Chapter Text
By the time she’s actually at the gate at Kingsford Smith on Tuesday morning, she’s decided: when this is finished, if it’s finished, she’s going to learn to wear a suit like Arthur, tell a lie like Eames, network like Yusuf, and pull perhaps two per cent of Saito’s annual income over her first five years post-doctorate.
Not necessarily because she’ll need it, considering her share and the bonus, but because it’ll demonstrate to the rest of the goddamn planet that she’s earned every cent, licit and otherwise.
From Cobb, she can’t think of a single thing worth keeping that she hasn’t already winkled out. Someone would have introduced her to dreamshare, at some point, so she doesn’t feel any particular sentiment-driven loyalty to him that might last beyond this job. And honestly, you can only get stabbed in the chest with a fucking sword—dagger, letter-opener, katana, it doesn’t really matter when it’s buried three inches between your ribs—so many times by a snarling Frenchwoman before the cachet of an unstable widower on the run from multiple governments who keeps a homicidal French lady in his brain wears thin. The number of times, for her at least, is exactly one, and she blames Miles entirely for the thing where the same woman impugned her assumed romantic experience. Even though she was right. Thanks for that, Cobb.
Although the memory of Cobb’s dead wife behind his squint has its uses. Such as securing her own intercontinental travel arrangements the night the elder Fischer had bit it, and Arthur’s tutelage in the application of handguns over the last highly illuminating weekend in New South Wales. They’d only gotten back to Sydney yesterday, twenty-five hours for turnaround.
Everything this morning has been lowkey, each arranging their own transit to the airport and wending through security theater alone. Granted, now Cobb and Saito are hanging out at the window in view of half the terminal, probably competing to see who can provide the least information in the most abstracted terms and the most portentous intonation, but Saito’s so rich no one can bring themselves to care what he does, or with whom.
Meanwhile, the person who is the girl who is Ariadne Finch is sitting on her own in two months’ rent of white collarless quilt-stitched jacket and patterned silk blouse and black denim and butter-soft knee-high boots, surrounded by actual strangers and rereading a Borges collection (she can’t help herself, they’re such easy jabs, it’s fucking called Labyrinths, but she’s hung the rest of her life on this job and she may as well have her fun in the margins). Every so often, as she comes to the end of a particularly twisty paragraph, she glances up, letting her gaze skitter around the gate, from Saito and Cobb with their backs to the crowd, to Eames people-watching and pretending to do a crossword (probably figuring out which rude words interlock best), to Yusuf, curly head bent over a pharmacology journal, to Arthur’s double-breasted waistcoat and New Yorker and, once, his smile-frown as he catches her looking. She gazes back blankly for a moment, letting her eyes unfocus, before she returns to her book; in her peripheral vision, she notes him shaking his head and smiling for real.
Only six days ago, Arthur had been violently opposed to her being on the SYD–LAX flight—and thus in on the job—at all, although he’d hidden it flawlessly in the workshop the night Maurice Fischer died. As she had carved an Ariadne-shaped cavity labeled necessary element of job into Cobb’s guilty conscience, using Arthur himself as the chisel (but being fucking quiet about it), he’d been only efficient blankness. He’d kept the front as Cobb told Saito to get another seat, as he himself asked Cobb whether he could lock up the warehouse, and then as he casually offered her a ride back to the 14th arrondissement. By modulating his tone only fractionally, he had made it eminently clear that the offer was not optional.
The ride, it turned out, had been cover for Arthur’s true mission of swearing at her. In seven languages, as far as she could tell, before he launched into an English-language tirade on her crime of being a new moving part, a new variable, a new responsibility. His voice rose in volume, flat and over-enunciating, each time she tried to reply, until just as he parked she finally lost it and bellowed, “Eat shit—” which had, to her surprise, made him shut up, and continued stridently, “and vent your beleaguered fucking spleen to Miles,” which had made him stare.
The ensuing conversation was, for purposes of plausible deniability, moved from Arthur’s leased Peugeot to her minuscule apartment. It had been a fascinating verbal coalescence of scattershot data into a beautifully detailed pointillist schematic, probably, for Arthur, and an ever-increasing headache for her. Sometime past midnight, it had finally dwindled to him leaning back on her blanket-swaddled couch and saying, “Fine. Last thing. You ever handled a gun?”
That had almost made her laugh, but a particularly sharp spike of pain behind her eyeballs cut it off before it could start. “No. We’ve been over this. Dramatically.”
He’d ignored that. “So you’re gonna learn.” He looked at the ceiling and drummed his fingers against the sole of his shoe. After ten seconds, she’d given up and gone to the kitchen for ibuprofen. “You’re getting to Sydney on your own, I don’t care how,” he’d finally said, “but you’re doing it in the next thirty-six hours, because—” Arthur had slipped a mini Moleskine out of his trouser pocket, neatly removed one of the perforated pages, and started writing with his little space pen, the one that she’s certain he uses on the go specifically because it’s small enough not to mess up the lines of his suits, no matter how many parts of them he’s wearing. She’d tipped two tablets into her palm and replaced the bottle before he resumed speaking. “This Saturday morning, seven forty-five AM local time, you’re meeting me in Surry Hills, and we’re visiting my friend Dana for the weekend, because I am not covering for you in Yusuf’s head for a week of dreamtime, I don’t care what the professor orders.” He lifted one eyebrow, pinning her with a look. “Clear?”
“Crystal,” she’d said through gritted teeth, and swallowed the two tablets dry without breaking eye contact.
“Good,” he’d replied, and beamed, so suddenly it shook her more than any of his swearing could have. “It’ll be fun. Forward me your itinerary.” He’d stood, slapped the note against the table, checked his pockets, and added, “Drink some water. I don’t know about you but dry-swallowing pills gives me heartburn. ’Night, Ariadne.”
And he’d left, closing the door gently behind him.
The notebook page—7:45 AM SATURDAY. SINGLE O, 60-64 RESERVOIR STREET, SURRY HILLS. BATCH BREW TO GO, which she supposed was no more than she deserved—had a smiley face with devil horns.
She’s only been Ariadne for three months, to Miles and the five men she’s been working with. Three of those six definitely know it’s a front, one because he named it, one because he built it, and one because it’s his job to know things. Saito might know, or could know, but in either case likely doesn’t give a shit because he’s above the maneuverings of the peasants doing things for him. Cobb will never find out, because he has no reason to. Yusuf has no reason to, either, but he and his contacts seem worth cultivating, so she’ll probably let it slip at some point.
If they keep up.
It’s blatantly clear—and would be even to naïve Ariadne—that it’s not protocol for people working a con (listen to her) to become pen pals. Not exactly the kind of relationship where you send each other Christmas newsletters. But they have to remain in touch somehow; they’ve been in each other’s heads, sure, but meatspace still requires speaking, phone calls, email, fucking telegrams for all she knows. Arthur probably manages off memory and burner phones alone; she envisions Eames keeping little tea- and wine- and brandy- and blood-stained stacks of notes in a recipe box, likely in code only he understands. The others—well, she’ll find out.
She fully intends to remain relevant to the circles of dreamshare research and exploitation, once this job is over. Assuming the end result isn’t prison. Or worse.
Dream crime, when it goes wrong and gets noticed, generally ends with worse, which is to say the unraveling of a person’s trail into loose ends and rumors. She’s found a single weblog by someone signing themselves “YungCarlG,” which is so staggeringly obvious the writer is probably a genius, that elaborates more helpfully on “rumors” beyond words like “disappearance” and “missing in action” and “off the map.” It mentions black sites, alphanumeric soups of intelligence operations, high-security prisons, solitary confinement, psychiatric torture. The last chronological post, and thus the first visible, is timestamped eight months ago, although that could mean anything, and it says only, “Ta for now.” When she read it weeks ago in Paris, the skin on the back of her neck crept as she evaluated the odds that she was, herself, falling for a text-based practical joke of Eames’s. However, after she’d dropped a remark about Jung while they were ferrying sandwiches the next day, he’d just asked why on earth the good schools were still teaching that Freudian shite. Then made a dick joke.
Granted, she does want to learn to lie like him.
But until she knows for a fact that they are in the clear—until the money’s in the account under her real name (which Cobb, neatly, thinks is an alias), until the text message clear -v (as in vark, as in aardvark, as in the cartoon, because Arthur—beneath the bespoke tailoring and the unnerving facility with firearms—is among the worst fucking dorks on the planet) appears on her job phone, until Fischer Morrow dissolves and fuck every hipster academic in Paris who’s going to give her shit for her new e-subscriptions to nine different business news web publications—she is operating under the assumption that the worst-case scenario after this flight is life in a forensic psychiatric hospital, consciousness optional.
She feels comfortable with this, for the revised value of “comfortable” she’s felt about everything that’s happened since her mid-March adviser meeting with Dr. Stephen Miles.
***
On a Wednesday ten weeks into term, during a routine catch-up on her independent research toward her doctoral thesis, Miles—an award-winning architect with a legendary portfolio, fantastic credentials, and a whisper-network reputation as a genuinely good guy, and thus rare as hen’s teeth—folds his hands over the folder containing her latest summary and two-week plan and says, “I won’t insult you by extending this pretense in which you need my feedback on the thesis work. So, let’s discuss extracurriculars.”
She dips her chin politely, despite her confusion, and replies, “I’ll appreciate your feedback at any point, regardless, professor. Extracurriculars?”
“You’ve an outstanding portfolio, admirable adaptability, clear facility with self-directed research, a fascinating sense for the edges of physical possibility, and—” He gives the smallest of smiles. “An excellent face for aliases.”
It takes her two tries to say “Pardon?” in the correct language. Smooth.
“Aliases. Noms de guerre. Have you acted?”
“In undergrad,” she says, surprised into verbal laxity, and then catches herself and clears her throat. “I was in some of my university’s productions. Why is this of interest?”
“Your undergraduate. At—?”
“You have my CV,” she says, and nods at the desk, at her own folder. “Left-hand pocket, as usual.” She repeats, hearing the slight chill entering her own tone, “Why is this of interest?”
He smiles again, a neat little curve of his mouth that suggests immense satisfaction. “Right temperament for it as well. I’ll tell you,” he says, when she opens her mouth to ask again, “I just wanted to be sure. I’ve some connections in a field with some very interesting opportunities, but it also happens to be a field where...” For the first time in the conversation—in the ten minutes since she entered his office—he pauses and looks down at his own folded hands, apparently working out his phrasing. “Where it may be wisest to use some obfuscation. Plausible deniability. Some layers between the working face and the actual person.”
She waits, until he goes wry and says it plainly. “A false identity. To avoid attaching criminal enterprise to a perfectly good international record.”
There we go. She lifts her chin to one side, keeping her eyes on his—when she’s had reason to use this posture in conversation with people in her age group, they’ve tended to spill their guts in moments, although she knows she’s not remotely intimidating in any traditional sense of the word. “Architecture where my portfolio quality is relevant doesn’t seem like it would lend itself to criminality,” she says. Illegal construction (shock-doctrine building projects, vast sums and human lives under the table) isn't done by people of Miles's ilk, and the only other things that come to mind are building code contravention and Gehry lawsuits. At Miles's level—which he's suggesting is her level—those are solved problems, too: you just do it right and make that part of your worth.
“It doesn’t seem so, no,” Miles replies, even more drily than usual, and she knows as surely as she knows her name that he’ll give her no further detail. “In one-on-ones and external meetings with me, you’ll be answering to Ariadne.”
That makes her blink. “The spider girl?” She catches her own mistake immediately, shaking her head at herself. “No, of course, that’s Arachne. Dammit, professor, I’m an architect, not a lit major.”
“And a Trekkie?”
“Generational osmosis,” she says vaguely, trying to remember the Bulfinch table of contents. “Ariadne. Ariadne.”
“Theseus. Minotaur in the labyrinth—”
“Oh.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “See, no wonder I got her mixed up. Red thread, spinning.”
“No difficulties at all on the temperament front,” Miles says, apparently to himself, before he adds, “The name suits your background. Classicist father, ah—”
“Literary deconstructionist other father,” she supplies for him. “Hippie surrogate mother.” She loves her dads, and she loves Harmony, but, well, she’s Harmony—and suddenly she catches her breath. “Wait. This—being Ariadne, and whatever follows. What’s the risk to them?”
“Nil,” says Miles immediately, and so firmly—how he imbues a single syllable with that much authority is beyond her—that she trusts the answer before he begins elaborating. “I’ve a gent—for certain interpretations of the term—he’ll spin up Ariadne…hm. I hadn’t considered a surname yet. He’ll build Ariadne out of thin air. Nothing pointing to you or yours.”
“Finch,” she suggests. “As a last name.”
“If you like, certainly—ah, clever.”
She dips her chin again, accepting the compliment. “Is there significance to the myth?”
“Oh, possibly.” Miles waves one hand, like he’s not thinking about it too hard. So he’s definitely thinking about it, but he doesn’t want to make it a thing for her to think about. “It shares the first few syllables of your legal name, which lowers risk. If a classmate recognizes you in the street, the people who know Ariadne will understand why you respond—those in the department mostly call you Ari, I believe?”
Reason enough. Still, after he lets her go—with three packets of printed-and-stapled scans of journal papers, probably more leads for her thesis—she finds one of the softcover dotted-grid notebooks she always buys too many of at the beginning of the semester and writes, on the third page, “LABYRINTHS.” She sticks the notebook in her brown leather satchel, thinking about House of Leaves and cursing herself for a doomed hipster.
***
Later, she’s flipping lazily through the stacks and stacks of used books that her favorite shop hasn’t gotten around to organizing yet. Her fingernail, ragged from an adventure with lugging modeling supplies up to the studios earlier in the week, snags on the jacket of a hardcover book called—in English, which is a little surprising—Art of the Maze. There’s doodling in black marker all over the edges of the pages, a key pattern into something like Celtic knots into spiderweb-like spokes into Voronoi polygons. Someone after her own heart, although she’s trained herself to scribble only on unbound paper and her own notebooks.
She frowns at it, flips through it, and frowns again, considering. Henriette, a woman in her sixties who co-owns the shop, is ten feet away with a laptop and a pad of stickers, pricing new additions. She wanders over and shows her the book; Henriette takes a look at the rips in the jacket, the marked-up page edges, and the 1990 printed price, and just grimaces.
“How much?” she asks anyway.
“I’d pay you to get that out of my shop.”
Henriette has uncommonly strong feelings about books.
“Really?”
“It’s making me sad to look at.”
“I’m going to take you seriously,” she says, and watches Henriette as she opens her satchel—with the LABYRINTHS notebook on top of the reading Miles gave her—and slides Art of the Maze in. When it’s ensconced in brown leather, Henriette’s face goes slack with relief.
“Take it away,” she says, and makes a shooing motion. Ari does, feeling not unlike the protagonist in the first two chapters of a middle-grade fantasy novel, where the normal kid is on the way to finding out she can do magic.
***
In her end-of-day ritual, a bit after ten, she sits on one of the ladder-back chairs at her all-purpose living-area table and empties her bag—the main compartment, anyway, leaving her wallet and cell phone and pens and chap stick in their dedicated secondary pockets—onto the surface. The bag goes on the floor (that phone has survived far worse) while she sorts through the day’s catch.
Her research notes, the hard copies, are in a hard-bound letter-size notebook. She looks them over first, scrawls marginalia in purple ink on what needs synthesis, distillation, expansion, and follow-up, marks the next clean page with a Post-It flag, and sets the notebook on its front cover to her left. Progress report in its blue folder; she ignores her CV, skims the report, circles Miles’ two comments (materials considerations? and projected timeline encouraging; she scowls at the first), and sets it face-down on top of the notebook. Miles’s readings; the first is vintage Elsevier, and its title is Meta-analysis of symbolism and symbolic objects (“Jesus, more?” she mutters) in therapeutic lucid dreamshare.
She’s nearly flipped past when the last four words register.
It was published thirty-eight years ago in Analytical Oneirology, which—it’s not that she has the Elsevier catalog memorized, but she feels certain she’d have heard of this one if it were still operating. Three of the authors were licensed psychiatrists, two with the Mayo Clinic and the third at McLean. The fourth author, Marie Gabriella de Luce-Miles, was a Ph.D. affiliated with the UC Berkeley department of neuroscience.
On the second-to-last page of the packet, before three-quarters of a page of references, are the notes from the authors: M.G.L.-M. thanks Dr. Stephen Miles for his illuminating assistance, discussion, and efforts to provide sustenance.
The next paper, twelve years after the first in the same journal, is Implementations and role-specific ramifications of intentional spatial modifications to dreamscape on participants in lucid dreamshare. Stephen Miles is the fourth of seven authors, listed as a postdoctoral fellow at the École. Finally, a fifteen-year-old article from Oneirological Neurochemistry: Qualitative and quantitative investigation of psychoactive pharmaceutical additives in consciensomnegic agents on internal and external qualia of lucid dreamshare. She doesn’t recognize any of the contributors, but the reference list includes five works co-authored by M.G. de Luce-Miles or S. Miles, including one collaboration.
She starts reading Meta-analysis, purple pen in hand. On the third paragraph, she gets up and retrieves a highlighter from the shelf over her drafting table. Halfway through the second page, she fetches her laptop and moves to the blanket nest on the couch, leaving the rest of the crap on the table.
Around midnight, she makes tea.
At half past two, her browser has forty-seven open tabs.
A little before six, she has three thousand words of notes arranged in a four-level outline in a .txt file.
When the sun rises, she e-mails Miles, subject line Assigned reading from yesterday, message body Came across a thread I’m following independently; I regret that I won’t be on campus today. -A
Fifteen minutes later, he replies: Do remember to eat. My classroom tomorrow 13:00. Cheers
***
When she enters his classroom—his preferred workspace, a smallish lecture hall where he teaches his two groups of undergrads about theory four days a week—she’s nearly vibrating, half caffeine (she did sleep Thursday night, just…not much) and half inquisitiveness. Miles doesn’t even look up. He keeps his eyes on some poor second-year’s paper as he says, “Your investigation will be vastly more cohesive than my pitching anecdotes at you, and I’ve neither patience nor time for it. Courier dropped that for you.” He jabs his pen in the direction of a brown envelope, letter-size, sitting on the corner of his desk nearest the door, and goes back to cutting the second-year down to size.
“Courier,” she repeats absently, as she picks it up. Padded and opaque with clear packing tape across the seal; blank except for a single word in neat, lightly penciled letters above the tape. Finch. She opens her mouth to ask—
“Discretion, et cetera, Miss Finch,” says Miles, dry as dust.
“Of course, professor,” she replies, sticks the envelope in her bag, says, “Thank you,” and leaves.
In her apartment, she naps, first, because the systemic letdown of two days of brain buzz followed by a neat and absolute rebuff by a septuagenarian is a bit much on this little sleep.
When she’s up, she cuts the envelope open and tips its contents onto her bedspread.
On top of the stack is a US passport issued four years ago—and looking it—for Ariadne Josephina Finch, who was born in the state of California (where she’s never set foot) on the sixteenth of June (a Gemini—Harmony would be horrified) going on twenty-one years ago (oh, fuck off, she thinks at Miles’s ‘gent’). It uses the headshot from her own driver’s license, last updated when she was twenty, which—she’s mostly furious because it passes easily for a sixteen-year-old. The first fourteen pages of the passport are stamped, recording yearly travel between the US and France and one-offs to Belgium, Switzerland, the UK, Germany, and Japan.
There’s also Ariadne’s French student visa, US social security card, birth certificate (parents Nicole Penelope Burroughs-Finch and William Joseph Finch), California driver’s license (organ donor; photo from her undergraduate department’s website before she talked them into removing it, which has… interesting implications), and her voter registration card (Democrat, at least). Transcripts from the École (one term in a master’s program, commensurate with Ariadne’s age, assuming she’s a precocious shit; her adviser is the woman who led her first-year master’s extension project) and, before that, from Cornell (she grimaces), and before that, from a public school system outside of San Francisco. A health insurance card, debit card, and credit card, all in Ariadne’s name.
Beneath all the odd-sized stuff, there’s a four-page debrief of account access information and Ariadne’s bullet-point life story: billionaire parents, Montessori school, flutist in the high-school marching band, two boyfriends from undergraduate. Finch is either straight or closeted. She supposes she can work with it.
The final item from the envelope is a surprise. A half-sheet of creamy heavyweight stationery, no letterhead but an embossed frame, swirls of emerald-green cursive. It’s another magical artifact in this double-life fantasy, even with the misspellings.
Little bird,
You’re quite clever I’m aware, but unless you’ve been very very clever indeed, evidents suggests this is your first go. From an old hand to an ingenue: This is not simply taking a name. You embody a PERSON each time you interact with the audiance i.e. world. This person is fundamentally different from you, for all your physical sameness. She exists in different modes. For verysim believablity an unquestionable undoubtable PERSON, THEORY OF MIND matters. As noted, you’re quite clever you’ll be fine.
Just Don’t fuck it up.
On the back:
PS Apartment now under Finch beginning August last, rent records supporting.
PPS Cards lend credence but cash more flexible.
PPPS Safes are good. Healthy paranoia.
PPPPS Keep your sets straight and separate: hers, yours.
VERY LAST PS Dosh in the bank is a favour to the good professor, use at your discretion to kit out MISS FINCH.
It’s unsigned, of course.
She retrieves her laptop from the couch side table and sits back down, cross-legged, on her bed. First, tech crap: partitioning the laptop’s drive, hiding her main account and setting it to boot automatically in Ariadne’s name. Next, getting all of Finch’s accounts in order, which is to say changing all the dummy passwords and checking the profile info (Finch’s checking balance and credit line are two and four orders of magnitude higher than her own, respectively; dosh indeed). Then examining the bank statements, which are fraudulent, of course, but their depth and breadth is astonishing.
As noted by Green Ink, the records of rent payments for her own apartment begin seven months ago. She’s been in the attic-level one-bedroom for four years now, but the building has changed hands—agencies—twice, and she only deals with occasional form e-mails and monthly direct deposits to something that looks rather like a shell corporation. It’s not sketchy, it’s just… impersonal, and it means that she won’t have a nosy landlord showing up at her door demanding explanations.
Ariadne Finch shops at J. Crew, Anthropologie, and the kind of thrift store that markets itself as vintage (she’s subscribed to their newsletters; her email inbox is a treasure trove of twee header designs). She wears jeans from Seven for All Mankind. Her monthly budget for hair care and cosmetics is more than she herself has spent on the same in four years.
Which brings her to her first major undertaking, beyond this preliminary research.
She looks at herself in her bedroom mirror, which mostly exists to remind her, forcibly, of the necessity of changing out of her pajama pants before she leaves the apartment. While her face can read young—as Miles’s green-inking gent so kindly exploited—her current sleep-mussed tied-up hair and under-eye circles stick her near her own age, which won’t do at all. She fusses for half an hour with her very small stash of drugstore makeup and hair-styling products and arrives at something—a look—that puts her squarely at twenty, if not younger. Hair parted a bit to the side to mask her grown-out fringe, smoothed at the top, curl emphasized with a little mousse, fresh-faced with concealer and gloss. Eyes rounded a little with white liner on the waterline and curled lashes, a light hand with brown mascara.
Fine. Next up, wardrobe. Right now, she’s in jeans from the boy’s section at Old Navy, worn thin as paper and soft as pajamas, with an oversized grey henley over a red camisole. Her standby jacket—her beloved greenish-grey leather moto, dug up in a New England thrift store seven years ago—is flung on the couch… and it won’t do at all. Green Ink, regardless of spelling and making her twenty fake years old, makes a decent point: the differences will make Ariadne, will create the distinction between Ariadne and herself and reinforce all of the differences in what each of them knows. Because she’s pretty certain that, even if Miles is making her introductions, she’s not going to be operating as his girl on the ground, not overtly.
Which means her favorite jacket is going into temporary retirement. The weather is just about too warm for her to need it, but she still sighs as she hangs it up properly, gives it a pat, and reviews the rest of her closet.
Twenty is young for grad school, and no matter how rarified her life has been, Ariadne Finch knows that. Finch knows that the deck is stacked against her, as a girl in a field dominated by men in a country where she’s working in a second language. It stands to reason, then, that she’d want her clothes to project… seriousness, at the very least. Not like she’d be in skirt suits for studio, but boy jeans are out.
She goes through her stockpile of interview clothes. Flat-front chinos in greys and browns, a couple skinny but most loose in the thigh and boot-cut. One pair of dark-rinse boot-cut jeans. They’ll do to start, although the brands aren’t what Finch is used to. For shoes, she has a pair of brown lace-up boots with a bit of a heel and thick soles. Not formal, but more polished than her own slip-on sneakers or shitkickers, and she can still ride a bicycle in them. On top… Her crew-neck t-shirts are out. Tanks and scoop necks and button-ups are probably workable, as base layers. The cardigans, the fine-woven ones (not the one she lifted from her grandfather)—they’ll be good.
For everything else, she goes back to her laptop and finds three style blogs, one Parisian, one San Franciscan, and one wherever the photographer happens to be.
In ten more minutes, she’s dressed to take Ariadne Finch shopping, in khakis and those lace-up boots and a windowpane plaid blouse over the red tank. As a finishing touch, she finds the Hermès scarf her dads gave her after she secured her two bachelor’s degrees and loops it around her neck. Accent piece, accent color, the kind of shit someone with Ariadne’s money would care about.
The first errand, of course, isn’t shopping at all. She visits Ariadne’s bank (there’s a branch nearby) and withdraws five hundred euro, then opens a safe-deposit box. To establish the thing, she has her best jewelry, a set of opals—pendant necklace on a white-gold chain, drop earrings, a beautiful little ring that just fits—that her grandmother gave her for her sixteenth birthday. She’s never even worn them, they’re too precious, but they’re a solid item to put in the box—along with Ariadne’s more valuable papers. Birth cert, social security—she’s memorized the nine digits already.
Her first material purchase as Ariadne is a safe, a sturdy little dude, with a really good lock (and she knows from locks). She has it delivered to her apartment directly; it’s only an extra twenty euro (only!). It’ll go on the floor of her closet, as the home for her paperwork while she’s being Ariadne. Among whatever else. The phrase criminal enterprises is delightfully nonspecific.
The fun stuff starts then, as she kits out Ariadne. Tunic tops with interesting seam details, neck scarves and kerchiefs for color, sweater vests and textures and patterns. Ariadne is the daughter of billionaires and has learned to telegraph self-confidence through wearing things that attract attention.
And—she, standing in J. Crew that evening, just can’t resist—she wears red, the stuff that’s already in her wardrobe for layering, plus a long-sleeve button-up (for under the sweater vest) and a fine-knit merino-cashmere blend cardigan, a little cropped in the torso, with lovely long sleeves, that may be the single most expensive item she’s ever purchased with the intent to put on her own body. A jacket, too, scarlet corduroy, structured in the shoulder with crisp lapels.
To emphasize to herself the division of Ariadne from herself, she gets a new wallet, a woman’s one in sunny yellow-dyed leather and the polar opposite of the shitty ripstop nylon bifold she’s been using since undergrad. She stops for a moment in a café’s locked bathroom to move Ariadne’s IDs and cards there, plus the cash, having newly come to understand the idiom money burning a hole in the pocket.
Last, Sephora—duplicates of the stuff in her tiny stash, plus a good primer and setting spray and remover, but they’re upgrades, and actual color matches. She selects from among the cornerstone brands everyone knows by their ad campaigns, and spends possibly a little longer than an accustomed rich girl would just holding the bottles, gazing at the compacts, running her fingers over the packaging, feeling the smooth satisfying weight of materials considerations done right. Aesthetics are aesthetics and she’s a designer; it’s just what she does—but she steers far clear of the really dangerous stuff (that would be the perfume) for her own good and the sake of sticking to a schedule. These establishing purchases go on the credit card, because Ariadne is due for a shopping trip. Her haul isn’t enough to make a blip in Ariadne’s spending habits, but it’s more than her own checking balance, all told.
Which is fine, because she’s Ariadne now. At least, some of the time.
***
Saturday, she wakes up to an email from Miles sent two hours previous, asking her to meet at a café, which is…nonstandard. It’s also for a time about ten minutes after she peels herself out of her research-binge recovery sleep, and the chosen café is a fifteen-minute walk with no convenient Vélib’ station combos, according to Google. She drags on yesterday’s jeans, shoves her sock feet into sneakers, yanks a black sweater over her head without bothering to take off her pajama top, and jets.
She doesn’t even think of Ariadne until she’s actually standing at the outdoor table where he’s camped out, despite the briskness of the day. He has a pot of tea for himself, and he’s ordered a mocha and a croissant for her. She drops her bag and sits. “Sorry for the delay.”
“Not a problem.” He sets his own cup down and folds his hands on the iron tabletop. “I’ve—regarding Miss Finch,” he says, and his face is strange, blank with cautiousness gleaming in his eyes. “On Monday, I’ll be introducing you to a—a—” She’s never heard the man stammer. “Well, to my son-in-law.”
Thus the hesitation. She raises her eyebrows, genuinely surprised.
“If you’re interested, it’s an entrance to the applications of architecture in the subject I had you reading on, in the context we discussed.” She catches the neat avoidance of identifying nouns. Miles sort of smiles then, but it’s utterly without humor. “I would personally appreciate it,” he says, “if you’d accept this. My son-in-law is brilliant, but troubled, and I’m of the opinion he requires… watching. And a knock over the head sometimes.”
It takes her a moment—two or three moments—to reply, as she lines this up and distills it. “You want me to babysit.”
“I do have your CV,” he responds. “The psychology background—that’s an interesting skillset.”
The rush of pre-caffeine anger—skillset, like all the fuckers she met at undergrad parties who went “Oh, so fix me”—is more than she’s prepared for; her field of vision pulses. “You want your son-in-law analyzed? By me?” She sneers, and she knows it’s unprofessional and she keeps her voice down because they’re in public, but for fuck’s sake— “It’s a bachelor’s. In neuro, not even psych. Where’s his wife? Your daughter?”
Anguish crosses Miles’s face, there and gone, but so intense for a moment that her mouth goes dry as her annoyance shatters. “Dead,” he says, flat and heavy as lead, and drops his gaze to his own fingers. “Thus my son-in-law’s troubles.”
“I’m sorry,” she says immediately. “For your loss.” For her attitude, but she thinks he knows that.
“It’s been rather a mess,” he replies, like he’s commenting on Métro maintenance. Then, flicking his gaze back up to meet hers, he says, “Regardless of your additional interests and my presumptions of their applicability, your architectural skills are everything the business could wish for, and it’s a very lucrative opportunity. I’d be introducing you no matter who offered it, if they’d happened to come to me first. I only—” He presses his lips together and goes back to examining the crumbs next to his teapot. “His associates—his main associate, really, is very loyal to him, which is of course excellent in their line of work, but I’ve rather a vested interest in the finer details of his stability.” He makes a little noise, like a sigh melded with a laugh but swallowed before it can become either. “Considering he’s the father of my grandchildren.”
She remembers the framed photos around his actual office—a watchful girl and a little blond boy with a smile that splits his face, two or three years apart; the girl might be seven in the most recent. She swallows. “So, if I accept this—contract?”
“Job.”
“If I accept the job, I do the work he gives me and keep an eye on him. Your son-in-law. For your—”
“Peace of mind.” He watches her now, eyes level. “You’d…watch him. Send me updates. I’d advise, if something came up that required it.”
She likes Miles, and she’s thinking about what her life would have been like without one of her dads, or without Harmony, as she says, “Sir, I’d—” She flounders. “I don’t know if I can—if I’d even—ethically speaking—”
“Ten per cent on top of your share,” he says, without blinking. “I trust you.”
The three words hit her like a punch, if a punch could be reassuring, and if he’s onto talking numbers he means it.
He goes on speaking. “My son-in-law, of course, would not be aware. Nor would the rest of your colleagues—there’ll be some, his associate and another few. Miss Finch would know nothing but that it was a paying job, if that’s within your capacity.”
THEORY OF MIND matters, says Green Ink. “Doable,” she says, and then, “What’s the… share?”
He tells her.
“Twenty per cent,” she replies, mostly to see what happens, and to find out how steadily she can speak while mentally processing the figure. Her voice is smooth and cool and crisp as the fine-woven silk of that Hermès scarf. Miss Finch’s signature.
Miles tongues the inside of his own cheek; he’s trying not to smile, she realizes. “Fifteen.”
“Twenty.” It’s an additional responsibility, after all. One of unknown magnitude, on a job that’s already risky. And she wants to know where this goes.
He sighs without the slightest hint of actual distress as he reaches into his coat pocket. He sets a cell phone on the table, next to her croissant. “Twenty.”
“Done,” she says.
“You noted your background, yes?” Miles says. “Do dress the part Monday, Ariadne.”
“Of course, professor.”
***
A little after noon on Monday, two hours before she’s supposed to meet her adviser’s son-in-law, the phone Miles gave her buzzes with a text: Please come by classroom earliest.
She puts her studio desktop to sleep and stands, attracting the attention of Etienne across the aisle. “Interview?” he says, and she evaluates Ariadne Finch’s clothes in the context of her own peers: dark-rinse jeans, brown boots, henley top and floral-patterned scarf and the structured scarlet corduroy jacket.
“Sort of,” she says. “Testing the waters. First meet later today.” She shrugs at him, he shrugs back, and she goes to Miles.
He’s in his lecture hall, and looks—well, first, he looks her over, slightly bewildered, and says, “Lord, you are taking this seriously, aren’t you.”
“Sir?” she replies, avoiding the bait.
“No, I need you for this. Finch comes later.”
She nods and relaxes, cocking a hip and folding her arms over her chest—Ariadne wouldn’t do the attitude, not in a one-on-one with a superior. “At two, right?”
“Two. I’ve—” He checks his watch. “All right, time. I mentioned… my daughter.”
“That she passed away.”
“It’s—the circumstances were—” He swallows and folds his hands, then spits it out. “Extremely poor, and extremely onerous on my son-in-law. More than I’d understood previously, and his associate provided a… distressing report. I met Dom this morning—that’s my—Dominic Cobb, Mr. Cobb, my daughter’s husband—and—” He pauses, shakes his head minutely, and goes on. “I’m throwing you into a pit of vipers,” he says. “I don’t even know what kinds, necessarily.”
She waits for him to condense, synthesize, convert this meandering into something concrete—and he doesn’t.
So she does it for him. “I like snakes,” she says lightly, and dips her chin, an affirmative to an unasked question. “You have my word. I’ll be there.”
The look then—gratitude of a depth she can’t deserve; she hasn’t done anything yet—knocks the floor out from under her, but she keeps standing, keeps her eyes and voice steady. “Two o’clock. I’ll be there, and afterward.” Humility and caution force her to add, “Assuming he wants to hire me.”
“Safe assumption, unless he’s gotten too stupid to deserve you,” Miles says, and nods her out.
***
Miles’s son-in-law is a blond man in his thirties and dad pants who looks like he needs a week of sleep, and the way Miles is with him in all thirty seconds she sees shoots secondhand anxiety up her spine. It’s like there’s a mile of ice water under whatever fragile bridge they’re standing on now, but they are not her business, and Ariadne doesn’t even know they’re related. She shakes Mr. Cobb’s hand, plays ingenuous, polite, and a little surprised (it’s not the normal way one comes across a recruiter), and agrees to walk and talk.
He tells her, Ariadne—he pronounces it like a fucking operetta, ah-ray-odd-neigh—that the job is not, strictly speaking, legal. It’s almost cute. He speaks with odd emphasis, like he’s trying to make his words fit a certain poetic meter, but she’s willing to bet he’s just not used to dealing with twenty-year-old women. At least, not since he had been a twenty-year-old man.
When he hands her a pen and a spiral-bound graph-paper notebook and says he wants her to design a maze, she’s too distracted feeling self-satisfied (oh, possibly some significance; sure, Miles) to remember her book (which she had gotten to, that weekend) so her first try is amateur hour. On the second, she’s rushing and sloppy.
Cobb looks disappointed and distant, like he’s trying to figure out how to say she’s not good enough for the job, even as he’s giving her shit (going to have to do better than that), and she doesn’t even know what the job is but the payout, the compounded share, is sitting in the front of her mind, that and the desperation in Miles’s eyes, and she can’t tell which is more goading but she glares and snatches the notebook out of his hands, flips it over and starts with a sweeping arc and thinks this time, and finishes with seconds to spare, hands back the notebook and pen before he can tell her to quit.
The circle maze confounds him for the required minute, possibly more, and he’s pleased, although all he does is squint at the paperboard and say something appropriately cryptic for a man trying to recruit a first-year grad student from the straight and narrow onto something not strictly legal.
***
Tuesday morning, there’s an email from Cobb—presumably; it’s from [email protected] and signed DC—in Ariadne’s École inbox. I was impressed with your interview yesterday. I’d like to bring you on site today, whenever is convenient. I can meet you at the college and we’ll go from there.
The domain name points to a site with a minimalist grey-on-grey logo and no content, aside from the copyright notice at the bottom for the previous year. The source code shows nothing of interest, and although she knows that appearances are trivial for someone with experience, it doesn’t seem worth digging into right now. The name itself, meanwhile— Erebos is an alternate spelling of the name of a primordial god of darkness. Dreamshare practitioners do love their Grecian mythology.
For the second day in a row she puts on Ariadne, parting her hair on the left and doing the makeup and pairing black trousers with a grey-blue tunic top that has cool not-quite-princess seam details. Pink-and-grey floral-patterned scarf, brown boots, and that beautiful, beautiful cardigan. She meets Cobb a little after ten, before she sees anyone from the studio, and—she should have done this yesterday, but who can fault a first-year for not carrying copies to class at the end of March?—hands him printouts of her resumé and CV after she shakes his hand.
He barely glances at them, just folds them in quarters and puts them in his pants pocket.
“We’re set up in a workshop in the 16th near Billancourt; my associate is there now,” he says, as she follows him down to the Métro.
“Associate?” she repeats. It’s the same word Miles used, clinical and distancing.
“My colleague. A friend. You’ll meet him.” His mouth shuts like a trap.
She gets ready for a silent, awkward ride, before he mentions his own architecture schooling in California, undergrad and a master’s. They burn ten minutes talking about undergrad coursework and studio hours and the way things have changed (CAD, mostly). Another ten discussing their favorites in the field, their sticking points and irrational peeves, and where she sees herself going when she’s done with academia, if she’s planning on being done with academia at all (she personally is on the fence, but Ariadne’s bouncing once she’s got her master’s).
For him, he says, something else had come along before he did any real projects, got his name on anything she could walk into. And Ariadne, of course, asks what the something else was, and he shifts his weight and looks at her with significance—he’s so blatant about it; it’d be charming if it weren’t so odd—and she says, “Oh, of course,” as if flustered, and asks how long he’ll be in the city, because everything from his canvas jacket to his pleat-front dad pants screams American, despite how casually he speaks of the neighborhoods and Métro stops.
“That depends on a great deal,” Cobb says, which she thinks is another deflection, but he elaborates. “Our calendar has significant flexibility, because the deadline itself is a moving target. Our client—we’re like a consulting agency—wants time for planning and practice. Our lease on the warehouse—our workshop—is six months, although it’s almost certain we’ll be moving on earlier.”
So we, whoever that is, have money to burn. “Where are you staying?” Ariadne asks, solicitous and curious and unaware that he’s Miles’s kid. Kid’s widower.
“La Défense—my associate chose a good hotel. Convenient for us.” Interesting, but then, just off the thirty seconds she spent in the company of both, it’s not terribly surprising that Miles isn’t falling over himself to host.
She’s almost surprised when Cobb remembers to ask, after too long a pause, “Is the 16th out of your way?”
She shrugs. “No more than the college.”
“Classes?”
“I’m only in a few,” she says smoothly (she hasn’t been in a formal class in sixteen months), “and studio time—I mean, you know about studio time, so I suppose that—”
“If you choose to work with us, we’ll have everything you need at the workshop.”
He interrupts. Rude. And everything you need sounds suspiciously like it’s intended to placate her.
But Ariadne would be amiably placated, so she simply says, “Cool,” and follows him out of the car and up to the street.
The warehouse-workshop isn’t far, a five-minute walk from the Métro station, with heavy paneled doors and gridded glass windows on three sides. Cobb opens one of the doors and heads in, not bothering to hold it for her, which—whatever, it’s just the poorest-run interview process she’s ever had. She lets the door fall closed behind her, which it does with vigor.
A figure at the back of the space (awash with sunlight, painted concrete floor and a weird assortment of furniture, including two incongruous lawn chairs in the middle of everything) looks over his shoulder at the sound. At this distance, she just sees patent-looking hair and his clothes. Far dressier than Cobb or herself; he’s got a dark brown button-up shirt tucked into close-cut grey-brown trousers, the color of a mourning dove’s feathers, and a waistcoat over the top. Vertical stripes down the back, and—as he turns to face the door fully, she sees—a plain front, in the same dove-colored fabric, with a diagonally striped tie that has a sheen like the inside of a shell. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, silver watch on his left wrist. He’s standing by a desk with a sleek-looking laptop and a stack of paper files, holding a Moleskine and a ballpoint pen. “Who’s this?” he says to Cobb, voice carrying easily. She can’t tell how old he is.
“Might be our new architect,” Cobb replies, and goes right to the table behind the lawn chairs to fiddle with a metal-sided briefcase. He unlocks it—it’s not a briefcase but a machine built into one, like an old oscilloscope minus the display—and Ari presses her lips together, trying not to smile. He’s just so bad at being an interviewer. She looks around instead, at the jumbles of stacked tables and dividers shoved against the walls, at decommissioned equipment of unknown purpose or status, at the watery sunlight flooding the room through the thick glass of the gridded windows.
The other guy approaches, shifting his pen to his notebook hand. Up close, his face is incongruously young for the clothes, the hair, the tone in which he says, “Cobb, you could tell me her name, at least,” over his shoulder, the way he clearly doesn’t expect Cobb to answer.
Cobb doesn’t. Instead, the guy gives her a look like he’s apologizing for everything to do with Cobb at once, inviting her to join him in generalized exasperation, and holds out his own hand. “Arthur,” he says.
“Hi,” she says, “um. Ariadne,” and shakes his hand. His grip is strong; she reflexively meets it, then catches herself and follows up with a tentative, “What’s your, uh, role here?”
“This and that,” Arthur replies unhelpfully, but he half-smiles as he says it.
“I have copies of my resumé and my CV,” she says. “Are those—are you part of—”
His half-smile goes wry, which is odd, but whatever. “I’ll have a look.” He skims her resumé, says, “Cornell, huh? I was Columbia,” and slips the papers under the cover of his notebook. Before she can remember whether the two Ivies have any special rivalry she should be posturing about, Arthur turns his head and asks loudly, “Cobb, you taking Ariadne under?” He says the name like a normal person, at least.
“Kind of the point,” Cobb says from across the space; he’s squinting into the machine that is the briefcase, goofing with vials of clear liquid and—medical tubing. IV tubing.
A portable automated Somnacin IV device. A PASIV. Which makes the clear liquid the Somnacin.
In the third chapter of the middle-grade fantasy novel, the protagonist first unequivocally experiences magic.
“Ariadne,” says Arthur, and she looks at him, affecting confusion, because taking her under doesn’t mean anything to the girl they’re interviewing. “Odd question for a first on-site, but how are you with needles?” He has a hint of an accent, Brooklyn-y. “Fainting, anything? It’s part of the job, so better we know now.”
“I’m fine with them,” she says truthfully, before blinking rapidly. Ariadne has no idea what the silver box is. “Why? What—you said under, could you—”
“This way, Ariadne,” Cobb says, having gotten the Somnacin configured to his liking, and he works the shit out of the vowels again. “Demo. Best way to get a feel for it.”
She blinks more, because really, and heads over. “What are you—what’s that?”
“Work equipment.” He has to know how useless that is; he has to know he’s the worst hiring experience anyone could ever have— “We—Arthur and I—the majority of what we do is, you see, in the mind. Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming?”
“Uh, sure,” she says, like she hasn’t spent the last week reading about it. “Like realizing you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming, and then you can do whatever you want.”
“Enough to start. Have a seat.”
She sits gingerly on the lawn chair aligned parallel to the table, feeling like an idiot, and takes off her lovely cashmere cardigan—mostly for something to do with her hands while she figures out whether she’s supposed to be lying down on the chair or sitting up straight or—whatever. She drapes the cardigan over the arm of the chair, drops her satchel on the floor next to it with the shoulder strap in easy reach, and watches as Cobb takes the second chair, perpendicular to her own, facing the table and the PASIV.
“Arthur, if you would.” It’s not even a question; Cobb’s kicking his legs out on the other lawn chair and rolling up the sleeve of his chambray shirt. “I have it set for the usual.”
Without comment, Arthur places a cannula in Cobb’s wrist and attaches the line from the PASIV. She swings her legs up and, slowly, still feeling like an idiot, leans against the back—it’s at least not at much of a recline. Arthur gives her a tight smile, swipes the inside of her wrist with alcohol, then says under his breath, “Little pinch,” exactly like a nurse doing bloodwork, and she wants to laugh at how utterly bizarre all of this is, but she just watches the butterfly needle go in and come out, leaving behind the cannula, and looks up at Cobb. He smiles at her for the first time. It looks like he’s forgotten how.
***
When she realizes, when her spoon rattles against the saucer, she thinks coldly, you fucking idiot. Then Cobb says, “Stay calm,” which goes predictably—fuck’s sake—she’s not scared, she’s furious with herself, and with having to hide it. Another window blows out, shrapnel ricocheting. You read about this, you knew what ‘going under’ meant, you’ve been talking about lucid dreaming and dreamshare for a goddamn hour, you humored his brain-use factoid three minutes ago, so fine, you’re dreaming, it’s a dream, this is a lucid dream now with elevated lucidity—
The explosions slow, and she looks at Cobb. He’s gazing at her with his sad eyes full of something like recognition, commiseration—and new anger surges in her at the tasteless espresso (she’d just thought Café Debussy was cutting corners) and the stereotypy of the street, but it’s not like she knows the 16th that well.
The problem is that she had bullshitted herself with that.
She is exactly the chump in every neurological case study she’s ever read about confabulation and filling-in and how brains fool themselves so goddamn easily, they’re tripping over their spinal cords to provide cohesive narratives, and it doesn’t matter how many papers she’s read about this, she didn’t see it—
—and the café itself explodes, collapses towards their table in an avalanche of brick and a shower of glass from that enormous front window. Cobb is covering his face. She demands why he’s bothering to, since it’s only dreaming, but before she gets the question out the cinderblock connects with a terrible sound and an indescribable feeling as her shoulder and skull give way—
***
She knows and cannot bring herself to care that she’s being a little shit on the second round. She’s babbling, a continuous stream-of-consciousness rant on the differences between virtual reality and projected reality, filled in reality. Keeping ahead of Cobb, letting loose on flip one-liners, cutting him off when he tries to sustain a lecture, because now she knows she’s dreaming, that she is standing in the middle of not-quite-Paris but at the same time she is asleep in the workshop on a lounge chair from someone’s back patio, and being down this rabbit hole is a rush. And Cobb keeps telling her, helpfully, that she’s building the world of the dream.
The word topology lodges in her mind and she stops still, suddenly enough that Cobb nearly bumps into her, and decides to take him at his plodding word.
She fucking builds.
To start, she folds the city in fucking half.
The parts of it she could plausibly see—a stretch of a thousand feet, call it—peel up from the substrate of whatever rests below pseudo-Paris (she sees the mistakes now, or the fudges, or whatever, the over-specificity of the grid patterns of the street). She adds right-angle hinges in two places, nudges the buildings into place so they’ll stack dormer-to-dormer, decides that it’ll be neatest for the direction of gravitation to remain normal to the plane of the street for any given section. It’s easier than orbital mechanics that way, although she gets distracted for a moment thinking about the actual physics of a taco city, but that’s for a procrastinating physicist or a decent computer to model, later.
Now, she has stuff to build, despite Cobb dogging her and the increasingly hostile looks from passersby. Cobb’s projections. His subconscious, personified but not, symbols of his underlying mental processes, and she recalls vaguely that one paper, role-specific ramifications, even as she rolls her eyes at Cobb’s bellyaching, but—a taco city.
She stands at an intersection with a roof set on four columns and decides it could be the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, under the right periodic boundary conditions, so she conjures mirrors and drags them both into place, invokes the uncanny valley of infinite reflection, countless Cobbs fading into greenish glassy distance (she tells the mirror trap that she only reflects once, because the feeling of breaking physics is fizzing in her veins like champagne). As a fuck-you to the exploding café, she holds her palm just away from the mirror in front of her and thinks, when I move closer, you’re going to shatter and you won’t even touch me, and it obeys.
She smiles.
The bridge is just like it is when she walks or bikes to the École, but pseudo-Paris is spread out above her, above the roof of the Bir-Hakeim. She takes off down the bridge, pleased, if “pleased” were any way to describe being God.
Cobb is—unnerved, behind her, his voice rising, about only building anew and never re-building memories, and she snarks the first thing that comes to mind—work with what you know, right? That makes him worse; he says never to use a full place, a real place, just details, a streetlamp or a phone booth, like those aren’t full real places in themselves, and he talks about losing the distinction, slipping from the knife’s-edge knowledge of the experiential doubling, about not being able to remember what’s real versus a dream.
“Is that what happened to you?” she flings at him over her shoulder, and she knows it’s a terrible thing to say, but the shock of Cobb grabbing her by the upper arm, hauling her face within inches of his—that paralyzes her.
“Listen to me,” he hisses, and she can’t even speak, she’s so shaken by the transmuting of his worry into anger, but her own fury is crawling up from the point where his fingers clamp around her arm—when did she ever say it was okay to touch her—cold and liquid, turning her nerves to ice. “This has nothing to do with me, you understand—”
Ariadne wouldn’t hit him, and besides, she has no good angle to. Instead, she lets her mouth twist and torques all of her fear, all of her fury, into sneering something else, something equally unforgiveable: “Is that why you need me to build your dreams?”
His face collapses, as surely as pseudo-Paris had, and she almost wants to apologize but not as much as she wants to shake his grip off her arm.
She does neither, because the projections lose their shit.
As Cobb growls and shoves one away she thinks wildly Converge is right— and then she can’t think anything but fuck, fuck, fuck as the hands close on her, two, five, a dozen, yanking her away from Cobb. He’s yelling something—Mall or Moll and NO—and panic rises in her chest as her voice rises into a shriek. It’s a dream, she’s terrified, she should wake up, it’s a dream and she should wake up right now, but she’s still wrenching uselessly against the hands on her arms, on her shoulders, her sides. The teeming projections split for a woman in a grey trench coat striding toward her like an entire army in one pair of heels and she can’t stop screaming, words ripping out of her throat, wake me up Cobb wake me up, and the woman lifts a fucking sword from her side and levels it.
Even in the shadow of the bridge the blade gleams before it sinks, just under her sternum with pain like—
***
—she flings herself forward, gasping and coughing, but the line is still in her arm and she can’t move farther than that and Arthur is crouching next to her and putting his hands on her, her shoulder and her wrist, saying pointless shit in an even tone, and she can’t fucking hit him, either, because she’s still trying to convince herself and her lungs that she doesn’t have a stab wound in the chest. After the second time he tells her you’re okay, which fuck you, Arthur, even if he’s trying to sound reassuring, she says brokenly, “Why—why wouldn’t I wake up—”
“’Cause there was still some time on the clock,” Arthur replies, removing her cannula like he’s done it thousands of times, “and you can't wake up from within the dream unless you die,” and she might be imagining the I fucking hate this part edge in his voice but it doesn’t matter, because his hands are still on her even though the cannula is out and she wants to deck him. She wants to know what the fuck is wrong with everyone in this room, including herself, and Cobb is surfacing and saying nonsense, she’ll need a token—
She splutters, “What?” as Cobb yanks his line to the PASIV and storms out of sight. Arthur drops his hands, at least, one fewer immediate stressor—
He starts speaking again and she spares half a thought to give him credit for thoughtfulness in trying to ground a freaking-out interviewee. He repeats the word—totem—but she’s busy working up the best yell she can after eighty per cent of a panic attack. “That’s some subconscious you got on you, Cobb,” she shouts—tries to shout—she despises the pitchy shakiness of her voice, the residue of pure fear in her gut. “She’s a real charmer!” Her vowels are flat and Canadian and she’s shrill with terror and anger and she hates herself—
“Ah,” says Arthur. “I see you’ve met Mrs. Cobb.”
That’s his—She wrenches the pronoun around. “She’s his wife?”
Miles, what the fuck have I put myself in—
Concerns. She puts one hand to her face, presses, like that’s going to do anything to block out Arthur, the workshop, the entirety of this fucking job. Troubled. Pit of vipers. I like snakes, she’d said, so lightly. Vested interest in his stability, which—she was just in the man’s brain, and she knows some of the projection activity was basically her fault—the taco city—but the terror in Cobb’s voice as he was screaming at his projection of his dead wife pulling a sword—a dagger, whatever, she’s never been into blades beyond utility knives and multitools—on a kid. Because Ariadne is a kid, all but, and Cobb brought that kid into his subconscious, and he was just as scared of the memory of his dead wife as she herself was—Pit of fucking vipers—
Arthur is still talking, low and calm, describing the properties of a totem—something you can keep in a pocket—and she ventures, “Like a coin?” in an attempt to be Ariadne while she’s staring at the size of this fucking mess against the backs of her eyelids, and Arthur says no, makes her look at a six-sided die with some shit in the middle of its red resin body, says only he knows exactly how it throws.
She needs to talk to Miles. She might like snakes but she needs to—
“I don’t know if you can't see what's going on or if you just don't want to—” she finds herself saying, before she thinks about it, and Arthur stops talking about loaded dice and looks at her, one eyebrow raised and looking fucking done, exhausted, and he hasn't even gotten stabbed today. As far as she knows. “But Cobb has some serious problems—” Get me out— “that he's tried to bury down there and I'm not about to just—” The aftershocks of terror come in handy here. “Just—open my mind to someone like that.”
She jumps up, snatches her cardigan and her bag, and doesn’t so much as blink when she whacks Arthur in the shoulder with both on her way out.
As she heads back to Billancourt, she can’t tell what she’s most upset about, and she doesn’t have time to be confused, so she forces herself to breathe deep, slow her steps, and sort it out. Dreamshare is… not as she expected, and it’s nothing like the journal papers from a decade and more ago. The visceral quality of it, the ugliness—the publications never touched on that, but then, they wouldn’t; they were academic, therapeutic. She’s furious that she was caught so thoroughly off-guard. But behind that, there’s—Jesus, Cobb, his infuriating winding lectures and his sheer terror of his own—his own wife, his dead wife, who he doesn’t see as just a projection, that much was clear from how he addressed her. The piece of his consciousness that he has devoted to remembering his wife has—done something, or he’s done something to it—
A pit of vipers in a poison sea, and she’s armed with the disposable knife of a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience.
She texts Miles on the phone he gave her. Need talk f2f. Where/when
He replies immediately, which is a surprise; it’s eleven-thirty and he teaches on Tuesdays. Office, whenever you get there.
She collapses into a seat on the Métro and holds one hand to her solar plexus, feeling her pulse and her breath, for the entire forty-minute ride.
***
Miles’s office is little and dominated by a desk covered in shit, with wingback chairs on either side of the desk instead of anything more normal. She knocks, enters, and drops into the heavyweight green upholstery with the goose down leaking out of the left-hand throw pillow, and all she thinks at first is god, this is real.
When she looks down from the ceiling she finds him peering at her, like he’s trying to see inside her brain, which she’s honestly had enough of for the day. To make him quit, she starts talking, letting her fingers worry at one of the quills of down trying to sneak through the brocade of the pillow under her hand. “I’m trying to figure out the most reasonable way to tell this,” she says. “Most reasonable and most accurate. It might take me a little.”
“My time is yours,” says Miles simply, and she trusts him, which is the heart and heartache of it all. She trusts him, and he said he trusted her, and she takes him at his word, that he believes that she is capable of keeping his son-in-law—safe, stable, sane. It makes her want to cry.
She looks back at the ceiling so that she won’t. “We did two dreamshare sessions with the PASIV,” she says, gazing at cracked plaster, and is vaguely aware that she’s speaking slowly, precisely, weighted like she’s trying to follow a poetic meter, and she’d slap herself if she could but maybe that measured quality is some way to anchor herself outside shifty dreamspace. “Five minutes, so about an hour in each dream. The first was only me and Cobb—Mr. Cobb, sorry—”
“Whatever’s easiest. Not a bother.”
She nods a thank-you and keeps talking, letting her eyes travel along the crown molding. “I didn’t realize that it was a dream until the end—I don’t know how I know it was the end. I freaked out, not because I was scared but because I was so mad at myself, because I thought I’d be able to tell, but I wasn’t, and the dream fell apart. I got clocked with a cinderblock. But that was also the end of the scheduled session, the end of the Somnacin dose, and when I woke up there was music playing. Edith Piaf?”
Miles’s mouth flattens. “Dom has a habit of that. Uses music—externally—to signal the end of a dream. Arthur was there, I assume?”
“He was.”
“He’d have started the player, then.”
“So dreamers still hear while they’re under—” Fascinating, but she shakes her head at herself. Later. “The second time, though, I knew, so I got to—” The sense rolls back into her chest, the power, folding up not-quite-Paris like it was a piece of origami paper, erecting bridges with a thought, shattering glass and simply deciding she was immune to it. “I got to build. Which was—it was—indescribable. Until—this was in Cobb’s mind. I was the dreamer, he was the subject. His subconscious didn’t like that I was building, or it objected to the scale of what I was doing, I guess, which—” She glances at Dr. Miles. “I mean, you wrote the book on it. Or at least a cornerstone study.”
“Among others.”
“So his projections grabbed me,” she says, and leaves out the panic, “and—” She pauses, because it is important to get this right, it is vital to get it absolutely correct— “One specific projection, a tall woman, dark chin-length hair. Who Arthur informed me, after, was—Cobb’s memory, and subconscious associations, of his wife.”
Miles, who hasn’t so much as blinked, somehow drops deeper into stillness. Then he rouses himself and turns a single framed photo on his desk to face her. “She looked like this,” he says. Not a question.
It’s her, same large eyes and dark curls, but the smile—
“Yes,” she says, and rips her eyes away, back to the ceiling while she collects herself, swallows against the tightness in her throat. “I know—” She looks at him then and keeps her eyes on his, because this is necessary, this is the problem, this distinction. “I know that the projection I saw, that the projection I—interacted with—is only Cobb’s memory of her, conscious and subconscious, and—whatever issues he’s had with her death. I know that the projection wasn’t—” She swallows again. “The projection wasn’t your daughter.”
Very quietly, Miles says, “Tell me what she did.”
She forces herself not to look away. “Stabbed me in the chest with a sword,” she replies, and clamps down on the sudden wild urge to laugh at what she’s saying. “Which—I know, I read your report and I know that’s one manifestation of the subject’s subconscious awareness of an interloper. But Cobb’s reaction to seeing her—he was—talking to her as if she were her, yelling at her not to, yelling her name—I think, it wasn’t clear—like he was trying to get her attention and convince her to do something else, as if she were—were herself. Not a projection.” She tongues at her own teeth, presses her hand against her chest again, looks at the wall. “I’m—you’d mentioned. That he was troubled, that it started when she passed away, which—it’s not a surprise, right? And you asked that I watch him and ask you for advice. I’m just—” She makes herself look back at him and hears her voice rise in pitch, as it shrinks in volume: “Professor, I don’t know what I—what I or you—could possibly do. If he—he’s been doing this, dreamshare, for—”
“A decade, thereabouts,” Miles supplies, distracted.
“So he should know,” she says desperately. “He should know, even with—with someone that emotionally charged, that they’re not real. He and Arthur were talking about totems—”
Something flashes on Miles’s face, like pride mixed with anguish, and he says, “His memory of Mallorie has been…polluted. Possibly the moment she died, I can’t be certain.”
Mallorie. “He called her—Moll?”
“Mal,” Miles says, making it rhyme with “pal” like it should. “Originally. But—lateral thinking, and a fine, mobile mind. She rather liked that the spelling of the short form was French for—”
“Wrong. French for ‘wrong.’”
“And a homophone of moll, as in gangsters. She appreciated layers. Consonances.” He’s sounding sadder and sadder.
“Polluted,” she repeats. “You think that—that Cobb is in danger, from or with his memory of his wife.”
Miles sighs, looking at the surface of his desk, and doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says, “Time for my cards on the table, I believe.” He looks up again, meets her eyes. “Dom is preparing a job for a client with power. Influence. The job…sounds impossible. Dom believes he can do it, and if he does, then I believe he can do it. I said he was brilliant and I meant it. But it will require more people than you and Arthur and Dom himself. And if he succeeds at the job, the client will be able to change his life.”
“Money?” She hears the disgust in her own tone.
“Reunification with his children,” Miles responds, and his voice is so dry that her throat closes; how is she always so wrongfooted? “I—will not disclose further. However. He will do this job, and if he succeeds, he’ll have his life back. But the chance of his own mind sabotaging the job—and thus the entire team, four or five or six of the brightest and best—and when dreams go bad, it’s…psychiatrically traumatizing.”
Reality, unreality, memory, barely controlled hallucination. Psychosis waiting to happen, really. “And you—”
“I am receiving updates from Arthur, although he is…reticent. And I am placing you—I hope—as a dedicated pair of eyes. You may need to deal with… unpleasantness.”
“Like swords in the chest?”
“Like a sword in hers.” As he’s talking about nothing.
She can’t think of a single response.
“I don’t ask you to heal him; I don’t believe that’s possible until he chooses to remember, and to know, that the projection he sees—as you’ve so carefully said—is not, in fact, his wife.” Miles is watching his own fingers, hands laid flat against the desk, gaze flickering between each nail. “I ask you to…observe him. Guide him. Remind him of the importance of the job, remind him of the people at risk who aren’t himself or—or Mallorie. My daughter is beyond danger.”
“Professor,” she says, and he meets her eyes, and there’s a gleam to his that looks like the shine of tears. She wants to cry, she wants to fight something, she wants to erase the misery in Miles’s face. Instead, she swipes at her eyes with her hand and says, “Do you believe—really—that I can do this? That it can be done by anyone? That I can keep him safe? Keep the—keep whoever we work with safe, from Cobb and from whatever’s in his head? That I can lead him right?”
He doesn’t quite smile. “You’re certainly more likely to than a bit of bloody string.”