The Seekers

Chapter Three

Ariadne struggled for a moment her cries for help muffled under her captor's hand. Suddenly the entire hall was deserted there was no one around to help her. Fear flooded through her veins she was full of adrenalin that she had no outlet for. The stranger had her completely immobilized.

"Ariadne please you can continue to struggle all you please but we both know that I am much stronger and today I am also on a vary tight schedule so I would appreciate if you could keep the kicking and screaming to thirty seconds maximum so we can get going" her captor sighed.

Ariadne's body relaxed when she recognized the voice and the sarcasm of her captor.

"Eames?" she hissed underneath his hand which was quickly removed. "Wh- what's going on?"

She wanted to reach inside her coat to find her totem but the Englishman still had her restrained.

"There's much to discuss Ariadne, you, me, Cobb, Arthur we're all in big trouble understand, you must come with me now" Eames whispered it was strange to hear him speak so seriously normally he took the piss out of everything.

She managed to break free of his grasp looking up at him with shocked eyes. She was finally able to pull her one of a kind chess piece from her pocket and hold it firmly in between her hands. No, she was not dreaming.

"Come with you where?" her heart was still beating fast as her head struggled to figure out what was going on. "Eames what's going on?"

"Ariadne, Cobb and Arthur are waiting for you, I wish I could explain it to you but we're being watched and I'm not particularly good at drawing pictures or with hand puppets".

He had tugged at her arm urging her into a brisk walk beside him. Ariadne's head spun with confusion. She had no idea what was happening or what she was doing but she couldn't deny the adrenalin rush either. She suddenly felt a lot more purposeful than she had done whilst she was slaving over her essays at crazy hours in the morning.

It was the same sort of feeling she had when she had walked back into the Inception operation with Cobb. She had tried to stay away the unstable nature of Cobb's subconscious frightened her but that world held too much promise for her as dangerous as it was.

"Can we talk now?" she asked as the pair of them walked quickly out of the building almost on the verge of a run. She struggled to keep up being much shorter than the Englishman. People around her were beginning to stare, sure, that was nothing new but she didn't want to alert any suspicion.

Eames cast a weary eye around at the on lookers. Trying to lead someone out of danger was a new experience for him. If he had been alone he would have been able to escape quiet easily just by making a turn down a corridor or by disappearing into a crowd. His skills as a forger translated quite well from the dream world to the real world. That was why the team had elected him to go and find Ariadne after all but with her smaller frame practically jogging to keep up it had become more difficult than he had first thought.

"Not yet" Eames said trying to slow his pace so that they would look a little less conspicuous even know he knew that he had to get her out of there as soon as possible.

Ariadne tried not to let her frustration. She knew that Eames as well as the rest of the team weren't exactly used to hanging around with younger people but they hadn't never talked down to her. They had always valued her intelligence even if some of them like Cobb didn't always acknowledge her efforts. This was the first time that Ariadne had felt like a child in a long time.

It wasn't until they had left the university grounds that he finally began to talk. Ironically they had just stepped out onto the bridge that Ariadne had reacted in one of her first lessons. It felt surreal almost as if she couldn't trust it.

"We underestimated Fisher" Eames began feeling a little more relaxed now. "We thought that his subconscious was armed with fairly adequate security but we didn't expect this".

"Expect what?" Ariadne raised her eyebrow. Eames had a bit of flair for dramatic storytelling but this was over doing it a bit much.

"Ariadne you know that all this technical science stuff isn't exactly my forte" Eames snorted. "But from what I can explain Fisher had implanted a sort of tracking device called seekers used to track intruders in his subconscious".

Ariadne's took a moment to get her head around the concept. "And what do these seekers do?" she asked.

"We're not exactly sure yet, but we know they're not planning to implant ideas that will make us rich and famous or improve our tap dancing skills".

Ariadne snorted at his flippancy before considering the seriousness of the situation. "So it's possible that I have a foreign visitor within my own subconscious wrecking havoc right now?"

The possibility terrified her. What could it be doing to her? Extracting information? Manipulating her dreams her thoughts her mind? Not implanting ideas and changing her very being? She shivered at the idea and continued to walk faster.

Eames nodded. "We're working to understand the technology as quickly as we can before it has potential to do any harm if it hasn't already. Arthur believes he has heard of a similar vice that aims to extract the information from the intruder to find out why they were intruding in the subconscious in the first place".

Arthur. Ariadne didn't mean to freeze for a moment at the mention of his name. That dream she had the other night had it been just a dream or was that the point man trying to contact her?

"Eames, none of you have tried to contact me before have you?" she asked not wanting to bring up the dream directly.

"God you ask a lot of questions" Eames sighed. "When Cobb was teaching you this you just seemed so accepting took it all on board without ever asking anything. No, we came to find you as quickly as possible".

"So where are we going?" Ariadne had so many questions swirling around her head she didn't know which was to ask next.

"You'll see, it's not far, everyone is waiting".

"Everyone?" Ariadne squeaked her heart stopped knowing that at any moment she would be face to face with Arthur again. Somehow the fact that an alien source could be hacking her brain suddenly seemed a less significant.