Chapter 17

"On the first level, create a keep within the citadel."

Eames stared down at the rough outline of the structure he'd created and tapped his pencil on the edge of the pad.

He wondered if Arthur knew what he'd really been asking for.

The word dungeon came from the root donjon in Old French and in its ancient usage meant the main tower of a castle.

Or a keep, Eames thought darkly.

Arthur wanted a defensible area of the citadel that could keep them sheltered until he came back from Limbo. He'd had enough experience in dreamshare to go through nearly every conceivable scenario that could be imagined; castles and fortresses were just elaborate ways to put together four walls and a ceiling, after all. But Eames knew the power of words, of the way meaning could be twisted by an innocent slip of the tongue.

He knew the way the mind could play tricks on itself and whoever else it might contain.

Though Arthur was fluent, Eames wondered if he knew that in French donjon still referred to a keep, while oubliette was the correct translation of the word dungeon.

And oubliette literally means "forgotten place."

Eames hummed to himself absentmindedly and began to scratch out a section of wall.

A keep and a dungeon were essentially the same thing. Security and savagery, confinement and imprisonment; the same idea really, just separated by a thin line of thought.

"This is where the dungeon is, Eames."

In the center of the citadel, before the stairs that wound up within a great tower, Eames drew a door that led downward.

"I don't think I've been inside."

He remembered Ana's soft voice, telling him where each passage of the citadel led and where rooms and hidden alcoves lay. He added twists and false entrances, doors and windows that Ana wouldn't recognize because Arthur was right. They couldn't stay too close to her original design.

But the dungeon had to stay, it had to be right where Ana knew it should be. Because the dungeon was the keep was the safe place where Ana would hide all her darkest, most treasured secrets. Beyond Gideon's code phrase, beyond the code to her phone… There was something behind the door that Ana was afraid of. He didn't think she even knew what it was but in his heart of hearts Eames knew Ana had been inside.

It was in her eyes, all there in her eyes.

Her eyes had gone vacant when she mentioned the dungeon. As if for a brief moment in time Ana simply hadn't been there with him. Her voice became faint and robotic, like a doll delivering programmed phrases to a child, but her eyes had chilled him.

He'd seen the expression before in shell-shocked soldiers or traumatized civilians who were forced to recite the worst moments of their lives but could only do so from a mental distance. For a split second, Ana was out of Eames' reach even though she was sitting right next to him.

Arthur may have to deal with Limbo, Eames thought, but he was the one who was going to be surrounded by the memories that Ana had left behind on purpose.

Because he didn't consider the question – if she only took some of her memories, what did she do with the rest?

He was sure, down to the marrow in his bones, that her worst memory was hidden somewhere in the dungeon. And if it came down to it, if Arthur wasn't back from Limbo and Eames had to pull them out of the dream before the timer went off… then there was no question about it.

He'd leave Arthur behind and take Ana with him.

###

"There was a man named Rishi Lewis," Arthur began, "who hired me as a part of a team to take on multiple extractions at once. He was the CEO of a risk analyst firm that was under suspicion of a number of crimes, mostly white collar stuff like insider trading, tampering with volatility levels, that kind of thing."

"He wanted to know if it was true?" Ana asked.

Arthur made an odd face and shook his head. "No, Ana. He was the one responsible for those things. He was under investigation and wanted to track down who on the board of directors was leaking information."

"Oh," she said, feeling naïve. "Go on."

"Multiple extractions are pretty rare. They're used when we need the subjects to interact at some point, sort of like observing animals in their natural habitat. They're difficult to pull off since the more subjects there are, the bigger the team. There were three board members Lewis was particularly worried about and that meant we needed three extractors in different locations within the dream.

"I was one of the extractors, Eames was another and we hired one other person to play the third. Plus the architect and Lewis, who insisted in joining in; it was a large group. I never should have allowed Lewis to go under with us. That was my second mistake."

"What was your first?" Ana asked, confused.

"Taking the job in the first place," Arthur said, without hesitating. "Lewis was highly paranoid. He didn't have a history of mental problems. At least any that I thought would cause us problems in the dream, but he was on the verge of losing his shit. I should have backed out when I realized the extent of his paranoia but by then we were in it all too deep and no one wanted to quit the payout. Seven figures is a hard number to walk away from."

He rubbed his eyes and sighed. "It took us about four months, give or take, to set everything up. We went under and at first, everything went smoothly. We split up, followed our targets and pulled what we could from them. My part of the job was supposed to take place in a bank. I had to find my target and run my play, just as practiced."

Ana studied his face, seeing the way he seemed to draw into himself. "Something went wrong with your target."

Arthur nodded slowly.

"Two versions of the target appeared near my location," he said. "The real target and a projection. Someone had brought it in; it was either Lewis' or one of the other subjects' but I had to make a call quickly since we had limited time."

And you made the wrong choice, didn't you?

He raised his head and looked off into the distance. "So I chose one and made the play. Got him to go into the bank we created and try to access a safe deposit box using a ten digit passcode. It's an old trick and it's worked well but the particular combination reminded me of something I found during my initial research. In general, it isn't the passcode that we really care about. It's just a vehicle, a way to access the information we really want."

"So you have the subject focus on that instead of hiding whatever it is they want to hide," Ana concluded.

"Exactly," Arthur said. "If we do our job right, the subject begins to prioritize gaining access over limiting it."

"Okay," Ana said. She tilted her head to the side. "But in this case, the subject used a number that actually meant something in the real world. And it wasn't phone number."

Arthur eyed her curiously.

"No, it wasn't," he said. "How did you know?"

"I guessed," she said with a shrug. Arthur looked at her pointedly and she rolled her eyes.

"You said 'digits' which tells me that the code was in numbers," she said. "But who memorizes phone numbers anymore? Analysts could but they're number crunchers so they would only memorize important data, everything else can be recorded. You can easily program a phone with a number, even code it, and then forget about it so there's no need to clutter up your memory like that. I think it was an account number or… Or maybe a file number."

"Why not coordinates? Or an actual passcode for something else?"

"Most coordinate systems use two by two by two pairings or three by three by three," Ana said without having to think about it. "And high security passcodes require characters, alphanumeric and caps."

Arthur smiled slightly, with a hint of admiration and pride in his gaze. It slowly faded as he went on.

"It was an account number. I recognized the first five numbers from some of Lewis' billing records and it made me wonder why someone would remember that account specifically. Once we were topside, I did more digging and found out that the account was just the first in a trail of bread crumbs leading up to something more than white collar crime."

"What was it?"

"Lewis was financing weapons deals on a global scale," Arthur said. "See, the government was getting information only someone within the company could access. Since my target knew of the account, the probability was high he was the mole. No one else on the team, none of the other subjects, had information that directly tied them to Lewis' activities."

"But your target wasn't the mole, was it? Because you followed the projection, not the actual subject."

Paler than she'd ever seen him, Arthur nodded. "I don't know if he really was the leak but the projection was Lewis'. He already believed my target was the traitor and the information I gave him just confirmed his suspicions."

Arthur pressed his lips together tightly for a moment before speaking.

"He had him killed."

Ana blinked and then something inside her mind snapped together in place like puzzle pieces. "Oh. He was a family member, someone Lewis cared about. Was it his brother?"

"His older brother." He swallowed heavily and ran his fingers through his hair. "Lewis' family was… They were fucked up. Lewis was prepared to hear his brother was the traitor but he also looked up to him as a kid, so the thought of his older brother betraying him drove Lewis mad. He brought in a projection that was indistinguishable from the real person. I… I couldn't tell the difference. Lewis' projection acted the way he expected his brother to act."

"He had his brother killed," Ana said, horrified. "Just for that. That kind of reaction… It's insane."

"Lewis was on the edge," said Arthur. "The CIA was building a solid case against him. The other two subjects we extracted from were found dead within a few weeks of each other. One was an apparent suicide and the other was a car accident but I don't think for a damn second Lewis didn't have a hand in both.

"And it was at that point I realized he was simply covering his bases because he knew he might have killed his brother for nothing. He knew I fucked up."

Arthur's expression was grim. "Lewis went looking for me but when I want to disappear, I can. The rest of the team went underground as well. As far as they were concerned, they were paid so they could afford to lay low for a bit."

And when Lewis couldn't find you, he decided he wanted you to find him.

Ana began to see where the story was headed.

"How did he know about me?" she asked.

"The mind is unpredictable and in a lot of ways, uncontrollable." She could sense Arthur starting to draw away from her so she curled her fingers in tighter, even though it pulled on the stitches a little. He tended to do that, she noticed: when he was uncomfortable about something, he pulled away mentally or physically or both.

He looked down at their entwined hands, resigned.

"No matter how much you try to control your mind, your dreams, things can break out. I'm trained to protect my secrets but things we don't want to get through can."

He raised his head and looked into her face.

"I have a projection of you," he said, like he was admitting something horrible. "Sometimes the projection is of a child, you as a little girl. And sometimes… Sometimes it's of you as you are now. It doesn't appear all the time but it started showing up more frequently when we stopped working together."

Ana said nothing. She could see how dangerous that could be.

"Most of the time projections are just simple constructs but they're also representations of elements of a dreamer's mind. The better they know the real version, the closer the projection is to reality. It knows what the dreamer knows. It can act the way the dreamer perceives that person to act."

Ana considered this and then frowned. "And how did my projection act in your dreams?"

"You… I mean it appears in the background of things." Arthur looked uneasy. "It doesn't do anything really, just sort of hangs back and watches. You're a natural observer, unobtrusive most of the time but not exactly inconspicuous."

"You mean my projection deliberately draws attention to itself?" Ana asked, taken aback.

"No. Like I said, it usually just observes," Arthur said. He gestured to her face. "I meant that it was hard to ignore sometimes. As a little girl, it could easily be disregarded but when it looked like you, as you are now… You're not someone that just fades into the background."

He trailed off and cleared his throat, shifting slightly. "In any case, it stayed away from the people we used to work with, the other dream-workers. But when someone new came into the dream, it would get curious. During an early test run with Lewis, it approached him and started up a conversation. When I saw what was happening, I overreacted."

"What do you mean?"

"I shot it," he said. "Lewis looked like he was getting too interested in it. I told him we were there to work and I shot it to get it out of the way. In hindsight, I shouldn't have drawn attention to it. I thought he'd forget about it, that he'd think it was just another projection but my reaction tipped my hand."

"But how did he know I was a real person?"

Arthur pulled his hand completely away from hers.

"He spoke to it. I'm still not sure what it said but it was enough for him to remember you, to track you down later. You were honest… That was something my projection was as well. It could have been something as simple as your name."

He looked frustrated and Ana could see the lines of his shoulders begin to hunch up again. "But I don't know. I don't know what he said to it and I don't know what it said to him. What I said to him. It might have just been enough to see your face. Because the projection was a part of me and that means Lewis found you because of me."

Ana stayed silent and watched Arthur's expression twist into something pained and angry. Something inside of her agreed with him. Lewis' reaction wasn't his fault but the fact that she'd even been in his line of sight was, to a certain extent, Arthur's doing.

"He tried to reach me through one of my contact lines, said that if I didn't get back to him, he'd take something away from me." Arthur shook his head. "I didn't give a shit about that then. I know how to protect myself. I figured I'd let him hang himself, let the government close in on him and then I could come out of hiding."

"But then he found me," Ana said.

Arthur nodded, looking down at the sketch pad. "He had a lot of money, a lot of sketchy resources, and a lot of rage. He found you and Matt."

Arthur reached out and picked up the pad, staring at the drawing of her asleep. In it, she was lying on her back but her face was turned to the side. There were shadows on her face and neck that indicated Eames had drawn it in the late afternoon. It was a peaceful image, one that Arthur seemed to find easier to look at it than her face.

"A few days later he left another message. Just an address and a date." His voice went oddly flat and monotone. "He didn't need to say anything else. You were… I heard you screaming in the background."

Ana shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. "Why did he take me and my brother? Why not just me?"

"You were taken from your home when Matt was over and he was collateral damage," said Arthur. "Your home showed signs of a massive struggle; it was clear you both put up a fight."

"So the only reason he was taken was because of me," Ana said, her stomach churning.

Arthur looked up, his eyes wide, and shook his head vehemently. "No, do not blame yourself for what happened to Matt. It wasn't your fault. You and Matt were innocent casualties of my mistakes. You had nothing at all to do with what happened to him."

"What did they do to him, Arthur?" Ana asked. Her heart started to beat rapidly and she was afraid to hear what Arthur had to say. She almost wanted him to stop but she knew she couldn't. In a near whisper she asked, "What did they do to me?"

This is what I wanted to hear, she reminded herself. Why I did all of this.

But the knowledge didn't make the sick feeling go away.

"Lewis had you for almost forty-eight hours," Arthur said. "I brought in Eames to help track you down. The address Lewis gave me was just a meeting point and I wanted to find you before then but we didn't. I was so afraid that–"

His voice cracked and he shut his mouth with an audible click. Ana saw that his hands had started to shake a little.

"Arthur," she said, "what did Lewis do to us?"

"You were tortured," he said in a halting, cracked voice. "We couldn't find you before his date so he had that long to hurt you."

Oh, god.

Ana felt cold all over. "Did he… was I…"

Arthur met her eyes and shook his head.

"You weren't assaulted," Arthur said firmly. "I hacked into your medical records later and there were no signs of… Of that. I don't know why, but most of his anger was taken out on your brother. I think it had to do with his own anger towards his brother, Matt as a proxy. Or maybe something about your projection helped shield you somehow. I just don't know. By then, Lewis was a wanted man. The CIA was after him. But he had you and Matt as easy targets.

"He wanted to scare you and he did. He kept you strapped down on a table and cut into you, deep enough to leave scars, deep enough that there was always the threat he'd just slice you open. He had his men beat you and your brother but Matt took the brunt of it. By the time Eames and I showed up, you were in bad shape."

"But my brother was worse off."

"Matt was beaten so badly, he was barely recognizable," Arthur said. "He would have needed major surgery to reconstruct his face."

Almost as if he were in a daze, Arthur reached out and touched her face, running his thumb over her cheekbone. "And you... Your eye and your cheek on this side were so swollen, you could barely see. You didn't have your totem. You didn't know if you were dreaming or if what you were going through was real."

"So what happened, Arthur? Why did they kill Matthew?"

"When I showed up things got out of hand almost instantly," Arthur said, lowering his arm. "Eames and I came with back-up but in the end, it came down to us and Lewis and two of his men in a room. Even though he knew it was over, Lewis wanted his revenge for his brother's death. He said he only wanted to pay me back in kind, an eye for an eye, one life for another. He'd even give me a choice, just as I made a choice the last time."

Without really meaning to, Ana recoiled from Arthur. "You chose me over Matthew."

Arthur's eyes were large and dark but to her confusion, he shook his head.

"Lewis made you beg for your lives but you each begged us not to kill the other. You begged me to spare your brother."

He closed his eyes and drew in a shuddering breath, so deep and so harsh that she could see his chest move with the effort. "I was trying to buy more time. The people we came with, I could hear them making their way towards us outside. They had to deal with the rest of his guards and make sure it was safe for us to get out. I knew if I could just hold Lewis off long enough, that if I could keep him talking, maybe we could get you both out of there but he... He asked us which one it would be: you or your brother. Which one? Which one do I want to watch die like he watched his own blood, his own brother, die. He said that was my fault, my responsibility and what I started with his brother's death would end with one of yours."

He stopped for a moment and then shook his head, more to himself than to her.

"I knew that even if we tried, if we moved as fast as we could, a bullet could travel faster and there were guns at your heads. They would have killed you… If I didn't make a choice, it would be both of you and they were going to take you first…"

Arthur's face crumpled and Ana could see everything he'd been trying to hide behind his carefully constructed walls. He looked like a man torn by indecision and guilt, someone who'd made himself sick with it all.

He knew he'd have to live with the consequences of his decision, she thought. "You couldn't choose, could you? So you weren't the one who made the choice."

At the question, Arthur seemed to pull himself together again. His expression evened out and he straightened, squaring his shoulders and swinging his legs over the side of the bed so that his feet were flat on the floor with his back to her.

She could see the tense lines of his back and she reached out and pressed her hand against him. Ana had a feeling that that was all he would allow. It wasn't so much her touch that bothered him, but the comfort he would have gotten from it.

"I took too long to answer." His voice was once again steady as he went on. "Lewis gave his man the signal and he was going to take you out first but Eames told him to take Matt, not you. And Lewis did. Matt died and a moment later, our back-up came through the doors. They grabbed Lewis before he could escape. Then Eames and I got you out of there."

"Was there gunfire?" Ana asked. Arthur turned his head a little so that she could see his profile.

"Yes."

"Did someone accidentally shoot me?"

Arthur frowned and his brow wrinkled. "No, you weren't hit. The people we came with provided enough cover so that Eames and I could grab you and Matt and get out."

They took my brother's body.

She wondered what the condition of it had been, especially if he had been shot at point blank. She wondered what Arthur had been thinking at the time, running with the body of his dead friend, the one he could have saved if he'd been quicker to speak. She wondered what he'd had to do, what he'd been prepared to do, to make sure they got out of there safely.

"When was I shot then?" Ana asked. She remembered looking at her reflection days ago, seeing the raised flesh of her scars on her shoulder. "It happened that day, didn't it?"

Arthur flinched underneath her hand. His back was a hard, knotted mess of muscle and she could almost feel the aching soreness they must have caused him.

"Arthur?"

Before she could stop him, he got to his feet in one swift, graceful movement. She scrambled to her knees on the bed and looked up at him in surprise and dismay.

"Don't go," she said. "I didn't–"

"I shot you," Arthur said, looking down at her with large, nearly round eyes. "We were on the way to the hospital. You were unconscious but then you woke up and… And you were so lost. You didn't want to believe you weren't dreaming. You couldn't accept the truth. We had to pull over because you were out of your mind with terror. Hysterical. Screaming and there was so much blood…"

"Arthur–"

"We got out of the car. You were going to hurt yourself so we needed to tranq you but before Eames or I could stop you, you took one of the guns we came with and said you needed to get back topside because you were trapped."

He raised his arm and pointed at his temple. "You held it right here and asked me if we missed the kick. Your finger was on the trigger. Ana, you were ready to pull the trigger."

"You stopped me. You saved my life," Ana said quietly.

His hands dropped to his sides and he looked at her with a wrecked, anguished expression.

Before she could get to her feet and reach him, Arthur turned around and left the room.

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How do we wake up when we miss the kick?

What do we do when we want to stay in a dream?

Different questions, same answer.

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Please read/review- thank you!