III.

Ariadne finds herself reminded of a painting that, no matter where you wander or how you turn, its eyes will follow you around the room. The barrel of the gun peers at her like an unblinking black eye, and however she shifts in her seat, dares to try inching further away, she always finds herself staring straight down it.

The woman sat behind the weapon gives her a hard stare. "Stop squirming."

It's said in a thick Russian accent, the glare on her sharp, angular face made more severe by the way her blonde hair is scraped back from her forehead into a tight bun. The black pantsuit she wears is similar to Ariadne's own, albeit sitting on a taller frame, and coupled with the severity of her ice blue stare, it lends her an air of refined, menacing elegance. The uzi in her hand seems all the more brutish for the contrast.

Ariadne swallows, and casts a glance around the train car one more time. Through the windows, the pitch black of the tunnel rushes by, granting Ariadne a reflected view in the glass of faces she can't quite see. Cobb and Arthur are in seats beside each other the opposite side of the aisle, IV cables stretched across the gap, while Eames is slumped one row down. Elena is in the seat beside the woman, electrodes attached to her forehead, while the PASIV device lies on the table between them. Propped up by the Russian's elbow, the gun hovers a foot or so above it.

"You don't want to fire that," Ariadne says, and is relieved that it comes out with the confidence she intended. "You shoot me, this dream collapses and drops them all into limbo. Including your boss."

"I'm aiming at your shoulder."

Ariadne could swear she isn't, but who's to say where a bullet would go in a dream.

On the table in front of Elena's unconscious form, there's a coffee cup bearing the logo of the Eurostar First Class. Barely drunk, the latte foam boasts a neat spade-shaped pattern, the stem smudged by Elena's first sip of the drug-laced drink. A small, pager-like device lies beside the saucer, wires running from various ports to the electrodes mounted on Elena's head. Ariadne doesn't recognise it.

"You're real, aren't you?" Ariadne says to the Russian. "Not a projection."

No answer. It doesn't matter. Ariadne can tell. Whatever happened up in the real world, they've been followed.

A beeping sounds from the device resting beside the coffee. Ariadne watches closely as the woman picks it up and studies the screen, though the angle is slanted too far for her to tell what it says. All she sees is the reaction, expressionless, but then the woman puts the device down and rises from her seat.

The gun stays on Ariadne.

"Don't move."

Taking care to avoid the cables, she takes a step down the car towards Eames and reaches out with her free hand to touch his neck, checking his pulse. A frown forms on Ariadne's face as she watches, and then the door at the end of the coach slides open. A man with a beard and brandishing a submachine gun strides in. "Ana." It's followed by something in Russian Ariadne doesn't understand.

"Artem." The woman glances back at him and they exchange a few more words. Neither seem stressed, confident that things are going their way, and taking her attention at last from Ariadne, Ana strides a few more steps in his direction. For the first time, her weapon's aim falters.

Ariadne hesitates just a moment. If she's to attempt this, she has to commit. She ducks beneath the table.

The train hits a kink in the track.

The resulting rumble sends a jolt through all of them, and Ana stumbles, clutching at the top of one of the empty seats for support. Her eyes widen, wondering if that was the accidental result of something one level up or the deliberate design of the architect, and then harden as they search for the architect in question. "You."

Too late. The train car is stretching.

It comes as naturally to Ariadne as it had that first time warping the streets of Paris to fold earth into sky. Ana tries to run for her, but the gap between them is widening faster. Instead, she and Artem heft their guns, letting off a burst of fire, but as the car elongates a ripple flurries through the structure. New seats spring into place, emerging from the floor and folding down from the ceiling in a way that forms an effective barricade against the fire. Ariadne stays crouched on the floor, close to Arthur's leg as she watches the Russians receding into the distance, and braces herself.

Split.

Like a bacterium, the train car divides. A metal shield curls itself around the gap rent in the middle of the coach, forming a new end until all that's left is the gap of the doorway through which Ariadne sees the reforming car ahead rushing along the track into the dark.

Throw the switch. Come on, concentrate.

There's another sharp jolt as the railroad switch shifts. The car occupied by Ariadne and the sleepers briefly rocks, and then the lights of the rest of the train vanish as the solitary coach hurtles off down a new branch of the tunnel.

Shakily, Ariadne gets to her feet. She has no idea where they are. This place wasn't part of her design.

As the train begins its rolling stop, she checks briefly on the others: most have emerged unscathed, though Arthur's arm is bleeding from where a bullet clipped him. He'll live.

We need to wake up, is the thought pressing urgently at the front of Ariadne's head. Cheat the sedative. We have to get out of here.

She's grasping at the tops of seats to support her trembling legs as she makes her way towards the end of the coach where the door remains propped open, granting full view of the blackness beyond. There'll be no running the train off the end of the track for a kick now, like they'd planned. Without the engines, the car will be stopping soon.

Ariadne comes to stand in front of the doorway, braces herself against the frame, and thinks:

Corkscrew.

The track shifts. The lights by the wheels are just enough for her to see as the rails and sleepers begin to climb the tunnel's cylindrical walls. The train car follows.

Arthur feels the first jolt as a sharp tug at the base of his spine while the lights in the vault give a flicker. Breaking concentration just for a moment, he glances upwards, abstractly wondering what's going on up there. "No, not yet," he murmurs, gaze returning anxiously to Eames' face. "We need more time."

It's been thirteen minutes, by his count. The stethoscope hasn't left Eames' chest for a moment and Arthur still hasn't heard anything. By now, he no longer expects he's going to. There's no avoiding the truth any longer: his friend is dying. By the absence of Eames' breathing and the coolness of his skin, Arthur could almost think he's already dead.

A sudden ache interrupts his thoughts as it blooms without warning just beneath his left shoulder. Arthur blinks, looking down to see a trickle of dark red oozing through his sleeve. Shit, he thinks. Ariadne's in trouble.

She might need him. So does Eames. "Just hang in there," Arthur mutters, pleading with them both to hold on. For the next seven minutes at least, unless Eames is going to open his eyes right there alongside him, Arthur doesn't intend to wake up.

He doesn't get a choice. The next jolt comes as a sharp wrench that lifts him clean off the ground, and then he's falling.

Ariadne doesn't manage to hold on as the carriage completes its loop. She hadn't really expected that she would. As the wheels reach the ceiling she feels herself wrenched off her feet, car barely clinging to the track as centripetal force fights gravity and the sleepers are launched into momentary freefall.

Then the train comes down again. The wheels screech, clatter back onto the flat, and the track buckles. Sparks fly from the axles as the carriage grinds to a stop.

Gingerly, Ariadne picks herself up from where she's landed in the aisle, praying she hasn't inadvertently caused any snapped spines as she gazes at the crumpled forms of the sleepers strewn across the carriage. "Oh, come on," she exclaims, seeing no movement. "You can't all have slept through that."

It takes a moment longer for her to realise they haven't. There's a groan, followed by signs of life as one of them begins to stir. "Arthur!"

He blinks in confusion as she reaches him, finding himself slumped half in the aisle and half under the seats. Cobb is still lying unconscious across his legs. "Ariadne? No, I can't be here...I need to go back…"

She helps him sit up as he tries to recover from his daze and tugs the cannula from his wrist. "Elena's men followed us. We're made. We have to pull out now."

"No, we can't." Like a switch has flipped in his head, Arthur suddenly fixes his gaze on her with perfect focus. "She has Eames."

"What?"

"Her people injected him with something to stop his heart. She won't revive him until he gives her what she wants."

"Wait, what? How? And what does she want?"

He's no longer looking at her as he scrambles to his feet, wincing from the pain in his arm, and rushes to find Eames lying several feet away on the floor. Hands sweep carefully over the forger's body, checking for damage, but the real damage is far better hidden and far more sinister.

"Classified information," Arthur explains hurriedly, "She's got some means of communicating with her team in the real world. Interpretation of rapid eye movement."

As he works to get Eames propped up against the seats, something clicks in Ariadne's mind. She crosses to Elena lying haphazardly over the tabletop, electrodes still stuck securely to her head. Her expensive suit is drenched in coffee. "You mean something like this?"

Ariadne snatches up the pager-like device from where it's dangling over the edge into the aisle and holds it out to him.

Arthur glances up, and his eyes widen as if he's suddenly scored bingo. "What does it say?"

"It's in Russian."

Arthur looks like he wants to swear. "Doesn't matter. What's important is I get down there now to wake him up before the dream collapses." He tugs off his tie, then begins to fasten it crudely around his bicep in an effort to stem the bleeding.

"Why hasn't he woken up already?"

"Him and Cobb went into Cobb's dream to pull out the information Elena wants. They're in too deep. If I'm not there to wake them, Eames' dream will crumble and they'll both end up stuck in limbo."

"Then...what about Elena?"

Arthur looks up, following her uneasy gaze to where the redheaded Russian is lying still very much asleep. He swallows. "I don't know."

It doesn't get much further thought as he starts spooling a fresh IV line from the PASIV device, safely intact inside its chrome case. His priority right now is getting back down there where there'll be time enough to figure it out.

"Arthur, wait." Ariadne has begun to struggle with shifting the much larger Cobb into a more comfortable position, blood trickling from his own forehead where he'd cracked it against the table. She gets as far as lying him flat on his back in the aisle when a thought occurs to her. "This train isn't moving and Elena's team are still out there somewhere. You go back down there, how am I meant to wake you again?"

Arthur hadn't planned that far ahead. Nothing about this had been part of a plan. "You think you can manage to wake Eames? It's his dream. It collapses all the way, hopefully that will be enough to pull me and Cobb with him." Assuming it doesn't just send us both crashing back into limbo.

Ariadne bites the inside of her cheek, thinking. "Remember the Fischer job? He was shot in the dream. We used a defibrillator to bring him back."

"The difference being Fischer wasn't actually dead."

"Well, neither is he." She jerks her head at Eames. "Not yet. He's here. His body is his own projection of himself. I'm not imagining him, or you."

She's right, Arthur realises, and hearing her say it fills him with a sudden rush of hope. Eames isn't dead yet. "Alright. You got a defibrillator?"

She's one step ahead of him, pulling it from an overhead compartment beside the emergency stop button. "Got it."

Arthur slides the IV needle into a vein and resets the somnacin pump while Ariadne fumbles with the buttons on Eames' shirt. "I didn't realise he had so many tattoos," she comments, and Arthur glances up.

"Oh yeah." He sounds unsurprised. "He does."

Ariadne sticks the pads into place and turns the machine on. On the screen where she'd expect to see a readout of Eames' heart rate, there's nothing. She feels a chill. "Alright, I'm ready." The reality of their situation is beginning to sink in. "How long do you need?"

"He has four days down there. At this level? Give us ten hours."

"Provided Yusuf doesn't have other plans." She glances in the general direction of upwards and wonders what's happened to the chemist.

The look on Arthur's face says he's wondering the same thing. "He's smart, like you. He can handle himself." His finger hovers over the red button on the PASIV.

"Arthur?" Ariadne meets Arthur's eyes one final time before they close. "Good luck."