Okay, last chapter was just a prologue – this is the actual first chapter! Thanks for reading!

Chapter One – The Merton Banking Job

The first time Mary ever experienced dream sharing, she was twenty-one years old, fresh out of university, and her father decided it was time for her to learn about the family business.

Her parents, Robert and Cora Crawley, were two of the creators of a military technology developed for both the U.S. and British armies. It wasn't, of course, a publicly known project, and Mary herself had known very little about it until the day her father formally introduced her to it. At first, she figured it was some sort of virtual reality, like an immersive video game, that was to be utilized as a training method for soldiers. Apart from that, she didn't know much else about it, and she didn't have much interested in whatever the mystery project was – until her father pulled her into it without warning.

She and Papa had been walking down Shaftesbury Avenue as she was telling him about her time at university; little bits and pieces though – even then she wasn't much for revealing what went on in her life. When they reached Charing Cross Road, her father asked her what simply sounded like a casual, if strange, question.

"Mary, do you recall where we started on this walk?"

And when she opened her mouth to answer, she realized that she didn't. It was like she and Papa had been dropped on the sidewalk, and there was no beginning to the conversation they had been having. She started to panic, wondering if she was losing her mind – how could she already be losing her memory at twenty-one? – but her father simply explained, calmly:

"We're actually in the sitting room, and this is a shared dream."

Despite her papa's reassurance, Mary's mind was sent reeling, and she looked around wildly at the crowded streets and people pushing past her. This … this isn't real? I'm dreaming?

Then, in a matter of seconds, the dream collapsed – the road in front of her exploded, whole buildings fragmenting and flying out into the air, debris being violently shot across the street, the people whipping their heads towards her before they too were projected into the air by invisible implosions.

And Mary wasn't just watching it all happen around her. She could actually feel the pavement rumbling beneath her feet, sense the tremours building underneath the block. Her instinct in a normal situation would be to run for cover, but she could only stand still, watching the intersection of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue burst apart.

Then the window in the building right next to her shattered, sending glass shards towards her face – and they stung. She could actually feel them prick her cheeks as though they were real!

But if this was a dream, Mary thought with alarm, then why did it hurt—?

A massive, fiery blast ripped the entire building apart in an instant, and the force of the explosion was strong enough to propel Mary into the air—

—and she jolted awake.

Her father explained, once she was calm, that this was the technology that he and her mother had helped developed in years past. And now, as he was approaching retirement, he had decided he would pass the knowledge of this technology to Mary, to let her decide where and how this technology might be used. She could sell the technology or teach it to other people, her sisters perhaps, or use it as recreation purposes, or simply lock it away and forget about it, if that was what she wanted to do. It was up to her, though he warned her, if she did wish to use it in the future, not to lose herself in the dream world.

That was Mary's first experience with shared dreaming, and despite the panic she had initially felt, along with the shock of watching Shaftesbury Avenue collapse right in front of her eyes, she wanted to go back almost immediately. The clarity and the realness of the dream, as well as the impossibilities that had happened within it, fascinated her. And no matter how many times she entered into the dream world, there was always something that made her stop and marvel, wonder just how the human mind could be the only tool that constructed these impossible places.

For days, she couldn't stop thinking about how she would use this technology – she couldn't shake off the excitement, the amazement she felt each time she went back into the dream world to see what she was able to do. She learned more on her own than her father or mother could ever teach her. And as much as she wanted to keep it a secret, she let her younger sisters in on it as well – but not before she had practically become an expert in understanding and shaping the dream world. Eventually all three of them moulded their careers to somehow fit into the occupation of shared dreaming – there was no way any of them could simply ignore or forget the world of the dream.

But in the years after that first experience in shared dreaming, Mary's world changed and not so much for the better; in her current situation, there weren't a whole lot of legitimate ways to use the skills she had anymore. She couldn't even remember the last time she went into a dream just for the sake of exploring it, to get away from the real world – now it was all just business, just part of the occupation that she had gotten herself into …

… And now couldn't get out of, like a bad dream.

For someone who wasn't formally trained as an architect, Mary thought Sybil had done a fairly good job of the conference room of the Merton Banking headquarters. A spacious, open room with unadorned cream-coloured walls, reflective panels in between the ceiling lights, a glass table one hundred feet long and lined with black leather swivel chairs. The Venetian blinds were drawn over the windows so that no one would see the solid black void beyond.

The layout of the rest of the building was simple, but Mary hoped there wouldn't be a need for a complicated maze for this job. It was created to only just resemble the real Merton Banking building in the heart of London – square, the lifts running up and down the center, offices and lounges everywhere else, a pristine lobby on the ground floor. Sybil had visited the real headquarters and taken detailed notes not only on the layout of the building, but of the decor, which was much like what one could find in any other office building. The building here had many differences to the real one, but Sybil had deemed it suitable enough to fool even someone who worked there daily.

And evidently, it was fooling both Richard Grey and his son, Larry.

Mary and Sybil, dressed in business attire, were sitting on opposite sides of the long glass conference table, and Richard and Larry Grey were seated side by side at the end closest to them. This was the setup of a small business meeting, a scenario that both Greys surely went through multiple times a day. Richard Grey wouldn't view this as abnormal and suspect that this a dream.

"I'm still not fully grasping this," Richard said hesitantly. "What is extraction, and what does it have to do with me or the company?"

"It's a method of theft – information theft to be precise," Mary explained matter-of-factly. "The most valuable secrets are not ones written on paper or published online – they're the ones that live only in the mind of the managing director or the owner of a company, the one who runs the whole enterprise. Someone like you, Mr Grey. Extraction is the process of stealing those secrets directly from the subject's mind, a process which can happen without the subject even knowing what has happened."

Richard Grey frowned. "How can someone steal something from another person's mind? Some sort of hypnosis?"

"No, not hypnosis," Mary said, "it's done while the brain is functioning at a subconscious level."

Richard Grey had a blank face, and Larry narrowed his eyes. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he asked.

"What Mary means," Sybil said, matching Larry's steely glare, "is that extractors can access a person's secrets through their dreams. Dreams are created subconsciously, while people are sleeping and they don't know what's happening. Their defenses are lowered which makes any part of their mind, including the part which holds secrets. A subject subconsciously conceals those secrets which can be discovered within a shared dream, if the person searching for them knows how to look for them."

With a midly frightened expression, Richard Grey asked, "Is that even possible? Can people really do that?"

"Yes," Mary answered. "It isn't something that's known to most of the public, and many companies still use common theft techniques such as hacking against their rivals. But it is a real technology. And you Mr Grey, as head of Merton Banking, are at a very high risk of being subject to extraction."

Richard Grey swallowed hard and nodded. "I do have a lot of rivals."

Larry's eyes narrowed again. "Would someone really attempt extraction on my father?"

Mary nodded. "Yes. Which is why we're here to offer you our services. We can train both of you to protect your mind from extractors, to allow your brain to defend itself even while you are asleep. For both of you, the head and future head of Merton Banking, protecting your most valuable secrets would be, as I believe, of the utmost importance."

Larry's eyes flickered towards the wall on his side of the table, a subtle motion which Mary caught.

Richard Grey seemed interested in the idea, but still wary. "How can you do that?"

"Because, if I chose to be, I could be the most skilled extractor," Mary answered with a tiny degree of pride. "I know how to search a person's mind and find their secrets, I know the tricks to hide and to uncover them. I can help you teach your subconscious to defend itself against extractors, so even when you are asleep, your guard is never down and your secrets are always safe."

"Right," Richard Grey murmured. "That sounds …" His eyes locked onto the glass table in front of him, widening as though he had just remembered something important he had forgotten. He stood up quickly, the swivel chair sliding back. Mary and Sybil rose as well, as did Larry.

"I will have to consider your proposal, ladies," Richard Grey said, fingering the buttons on his three-piece suit. "But thank you for your consultation."

He gestured to the double doors in the middle the room that led to the reception area on this floor. Mary and Sybil shook hands with him before exiting the conference room, followed by Richard Grey and lastly Larry. Larry shut the doors to the conference room and locked them with a key he produced and then returned to his own pocket. He followed his father down a corridor, Mary not taking her eyes off either of them until they turned a corner and were out of sight.

"Do you think he knows?" Sybil asked, keeping her voice low. "Richard seemed sort of confused, but his projection of Larry … I think he's a bit suspicious."

The projection of Larry was a bit of a hitch in the plan: Richard Grey's projection of his eldest son and heir was more developed than what Mary was used to dealing with. It was the part of his subconscious that might alert him to suspicious activity – such as extractors poking around. Mary thought it likely that Richard Grey's subconscious based the projection off of the real Larry Grey.

"It doesn't matter," Mary said, hoping that she could convince Sybil that it really didn't matter. However, she had the hunch that it might matter a great deal indeed. "We can get the information here. The information is in a safe behind one of the wall panels; Larry Grey looked at it when I mentioned valuable secrets."

"In the conference room?" Sybil glanced back at the double doors, locked and probably much too heavy to knock down.

"Yes, of course in there—" Mary stopped suddenly. They weren't alone: plenty of other projections were milling about the reception area – one behind the desk, a couple seated in the black and metal chairs, one standing beside a large fish tank. There were others walking around, holding files or briefcases, and one was dressed as a janitor with a yellow bucket and a mop. And most of them were looking towards Mary and Sybil, standing by themselves in front of the conference room doors.

"Come on – walk, and look straight ahead," Mary instructed Sybil, starting off as she spoke. Her heels clicked against the freshly-mopped floor. "We're drawing attention to ourselves."

"I know, I know," Sybil said, taking big steps just to keep up with Mary. She wasn't accustomed to wearing high heels. "There's a break room down this way, we can probably talk there."

Mary assumed her businesswoman stride, hoping that would convince the projections she was not a threat. It worked – at least on some of them. This was a job they would have to complete quickly, and without any more attention being drawn to either her or Sybil …

But they had hardly passed the reception area when the tremors started.

Both Mary and Sybil stopped short, feeling the floor shake underneath them. Glass window panes rattled and the Venetian blinds over them clattered. Water sloshed out of the large fish tank, and pens rolled off the receptionist's desk. None of the projections seemed to pay any mind to the shaking, but they had resumed staring at Mary and Sybil.

"What's going on up there?" Sybil wondered aloud, looking towards the ceiling as though she might find the answer there. The lights flickered on and off briefly.

"Shit." Mary's eyes ran around the reception area, watching every object in the room quiver. "Keep it together, come on," she muttered as if talking to an invisible person.

Another tremor rocked the headquarters of Merton Banking …

… as an explosion on the street shook the foundations of the flat Edith was standing in.

She stood close to the window, close enough to see a car spontaneously burst into flames. There wasn't much time left in this dream – the projections were already raging around the London street, breaking into shops and flats, breaking windows and occasionally attacking each other. They weren't armed, thank goodness, and they weren't any more organized than a mob, but if they all came flooding into the flat at once … that would be enough to wake everyone up.

The Grey family's London home was an easy location to replicate – all three Crawley sisters had been there at least once once, so the others had been able to help Edith dream it up. It wasn't a place where there was going to be much interaction: Mary and Sybil only needed this level as a stabilizer to go down another level – a dream within a dream, deep enough to uncover a subject's most highly valued secrets. Edith was only here to make sure the projections didn't converge on them. If they did, it was her job to either warn Mary and Sybil that they needed to hurry up, or to wake them up from the dream they were in.

I'm always the one saddled with the dull job, Edith said to herself. To be fair, she wasn't officially an extractor like Mary and Sybil were, but for once it would be cool to really see how they worked their deception on unsuspecting people.

At the moment, there wasn't much to do but mind the reverberations of the harmless explosions – harmless for now, to be precise. Edith, more out of boredrom than a real need, checked the tubes running from the machine sitting on the sitting room coffee and into the arms of the sleepers nearby: Sybil lying on a chaise longue underneath the window, Richard Grey in a leather wingback chair, and Mary in a wooden chair. There was still plenty of time on the clock, they wouldn't be waking up soon … as long as all went according to plan.

Another explosion outside rattled the windows and shook the chaise longue that Sybil was lying in. She'd be feeling the explosions in her dream – it was probably a mistake to position her so close to the window.

Edith could see the projections outside on the street – it was only a matter of time before they came into the flat.

"Hurry it up, you two," she murmured as she looked between Sybil and Mary.

As she and Mary resumed walking away from the reception room, Sybil felt another tremor underfoot. Whatever was going on up above, she was optimistic that she and Mary would have enough time to get into the safe. The dream still felt relatively stable, and as long as it remained that way for a little while longer, they could get this job done.

That depended on the tremors not getting any more violent, though.

"So what's the plan?" Sybil asked Mary.

"I'm going to get in from the outside," Mary explained. "We'll go two flights up, then I'll repel down and get into the conference room. You need to keep a look-out. If Larry Grey hints to Richard that something is off, either he might try and reach the safe first, or the projections will become armed bodyguards."

Sybil groaned. "I'm not sure if I hate the real Larry Grey or the projection more."

Mary gave a hint of a smile at her sister's obvious disdain towards Larry Grey. "If you come across him, you can shoot him, you know."

"Oh, I certainly will," Sybil promised, grinning eagerly at the thought. She pointed to a short corridor branching off from the area they were in. "Stairwell's down this way."

She lead the way to a metal door and pushed it open. The stairwell was completely empty, which meant that things were going in their favour. Mary cautionsly peered over the railing – nothing but stairs as far as the eye could see. The building had to end somewhere, but all Mary could tell was that they were very, very high up.

"Which floor are we on?" she asked.

Sybil shrugged. "One in the double digits, I suppose."

Both women hurried up two flights, then exited onto the empty floor. No projections were milling about, and if they were quick enough, they wouldn't come across any hostile ones. They headed across the empty waiting area and flung open the door to the small office that was above the conference room.

The office had only a desk with a computer, turned off at the moment, but lying in one corner was a rappelling device and a glass cutter. Just where Mary had told Sybil to plant them.

"Perfect," Mary murmured to herself. She looped the rope and knotted it before lifting one edge of the desk up and securing the rope around the leg. She tested it; it would hold firmly.

Sybil stood in the doorway, glancing behind her in case any of the projections came running down the corridor. "Are you going to give me something to defend myself with, or shall I resort to hand-to-hand combat?"

Mary paused in the middle of securing the rappelling device around her waist. "Oh right," she muttered, reaching into her blazer and holding out the SIG-Sauer for Sybil to take.

"You sure you know what you're doing?" Sybil asked, taking the handgun.

Mary decided it would be best not to answer that question directly. "Once I'm down all the way, go back down to the conference room doors and make sure no one gets in."

"And if they kill me?"

Mary rolled her eyes – Sybil knew well enough what would happen if someone died in a dream. "Well, then you'll wake up. But try not to die, please – it'll make things a lot harder for me. I'll knock on the doors when I've got the information we need."

Sybil let out petulant huff. "Try not to die yourself," she retorted.

"Oh for heaven's sake, don't be a child," Mary mumbled as turned her back on Sybil. She lifted the blinds to expose the window glass and start cutting at the panel. Outside there was nothing but a pitch-black field, almost like a starless night sky. As she cut a hole in the pane large enough for her to fit, she felt the building tremble again – the tremor was not as turbulent as before, but Mary knew there would probably be a more violent one coming.

"What is that?" Sybil wondered aloud again.

"The projections in Edith's dream are getting angry, I think," Mary answered immediately as she pushed out the circle of glass she had just cut through. It fell out into the void in front of her, and she stuffed the glass cutter into her blazer pocket, next to her own handgun.

Sybil took in a shaky breath. "Do you think Edith can hold them off?"

"I don't think they're that close," Mary said, although she wasn't sure of her own answer. "They're probably still tearing up the street."

"They were rather angry when we knocked Richard Grey out almost as soon as he got into the dream," Sybil said.

Mary tugged on the rope around the desk leg one more time to ensure it would hold, then she let the other end fall through the hole in the window. "Okay. I'm going to go down now. Remember, wait until I'm all the way down, then go—"

"I know, go downstairs and try not to die," Sybil finished.

Mary frowned. "I'm serious, Sybil. Don't die."

Without giving Sybil a chance to make up some excuse for her retort, she jumped through the hole.

It was oddly cold outside the building, like there was a giant invisible air conditioner in the dark empty field. Clenching the rope tight with her shivering hands, Mary rappelled down the glossy side of the incredibly tall building; she couldn't see where the ground was, or how far up the skyscraper went – it simply disappeared into inky-black nothingness. She darted past the window of the story that separated the office she had just exited from and the conference room.

She stopped herself in front of the conference room window. The lights inside were off, but she could still see a slight reflection on the long glass table. Pulling the glass cutter from her pocket, she made a hole identical to the one she had put into the window two floors up. By now, Sybil should be racing back down the stairs back to the conference room doors, ready to hold off any converging projections. She was a fair shot, and Mary was optimistic that she could keep the projections at bay long enough for her to get what she needed.

Silently, she slipped through the hole and crept around the glass table where she had been sitting at moments before, pulling out her handgun as a precaution. Larry Grey had looked towards one of the wall panels, where the safe had to be hidden behind. She knew how to find these concealed safes, and it didn't take her long at all before she found the right wall panel and swung it open to reveal a large, heavy safe.

Outside the door, she heard a shot and froze, listening, but she couldn't make out any following sounds. Hopefully that was just Sybil taking down a rogue projection. No matter what, though, she couldn't stop to check. The job needed to be finished, and fast.

The lock to the safe wasn't hard hard to figure out at all – there wasn't any specific numbers to unlock it, all Mary had to do was spin the dial until she heard a click and the door opened up. A white envelope was sitting in the safe, and Mary took it out as she pulled an identical one from her trouser pocket. She had come prepared, knowing exactly how Richard Grey's subconscious would hide—

The lights came on. Mary froze, watching the double doors open from the corner of her eye.

"Hello Mary," Larry Grey drawled, pulling Sybil into the conference room and holding her own SIG-Sauer to her head. He held onto both her wrists with his other hand. Sybil was glaring up at him, looking like she'd tear his face out if she got free of him.

Mary instinctively raised her own handgun at the sight of her sister with a gun to her head, but Larry shook his head. "Put it down." His finger waggled over the trigger, indicating just what he had in mind if Mary didn't comply.

But Mary just laughed. "You should know what happens if you die in a dream. She'll just wake up."

Sybil squirmed to free her wrists from Larry's grasp. "Let me go, you wanker!" Being touched by Larry Grey, she often claimed, was one of the most repulsive things that could ever happen to her.

"Did you happen to inform your father?" Mary asked, arching an eyebrow. "Or are you just taking matters into your own hands?"

"If you play nicely, he doesn't have to know you were trying to steal from him," Larry said. He glanced to the envelope in Mary's hand. "Please."

Mary slapped the envelope onto the table, not taking her eyes off of Larry or lowering her gun.

"And the gun," Larry added. To show that he meant business, he cocked the gun at Sybil's temple.

Reluctantly, Mary placed her gun on the table and slid it along the polished glass. It stopped about halfway between her and Larry. Slowly, she lifted her arms so Larry could see she had nothing else to threaten him with. "There. Now I suggest you let her go."

But Larry didn't release Sybil, nor did he remove his gun pointed at her temple. "We're not finished here. You're going to tell me the name of your employer. Who sent you to do this job?"

Mary hesitated – what kind of twisted projection was this? "Are you going to run off and tell Richard? You're just a projection, I could kill you and no one would need to know—"

"What's going on here?"

All heads turned to the booming, frightened voice of Richard Grey, who suddenly strode into the conference room. "What is this – Larry, what in God's name are you doing?"

"These two little thieves were trying to steal the idea about the American expansion," Larry explained quickly. "They're going to tell me who sent them."

Richard Grey looked around in utter confusion. "What – I don't … what are you doing?" He suddenly seemed to realize that Larry was holding Sybil hostage. "Larry, just let go of Miss Crawley, please. I don't think there's any need for that."

"Your father is quite right, Larry," Mary added. "There's no use in threatening her."

Larry quirked a brow, and the corner of his mouth turned up in his trademark sneer. "Depends on what's being threatened here."

He pointed the handgun downwards, and Mary didn't have time to shout "Stop!" before he pulled the trigger. Sybil gritted her teeth but couldn't hold back the scream of pain as the bullet entered her right foot. She doubled over, but Larry kept his grip around her wrists.

"Larry! What are you doing?" Richard Grey still had not yet realized the nature of the scenario.

"Relax, Father," Larry sniffed. "Mary's just going to tell you who wants to steal your secrets, unless she wants to see me shoot Sybil's other foot."

"You arsehole!" Sybil said through heavy breaths. "I'm tougher than you think. I can take the pain!"

Larry shrugged. "Okay, let's see how you do then." He pointed the handgun at Sybil's left foot.

Mary didn't waste any seconds in thinking through what would happen after she did what she was about to do. She sprang onto the glass table, skidding across the smooth surface and grabbing the gun when she was within reach of it. She pointed the gun upwards and hit her target on the first try.

Sybil collapsed to the floor, a bullet in the middle of her forehead. As soon as she dropped to the floor, the entire building began to shake with more violent tremors than had gone through the dream before. It felt like an earthquake.

Sybil's eyes flew open, and she startled Edith when she shot up from the chaise longue, spitting out a loud, "Shit!" as she got to her feet.

"What's going on?" Edith asked, looking at Sybil frantically. "What are you – Mary's still in there!"

"I know!" Sybil cried. "We ran into some trouble."

Trouble was an understatement. She was the dreamer of the dream that Mary and Richard Grey were still in. Since she had woken up, the dream would crumble, and there were only a few seconds before the other dreamers woke up. And Mary, still within the dream, barely had two minutes in the dream before it collapsed around her to get what she needed.

Edith looked over at Mary, who was still sound asleep. She glanced back at Sybil, confused at the events that had happened within the second dream. "Why'd you wake up?"

Sybil let out a grumble."That bastard Larry Grey showed up as a projection, and he got out of control. Way out of control. He was almost like the real Larry. Mary had to shoot me in the head to get me away from him."

Edith gave Sybil an odd look. "Even in your dreams, he can't take a hint and stay away."

"If I ever see him again, I'm going to do some rather nasty things to him," Sybil promised.

She knelt down to Richard Grey, checking the tubes in his arm. "Help me reconnect the loop – we have to keep him under a little while longer."

"Did Mary get whatever she needed?" Edith asked.

Sybil shook her head. "Not yet, but she's almost—"

Outside, another explosion blasted nearby. "God, what's going on up there?" Sybil asked.

"I don't know. Rough piece of track, I guess? It's been like this the whole time," Edith explained. "The projections calmed down a few minutes after you went under, but they started rioting about ten minutes ago. Did you feel anything in your dream?"

"Yeah, we felt the shocks, but it wasn't anything serious," Sybil readjusted the tubes in Richard Grey's arm, allowing more of the REM-inducing drug to flow into him. "Do you think they'll come in here?"

Edith tossed her arms up in exasperation. "I don't know! I don't know how this stuff works! You go out there and see if those stupid projections are going to attack us."

"Alright Edith, just stay calm," Sybil said. "They won't attack us if he doesn't wake up to the middle of all this."

Another car blew up, only about twenty feet from the flat. Sybil raised her head and saw the fiery cloud through the open window. "Some rough piece of track," she muttered. "Hopefully we won't accidentally get a kick from the train. Do you know how much time is still left on the timer?"

"I'm not sure," Edith admitted. "You taught Gwen how to signal the countdown, right?"

Sybil nodded. "Of course I did. She'll do it on time. I trust her."

In the train rattling across Europe, in a closed off compartment, Gwen Dawson watched the timer on the machine tick down the seconds. 60 … 59 … 58 …

She didn't really have the faintest idea why her long-lost friend Sybil called her about a favour, which involved her flying out to Prague and getting on a train where the Crawley sisters plus an unfamiliar old man were. Sybil had briefed her quickly on what she needed to do, which involved a timer on a machine in a suitcase and an iPod. Whatever was going on, Sybil had told her that she couldn't say much about it.

"It's a job," Sybil had simply told her. "But it's a really important job, and we need your help to make it go smoothly. Don't worry, you can do this."

Gwen was still baffled at what kind of job this was, if it even was a job – it looked more like some weird science experiment, with tubes running into the four sleeping persons around her and the strange wiring in the machine sitting on top of the fold-out table. And the old man … Gwen didn't recognize him, though she though he looked like an important businessman. But whatever the fine details were, Gwen didn't want to let her friend down, and that's why her eyes had been glued to the timer since the two minute mark.

41 … 40 … 39 …

Just as Sybil had instructed her, Gwen placed the headphones over Edith's ears and readied the iPod to play the song that Sybil had pre-selected. The train went over another rough part of the track (it had been a very bumpy ride) and Edith's head bumped against the window with the sudden jolt. Poor Edith might get a headache with how many times her head had been bumping against the window whenever the train went over a bad part of the track.

32 … 31 … 30

As soon as the timer blinked the number 30, Gwen hit the 'play' button with her thumb, raising the volume until it was nearly at the highest bar. She wondered how was Edith not jerking awake with the sudden loud music blasting into her ears? From where she was crouched on the floor, she could just hear the music through the headphones, and she could make out the lyrics playing.

Sometimes, when I feel sad, and things look blue

I wish I had a girl …

… say one like you

Edith had initially thought it was just an echo from the shouts of the rioting projections, but then she realized that it was the music – distant, low and slowed-down, but there was no mistaking that it was the countdown that Gwen Dawson had just signalled.

"Do you hear that?" Edith asked Sybil.

Sybil nodded, worrying her lip. "Yeah, sort of. So there's not much time left. Great."

She went over to Mary sleeping in the wooden chair, checking her face for any signs of stirring. There was nothing to indicate that she would wake up soon. "She's still in there."

Edith folded her arms, standing over Sybil. "I hope she knows what she's doing."

"Me too," Sybil agreed, "though I'm not sure she actually does. And she doesn't have a lot of time left with the dream collapsing."

So Mary's gotten herself into another mess, Edith thought. "So what do we do? Let her stay there?"

"Wake her up," Sybil answered. "Give her a kick."

The dream was collapsing without Sybil to hold it together.

Glass windowpanes were cracking and shattering, the metal beams in the skeleton bending and shooting chunks of the ceiling to the floor. The entire building bucked and started to break apart – Mary knew she had only a few minutes before it would collapse on top of her or she'd be killed by a piece of debris.

She had known exactly what would happen when she decided to shoot Sybil in the forehead to wake her up. She fully understood that, without Sybil to keep the dream together, everything would collapse quickly – perhaps too quickly to get the information she needed to acquire. And now, she needed to react quickly to finish the job.

Richard Grey was cowering with his hands on top of his head to protect himself from the debris falling from the ceiling. "Someone help! Help us!" he called out.

Mary slid off the table and lifted the handgun again, this time pointing it right at Larry. She fired at his chest, the force of the bullet entering him propelling him backwards – right as the ceiling at his end of the room cracked and fell apart. Larry hardly had time to look up as a huge mound of plaster, metal and stone crashed down on top of him.

"Oh God! Larry! Someone help!" Richard Grey shouted.

Mary didn't look back at Richard Grey, still covering his face and crying for help, as she raced out the door, wrenching the envelope from her jacket pocket and tearing it open to get at the papers inside. The projection of Larry Grey really was just like the real person – which included being insultingly thick in the head. He had seen right through her trick of using two identical envelopes, one with a blank piece of paper tucked inside.

She dashed for the nearby reception area, the floor of which was still shaking as though there was a massive earthquake. Water sloshed out of the fish tank and crystal flower vases crashed to the floor. Light fixtures snapped off of the walls, sending sparks flying. Mary could hear the entire building heaving, unable to support itself.

"No, just wait!" Mary said, as though that would hold the dream together. Was killing Sybil really that smart of an idea?

A bullet whizzed past her shoulder, and instinctively Mary started shooting in front of her, right at the projection aiming a shotgun at her. It went down in a second, but she could hear others coming towards her amidst the crumbling infrastructure.

"God, this just had to happen!" she moaned as she aimed her handgun at another projection, dressed as a security guard. She had to get somewhere else – somewhere private where she could read through the papers she was holding. She estimated she had at most two minutes before the dream killed her and she woke up.

She lurched towards the stairwell as the marble floor caved in beneath her feet. Slamming the door behind her, she pulled the sheets of paper from the envelope, holding them close to her face so she could read the words under the lights rapidly blinking on and off.

Every line of text was blacked out.

"Shit!" Mary swore, roughly tossing aside the papers. Richard Grey had somehow realized that something was up, and now the vital information Mary needed was hidden away again. She had failed.

She didn't have a lot of time to curse her failure before – as though there was an invisible hand pushing against the back of her skull – her body was hurled into the air. She plummeted towards the stairs, which crumbled apart before she could crash into them—

—and her eyes flew open, staring at the ceiling and Sybil and Edith's faces directly above her.

"We gave you the kick," Sybil stated matter-of-factly, just to keep Mary from asking what the hell had happened. Tipping Mary's flimsy wooden chair over, with her in it, had done the job.

Mary jolted upwards, scrambling to her feet and tearing out the tubes in her arms. "Is Richard still out?" She could see for herself that he was still unconscious in the wingback chair, but it wouldn't stay that way for much longer. "The dream's falling apart around him – he's going to get killed and he'll wake up."

"Don't worry, I gave him a bit more to keep him from waking up," Sybil said. "But the countdown started."

Mary had heard the echoes of the music throughout the flat the second she woke up: even slowed down, she'd never fail to recognize her favourite song – or what used to be her favourite. "Then there's not much time left," she said to Sybil.

The very question that Mary knew would be asked sooner or later, though she was afraid to give the real answer, was asked by Edith. "Did you get what you needed?"

Mary shook her head. "He was starting to suspect that someone was getting into his mind, thanks to Larry. He knew something was up, so he held back. He blanked out all the important bits on the paper."

Edith and Sybil were silent, looking at each other in the full realization that they had failed the job. Mary turned her back and pretended to fiddle with something on the machine. "Look, I'm sorry. It's just … ugh, too many things happened all at once. It was out of my control."

She could sense the disappointment both her sisters had for her. Control was something she prided herself on having and she felt ashamed for no longer being the one with it. She was getting sloppy, and in their current situation she couldn't afford to slip up during a job.

And even worse, she felt that if she hadn't been so hasty, this mishap could have been avoided. She should have see that the projections would catch up to them so quickly – the design of the Merton headquarters was too simple, too uniform, too identical to the real one. That was the cost of no longer having a trained architect on the team. She and Sybil could only do so much on their own.

Sybil was obviously trying to make it seem like she wasn't half as disappointed as she really was. "Well, I suppose that's that then. I swear we had it. It seemed so simple. I didn't think Richard Grey would see through the deception so easily."

"It wasn't Richard who saw through it – the projection of Larry was the one that alerted him to the fact that something more was going on," Mary said. She furrowed her brow as she recalled the realism of the projection of Larry Grey. "I've honestly never seen a projection like him before. It was like he was actually there, like he was living in his father's subconscious and waiting for us."

That was the one element of the failed job that she knew she couldn't have foreseen. Why did the projection of Larry Grey behave like he did? It didn't seem quite right – had Mary not known any better, it would have seemed like they were infiltrating Larry instead of his father. That confused her

"Do you think it's some sort of defense mechanism that he's trained in?" Sybil asked.

"If it is, it's a brand-new one," Mary answered. Whatever the reason behind it was, it would be something they had to figure out later. If they came across something like it again, they wouldn't succeed in that job either.

"So now what do we do?" Edith asked, looking at Mary in a demand for a good answer. "We've got the countdown to worry about, he's going to wake up any minute, and those bloody projections sound really angry."

Another car explosion accentuated her point. The projections in this dream were still outside, but if Richard woke up and figured out that he was still in a dream that wasn't his own, they'd stampede upstairs and attack them.

"We don't need to worry about the countdown," Mary said. "If I can get the information out of him here, then we'll be fine."

"Oh, so you actually have a plan?" Edith snorted.

Mary rounded on Edith. "Look, if you've got a plan yourself, I suggest you say so right now. But I'm trying to use our last chance to get what we need, and frankly I don't see how you're going to help."

"You failed in the second level, so how the hell are you going to make him talk here without making it obvious like you did the last time?" Edith shot back.

"You weren't even there!" Mary shouted. "You don't know what happened, so don't act like you could do any better of a job!"

"Oi!" Sybil got in between her older sisters, pushing them apart. It was bad enough that they argued in reality, she didn't like the thought of them arguing when there was a rampaging mob right outside the flat. "You two can argue later, but if there's another way to get that information, then I think we should try."

Edith stepped back towards the wall, still fuming. "You better not mess this up, Mary."

"Thank you for your kind words of support," Mary spat in return as she walked over to the master bedroom, where she knew a handgun was sitting in the top drawer of the dresser. At this point, she was only improvising, and she didn't know if this idea would come even close to working.

As soon as Richard Grey's eyes flickered open, Mary pressed the gun straight to his temple. "The plans for the American expansion," she said. "What are the details?"

Richard Grey, still slouched in the wingback chair, slowly lifted his shaking arms above his head. His eyes darted around the room, briefly resting on Sybil and Edith standing on the opposite wall. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I think you do," Mary said. "Tell me what your decision is regarding those plans."

"I said I don't know what you're talking about," Richard Grey insisted.

Mary cocked the gun. "Do you know now?"

Richard Grey opened his mouth just as a shop down the street exploding, glass cracking and noisily bouncing off the street. He frowned, trying to peer around Mary to see out the window. "What on Earth's going on out there?"

"Not any of your concern!" Mary knew she was going to need answers within a minute or the timer Sybil's friend was minding would force her to wake up. "Tell me what you know right now!"

"Why do you want to know?" Richard Grey sputtered. "Who are you working for?"

Mary groaned, the music echoing through the flat serving as a reminder of the clock ticking. "You've got five seconds to start saying something useful, or I blow your brains out."

Richard Grey's face paled. "Alright, alright!"

Mary thought that she had secured a last-minute victory, but Richard paused suddenly, his brow creasing. Once she realize he was studying her face curiously, she feared that success wasn't going to happen after all.

"Wait a minute," he said cautiously, "I know you. You were in my dream just now. You and her too." He pointed at Sybil standing by the wall, who looked at Mary frantically.

The sound of the front door breaking down and hundreds of feet pounding on the floor sent a very bad feeling through Mary. In desperation, she grabbed Richard by the shoulder and forced him to his knees, pressing the barrel of the handgun to the back of his head. "Just hurry up and tell us what you plan to do with the American expansion project! Right now!"

"Who are you?" Richard cried out instead. "How did you get in … ?" His face drained of colour again as he suddenly realized exactly Mary was afraid he would find out. "Wait … how did I get in here? I thought I was just in Prague … no, wait … I was—"

The door to the flat splintered apart as a dozen men and women came flooding through all at once, tearing through to the sitting room in seconds.

"Godammit!" Mary shouted as she woke up, startling Gwen who was still crouched on the floor of the train compartment.

Richard Grey figured out he was dreaming by remembering where he was really supposed to be. People did that in dreams sometimes – in the middle of a dream about them being back in school, they'd remember that they were actually grown-up – but in Mary's experience that rarely happened during a heist. Just her luck that the man had to think about his own question, where did they come from.

And they were so close! They could have gotten the information if he hadn't purposefully stalled.

Sybil and Edith were awake too, but Richard Grey was still asleep – the projections wouldn't have touched him. Gwen stood up quickly as Mary ripped off her tubes, and bent over Richard Grey's sleeping figure, checking the tubes in his wrists, then hurriedly tapping a few buttons on the machine.

"I can't believe you!" Edith shot up from her seat, practically lunging at Mary. "You said you were going to get it this time!"

"I said I was going to try!" Mary shouted back. "I didn't say for certain that I would."

Edith sniffed. "You seemed pretty confident that you would."

Mary straightened up, pointing at the timer which the tubes in Richard Grey's arms were connected to. "Just be happy he isn't going to wake up yet. I've set his timer back two minutes. So let's get out of here before he wakes up for real."

She pulled down her bag that was up on the rack above the seats and slammed the machine closed. "We'll be in Berlin soon; we're getting off there," she said over her shoulder as she pushed the compartment door open and disappeared down the corridor.

Edith could only grumble as she got her own bag down from the overhead rack. She followed Mary out, leaving Sybil and Gwen alone in the compartment (aside from Richard Grey, still asleep).

"What happened? The timer didn't reach zero. Did I do something wrong?" Gwen fearfully asked Sybil.

"No, you did perfect," Sybil assured her. "You remembered the music, and it really helped us."

Gwen nodded. "So now are you going to tell me exactly what all that was about?"

Sybil worried her lip and looked away. She really hated keeping her friend in the dark, but she knew she could under no circumstances reveal what she and her sisters really did. It wasn't that Sybil believed Gwen couldn't keep a secret, but maintaining confidentiality on the shared dream technology was much too important.

"I'm sorry, but I really can't," she sighed.

Gwen lifted eyebrow. "Sybil, I really want to know – you disappear from London without even another address to give me, then you call me up to help you do this weird thing on this random train going to Germany with some weird old man. You're not doing something illegal, are you?"

Sybil hesitated before telling Gwen, "Maybe someday I can tell you what my sisters and I were doing. But for now," she unzipped a corner of her backpack, "we'll just have to part ways with this."

She held out a thick wad of money to Gwen. It felt so wrong just to hand off Gwen's payment without an explanation as to why she had called her out to Prague to get on a Berlin-bound train. It made Gwen seem less like an old friend and more of a temporary helper hired for this one job. The last thing Sybil wanted was for their friendship to be totally severed because of this.

Gwen reluctantly took the money. "Just email me sometime, okay? There are a lot of people back home who miss you too. Thomas says the hospital hasn't been the same without you. And Daisy misses getting together to bake cookies and stuff with you." She paused. "And I've missed you so much. I thought about trying to find you wherever you were, just so I could see you again. I thought something terrible had happened to you when you left your flat in that state. Like you had been kidnapped or forced to leave the country. It's not like you to just … vanish all of a sudden."

Sybil couldn't suppress the enormous twinge of guilt as she thought of the friends she had been forced to leave behind. "Just tell the others that I'm fine. I'm perfectly alright, and I miss them so much to. And tell them that maybe … maybe I'll get to go home in a while."

"Maybe?" Gwen repeated, her suspicions rising. "Sybil, are you doing something—?"

Sybil spun around and exited the compartment before Gwen could finish. Tears were starting to form in her eyes at remembering the life she had loved and had been forced to leave behind. Her brief stint at the hospital, working alongside the cheeky but well-meaning Thomas Barrow – cut short all of a sudden. Her evenings of hanging out at the pub with Gwen and her other friends – also gone in an instant. And all the times she had been meaning to email or call them, instead being petrified with the fear of not being able to give them a good reason why she had suddenly disappeared like a thief in the night.

She wanted to go back so badly, but she couldn't. If she or either of her sisters tried to enter any part of the United Kingdom, they'd be arrested. And she had no clue why that was – only Mary knew the exact reason to why that was, but she had never told them. So they were stuck together, forced to do extractions like the one they had just attempted in order to survive, all the while hoping they might discover a way to return home.

Why had she let Mary drag her into this?

A/N: Pretty early on I realized it was going to be difficult writing about things happening simultaneously in the different dreams, and since there's no way to watch fanfiction like an actual movie, I just have to resort to using the page breaks. So please excuse any confusion, there's only so much I can do with writing :\