Glitch - 1
Jan. 14th, 2011 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabi_essentiallySummary: Arthur wakes in a hospital with no memory of who he is or how he got there. All he knows is that someone messed him up pretty badly, and his dreams are violent and terrible. After weeks of wondering why no one has bothered to look for him, he just about gives up. Eames is the one who finds him. They have to discover what a mysterious group of people did to Arthur and his former team to make dreaming so dangerous for them. And they need to find the "Glitch Machine" that is the cause of mass dreaming hysteria, and undo its effects on Arthur and the dreaming community.
Author's Note: Based on so many prompts it's ridiculous. See list of prompts for this story to know where all these ideas came from.
Rating: R
Word Count: WIP
Warnings: Violence. Mental issues. Massive h/c.
** ** ** **
FEBRUARY
Eames walked along the overly-bright, sterile hallway. His fingers found the poker chip in his pocket, next to the forged passport with Arthur's picture, new social security number, date of birth, and the name "Arthur Bishop" printed on it. "Bishop" was Eames's original last name, and Arthur would just be galled to learn that he'd given him his old name. When he found the irritating son of a bitch. Because he would.
This excursion – well, it was just a formality really, just a way to turn every stone. There was no way Arthur was here.
It was two weeks since Eames had gotten the call that had cut off suddenly with a choking gasp. The number hadn't come up. The only number that was ever blocked on Eames's phone was that of the only man who knew how to thoroughly block his contact information. In all the years he had known Arthur, he'd never found a way around that block.
He'd tried to call, text, email any and all of Arthur's secure and not-so-secure contacts for the week after that. He'd called Cobb, asking if he'd heard from Arthur. 'He had a job out east,' Cobb had said. 'Why, did you need him?' Cobb had been with his kids for two years now, and had gone on to become a legitimate dream-therapist and professor. He'd lost his instinct for trouble except for where it concerned his children. Cobb's use to the world was of a different sort now – a more noble one, possibly. But of no help to Eames.
"This way, please," the orderly said, opening the door to the morgue. The orderly was professional, stone-faced, and showing no trace of sympathy yet. Eames had forged some missing person documents and come stateside, the last place he knew Arthur had been. He had access to just about every morgue, hospital or legal document he needed.
Eames kept tabs and did it very well, but was shit at it as compared to Arthur, as most people were. So he'd followed every John Doe lead he could find. The latest one (dark haired male, scarred, between the ages of 25 and 30 – he knew Arthur was 32 but easily passed as younger,) had led him to the county morgue in a Georgia town.
He stepped inside the room full of cold drawers and waited, quiet and tense. For a moment a feeling of unreality swept him. Eames had done his share of IDing the bodies of work associates. It always felt dream-like.
The orderly pulled out one of the drawers and Eames forced himself to step up, as professional hands unzipped the black bag.
Short dark curls framed a young face with a bow-shaped mouth so similar to the one that had occasionally panted across his shoulder that he had to stare a moment. Blood had been cleaned away from a deep slice on the blue-mottled skin of the forehead. They eyes were already sunken behind the lids.
He released the breath he was holding. Someone's son, brother, husband, lover. But not Arthur. He shook his head.
The orderly gave him a small smile and showed him out.
** ** ** **
JANUARY
Arthur had not lost his instinct for trouble, because Arthur had never gone totally legal. He had tried, briefly, to follow Cobb into the overworld of dreamsharing. But as meticulous and exacting as Arthur was, he had little use for other people's rules. He dreamed because he loved it, not because he needed money. Eames's line of work was more to his tastes lately.
The last job was a simple corporate extraction on a mark named Havrey, a museum curator. It had gone well until the actual dreaming part, when Arthur's sense for trouble had flared to life in a field of too-docile projections. The rest of the team he had sussed out far before taking the job and they were all legit as far as he was concerned. He'd gotten his friends in high places to look into them (which he rarely did anymore – so maybe he had sensed something even before the end.)
If he was being played, then his entire team was being played.
The projections of their mark had acted normally until the actual extraction and then they had become too docile, too predictable. Too still. Arthur was on the top level when he saw it: the flicker of the projections as one, as if they existed on a screen instead of as real, vital pieces of a human psyche. He felt cold. The dream felt dead. Arthur felt, for the first time, as if the dreamer had died while he was in the dream.
The projections all froze as one, like they were stuck. One of them started looping, lifting a tea-cup to its lips, putting it down, and doing it again and again. He heard a high-pitched, mechanical whine that split his head wide open more violently than any dream-death and he fumbled for his gun.
Arthur blew his brains out on the first level and woke up topside, fighting the urge to puke his guts up in the small hotel room they'd chosen for the extraction.
The guard, a guy he'd culled from military black ops, was dead at the door, his brains on the wall.
He suppressed the urge to be sick and got to work. The rest of his small team was still under, their bodies jerking and twitching as if trying to wake up. The PASIV was hooked to his team and the mark, as he had left everything. NOT as he had left everything, the mark himself was hooked up to a separate machine, one that Arthur didn't recognize. An actual, whirring machine, that had wires like the PASIV and something that looked like a hard drive.
Arthur slammed the button on the PASIV, setting it to zero and rousing the rest of the two-man, one-woman team. One of the men, an architect named Mr. Allen, came awake vomiting. Then he crumpled from the chair and went into a twitching seizure.
The mark, Havrey, did not wake.
"Get him out," Arthur ordered the other two, pointing to Allen. "We're not alone. I'll take care of the rest, just get yourselves out."
"What the fuck, what the fuck?" the extractor, Yuri, was shouting. He tried to make it to the door alone and stumbled on the body of their guard and then vomited on it. He started to hyperventilate.
"Help me, damn you!" the woman, a pretty redhead named Alice May cried as she tried to lift Allen on her own.
"Fuck," Arthur said. He had to get his team out, but he had to have that gadget they'd all been hooked up to so he could find out what the fuck it was, and he had to have all their backs as they exited, and most of all he had to know who was behind this shit. But Yuri was a coward who was running from his team and Allen was busy seizuring and Alice May was tiny and sick, her lips white as she tried to lift her fallen team-member herself.
Arthur slammed the PASIV shut, and in a surge of adrenaline threw Allen over both shoulders. Allen jerked and twisted and almost made him stumble down the stairs. He coughed and writhed, getting foamy drool down the front of Arthur's jacket that he wouldn't even care about later. He had to get back and get that fucking machine.
But the team came first.
He got them all to the garage of the hotel, shoved Allen onto a trembling and hysterical Yuri and told him, "Man up. Get out of here and get him help."
"What the fuck, what the fuck?" Yuri babbled, as if those were the only words left in his vocabulary.
"That's what I'm going to find out," Arthur said over his shoulder as he ran back toward the stairs. "Get out of here."
He couldn't leave without the device the mark had been hooked up to. It had done something to them, something he'd seen and felt and did not understand. He wondered if Havrey was in on this.
He made it to the third floor when he heard footsteps running down to meet him. This was no one he knew; his team was already escaping. This had to be whoever had set them up.
Arthur wrenched open the door to the third-floor hallway of the hotel and threw himself through it, pulling it closed behind him. Someone shouted "In there!" and Arthur ran, shoving past two hotel guests making their way back to their room. The door behind him flew open and a group of men in flak jackets came after him.
Arthur ran towards a man carrying a tray of room service. He ripped the metal tray and a stainless steel fork from the man's hands, spilling plates and glass everywhere, and then dodged around the corner of the hallway. He pressed himself back against the wall and waited. He had his gun, but could not fire it among civilians.
The first man came around after him, and Arthur swung the metal tray into his face. It made a tremendous, reverberating "BWONG" sound that would almost be comical if he wasn't being hunted by a group of unknown assailants with unknown weapons.
The man fell, and Arthur began the count.
One down.
He dropped the metal tray—it would only slow him down—held onto the fork, and ran towards the next door.
** ** ** **
FEBRUARY
Sixteen days since Eames had heard Arthur gasp over the phone before the line went dead. Sixteen days, five states, two morgues, ten hospitals, three jails, fifty three forged documents. Eames had been a doctor, a special agent (that one wasn't too hard to do,) a psychologist, an American detective, a concerned brother.
He was a good tracker. He was no Arthur, but then no one was. He liked to think maybe he was second best and finding people. He was sure that Arthur was still alive, just because dying wasn't Arthur's style. Arthur was going to live long enough so that all of the injuries of his youth would be aches and pains of old age. Arthur was going to live long enough to tell stories to neighborhood kids about the Golden Days of dreamsharing. About going under with the legendary Cobbs, about getting chased through mad towns, dodging bullets, extracting from the mob, jumping out of windows, firing his Glock out of moving cars, and his torrid affair with the mysterious forger. Adventuring into old age was Arthur's style.
Not dying anonymously and never being found.
The next John Doe on his list was laid up in a hospital on the East coast. Another "dark-haired male, scars but no ID, badly injured, 25-30, lucid but with amnesia."
Eames liked that lead a lot, because it would be just like Arthur to feign amnesia in order to keep his identity private while unable to be released. He didn't like the sound of "badly injured" but it was better than dead. Lucid was good, too. And if Arthur had his shit together enough to play the amnesia card, even better.
Eames got intuitions, and they were rarely wrong. Mr. East Coast John Doe was giving him one such intuition.
He got on the plane to New York.
** ** ** **
JANUARY
Two, Arthur thought, as he stuck the fork into the shoulder of the man who had cornered him in the stairwell.
The man had grabbed him by the arm and twisted. Arthur had just used the momentum to turn and stab him, and this dickhead was lucky he hadn't gone for his throat or his eye. The reason he hadn't was because they weren't shooting at him. He did bash the guy's head into a wall, however, knocking him out. Then he kicked him a few stairs down, so it would seem like he'd gone down the stairs instead of back up to the room.
He still wanted that device. They would expect him to have gone down the stairs anyway.
He heard the door to the stairwell fly open one floor down, where he'd just left. He heard their footfalls descending the stairs, as he had planned. His breath burning in his lungs, he lunged up the stairs, taking three at a time. Fourth floor. Fifth. Sixth. The room had been in the seventh.
When he got to the door of the seventh floor, he unholstered his Glock, preparing for ambush. Tried to lick his dry lips and still his hands. Took a second to breathe. Then pushed the door open slowly.
The hallway was empty. The door to the room they had been in in stood open. Arthur made his silent way down the hall, gun clutched in both steady hands. He was alert and just as ready to hold his fire as to shoot.
Since the door was already open, he peered into the room instead of bursting through it with the element of surprise.
The room stank of vomit, blood and chemicals. He stepped over their dead guard. In the center of a circle of chairs was the PASIV device, which was still hooked to Havrey, who was inexplicably hooked up to the whirring machine that they—whoever they were--had fed into them.
There was no time to look at it now. There wasn't even time to call for backup – not that he knew anyone to call who could get to him in time. Cobb was out of the business, and on the other side of the country. Eames was on another continent. Later, he'd call for help, at least in finding out what the fuck this was.
For now, he just grabbed both devices. Havrey did not wake, and Arthur didn't have time to wait around to question him. He made for the fire escape.
He was in the alley below the hotel, just about having caught his breath, when they came around the corner and saw him.
Arthur turned and fled.
** ** ** **
FEBRUARY
"He didn't have any ID," the doctor informed Eames as they sat in a private room, the late afternoon sun streaming in through clinical looking blinds. Dr. Grisham was a young woman, small, dark-haired and with perpetual dark streaks under her eyes. She looked smart, sharp, kind, but not easily-fooled. Luckily, Eames's job was fooling the not-easily-fooled.
Today he was the husband of the missing person, because Arthur would hate that.
The window outside showed a field of winter-storm white, dotted with winter-dead trees. Eames was exhausted. He'd slept only a little on the plane before coming right down here.
"Some kids found him in an old train-yard. He looked at first like someone who'd been purposely left for dead, but the more I examined him the more I thought that wasn't the case. None of his injuries looked like they had intent to kill. The fact that he was dangerously hypothermic and unresponsive really did seem accidental. We thought at first that he was robbed and possibly left to die. Just not purposely left for dead. Whoever attacked him could have killed him, but didn't. We found traces of ketamine in his system, and further investigation revealed a puncture on his back. Like someone had hunted him on safari. Ketamine slows the system down enough to preserve it through hypothermia, so the fact that he was drugged with that specific chemical is probably what saved his life. We estimated he'd been there for about a day. He was in a coma for about three days, and then he didn't speak for a few days after he woke."
"What did he say?" Eames asked. "When he did start speaking." His own voice sounded dry and too quiet. He swallowed hard.
"Not much, and nothing about himself. He's very polite. Friendly, everyone likes him. But."
Eames gestured for her to go on.
"His injuries are not accidental. Some of them are defensive and not all of them are new. If this is your missing person, then he's involved in some very serious business. Mr. Bishop, I know a dangerous man when I see one. This could end up with the authorities and out of my power. We haven't handed him over because of the extent of his injuries. But without anything to go on, we might have to."
"He's not dangerous," Eames said. "At least not if it's Arthur. Look, you know how things are. People like us, we have to defend ourselves. Also he's military, you see. He's bound to have scars. He served, and it wasn't an easy tour."
She smiled at that, maybe a little bit fooled. It made sense. Everything Eames had forged for his identity was air-tight.
"We were about to hand him over today," she went on. "Not to the authorities, but to a special facility."
Something in Eames stirred then, some sense of foreboding. He wondered if his intuition had been wrong, that he had followed another bad lead and that Arthur was nowhere near this place. "What sort of speciality facility?"
"For sleep disorders," the doctor said.
Eames stood up, agitated. He fished around in his pocket for the forged passport. "Look. Just tell me if this is him before I keep wasting my time," he said, as he slapped it onto her desk.
She glanced at it, turned it towards her, and stared. Then she looked back up at Eames.
"Come with me, Mr. Bishop."
He followed her out of the office and to the elevator. As the doors slid open, a tall nurse with dark hair stepped out and said hello to Dr. Grisham.
"Hello, Emma," the doctor said. "How is Scout?"
"Sleeping," she said. Her eyes suggested something more meaningful than that. Whoever they were talking about was doing something other than natural sleep, that much Eames got.
Emma looked from Dr. Grisham to him, and finally, as he was getting into the elevator, she took a good long look. Her eyes lit up in a kind of revelation that meant nothing to him. She caught the elevator doors before they closed and leaned in.
"Oh my god," she said. "Are you here for Scout?"
Eames was about to say no, but Dr. Grisham gave them both a small smile.
"Scout?" Eames asked.
"You are!" Emma squealed. "Oh my god, you're here for Scout!" And she threw herself at him, twining her arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek, the picture of unprofessionalism. "My god, finally! What are you, his - his brother? Oh, I don't even care! You're someone."
"All right," Dr. Grisham said. "Let's not get too excited yet. It could still be a mistake." Her eyes said that she knew it wasn't.
"I'm confused," Eames said. "Scout?"
Instead of answering, the nurse named Emma just grabbed him again and squeezed.
Next part
Author's Note: Based on so many prompts it's ridiculous. See list of prompts for this story to know where all these ideas came from.
Rating: R
Word Count: WIP
Warnings: Violence. Mental issues. Massive h/c.
** ** ** **
FEBRUARY
Eames walked along the overly-bright, sterile hallway. His fingers found the poker chip in his pocket, next to the forged passport with Arthur's picture, new social security number, date of birth, and the name "Arthur Bishop" printed on it. "Bishop" was Eames's original last name, and Arthur would just be galled to learn that he'd given him his old name. When he found the irritating son of a bitch. Because he would.
This excursion – well, it was just a formality really, just a way to turn every stone. There was no way Arthur was here.
It was two weeks since Eames had gotten the call that had cut off suddenly with a choking gasp. The number hadn't come up. The only number that was ever blocked on Eames's phone was that of the only man who knew how to thoroughly block his contact information. In all the years he had known Arthur, he'd never found a way around that block.
He'd tried to call, text, email any and all of Arthur's secure and not-so-secure contacts for the week after that. He'd called Cobb, asking if he'd heard from Arthur. 'He had a job out east,' Cobb had said. 'Why, did you need him?' Cobb had been with his kids for two years now, and had gone on to become a legitimate dream-therapist and professor. He'd lost his instinct for trouble except for where it concerned his children. Cobb's use to the world was of a different sort now – a more noble one, possibly. But of no help to Eames.
"This way, please," the orderly said, opening the door to the morgue. The orderly was professional, stone-faced, and showing no trace of sympathy yet. Eames had forged some missing person documents and come stateside, the last place he knew Arthur had been. He had access to just about every morgue, hospital or legal document he needed.
Eames kept tabs and did it very well, but was shit at it as compared to Arthur, as most people were. So he'd followed every John Doe lead he could find. The latest one (dark haired male, scarred, between the ages of 25 and 30 – he knew Arthur was 32 but easily passed as younger,) had led him to the county morgue in a Georgia town.
He stepped inside the room full of cold drawers and waited, quiet and tense. For a moment a feeling of unreality swept him. Eames had done his share of IDing the bodies of work associates. It always felt dream-like.
The orderly pulled out one of the drawers and Eames forced himself to step up, as professional hands unzipped the black bag.
Short dark curls framed a young face with a bow-shaped mouth so similar to the one that had occasionally panted across his shoulder that he had to stare a moment. Blood had been cleaned away from a deep slice on the blue-mottled skin of the forehead. They eyes were already sunken behind the lids.
He released the breath he was holding. Someone's son, brother, husband, lover. But not Arthur. He shook his head.
The orderly gave him a small smile and showed him out.
** ** ** **
JANUARY
Arthur had not lost his instinct for trouble, because Arthur had never gone totally legal. He had tried, briefly, to follow Cobb into the overworld of dreamsharing. But as meticulous and exacting as Arthur was, he had little use for other people's rules. He dreamed because he loved it, not because he needed money. Eames's line of work was more to his tastes lately.
The last job was a simple corporate extraction on a mark named Havrey, a museum curator. It had gone well until the actual dreaming part, when Arthur's sense for trouble had flared to life in a field of too-docile projections. The rest of the team he had sussed out far before taking the job and they were all legit as far as he was concerned. He'd gotten his friends in high places to look into them (which he rarely did anymore – so maybe he had sensed something even before the end.)
If he was being played, then his entire team was being played.
The projections of their mark had acted normally until the actual extraction and then they had become too docile, too predictable. Too still. Arthur was on the top level when he saw it: the flicker of the projections as one, as if they existed on a screen instead of as real, vital pieces of a human psyche. He felt cold. The dream felt dead. Arthur felt, for the first time, as if the dreamer had died while he was in the dream.
The projections all froze as one, like they were stuck. One of them started looping, lifting a tea-cup to its lips, putting it down, and doing it again and again. He heard a high-pitched, mechanical whine that split his head wide open more violently than any dream-death and he fumbled for his gun.
Arthur blew his brains out on the first level and woke up topside, fighting the urge to puke his guts up in the small hotel room they'd chosen for the extraction.
The guard, a guy he'd culled from military black ops, was dead at the door, his brains on the wall.
He suppressed the urge to be sick and got to work. The rest of his small team was still under, their bodies jerking and twitching as if trying to wake up. The PASIV was hooked to his team and the mark, as he had left everything. NOT as he had left everything, the mark himself was hooked up to a separate machine, one that Arthur didn't recognize. An actual, whirring machine, that had wires like the PASIV and something that looked like a hard drive.
Arthur slammed the button on the PASIV, setting it to zero and rousing the rest of the two-man, one-woman team. One of the men, an architect named Mr. Allen, came awake vomiting. Then he crumpled from the chair and went into a twitching seizure.
The mark, Havrey, did not wake.
"Get him out," Arthur ordered the other two, pointing to Allen. "We're not alone. I'll take care of the rest, just get yourselves out."
"What the fuck, what the fuck?" the extractor, Yuri, was shouting. He tried to make it to the door alone and stumbled on the body of their guard and then vomited on it. He started to hyperventilate.
"Help me, damn you!" the woman, a pretty redhead named Alice May cried as she tried to lift Allen on her own.
"Fuck," Arthur said. He had to get his team out, but he had to have that gadget they'd all been hooked up to so he could find out what the fuck it was, and he had to have all their backs as they exited, and most of all he had to know who was behind this shit. But Yuri was a coward who was running from his team and Allen was busy seizuring and Alice May was tiny and sick, her lips white as she tried to lift her fallen team-member herself.
Arthur slammed the PASIV shut, and in a surge of adrenaline threw Allen over both shoulders. Allen jerked and twisted and almost made him stumble down the stairs. He coughed and writhed, getting foamy drool down the front of Arthur's jacket that he wouldn't even care about later. He had to get back and get that fucking machine.
But the team came first.
He got them all to the garage of the hotel, shoved Allen onto a trembling and hysterical Yuri and told him, "Man up. Get out of here and get him help."
"What the fuck, what the fuck?" Yuri babbled, as if those were the only words left in his vocabulary.
"That's what I'm going to find out," Arthur said over his shoulder as he ran back toward the stairs. "Get out of here."
He couldn't leave without the device the mark had been hooked up to. It had done something to them, something he'd seen and felt and did not understand. He wondered if Havrey was in on this.
He made it to the third floor when he heard footsteps running down to meet him. This was no one he knew; his team was already escaping. This had to be whoever had set them up.
Arthur wrenched open the door to the third-floor hallway of the hotel and threw himself through it, pulling it closed behind him. Someone shouted "In there!" and Arthur ran, shoving past two hotel guests making their way back to their room. The door behind him flew open and a group of men in flak jackets came after him.
Arthur ran towards a man carrying a tray of room service. He ripped the metal tray and a stainless steel fork from the man's hands, spilling plates and glass everywhere, and then dodged around the corner of the hallway. He pressed himself back against the wall and waited. He had his gun, but could not fire it among civilians.
The first man came around after him, and Arthur swung the metal tray into his face. It made a tremendous, reverberating "BWONG" sound that would almost be comical if he wasn't being hunted by a group of unknown assailants with unknown weapons.
The man fell, and Arthur began the count.
One down.
He dropped the metal tray—it would only slow him down—held onto the fork, and ran towards the next door.
** ** ** **
FEBRUARY
Sixteen days since Eames had heard Arthur gasp over the phone before the line went dead. Sixteen days, five states, two morgues, ten hospitals, three jails, fifty three forged documents. Eames had been a doctor, a special agent (that one wasn't too hard to do,) a psychologist, an American detective, a concerned brother.
He was a good tracker. He was no Arthur, but then no one was. He liked to think maybe he was second best and finding people. He was sure that Arthur was still alive, just because dying wasn't Arthur's style. Arthur was going to live long enough so that all of the injuries of his youth would be aches and pains of old age. Arthur was going to live long enough to tell stories to neighborhood kids about the Golden Days of dreamsharing. About going under with the legendary Cobbs, about getting chased through mad towns, dodging bullets, extracting from the mob, jumping out of windows, firing his Glock out of moving cars, and his torrid affair with the mysterious forger. Adventuring into old age was Arthur's style.
Not dying anonymously and never being found.
The next John Doe on his list was laid up in a hospital on the East coast. Another "dark-haired male, scars but no ID, badly injured, 25-30, lucid but with amnesia."
Eames liked that lead a lot, because it would be just like Arthur to feign amnesia in order to keep his identity private while unable to be released. He didn't like the sound of "badly injured" but it was better than dead. Lucid was good, too. And if Arthur had his shit together enough to play the amnesia card, even better.
Eames got intuitions, and they were rarely wrong. Mr. East Coast John Doe was giving him one such intuition.
He got on the plane to New York.
** ** ** **
JANUARY
Two, Arthur thought, as he stuck the fork into the shoulder of the man who had cornered him in the stairwell.
The man had grabbed him by the arm and twisted. Arthur had just used the momentum to turn and stab him, and this dickhead was lucky he hadn't gone for his throat or his eye. The reason he hadn't was because they weren't shooting at him. He did bash the guy's head into a wall, however, knocking him out. Then he kicked him a few stairs down, so it would seem like he'd gone down the stairs instead of back up to the room.
He still wanted that device. They would expect him to have gone down the stairs anyway.
He heard the door to the stairwell fly open one floor down, where he'd just left. He heard their footfalls descending the stairs, as he had planned. His breath burning in his lungs, he lunged up the stairs, taking three at a time. Fourth floor. Fifth. Sixth. The room had been in the seventh.
When he got to the door of the seventh floor, he unholstered his Glock, preparing for ambush. Tried to lick his dry lips and still his hands. Took a second to breathe. Then pushed the door open slowly.
The hallway was empty. The door to the room they had been in in stood open. Arthur made his silent way down the hall, gun clutched in both steady hands. He was alert and just as ready to hold his fire as to shoot.
Since the door was already open, he peered into the room instead of bursting through it with the element of surprise.
The room stank of vomit, blood and chemicals. He stepped over their dead guard. In the center of a circle of chairs was the PASIV device, which was still hooked to Havrey, who was inexplicably hooked up to the whirring machine that they—whoever they were--had fed into them.
There was no time to look at it now. There wasn't even time to call for backup – not that he knew anyone to call who could get to him in time. Cobb was out of the business, and on the other side of the country. Eames was on another continent. Later, he'd call for help, at least in finding out what the fuck this was.
For now, he just grabbed both devices. Havrey did not wake, and Arthur didn't have time to wait around to question him. He made for the fire escape.
He was in the alley below the hotel, just about having caught his breath, when they came around the corner and saw him.
Arthur turned and fled.
** ** ** **
FEBRUARY
"He didn't have any ID," the doctor informed Eames as they sat in a private room, the late afternoon sun streaming in through clinical looking blinds. Dr. Grisham was a young woman, small, dark-haired and with perpetual dark streaks under her eyes. She looked smart, sharp, kind, but not easily-fooled. Luckily, Eames's job was fooling the not-easily-fooled.
Today he was the husband of the missing person, because Arthur would hate that.
The window outside showed a field of winter-storm white, dotted with winter-dead trees. Eames was exhausted. He'd slept only a little on the plane before coming right down here.
"Some kids found him in an old train-yard. He looked at first like someone who'd been purposely left for dead, but the more I examined him the more I thought that wasn't the case. None of his injuries looked like they had intent to kill. The fact that he was dangerously hypothermic and unresponsive really did seem accidental. We thought at first that he was robbed and possibly left to die. Just not purposely left for dead. Whoever attacked him could have killed him, but didn't. We found traces of ketamine in his system, and further investigation revealed a puncture on his back. Like someone had hunted him on safari. Ketamine slows the system down enough to preserve it through hypothermia, so the fact that he was drugged with that specific chemical is probably what saved his life. We estimated he'd been there for about a day. He was in a coma for about three days, and then he didn't speak for a few days after he woke."
"What did he say?" Eames asked. "When he did start speaking." His own voice sounded dry and too quiet. He swallowed hard.
"Not much, and nothing about himself. He's very polite. Friendly, everyone likes him. But."
Eames gestured for her to go on.
"His injuries are not accidental. Some of them are defensive and not all of them are new. If this is your missing person, then he's involved in some very serious business. Mr. Bishop, I know a dangerous man when I see one. This could end up with the authorities and out of my power. We haven't handed him over because of the extent of his injuries. But without anything to go on, we might have to."
"He's not dangerous," Eames said. "At least not if it's Arthur. Look, you know how things are. People like us, we have to defend ourselves. Also he's military, you see. He's bound to have scars. He served, and it wasn't an easy tour."
She smiled at that, maybe a little bit fooled. It made sense. Everything Eames had forged for his identity was air-tight.
"We were about to hand him over today," she went on. "Not to the authorities, but to a special facility."
Something in Eames stirred then, some sense of foreboding. He wondered if his intuition had been wrong, that he had followed another bad lead and that Arthur was nowhere near this place. "What sort of speciality facility?"
"For sleep disorders," the doctor said.
Eames stood up, agitated. He fished around in his pocket for the forged passport. "Look. Just tell me if this is him before I keep wasting my time," he said, as he slapped it onto her desk.
She glanced at it, turned it towards her, and stared. Then she looked back up at Eames.
"Come with me, Mr. Bishop."
He followed her out of the office and to the elevator. As the doors slid open, a tall nurse with dark hair stepped out and said hello to Dr. Grisham.
"Hello, Emma," the doctor said. "How is Scout?"
"Sleeping," she said. Her eyes suggested something more meaningful than that. Whoever they were talking about was doing something other than natural sleep, that much Eames got.
Emma looked from Dr. Grisham to him, and finally, as he was getting into the elevator, she took a good long look. Her eyes lit up in a kind of revelation that meant nothing to him. She caught the elevator doors before they closed and leaned in.
"Oh my god," she said. "Are you here for Scout?"
Eames was about to say no, but Dr. Grisham gave them both a small smile.
"Scout?" Eames asked.
"You are!" Emma squealed. "Oh my god, you're here for Scout!" And she threw herself at him, twining her arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek, the picture of unprofessionalism. "My god, finally! What are you, his - his brother? Oh, I don't even care! You're someone."
"All right," Dr. Grisham said. "Let's not get too excited yet. It could still be a mistake." Her eyes said that she knew it wasn't.
"I'm confused," Eames said. "Scout?"
Instead of answering, the nurse named Emma just grabbed him again and squeezed.
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