The night in London was as brisk and biting as the day. Arthur reached down and zipped up his brown leather jacket in the dark. A streetlight was up ahead. He reached it, and, worrying, pulled out his cell phone for the second time and dialed Ariadne's number. Nothing but empty ringing greeted him, followed by the automated cheerfulness of her voicemail recording.

Hi, this is Ariadne, I can't come to the phone right now, so please leave a message and I'll call you back. Thanks!

Beep.

He flipped the phone shut and bit down anxiously. He stood at the edge of a dirty cosmopolitan street, littered from corner to corner with softly glowing neon signs and smokers and prostitutes and people sitting out in their coats with beers, talking loudly about personal things. Not exactly the place Arthur wanted to be. But he had nowhere else he could think of going — not while he had lost track of Yusuf, Ariadne, and Eames. He had to find them first.

His eyes settled for a moment on a gruff, loud-laughing drunk across the street to the left. Then a block of white in his peripheral vision caused his eyes to flit right.

Arthur started in shock.

Standing there, beneath the streetlight directly opposite him, was a tall, thin figure in a dark trench coat, a ghostly white mask over its head.

Staggering backward a little, Arthur turned away and drove his hand into his pocket, fumbling around for his totem. He retrieved it and shook it in its palm. After a few seconds, his arm slowed and stopped, and he put the red die back into his pocket.

He walked.

The figure's sightless, hand-drawn face watched him pace down the dark sidewalk, then turned to move. When Arthur glanced over his shoulder there was nothing beneath the lamp but the pavement. He turned back around.

The white-masked figure was right in front of his eyes.

Unarmed and afraid to fight because of the crowds, he stepped back and turned around — only to see another two masked figures, one in a navy coat and one in brown, coming toward him. He spun around to face the thin figure again.

"Daneda," he growled.

The other two stopped behind him. The entire group of patrons seated outside a nearby bar also went silent and stared. Arthur looked into the limp white mask over Daneda's face.

"I was wondering when you'd pick up on it," she said. "Couldn't remember how you got here?"

Some of the bar-goers behind them were standing slowly up. "No," said Arthur. "I saw you." She said nothing. "Why did you bring me here?" He added.

"Not just you," came a man's voice from behind Arthur. One of the masked men. "All of you. But you don't have to be here. Tell us who you work for, and we'll wake you all up."

The bar-goers were walking toward the scene. "Steevo," Daneda said.

The brown-coated masked man glanced over his shoulder. "Anything, Mr. Arthur?"

Daneda pressed the barrel of her pistol against his arm. Arthur didn't reply. He smirked.

"Looks like those projections are looking for the dreamer," he said.

He was right. A large crowd was moving toward them, focused and silent.

"Steevo!"

"Let's move," said the man in the brown coat. He walked briskly at Arthur and grabbed his arm, while Daneda turned and grabbed the other, and they rushed into the street in the opposite direction of the projections. The crowd followed menacingly. Daneda and her associates hurried Arthur into a condemned building, kicked down the door, and bolted up the stairs.

They threw Arthur to the creaking, dust-covered floor. Daneda and the brown-coated man had pointed their weapons at each of Arthur's knees.

"The pressure's on you now," Daneda said. Although harsh, her tone was actually wavering in fear. "Give us the name. Who do you work for?"

The masked man in the black jacket noticed her trembling voice. "Daneda, it's fine. We haven't reached the Point yet. H designed this."

Arthur still would not answer his question. He watched the team converse.

"We're not going to be able to control it," Daneda said shakily. "This one's already changing on its own. This building wasn't in H's design."

Both masked men looked quickly around the old, rotted room in which they stood.

"Dammit," the black-jacketed one hissed after a brief silence.

There was a sudden rumble beneath the floor. Arthur blinked. Suddenly the wall to his right was black. It began to melt as if made of wax.

"We are not prepared to hit it this early," the brown-coated man said, and turned to Arthur, who was staring at the melting black wall. "Tell us the name!" He yelled.

But then the entire room turned black. The masked group's weapons crumbled out of their hands like sand. A pair of spiked pillars — like huge nails — shot from the ceiling and penetrated through the floor on either side of Arthur's body, and then the floor was soft, and he was falling backward, dark and fast. As he fell, out of sheer confusion and fear, he shouted the name George Cohen.

Arthur opened his eyes. He lay on his back on the Moroccan rug in the team's London apartment. He reached over and touched the PASIV wires hooked up to his wrist. In his peripheral vision he noticed two men sitting in chairs on his left and right. As he propped himself up on his elbows, Arthur saw — sitting on the sofa, hands clasped and head down — Daneda.

"Why didn't you get out while you could?" was the first thing he said, glaring with hatred into her mask-less, sun-burnt face.

She looked up. There was something strikingly different in her expression now. It was no longer infuriated, suspicious or terrified. Her eyes stared at him softly, blankly, glazed. Her mouth was loosely shut.

"We didn't hear what we wanted to," she said quietly. Arthur turned briefly to look at the men seated on either side of him. To his left was a young-looking, pale blond, eyes turned down in thought. A broad-shouldered, Asian-looking man watched him from the right.

"What?" Arthur pressed.

"You said you work for George Cohen," said the blond.

"You know him?" said Arthur.

"Know him!" laughed the blond man. "He hired us for this job."

Arthur stared.

"I don't believe you," he said. "He hired us."

Daneda shrugged. "You must," she said.

Arthur fished in his pocket and retrieved the red loaded die, setting it on the rug. He tapped it with his finger and it fell over. He gazed blankly into the bottom of the sofa.

"Where is the rest of my team?"

"Asleep," said the blond. "They'll wake up soon, but they probably won't be happy."

A long silence crept over the group. Faintly, in the background hummed the low, pulsating drone of the PASIV, still hooked up to Ariadne, Eames and Yusuf, who lay on the floor behind the sofa. None in the conscious group looked up at one another. A certain wall of mystery had broken down between them, but now a new one rose up. If Arthur was to believe them, then what had he been put up to?

"If it's any help, it's hard for us to trust you, either," Daneda said. "But we would have absolutely left before you woke up if the circumstances weren't so strange — or if we believed you were lying. But what you said back there was straight out of—"

"Just cold, complete fear," the Asian-American man finished excitedly. "Perfect Fear, it's called. We see it all the time. It's one of the best truth serums there is."

Arthur chuckled snidely, embarrassed. "You think I was that afraid?"

Daneda restrained a mocking grin. "Well, Perfect Fear is a great tool because the Mark usually can't gauge how afraid he or she actually is."

There was a short pause. "You certainly cover a different field of extraction," Arthur said.

"We do," said the blond. "But we're not going to tell you any more about us until we have your word. So, do we?"

Arthur heard shifting behind the sofa. He looked around at each member of the new team.

"Alright," he said.

Just as he was saying this, a loud gasp — unmistakably Ariadne's — sounded from behind the couch. Daneda turned and leaned over the back to look at her.

"Sorry about that," she said quickly, reaching down for the wires on Ariadne's wrist. A loud slapping sound caused Daneda to leap back in shock. "Hey!— "

Ariadne's head popped raggedly up from behind the sofa. Her face was streaked with lines of tears and mascara. Red-rimmed eyes settled on Arthur.

"What the hell was that?" She cried. Daneda stared guiltily. "A-Arthur... what... why are they still here? Wh..."

Arthur glared at Daneda. "Well, we did just make a truce," he replied. "But I'm not so sure I want to honor it anymore." He stole a glance back at Ariadne's panic. "What happened to her?"

"She got trapped inside a nightmare," said Daneda. "We didn't mean it to turn out that way..."

"But that... that was unlike anything I've ever created," Ariadne spluttered. "It had no... shape — and the projections... the projections were unbelievable."

"We were about to tell Arthur: that's what we specialize in," the blond man said, a hint of sympathy in his voice. "What you just experienced was an Amorphous Nightmare. At a certain point the balance of the dream shifts, and we are no longer under control. This one shifted earlier than we expected, so we couldn't do anything with it."

Ariadne's head sank, and she shivered. "Arthur made a truce with you?"

Eames's body rose to its feet from behind Ariadne. He was sweating. "What's all this, then, go on with it," he half-murmured.

"Cohen put two teams on this job without telling us," Arthur stated bluntly. "These guys are the other team."

"Bloody hell," Eames mumbled, eyes staring into nothing.

It was then that Arthur noticed a third figure standing up to Eames' left — someone he didn't recognize. This man had curly, side-parted brown hair and a coarse, unprofessional chinstrap beard across his jaw. His eyes wandered around the figures before him, sharp, hard, with an unusually powerful sense of focus. He rubbed his tanned neck and walked over to lean on the sofa beside Daneda.

"Sorry, I got stuck," he said in a familiar voice. The man in the brown coat.

Daneda shrugged. Yusuf stood groggily up beside Ariadne. "Turned out fine," Daneda said. "Steevo, we just became allies with these guys."

Steevo stared with his glaring eyes. "Ok. Why?"

"Our employer screwed us over," said the blond man. "Mr. Cohen put both of us on the same job."

"Arthur, and your team, this is Steevo." Daneda tugged on the man's sleeve. "Over there is Harrison," a hand-wave at the Asian-American man, "and that's Cory." The blond man nodded and crossed his arms.

Arthur stood up from his comfortable sitting position. "Ok," he replied. "This is Yusuf, Ariadne, Eames."

There was a short pause. Now what?

Finally, Eames, shifting his weight and leaning toward the center of the room, folded his arms, grinned slightly, cleared his throat and said,

"Well, what we've got is this utter dilemma that Mr. Cohen deliberately didn't tell us about. In terms of finding out why..." He glanced down at the poker chip he'd retrieved from his pocket, then held it up with his thumb and forefinger, looking up mischievously. "... Why not do that in the best way we know?"