Hi! Below you will find Part Four. As always, I would be overjoyed to get some reviews of any kind, critical or otherwise, because I know this story is kind of strange and I'm curious what people think of it... On that note, I want to thank the awesome Guest(s) who reviewed chapters Inceptus and Expostus last time - thank you for the kind words and for taking the time to read and respond! If you're authors too, Guests, feel free to PM me your user for returns.
I'm sorry I'm posting this chapter so late in the day - school hit me like a freight train ;) this week.
I'm sure you've all figured this out by now, but I want to say it just so you don't get your hopes up this chapter: there will be no English translations provided for any non-English words in this story (with the exception of those that the characters explain to each other, like "meet me at night"). There are two non-English languages used in this story, and both of them are there for a reason and I feel that putting translations with an asterisk at the bottom would take away from the experience of reading. Don't worry; you'll still be able to understand the story without me spelling everything out - but I would encourage you to google the bits you don't understand after if you want to know their meaning.
I do not own Inception, the Ecole d'Architecture, Little League Baseball, the Cupertino Courier, AirBnB, Coudenberg, or the folk song.
"Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs." – Rudyard Kipling
/ ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /
The Palace of Coudenberg was a sprawling mansion indeed. It was situated on a knoll in Brussels, though it would have towered over the surrounding landscape even without the little hill beneath it. Its walls were stone. They varied between three and six and more stories above ground, an impressive feat considering the date of the palace's construction was just over a thousand years after the time of Christ. The walls had windows, too, and many of them; its stint as a defensive building had been brief. In its most complete form, the Palace of Coudenberg was arranged in a rectangular structure, its wings enclosing a courtyard within, and staring outward over the misty green beyond.
The windows – real glass, the lot of them – lined the second and third stories of the longest wing of the palace, and open air archways lined the first. It was here, along the latter, that Arthur and Ariadne walked. Their shoes fell softly on the corridor, and it was clear though the air smelled of recent rain. The faint shadows of the pillars fell over them at timely intervals as they walked toward the main areas of the palace in the larger wing adjacent. A mural of a trio of ships weathering a gale accented the inner wall to their left. Once in a while, Ariadne would pause and lean out from beneath the archways to admire the architectural handiwork above. The windows and the stone between stood perfectly spaced, like sentinels, supporting a forest of narrow turrets and chimney stacks up on the roof.
She took a deep breath of the dewy air, trying to clear her head. Arthur did the same.
There was no harm in running, she told herself – and they weren't, technically; they were walking. The walking was calming, rhythmic clicks on stone. Arthur pulled open an oiled wooden door. It didn't creak.
They entered the main part of the wing, where the roof came to peaks overhead and little breeze made it through the windows. She wasn't prepared for the luxury inside – polished floors and imported furniture and tapestries of richly dyed threads. The rooms were a little cramped, the ceilings lower than the modern norm because of the time period when they were built. They made up for it, though, in sprawling open layout, one chamber feeding into the next, next, next, and ahead Ariadne knew they would eventually reach the grandest part, where two-story windows soared above the rest of the palace on a corner chambre worthy of a cathedral. They took their time walking, though, as it was so beautiful on the way through. It was the kind of place Ariadne would have loved to visit before, if she'd been able – Belgium wasn't so far from France, and this place was a stunning example of Gothic and Renaissance styles.
But, that was impossible. The Palace of Coudenberg had burned to the ground in 1731.
Arthur held open a second door, this one one of a set leading into the octagonal meeting place of the two wings. The details of the palace filled themselves in as he approached, bringing them into focus. Edges sharpened, wood shone, shadows fell into line. He held a hand out over his rendition, palm up.
"What do you think?" he asked of Ariadne. She smiled, genuinely, and it unwound something that had cramped in her jowls over the past week.
"I think it's just perfect. It's just like – better than – any scholar might have imagined." They had some paintings, some texts and other ornaments to go off of, the architects did, but in the end all their scale models were hollow skeletons of paper and foam. To see it for real – and she used that phrase with the damning knowledge of their true state shoved firmly to the back of her mind – was remarkable. They reached the bottom of a wide, gradual spiral staircase. It reached up into the next several stories and would eventually dump them out in such a position to step out onto the grand balcony between sets of oversized windows.
Arthur leaned on the rail post. "I know it's breaking a few rules, creating a whole, real place, but I figured . . . considering . . . ." His architecture skills were not the best in the world, there was a reason Dom had reached out to Ariadne all those months ago – but with a complete blueprint to work from, it wasn't so hard. Arthur considered this palace fair game for copying because it no longer existed – never had, in their lifetimes – and could never be rebuilt due to the modern cityscape which had overtaken Brussels in its absence. He'd studied it hard over the past few weeks, memorizing wings and windows and guessing at inner chamber layouts. The internet surrendered only so much, and he had to call upon the memory of a visit he'd made once to a tourist spot nearby, and trust his subconscious to do the rest.
So far, it performed beautifully. He'd been in this dreamscape a few times before, to check that it was stable and detailed and fortified, and he'd been waiting for an excuse to show it to Ariadne. The fact that she'd refused to go under in a dream of her own design, or alone, and also the fact that they'd been unable to sleep otherwise, while sad, had provided the opportunity.
She climbed a couple of steps so that they were equal in height.
"It's great." There were a few columns she'd have shifted, a few bits of bannister out-of-period, but for a non-architect it was stellar – and thus far, securely empty; they'd not passed a single projectional soul since their arrival. It was a welcome respite from the real world.
Arthur leaned over to kiss her on the nose. She tilted her head, yielding instead to a kiss on the lips.
They knew the true feel of one another's mouths by now, thanks to that one brief meeting in the Los Angeles ristorante, and their memories wasted no time filling in here. Subconscious inference had to be used for what came next, though: It deepened quickly, deceptively so, like a rising flood. Before they knew it they'd found one another's waists and lost their balances, and were sitting instead of standing on the bottom of the winding staircase.
In limbo only a few days before, Ariadne had pleaded Dom Cobb not to lose himself in the depths of his subconscious. Here and now, she silently begged the opposite of Arthur, and of herself. Lose yourself here. Lose yourself. Stay in this. Stay stay stay. With eyes closed and lips open, the dream had transformed into a fireworks show of touch and taste rather than the usual form of visual splendor.
Did the palace still exist around them, when Arthur wasn't watching? Who could tell. He wasn't in any hurry to check, nor did he put any conscious thought into maintaining it. The velvety carpet of the staircase beneath his fingers said yes it was, so he was satisfied. He moved his other hand up to the trim of Ariadne's shirt, but that was where it stopped.
A few minutes later, they parted as the first notes of their warning song rang out over the dreamworld, and eyes opened. Coudenberg was still there. Arthur glanced sidelong at it and shifted so he sat more beside Ariadne than around her.
"Something wrong?" she asked.
"No, no. It's just – we ought to stop. La grande mort isn't the only way to wake oneself up accidentally," he said with a smirk. That was true, he knew from experience, but if he were more honest he'd have said he just didn't want to continue in a dream. Wasn't real enough, seemed insincere.
Together they began to climb, as the music soared too slowly through the air.
"Arthur, do you think we could just . . . walk a while longer?"
He nodded and altered the staircase so subtly and skillfully it couldn't be seen. When by his own estimate they had about five minutes remaining before the Pasiv would call them back to the Ragged Point Inn in California, he changed it back and guided them to an exit corridor. Suddenly they were on level cherry flooring, impossibly only three stories above where they'd begun. They made it out onto the palace balcony in time to watch full dawn break over the horizon.
/ ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /
Back to work. The Pasiv was today their alarm clock, and when it shut off the flow of sedative they were up and preparing for a full day of hunting. Arthur reveled in the search, but Ariadne hoped it wouldn't take long. The morning queasiness was becoming almost unbearable.
This time they were packed and out the door before breakfast, not wanting to risk being seen again alongside the morning newscast on the dining area television. They were both lucky and unlucky, Arthur thought, that few details were known about the presumed robbery at their LA hotel: lucky, because the vagueness would keep them off the Wanted lists, and unlucky because everyone loves a good mystery story, so the news would likely continue to run it for days. He guessed – and hoped – it would stay relatively local. Today they were heading even further from the source.
San Francisco was their destination – or, first, the smaller city of Cupertino to the south. One of their six remaining names was said to reside there. They picked up a few essentials, and then began the long drive on the highway. Ariadne at the wheel this time, they wove their way north on the cliff-side road like an ant upon a cinderblock.
Rev. Donovan Grisham, 36, no criminal history and no discernable motive. He was a former scholar of Regent University, yearlong monastery resident, and one-time student missionary to the slums of Paris via service in an orphanage there. Now he spent his days at Glory Above Church, his flock composed of the devoted parishioners at one edge of Cupertino. A model citizen if there ever was one. But, in this game of late, no one was off limits as a suspect.
Arthur reviewed his notes, and routed their GPS to the address he'd written down. They slowed as they approached the church parking lot.
"So, do we have a plan here?" Ariadne asked. With the individual they'd checked up on the day before (the molecular biologist in Santa Cruz), his innocence had been apparent at once – he'd been in Australia for the better part of the year, and two family members confirmed it, separately. Here she sensed it wouldn't be so obvious. She could already see Grisham's car in the lot, he was here, and their list of known friends in the area they could talk to was not lengthy. They'd have to go in directly.
"Watch and learn," Arthur responded as they parked. Ariadne was miffed.
"I'd rather you just tell me the plan first, if you've got one," she said. Arthur unbuckled his seatbelt.
"No, that is the plan." He opened his door. "We watch him, and learn what we can. If we can't rule him out from that we'll go try and talk to him after." He stepped out and shut it behind him.
In his usual three-piece-suit, Arthur looked only a little out of place amongst the small crowd flowing through the front doors. They chose a pew in the back, between an elderly couple and a man who couldn't stop readjusting his bowtie. Arthur hoped from their vantage point to see their mark before he saw them.
Sit, stand, kneel, sit. He went through the motions like a professional, all the time keeping a watchful eye upon those around him. Tried to tune them out verbally, though, so he might listen to Ariadne's voice alone in the songs.
It was a small enough building, slightly trapezoidal in shape. Even from the back they had a clear view of the proceedings on the dais. There a quartet and a small choir took turns leading in hymns, and a few speakers stood waiting for their turn at the pulpit. A musk of fake flowers and incense rolled lazily through the air in ribbons.
When Reverend Grisham, introduced by an altar boy, stepped up to the open book on the lectern, Ariadne knew immediately it wasn't him. It just wasn't. He was tall, probably husky beneath the robes, with a round chin and dimpled, bearded cheeks. He turned pages slowly, a tremor in his wrist. In the clear baritone that seems to be reserved for preachers and people who play them in movies, he implored the congregation to open their Holman Christian's for the sermon.
"Today we will begin our reading together with Ecclesiastes 1." A collective ruffle of criminally thin pages as everyone found Ecclesiastes 1. Grisham began to quote from the passage, and the congregation responded in turn. Ariadne leaned over and whispered to Arthur, much to the chagrin of the couple to their left.
"It's not our guy."
"How do you know? It's not in the looks – people can change them in the dreamworld if they want, like Eames."
"I know, I know. It's not that, it's just . . . not him. He moves differently. Ugh. I don't know. We can talk to him if you want."
They stayed on for the sermon for the sake of normalcy, heads bowed to hide their faces from the others, and waited after for even their pious neighbors to clear out. The pair then rose and made their way to the dais. This was their chance to learn about him more closely.
They crept around the side, into the offices and confessional rooms. They slipped through the private space unseen for a while – finding no evidence against the pastor's innocence – until they ran right into Reverend Grisham in the narrow hall behind the dais. Ariadne stumbled.
"Father?"
He looked up from the linen he was folding. Arthur watched his face carefully for any indications that he'd met them before. There weren't any. He blinked at them through thick half-rim spectacles. His movements betrayed no nerves or hostility.
After a moment's wait, "Yes?" He smiled, and Ariadne found it warm. She thought quickly of something to say.
"My, uh, brother and I. We're traveling this week. I was hoping we could have a blessing from you?"
"Of course. The Lord always watches over those on journeys. Might I ask where you're going?"
In Ariadne's second of hesitation, Arthur responded. "Pennsylvania," he said. "For the Little League World Series." He stood half a step behind her, hands folded.
"Ah. Far. Well enjoy, then," Grisham said. He gave a brief blessing, during which Arthur finally conceded to Ariadne with a shake of his head. Not him. When Grisham was finished, he opened his eyes and said more softly, "Glad to see you little lost sheep are safe. Is there anything else?"
Ariadne said, "No, thank you, I don't think – wait, what do you mean?" He recognized them. For a second her heart clinched. If this was their guy? They were alone now. He might be armed. Arthur scanned the hall.
"You were in the paper this morning."
The papers. Damn. They hadn't counted on that. Ariadne slumped a little. That their faces were this far north in the papers was no good, and even more disappointing that they were no closer to the true identity of her monster.
It took some gentle arguing, but they did get him to not worry about them being in the paper. Even if they claimed she wasn't in danger, it was his duty, he'd said, to report to the authorities the truth. Arthur responded, almost hypnotically, that so far as he knew, the truth was that they'd run off east to watch the Little League World Series. Grisham had looked at the floor, fingered his wedding ring, and told Arthur, "That's right," with a weary smile. Minutes later they were out the door with another name crossed off and their own copy of the Cupertino Courier.
Back in the car, Arthur scanned the Courier headlines in the small section dedicated to crime. He was relieved to see their false names were still in use. Crime was no rarity, but he suspected the unknowns of their case had drawn interest, coupled, sadly, with the fact that it was perceived to be so high-profile. Next time, he thought, they wouldn't pick such a damn nice hotel.
"This could work to our advantage," Ariadne was saying, mostly to herself. Being recognized created risk, but they might just avoid detection with the word of someone who, literally with God as his witness, attested to authorities that to his knowledge the missing persons were en route to Pennsylvania. Even the disorder created by a few hours or days of a wild goose chase in New England might buy them enough time to find out who had gotten into Ariadne's head. Apprehend him, too, hopefully before the LAPD caught up with them.
Arthur drummed his fingers on the dash. The sun was high overhead, it being afternoon by now on a summer day.
"On to the next one, then?" Ariadne said tiredly. Looking at their notes, there were five names left on their list. One more in the area of San Francisco, and the rest hours further to the north.
"Probably time for at least one more today," said Arthur. He programmed the GPS while Ariadne put the car in gear. They sped out of the near-empty lot.
It was late afternoon by the time downtown San Francisco appeared on the horizon. The city itself was packed between the fog-laden mountains and the water. It was situated on the lowlands, so that from certain angles it looked like it was actually floating on the bay. The road they took arced around it, out of town and into the industrial areas inland. It was quieter out this way; there were few cars and the buildings were well distanced from one another, unlike in the busy city. Ariadne pushed the car past 130 kph on straightaways. The engine whined, then roared to keep pace.
"Something wrong?" Arthur said from the passenger seat. Ariadne took her foot off the gas.
"No, I'm okay. It's just – what are we even doing? Driving all over the American coast, looking for someone we don't even know exists . . . You're wanted . . . Why are you helping me with this?"
"Ariadne, he spoke a language you don't. And I saw him fight us at the elevators – an untrained person, violent and thinking to wear a vest? That's not normal."
"But why–"
She turned to meet Arthur's eyes for a moment, cut off when he set a hand on her forearm. She found his face smooth, almost incredulous, brow pinched slightly beneath his slicked hair.
Say it, he thought.
". . . Because this can't go unchecked. This could affect all of us if someone's out there to torment people in our line of work," he said instead.
"Oh," said Ariadne softly, glancing between him and the road.
Her eyes showed disappointment, so Arthur continued, "We'll get to the bottom of this, don't worry."
"Yeah," she agreed. She refocused on the road. There were a few seconds of quiet before she posed another question.
"Arthur?"
"Yes?" Still with his hand on her arm, gently massaging her wrist draped over the gearshift.
"Do you think it's worth it, to do all this to try and protect . . . our line of work? What if this is just something that happens to us? First Cobb, the ops guys, then me."
"No, I think it's different this time. Unless you secretly have a snake-man husband in your past – not judging – that would be haunting you, I think it's different."
Ariadne laughed.
"And I think," Arthur continued, "that if you love something, you should protect it . . . You do love it, don't you?"
Ariadne did love the dreamworld. Loved it with everything – it was free, it was creation, it was a challenge, it was hers and anyone's she chose to share it with. And it should be safe, too, but for this poison that had seeped in over the past days.
"Yes. Do you? You just seem to think of it as . . . just a job, sometimes."
Arthur smirked. "It is but not really. Pays well, too. But besides the obvious benefits, I'm not blind to what a rare situation we've got. When most people go into work, they sell their time. When I go into the dreamworld, I get to buy it back."
They spent the rest of the ride coming up with a new story to use should their next person of interest ask the reason for their visit. They stopped once to purchase a change of clothes. The sloping highlands, covered mostly in pines, stretched on with sometimes miles in between buildings. A luxury home here, gargantuan tech headquarters there. Finally, the sleek little car turned off the main road onto a narrow, winding drive. The drive had been paved relatively recently, Arthur could tell; gravel was still scattered alongside it and the air still smelled of cut trees. They slowed and took the turns gently. Just when it seemed the forest would engulf them, they rounded a bend and came upon a squat gray building.
It was a plain structure, rectangular with modern glass doors and a few windows in the front, and ventilation stacks poking up from the roof towards the back. It was only three stories in height. Beside the front entryway was a single scraggly redwood tree, which towered another full story above the building. A garden of white poppies covered the grounds around it. The parking lot wasn't more than a quarter full, at this hour.
Ariadne parked next to the ugliest fuchsia sedan she'd ever seen, and pulled the key from the ignition. A moment to breathe. Arthur got out his notebook.
"So this one's the lab, right?" he said.
She said, "Yeah, should be. The neurologist?"
"Yep. That one – that went fishing off of Olèron last summer. Simonsen. It's a long shot, him being in on a weekend, but we've got to check it out."
This building before them, like many places of business and research, was home to a small cluster of laboratories and office spaces. Corporate researchers and some lucky academics would rent facilities within the complex to carry out their work. This one, according to its website, was home to a number of labs, most focused on genetics, neurology, or another field in medicine. Arthur and Ariadne left the car and walked in the main entrance, dressed in t-shirts blue and gold. The doors parted automatically.
The lobby was dominated by a huge half-moon receiving desk. Behind it, there were a few doors, each leading to a different section of the building. Black granite floors and pastel blue walls. Stairs and an elevator were located in the back left, and a group of businessmen clustered in the corner, awaiting a meeting. The one person at the front desk didn't look up, no bell sounded when they entered. Arthur cleared his throat.
"Yeah?" the receptionist glanced up, moving only his eyes. His chin rested on one hand. Ariadne stepped forward, prepared this time, and, using the story they'd crafted, explained who they wanted to see. He cast a disdainful look at her top and shrugged.
"The docs usually like if you call ahead, you know, but it's been a slow day. I'll see what I can do." He rose from his wheeled chair and disappeared through the centermost door behind him. For an instant they saw the bland, narrow hall beyond. Then for a few minutes Arthur and Ariadne were left alone in the lobby.
Arthur peered over a clipboard on the front desk. It wasn't long before he spotted their man on the staff roster.
Aergia, Jeremy
Groves, Edward S.
Langley, Meredith
Levesque, Icarus L.
Machado, Julio F.
. . .
. . .
Simonsen, Tam G.
There. They were in the right place.
The secretary returned and dropped back into his chair. "Dr. Simonsen's out through next week. Sorry."
Too long to wait. Better talk to someone else, try and learn more about him.
Ariadne breathed deeply. "Okay, um, our report is due this week, though. Are any of his colleagues available?"
Slowly, huffing as if gravity had tripled in magnitude, the man again stood and went briefly into the hall.
"If it's that urgent you can ask Dr. Levesque, he's got his own lab over there, in the right wing," he drawled when he returned. "He's in, and he'll see you, but they're closing up shop soon." His eyes moved to the wall clock.
Better than nothing.
Ariadne said, "Thanks, mister . . ."
"Jeremy."
"Jeremy. Slow day, huh? You seem a little underwhelmed here."
He shrugged again. "I'm supposed to be in a biotech shadow program, but this intern crap is all they have me do. Would've been better to try and get a lab gig back on campus. The hell if I even know what's going on here, they never tell me anything."
The door behind him swung open again, and a woman appeared. Jeremy stopped talking abruptly.
"I'll be with you in a moment, ma'am," she addressed Ariadne. Her voice was tight, her stride long and bouncing. She made her way to the far end of the desk, to a secondary computer console.
She was a scientist by the look of her. Not Dr. Levesque, but someone familiar with the practices of a lab. She wore a bleached lab coat and baby blue gloves, and her frizzy red hair contained up in a ponytail. Goggles hung at her collar in place of a necklace. Dense freckles didn't completely hide the dark circles under her eyes.
Snap – the blue nitrile gloves came off, and her fingers were at the keyboard. And Arthur and Ariadne couldn't help but stare.
The woman wasn't a particularly fast typist or anything, maybe slightly above average; what drew their attention were the scars that covered her hands. Milk-white and raised, long and overlapping in no particular pattern, from the fingertips up to where the wrist disappeared into her sleeve. They ran like creeper vines over smooth, pink rubber tree limbs.
She might have noticed – her lips pressed together just so – but she never lifted her eyes from the screen while she worked. Still, Ariadne was embarrassed. She looked away. Arthur turned his focus to a pen on the counter. They waited in the pitter-pat silence.
After a few moments, the woman called to Jeremy.
"Hey," she waved him over, "Could you reset this boot program? . . . Yes, yes, that icon there. I think the passcodes . . ."
For a moment, the secretary took her place at the standing desk before the monitor. The scientist turned to their visitors. As she spoke to them a translucent glass door on the right side of the lobby unlocked with a hiss, and Jeremy scooted back to his own station.
"Sorry about that. I'm Cierra. I work under Dr. Levesque. What would you like to see him for?" She came out and stood between them and the unlocked door, smiling politely.
Arthur exchanged a glance with Ariadne.
"My lab partner and I are graduate students at Berkeley, and we'd like to ask Dr. Levesque a few questions about his research. What kind of work do you do?"
She answered without hesitation. "I'm a student of computer science, actually. The human brain is a lot more like a computer than you might think, and analyzing and reverse-engineering that side of it is thought to be one of the most promising ways to figure out how to fight disease."
Behind her, a shadowy silhouette appeared behind frosted glass. The muffled beep of a keycard.
After another hiss and a beat, the door opened partway and the man within emerged to fill the gap.
"Good day. You are our visitors?" His voice was friendly and tinged with an accent he hadn't quite buried. Ariadne paled. Impossible.
Arthur answered. "Yes. Dr. Levesque?"
He waved it off. "Icarus, or Ike, please – I never did care much for phonetics. Come along inside." He opened the door wider to allow them through. "We are always glad for the interest of students, you know. What is it that you study?" His eyes lingered on Ariadne a moment.
She sensed his stare but plunged ahead with their lie anyway, once shock released its grip on her tongue. "We're biologists – med track, you know? – from UC Berkeley. Um, our lab staff leader sent us to interview Dr. Simonsen about his experiments, but if it's alright we'd like to talk to you too. Do you think we could have a look around?"
". . . Certainly. I'll give you the grand tour." He stepped through the door – the first of a pair, they saw now – and looked over his shoulder to flash her a smile.
They stepped through after him, and found themselves in a sort of airlock, the other sealed door ahead of them still. Dr. Levesque busied himself with the second keypad, giving Ariadne a chance to send a panicked look to Arthur. Him?! Arthur nodded slowly but remained skeptical. He'd been in the dream with Ariadne's monster for mere moments, so his judgement might not be the best, but the bone structure was awfully, awfully similar. Very similar. The gait, too. But, what were the odds . . . ?
The keypad buzzed loudly and a spark popped from it, and Levesque slapped it with the heel of his hand. "Damn thing . . . shorts out at the slightest disturbance, I swear . . ." he muttered. He jiggled the shell and re-entered his code.
The second door opened and they entered the lab. Dr. Levesque leading, Cierra last. The doors stayed open behind them, sounds of the receptionist's computer game leaking in from the lobby.
Compared to the few laboratories Arthur had seen before, it was large, but still crowded, always looking as if it needed a larger space to expand into as these places do. Nearest, there were two long lab benches that began close to the door and extended towards the far end of the room. In the corner, a cloaked MRI machine that nearly touched the ceiling. He scanned the bookshelves above the benches for volumes on Latin, France, dreams, anything. Nada. Every surface on the lab benches was coated with supplies – most of them with flasks, Bunsen burners, stacks of paper, or various instruments of measurement. None resembled a Pasiv. On the end of the leftmost bench sat a cage of white mice. Dr. Levesque stopped to observe them. One climbed into its hamster wheel and began to run furiously when he bent down to the bars.
He straightened all at once. "You'll have to forgive the mess," he said to his guests. "We're in the middle of quite a few long projects at the moment."
Arthur assured him the facilities back at their university were not unaccustomed to the organized chaos of research. Especially in this time of year, with the summer term winding to an end.
They traversed the room, walking up and down the benches, squeezing past the hulking MRI, all the time Levesque's cool voice narrating what this or that was used for, the mice's squeaking filling his pauses. They even stopped briefly outside Dr. Simonsen's lab in the other wing, and found it looked quite similar.
Levesque's background was in radiology, Arthur and Ariadne learned, and he'd only recently turned to medical research as a field of application for new devices. He and Cierra were currently working on developing a patch and app system to treat Alzheimer's, he said, though he really wanted to get into working with nanobots if he had the chance. He perused all the big Silicon Valley publications religiously, Cierra confirmed, earning an embarrassed chuckle from him.
"So, that's about all," he said, and by this time they'd circled back around to the door. Dr. Levesque called himself back from deep thought and looked directly at them for the first time since they'd entered. Brown eyes, russet at best under the lights. "Did you learn anything useful for your . . . what was it?"
"Term paper, yes."
"Ah," he smiled. "A Term Paper. A-T-P. Either sustains you or drains you, doesn't it?" He snorted as if he'd made a hilarious joke.
Ariadne and Arthur looked at each other blankly.
Levesque's smile dropped and Cierra seemed to gauge their reaction. "Are you sure there's nothing else?" the doctor said lowly. "I could certainly stay after hours . . . If you need something, I truly insist . . ." The desk attendant outside was already packing up, zipping his bag now, standing, ready to be out the door within moments of five o'clock. The businessmen were leaving too.
Ariadne sighed. She looked around the lab once more. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing damning, nothing proving either Dr. Simonsen or his colleague here was her monster. She heard Arthur's lecture from that morning over again in her mind, so clear he might have re-spoken it: we can't nab him until we're sure. Without a tie, to give themselves away to someone other than her monster would both make them look insane, and get them in trouble with the law as outed illegal Pasiv users. So no matter how much her gut prickled in this building, she had to bite her tongue now.
"No, thank you."
"Very well. Do feel free to come back should you think of something."
Arthur and Ariadne thanked him and left on the tail of the receptionist. Levesque watched them go through the glass. Only when they were back in the car with the doors locked, backing out, heading onto the winding drive, did they talk.
"What do you think?" Arthur asked. He trusted instinct above all.
"I don't know. I don't think it's Simonsen, but Levesque . . . I just have a weird feeling. I don't want to go back but I think we should."
Arthur nodded quietly, and signaled his turn out onto the main road for the empty woods to see. No good realizing some detail when they were halfway to Portland.
"I agree. We'll be low on time if Grisham leaks anything on us, not that he knows much. But tomorrow. Eames sent me an email, and I want to read it tonight before we do anything more."
"Where are we going tonight?" Ariadne doubted if it were safe to book another hotel, now that half the state thought Arthur was a burglar that frequented them, but the car was too cramped to conceive of staying in it, either.
"We're going couch-surfing."
"You think that's safe?"
"There's a new startup out of San Francisco regulating it now; the city will be a hub of theirs. And it's easier to keep one person quiet than a hotel-full."
"Keep them quiet? So we're gonna, like, kidnap someone?"
"No, no – just make sure they stay either in the house or away from us. We'll be at their home, so, technically, we won't be abducting them."
"I can't believe this."
"You'd rather get caught?"
San Francisco came out on the horizon, sudden and towering and twinkling in the dying light. Once they were across the bridge and into town, they stopped at a Starbucks to book Airbnb accommodations electronically. Ariadne drank her coffee through a straw.
Arthur checked his email:
Greetings.
I imagine you haven't made much progress without my help, so I think you'll appreciate this: Yusuf wouldn't stop worrying about you two, and I was so sick of it I took the liberty of running your description of Ariadne's symptoms past one of my sources. She's not the first. Four of the early test subjects in the USAF Pasiv initiative were committed, but you knew about that. I'm talking about others. Outside the Pasiv program. Public. My source dug up two articles – six months apart – that both detail the same symptoms. See this link and this link.
Arthur did. The first was on a physician in Nevada, who had been admired in his field until one day he decided he couldn't stomach picking up a needle anymore and started hiding in broom closets, convinced he was being stalked. Law enforcement swept his property but found no one, and nothing missing but a couple file folders of data charts. He was still receiving treatment. The second was a Malorium Grant finalist, who was dropped from the competition because the week before review he drove his car through a storefront, injuring six and destroying his grant-prospective invention in the process anyway. The pair's early reactions, though, were the same: insomnia, shakes, nausea, paranoia, cause unknown.
Coincidence? I do love to gamble, but I wouldn't bet on it.
No news on Yusuf's late classmate. Shame. Back to my holiday, then, I've done enough for you. Can't be holding your hand through everything. Maybe bring Ariadne out here a while if your current efforts are unsuccessful; I've become convinced there's nothing sand and martinis cannot remedy. Good luck.
Cheers,
Eames
Some time later, they were creeping up a sharp hill when the car's navigation system announced they had arrived at their destination. They came to a halt in front of a peach Italianate row house, one of a dozen or more packed like books on a shelf into the steep block. Ariadne peered up at it. It had two bay windows, one atop the other, concrete steps spilling out from the front porch, and a garage door half buried in the sidewalk terrace. It was all wood, one of a precious few in this area like that remaining, she knew from school. She wondered if Arthur had thought of that when choosing it. Every window and door was framed with elaborately carved trim, right up to the flat roof. A set of wind chimes hung over the porch rail.
Upon closer inspection they appeared to be found-art wind chimes, she noted, as they were made of four rusted drain pipes and a handful of bottle caps. Arthur ducked to avoid them as he rang the bell.
The door swung open, and the unmistakable smells of cannabis and oil hit them in a single wave. As for the man that answered the door, it was difficult to tell which had come earlier: his last shower or his last meal. Even barefoot he was taller than Arthur, lanky, with blond dreads to his shoulders and a bronze to his skin that might have been from sun or dirt.
"Yello," he said, a slow smile coming. He asked their false names, and they nodded, confirming. "Awesome. I'm Floyd then. C'mon inside, you golden bear – and bear-ette. Must be freezing." The faded thermometer nailed to the doorframe showed 62 F, but did not account for the wind.
He'd inherited the place from his aunt, he said. Apparently not the furniture, though, Arthur thought; on their trek to the third floor they passed only two small tables, and there were more woven floor mats than chairs in the place. No televisions. Good. Floyd guided them to the suite they'd rented and held open the door. Ariadne held her breath as they entered, and released it as Arthur released their luggage onto the bed. Slosh. Ugh. A water bed. Floyd turned on the lamps and caught the silver glint of the Pasiv.
"Dude, sweet case. What is that?"
Arthur narrowed his eyes. "Nothing you need to be concerned with."
"I'm not concerned, man. Totally chill. I was just, like, 'what is it?'"
"I was under the impression we rented a room, not a nanny."
Floyd threw up his hands, fingers splayed, eyes on the floor, and walked away with a shrug.
Close one. "Cold," Ariadne said playfully. More serious, "You don't think he'll go to the police?"
Arthur stopped midway through unzipping their suitcase.
"Ariadne," he said dully, voice low, "He doesn't need the police here any more than we do. He's got enough pot in this house to sedate a grizzly bear, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's not all he's on." He paused. "Even if he were observant enough to identify us and stupid enough to go to the police, they'd never take him seriously."
Floyd reappeared then, at the edge of the doorway, but made no indication he'd heard them. Leaning into the room, he held one generously-ringed finger up in the air.
"I forgotta tell you," he said, "But if you want'some, uh, basil from the rooftop garden, that's totally cool. Make yourselves at home. Just be careful, though – las week I was sittin' up there and I saw a real honest-to-God UFO. Bastards almost got me again. Anyway, later bro." With that, he vanished to the ground floor.
Arthur raised his eyebrows pointedly to Ariadne. See, told you.
Host-wise, they'd won the lottery.
A while later Arthur turned off the lamps and crossed the room by memory. Ariadne felt the mattress sink as he climbed onto the other side, heard the soft click as he set his gun on the nightstand, within easy reach. After that he laid very still, arms at his sides. Ariadne was unsure of what to do. They weren't unaccustomed to sharing a bed by now, what with work and the events of this week, but still. She swallowed. And what about Coudenberg? Did that count for them, or was it something to stay in dreams and melt away by morning like fog? She should say something of it.
"Do you think we found him today?" she whispered instead. A ruffle of sheets.
Arthur replied, "Honestly, I don't know. He seemed normal, lab seemed normal, but I think there's more to it. You'd know better than me." His breath was warm on her cheek. Her cheeks were warm.
Focus. You'd know better. Did he seem normal? He did.
"Why do you think he looks like that in dreams, then? Like a monster?" No one would do that intentionally, not even Eames.
". . . Sometimes, in dreams, I think what we see of unfamiliar people through projections is not so much their physical appearance but their character. The brain can't create entirely new faces, so it takes what it has and stitches it together."
Ariadne went to sleep thinking of the patchwork quilt spread over them.
/ ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /
A trio of young voices faded in with the sky.
"J'ai descendu dans mon jardin
J'ai descendu dans mon jardin
Pour y cueillir du romarin."
Ariadne's head snapped up. She looked around. A group of children on the quad, bundled in scarves, gathering fistfuls of grass as they sang along with their au pair halfheartedly. Something on her shoulders, a weight – a backpack. In her hands was a smooth mailing tube.
"Qu'un rossignol vint sur ma main
Qu'un rossignol vint sur ma main
Il me dit trois mots en latin."
Bells sounded now, full and resolute, drowning out the rest of the children's song. Something. They meant something. Ariadne looked up at the bell tower. She was supposed to do something. What? What what what was it? But before she could worry, just like that her feet carried her to a lecture hall and her arms surrendered the tube at the door. She sat.
She reached into her backpack, fishing for a pen because that seemed like the thing to do, but came out with something cold. Her hand opened to let the lights touch her bishop. The lights . . .lumière?. . . no,
léger – light. Light. She turned the bishop over between her fingers. It was much too light, as if it were made of plastic.
Oh.
Ariadne stood and left the hall before class could begin. In a room of near three hundred, no one noticed. She arrived again on the narrow brick path that crossed the quad. It was a dream. Only a dream, must have been. Somewhere, she knew, she was still under a quilt next to Arthur in an Italianate row house. She took in the world to try and make sense of the dream. A few trees had changed places since she'd been out here last, and refused to cooperate when she tried to put them back the way they'd been only a few minutes before. They were untouchable to her. She squinted but didn't test her power further.
It was colder here than it should have been. There was no frost on the quad green, but the first winter winds had begun to pluck leaves one by one from the wayward trees' limbs. She reached out to her body for warmth, gently, so as not to wake herself, but found she could not feel it. Odd. A man was seated on a bench not far down the path, and she approached him.
"Hey." She poked his shoulder. He didn't turn.
"Hey! Where am I?" she said, throwing her arm out over the dreamworld. It was a university, doubtless, but not hers, not the Ecole d'Architecture. The man sunk deeper into his upturned collar and continued to drink from his thermos. She sighed and a cloud appeared, and so she walked on to the nearest brick building and let herself in. She found herself in the common room of a dormitory, a bright fire burning in the hearth and a half circle of wingback chairs situated around a coffee table before it.
Particles of ash stung Ariadne's eyes, invisible, from the air. She tilted her chin first to the fire and willed it to go out. With her mind she pushed at its edges. They resisted and stretched like plastic film. Push. PUSH. Snap. There, the barrier gave; she was through. Slowly, with some mental wrestling, the fire obeyed and fluttered down to a soft glow.
Feeling a little better despite the cold, Ariadne turned her attention to the rest of the room. A few of the projection-students studying there looked up, but none moved from their tables to address her or the hearth. They paged through their materials frantically in these last hours before some exam. She knew the feeling.
All the wingback chairs were empty but well-worn; the one across from her had a defined sunken middle, where someone had clearly sat daily for years. Maybe the same someone. A strange thought, maybe not hers.
Pencils whispered, furniture creaked, toes tapped. Ariadne settled into the nearest chair before the dead fireplace. What to do? The landscape didn't listen, her projections wouldn't speak to her, but she didn't feel ready to try to wake yet. She let the hum of the room envelop her. Maybe . . . maybe she was just tired. She'd barely slept this week and her mind was strained, no wonder tonight's dream was out of order. She hoped she wasn't . . . succumbing to whatever had happened to those men in Eames' email.
Her eyes went to the fireplace. Maybe she could feel better by doing what she did best. She focused on the bricks, white bricks, rounded and chalky, and tried to turn them a proper red. The mantle trembled and a bit of dust sprinkled down, but in the end the chalky bricks stared back. Her grip tightened on the wingback's arms under the shuffle of half a dozen textbook pages.
The rhythm of the room was disrupted. A creak as someone sank into the opposite chair. His head was tucked in the dim cold, but he only sat a moment to put his hat and notebook on an end table before rising again. Two steps to the fireplace, he grabbed a poker and bent to survey the charred logs. He bent perfectly at the waist as if a practiced gymnast. His chin came up then, and Ariadne froze. His sleeve came up, too, in case there was any doubt, when her monster stoked the embers. Only one prod and they were alight again.
Dr. Levesque resettled into his chair without acknowledging Ariadne. He checked the time. Smooth, spidery hands opened his notebook.
Or maybe he was not Doctor Levesque yet, she thought. It was him for sure, but here he looked so young, with no creases or grays. Like one of the students. He looked down again, and his pen began to glide over the page. Equations flowed out at a feverish pace. A world away in the lull of the dormitory, Ariadne gave a warm smile, curious for this glimpse of the scientist's youth, however falsified. The subconscious does such strange things! she mused.
The rhythm continued now, like clockwork. Rolling writing, ruffling pages, the creaky chairs. Ariadne sat, loathe to disrupt a dream so smooth-flowing for a change. Any sense of time or intent left her.
Wait a minute. Like clockwork. Clockwork tick tock tick tick tock work. Under Levesque's pewter cuff, in the newly-rekindled firelight, flashed a Weiss. Ariadne's heart thudded much faster than its ticking. The brass studs on the chair arms bruised her fingertips when she squeezed.
Had she seen it? Was it real? Was her mind but showing her inaccurate details to trip her up? Think! Yes, yes; she'd seen it when he pointed to a poster high on the laboratory wall.
"Ike . . . Is it you?" she breathed. He looked up and cocked his head. In some disturbing medley of realities, his face was human but tinted with the piercing gaze of her monster.
"Dīc iterum? –Répétez?"
The air between them suddenly grew cold, irreverent of the hearth. Those couple meters stretched for miles. Ariadne stayed silent.
Levesque squinted and looked around at the other students, who had not taken notice. He checked the time.
Run, or stay? Ariadne felt no draw this time, no bonds, no force keeping her prisoner to his plans. She chose run.
It burned her lungs to run in this bitter air, but she ran until she finally puffed up to the campus bell tower, wherever it was. She looked back. She hadn't been followed. For the rest of the dream she circled up the winding stairs of the bell tower, and woke naturally before she had need to jump.
/ ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /
That chapter was 8,500 words so you're probably almost as tired as I am so I'll make this post-A/N brief:
Review! Please and thanks,
- Hazel