Chapter Text
Chapter 1
The dream was Ágata’s construct.
Martín could always tell it because every reflective surface got a slight gold sheen, making him think about her rings and bracelets that chimed musically whenever she gesticulated.
The city they were walking through was a very detailed variation of real-life Córdoba, the age-worn and sun-bleached stones resembling the old city that should be unbearably hot at this time of the year. But Ágata liked to dream about the light breeze caressing the skin and cool water rushing down the riverbed instead of the sizzling hot air and draught barren earth even during the height of summer.
He took out his pocket watch, its weight a familiar comfort in his hand as he flipped it open. It worked perfectly, ticking away in a gentle rhythm. Its real-life counterpart stopped working years ago when it prevented a bullet from hitting a hole through his lungs - he got the case repaired, but never the inside.
‘Still checking your totem, despite knowing this is a dream? Are you daydreaming, Martín?’ Ágata asked, stepping up beside him while wearing the face of their target’s personal assistant. ‘I know you could easily tell why my Mezquita doesn’t compare to the real one.’
‘And you know I always check my totem when I enter a new dream.’ he said with exaggerated cheer, snapping the watch shut and tucking it into his pocket.
‘But only since Florence.’ she said, mock solemnly.
‘And we-’
‘Don’t talk about Florence.’ they chorused together.
‘Exactly, my darling. So let’s just get this over and done with. Aníbal and Mirko are waiting for us upstairs.’
Their target was a banker, Mario Urbaneja, who held some juicy secrets about the greatest competitor of their current client.
It was child’s play, a simple two-level dream.
The first level was used to establish this meeting and perfect the illusion of how Urbaneja saw his secretary by following her projection around, then on the second level, Martín would act as the competitor’s proxy, making him think and talk about the very secrets they were after in this fake meeting while Ágata stole the metaphorical and very literal keys off his person while acting as his personal assistant.
From there, it was just a matter of getting into his mental vault to confirm everything.
They entered the hotel lobby and there he was, waiting for them like a good little mark, smiling warmly at Ágata.
‘There you are, Amanda! Thank you for escorting the gentleman here.’
It was ingenious how much trouble they saved by making the forger their dreamer - despite the man having a sophisticated albeit not too deadly mental security which Mirko could take care of on level one with little trouble - the instinctual trust Amanda’s face evoked sedated his bodyguards to alert guard dogs instead of deadly weapons, letting them waltz into his mental vaults with little resistance.
What he didn’t expect was to see him in here, idiotic glasses and university professor get up included.
Ágata jerked in surprise next to him, the sunlight dimming like a faulty bulb for a second and the guard dogs seemed suddenly more alert as the dream tilted off-kilter
‘Keep your wits, Amanda.’ Martín hissed, and her syrupy smile returned full force. ‘Do your fucking job. We’ll deal with the tourist as soon as you get me the keys... Mr Urbaneja, what a pleasure to finally meet you!’
He sat by the bar and watched subtly as Martín talked circles around Mario Urbaneja, making him describe the monetary dealings of their true target and the security of his own mental vaults in exact detail in an attempt to win Martín’s approval as his client’s proxy.
Ágata sent him a panicked look 20 minutes in.
Fucker.
‘Excuse me, sir. I must use the facilities.’ he smiled charmingly, motioning for Ágata to stay put. He would deal with this alone.
He passed the bar, and the bastard had the gall to smile at him, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Martín, instead of choking the life out of him like he itched to do, whistled a jaunty tune with four descending notes hidden in it. It was a silly old code they made for themselves back when they were both green and thought themselves oh so clever.
It meant: follow from behind.
Martín stepped through the door separating the lobby from the side corridor, waiting in the shadows for their tourist to make himself known.
‘You’re getting rusty, Martín.’ he chuckled. ‘You should’ve realised minutes ago that I already stole the keys.’
‘What do you want, Sergio? Better yet, how the fuck did you get into this dreamscape two levels down?’ he asked, motioning for him to lead the way - they might as well get the job done.
‘Martín.’ he chided, making him grit his teeth.
Shooting him would do them no good, even if it would be immensely satisfying.
‘Aníbal and Mirko are both amendable to negotiating.’
He was killing both of them.
‘You actually promised to bail Silene and Radko out of prison to infiltrate my job, didn’t you?’ Martín asked incredulously as they reached the entrance to the centre of the dream maze where the mark’s vault waited for them.
Silene was a fairly decent point man and Radko was good at getting marks where they wanted them to be, but they fucked up a job in Madrid and now enjoyed the prison facilities while their client quietly got rid of the idiot that called himself an extractor.
Getting them out of prison meant that whoever hired Sergio had friends at very, very high places if they could manage that without angering the client further. Or very low places, depending on how one wanted to view the more dangerous elements of their underworld business.
‘What the fuck sort of mess are you actually in?’
‘It’s Andrés.’
‘Of fucking course it’s Andrés. You are so far up in your brother’s ass I don’t even know how you ever manage to think for yourself - oh wait. You don’t.’
Sergio, to his credit, didn’t even react, just swiped the keycard and entered the secure area.
He continued to stay quiet while they navigated the maze, the two of them falling back on years of experience when they worked as an extractor and point-man together as they avoided the security of the place.
Martín got them into the vault with the key and the code they nicked from the first level and flipped through the files he needed for his job to be considered done.
Honestly, if he wasn’t the best, he might not have retained the information printed out in perfect little files for him because he was so damn annoyed by Sergio’s presence and everything it meant for his continued good health.
But Urbaneja’s subconscious didn’t even try to censor them.
Ágata was worth every cent he fucking spent on her, unlike those fucking traitors.
‘Now, talk.’ he snapped, tucking the files into his inside pocket.
‘I need your help.’ Sergio said simply.
‘I stopped dreaming with you three years ago. Why, pray tell, should I even think about changing my mind?’ Martín sneered, taking out his gun to show he was ready to end the dream early if he didn’t stop wasting his time.
‘Andrés accepted a job.’ Sergio sighed, pausing as if the sheer thought caused him pain. Good.
Then he dropped the bomb.
Martín Berrote was the most sought after extractor in the cutthroat and illicit business of dream thieving, meaning he was alive and relatively sane, not comatose in a somnacin-den in some dusty old warehouse or disposed of as fish food by one of the many corporation-monsters he usually stole from.
Martín Berrote also refused to work with a select few people who occupied some dark corner of this highly-illegal business sector.
The reason was simple.
He’d been a fool enough to mix the matter of the heart with work and almost gave up reality for a single second in a dream, two levels down with only limbo to await him.
Martín Berrote’s totem was, however, foolproof.
His resolve wasn’t.
If an exceptionally tricky job was on offer, he couldn’t resist the challenge.
Not even when those select few tried to sabotage his job to talk to him about it.
‘Inception.’
Holy shit.
‘What an absolute fucking idiot!’
‘The client wants the best extractor on the job and everyone knows you are the best. Martín, please.’
Martín pinched his nose, letting out a frustrated growl. ‘Sergio, I’m not working with any of you-’
‘Something happened two levels down on the Florence job. I know. But without you… We’ll all end up dead or worse.’ he pleaded.
‘And how is that my problem? You chose to work with him instead of me, remember?’
Sergio paused again, and Martín braced himself. ‘He recruited your forger and chemists already.’
Martín glanced up sharply at him.
Ágata didn’t worth a single cent, and Aníbal and Mirko were backstabbing bastards.
No wonder she got so surprised by his presence - she knew why Sergio was there.
Oh, Martín was going to skin them all alive.
‘Sergio, I’m this close to shooting myself a level up to escape this nonsense if you don’t tell me something remarkably convincing in the next ten seconds. I have a team to send to the afterlife.’
‘Our client is waiting for you one level up and she won’t take no for an answer. Why do you think I came this far down to get you alone with enough time to explain everything?’
Another fucking tourist.
Of fucking course.
‘Sergio…’
‘A chemist synthesised a drug that has extraordinary properties unlike any compound of somnacin currently on the market. If the sources are to be believed, it affects lucid dreaming and the dreamer can experience the dreamscape without the need of a PASIV or somnacin.’ he said in a hurry.
Martín stared at him in disbelief.
If every fucker with a bit of money could indulge in this kind of lucid dreaming, the consequences could be insane…
Martín imagined how addictive it would be, how many people would give up everything to escape reality for the dreamworld they could bend to their own will. He thought about those poor fuckers clinging to somnacin-dens and wasting away slowly and dared to imagine what would happen if everyone could do that without a PASIV.
He then tried and failed to imagine how much money was on the line.
‘Fucking hell, Sergio.’
‘The client wants to get the formula.’
Martín dropped his head in his hands with a loud groan, but it clicked then that Sergio didn’t say extraction. He said inception.
‘How does inception come into play in this job?’
‘The chemist escaped to Switzerland and asked for asylum when he realised the drug will never be used as a medicine as he intended.’
And it was illegal in Switzerland to dream-share due to how much sensitive information went through the country. It was also mandatory for people who worked in certain sectors to militarize their minds to high hell and no somnacin could enter the country that wasn’t overseen by their military.
‘Tell me there is a but in there, Sergio. Otherwise, you just signed everyone up for sure death.’
‘But he has a daughter, and that’s a fact no one but our client knows about. The client wants us to execute inception on his daughter to make her hand over the formula to them. They are willing to pay fifty million dollars.’
Martín threw his head back and laughed, Urbaneja’s subconscious be damned.
Fucking hell, but that was actually brilliant.
It was also highly dangerous and nigh suicidal if one considered limbo a suicide.
And the client certainly seemed to be capable of making them disappear if they fucked this up.
It was exactly his type of crazy.
Fuck.
The signal for the end of the dream echoed across the dreamscape, and Martín leaned his head back against the wall to meet Sergio’s eyes.
‘Tell me more about the client who was ballsy enough to meet me in a dreamscape. We have a minute left down here.’
‘Her name is Alicia Sierra, and she is the executive director of a minor pharmaceutical company, Vicuña Solutions.’
‘So she is in the pocket of the black market big guns and sits on a laundry machine about to become the world’s biggest company.’
‘Basically.’
‘Fucking hell. Your brother is an idiot.’
‘You won’t hear me argue that point.’
The time was up.
Martín woke to the sound of traffic and the soft light filtering through the curtains of the office they dreamed up to match Mario Urbaneja’s.
It could be considered one of his more pleasant awakenings. For starters, he didn’t need to use violence to come up and there was no kick to jolt him awake in a highly unpleasant way. Instead, it was the slow rise from a PASIV managed and somnacin-induced sleep that felt like rising from the bottom of the ocean, shedding depth until full clarity returned.
His good mood lasted until his memories caught up with him in this disorienting comfort.
Then he jolted right up, pointing a gun at the woman who sat in front of him on the windowsill with an unpleasant smirk in place as he surreptitiously checked his totem.
Still dreaming.
They had another six minutes before Mario Urbaneja woke up - they’d calculated his somnacin dose to give them a getaway window. That was all the time he needed to gauge this client and decide whether he wanted to expose himself to Andrés de Fonollosa to be part of this job.
Beside him, Ágata was already up and packing up the PASIV with a sheepish look on her face as Mirko helped her without meeting his gaze.
They would get what was coming for them, but only back in the real world.
It was time for business.
‘Alicia Sierra, what an unpleasant surprise.’
‘Mr Berrote.’ she greeted cordially. ‘Let me tell you, I love what you did with this place. Who’s your architect? Because they did a beautifully thorough job.’
‘Let’s not waste each other’s time now.’ he smirked back. ‘Tell me why you want me on the job when it’s an open secret we don’t work together.’
Her smile just widened at his reaction as she leaned forward. ‘I hoped Mr Marquina had already impressed upon you how vital it is to get the best team for this job. Andrés de Fonollosa chose you. We also chose you. It’s as simple as that.’
That he failed to share.
But he was not about to unpack his issues in front of this woman.
‘What if I said no?’
‘Let’s not demean each other with coyness, now. We know how much you enjoy a challenge, Mr Berrote.’ she waved dismissively. ‘I’ve come personally to offer you the same deal I did to Mr Marquina and Mr Fonollosa already. And I guess Miss Jiménez, Mr Dragic and Mr Cortés, too.’
‘Fifty million dollars.’
‘Exactly. We have a job. We put together a crew whose members you already know intimately. I see no reason we can’t both wake up from this dream happier than we arrived.’
Martín made a show of thinking about it when, in reality, they had him at inception.
He loved a good job more than he hated Andrés de fucking Fonollosa.
Sergio was already smiling in relief. The bastard.
Martín lowered his gun and reached his hand out. ‘Neither do I.’
‘Then we have a deal, Mr Berrote.’ Sierra smirked, shaking his hand. ‘We will be in touch with you.’
With that, she threw herself backwards, the motion of falling jolting her awake and out of the dream.
‘Thank you for agreeing. See you later, Martín.’ Sergio nodded, using his preferred method of a gun to follow Sierra out of the dream and escape before he could ask just what the fuck possessed his brother to nominate him for the job.
Martín sat there in silence for a minute longer, cursing his inability to say no to a complex job, but also feeling the rush that followed on its heels.
The rush of a true challenge.
‘Ágata, Mirko,’ he said pleasantly, making them freeze, ‘you’d better be ready to run as quickly as you can when we wake up because I will fucking hunt you down.’
‘They made us promise not to tell you, cariño.’ Ágata tried to placate him.
‘We thought you wouldn’t agree, and we didn’t want to upset you.’ Mirko nodded with wide eyes.
‘Oh, spare me, princess. You both failed to spare my sensibilities two seconds into our working relationship. Let’s not start now.’ he snorted, rolling his eyes.
Ágata exchanged glances with Mirko, before turning to him with a wide grin.
‘Well, in that case. Go on ahead, asshole. Hunt us down. But good luck finding someone stupid enough to work with you long term. Do you think idiots of our calibre come cheap?’
Martín threw his head back and laughed just as Mario Urbaneja began to stir.
‘Are you not mad, then?’ Mirko asked hopefully.
‘I’m fucking furious. But we got a job done and scored a bigger one in the middle of it… I think anything that goes that well deserves a drink for a chaser.’ Martín shrugged. ‘And I’m not drinking alone.’
‘It’s ten in the morning.’ Mirko noted as the wake-up call echoed across the level.
‘What’s your point?’
‘Let’s deliver the info and get wasted.’ Ágata grinned, snapping her fingers to get their attention. ‘Then you’ll tell me what your deal with this Fonollosa guy is.’
Martín sent her an unimpressed look, pitching his voice to match it. ‘You can’t make me drink that much.’
‘Is that a challenge, cariño?’