Stepping Sideways Into the Underground

by toujourspret

The team takes a case that's different from the usual case: extract the location of a serial killer's last victim. Ariadne finds herself inside the murderer's mind, lost in a twisted Wonderland where the only way out is in and the only way up is down.

Author's Note: This is definitely one I'd recommend reading on my journal, but I'm putting it up for the sake of having it with everything else. This fic is one of the big reasons for the radio silence; it was written for the Inception Big Bang, and there is some absolutely stunning art by slanted_edges that you can see through the link on the master post in that community and my journal. I've got one more Inception fic coming (and one for Sucker Punch), and then I'll see where I go next!

Warnings: Very disturbing imagery, violence against children, offscreen mention of sexual abuse, character death (non-canon characters)

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Stepping Sideways Into the Underground

There's something so wrong about the way her totem tips that she can't even recognize what it is at first. She realizes she's holding her breath, and as it rushes out of her chest in one devastated whoosh, the metal figure falls faster, landing on the stone with a ringing sound that echoes as it rolls on the rim of its base. This is a dream. Of course it is; she realizes this now, wonders how she ever, ever managed to forget this. Over the barrel of his pistol, the man's eyes screw up in an unreadable expression. The music hasn't started yet, but the projections somehow already know this is a dream.

She has no choice. Ariadne bolts into the trees.

::

The case is easy enough. They're working for the government this time, one of those rare cases that's not only perfectly legal but moral as well, the kind of case Cobb picks up when the boredom of fatherhood drives him back into the shady realm between consciousness and awareness.

"The mark's name is Karl Lewis," Cobb explains. They're in a workspace, an honest to god workspace with real carpeting and stale coffee and no exposed concrete or rusted chaises longues, a stark difference from the warehouse in Paris. Cobb's got a fistful of folders, case files on the mark and anything pertinent to their roles that Arthur's research may have pulled up. She flicks through hers, and it's full of blueprints, images of a dingy cottage in the woods, a map. There's an illustration at the back and she holds it up to Cobb.

"Lewis Carroll?" she asks. His nod is terse. "Karl Lewis, Lewis Carroll. So he's named after the writer?"

"What, like Alice in Wonderland, then? 'Follow the White Rabbit' and all that lot?" Eames asks. He's got his feet kicked up on the edge of Arthur's desk, to Arthur's obvious irritation. "But you don't take these cases based on love of literature, so there's got to be something more."

"There's something more," Arthur tells him flatly, and Ariadne shivers. He doesn't even shove Eames's feet off of the polished wood, speaking silent volumes about his distraction. She turns back through her file, skimming. Her hand pauses on the map.

"This case—what's it about?" Ariadne asks. "Corporate espionage, government secrets—we're not doing another inception, are we?"

Cobb shakes his head and turns to the whiteboard behind him. "We're legal this time. We'll be working with the LAPD on an investigation—"

"The police?" Eames interrupts. "We'll be working with the police? Because need I remind you, some of us are still wanted criminals."

"We've been offered immunity for the duration of the case," Cobb says. Eames shifts in his chair but is silent. "I wouldn't stick around too much longer after, but it'll be fine while we're working."

"But what is the case, Cobb?" Ariadne asks again.

"Murder." Cobb's face is solemn, closed-off. "The police know Lewis has killed more than six times over the course of the last ten years, always children. Your files should have all of the information you need to know."

"What's in your folder?" she asks Eames, but she's pretty sure she already knows. He makes a choked sound of disgust. When he turns the pages of pictures to her, their dead, milky eyes are almost as bad as what she's been imagining. She doesn't wonder any more why Cobb, father of two small children, would take this case. "That's revolting," she whispers. Yusuf swears low. Her lunch is suddenly there, trying to come up again, and the room is silent.

"They," Cobb starts, then takes a shuttered, angry breath. "They can't find the last one. The police know there's one more. They've found all the others, but he won't tell them where this last one is." He stops, eyes trained on the distance as he regulates his breathing. When he turns back to them, his face is a fierce mask. "We're going to find her, and we're going to get this son of a bitch. We're going to give that little girl back to her family."

When he breaks the silence, Arthur is brisk and businesslike. "We won't have to find a time or place to perform the extraction on Lewis; it's one of the benefits of working with the cops on a case like this: they'll have Lewis sedated and restrained for us before we even show up. All we have to do is use the PASIV to get him to tell us where he's disposed," he breaks off, glancing at Cobb and weighing his words, "—where he's hidden her. It's about as easy as an extraction is going to ever be. And that's good, because Cobb has negotiated a much lower fee than usual for this case." Eames makes a frustrated sound, but he shrinks away when Arthur glares at him. He even removes his feet from the desk, properly cowed. "—which personally I don't have a problem with, but if you do, feel free to get the fuck out right now."

Eames holds his hands up in a pacifying gesture. "No problem here, darling." Arthur stares at him until he goes back to his folder.

"Good," Cobb says. "I'm going to need you to—" He points to the folder in Eames's lap, at the one image of a live girl on the page. She's cute, all gapped teeth and a dark pixie haircut. She's Phillipa's age. Eames looks disturbed.

"Hey, now, I don't know if I can—" he protests, holding his hands up in supplication and already shaking his head.

Cobb cuts him off. "Lewis has already said that the only one he's going to tell is Alice. That girl is—was—is Alice. Alice Seward."

"It's never going to work," Ariadne cuts in. "He'll know it's not her. If he's already killed her, he'll know it can't be her, not really."

"Lewis is going to know it's a dream," Cobb says, and Arthur interrupts now.

"You can't perform an extraction on a hostile subject who knows he's dreaming," he tells Cobb. "That kind of dream is next to impossible; the layers get ridiculously unstable, and there's a chance we won't find anything at all if Lewis has a chance to protect his subconscious before we get there. It's too dangerous, and you know it, Dom."

"That's where Yusuf comes in," Cobb explains. He turns to the chemist, pointing. "You're going to come up with a sedative that'll make this all possible."

"You're going to play with sedatives after the Fischer case?" Eames says, and though she hates it, Ariadne finds herself agreeing with the sardonic tone in his voice.

"We're going to find Alice Seward, Mr. Eames," Cobb says, voice sharp. "I don't give a damn what happens to Lewis, but we're going to find that little girl."

"I think we should do it," Ariadne says finally, flipping her folder open to the illustration. On the page, Tenniel's Alice stands, nervously clutching her bird croquet mallet. Ariadne thinks of herself at Alice Seward's age, reading stories about Carroll's Alice and dreaming about strange worlds where nothing was quite as it should be. She thinks of Phillipa, of the children she might like to have some day, and she knows that if she were Mrs. Seward, if it were her daughter, her Alice, that was missing, that was probably dead and hidden in a lunatic's house, she would move Heaven and Hell to get her back.

Cobb looks grateful. "What about the rest of you?" he asks. In the end, they all agree, and Ariadne begins to mentally design Wonderland.

::

If nothing else, the police are true to their word. When they get to the prison, all bleak, crackling fluorescent lights and gray painted cinderblock, Karl Lewis is already under, eyes closed and mouth curled in a dreamy, unaware leer. Ariadne feels revulsion clamber up the ladder of her spine as she watches him smack his lips in his sleep. It's a feeling like déjà vu when she looks over his bald, shining head that's crossed with bulging veins. She's studied this man, knows as much as she can about him without having actually met him, but the idea of entering his dreams suddenly terrifies her.

The room is buzzing with more police officers than she has ever seen in real life, and she notes with some amusement that Eames is practically twitching in the corner. She sees Arthur's barely restrained grin—he raises an eyebrow at her returned smile—and bites back a laugh. Yusuf is toying with the bottles of sedatives on a low metal tray by the bed, lifting them and inspecting them in the light, and Cobb is wrapped up in conversation with one of the police officers, gesturing emphatically at the folding chairs that are arranged in a circle around the PASIV. She realizes with a start that they're all doing it: they're all avoiding looking at Lewis, at the smug arrogance of his features and the self-satisfied set of his mouth. She watches his eyelids twitch and knows that he's dreaming, remembers that he knows he's dreaming, and nearly crawls out of her skin with relief at the clattering racket the officers make as they bring in new chairs, padded and comfortable enough for a five-minute nap.

Hopefully the dream won't take more than that. Yusuf's sedatives, administered only to Lewis this time, since it's his mind they need to penetrate and his mind that could collapse under the weight of awareness, are designed to drag this out. They're powerful enough to put Lewis under for a solid hour—nowhere near as strong as the ones they'd used in the Fischer case, but strong enough that the potential for disaster is there, or would be there if anyone involved cared about Lewis's mind or sanity—but they shouldn't need that. At this level of sedation, an hour would be just less than four days in the dream, and the thought of being under with Lewis for that long is terrifying. This might be the only time in her life that Ariadne can say she's looking forward to being shot in the head.

Now Cobb is describing the plan to the police. Ariadne can see that most of them don't get it; he gestures to her and she hears him say "architect", then, "No, the kind that have blueprints and draw buildings," and chuckles under her breath. The laughter is nervous and dies on her tongue when she notices the others taking their positions. She sidles into her chair like she's at the dentist, fingers clutching the padded leather armrests uncertainly. There's nowhere else to look but at the PASIV's bright metal case and the lines that are coiled, waiting, on top of it; Cobb's chair across the circle is empty as he argues the legality of thought crimes with a policeman, and the others won't meet her eyes. Eames rolls his poker chip between his fingers and glances up, smiling suddenly.

"Don't worry so much, sweetheart. It's a simple extraction; we'll be in and out before you know it." Then the nurse enters the room and butterflies bloom in the hollow space of her stomach. It's almost satisfying to see Lewis wince as the nurse administers the needle of Yusuf's formulation to him. Cobb finally sits down, and lines are handed out. If anyone in their audience is curious at the ease with which they open their veins, it's lost in the fascination on their faces as they watch the team finally getting to work. Ariadne's eyes grow heavy as the droning of the PASIV echoes in her blood. The chill of the air conditioner barely registers on her bared arm as the dingy room begins to fade away; the last thing she sees before unconsciousness takes her is the memory of Alice Seward's face in Eames's folder.

::

Ariadne comes to herself in the middle of the dream, already striding down the pebbled path. She knows with the logic of a dream that this is the right direction; her totem is a comforting weight in the pocket of her pinafore. Her stomach roils as she realizes that from the bow in her hair to the childish shoes strapped to her feet, she is Alice—and Alice has to go down the rabbit hole. Ahead of her is the forest, but right now she's standing in a pastoral field like a backdrop on a movie set. This is a landing place of sorts, the first level of a dream labyrinth built like a three story house. There's nothing on the level she's on; it's a façade. Nothing useful can happen here. She approaches the forest, and the brush parts like a children's popup book, revealing the tree and its tiny door set between the roots. The door opens, and she draws back in horror.

Eames has done a fantastic job on the girl. Her eyes are hollow, dark and sad, and there are twigs in her hair and a smudge of dirt on her cheek. She beckons Ariadne with one thin arm and then the dead girl retreats back into the tree. Ariadne can hear the shuffle of the cheap Halloween costume she's wearing as it scrapes against the walls. She steels herself before pushing her way in to follow. "You're a creepy jerk, Eames," she calls to him, but he doesn't respond. The girl is moving too quickly for her to keep up, and eventually she stops trying. It's not like she'll be headed anywhere different.

The tunnel opens up into a room that is immediately familiar and strange. It's the same room from every version of Wonderland, the same room she's meticulously designed and modeled over the past two weeks, but nothing has prepared her for the oddness, the strange eeriness of the damp earthen walls and uneven doors propped around the room. Black and white checkered linoleum crackles underneath her feet, and she ducks to miss a low-hanging tree root where it breaks through the wall to disappear into the ceiling. She tries to shake off the haunted feeling of the room. She knows where she is. She knows how to get out. This time, "Alice" checks the table first and takes the key, dropping it to the ground for later, and, after judiciously sipping from the tiny green glass bottle, Ariadne finds herself strolling through the tiny door into the bottom of the garden. There is no sign of the dead girl; it is as if she was never there.

"Weird," Ariadne mutters to herself. Still, she knows the story and she knows the plan, so she heads off to find the Caterpillar's mushroom. The team's idea was to follow the story as closely as possible and to guess the role Lewis has selected for himself. Each character might be a chance to find the information they're looking for, so she has no choice but to play the game and play along. It's a role Ariadne's childhood bookworm self was born to fill, tripping through the familiar forests of her imagination, forests filled with talking animals and never-ending tea parties and playing cards as royalty.

As she trudges through the tall, fantastical leaves—she wonders now why she would make the distance so large and then realizes it's only about four yards; it's Ariadne herself who has changed, not the architecture—she comes across a wending trail of blue smoke. It flickers through the tall grass like a snake, and she follows dutifully to discover the source is an enormous hookah, just like the one she'd seen in the little head shop near campus on her way back and forth to classes. The smoke is sticky sweet like honey, viscous and beckoning as it leads her to the base of an enormous mushroom.

"Alice." The voice is slow, peaceful, and instantly recognizable. Yusuf is the caterpillar, lounging against the mushroom in a zen, blissed-out state. The length of his body, perhaps only four inches or so, towers over her from its perch on the mushroom until she has to crane her neck back to see his face. His skin is the pale green-white of a corpse, and it seems to be moving wherever she looks at it and covered with fine, bristly hair that adds to the illusion. There are skull shaped markings on one end, but on the other, it's Yusuf's face, familiar and normal enough, if set in a wholly un-normal place. A dozen neat little hands line his body on each side, several of which are clutching the hoses from the hookah in a clench. "Alice," he tries again, giggling. "You're not supposed to be here. I'm waiting for Ariadne."

"I am Ariadne, Yusuf," she says. "And you're the Caterpillar? Weird."

"You can't be Ariadne because Ariadne is real and Alice is not," Yusuf says philosophically.

"So I must be Ariadne, because Alice isn't real," Ariadne reasons.

"Alice is dead," he says. "Alice is dead, or is it Ariadne?"

"It's Alice," she says.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Alice," Yusuf tells her dreamily, extending several hands to shake. "It's so nice of you to talk this time."

A chill sweeps over her. "What do you mean?" she asks.

"What do any of us mean? What is the meaning of life? Does meaning have meaning? What does 'mean' mean?" He's drifting, and she grabs one of his hands.

"Pay attention to me!" she demands. It's only when he rolls toward her, face dopey and curious, that she remembers this part of the story and wishes they hadn't followed it so faithfully.

"You? Who are you?" he asks.

"I'm Ariadne!" she says desperately.

"Ariadne is dead," Yusuf tells her simply, dropping back down to the mushroom and sucking leisurely at the hookah, "so you must be Alice."

"Alice, the dead girl?" Ariadne asks, and he nods slowly. "You've seen Alice, the dead girl?" He nods again, and she grabs his hand. "Where did she go?"

He gestures vaguely, laughing when his hands contradict each other. "That way," he says, and since half of his hands are pointing back the way she came and the other half are pointing ahead, she decides to go the way she hasn't tried yet.

"Thanks, Yusuf," she says. Then she remembers, reaching out to touch the mushroom. "Which side is which?"

Yusuf raises his right hands. "This side is the right side."

"The right side?" she asks, confused.

"And so the other side must be the wrong side," he tells her.

"Wrong side for what?" she asks. "I need to know which side will make me bigger. I want to get bigger."

Yusuf pauses, turning to her. His face is serious. "Alice will never get any bigger."

Ariadne frowns. "You're really creeping me out."

"Listen to me, Ariadne," he tells her. "Alice will never get any bigger. Alice is dead." He rolls over, tucking himself around the hookah again.

She waits for him to turn around, but he doesn't. Sighing in exasperation, she tears off a hunk of the mushroom with her hands, tucking it into her pinafore, then reaches for another. The back of her hand brushes him, and for a moment she's horrified by the jelly texture of his flesh. It's almost cold and wiggling under her hand, the bristled hairs sharp enough to prick her palm. She pulls back, startled, and he twists to face her.

"Alice. You're not supposed to be here; I'm waiting for Ariadne," he says, twisting back toward the hookah.

She takes a step back and then another, and suddenly she's running through the grass, terrified. She stops to lean against the stalk of a tall flower and sags, sinking to the ground exhausted. Through the leaves she can still make out the trail of smoke like a ghost in a cartoon, pale blue and beckoning. The lumps of mushroom are heavy against her legs, and she pulls them out to look at them.

One piece has oxidized, edges curling and turning a twisted black. She remembers—the other side must be the wrong side, he tells her—but there's really no other way to go but forward; she has to eat one of them. Ariadne turns the other piece over in her hand, considering its smooth, springy flesh before breaking off a piece and popping it into her mouth. A noxious sweetness fills her mouth and as she holds a hand out, she can see herself shrinking, fingers shortening and body drawing up. Her stomach seizes in pain and she doubles over, hacking and retching the mushroom up in a bilious spill across the ground. She stops shrinking, but it takes several long moments bent over and shivering before the wracking spasms stop.

The fabric of her pinafore is rough against her mouth where she wipes her face, and when she turns the fabric upside down, the withered mushroom falls out of the pocket. Her stomach lurches; she doesn't want to try it, is afraid to try it, has no choice but to try it. The mushroom crumbles in her hand when she tries to break it; the largest falls into her hand as the rest drops to the ground. She tentatively tastes the chunk and is rewarded with a taste like green banana peels and the rushing sensation of height. When her head is the height it should be, she is careful to spit the crumb out.

"I suppose one side of the mushroom was wrong, after all," Ariadne muses to herself aloud, voice breaking the eerie silence. She looks around and realizes she's lost; it looks nothing like the childish wood she's designed. The trees are darker, leaning menacingly over the narrow path of broken stones like dark hags hunched over a cauldron. There is supposed to be a sign here, but all that's left of it is the splintered remnants of the post. Behind the sign, a banyan tree reaches spidery hands in opposing directions, and it's only her memory of the story that tells her where she is.

"This way is the Mad Hatter," she says, pointing, "and this way is the March Hare."

"Then you've been here before," Cobb says from where he is perched on the branch. His tail curls beneath him like a question mark.

"No, I just know how this part goes. It was always my favorite," Ariadne tells him. She peers up into the tree, eyes wide as she takes him in. "You're the Cheshire Cat."

"And you are Alice," he says. He's more than twice the size of a normal cat, and yet he's not the tall man she's used to seeing with his face. Unlike the cartoon version, he is a sandy calico tabby, spotted and striped until she can't tell what's Cobb and what's shadow, and when the leaves rustle around him, she doesn't know if it is the wind or his tail that disturbs them. Brilliant blue eyes peer at her from his strangely flat face, watching her intently.

"You're supposed to show me which way to go," she tells him, and his smile is slow and wide.

"I can't do that. I'm waiting for Ariadne," he says, and she frowns.

"I am Ariadne."

"Thinking that you are two people at the same time is a sign of madness, you know," he tells her conversationally.

"So is talking to a man who is a cat in a tree," she agrees. "Anyway, I can't be Alice. Alice is dead."

"He's only going to talk to Alice," Cobb reminds her. "You're going to have to decide which is more important: Ariadne or Alice. You can't be both."

"Eames is going to be Alice," Ariadne says, and he grins again. "I've already seen him."

"Then you know which way to go," he says.

"Nobody here makes any sense!" she complains, and he laughs outright.

"Nobody anywhere makes any sense. At least here we're honest about it." He begins to disappear, voice fading as he goes. "You know which way to go. Watch out for the Queen."

"Wait, Cobb! Something's wrong with this dream space! It's corrupted somehow; it doesn't match my design!" she calls after him. He doesn't answer. He's already gone.

The problem is that she doesn't actually know which direction is which. She recalls vague memories, different versions of the guardian of the labyrinth who hides a secret entrance, hides the utility path that leads to the heart of the maze, and presses her palm against the high, arched roots of the tree. Leaning over, she can see daylight between them, where the heart of the wood should be.

"I wouldn't do that," Cobb says behind her, and she jumps, swearing when her head knocks against a root.

"Jesus Christ!" she yelps, falling back against the ground. "What the hell's wrong with you, sneaking up on people like that?"

"That's not the direction you want to go," he tells her instead, pacing around the tree and appearing back in the branches.

"Why not? We're looking for Alice, and I'd just bet he put her in the center of the labyrinth," she argues.

"That path doesn't lead to the center of the labyrinth." His gaze is like a solid thing, fixed on her face. "That path will take you underground."

"We're looking for a grave, aren't we?" she asks, confused. He doesn't answer, simply resting his chin on his hand to look at her. "That's the utility path, isn't it? There's always a utility path to the center of the labyrinth, and that path will take me right to Alice."

He regards her coolly, as if he were a professor speaking to a particularly slow pupil. "And when," he asks her, "has this place ever reacted the way you expected it to?"

"Well, never, I suppose," she agrees reluctantly. "But then which way do I go?"

"It depends on where you want to arrive," he says, shrugging. "If you go to the right, you'll find the Mad Hatter's house. If you go left, you'll find the March Hare."

"Then I'll go left. I don't want to go to a mad man's house." She parrots the line from the story playfully. Cobb shrugs.

"Do what you like. It's no skin off my nose," he tells her. She frowns up at him and he laughs.

"You're not supposed to tell me that! When Alice tells the Cheshire Cat she doesn't want to meet a crazy person, he's supposed to tell her, 'We're all mad here.' You suck at this cryptic advice thing, Cobb," Ariadne declares decisively.

"But you already know all that," he says simply. "Where's the fun in repeating old ideas? But let me try that cryptic advice thing one more time: have you ever woken up from a dream to realize you're still dreaming? Everyone has had those dreams one time or another. But what about this time? Have you woken up, or are you still dreaming?"

"Of course I'm dreaming right now, Cobb. We're in Wonderland, and I'm talking to a giant cat-man thing. Which happens to be you," she points out, "in case you hadn't noticed."

"But the case. Does it make any real sense? Isn't there something a little off about it, a little too Hollywood about it? And why would I take a murder case like this one at all?" His eyes are serious as he looks at her from the tree.

She laughs nervously. "Shut up, Cobb. You can't incept me like you did Mal; I know better than that."

"You're waiting for a train—" he starts as he fades, voice drifting into the tree. "Watch out for the Queen."

"And who's this Queen, Cobb?" she shouts at the tree, knowing he can't hear her. "Is it Lewis, or is it Mal? Is Mal going to chop off my head? Answer me!"

The tree is silent and reproachful. She thumps her fist against it, more tempted than ever to duck through the roots until the sharp crack of a snapped twig jerks her attention to the side. Alice is there, dark eyes fixed on her. She wiggles her finger in a childish beckoning motion before starting down the path. The back of her dress is tattered, thin polyester shredded and rotting to expose Pooh-bear underwear. Her legs are naked down to her bare feet, toes dark and murky colored with purple-streaked nails. There is a bloody trail wrapping around an ankle from a scrape on the knee above it and a palm-shaped bruise climbing the back of her calf. She pauses down the path, waiting for Ariadne to turn the corner and see the house.

This isn't the Hatter's house. Ariadne knows that, somewhere along the way, she's supposed to visit the White Rabbit's house and be mistaken for Mary Anne; she's always loved that part of the story, with the lizard chimney sweep and the fan that makes Alice small enough to climb out the window, but she knows she didn't put this cottage into the labyrinth. This is not the White Rabbit's house.

Breath escapes her in a percussive whump like a punch as she stares up at the cottage from her case file. She already knows this house, with its whitewashed clapboard siding and its low little roof. She already knows from case photos what the inside of this house will look like, knows without going inside how the rooms will be laid out, knows about the vintage movie posters that line the hall from the front door to the "Alice room", where investigators found Lewis's collection of different editions of the two books and his wholly different collection of little girls' clothes, each article left behind by a victim. She already knows everything about this house, everything in the pictures and everything in the police reports and everything in the newspaper articles. She even knows where she'd find the graves, if she could work up enough nerve to look.

The door opens. Inside, the hall unfolds like a telescope; she imagines she can see all the way down to the door of the Alice room, the heavy oak door vaguely pulsing with a sickly light. There is a girl in the window of the house, holding the wispy curtains back as she regards Ariadne with filmy eyes. She is half rotted, solemn and patient as she waits for Ariadne to enter. Ariadne stumbles back, a wobbly cry escaping her. She recoils from the house and turns, running blind away from it until her feet find the path and she finds herself shivering over a low white picket fence that surrounds a cozy little house that looks like a fallen layer cake. She can hear squabbling nearby.

"I told you I don't like tea. I just want coffee; is that so hard?" Arthur is griping from somewhere behind the house she remembers designing for the Hatter.

"Honestly, pet, you must try to be a bit more civilized sometime. When I tell you it is a tea party, it is a tea party, not a 'tea for Eames and coffee for Arthur because Arthur is a complete Yank' party," Eames responds, voice smooth and teasing. From beyond the gate, Ariadne imagines the typically grumpy expression on Arthur's face as he tries to deal with his playful colleague and smiles to herself. She's still shaken, but it's nothing a good cup of tea with friends can't help smooth over. She reaches over the fence and flips the latch, letting herself in to follow the voices.

"If you can't comprehend the beauty of a perfectly pulled espresso, Mr. Eames," Arthur says peevishly. His words trail off here, leaving the impugnation of the other man's intelligence to the imagination. Ariadne laughs to herself as she rounds the corner of the house, then laughs harder when she sees the loudly colored hat perched on Eames's head and the bunny ears on Arthur.

"You're the Hatter and the Hare!" she cries out in delight. They turn to her and she takes in their Wonderland selves, so similar and yet dissimilar to their normal appearances. Both are dressed in frock coats, Arthur's a pale dove gray in a dashing cut and Eames's a wild, patched orange with tails turned into curlicues that bob as he walks. Even as the March Hare, Arthur is elegant, creases pressed sharp in his pants and waist buttoned up smartly with a waistcoat. Eames's hat hangs rakishly over one eye, size card replaced with—of course—the ace of spades. The rest of his clothes are motley, giving off the impression of either a clown or the unfortunate victim of a mad, colorblind tailor.

"And you are Ariadne, my doll," Eames says. Arthur shoots him an incredulous look.

"It's Alice, come to the tea party, of course," Arthur corrects him, rolling his eyes. "I don't know where he got this Ariadne thing from," he tells her, tone confidential. "Ariadne's just a story book girl."

Eames's smile drops as he turns to look at Arthur. "Don't you recognize our Ariadne?"

Emotion wells up in her chest, and she all but throws herself into the seat next to Eames, hands shaking with fear as the words tumble from her lips. "Eames, there's something really wrong with this place! Some of the places I designed don't look like they're supposed to, and everyone thinks I'm really Alice!" She stops to catch her breath, then starts again in a small voice, "And that house is here, the one where Lewis—"

He cuts her off. "Don't say that name, love. You don't want to call him here."

She swallows, nodding. "—the one where he killed those girls. I didn't put it in here; I swear I didn't put it in the labyrinth!"

"It sounds like we've got a lucid dreamer on our hands," Arthur says as he sits down on her other side, coffee cup clenched between his hands. He sets it aside to take one of hers between his, and they are almost uncomfortably hot. "It's like: imagine dreaming as if you were the architect of the dream, only there's no PASIV. A lucid dreamer knows he's dreaming, and because of this, he can exert his influence on the shape of the dream. He can even control what happens, at least to the parts of the dream that are his. He can consciously control his projections, but not only that; he can consciously control the surroundings. He can add to the dream space, make it more complex and change your labyrinth to the point that you can't even recognize it anymore."

"What can I do to stop him?" Ariadne asks.

Eames takes her other hand, squeezing reassuringly. "You mustn't forget that you're dreaming, Ariadne. You can't ever forget that you're dreaming, because you lose control of the dream when you forget that."

Ariadne laughs, short and sharp. "Forget I'm dreaming? I'm in Wonderland. I've been talking to caterpillars and cats and rabbits and—" she blinks, a question falling into her eyes. Tugging her hand from his grasp, she shoves at his shoulder angrily. "And what's all that creepy stuff with turning yourself into the dead girl and leading me to his haunted house, huh? That was really messed up!"

Eames narrows his eyes. "I've never been Alice, Ariadne. I haven't left this table."

"It's true," Arthur says, lifting a teapot over one of the empty cups in front of her. "Ever since he bored the Queen with his absolutely awful singing and she tried him for murdering the time, it's always tea time. Would you like sugar?"

She looks at him, amazed at the lack of recognition on his face. Creeping fear gathers in her stomach, and she turns to Eames. "What's wrong with him? Why does he keep doing that?"

Eames shrugs helplessly. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" he asks. At her uncomprehending stare, he shrugs again. "No one has ever been able to solve that one. It was kind of you to try, Alice."

Horrified, Ariadne shoves away from the table. Standing on suddenly weak knees, she takes in the whole picture: in sets of two, half drunk coffee cups and tea cups pair around the table. Despite flashes of awareness, Arthur and Eames must have been playing the Hatter and Hare's dance all day, and as she watches them, they shuffle over two more seats. Arthur offers Eames tea, and Eames frowns when he reaches for the percolator. "Honestly, pet, you must try to be more civilized," Eames scolds teasingly. "When I say this is a tea party—"

She doesn't hear the rest, already dashing through the woods toward the path. Trees reach out toward her, whipping narrow branches against her face, and she can feel blood trickling down from a thin cut above her eye. When she stops, breathless, to lean against the banyan tree, she notices her dress is shredded and cheap looking. Her chest heaves for air against the nervous sobs she can feel building up. She feels clammy, and her hands are shaking.

"You look more like Alice now," Cobb says, and she's not surprised to see him lounging in the branches again.

"I don't want to look more like Alice," she snaps. "I want to look like Ariadne, because I am Ariadne."

"Ariadne's just a story book girl," Cobb repeats Arthur's words.

"Stop it!" she cries, covering her ears. "Just stop it! You're no help at all!"

He waits in the tree patiently until she uncovers her ears and looks at him. "Why is this happening to me?" she asks, voice cracking. "Why am I the only one who isn't lost in the dream?"

"But you are!" he tells her, laughing. "You're more lost than any of us."

"Please, just," she says desperately, "Just please stop trying to scare me and help me. I'm—I'm really scared right now, Cobb, and I need you to help me." She waits for him to say something, anything, but he doesn't. Turning on her heel, she starts to walk away.

"Ariadne," he says, and she turns back. "It's going to be okay. We're going to get this son of a bitch, and we're going to give that little girl back to her family." She waits for him to say more, but he's silent.

"I don't even know where to look," she complains bitterly. "She could be anywhere."

"That's not true. You know that. You even know where she is; she's shown you," he tells her, and she remembers the length of the hall opening up, extending deeper into the dream, the house like a cancer infecting her labyrinth.

"I don't want to go back there, Cobb," she admits.

"Listen to me: it has to be you. The rest of us are still dreaming. You're the only one he hasn't gotten to yet; you're that little girl's last chance. It has to be you."

"Why didn't you tell me how dangerous it would be, Cobb?" she demands now, anger seeping into the cold, numb fear. "That a lucid dreamer would have so much control over what happens in the dream, that you guys might end up corrupted and leave me here all by myself to deal with a serial killer and child rapist? What the hell were you thinking?"

Cobb shrugs, an entirely feline gesture. "Does being angry about that change anything that's happened now?"

"Don't you tell me not to be angry!" she retorts sharply.

He smiles then, eyes luminous. "You should hurry up," he tells her, flicking his tail toward her. "Alice isn't going to wait forever." A branch creaks behind her, and Ariadne turns, taking in the sight of the dead girl sitting next to the broken stump of the sign. She looks worse, decaying now. Her hair is knotted, shorn close on one side and matted with dried blood on the other. Blackened toes curl toward the soles of her feet, and her fingers are twigs, twisted and stiff and bruise-colored. When she notices Ariadne looking at her, she tips her head in a way that exposes the handprints around her throat and climbs to her feet, waiting. Ariadne nods and follows.

"You're just a projection," Ariadne tells her. Alice ignores her as they walk through the strangely silent woods. There isn't even any birdsong, and Ariadne shivers, filled with a strange compulsion to fill the empty air with words. "The question is: whose projection are you? Do you belong to one of us? Or are you what I was expecting to find here? Is that why you're here? Or are you his?"

Alice stops, turning to her and holding up a hand. She shakes her head, and Ariadne lets out a frustrated breath. Alice touches a dirty, withered finger to her lips and makes a shushing sound like the wind rushing through dead leaves, crackling and dry and inhuman. Ariadne bites back the urge to be sick and nods, understanding: shut up.

It's entirely too soon when she arrives at the cottage behind the dead girl. It looks worse for the wear, as if it is decaying, too, just like the little girls whose corpses it has hidden. The painted siding is peeling, exposing wormwood white boards like bleached bones. The low bushes are dead, branches grasping upward like skeleton hands from a grave, and a creeping black lichen like a mold covers the exposed concrete of the basement, seeping up the walls wetly toward the cracked and shattered windows. The gutter hangs loose, drooping sadly over the sagging porch filled with blackened, soggy-looking furniture. Alice takes the stairs toward the cavernous front door without a trace of fear, though Ariadne wonders briefly what fear there is to be had when you're already dead. She reaches our to touch the rail to follow and jerks back, sucking at the splinter in her finger.

"Son of a bitch," she mutters, peering at her hand in irritation. The wound looks clean, but she doesn't dare trust the rickety rail again as she reluctantly approaches the house's entrance. Curtains like cobwebs hang limp in the window, and when she looks closer, she can see spiders with more joints than imaginable skittering up and down the tattered lace. Somewhere inside the house, there is faint music playing, but she can't make it out. When she touches the door to push it open, the splinter in her hand burns.

"Hello?" she calls to the empty house. "Is there anyone here?" To the right of the door, the parlor stands empty of the little girl she'd seen earlier; not even footsteps disturb the thick layer of dust on the floor. It's the same thick dust that covers everything in the room, from the intensely detailed carved wood of the sofa to the elegant standing piano in the corner. There is only one set of footprints in the entire room, in fact: in the center of the cushion of the wingback chair by the fireplace, two perfectly formed child's footprints point in the direction of the huge, ornate mirror above the mantle. A small circle is rubbed out of the dust on the glass; she turns her face away, suddenly afraid of what might be reflected.

Ahead of her is the Alice room. She can faintly make out the music now—the poem "Jabberwocky" set to an eerie, jaunty tune—and covers her mouth to trap the squeak of fear inside. She listens to the ballad long enough to figure out that it's playing on a loop before cautiously pushing open the door.

In the flickering gas lights, the first thing she sees is the photograph, blown up and hung prominently in the alcove between bookshelves. Alice Liddell, the first and real Alice, looks down on her from the lithograph on the wall as she leans against a rough stone wall, greenery tangling around her bare ankles. She stands shoeless in a rucked and messy dress, hand cupped at her waist and a strangely adult expression on her face as she regards the camera, head cocked defiantly. The tangled neck of her dress is fallen, as if yanked, exposing a breast. The photo is surrounded by all of Lewis's copies of the books about her, and Ariadne knows that some of these are only wished into existence. She raises a hand to brush the spines, to touch the gold lettering, and all around her she reads Alice, Alice, Alice.

"Don't touch those," Alice says behind her, and when Ariadne starts, turning to face her, she is surprised again. Alice is alive, cheeks pink and hale, dress untorn and whole. Rigor has retreated, leaving her skin fresh and pale. The crescents of her nail beds are no longer streaked with death.

"You're Alice," Ariadne breathes. Alice nods. "I've been looking for you."

Alice shrugs. "I've been here the whole time."

Ariadne frowns. "No. You've been following me."

"You've been following me," Alice corrects simply.

"What have you been doing this whole time?" Ariadne asks.

"Playing." Alice walks over to the shelf, trailing her fingers until they land on a small, heavy-looking wooden hourglass, flipping it idly. "This place is wonderful. It's just like the book. The part at the beginning was a little too Disney, a little cutesy, but the rest of it's just perfect." The sand in the glass moves sluggishly, trickling grain by grain as if reluctant to fall into the bottom of the glass. She taps it, frowning when the sand doesn't speed up. "Time is such a strange thing," she remarks, tapping the glass again.

"We have to get out of here," Ariadne tells her. "Now."

"No." Alice's refusal is short, strong. She taps the glass again.

"We have to get out of here," Ariadne repeats desperately. "It's not safe here."

"You go. I like it here," Alice says.

"Alice, please listen to me," Ariadne pleads. "It's very, very dangerous for you here. The man who lives here is a bad man."

Alice turns, regarding her with a cool eye. "You know I'm dead, right?"

Ariadne chokes, remembers the decaying girl from earlier, wonders how Alice could ever think she'd forget, even for a moment. Alice watches her, disingenuously healthy and finally interested. "I—yeah," Ariadne finally manages, flushing. "I just," she pauses, looking for the word, "…forgot."

Alice frowns, tapping the hourglass again. "I didn't forget."

Ariadne swallows hard. "I'm sorry."

With the mercurial temper of a child, Alice smiles quicksilver bright. "What's your name?"

Ariadne is overcome with the urge to lie, and she smiles too wide as she racks her brain for a name, any name. "My name is Lucy, like in Narnia. So we're both named after little girls in books, aren't we?"

Alice's smile grows slow and secretive. "You're a dirty fibber," she says, and Ariadne's skin crawls like spiders skittering up her arms. "The Cheshire Cat called you Ariadne."

"I—"

"But Ariadne's a storybook girl, too," Alice says. Ariadne takes a step back, and Alice's grin grows wider. "Just a different kind of storybook girl.

"Ariadne hanged herself, didn't she?"

And Ariadne bolts, palms slamming into the space where the door used to be. There is a smooth expanse of paneled wood where it had been, not even a thin outline betraying its previous location. "Let me out!"

"Little girls shouldn't go exploring where they're not wanted," Alice says.

"Oh, God," Ariadne whimpers, curling against the wall. Alice closes the distance between them easily. Under the sweet exterior, Ariadne can smell the thick, brutish smell of decay. "Oh, God."

"You're an intruder," Alice continues, reaching out to pet her hair. "You came in here to steal from me." Her fingers tighten, grow fatter and longer and stronger, yanking her head back until she's staring up at Lewis's sneering face. "You can't have her."

"I just," Ariadne starts, but she's got no clue where to go with it, and then he slaps her, the full of his hand crashing along her cheekbone. Her head bounces on the wood paneling. The book case rattles, but nothing falls. She raises a hand to touch her throbbing head and he wraps a meaty hand around her wrist, yanking her to her feet. Ariadne raises her heel and kicks him in the kneecap. He stumbles, but his grip is firm, and when he squeezes she can feel the bones in her arm grating against each other. She kicks at him wildly, and he throws her again.

When she hits the wall, she recognizes the tunneling vision of a concussion forming, but somehow, miraculously, she recognizes something else: the wall bends, ever so slightly, with the force of her body against it. She reaches out with prying fingers at the corner of the hidden door, fumbling for a catch or spring or anything. His boot comes down, grinding, and for the first time she screams, the sound tearing from her throat more in surprise than pain. The catch pops with a click she feels in the bones of her broken hand instead of hearing it with her ears. The door creaks open an inch. She doesn't dare stick her fingers through, but rolls to the side as he reaches for her again.

She comes to her feet clutching her wrist and leaning heavily against the low chair by Lewis's reading table. Ariadne remembers wildly that in reality, this is the chair where Lewis had tied his victims, taking his time to touch and enjoy them before wrapping meaty palms around their throats, strangling them before disposing of the corpses under the floorboards of the Alice room. This thought blinds her, and somehow she is fumbling against the bookshelf, hands searching for something, anything to protect herself with. Her fingers land on something smooth, hefty. She has the hourglass in hand. Lewis shouts—"No!"—and she sends it crashing against his head. The glass is heavy, thick-bottomed with age. It doesn't crack in the explosion that follows; the intricate detail of the wooden frame shatters, splintering in her hand, but the glass is intact, the sound of it hollow as it collides with Lewis's skull, a flower of blood blooming on his brow before sluicing over the crumpled cheekbone and down the spasming jaw. The glass jars hard enough that the tingles spread all the way up to her shoulder and it falls from her suddenly nerveless fingers to the wooden floorboards. She takes a step back, hands at her mouth, and shudders hard once, twice. Blunt force trauma is such an intimate way to kill someone, she thinks improbably. She's killed hundreds of times in the dreamscape before, but always with guns. Lewis groans, eyelids twitching unconscious but improbably alive, and she remembers the tiny catch, diving for it and yanking the door open to spill into the hall.

Smiling faces peer down at her, movie stars from decades past dressed as Alice decorating the hall. Ariadne grunts, pulling one down, a triumphant scream welling up in her chest as the frame shatters, littering the hall with glass. Her hand aches. She hears footsteps in the parlor and thudding footfalls behind, and her feet tangle together with indecision. Then she hears the voices.

Here, the whispers say. Here. This way, this way. Hurry. Hurry. They call her to the parlor, louder than Lewis thundering clumsy in the Alice room, louder than the pounding of blood in Ariadne's ears. She stumbles down the hall toward the open door, freezing with her palm on the wood. There's nowhere to go; Wonderland belongs to Lewis, the perfect playground-cum-hunting grounds, only half her design and half the Tulgey Wood, wild and cruel and dangerous. Movement catches the corner of her eye; she gasps in horror, and in the back of her mind marvels that anything can still unsettle her.

And it is unsettling, the way the girls are pressed against the inside of the mirror, palms flat against the glass and mouths hidden behind moist smudges of condensation. There are eight of them, two more than the police knew about, and Alice Seward is alone in the corner, eyes filmy white and expressionless. Her mouth opens, revealing tiny white teeth caked with dirt, and Ariadne knows she was buried with her mouth open. She was the only one buried outside.

"I'm," Alice says in a thin, trembling voice like choking. "I'm scared." The other girls stir, uneasy. I'm scared, they repeat in a whisper like the pages of a book being turned,. The sound rises and falls in volume as they cry like a Greek chorus. I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared.

"I tried to help you," Ariadne tells her, and Alice tips her head in acknowledgement. "There was nothing I could do. I can't find you; he's hidden you too well."

"Let me out," Alice says, and her mouth's movements don't match the sound of her voice, like a three second delay between the recording and the image. She curls her hand against the inside of the glass, and Ariadne can hear the squeak of skin on glass as she tucks her fingers into a fist to thump at the glass with the heel of her hand. "Please let me out."

Let us out, let us out, the girls cry, and the pounding of their fists begins to lift the frame from the wall. Please, they beg.

"Please, Mommy," Alice whispers. Ariadne backs into the wall, one hand on the doorknob before she's aware of it. "Please, Mommy, please." Her face changes, quickens and becomes sly in a way that reminds Ariadne of Lewis.

"He's coming." Alice pushes her palms against the glass. "He's coming for you, too."

"I'm sorry!" Ariadne gasps. "I'm so sorry! I have to go; I can't help you!"

"Find me." It's not a request. Alice is barely audible over the rustling, ethereal voices that tumble together, he's coming, he's coming.

"How? I don't even know where he's put you!" Ariadne says. She can hear the heavy crashing sound of Lewis trying to get out of the Alice room; the noises are growing faster, more sure. She has seconds to get away, and there's nowhere to go.

"The looking glass," Alice says, pressing both palms to the glass between them. "You have to find the looking glass. You have to go under the ground." The looking glass. Looking, looking, the looking glass, the girls chorus. The door to the Alice room explodes as Lewis slams it open, and Ariadne is already out the door and on the path when he staggers onto the ramshackle porch, swearing bloody murder. The trees tear into her when she hits the tree line, branches curling sharp to try to hold her back.

The forest has expanded, huge swaths of it stretching and growing until the path is little more than rubble in a thin band and spidery new trees shove at each other for space between the manicured garden of Ariadne's wood. A hunched willow like Black Annis twists its gnarled and knobby branches down to snatch at her with a dry cackle; Ariadne leaps to the side and plows through the rushes on the other side of the path just as a fine tremor begins to make itself known, shaking the world with all the tenderness of a mother shaking her child awake. Off the path, the plants are wild and somehow strangely flat, layered segments like a set for a children's play even as they clamber and claw at Ariadne's skin, drawing beads of blood where they touch her.

"Cobb!" she screams, hands coming up to protect her eyes from a hanging tendril of ivy barbed with nettle-like hairs that bite viciously into the soft flesh of her palms. "Cobb, where are you?"

"You're sure you're not Alice?" Cobb asks from nearby, and she almost stumbles over a root in her haste to stop. He's nowhere to be seen.

"Cobb, please! You've got to help me get away from him," she pleads, spinning in place as she scans the trees.

"Why?" he asks from behind her. She turns on her heel, but he's not there. "Are you scared?" His voice rings echoes around her.

"Yes, damn you. Yes, I'm scared!" she admits, voice growing shrill. "Where the hell are you?" she demands.

"Hell? It could be argued," he says contemplatively, slowly folding into reality at the base of a nearby bush. "I've heard things in the undergrowth here; they may be for eating," he explains with the logic of a cat.

"Can't you take anything seriously?" Ariadne snaps, and he turns to her, expression chilly.

"I'm taking this very seriously," he says. "You're the one that's not even paying attention."

"What do you even mean?" Ariadne cries, frustrated. "You're almost worse than no help at all!"

He rounds on her, then, eyes flashing. "And you're the one who's lost her totem!"

Her breath stutters in her chest. "Lost my—I haven't—" She reaches into the pocket of her pinafore, remembers tipping it out by the tree. Panic hits her in a wave. "No, I—Cobb, how could I—?" The pocket is empty but for the crumbled mushroom, its perfection making her stomach roll as she remembers its toxic taste. "I have to get back to the tree, Cobb. I have to find it!"

"And where do you think you are, silly thing?" he asks her, not unkindly. She looks around, confused, and it hits her: these trees, these branches—they're the banyan's roots. The dark tree has spread, infecting her labyrinth deeper and deeper. As she watches, the roots twine like naked bodies crawling together; a root drops from the top of the tree and plunges into the ground, pulsing as if feeding on something under the dirt. A disgusted sound falls from her mouth as she watches the pale roots dig and writhe, alive and wicked. They part for a moment and she sees the light at the heart of the wood, and before she can convince herself it's a bad idea, she shoves her way between the roots of the tree and into the narrow tunnel beneath it. The roots snap shut behind her, and there's nowhere to go but down the steep, winding path. Claustrophobic dirt walls squeeze in on her, but the roots don't penetrate the tunnel, and it remains dimly lit by a distant source of light. She looks at the solid wall of wood where she entered and frowns, elbowing her way deeper when the tunnel grows too close and dropping to her knees to crawl when it becomes too short.

Just as she's sure the tunnel is going to turn into a dead end, leaving her alone in the dark in a space too small to breathe, she comes to the door. It's tiny, perhaps only a foot tall, and much too narrow to fit her shoulders. She doesn't see any table in this anteroom, no cakes that say "eat me" or bottles that plead "drink me", but she reaches out, tentatively trying the knob. It doesn't budge. Ariadne lowers her face to peer at it carefully, and to her surprise, there is a key on the top of the frame. She fishes out the mushroom and eyes it suspiciously before placing it on her tongue and gagging. When she's a little taller than the door, she spits out the mushroom and takes the key in hand. It's surprisingly hefty, and for a moment a cold chill washes over her; she'd blindly trusted that this key would fit the lock. If it doesn't, there's not enough mushroom left to shrink small enough to fit under the gap beneath the door. She'd have to try squeezing through the roots of the tree and hope Lewis wouldn't squish her like a bug.

The key fits into the lock with a snick like clockwork, cogs and metal ribbons fitting together precisely into their homes. When she turns the knob, the door swings silently and effortlessly into the room, and she draws in a breath. It's Lewis's parlor, just as she'd seen it the first time she'd entered the cottage, dust covered and abandoned. She steps in, the rounded, childish shapes of her shoes leaving footprints like those in a cartoon, evenly spaced and half-realized. Without thinking, she climbs up into the chair, and the footprints in the dust covering its cushion are hers. She looks through the hole in the dust on the glass and sees herself and the team in the prison cell, the PASIV's red light glowing. The numbers are ticking down, and as soon as she realizes this, she hears the faint strains of music filtering through the glass. She presses her hand against the glass and shivers; it's cool and malleable and elastic as gelatin. Ariadne pokes at it with her fingers and the tips go numb with waking.

"You're not through here, you know," Cobb says, and she's almost unsurprised that he's here with her. "There's still more you need to know."

"I don't need to know anything. I'm done with this job," she tells him, and she pushes through the glass and then she's falling, falling, falling….

::

Her eyes snap open, blurry with tears, and she stares at the ceiling, feeling the chemicals from the PASIV fade, the tide ebbing and leaving in its wake the harsh burn of reality. Ariadne feels her chest heaving for breath, feels the sting of panic already slipping from tense limbs. She props herself up on her elbows and looks around; Yusuf still looks dazed, and Cobb avoids her eyes as he coils the lines methodically. Arthur still looks puzzled, as if coherence is the wrong frame of mind. When Eames quirks a concerned eyebrow in her direction, she realizes she's still attached to the machine and, with a brutally efficient tug, reaches down to yank the line from her arm. Hot blood wells at her wrist, and she can hear it spattering on the floor under the hum of the lights, the idle chatter of police officers milling nearby, the throbbing pound of her pulse in her temples. She doesn't look at Lewis; she thinks she can feel his eyes on her.

"I didn't get it," she announces to the room as she shrugs on the sweater she'd draped over the back of the chair. "I failed." She moves to the door, ignoring Cobb's hand as he reaches for her. "Not right now," she tells him, shoving brusquely into the hall, but there's nowhere to go. Ariadne slumps against the cinderblock wall heavily, scrubbing at suddenly tired eyes with the back of her hand. She's torn between going out to hide in the car in embarrassment and going back in to apologize when the door swings open.

"Are you through with the self-pity now?" Arthur asks, but his tone isn't unkind and there's a faint softness around his eyes. She nods shortly, ducking her head and patting her face with her scarf. "Everyone fucks one up now and then," he tells her, and she laughs. "Don't worry about it."

"That whole thing was so fucked up," she says. She doesn't like the wobble she hears hiding behind the words or the way her throat feels sticky. "I," she starts, then reconsiders. "He was waiting for me. He knew what was going on. I think," she stops, then presses her fingers into her closed eyes. He waits patiently. "I think maybe Cobb tried to warn me? But it was so confusing. I didn't—"

He nods patiently, but his grip on her elbow is firm. "Let's go back inside now," he says, and when he pulls the door open again, she peers past him. The police officers look strangely sheepish, ducking away from her eyes as she looks at them. The nurse is helping them strap the still unconscious Lewis into a wheelchair for transport. Ariadne shudders when her gaze lands on his face. He looks even more smug than before, if possible, and she pictures him wandering around in the Wonderland she's left in his subconscious, sees him lumbering through the dark and twisted forest he's corrupted, or worse—she sees him as Alice Seward, sees him pretending to be the little girl he'd murdered. She looks away. Arthur guides her with a hand at the small of her back, and she fights back the urge—instinct—to bolt again. Instead, she steps away, taking her seat and fiddling with her scarf until she hears the squeaking of the wheelchair leave the room. She looks up, then, and is surprised to see she's the center of attention.

"What happened?" one of the police offers asks, his tone a bit awestruck. She looks at him, really looks, and decides meanly that he'd never be able to understand. She ignores him, turning to pin Cobb with a look.

"Did you know that was going to happen?" she demands.

He shakes his head slowly, jerkily, and she knows he's lying. "I was aware of some of the risk. There's not really a lot of information out there about lucid subjects yet—"

"It was an experiment?" she interrupts. Yusuf looks abashed, Arthur guilty. Eames pins Cobb with a searing look. "I can't believe you. I thought," she stops herself. Her hands clench on the armrests of the chair as she wills herself not to push away, not to get up and walk away from the team and the poison-sweet world of dream sharing altogether. She clears her throat. "I thought I could trust you."

"Oh, pet," Eames starts.

"You wouldn't have been in any real danger," Arthur says, overlapping.

"It was just a dream," Yusuf reminds her gently.

"Fuck you all," she says, and she's surprised at the angry tears that threaten to fall. "You didn't," she chokes. "You weren't—it wasn't the same for you. For any of you. I—" and she stops herself again, stubborn and unwilling to admit in the light of day just how scared she was, how desperate she'd felt. She refuses to admit how close to forgetting she'd been.

"That's fair," Cobb says, and she remembers then that of all of them, he'd be the one to know how real a dream could feel, how potent and terrible fear and pain and forgetting could be. Regret surges into her mouth and she wants to apologize, but can't. "Someone should have told you. I should have told you."

A cough breaks the numb silence of the room. Ariadne jerks to look at the detective where he stands at the edge of the crowd. While they were arguing, he's turned the white board around, revealing an intricate spider's web of strings connecting photographs and dates, newspaper clippings and tiny bags marked EVIDENCE, until blue threads have tangled around the smiling face of Alice Seward and the question mark drawn next to her head. Ariadne shakes her head at the detective's hopeful expression, flinching when he swears loudly and throws his pen across the room.

"What happened?" he snaps, and she can feel tension rising in the team.

"Look, Mr. Lightoller, you've got to understand that dreaming isn't an exact science," Arthur warns him. He's rolled into a protective stance on the chair, elbows on his knees in a position that makes him look pedantic, as if explaining simple things to morons.

"I understand that the state of California has paid you people a hell of a lot of money to come in here and take a fucking nap," Lightoller says.

"We can try it again," Ariadne suggests, braver than she feels. She's grateful when Cobb shakes his head.

"It wouldn't work. It would give Lewis the chance to militarize, to understand what cooperative dreaming feels like and be ready for us," Cobb says, and Ariadne's skin crawls at the thought of Lewis being better equipped.

"Maybe something happened in the dream that can help," Yusuf suggests. Ariadne nods, turning back to Lightoller. He groans softly, gesturing for her to begin.

"Well, for starters, you're missing two girls," she says, and from the surprised looks on the officer's faces, she can tell she's got them hooked.

It takes her three hours to tell the story, and when she's done, the knot of tears is back in her throat. She describes the sickening crack of Lewis's skull and talks in a muted tone about the banyan tree, the way its slender roots had tangled their way through the dream world until she'd realized there was nowhere to go.

"And then?" Lightoller asks. She shrugs.

"Then the music started and I woke up," Ariadne says simply, pointing to the tape player resting on the PASIV's shiny case. Through the headphones, she can still hear tinny music, distant and far away.

Lightoller frowns to himself, turning away thoughtfully. When he turns back, a manic sort of hope has begun creeping across his face. "You think he buried her. You really think that?" he asks. She nods silently, a flash of dirt-smudged teeth flickering across her mind's eye. "Do you think—" he cuts himself off, crossing his arms and pacing in front of the board. "Would you recognize that tree if you saw it again? The one from your dream?"

She shivers, tugging her sweater tighter across her shoulders. "Yeah," she tells him. "I'd remember it. I don't know how important it could be, but I'd remember that tree."

"Good," he says.

::

Somehow, the cottage is even more terrifying in real life. It's fallen into disrepair, yes, but nothing like the dream, and yet it looms ominously over the car. Ariadne's limbs refuse to let her get out. Her nails are white against the plush leather of the car's seats, and it's only when Lightoller's irritation draws a protective snip of displeasure from Cobb that she manages to force her legs through the open door. The leaves crack in a familiar way under her feet, and even though he hasn't been here since his arrest over a year ago, the whole area is so tangibly Lewis that her skin crawls. She pushes away from the car with faked confidence, and she only allows herself the barest of glances over her shoulder, half expecting to see Alice there. She can feel the girl's eyes between her shoulder blades.

There's a small garden that wasn't there in the dream, daylilies and marigolds spilling raucously over a tiny picket fence holding them back from the worn path. They've gone wild, and Ariadne thinks of the garden of live flowers and frowns, imagining them feral and mean. There is a worn stone caterpillar nestled between the stalks. Ariadne glances at Yusuf, but he's looking away.

"We'll start inside," Lightoller says, and she nods dumbly. He slices through the police tape cleanly with a knife, the sound of metal on plastic grating and sharp in the unearthly bubble of silence surrounding the cottage.

Inside, the cottage is subtly different from the dream. The furniture is arranged differently, a painting changed here or there. She drags her finger along the dust smearing one of the movie posters in the hall and is surprised to see that underneath the grime it's not Alice at all, but Gone With the Wind. The big mirror in the parlor is gone, in its place a deadly dull landscape of a pastoral scene. The chair is there, turned away to face the television set that now intrudes upon the room, hulking in the corner as if to say it's always been there. Ariadne touches the remote on the armrest and it's real, slightly chilled plastic firm and present. Lightoller gives her an odd look, and she's not sure if it's frustration at her odd behavior or irritation that she can't seem to stop touching things, so she tugs her hand back reluctantly and follows when he leads them into the hall.

She drags her feet as Lightoller opens the heavy wooden door at the end of the hall and the others get their first glance at the Alice room. When she finally enters, she's struck by the disparity: things she'd assumed were fantasy—the flickering lamps lighting wall sconces with antiquated eeriness, the enormous bookshelves full of different editions of Carroll's works—are real, and things she'd taken for granted—the rounded reading chair, the enormous lithograph of Carroll's Alice covering half the wall—are different, wrong somehow for the inelegance they add to the room. Most striking is the chair, that chair where the girls were bound and killed. In the dream, she'd taken its soft calfskin leather for rote, assumed that its teak and brass tacks were a very definite part of the real Alice room. Outside of the dream, the chair is sad, a lonely little kitchen chair stranded in the wrong room and used for wrong purposes. There are inelegant scars on the wood where handcuffs were dragged against its legs and arms, where lab technicians have taken hunks of its flesh to test and tag and file away for evidence. Ariadne's fingers flutter over the edge of its tall back before she realizes, jerking away as if scalded.

"This isn't right," she says, scanning the room with her eyes. The lithograph, so unsettling and wrong in the dream, has become a framed press of flowers. The floors are no longer smooth and glossy but scratched and marred where hundreds of trampling feet have trod them, where nosy pry bars have lifted them to plunder the dank secrets below. If she thinks about it, even the wallpaper is wrong, cheery yellow stripes of floral damask to the brooding mahogany swirls before. She spies the record player and lifts the arm to see what Lewis left playing. A jolt like electricity grabs her as she recognizes the name on the plate. Epiphany waits on the back of her tongue, and it's important to touch the hourglass suddenly, but it's gone. She doesn't mention aloud how much this scares her.

"There's nothing in here," Lightoller says. "Let's go outside."

Ariadne follows behind, part of her stuck in the Alice room with her thoughts. The back yard is unremarkable, flat and bland but for a small, pink plastic tea table left moldering at the bottom of the garden where a sandy creek cuts across the property. She doesn't notice the water until she's stepped in it, and it flushes into her shoes, cold and muddy. There's nothing familiar about this place, but everything's the same. She recognizes the willow from Wonderland where it dangles its leaves into the trickling creek, and on a whim, she turns, leaving the team and the police and the rational world behind, striking out in the direction she knows is right.

It shouldn't be here. It's improbable, impossible; it shouldn't be here, but it is, and she stares up at the banyan with something like cotton, something like blood in her mouth. "This is the tree," she murmurs, stuck in sloshy shoes at the base of the beastly tree. When Lightoller jogs up, mouth set in a disapproving line, she simply says, "Dig here," and walks away to crouch against the trunk of another tree. Her sweater isn't enough to stop the shivers this time as she wiggles her toes against her wet socks and wonders if she'll ever be warm again. Lightoller's men are rushing back and forth with shovels, and the others look torn between watching in interest and consoling her. Cobb goes, finally, rolling up his shirtsleeves to help dig, and Arthur follows, standing back to preserve the crisp white of his own shirtsleeves. Eames is staring morosely off into the distance, and Yusuf smiles apologetically as he leaves her to pitch in, hauling dirt out of the rapidly deepening hole to sort through makeshift pans.

There's something wrong, but she can't place it until she sees Eames's hand moving, flicking rapidly over his poker chip like it's a worry stone, like it's an idol, like it's a—she snatches at her pocket, suddenly desperate. Like it's a totem, she realizes, and hers is nowhere to be found. A soft cough breaks through her distraction and she looks up to find a young officer standing over her, hand outstretched.

"You dropped this, I think," he says, and when he rolls his palm over and uncurls his fingers, she stops cold. Her bishop gleams in his palm.

"Th-thanks," she says, reaching out for it. He pulls his hand away, lifting the bishop to catch the fading sunlight of the day. If they don't find Alice soon, it will be too late.

"What is it?" he asks, still peering at it in fascination.

"It's a tool of the trade. It's very important to me," she tells him, forcing a smile onto her face. "I'd like to have it back now, please."

"If it's so important, you should be more careful with it," he says. "Ariadne."

She hears a click, hears a click like the safety of a gun, hears very faintly that someone has started the record in the cottage, hears—

—Non, Je ne regrette rien—

—and she tries very, very hard to remember the car ride to the cottage. They'd gotten into the car at the station. She'd buckled her seatbelt; Eames and Arthur had bickered over something inconsequential. The car had left the lot, got onto the highway, driven for a long time. Had they taken the road south? North? When had the cactuses turned to deciduous trees? She can't remember. She realizes she can't remember beyond Lightoller saying they needed—no. She can't remember anything between thinking, He's going to need us to go to Lewis's house and the crunch of dead leaves under the car's tires. Her mouth stretches into a forced smile as she holds her hand out, palm up, and waits for him to place it in her hand. Cool metal chills her skin for a moment before she tips her palm, spilling the bishop onto the stone at her feet.

It falls in slow motion, tipping end over end in time with the beating of her heart. By the time it hits the granite paving stone between them, it is spinning, whirling faster and faster until it crashes against the stone with a ringing sound and dips, whirling on its rim in circles. It's wrong. A wave of déjà vu sweeps over her. She smiles at Lewis; he smiles back crooked teeth through the young officer's chapped lips and charming scruffiness.

"You're a smart girl," he says, and behind him, the projections that look like her team members are staring at her.

"Thank you," she says, and she's proud that her voice doesn't wobble. Edith Piaf sings in the background as the sunlight turns fire-colored through the leaves and the tips of the trees that reach up in supplication.

"You still haven't found her," he says, and she nods. "You want me to tell you?"

"Please," Ariadne asks. "Don't you think I've earned it?"

"Oh, very nearly. It's a nice trick, that music," he tells her, and for a moment they're silent, listening to the swell of the orchestra as Edith sings. "But I can't let you have her. She's mine."

"She doesn't deserve to be hidden away, waiting to be found. You're never coming back here in real life," Ariadne tells him. Lewis's smile falls between them.

"That's what you think," he says shortly. The young police man's face flickers, his mouth shifting into Lewis's thick-lipped scowl and back to the young man's smooth features. "You'll never find her, and I'll never tell. She'll still be here when I get out."

"Don't you get it?" Ariadne snaps, voice raising to a frenzied pitch. "You're never getting out! When we wake up, when we really wake up? They're going to lock your crazy ass up for murder!" Her voice dips, deadly and slow, "And you. You are never getting out."

Lewis's façade cracks. "I am not crazy!" he snarls back, and when he rears back, Ariadne remembers the officer's gun. He levels it at her, face twisted in a way that she half-remembers. Behind him, the projections are growing uneasy, shuffling into a ragged line like a house of cards. Lewis bares his teeth, and Ariadne flinches at the explosion of powder, twisting left to dodge and charging into the dusky woods.

There's only one place to go, only ever been one place to go: the center of the labyrinth. And the center isn't below ground, not beneath the tree, not in the Alice room. Ariadne closes her eyes and thinks hard, trying to follow the flimsy thread of dream through the labyrinth. Her hands clench around air as she stops and remembers. And then she knows.

The dream's layout is Wonderland, always Wonderland, dilated and stretched, but even through the red paint she can see the white rose petals beneath. Her eyes pick up on a smooth stone from the path she'd followed into the forest. She passes the twirling, snapping flowers until—there it is before her, just as she'd imagined. She hadn't bothered looking back the first time through, but now she wonders how she'd missed it.

The rabbit hole is slight, just a dip in the low mound of a hill between two yew trees. The yew is a symbol of eternal life, she remembers as she takes in the tattered, weather-worn bow looped through the lower branches. Alice Seward's hair ribbon is frayed, waving in the breeze, tangled with the thick, ropy branches. It explains a lot, the way the thick trunk resembles the banyan's loping roots. Yews are sacred, holy, protected. Yews are hollow. She raises a hand, pleased that it's only slightly shaking, and knocks firmly.

"You can't get in that way," Alice says behind her, and when Ariadne turns around, she knows it's really her. The bark of the tree is dry, dead. Ariadne pushes against it and it creaks under the strain, cracking with thick, meaty snaps. She peers between the splinters, and for the first time, she sees Alice.

The girl is desiccated, dried out and bloodless but somehow whole, crouched on the ground with her arms wrapped around herself. Filthy bruises mar her skin; she has been posed. Ariadne pulls at the wood until she has pried open a hole big enough to reach in. Alice's cheek is cold and smooth, chilled by the winter air. Her lashes flutter and Ariadne jumps back, sprawling on the ground with her heart juddering in her chest.

A cold hand traces along the side of her face and she screams, skittering away from the projection of Alice where she stands, watching Ariadne. "Thank you," Alice says, and Ariadne bites back the ridiculous urge to say, It's cool. She coughs, instead.

"I—it was nothing," she says, unable to focus her eyes on the girl as she stands before her. Alice's smile is sideways and wry, and she tugs on the orange sweatshirt the corpse—and now she—is wearing. "I," Ariadne starts, but she doesn't know where she's going and stops.

"You should go now," Alice tells her, and Ariadne nods shakily, climbing to her feet to brush the dead leaves from her jeans. She's walking away, wondering how she'll find her way back to the cottage, when the thought occurs to her.

"Alice?" she asks, and Alice steps out from behind a tree ahead of her onto the path.

"Who," Ariadne asks, biting her lip as she decides whether to ask or not. "Cobb mentioned…who was the Queen? Cobb said I should keep an eye out for her, like she was dangerous or something, and I just wanted to know," she says, words pouring out of her nervously at the cat smile forming on Alice's face. "Who was he talking about?"

Alice's smile is sharp. "Me, of course. Alice is the queen of Wonderland. It's all about me; it always has been."

And Ariadne is tired of running, so when Alice raises the gun she smiles and takes the bullet, and she hopes when she opens her eyes again she's somewhere else.

::

She opens her eyes and the fluorescent lights give her a blinding headache, or make her more aware of one that's formed just behind her eyes. She feels nauseated for a moment, and when she can finally see one of everything instead of two, she registers the concerned faces around her.

"You missed the kick," Arthur tells her as he removes her line and turns it neatly around his elbow. "So we gave you another one. You missed it, too."

"She wouldn't let me leave until I found her," Ariadne murmurs softly. Cobb's expression turns sharp.

"You found her?" he asks, and she nods, tentatively. The officers rush, then, surrounding her with notepads and hushed, excited faces. She describes the grave, the ribbon marker and the yew trees, and when Lightoller starts barking orders and the officers pour out of the room, she's surprised by how little she cares if the girl is there when they find the place. She knows the place will be there, too, just as she knows that the Alice in the dream hadn't been hers or Lewis's. Her stomach flips; she glances over at the empty spot where Lewis had been strapped to his bed.

"Did they take him out when I missed the kick?" she asks, pointing to the empty bed. Cobb peers at it thoughtfully, as if unsure what to say.

"Ariadne," he finally manages, then stops. "Ariadne," he tries again.

"I," Eames says, flustered. "Lewis died, love. Some sort of reaction to the somnacin."

Ariadne's skin goes cold. "That's not possible. He was in the dream with me. We were there for less than a day; that's, what, twelve minutes? He couldn't have died in twelve minutes," she says.

"You were under for three quarters of an hour," Arthur tells her, and she stares at him. "The rest of us came up at twenty five minutes. Lewis flatlined at thirty. You were by yourself for the last fifteen."

Bile burbles in her stomach. "No, I wasn't. That's a day in dream time, and I wasn't alone for a whole day in dream time. I wasn't even there a whole day."

Arthur narrows his eyes. "Ariadne, this case was timed perfectly. You were the only person who didn't come up according to plan. We thought you'd fallen into limbo."

And Ariadne's mouth goes numb at this thought. "Is that—" she turns to Cobb with imploring eyes. "Is that what happened to Lewis? Is he in limbo now?"

"Lewis is dead, Ariadne," Arthur tells her. She shoots him a dirty look and goes back to Cobb.

"Is he there? Trapped in limbo?" she demands. Cobb shrugs helplessly.

"I don't know, Ariadne. I—limbo isn't a real place, you know. It's a construct of the mind. If you went to limbo with Lewis, then yes, he'd be in limbo for you, but he wouldn't be there for me, or for anyone else. He would just be a projection. You can't trap someone's soul inside the PASIV," he says, and his bitter tone says he's tried. Mal, she thinks, then shakes the idea away.

"Lewis was in the dream after you guys woke up. I know he was. I saw him. He chased me!" she insists.

"I don't doubt he did," Eames says, wincing at the memory. "Projections can tell when things are going wrong outside the dream. I was working this one case with an extractor named Jones; we were traced back to headquarters, we had a rat, something, and somehow Jones was shot outside of the dream. It was horrific. He lingered for hours in the dream, and we didn't notice until all of a sudden the dream started to collapse—it was like it started to rot from the inside out. The projections went mad; they gutted my architect like a fish."

"That's not what happened," Ariadne grinds out through gritted teeth, and he the smile he gives her is more patronizing than placating.

"Well, whatever happened, it's over now," Yusuf suggests. She bites back a sharp retort and settles for tugging on her sweater. There are a few officers left behind, grumbling to each other as they fold the chairs. The dead girls stare up at her from the folder Eames is holding; he flicks through the pages idly before closing the folder and handing it to Arthur. Arthur tucks it away, and Ariadne realizes: they're leaving. Yusuf has tugged his coat on, adjusting the sleeves, and Eames is on his way out the door.

"Not to say that this wasn't a lovely way to spend the afternoon," Eames says, waving jauntily as he heads out, and suddenly he's gone. She can hear the click of his boots on the concrete in the hall, listens as the heavy metal door at the end of the hall grates open and closed again. She holds these sounds to herself, proof that Eames is real. Yusuf gives her a halfhearted smile and ducks out, himself.

"I'd better get going, too," Arthur says briskly, punctuating this statement with the click of the clasps on his briefcase. Buttoned up in his coat with the big black case resting against his leg, he could pass for a lawyer. The PASIV is inside. He has three warrants out for his arrest. He smiles at her with a short salute and he's gone.

"Are you going to be okay?" Cobb asks her, and she nods. She doesn't trust herself to speak, but shakes her head a little and nods again.

"Each of these cases is like a dream, itself. They leave me wondering what's real and what's not. But this one was more like a nightmare," she manages. Her smile is weak.

"You mustn't forget that you're not dreaming, Ariadne," he tells her seriously, pressing an impulsive and fatherly kiss to her forehead. "You can't ever forget that you're not dreaming, because you lose control when you forget that." She nods and he stands there, watching her with an inscrutable expression on his face.

"You'd better go," she tells him. She's proud that her voice only wobbles a little. "James and Phillipa will be wondering where you are." He nods slowly, and she listens to his ponderous footsteps going all the way down the hall before she steps out of the room. He's gone.

And when, a week later, she is watching on the news as police describe the stroke of luck they'd had in finding Alice Seward's body, she pushes her bishop over to watch it roll along the counter. It tips slowly, then faster and faster until the sound of metal ringing on marble fills her ears.