “Eames must have missed the first kick. He’s got a few more minutes to synchronise the second one.”
“And we’ve got twenty minutes.”
“Yes,” Cobb said. “So we need to move fast. Saito and Fischer should be somewhere nearby, or even inside the complex by now. So we need to make our own way in and set up so that we’ll be ready to cover them by the time they make their approach.”
Ariadne nodded. “Well, then,” she said, matter-of-factly, “Shouldn’t we get moving?”
She didn’t miss Cobb’s look of approval. “Yes,” Cobb said, “We should. Lead the way.”
At her look of confusion, he reminded her, “You’re the architect. I need a way into the facility, and fast, so we can reach that south tower in time to cover them.”
“There’s a route,” Ariadne said, after a few moments of thought. “It’s not a back door, but we can probably slip in.” She shouldered her pack and started moving off first, towards the base of the hospital complex.
A few moments later, Cobb followed.
-
Trying to make his way down a corridor with no gravity was something Eames found to be fiendishly tricky. He tried to swing free of the lamp, only to find himself tumbling uncontrolled down the corridor once he’d relaxed his grip. He glanced at the numbers on the doors and managed to grab onto a sconce as he passed 532, bringing himself to yet another abrupt halt.
Eames blinked, and gave himself a moment to work past the disorientation. Alright, he thought cautiously and let go of the sconce. He studied himself for a moment. Just floating. He had the vaguest of ideas that trying to walk normally wasn’t a good idea. He’d probably overbalance or something and end up going flat on his face - no wait. That wasn’t going to happen. Small comfort.
Moving was a tricky business, and after a few mishaps with the walls (hadn’t he had enough collisions for today?) Eames figured that getting around was a bit like swimming. At least he was a good, strong swimmer so that was something in his favour. He studied the numbers on the doors, trying to look out for room 528 and grabbed for the doorframe when he caught sight of the number. He caught it, and came to another halt. He reached into his jacket pocket for the keycard, found it, and inserted it into the door and managed to work it open with some difficulty, thinking absently that at least the bloody corridor wasn’t rotating this time.
Slipping in through the open door, Eames found that the gravity issues were evidently quite universal. Huh, he thought. It wasn’t as if he’d expected otherwise. Lamps, the telephone, wires, cables, the PASIV - anything not nailed down or attached to something was floating and Eames stared in disbelief at what must have been floating sachets of tea, coffee, and sugar. “You’ve got to be bloody kidding me,” he muttered aloud.
And then, Eames realised he had far bigger concerns. Going through aspects of their plan, he’d realised that he’d need to time the kick precisely with Yusuf’s. It didn’t leave very much margin for error, but they hadn’t had very many choices. The van had gone over the barricade, which gave him a few minutes to administer the kick, right before they hit the water, and to hope that it was going to be enough.
Staring at the unconscious, floating bodies of the rest of the team he’d signed on with, the implications of the sudden loss of gravity properly presented themselves. Eames looked at the carpet flooring of the room and swore. He was in for it.
How the blazes was he going to give them the kick if he couldn’t drop them?
-
Infiltrating the facility provided Cobb with two options. He could take out all the sentries on their way in, or he could take out the sentries that crossed their path. In the end, he opted for prudence. They weren’t going to get in there without raising an alarm if any of the remaining patrols caught sight of bodies or if someone failed to check in. A quick radio call confirmed that Saito and Fischer were attempting their own entry and would signal when they were ready to attempt the approach.
Which meant, Cobb knew, that they had to be in place and as fast as possible.
Moving in with Ariadne made matters slightly more difficult. In the time after Algol and his subsequent flight, Cobb had been used to mostly working alone. Though Ariadne had told him she could handle her own end of things, Cobb was slightly inclined to disbelieve her. Either way, it didn’t matter. She had little to no experience when it came to sneaking into a high-security area, and most of Eames’ training had focused around self-defence.
“You aren’t taking them?” she asked, in a hushed whisper.
Cobb shook his head briefly and raised a finger to his lips, then beckoned her over. She scooted closer, and he said, right into her ear, “They’ll start wondering why people aren’t checking in.”
She made an ‘o’ of comprehension and nodded. Carefully, Cobb peeked from around the pile of sandbags. The coast was clear, and he’d had the patrol patterns of the sentry down pat. He motioned for her to get up and whispered, “Stay close.”
He made a quick dash across the courtyard, stopping only to press himself against the wall of a building. Part of the difficult bit was over. Most of the courtyard was open space and the worst thing that could happen was for them to be caught there. The sentry made his appearance again at that point in time, weaving out from between the two pillars to take his position on the walls. He stood there, staring out at the snow below. While his back was turned, Cobb counted to five and tapped Ariadne on the shoulder.
There was no time to look, no time to check if he’d been right and the second sentry had turned away by now. If he’d been wrong, they’d be caught.
He wasn’t wrong.
In this way, they made it from the outer area towards the interior, and the south tower, mostly without incident. There’d been one or two near mishaps, and Cobb had hidden the bodies and hoped they weren’t going to be missed. It was a sign they had to move faster. As Ariadne had said, the whole building was a labyrinth they were threading: a three dimensional labyrinth in three axes and even navigating the walls itself was a maze. Here, they had to share the responsibility of pathfinding. Ariadne pointed out possible hiding locations and the design of the area while Cobb led them past the projections.
They kept conversation to a minimum, except for what was strictly necessary.
“We’re close,” Ariadne said, after they’d slipped through a maze of corridors within one of the buildings. Cobb nodded in acknowledgement. He glanced in the next room, and counted two projections. Beyond that must have been the exit, the one that led back to the open walkways. He whispered the question into her ear, and she confirmed his guess.
He could have shot the projections. But their weapons weren’t going to be silenced and he had a minute’s window or less to take them down before the projections out there on the walkway (he couldn’t see them but it was a decent guess they were there, patrolling the access to the south tower) realised they had intruders, and then they would be in for it.
Cobb turned to Ariadne, a quick plan forming in his head. He opened his mouth to say ‘Cover me’, in a reflex so old it was almost instinct. And then it sunk in, as it always did. He realised who he was facing. He closed his mouth again and came up with another plan.
“What’re you doing?” Ariadne asked quietly, as Cobb reached into the pack and felt for the combat knife. He found it and gripped it, considering his options again. They weren’t pretty.
“Something stupid,” he answered her, and then glanced into the room again, sizing up their movements and where he could find cover.
And then he moved.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3
Part II: Inception
4 | 5 | 6
Part III: Eidolon
7 | 8 | 9
Author: coldthermistor
Artist: ellegen
Rating: R just in case, mostly for violence. There is no porn.
Word count: 80,617 words
Warnings: A little violence (possibly graphic), implied torture, and swearing.
Pairings: Cobb/Mal, Arthur/Cobb
Summary: Dominic Cobb is a man on the run. He's on the run from a marriage slowly falling apart, from being framed for a crime he didn't commit...and on the run from the memories of a betrayal that haunts him still. He remembers little of the night except for one thing, burned into his mind: Arthur betrayed him. Arthur cannot be trusted. Now, a business man, Saito has come forward: with what seems to be Cobb's best hope of learning the truth about that night so many years ago...and with Cobb's best hope of clearing his name. In return, he only wants an impossible job performed. Inception. There is no room for failure. The stakes are too high. But there is an enemy haunting Cobb's footsteps...an enemy wearing the face of a man that Cobb knows only too well: Cobb's former point man, Arthur...
-
Yusuf gritted his teeth, reached over with his free hand and grabbed the projection’s arm around the wrist and pulled, leaning in as much as he could. He couldn’t let go, couldn’t give the projection time to produce the shotgun or to use it. Rain streaked in through the rolled down windows, and part of his clothing was getting more than just unpleasantly damp and clinging to his skin.
The projection tried to pull away. Yusuf pulled back, tried not to let go, and sped up at the same time. They struggled for control of the steering wheel when Yusuf’s hold was broken and the van suddenly swerved into the next lane, almost hitting the car behind them which braked sharply and honked at him.
Yusuf muttered an apology and sped up again, as fast as the van would allow, shoving the projection’s arm away. The rider hadn’t been able to keep up on his motorcycle and when the van sped up, he fell, tumbling to the wet road. Yusuf grunted in satisfaction. He didn’t glance back to see if the projection was going to stay put, just sped up and tried to outstrip the rest of the motorcycles.
He didn’t see the black SUV until it was too late. The collision had been glancing but deliberate and the impact shook the van and shouldered it aside. The van skidded across the wet surface of the road, swerving sharply. Yusuf cursed and tried to right it but the barricade was approaching, too fast. He might have managed it, there and then, but the black SUV came in again, and this time, Yusuf swore he felt the shuddering jolt deep in bone and muscle.
The van crashed through the barricade and began to slide, tumbling down a slope, rubber finding no purchase on fine gravel slick with rain.
-
Eames had known pursuit was close. But when he’d slipped out from the turning, he’d opened himself right for a quick grab to his wrist. The projection twisted his arm about: Eames was forced to follow obligingly as his arm protested the unnatural angle. Somewhere along the way, his fingers opened and the H&K fell and they must have been reasonably lucky because it didn’t go off. He went with the flow, because the projection had the momentum and none of that was with him.
He thought he’d caught a glimpse of the man’s buddy somewhere down the hallway, gun trained on him and figured that meant he was royally screwed the moment he put any kind of distance between himself and the projection that slammed him into the wall. Well, Eames thought sardonically as pain bloomed in his back, and he obligingly turned, allowing the projection control over his arms and aimed a curving knee strike, up and in.
He made contact with something soft, probably the stomach, and his attacker grunted in pain, and his grip slackened. Eames broke out of it, tried to slip out to the side and succeeded. He delivered a series of quick jabs, just to keep the projection off balance and to force the man back. The first connected, the projection accepted the second so he could hit Eames with a heavy right. Eames swore, took the blow across his ribs and drove two elbow strikes in rapid succession, but found himself tumbling, he’d completely missed -
What?
The hell, Eames thought, as the world tilted and spun and he realised it wasn’t because the blow to his ribs had hurt, it was because the world really was swinging around and what he took to be the floor was the door of a room, complete with numbers: 552, he read.
One of the projections had been flung against a door and the gun had skittered from his grasp. The other one - Eames didn’t know where the hell he’d gone and didn’t bother.
Before the disarmed projection could recover, he raced down the corridor, trying to keep his balance as the walls shifted and rotated beneath his feet and the floor became the ceiling and then the floor again then a line of doors. He stumbled, recovered and slammed right into the man with a cobra punch that hit him on the cheek, but the projection was already turning, already reducing the force of the blow so Eames snapped out a left hook. It would have connected with the projection’s chin, except that he was foiled again by the rotation of the corridor, probably because of whatever was going on with the van up there.
The entire corridor spun again and Eames was slammed against the ceiling though the projection hadn’t fared better. He advanced more cautiously this time, and the projection carefully backed up. They’d probably given each other enough cause for concern and Eames dodged a punch, countered with swift jabs that were easily turned aside. Conservative, he thought. They were all playing conservative right now, especially because the gravity kept shifting, kept turning the tables on them.
Eames decided he needed to get this projection out of the way fast before his partner came back with someone’s gun.
He went in for it again, with a knee strike to the projection’s thigh, and then an elbow to his chin but caught the full impact of a right cross straight to his abdomen. Pain flared - Eames blinked, gasping, but the breath left him, and he was saved only by the shifting gravity. He was slammed back first into a door which gave way, except the collision didn’t do much good for Eames’ back.
Hell, Eames thought, blinking his bleary eyes back into focus. The next thing he hit was the wall, and hard enough to completely knock the wind out of him. He just lay on his back for a moment, breathed, and then intercepted the falling projection with his foot and a certain satisfaction.
The gun slipped into the room, and Eames lunged for it - and missed. The room tilted and the gun slid again, past him and closer to the projection who was moving for it -
Eames charged in, intercepting the man with a low diagonal kick to the thigh. He winced at the knife-hand strike to his much-abused ribs and snapped out two quick palm strikes, both to the hinge of the projection’s jaw. They tangled and tumbled. The gun slid away.
They both struggled and grappled for advantage. A quick throw had Eames slamming into the wall right above the bed and then crashing onto the bed as the axis swapped yet again. At least the mattress absorbed the impact. He’d taken enough of a battering today from collisions all over the bloody place.
Eames tried to right himself and then found fingers going for his throat, trying to grab him in a chokehold. Fuck it, he thought, and kicked out, his leg snapping with explosive power into the projection’s groin. Not quite. His foot connected just above the groin but the hold relaxed and immediately, Eames thrust himself away, trying to put some distance between him and the projection.
He rolled off the bed, hit the other side of the room with a bit more force than necessary and swore but he was lucky. The gun slid out from under the bed and right into his grasp. Eames caught it just as the projection realised he was screwed and launched himself in a tackle right at Eames.
Without a pause, Eames fired right at the projection.
The gun went off and Eames scrambled out of the way on his knees as the projection hit the ground, slid, crashed into the wall and the room righted itself, all at once. Still holding the gun, he prodded the body once with his foot, and then flipped it over.
He’d shot the projection in the head, almost right between the eyes. Fucking lucky, Eames thought, not even savouring his victory. He checked the gun, was disgusted to find it was empty, and dropped it on the floor without a second glance.
He sucked in a deep breath of air into his bruised lungs and just enjoyed being alive for a few moments before he headed out of the room to go find the other projection.
-
The van righted itself, and then slid backwards. Yusuf desperately hit the brakes, trying for some kind of control - and then breathed a huge sigh of relief as the bumper smacked into the barricade at the bottom of the gravel slope and the barricade held. The van ground to a complete halt and Yusuf slumped back into his seat.
He was sure there was going to be a bruise where his head had slammed against the windscreen, but no matter how he took stock, the conclusion was the same. They’d survived a suicidal tumble off the road and down a slope, and he was still alive.
The laughter came, weak and hysterical. “Did you see that?” he demanded, turning around to glance at the van’s occupants.
He was greeted by complete silence and the part of Yusuf’s brain that was finally functioning again after the adrenaline overload told him that it wouldn’t have been a good thing if he’d gotten any kind of answer.
He shrugged, just a little deflated and started the van again, heading for the nearest gap in the barricade and the road again. He thought he’d recognised where they’d been thrown off the main road, and if he was right, it would take a few turns at the right intersection to get back on track and headed for the bridge.
-
It took them maybe ten minutes to negotiate the descent from the cliff towards the terraces, even when they were skiing down the slope. Ariadne led the way. She was far more familiar with the geography of the dream than Cobb was.
They spent most of the way in silence. Cobb pushed them, as fast as he could. Ariadne shot him the occasional glance, and he could all but tell that there was a question on the tip of her tongue. She didn’t ask it though, and Cobb didn’t think he’d have answered her even if she did. He didn’t even want to know what it was, although he had some idea, and he deliberately glanced ahead, focused on the task of reaching the rendenzvous point.
He caught sight of the figures ahead, waiting, and slowed down to a stop. Arthur nodded to him, and said nothing. Saito was a silent presence to the other side of Robert, who glanced at him with - was that some kind of relief?
Cobb didn’t want to think too hard on that. He didn’t try.
He motioned to Arthur to follow him, and pulled him out of earshot. Robert made a tentative attempt to follow, but Ariadne noticed, and headed him off. “I need you to draw security away from the complex,” he said, keeping it quiet to minimise the chances of Robert overhearing them.
Arthur nodded slowly. “I can’t do that without knowing enough about what this level’s like,” he replied, his voice equally soft. “You know that.”
Cobb hesitated. There was that. But there were only so many options. He could draw security off himself, but he didn’t know enough about the route, not the way Ariadne did. Ariadne wasn’t an option. She was a quick study, but this was something more than playing around with the physics of a dream. She’d willingly joined in and while Cobb couldn’t deny that a large part of it was probably due to her fascination with dreamsharing, he also couldn’t deny that she was making the job easier on him. He owed it to Miles at least to keep her out of as much trouble as he could. She could handle herself fine. Eames had taught her how to use a semi-automatic anyway, but facing armed and militarised projections was something else entirely.
And there was Arthur.
It all boiled down, Cobb thought, to whether he trusted Arthur. Whether he could trust Arthur. He studied Arthur’s features, willing himself to find some trace of deception, some sign of Arthur’s intentions, but he found nothing. Arthur met his gaze, serious, waiting, strangely honest and yet opaque at the same time.
He never saw the deception until it came. Had never seen it. And likely never would.
In the end, Cobb made the decision. It really fell back to between the two of them: he or Arthur, and no matter how he thought about it, he didn’t know if he could -
He knew he couldn’t trust Arthur.
Instincts born from years of friendship and working together said he wanted to.
“I’ll get her to tell you the route,” Cobb said slowly. If Ariadne briefed Arthur on the route but left anything about the interior of the hospital untouched, it might buy them enough time. It seemed like the only solution that came to mind.
Arthur shrugged, “Okay.”
“Thanks,” Cobb said. He was only mildly surprised to discover that he meant it. He missed Arthur’s reply as he caught Ariadne’s eye and motioned and she came over to where they were. “What is it?” she asked.
“I need you to brief Arthur on the area surrounding the complex,” Cobb said, very carefully. Ariadne frowned and raised her eyebrows at his wording.
Not the complex? She mouthed. Arthur studiously looked away. And then, oh. She understood.
“Cobb,” she called out quietly, putting out a hand to restrain him. “Are you sure about this?”
“Everyone’s been asking me that since I first got Arthur on that van,” Cobb replied. “We make the best choices with what we’ve got, right?”
She studied him for a few long moments, lips pursed. “You know,” she said, slowly, “I think that even if it wasn’t the best choice, you’d still have taken him along.”
Cobb’s eyes flicked to Arthur and back. “Tell him the route,” he said brusquely, and strode off to a safe distance where he couldn’t possibly hear what information was passing between the two of them. It was more reflex than any kind of caution. The only information Arthur would have to work with was what Cobb knew - and what Ariadne told him. Listening in wouldn’t have changed anything, but Cobb found himself moving away, before he’d thought things through, putting some distance between himself and the pair before he paused and looked back at them.
Arthur nodded briefly at occasional intervals as Ariadne said something. He bent and scrawled a crude diagram into the snow and Ariadne looked over it and said something else. Cobb’s breath caught for a moment. It was something familiar, all of those details he’d never known his mind had picked up on and preserved until he’d seen them embodied in his projection. Their voices carried just a little and Cobb’s feet took him back in the direction of Saito and Robert, instead of picking up on what Arthur and Ariadne were saying.
“What’s going on?” Robert asked, a little uncertain.
“I’m briefing my team, Mr Fischer,” Cobb half-lied. “One of them will create a distraction and draw the men away from the complex so that you won’t have difficulty penetrating it.”
“You won’t be coming in?” Robert wanted to know.
Cobb took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “You have to do this on your own. The truth about your father’s in there. You just need to get right in there, and find it.”
Robert nodded, just once, and in that uncertainty, Cobb saw something else: the tentative signs of a very familiar determination, and he swallowed bitterly and almost turned away. “Keep this live,” he said, with a light tap to the radio mike peeping out from the lapel of Fischer’s jacket. “I’ll be listening in the whole time. The windows on the upper floor are big enough for me to cover you from that south tower. You see it?” He’d caught sight of it when he had been scanning the complex through the scope. For what he was going to do, he’d thought back then, it would suit very nicely.
Robert’s eyes followed the direction Cobb was pointing in. He nodded. “Okay, I see it.”
“Great,” Cobb said. He moved over to speak to Saito. “I need someone to take Fischer into the complex…” he began.
“I can do it,” Saito replied immediately. He looked at Cobb, his gaze steady and unwavering. “That is why you asked me?”
Cobb nodded, relieved. “Yes,” he said, slowly. “I can’t take Fischer in, and I need Ariadne with me…”
“And Arthur?”
“Drawing away Fischer’s security,” Cobb clarified.
Saito coughed for a moment, bending forward and when he straightened up, Cobb frowned as he saw spots of blood, dark red on the white snow. Whatever time they had was quickly running out. He ignored the quiet voice that told him that no matter how fast they moved right now, they wouldn’t be able to get Saito out before the sedative wore off. Unless the idea took. Fischer’s subconscious security might be less agitated then. It might be possible to try to stabilise Saito…
Cobb dismissed the thought. It was wishful thinking and he knew it. Ariadne finished briefing Arthur and he set her to briefing Saito about the route to the complex. While she did so, he pointed Saito out to Robert, told him Saito would guide him in, and then walked out, away from the group.
Arthur followed him.
Cobb tensed, and then forced himself to relax when Arthur paused behind him. It always came back to that: two different sets of memories, telling him two completely different things. Arthur spoke up eventually. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Cobb said. He didn’t elaborate. Ariadne was partly right, he thought. The further they went down, the closer he went to all his doubts, all his misgivings. The knotted tangle that his memories had become, his growing uncertainty.
“Sure sounds like it,” Arthur said with an ironic lift of his shoulders. He came up beside Cobb, joined him in glancing down the terraces at the facility that lay below, bristling with armed menace. “Fischer’s security’s going to be a tough one.”
“That’s why I need you to tie them up,” Cobb agreed.
“I’d need my own private army,” Arthur scoffed, studying the complex.
Cobb almost smiled at that. “Sorry, Arthur,” he said, “You don’t get any backup for this one.”
“Pity. I’d think this is more Eames’ sort of thing.”
“Not even a little grudging?”
“Alright, just a bit,” Arthur admitted. Cobb hid the smile that threatened to break out. “He’s better at this kind of thing. And given the conditions…”
“I trust you,” Cobb said in a low voice, surprising himself with his vehemence. “You’ll manage.”
Arthur turned to glance at him. He smiled, sadly and knowingly. There was an almost tired slump to his shoulders but he shook that off and straightened up. “No, you don’t,” he corrected gently. “Not really. Guess I can’t blame you.”
He turned to leave, and Cobb waited for a few more moments, took one last long look at the hospital complex. “Good luck!” he called after Arthur’s retreating back. “You’re going to need it.”
Arthur paused, turned on his heels. “Yeah,” he said. “You too.”
-
Eames came almost face-to-face with the other projection when he walked out of the hotel room, door swinging shut behind him. They both started: Eames swore and snapped out a low kick, turning at the same time to disarm the man with a grip of his wrist. The kick didn’t land - it was more a distraction than anything. He twisted the projection’s wrist about, forcing him into the same position that the man had gotten Eames into earlier.
Numb fingers popped open and a gun fell free. Eames knew better than to lunge for it, not when he was hampered by his opponent. He managed a grip on the projection’s biceps with his free arm and then yanked him in, moving at the same time to introduce the point of the projection’s chin to Eames’ forehead at something that must have felt like terminal velocity to the unlucky bastard. They met with a sharp crack.
The struggling projection went limp in Eames’ grip for a moment, and Eames hit him once more with a solid left hook. There was nowhere to move, no block, and more importantly, no gravity shifts to deny Eames the power he needed to put behind the blow and this time, the projection took it straight on and dropped like a stone.
Eames picked up the gun. It was his, and he checked it. It took only one shot to make sure that projection wasn’t going to bother him again.
A glance at his watch showed that they had a while more before it was time for Yusuf to set up the kick on his end, but Eames figured he’d better make sure there hadn’t been any tampering with the charges he’d set.
He pushed open the two sets of heavy doors and headed down the stairs.
-
Cobb gave Arthur about seven minutes to get to work on that distraction. Arthur had taken about five before they saw the red-orange burst of the flare, stark against the almost colourless grey of the sky. “That’ll be him,” Cobb confirmed, in answer to the unasked question from Ariadne standing beside him. “He’s started.”
“He won’t cross paths with Saito and Fischer,” Ariadne said. “I made sure of it.”
He was going to ask her how, and then remembered she’d briefed both Arthur and Saito on the routes. It was likely she’d given them information about different sections of the dream level and just withheld the rest. “Good thinking,” he said approvingly.
“I thought you might want to be safe,” she replied quietly, “And not let Arthur know about…the important things.”
“Yes,” he said, offering her a slightly impressed look. “Good work.”
The complex looked like an anthill that had been kicked over. They were too far to hear the shouting, to catch more than distant, frenetic activity and the shape of snowmobiles heading out to search for the source of the disturbance. Projections spread out in several directions: they didn’t seem too sure about exactly where to go, or they had the numbers to conduct a systematic, sector by sector search.
Cobb checked again. Not all of them had left. There were still sentries patrolling the walls, but the important bit was that Arthur had pulled away a significant portion of Fischer’s projections. If things went their way, Saito and Fischer would get in and get out again without a hitch. Then, they could worry about setting off the kick to synchronise with Eames.
For a moment longer, he hesitated, trying to see if he could make out the sight of a lone white figure, skiing down the slopes, with Fischer’s projections in hot pursuit. It was pointless, Cobb thought. They had to start moving now, before they encountered any of the projections sweeping the area for Arthur. They’d need every second of the time Arthur was buying them. He shouldered his rifle, slipped back into his skis and nodded to Ariadne.
“Let’s move,” he said quietly, and they headed on downwards, towards the silent, lonely hospital below.
-
The first thoughts that he might not make the timing entered Yusuf’s head when he glanced at his watch and grimaced. He was headed for the bridge too soon, but he didn’t have much of a choice about it. The black SUV was right on their tail again, and he’d tried but failed to shake the vehicle off. Not without encountering a flurry of motorcycles again.
He briefly wondered where the other one was and dismissed it. Not now. He had too many things to worry about right now. He made the bridge, right before the barrier came up. The SUV was not so lucky: Yusuf heard the collision and when he checked the rearview mirror, he saw that the entire rear axle of the SUV must have been yanked off. The large vehicle spun about, out of control, before scraping to a complete halt.
Yusuf sped up the van and tried to head off the other end of the bridge but he was too late. The barriers on the other end of the bridge had already been raised, too high for the van to attempt to cross. He backed up again, thinking fast. They were trapped on the bridge with the SUV, and he was heavily outnumbered and probably outgunned too, and none of it added up to anything good.
“Bugger,” he said aloud, and then the shooting started.
-
Eames came out through the door and saw immediately that he was right. Two more security projections were outside 491. They clearly knew there was something important in that room - they just didn’t know what. Eames put two bullets into the head of the first projection, and then another two into the torso of the second. At the same time he was moving, trying to make himself a more difficult target.
He threw himself backwards, shouldering the second door open, and letting the first one swing shut. He didn’t think the heavy wooden doors would provide any sort of decent protection and waited to the side of the doorway, counting off in his head again.
He was sure the first one must have been killed, but he’d had the advantage of surprise then. Eames was sure he’d missed the second at least once, and he wasn’t sure if any of the shots had stopped the man.
He waited a few more moments and then swung open the doors again. The security projection was ready for him and Eames felt a flash of sharp pain - splinters of wood jabbed at him as bullets tore into the wood of the fire escape door behind him.
He wasn’t so much sighting now as shooting from instinct and the shots he squeezed off should have missed, but he got a lucky one at the projection’s thigh - not that he’d even been aiming for it, but Eames figured he’d take the credit all the same.
He retreated behind the door again, and as he moved, he thought he heard the projection trying to shoot at him again. He grimaced as he felt something wet trickle down his cheek and knew it was probably blood. Must have been the splinters, Eames thought. They’d laid his cheek open. He started counting off again to when he’d break cover and try to get a finishing shot in. This time, Eames changed the count. Didn’t make sense to make offing him ridiculously easy for the projection.
-
Sod it, Yusuf thought. He’d made a valiant enough effort to fend off the projections. He was painfully aware of how the open windows of the van provided no protection at all from bullets - not that glass would have been much better.
The projection Yusuf could see at the moment was persistent, doggedly trying to get him and ducking behind the body of his crippled SUV for protection the moment Yusuf tried to retaliate in kind. Sod it. He’d never been too much good in a firefight anyway, and he was in over his head. It wouldn’t take long before more projections started swarming the van and one of them got killed, and at that moment, Yusuf was certain that ‘one of them’ would be him.
He bent down as far forward as possible to keep his head from banging against the ceiling and clambered to the back of the van. He checked the MP3 player, and slipped the headphones over Eames’ ears and then hit the play button to start the music cue. “I hope you’re ready,” he said aloud, and then moved over to check briefly on Saito.
Checking on Saito, the first thing Yusuf saw was a growing bloodstain. Saito was bleeding, straight through the bandages. He shook his head. It wasn’t good, but there was nothing Yusuf could do about it now.
He made his way back to the driver’s seat as fast as he could and then backed the van up, sticking his head outside of the window for an instant to make sure he’d lined the van up properly with the barrier.
Without a pause, the moment Yusuf got the van in position, he reversed, hard and fast, slamming the van into the barrier. The barrier broke, beneath the momentum of the van, and they hurtled backwards, off the edge…
And downwards, plummeting towards where the distant river glittered in the sunlight.
-
Eames heard it then, and blinked, faltering in his count. He hissed a curse under his breath in mild annoyance, and started out the door again. The projection had gone almost still, but Eames put one in his head just to be sure.
Self-preservation had him dashing down the corridor first, to make sure the man was dead. He was. And then, Eames frowned, glancing upwards - except of course, the sound wasn’t literally coming from the fifth floor.
It was the music cue, he realised, slowed because this was one layer down. Eames frowned and checked his watch. It wasn’t time yet. It was too soon, way too soon for the kick. What the hell was going on up there?
He started for the fifth floor anyway, moving at a brisk jog because one way or another, Yusuf was going to be delivering a kick, and Eames didn’t fancy being around to have to figure out how to perform a kick in zero-g.
-
“Cobb, did you hear that?”
“What was it?” Ariadne asked, frowning. She’d picked up on something too.
Cobb held up a hand for silence and replied over the radio. “Yeah, I heard it.”
“It’s the kick, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Cobb said, distractedly. “Damnit. It’s too soon.”
“Plan?”
“We move fast.”
“That was Plan A.”
“We move faster,” Cobb corrected. “Saito, did you copy?”
There was silence for a few moments, and Cobb wasn’t sure if Saito had heard them, but then Saito came back over the radio, calm and unruffled.
“We’re going as fast as we can.”
Cobb frowned, trying to think it through. “It’s the kick,” he explained to Ariadne. “The music cue. It’s slowed down, through the layers, probably because we’re hearing the music from Eames’ cue, which means he hasn’t gotten around to starting yours.”
“How long do they have?” Ariadne asked quietly.
“Yusuf’s about sixty seconds from the jump,” Cobb said slowly, “Which gives Eames about three minutes, which gives us about…”
“Sixty minutes,” Ariadne said, doing the math.
“Can they make the route you gave them in under an hour?”
Ariadne considered it, but then shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said, “They’ve still got to climb down to the middle terrace before they make the approach.”
“Then they need a new route,” Cobb retorted, impatiently. “A direct route.”
“The whole building’s designed as a labyrinth,” Ariadne pointed out.
“There must be access routes that cut through the maze,” Cobb said. “Any architect always adds a back door into their design. You changed the maze, didn’t you?”
Ariadne hesitated. “If Arthur knows…”
Cobb switched off the radio mike clipped to the lapel of his coat. “We don’t have time for this now,” he snapped, urgently. “Is there a back door?”
Finally, Ariadne nodded. “An air duct system,” she said, breathlessly. “There’s an air duct system that cuts through the maze. It heads straight from the walls to the - “
“I don’t need to know any more,” Cobb said, cutting in roughly. “Explain it to them. Use only Saito’s channel.”
“Alright,” Ariadne said. She reached for the radio hooked to her belt and swapped the channels. She spoke quietly, trusting that the mike would pick up on her words, and walked a short distance away from Cobb to do so.
Cobb switched the mike back on, and waited. Finally, Ariadne turned back. “Done?” he asked.
She nodded in assent.
“Then let’s keep going. We’ve got to move faster.”
Then, the world shook and half the mountainside came loose with a thunderous white roar.
-
Eames had been sprinting down the corridor to 528 when he first felt the collision with the barrier. The entire dream jolted and shuddered, like a bell that had been struck with a hammer. Eames’ feet found no purchase on the ground and he was flung through the air, down the corridor.
He reached up, and managed to snag a ceiling lamp as he passed and then came to an abrupt halt with a sudden impulse that Eames swore he could feel all the way in his abused arms.
Fuck, he thought. Not good.
-
Saito heard the rumble in the distance first and glanced up and then realised what he’d heard about. There was an avalanche, higher up, thundering down the mountainside in a flood of unstoppable snow. They were doomed if it caught them while they were dangling on the ropes, Saito knew. Falling to their deaths would be the last of their worries. They were far more likely to be smothered, or to die of hypothermia, or even struck by debris that the snow concealed.
While another man in his position might have hesitated, caught between two equally undesirable choices, Saito did not hesitate. He made a decision quickly and called out a warning to Fischer.
Fischer glanced up, puzzled -
As Saito gathered the rope in his free hand and cut through it with the utility knife.
He had barely time to protest, to make any kind of sound as they fell, faster and faster. Maybe he was yelling - he couldn’t hear it over the sound of the wind in his ears. He glanced up for a moment and watched the avalanche pour over the edge of the cliff, massive, torrential and unstoppable force.
For a moment, it looked like the avalanche would catch them, and bury them alive in thick layers of snow and debris, but then they cleared the path of the avalanche. Saito hit the sloping terrace at an angle, half-rolled and half-slid down most of its length and sank into the snow at the very bottom. He lay there for a moment, tasting dust and ice and the dull copper of blood in his mouth and sucking chilly air into his lungs.
They’d made it.
Saito was no fool, and no stranger to the dangers that avalanches presented, and he knew that they were terribly lucky to have been alive. He lay back a few more moments, but then a weak cough shook him, and he felt the taste of blood flood his mouth again. He turned and spat it out on the snow, watching the red seep into white with a morbid kind of fascination.
He pushed himself painfully to his feet. He was battered, bruised, and half-frozen from their long slide down the cold slope, but at least he was alive. He brushed some of them off and ignored the rest. “Fischer?” he called out, glancing around. For a moment, his blood ran cold at the thought that his companion might not have survived their immensely risky fall.
And then he heard it, a muffled groan and then part of what Saito had taken to be nothing more than snow shifted. He held out a hand to help Fischer to his feet but Fischer shook his head and managed to get up on his own. He wasn’t a much better sight. Ice had been compressed all over his goggles and as he moved, it flaked off.
“What was that?” he gasped. “Couldn’t someone have dreamed of a godamned beach?”
Saito said nothing about the hazard of tsunamis as they made their slow and painful way, towards the base of the complex that loomed, large and towering in the distance. At least their dangerous descent had saved them time; time they’d have spent negotiating the journey downwards with a great deal more caution.
-
“Cobb! Did we miss it?” Arthur sounded out of breath.
“Yeah, we missed it,” Cobb said, scowling at the devastation the avalanche had wreaked in its wake, and he hoped that Saito and Fischer had managed to get out of the way.
“What’s the plan now?”
“Finish the job before the next kick,” Cobb responded.
“What next kick?”
“When the van hits the water. Eames should have a couple of minutes. We’ve got about twenty. Keep tying those projections up. We should be done soon.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Arthur said, wryly. “Shaking them off will be the difficult part.”
“It always is,” Cobb said, but got no response. He wasn’t expecting one.
“What was that?” Ariadne asked, shocked. She was still glancing at the cloud of dust and ice that lingered along the path the avalanche had taken.
“The kick,” Cobb explained. “From the van hitting the barricade.” He stared at the ice cloud, thinking. “Eames must have missed the first kick. He’s got a few more minutes to synchronise the second one.”
“And we’ve got twenty minutes.”
“Yes,” Cobb said. “So we need to move fast. Saito and Fischer should be somewhere nearby, or even inside the complex by now. So we need to make our own way in and set up so that we’ll be ready to cover them by the time they make their approach.”
Ariadne nodded. “Well, then,” she said, matter-of-factly, “Shouldn’t we get moving?”
She didn’t miss Cobb’s look of approval. “Yes,” Cobb said, “We should. Lead the way.”
At her look of confusion, he reminded her, “You’re the architect. I need a way into the facility, and fast, so we can reach that south tower in time to cover them.”
“There’s a route,” Ariadne said, after a few moments of thought. “It’s not a back door, but we can probably slip in.” She shouldered her pack and started moving off first, towards the base of the hospital complex.
A few moments later, Cobb followed.
-
Trying to make his way down a corridor with no gravity was something Eames found to be fiendishly tricky. He tried to swing free of the lamp, only to find himself tumbling uncontrolled down the corridor once he’d relaxed his grip. He glanced at the numbers on the doors and managed to grab onto a sconce as he passed 532, bringing himself to yet another abrupt halt.
Eames blinked, and gave himself a moment to work past the disorientation. Alright, he thought cautiously and let go of the sconce. He studied himself for a moment. Just floating. He had the vaguest of ideas that trying to walk normally wasn’t a good idea. He’d probably overbalance or something and end up going flat on his face - no wait. That wasn’t going to happen. Small comfort.
Moving was a tricky business, and after a few mishaps with the walls (hadn’t he had enough collisions for today?) Eames figured that getting around was a bit like swimming. At least he was a good, strong swimmer so that was something in his favour. He studied the numbers on the doors, trying to look out for room 528 and grabbed for the doorframe when he caught sight of the number. He caught it, and came to another halt. He reached into his jacket pocket for the keycard, found it, and inserted it into the door and managed to work it open with some difficulty, thinking absently that at least the bloody corridor wasn’t rotating this time.
Slipping in through the open door, Eames found that the gravity issues were evidently quite universal. Huh, he thought. It wasn’t as if he’d expected otherwise. Lamps, the telephone, wires, cables, the PASIV - anything not nailed down or attached to something was floating and Eames stared in disbelief at what must have been floating sachets of tea, coffee, and sugar. “You’ve got to be bloody kidding me,” he muttered aloud.
And then, Eames realised he had far bigger concerns. Going through aspects of their plan, he’d realised that he’d need to time the kick precisely with Yusuf’s. It didn’t leave very much margin for error, but they hadn’t had very many choices. The van had gone over the barricade, which gave him a few minutes to administer the kick, right before they hit the water, and to hope that it was going to be enough.
Staring at the unconscious, floating bodies of the rest of the team he’d signed on with, the implications of the sudden loss of gravity properly presented themselves. Eames looked at the carpet flooring of the room and swore. He was in for it.
How the blazes was he going to give them the kick if he couldn’t drop them?
-
Infiltrating the facility provided Cobb with two options. He could take out all the sentries on their way in, or he could take out the sentries that crossed their path. In the end, he opted for prudence. They weren’t going to get in there without raising an alarm if any of the remaining patrols caught sight of bodies or if someone failed to check in. A quick radio call confirmed that Saito and Fischer were attempting their own entry and would signal when they were ready to attempt the approach.
Which meant, Cobb knew, that they had to be in place and as fast as possible.
Moving in with Ariadne made matters slightly more difficult. In the time after Algol and his subsequent flight, Cobb had been used to mostly working alone. Though Ariadne had told him she could handle her own end of things, Cobb was slightly inclined to disbelieve her. Either way, it didn’t matter. She had little to no experience when it came to sneaking into a high-security area, and most of Eames’ training had focused around self-defence.
“You aren’t taking them?” she asked, in a hushed whisper.
Cobb shook his head briefly and raised a finger to his lips, then beckoned her over. She scooted closer, and he said, right into her ear, “They’ll start wondering why people aren’t checking in.”
She made an ‘o’ of comprehension and nodded. Carefully, Cobb peeked from around the pile of sandbags. The coast was clear, and he’d had the patrol patterns of the sentry down pat. He motioned for her to get up and whispered, “Stay close.”
He made a quick dash across the courtyard, stopping only to press himself against the wall of a building. Part of the difficult bit was over. Most of the courtyard was open space and the worst thing that could happen was for them to be caught there. The sentry made his appearance again at that point in time, weaving out from between the two pillars to take his position on the walls. He stood there, staring out at the snow below. While his back was turned, Cobb counted to five and tapped Ariadne on the shoulder.
There was no time to look, no time to check if he’d been right and the second sentry had turned away by now. If he’d been wrong, they’d be caught.
He wasn’t wrong.
In this way, they made it from the outer area towards the interior, and the south tower, mostly without incident. There’d been one or two near mishaps, and Cobb had hidden the bodies and hoped they weren’t going to be missed. It was a sign they had to move faster. As Ariadne had said, the whole building was a labyrinth they were threading: a three dimensional labyrinth in three axes and even navigating the walls itself was a maze. Here, they had to share the responsibility of pathfinding. Ariadne pointed out possible hiding locations and the design of the area while Cobb led them past the projections.
They kept conversation to a minimum, except for what was strictly necessary.
“We’re close,” Ariadne said, after they’d slipped through a maze of corridors within one of the buildings. Cobb nodded in acknowledgement. He glanced in the next room, and counted two projections. Beyond that must have been the exit, the one that led back to the open walkways. He whispered the question into her ear, and she confirmed his guess.
He could have shot the projections. But their weapons weren’t going to be silenced and he had a minute’s window or less to take them down before the projections out there on the walkway (he couldn’t see them but it was a decent guess they were there, patrolling the access to the south tower) realised they had intruders, and then they would be in for it.
Cobb turned to Ariadne, a quick plan forming in his head. He opened his mouth to say ‘Cover me’, in a reflex so old it was almost instinct. And then it sunk in, as it always did. He realised who he was facing. He closed his mouth again and came up with another plan.
“What’re you doing?” Ariadne asked quietly, as Cobb reached into the pack and felt for the combat knife. He found it and gripped it, considering his options again. They weren’t pretty.
“Something stupid,” he answered her, and then glanced into the room again, sizing up their movements and where he could find cover.
And then he moved.
-
Prologue
Part I: Extraction
1 | 2 | 3
Part II: Inception
4 | 5 | 6
Part III: Eidolon
7 | 8 | 9