Work Text:
It was more a ramshackle shed than an airport. The flies skimmed like malicious bullets against Arthur’s cheek. His shirt was glued to the small of his back with sweat.
“I would’ve been back in civilisation in a week, mate,” Eames noted in a grating local twang that Arthur’s recently landed ear couldn’t distinguish from the real thing. He hefted his bag onto his shoulder, catching sight of the distant splinter of the plane clearing the red hills and turning toward them, and dropped the accent like an apple core. “Your close surveillance was hardly called for.”
If Arthur kept tabs on him, it was only because he was slippery as an eel, with a tendency to vanish for months at a time to work on those low-rent, high-risk jobs he referred to as “keeping my hand in”. It a perfect world, Eames’s priceless skill set would have come in a more professional package, but on this job, they were in no position to be choosey.
Arthur slid his phone out, but cell reception was a thing to be dreamed of. The hills were full of iron ore and the only development in these parts was a sheep station about the size of Germany.
“Saskia’s starting another job Sunday. I didn’t exactly have the luxury of patience.”
“Yes,” Eames said with interest. “The size of your offer spoke for itself on that front. Are you funding this with the fee from the job on Fischer?”
Arthur wiped at the damp back of his neck and waved away Eames’s offered handkerchief. The plane had got close enough to compete with their voices.
“It’s Yusuf’s cut. He should have found out who was writing the paychecks before he decided to screw us over.”
“You docked his pay?” Eames sounded entertained, more than anything.
“Half of it. I shared the other half out between the rest of us. You didn’t notice?”
Eames was scanning the sky, as if another source of interest might reveal itself in this lonely stretch of country. “Life’s too short to spend on all those currency conversions.”
Eames’s insouciance over a ten grand bonus might be genuine, or part of his act. It didn’t matter to Arthur. He filed it away as a trait that could be useful on a future job. The plane was wheeling around to line up with the bare dirt that served for a runway.
“The first level’s a hospital,” Arthur said to fill in the time. “Six storeys high, Saskia’s detailing almost a hundred separate wards. There’s dozens of elevator shafts, but the trick is that they’re sealed off on most floors. The elevators take you round in circles. It’s a maze in 3D. The only way to the top storey is a staircase that leads off the plant room.”
Eames greeted that blankly.
“Lovely. Me, I was only stinging a few greedy Shanghai investors for half a million dollars for some mining rights that don’t actually exist. Nothing as cutting-edge as an imaginary hospital.”
On the long flight back to Perth, Arthur politely asked him about his job, in between sending some overdue texts to Dom and Saskia back home. He had already resigned himself to the unpleasant tasks of wrangling Eames’s ego, along with all the piqued silences and cheerful insults. The job required the most perfect forgery of any of their careers. And that meant he had to make it work.
**
When they met Cobb in his rented flat, he looked as if he hadn’t slept in the time Arthur had been away. His eyes were bloodshot, and he had that frayed sort of stillness Arthur remembered from their years of exile, which threatened to break into reckless action at any unexpected moment. But the light of purpose came into him the moment the door opened, and he clasped Eames’s hand zealously.
“Just the man we need,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
Eames laughed and patted his arm, already pulling away down the hall. “You look good, Dominic. Take it easy.”
Day one of the job and Eames was already indulging in those subtle gestures that marked him out as the outsider within the team, whose presence was not completely reliable. Arthur closed the door behind him and dropped Eames’s bag in the last bedroom. At least he only had to hold them together for 48 hours before they were wrapped.
“Just how bad is she?” Eames asked bluntly, looking Cobb in the eye, as soon as they had settled on the scant pieces of mismatched furniture in the living room.
Cobb’s hunched over his hands, as if his will to live had been punched out of him.
Eames shifted his inquisition to Arthur. “Have you seen her?”
“Considering what she’s been through, she’s in good shape.” The knowledge was second-hand, as the clean-up from the Fischer job and the failed Cobol assignment before it hadn’t exactly left Arthur a lot of opportunities to pay social calls to ex-colleagues’ children. “She does okay at school, doesn’t act out. A little – solitary, is the worst you could say.”
“It’s only me,” Cobb added at last, not looking up. “If I come to the house, she runs off. It makes her panic if I’m in the same room, and if I try to touch her or James, well—“
”And the reason for this?”
Eames’s hands were clasped on the table like a police interviewer. Arthur kept his irritation under control. “You can put two and two together, Eames. She heard her mother say she wasn’t real. All those weeks when Mal was losing it. The kids saw it all. And then at school, people talk. Someone tells her that her father killed her mother. The thought takes hold.”
“By the time I came back, I was a stranger.” Dom straightened up at last, his face haggard. “I need a way in. That’s all. A chance to get my daughter back.”
Eames’s silences always had a dangerous edge. He let this one drag out before he asked, “And you plan to do this by manipulating her sub-conscious?”
“Yes,” Arthur told him firmly. “It’s what we do.” He stood up to open the windows and let in some air. “It’ll be a light touch. No heavy artillery.” Since that didn’t seem to clinch it, he added, “Miles and Eloise won’t be around forever. Philippa needs her father.”
By the time Saskia had shown him through the dreamscapes, he seemed somewhat mollified. He complimented her on the olfactory dimension of her hospital level, and approved of the slightly upscaled proportions that created an intimidating loom.
“A place of safety that is not friendly,” Saskia told him, straightening her glasses and neatly winding up her line. “To see both her parents together in such a place will give her comfort.”
Eames’s thoughtful nod had none of the barbed humouring he reserved for Arthur’s work.
“Did you try the forge?” Arthur asked, impatient.
Eames glanced at the doorway where Cobb was observing.
“Not yet.”
Arthur went to pack up the PASIV case.
“We need to keep working,” Cobb broke out, rolling up his sleeve. “We have a test run first thing in the morning. Everything has to be ready.”
“The architecture is ready,” Saskia said coolly. “Further testing is unnecessary.”
Xiaoxin didn’t even look up from his sprawl on the couch, swift fingers tapping in adjustments to the graph-studded research paper he had up on screen. “The mix is good.”
After a pause, Arthur switched off the machine and started to disassemble the serum receptors. “She’s six years old. We don’t go into her mind unless it’s a hands-down emergency. We can get by without a test run.”
From the clench of Cobb’s fingers, this was going to cause yet another night of sleepless pacing, with yet another layer of jagged charts and scrawled notes pinned to the wall by morning. “Her grandmother will be back on Monday morning. We have one chance before—“
It was Eames who put his hand on Cobb’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said, using a mild fraction of his weight advantage to coax him out of the room. “You’ve hired the best. Let them do their work.”
**
The house was quiet when Miles opened the door to them. From outside, the thick timber and the heavy clouds above had created a momentary impression of something lifeless, preserved under great weight, and for a moment Arthur could let himself imagine that the door might open onto a bygone time. Then James burst out of the kitchen and came hurtling like a cannonball down the hallway.
Too young to remember Arthur from the days when his parents had been the industry’s most stellar innovators, he still accepted the visitors as colleagues from Miles’s old university, passing through on their way to a conference.
“Let me do it,” he said brightly, and a moment later he was making off with Saskia’s overnight bag, dragging the twice-his-size object single-mindedly down the corridor.
Miles’s fond smile disappeared when he turned back to the visitors.
He’d always kept a polite distance from Arthur, like he’d been a bad influence, when in fact it was Mal herself who’d been the most reckless influence of them all, unquestioningly confident that there was no obstacle she couldn’t overcome with a gracious smile and her endless vault of imagination.
“Dom’s waiting in the car,” Arthur said, and that at least won him a nod.
The academic in Miles disdained his military discipline, as compared to the blank palettes of his young protégés that excited his sense of potential. Arthur reminded himself not to take it personally.
He added, “It means a lot to him to have this chance. He knows how much it is to ask. In the circumstances.”
“I’ve put you all out the back here,” Miles informed them briskly. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got some papers to get back to.”
It was Eames who tracked Philippa down.
They’d walked around enough to get familiar with the layout of the house, finished a pot of tea and watched their chemist, Xiaoxin help James build a submarine train out of Lego blocks when Arthur noticed his absence. He went in search, because a gut feeling that Eames had enough moral fibre not to use this job as an opportunity to ferret out secrets to use for leverage was not the same as a guarantee.
Arthur found him loitering at the edge of the garden, where Miles’s orderly flower beds started to disappear into the rambling wood beyond. He was intently watching a treehouse almost hidden by early evening shadow. The first striking detail was that the rungs on its ladder had been smashed away, so that the remaining short stubs provided a toe-hold for nothing larger than a nimble six-year-old foot. Inside, he could just distinguish a neat blue dress and white stockinged legs. Behind her, Arthur could make out the shape of a wing on the wall. The translucent veins were being sketched in with meticulous control that belonged on a much older hand. A familiar hand. Arthur looked away.
There was a black plastic snake across the threshold. Eames stepped forward to stroke its curved back cautiously, avoiding the head.
“They’re only fierce if you surprise them,” he said in a low voice that was hard to catch. “I had a royal python in a tree stump in my back yard, in a place called Mopti. She ate the rats and scared the burglars. Dogs, they get into fights and chew the furniture. It’s a snake you want, every time.”
Philippa left off her drawing and turned, chalk in hand, but made no reply.
If he found himself unwillingly convinced by Eames’s heartfelt narrative, it was only a sign that he’d picked a team that knew their job. In any case, the core of Eames’s skill set was acting, and a good actor knew how to build an illusion on foundations that were grounded in truth. Eames had been in Mali, that much was true. Back in his short-lived stint in espionage, before his lucrative hustling days, before he’d discovered dreamshare.
“I used to let Ripley climb up my arm, if the night was cold.” He was leaning on the side of the treehouse wall now, as if conducting a conversation with himself that Philippa just happened to be in earshot of. “The people I was working with weren’t the nice sort. So it was just me and that snake. And a roof that leaked in the corners, and a kitchen full of ants. And a crate of illegal handguns, to get me a foothold in the black market.”
Even as he frowned, Arthur remembered that Mal had been fearless, her curiosity most powerfully aroused by knowledge that was unseemly, forbidden, or downright impossible.
Eames folded his arms and waited. A small, clean hand reached out, chalk tucked in the crook of its thumb, and stroked the snake’s back, just once.
Eventually, the tap of chalk strokes resumed. A break in the clouds illuminated the interior momentarily. He caught glimpses of figures – the legs of a horse, a set of horns, and a curling, barbed tail. And leaning by the wall was a plastic doll in a fitted black dress. Her glossy blonde hair had been cut to shoulder length and coloured black with a marker pen.
Eames bent down and picked up a leaf.
“Caterpillars, on the other hand.” He deposited the leaf inside, and she turned around to look. “They’re good travellers. The gypsy moth can go for miles, sailing on a parachute made of silk. But they’re rotten guard animals. Even the ones that spit acid, you’d need a thousand of them to make a good defence. Hard to train that many.”
She bent down warily.
“And even harder to remember all their names.”
He must have smiled then, because she mirrored it as she looked up and told him, “I’d call them all the same name. They wouldn’t mind.”
Arthur’s next breath was tight with the memory of that smile, on Mal’s lovely face, smoothing over a refusal or a disagreement, effortlessly making consensus out of conflict.
Maybe Eames was as thrown by it as Arthur, because all of a sudden he picked up the elegantly dressed doll and asked presumptuously, “Who’s this?”
Philippa’s face closed off. “No-one.”
Then she slid expertly down the ladder and ran into the woods.
**
The mood was solemn in her little bedroom that night.
“No,” Arthur whispered, grabbing Cobb’s hand in the act of reaching out to stroke her hair. “Don’t wake her.”
Mercifully, Xiaoxin hit the release switch and a second later they were unconscious.
**
As they hurried down the main corridor of the hospital’s ground level, Arthur had a moment to regret the brevity of this job. Saskia’s build was the sort of clear-headed geometric marvel that deserved a hell of a lot longer to walk around in.
It was an enormous level, far out of proportion to the scale of their mark. But it had to be. What little formal scholarship existed on somnacin was full of warnings about the tendency of young imaginations to populate dreamscapes with wholly unpredictable swarms of projections. So their design had to be robust enough to contain everything from ballerinas to a rampaging herd of triceratops.
They were in the lift shaft when the first shudder shook the building.
“Foundations?” Arthur frowned.
“The footings could withstand a low-level missile strike,” Saskia told him. “Reinforced concrete slab. Piles are ISO standard with a twenty percent margin of error. It’s not the foundations.”
They had navigated the hidden service staircase and the plant room catwalk, and were coming up to the waiting room outside the surgery where Philippa would be, when the second tremor hit.
“Quickly,” Cobb said, taking the last flight of stairs two at a time. “We’re going to have to make it fast.”
By the time they had stopped outside the waiting room for Eames to put on his forge, window panes were smashing like popcorn along the building exterior.
“It’s got to be an external influence,” Saskia diagnosed in alarm. “There’s nothing in the architecture to explain it.”
A shadow passed outside the building, rippling and elongated.
“Pick up the pace, come on, come on,” Cobb said, hand on the waiting room door.
“I’ll go in to her. You follow.” In her scrubs, Saskia looked trustworthy down to the tips of her neatly tied back hair. “Philippa,” she said as she entered. “I’m Dr Malling. Don’t worry, your parents will be along shortly. James is going to be all right. We’ll take good care of him.”
That was when something enormous crashed into the level below. The floor jolted like a tabletop struck by a giant hand. The side of the building exploded into flame and debris.
Arthur remembered the bizarre moment of catching Eames’s gaze in the mirror. His steady, battle-hardened look, transposed poignantly on to Mal’s elegant features. Then the floors buckled like wet cardboard under bricks, and crushed them away into nothing.
**
By the time Arthur could get to his feet, Eames had Cobb up against the wall outside the bedroom.
“What the fuck was that?” he was growling.
“Calm down—“
“All right, I’ll say it. Her sub-conscious recognised the dream state. She’s been under before. And she didn’t like it. Am I close?”
Arthur put his hand on Eames’s forearm until he let go. “Not here. Keep moving.”
In the kitchen, Cobb ran himself a glass of water and put it down again.
“Tell me you didn’t do it just for kicks,” Eames demanded, the tight cross of his arms making his biceps stand out menacingly.
“What do you think I am? Jesus.”
Saskia hugged her arms around herself protectively. “I’ve never seen such an extreme reaction.”
Eames’s expression remained thunderous.
“You’ve been in her dreams before.”
“Only once,” Cobb scowled back at him. “If you’d seen how unhappy she was, you’ve have wanted to protect—“
“You’ve been in her dreams before and you didn’t think to mention it. Anything could have happened in there. You useless fucking cowboy, there was half an hour on the clock, and we could have spent it crushed und—“
“Anyway, it didn’t take.”
The chill grip of dread made Arthur speak up. “What didn’t take?”
“Militarisation.”
He heard his own breath came out in a hiss.
Cobb went on. “It was bad, at the end. You never saw the worst. Mal could have been capable of anything.”
Eames’s hand closed around the handle of a frypan that, with his full strength behind it, could become a murder weapon.
“So we’re dealing with a half-militarised child with a traumatic reaction to shared dreaming,” Arthur said, trying to re-cast it as a puzzle. “And we have to find a work-around tonight.”
The saucepan clattered as Eames discarded it. “No. There is no round two. Not tonight. I’m not going under again until he’s on the other side of a state border.”
Dom turned his back. “Jesus Christ.”
It was like a boxing ring, all this hostility zinging around the kitchen’s pale yellow walls. Arthur pulled a pristine handkerchief from his pocket and gestured to the wound inside Eames’s elbow from the hastily removed needle. Cobb had every right to be part of this extraction. And, for every year his ill-disciplined improvisation had taken off Arthur’s life, it had also got them out of a dozen tight corners. But the job had just become diabolically difficult, and the thought of losing Eames’s dependable competence made his head throb.
“Just say I was prepared to re-write the entire plan at the eleventh hour,” he let himself think aloud. “You still can’t forge both parents.”
“Saskia can play Mal on the first level. Give her a chignon and the right dress, she’ll pass from behind, and we let the kid’s imagination do the rest. I’ll forge Dominic. Better than the real thing.”
Cobb leaned back against the bench, falling into the suave conman persona that always seemed to arrive in times of deepest crisis. “This job needs the best extractor in the business. Especially now.”
Eames said, “If he’s not in a taxi in five minutes, I will be.”
Arthur glanced at the other two. Saskia looked as side-swiped as he felt, and Xiaoxin had whipped out his phone, most likely to send a few more emails for his research project back in San Francisco, as if to make it clear that his role stopped at mixing the compounds.
Planting his feet squarely, he turned to Cobb. “It won’t hurt to leave some time for the thought to settle in her mind before she sees you again. Really let it take hold. Have the rest of the weekend in Vegas. Work over a few blackjack tables. We’ll see you on Monday.”
“Send a photo from the Strip,” Eames said darkly. “Today’s paper.”
**
If the first level said my father looks after my mother and my brother in a crisis, the second level was more general and featured Cobb (or Eames’s forgery of Cobb) in the role of firefighter, saving a library from what was supposed to be a carefully controlled blaze that followed a precise pattern of strategically placed flammable materials.
The storeroom had barely begun to smoke when there was the sound of something truck-sized crashing into the roof. Shelves along the walls collapsed. Then the entire ceiling burst simultaneously into flame.
Watching Eames shove his whole head under the kitchen faucet and run cold water until his trembling subsided, Arthur helplessly collected a tea towel and waited for the chance to pass it to him.
“We need to try something new,” he said as Eames held the towel over his face and shook his head. “I’m not giving up on her.”
Eames plucked a coffee cup off the dish drainer, sloshed a measure of Miles’s best scotch into it, and knocked it back in a couple of gulps. He raked his wet hair back off his face and let his hands rest there for a good while.
Then he said, “Let her set the scene. No, hear me out. We go into Philippa’s dream. Your architect is solid. You can think on your feet. And Cobb’s face is easy enough for me to put on, wherever we end up.”
Eames looked bone tired, as if he craved a beer and a comfortable sofa much more than a needlessly high-risk dream venture. And although he relished a gun-fight or a car chase if it came his way, and played up to either with unashamed derring-do, he never drew danger to the job deliberately. In fact, he put in innumerable quiet hours of research to eliminate any risk that could be disposed of.
“We’d need extra time on the clock,” Saskia agreed a short while later. “With a sub-conscious this hostile, I won’t be able to build much in situ. I’ve got a good library of stand-alone structures in here I can put up on the spot.”
Xiaoxin slotted the revised mix back into place and said, “Let’s get this monumental cock-up on the road then.”
**
Philippa dreamed big.
At first it seemed that the whole world was nothing but reddish-brown ridges, stretching out forever like he was flying over a desert of thin plateaus and deep, shadowy chasms.
Then Arthur got his bearings and realised he was looking at a tree. The trunk was so wide he could barely see the edges. Thirty or forty of him could have joined hands around the base and still not met at the other side. A skirt of moss covered the lower reaches, and the top was lost to sight.
The air was still and quiet, as if the wetness in it had sucked up all the sound. It reminded him of an older, more dangerous version of the woods around the house. A place where nothing happened quickly; where the silent forest could wait a day, or a week, for the distraction of a dead twig falling. The centuries-old memory of the trees seemed to blanket the ground as heavily as the sodden smell of the leaf litter.
He turned at the sound of a low whistle.
It took him a stunned instant to process the sight. That was not Saskia beside a horse, or on a horse, or in any way near a horse.
Where her waist and hips should be, her bare skin fused into the forequarters of a champion thoroughbred, covered in a sleek coat the same deep brown as her hair. Her four hooves shuffled almost noiselessly on the soft ground. A leaf coloured top with leather thong lacing struck an awkward balance between modest and deadly. She looked, he thought guiltily, like she had a hell of a gallop in her.
Tentatively she turned a circle. Each step fell quicker and neater than the last.
“This I can work with,” she said with a grin, and in two powerful strides she had launched up into the air and over a fallen log.
Arthur, who was a sucker for beauty and agility wherever on the gender spectrum those qualities happened to collide, followed her helplessly with his eyes.
“Let’s see what you can do then.”
It registered that Eames was talking to him. For a second, he thought the dream had let Eames off lightly, leaving him his ordinary strongman proportions. Then he noticed the haunches, the fetlocks. The wicked pointed ears. And the tattooed bands that wrapped around his arms like tame snakes.
Eames repeated, “Go on. Give us a flutter.”
That was when Arthur realised he was five feet off the ground, and promptly fell out of the air.
When he recovered himself, Eames was busy smoothing down the tawny hair on his lower half, shifting about with jerky steps that produced a muffled thud of hoof. “The young lady,” he was musing to himself, “certainly is a distinguished judge of character.”
Dreams drew something out of their forger, Arthur had already known that. In the skin of any character, he put aside his prickliness and relished the performance. It opened him up in a way he may not have been aware of. There was something childish in his love of the theatre of it. Early on, Arthur had mistrusted it as amateurism, before they’d been through enough narrow escapes to show how he could switch from playful to deadly in the blink of an eye, at the first sign of a threat.
It was a bit infectious, his obvious glee. It spoke to the side of Arthur that woke up whenever a plan went off the rails and he was forced into helter skelter improvisation with a mob of furious projections on his heels. It was all too easy to forget that, when you took away the clients and the deadlines and the threat of brain-frizzle, they had more fun than almost any other trade on the planet.
He kicked up into the air, flexing his wings, and drew an unlikely sword from his belt.
“Well if you aren’t the fearsomest fairy prince in the kingdom,” Eames said, a little softly.
His intent gaze had slipped around to the speedy flit Arthur’s wings as he hovered. That was definitely a smile.
Arthur let him mock. At least Philippa’s imagination had dressed him in the waistcoat and pants he’d worn that morning. The indignity of being less than a foot high would have been harder to bear if he’d had to do it in a tunic.
“Do you know you have horns?” he asked, as if Eames had grown them on purpose.
Slowly, Eames felt one corner of his forehead, then the other. The skin rose up, turning thick and callused, and out of it projected two slender, vicious looking spines. The intimate curiosity with which Eames fondled them made Arthur faintly embarrassed.
He was almost glad when Saskia cocked her head and said, “Something’s coming.”
It was pretty handy to be able to dart up into the treetops to get a better vantage point.
“There’s a crowd coming up the hill,” Arthur reported. “Fifty. Maybe a couple hundred. They had some blades on them, I could see that much.”
“I better get to work then,” Saskia said briskly, “if we want to survive long enough to get through to her. You go find our subject while I sort this out.”
Arthur glanced around for any way to stop a horde of projections without meddling with an obstinate dreamscape, and came up blank.
“Keep it light. Light as you can.”
She threw him a hot-blooded look over her shoulder as she cleared a huge tree root and vanished into the trees. In the distance, he saw the subtle sway of the canopy where she was starting her build, gouging chasms and pits into the earth to excavate a maze.
“We won’t have much time if Philippa reacts to this the way I think she will. Let’s go. Eames?”
He was staring into middle distance, looking dazed. He shook himself vaguely at Arthur’s prompt.
“You wouldn’t have a leg of mutton in one of those impeccably prepared pockets, would you? I’ve got the damnedest craving.”
**
His craving notwithstanding, Eames was in pretty fine spirits by the time they reached the top of the ridge. Apparently it was a heady combination, mastering the treacherously steep terrain on his nimble goat legs, shirtless in the sun-dappled woodland. Arthur might have shared a bit of the same excitement – although he kept a better lid on it – as he set himself down on a rock on the bare ridge. The more impossible the challenge, the greater the satisfaction of mastering it.
The wooden fortress at the tip of the spur was a more serious version of her treehouse. Its inner defences were palisades filed into lethal points on top. The outer defence was a ditch full of bears.
“Forcing our way in will only make her fight. We have to make her want to come out here. We need a temptation.”
Eames’s hooves stamped.
“A feast.” Arthur gave him a crushing look. “I’m serious. A feast. Surely you can rustle up a roasted boar or two. I’d settle for a pigeon.”
Arthur glanced into the ditch of lumbering bears, going about their everyday business as gently as oversized kittens.
“Throw in a barrel of wine,” Eames embellished, “and some nubile dancers as well.”
In the corner of his eye, he could see Eames feeling around for a set of pan pipes that Philippa’s sketchy mythological knowledge had failed to supply.
“A tea party,” Arthur said.
“A bacchanal!”
“A tea party.”
“Sort of the same thing with floral crockery, when you get down to it.”
The disgraced aristocrat act was the biggest con Eames had ever pulled, Arthur thought to himself. Even if his research hadn’t already told him that Eames was born and bred in Peckham, there were little ways it showed.
It made a weird spread, the plates of pink iced fairy cakes and éclairs set beside the haunch of roast meat that Eames was practically munching with his eyes. The best teapot he could dream up without a real life model to work off was red with while polka dots. The smell of peppermint wafted pleasingly from the spout.
“Shall I pour two cups then?” Eames enquired in his most carrying voice.
A moment later, the drawbridge began to descend.
“Lady Philippa,” Arthur said, with what he hoped was a courtly bow. “Welcome.”
She was reserved at first, as she picked the cherry off the top of her cake and popped it cautiously in her mouth. She sat on the red checked picnic blanket with her knees bent underneath her, as if prepared for a quick exit. But a laugh burst out of her when Arthur went to pour from a teapot that weighed more than he did. He gave her a nice bit of slapstick as he tumbled back, arms wheeling. Eames picked him up as easily as a daisy, and took up the pot to pour.
“If you don’t mind me saying, you have a lot of bears,” Eames made conversation as they sipped. “Are they friendly?”
“Only to me.” She examined Eames critically, as though weighing up how far she could trust him with her secrets. “They protect me. They do what I tell them. I feed them honey and roasted nuts, but they can eat you up whole if you do something bad.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” replied Eames with a worried frown.
She smiled sweetly, a rapid transition that was every bit as disarming as when her mother had wielded it. “They don’t eat my friends.”
When Eames grinned that wicked, conspiratorial, unexpected grin right back at her, that was when Arthur knew as a certainty that they could pull this job off.
“Have the bears always been there?” Arthur asked.
“There used to be water,” Philippa explained, with a child’s satisfaction in the role reversal of teaching a slow-witted grown-up, and the heady power of building a reality with every word she spoke. “There were dolphins, before. And mermaids. They used to play on the rocks outside my house. But then-“
Something shifted in the air at her pause. Something like the static charge of an incoming storm. Back down the slope, where Saskia was building her maze, the air darkened.
“What happened?” Eames asked softly.
She put her half-eaten cake down and clenched her sticky hands together.
“There was a bad man.”
Arthur shared a brief glance with Eames. This was getting to the heart of it.
“What sort of man?”
“He was – a wizard. He came here. I tried to make him go away. He scared me. I had to—”
There was no need for her to finish the sentence, because by then Arthur could see the manifestation of her anxiety and panic. From the gathering storm wove a black dragon, long and sinuous as a snake. Smoke blew from its nostrils. It circled the treetops above Saskia’s location, as if searching for something through the canopy.
“Now you’ve got your bears to protect you,” Eames said quickly.
Arthur drew his sword, “And us.”
“No-one,” Eames added darkly, “is getting their hands on our picnic. Not if I can help it.”
He took a greedy bite of his lamb leg. Arthur skewered a glacé cherry viciously on the tip of his sword. She plucked it off with a giggle and the sky began to clear.
A plan was pulling itself together in Arthur’s head now. All he needed was a distraction to give him a chance to talk it over in private.
“It appears you have reinforcements,” Eames said, pointing to the sky above her head. “What are those, do you think?”
At first, Arthur could see nothing among the distant clouds. Then, as Philippa’s imagination turned Eames’s suggestion into solid form, he made out specks heading in their direction. As they approached, he could see the parachutes, domes made from silk in orange and sky blue, purple and yellow. Then the occupants came into view. Pale green caterpillars, as big as cucumbers and smiling as they floated down.
Arthur seized the opportunity to climb up onto Eames’s shoulder and whisper in his ear.
“Can you forge here?”
“I think so. For a short while, at least.”
The nearest horn seemed to shrink and pull back into his body, the skin smoothing over. Then it sprang back into place as Eames let Philippa’s imagination have its way again. Out of nowhere, Arthur found himself captivated by the refashioned contours of Eames’s face: the way his strong jaw tapered back to the long, graceful ridges of his ear. The bony strength of them, no soft lobes to speak of. He felt the ditch and swell of Eames’s shoulder beneath him as he licked meat juices off his finger.
“You’re not watching,” Philippa said sternly.
“I’m watching very carefully indeed,” Eames told her. “Look at that.”
Where he pointed, a bright green shoot sprung up from the ground, weaving towards the sky like a fast-motion beanstalk. Its head burst open into white daisy petals, hasty and cartoonish as a child’s drawing. As the first caterpillar descended, it landed right on the yellow centre of the flower and curled into a ball as the petals closed back over it.
It looked simple enough, but Eames’s temple was damp from the exertion of battling for control of the dreamscape. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his face.
Philippa had no more than drawn an anxious breath when the petals opened again. A butterfly floated out, its newly fledged wings unfurling to reveal silvery threads that caught the light and threw it back in sparkles. The butterfly gave a swooping, leisurely flap and sailed away on an updraft.
With a gasp, Philippa jumped to her feet to chase it.
Arthur was pierced with a sense of unfairness and dread. He was too old to fall for magic tricks. He should know better. But here he was, watching Eames dream up these delicate gossamer wings, after lazing about clad in those warrior muscles, tearing meat off the bone like a lion. Here he was, watching Eames pull another ingenious trick to steer the job where it needed to go.
He struggled to gather his thoughts. Of all the inconvenient moments to look at his co-worker and see brilliance instead of attention-seeking, and steadfastness instead of contrariness. Of all the times to be ambushed by his own goddamn—
“Yes I can forge here,” Eames said mildly. “And?”
Arthur blinked himself back into focus.
“We need danger. Something her father can save her from. But it’s got to be gradual. We know what happens if she gets too scared.”
“Peril it is then,” Eames said. “The fluffy kind. Now for the nectar of inspiration …”
He drank from his cup with a gusto that cold peppermint tea was unlikely to merit. When Arthur dipped his sword in, the contents smelled like something you might get if you fermented unripe grapes with aniseed and maybe some wasp venom, and didn’t much mind whether you woke up the morning after.
“If I play a part, I don’t stop half way.” He gently took Arthur off his shoulder and set him back on the rug. “Careful. A little thing like you could get knocked out on just a whiff.”
The pad of one finger stroked the flat of Arthur’s wing as he let go.
The purposeful sound of Saskia’s hooves announced her approach. Philippa looked up at her with such distracted wonder that the silvery butterfly launched off her finger and escaped.
“I’ve done the best I can,” she reported. “They’ll find their way out pretty soon.”
“I’ll stop them,” Eames vowed, brandishing a teaspoon like a sabre.
Arthur drew his sword. “We need to be gone before they get here. The less we have to do with the wizard’s soldiers, the better.”
Saskia followed his lead. “Into the valley then. I can take the princess.”
“Unless …” Arthur paused. One by one, they looked to him. “While his mind is here, searching for us, we could take the battle to him.”
“A quest.” Eames raised his teacup in a toast. “I do love a quest.”
“What do you mean?” Philippa demanded.
Arthur let his voice get hushed. “The wizard draws his power from a black mirror. He keeps it hidden, deep in his castle, where no-one can get to it. But for someone brave enough, there just might be a way.”
Before his eyes, the child drew in on herself.
“The castle’s a hundred leagues away, you know.” Eames was all wide-eyed innocence under Arthur’s glare. “Or ninety-eight as the raven flies. What we need is a short-cut.”
“A short-cut. And I suppose you know where to find one, do you?”
“Not me.” He got to his feet with a sturdy ease that should not have been possible on goat legs, and stretched indulgently. “Isn’t there a fairy path in these parts?”
There was no mistaking the new eagerness in Philippa’s attention. Arthur sprang up into the air and let his wings lift him higher.
“This way.”
The far side of the ridge, where no-one’s imagination had ventured, was just a tangle of trees. Arthur flew over the thick ferns and gnarled mossy roots while Saskia followed more cautiously with Philippa on her back. It was going to be very slow going, unless—
“There should be stairs,” he said, “around here somewhere.”
“There!” As Philippa pointed, her imagination transformed a random hollow into the path they needed. There were fully formed stone steps by the time they reached it, covered in ancient moss and winding down into the darkness.
As Saskia navigated their widest breadth, at the circumference, Arthur built their route in his mind and described it.
“There should be one more twist,” he said. “Then the stairs flatten out and there’s an archway made of white bricks, and a tunnel. It’s only short. Then you start to see a glow, and before you know it you come to a door. It’s silverly and thin, like a curtain made of mist, and it glows like the moon.”
The shimmering door blocked the path almost exactly as he’d imagined it. They stopped in front of it.
“On the other side, we’ll be in the dungeons of his castle. Don’t be afraid. He isn’t home. Now, this is a special door, without a handle. You walk right through it. We’ll go first.”
As they pushed through into unstructured darkness, Arthur felt his way towards Eames’s ear and said, “Go on ahead. Find a cell somewhere. Put your face on. If you can’t hold it, make a fist with your left hand, and I’ll distract her.”
Behind them, Saskia carried Philippa through the door, and immediately the corridor around them took shape. The floor hardened into flagstones, and stalactites like dragon teeth sprang from the ceiling far above them. Eames was already hurrying up the stairs ahead of them.
By the time they reached the first level, he had tied himself to an iron loop embedded in the wall. He was Dominic Cobb down to the hunted look in his eyes. He wore a white shirt and what must have been a splendid gold doublet before the ordeal of his imprisonment. The strain of holding the forge together could just as easily be explained away as torment. It was great material to spin into a noble tale.
“Don’t let him out!” Philippa cried in alarm, arms tightening around Saskia’s waist. Almost immediately, Arthur felt that tell-tale menace in the air.
“We can’t leave him here,” he told her. “He’s close to death.”
Eames groaned weakly and slumped in his bindings. “Help me,” he said in a husky version of Cobb’s voice, eyes fluttering closed.
“Where’s the mirror?” Philippa demanded. “We have to go.”
“Please help me,” Eames tried again. “The wizard invaded my kingdom. He took away my queen and locked me in this tower. It’s been two years. All I want is to go home and see my children one more time. Please, my lady. No-one else can save me.”
As she hesitated, Arthur saw that she was no longer a young child to be tricked against her will. Something incongruously adult had taken up residence behind her eyes. Something that knew the imprisoned prince was not what he appeared.
“It’s all right,” Arthur said as he cut Eames free. “I’ll stab him through the heart if he tries to hurt you.”
But her unease was barely quieted. As they climbed up to the throne room, the walls around them shuddered.
“The mirror is in a secret chamber behind his throne,” Eames-as-Cobb said. “He showed me when he brought me here.”
Wisps of smoke were creeping in the windows as they reached the throne room. Outside, a dark shadow wended its way back and forth, a black predator seeking a way in.
Philippa swung down from her mount and ran towards the back wall. When she touched it, a hidden doorway opened.
Eames seized a pike from a suit of armour and followed at a run. Arthur arrived just in time to see him drive the pike straight into the mirror’s surface. With a piercing shriek, the glass melted into a silvery stream and puddled on the floor.
The forge slipped as Eames fell onto the ground, exhausted. Luckily, Philippa was too busy staring in horror at the metallic pool that was creeping towards her sandals.
“This way, my lady,” Arthur said, drawing her back to the throne room.
But in the doorway, she turned back to where Eames’s broad shoulders were shrinking back into Cobb’s proportions. She stumbled and at the same time the black dragon smashed through the wall of the throne room with a roar that made the floor shake and the mortar shower down from the walls.
Philippa hugged her arms around herself as if she didn’t know which sight to be more frightened of.
“Stay back!” Saskia commanded, staring down the beast that was twenty times her size.
But she had no weapons at her disposal, other than the bluff in her voice, and manipulating the dreamscape with Philippa in this fragile state would be the end of everything.
“Let me deal with this,” came Cobb’s voice, and Eames strode past them, back in character. The gleam had returned to his doublet, and he looked every inch the fairytale prince. But as he plucked Arthur’s little sword from his hands, on his face was a look of distinctly unimpressed resignation that was pure Eames.
The dragon launched into the air and circled menacingly the moment it caught sight of him. Its golden eyes had the unrelenting focus of a hungry cat. Whatever it was – some remnant part of Cobb, or of Mal, or just three years of childhood trauma given flesh – it fixated on him. Arthur’s ribs tightened as he realised that, if Eames managed to give them the heroism that Philippa needed to witness, it was unlikely to be in victory.
The dragon swooped, its elegant curves turning straight as an arrow.
“Stay behind me,” Eames ordered with a wild-eyed glance towards them. “I won’t let it hurt you. I promise.”
At the last minute, he dived away, and rolled a couple of inches from where the glistening point of the dragon’s claw raked the stone with a shriek. It roared as it ascended again, into the thick clouds of smoke that spilled from the flaming turrets.
Beside him, Philippa was crying now, her eyes glued to the dragon as it circled and whipped its long tail about.
“Stop!” she sobbed. “Go away. Go away.”
Arthur fought the urge to comfort her.
“Listen to me,” Cobb called as he got painfully back to his feet. “I’ll keep you safe. You have to trust me.”
And a moment later, the dragon hurled like black lightning out of the smoke and snatched him in its claw.
Pain was in the mind, Arthur thought as a drop of blood struck the floor in front of them. He remembered how the shade of Mal had always aimed to cast the most excruciating wounds. The gut, the knees, and that shot in the cathedral level that had severed his lower spine.
Above them, Eames cried out, holding Cobb’s voice.
“Let him go,” Philippa whispered.
But this part of the dream was borne from sub-conscious emotions well beyond her control.
Arthur saw him brandish the tiny sword, that looked as useless as a splinter. Then his heart lifted. This was a dream. Scale was meaningless. The sword was nothing but a symbol. The real battle was between the iron control that Philippa’s fear and pain wielded over the dreamscape, and Eames’s slippery ability as a forger. All that mattered was what Eames could make her believe that sword could do.
“It’s a fairy sword,” Arthur said in a whisper. “A true prince can use it. Go on.”
Eames slashed upwards and caught the dragon’s throat. For a moment, Arthur held his breath. Then the creature shattered into a cloud of black ash. And out of it, Eames fell.
Philippa had her hands over her face, shaking. Before Arthur could properly curse his lightweight proportions, Saskia was kneeling on the ground, wrapping the traumatised child in her arms.
“It’s over, darling,” she repeated as the tears of shock and fear grew into heartbroken, overwhelmed sobbing. “It’s all right.”
By the time Arthur reached his side, Eames was barely conscious. It was his own body that lay broken on the flagstones, in his own charred and torn street clothes. The satyr legs of Philippa’s passionate imagination disappeared as she cried herself into an exhausted sleep. When Arthur went to flutter his wings, they were gone.
He knelt down and put his hand lightly on Eames’s shoulder.
“Nice work,” he said softly. “Well beyond the call of duty.”
Eames’s gaze took a while to lock on him. “Oh Arthur. Your grudging praise is like the songs of—”
The rest of his reply was swallowed up in a grimace of pain.
Arthur thought about the PASIVs he’d dreamed up to take the team down to a second or third level, remembered how meticulously he’d had to replicate the chemist’s specifications to fill the receptors with the exact mix they needed. In his mind, he shuffled the formula around: elevated barbiturate levels and a pleasant overlay of narcotic. He put his hand in his pocket and drew it out full of white powder.
“Sweet dreams, Mr Eames,” he murmured as he blew the powder into a fine mist.
The pain on Eames’s face smoothed into a weak smile. His breath grew slower, and slower, and stopped. Arthur just had time to thumb at the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth before he slipped away entirely.
**
Eames was standing in the doorway with a glass of water when they came round.
In the light of the bedside lamp, Philippa’s sleeping face looked angelic, but there was the tiny glitter of a tear caught in the corner of her eye.
“Will you stay with her?” Arthur whispered to Miles.
“Of course,” Miles replied from where he’d been dozing in a chair on the other side of the bed. In his eyes was a question.
“It went pretty well,” Arthur told him, and meant it.
He pulled the blanket up nice and snug under Philippa’s chin, and switched off the light.
**
The pack-up the next afternoon, back at Cobb’s flat, was satisfyingly neat. It took half the work out of the job when they had a mark who didn’t need to be lured into a dark corner and forcibly sedated. But Arthur found himself tempted to drag it out.
“All in order?” he asked, leaning in the door of Eames’s room to watch him knotting up a plastic bag holding a pair of hiking boots.
“No lasting effects, if that’s what you mean.”
Arthur’s eyes clung to him as he squatted down to clear a space in his suitcase. It was fascinating the way his perspective had changed overnight. He’d always filed away Eames’s powerful build as being a handy asset if a job came down to a fist fight or a locked door. Today, his palms tingled with impatience to know what all that carefully tended muscle felt like flexing under his touch. He wanted to earn the privilege of finding out.
“We’ve most likely wasted our time, of course,” Eames went on as he jostled the boots into place. “Your man Cobb’s an addict. He’ll only fuck it all up again.”
Arthur thought that was unlikely, for two reason. The first was the way Eames had grabbed Cobb by the front of his shirt the moment he stepped in the door, and whatever he said had drained the blood from Cobb’s face and sent him sulking into the kitchen for the last hour. The other was packed in its silver case in Arthur’s room, waiting for him to take with him.
“Even if he hadn’t learned his lesson,” Arthur said. “He’s can’t go under without a PASIV. I charged a very specific fee for running this job for him.”
Eames laughed approvingly as he reached around to collect the novel and notepad from the nightstand. A few moments later, he left off his packing and sat on the bed. His attention settled enquiringly on Arthur.
There was nothing to do but give it his best shot.
“I’ve got a job in Frankfurt in a couple of weeks,” Arthur told him. “It could use your help.”
Eames leaned back, hands sinking into the sheets. “This is the one that Sass tells me has got no room for a forger. Is it?”
Arthur met that with an inconsequential shrug and refused to be thrown.
“It’s a slow job, lots of free weekends while the ground work goes in place. It’s only four hours by train to Berlin. There’s some people I could introduce you to. And I’ll bet there’s places you’d like to go back to. ”
Eames looked at him with the same incipient smirk he’d use to greet welcome or unwelcome news.
Then he said, “Why go through EU customs if I don’t need to? Come back to my room at the Paramount. I’ve got a day to kill before I fly out tomorrow.”
Arthur had to look at the floor to keep the smile off his face, because sure, he’d take a few hours of recreational sex if that was the best offer he could get.
“You should come to Frankfurt.” He held Eames’s gaze. “Come on board as a consultant if you like. I’m pretty sure I can make it worth your while.”
A sudden grin broke across Eames’s face.
“And here I was thinking you played your cards close to your chest,” he said, half laughing, as he scratched bashfully at the front of his t-shirt.
“Occasionally I throw down my hand. If the stakes are worth it.”
Delighting Eames with the unexpected was enough to win him a few moments of his fickle attention. But Arthur was gambling for higher stakes than that.
“Come to Frankfurt,” he repeated in a voice that sounded revealingly warm. “You’ve got a week to think about it.”
He went to collect his suitcase and the PASIV, and to deliver Cobb a very stern lecture about the new leaf he was about to turn over, whether he liked it or not.
**
He knocked at Eames’s hotel room that night anyway. Because he’d closed enough tricky deals in his dreamshare career to understand the compelling value of a product sample. And this was one opportunity he was going to pour every last drop of his determination and ingenuity into holding onto.
**
Sometime long after dawn, the faint buzz of his phone reached into sleep and hooked him out. He slipped out of the messy sheets and plucked it off the coffee table.
Attached to Miles’s text was a picture. Philippa’s blond head asleep in Cobb’s lap. Her father’s hand grasping her wrist in a grip that looked certain not to let go easily.
Arthur stretched and reluctantly started the process of getting back into last night’s clothes.
Out cold on the bed, Eames made a disarmingly lovely sight. Arthur drank in the intimate view of his back and shoulders, the sprawl of his legs under the sheet.
His mind was busy with curiosity and greed. He wanted to watch Eames style his hair in the morning, find out how he wielded the comb. He wanted to watch Eames doing mundane things, like unplugging his phone to roll the cord deftly into loops and cinch it with a wire tie. He wanted to see those capable hands pulling apart a soggy hotel croissant, choosing between marmalade and jam.
But he knew better than to let Eames’s stillness fool him. On waking, he’d be as elusive and barbed as ever. If there was ever going to be a day when he opened his eyes and reached out for Arthur with a smile, they had a lot of ground to cover together before they got there.
Arthur found he didn’t mind. The more impossible the challenge, the greater the satisfaction in conquering it.
On the bathroom counter was a hotel sewing kit. It took less than a minute with his Swiss army knife to fold a pin around the needle in the shape of a hilt.
He dropped the tiny sword into an envelope and left it on the pillow.
**