An original flavor Evangelion story in a "second season" setting: the year is 2018, and...
The Second Coming [NGE]
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1.1 Two Years Later
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
An original flavor Evangelion story in a "second season" setting: the year is 2018, and Instrumentality is over. Shinji and Asuka have been trying to keep a low profile, but that is about to change...
Part One: The Boy Who Became a Legend
1. Two Years Later
People ask me, sometimes, if there's anything I regret about my life. I try not to have regrets—or if I do, I try to learn from them, to learn how not to make the same mistakes. "But is there anything you would change?" they say. "Is there anything you wish were different?"
There was one thing, actually. I used to wish I could pass people on the street without being noticed. I used to wish I could make eye contact with a stranger and just walk on by. I used to wish I could meet someone for the first time without them saying,
"You're that boy…."
That boy. They might not have known my name, but they knew my face. They knew what I looked like and how I carried myself, and the glint of recognition in their eyes—it was unmistakable.
Like me, I guess.
But you see, some things can't be put behind you just because you'd rather forget. I learned that well one day.
I was working in a soup kitchen at the time. We were chronically short-staffed, with people coming and going on a daily basis. We had people burn themselves on the pot handles or pour out too much stock for a given meal. That was the way things were. We had people come in with the qualifications to be literary critics or materials scientists. That didn't help them learn how to bring broth to a simmer.
The newest recruit was a middle-aged man named Taniguchi. I met him on an afternoon shift at the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.
"You're that boy, aren't you? You are!"
I sighed, shook my head, and said, "My name's Nakai. Nice to meet you. Do you understand?"
He nodded eagerly, beaming. It was like how, if you told a friend in school that you were interested in a classmate—that you liked her—and asked them not to say anything, they'd smile and nod and grin at you knowingly. Taniguchi's smile was like that.
"So, what do I need to do, uh, Nakai?"
He learned fast, too—not just what to say, but how to cook. He may have been unkempt—with a scraggly beard and disheveled hair—but Taniguchi cared for the soup gently, moving the ladle with deliberate caresses as he stirred.
"It's not bad, you know?" he said, once I showed him the ropes. "It's nice to make something other people will appreciate."
I laughed to myself at that. "You haven't seen the ingredients."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
I tore open a gray paper packet and dumped the contents into the broth. Dried seaweed floated in a clump on top of the broth, and a few cubes of tofu followed.
"You're kidding," he said, scoffing.
I opened a cupboard, showing him dozens of those gray paper packets.
"Take five more of these per pot. That's the standard batch."
He shook the packet with two fingers. "How many people is this pot supposed to serve?"
"Thirty, if you can stretch it that far."
Shaking his head, Taniguchi tore open another packet and stirred the seaweed and tofu into the pale yellow broth.
"Didn't used to be this way…," he muttered.
He was right about that. It didn't used to be that we had to stretch out instant soup packets to feed the hungry. It didn't used to be that a boy not even out of high school and a salaryman would cook up soup for people in a school kitchen, but that was reality. We were two men in a spacious, shiny middle-school kitchen, surrounded by polished steel stoves and ovens. The white fluorescent lights cast a glare from those surfaces, as though the past itself were looking back at us with an unwavering gaze. If you looked hard enough, you might see the distant memories of children stopping by to pick up lunches and chat with their classmates. They would've eaten just through the double doors to the cafeteria, day in and day out, never paying any mind to the food service workers in the kitchen.
As Taniguchi tended to the soup, I peered through a tiny, circular window in the double doors. There were few children in the cafeteria that day. There were mostly adults in rags or tattered clothes. Open sores and boils festered on their skin. A stereo in the corner played a tape of '70s pop music. A couple people rocked to it, but mostly, the patrons stared at the cafeteria walls, thinking nothing and feeling nothing.
"Ah, Nakai? I think the soup is ready? What do we do now?"
Taniguchi leaned over the steaming broth and turned his head sideways, watching bubbles form on the surface.
"It is ready, right?" he said.
I looked over the edge of the pot and nodded. "You can take it outside. Bowls should be under the table."
"You're not coming with me?"
"Someone has to clean the kitchen," I said with a shrug.
He frowned, but I offered him a pair of mitts to hold to carry the pot with, and he went on his way. The patrons would form a line in front of the soup pot, never sniffing with joy the food before them, never smiling as they filled their bellies.
For all their infected sores and brittle bones, they were alive, right? And I—I did my part to provide for them, unseen and unknown. I stayed behind in the kitchen, and to the beat of a distant, archaic eight-track, I straightened up the boxes of seaweed and tofu packets. I ran water—spurting, irregular water—to clean bowls from the morning meal. And if the kitchen looked clean, that was only to the untrained eye. Tiny yellow spots dotted the area around the sink and even past that. I found a few stains on the center island, too, and I kneeled down to wipe them away.
That's why, when the double door opened, I didn't see who came in. I just said, "If you need more bowls, I'll be through with them in a minute."
"Sorry, I'm not hungry."
I shot up. It was a man—a stranger in a dirty green jacket two sizes too small. Despite his haggard appearance, the man's gaze was steady and even.
As steady as the revolver at his side.
"I see," I said. "What do you want? We don't have a lot of money."
The man huffed, shaking his head. "This isn't about money."
"What then?"
At that, the man made no reply, at least not at first. Instead, he wandered the kitchen for a bit. He ran a finger over the countertop, picking up loose droplets of soup. He admired his own reflection in the dangling pots and pans.
"Why here?" he asked at last. "What are you doing here?"
"It, uh…" I backed away from him. He circled the kitchen island, following me, and I backpedaled to match his strides. "It helps people," I said.
"Does it?"
I reached for the edge of the island behind me. "I like to think so."
"It doesn't help me," he said, keeping up with me with long steps.
"It could." I gestured to the doors leading into the cafeteria. "Are you hungry?"
He shook his head. "I don't need help. If you want to help someone, help my wife."
I frowned. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could speak, the doors to the cafeteria opened. Taniguchi came in with an empty pot.
"I can't believe we got that much out of that one packet," he muttered. "All right, so, I think we might need another—oh."
The stranger hid his hands behind his back, nodding in apology. "Sorry, I was just talking with my friend here," the stranger explained. "We go way back."
Taniguchi frowned. "Is that true?" he asked me.
My eyes flickered to the revolver behind the stranger's back. There were less than two meters between Taniguchi and the stranger—a short enough distance for one man to tackle another in a couple steps, and short enough that a shot from that range would be fatal.
"It is. It's, uh, been a long time, so we're just trying to catch up."
"All right. I'll leave you two alone, okay?"
I nodded. "Great!"
Taniguchi left us, though not without one last look at the stranger. When the door shut, the stranger put the revolver at his side again. He stared at the door with narrowed eyes.
And while he was doing that, I slipped a pot from the rack above me and hid it behind my back.
"Your wife, was it?" I said, breaking the silence.
The stranger's eyes snapped back to me. "Yes," he said. "She's had a hard time finding a job. We both have."
I nodded. "I could help you with that. We know some people, recruiters—"
"No, no." The man shook his head and looked aside. "She's gone now."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"She walked into the ocean and didn't come back."
The stranger pressed the gun to the side of his head.
"And you were right here," he said. "You weren't there for her."
I put out a hand, trying to calm him down. "Hey, wait a minute. I've been trying to help; I—"
"Help? Like this?" He tapped a couple pots with the grip of his revolver and scoffed. "Does this look like helping to you? Look at all this. Look at this mess! We needed you, and you hide here. You don't even show your face! You're not helping anyone!"
"I am!" I said, stomping my foot on the floor.
"You're not." The man put the gun back to his temple. "And you can't help someone like me."
"No, that's not—" I shuddered. "That isn't—that's not fair!"
"Not fair?" The man laughed. "Does something about this seem like it should be fair to you?"
I shuddered again. I ran my fingers through my hair. "You come in here—you tell me I'm not helping people—and you don't give me a chance to make it right?"
The man tilted his head slightly, and the barrel of the gun moved a few millimeters from his skin. "What can you do?" he asked.
I circled back toward the man, approaching him between the island and the oven rack. "I don't know what exactly," I admitted, "but I can try. I can try to find a way to make things better."
"You promise that?" he asked. "You promise to try, no matter how hard it gets?"
"I do, absolutely." I nodded twice, keeping my eyes steady on him.
The man shook his head, breaking into a coy grin. "No, don't mess with me, kid. You're just saying that. You gave up on us a long time ago."
I winced. "That's not it! Honest! I did what I could when there was an opportunity. I haven't been able to do that in a while, but maybe. I didn't want to lead everyone back out here to something hopeless. I didn't want…" I gestured to the cafeteria outside. "I didn't want to lead people to just this. It needs to change; I know that. We need to make things better. I don't know how, but it has to happen."
"Better how?" he yelled.
"I don't know how, but it needs to be good enough that…" I looked aside, fumbling for words. "That people feel they can stay in this world!"
The man raised an eyebrow. "I see. So that's what you think, huh?" He laughed, taking his eyes off me. "I thought so. All you needed was a little push, and you'd show what still mattered to you. Good. I'm glad for that."
"I'm glad too," I said, daring to smile. "So—"
The man raised the gun.
He raised the gun and pointed it at me.
He lined up his eye to the barrel, and he put his finger on the trigger.
I shrank down; I threw the pot from behind my back and crouched!
BA-CLANG!
Metal ripped at my shoulder; I fell back into the row of cabinets behind me. The pot fluttered across the room and clattered on the tile. My arm burned like a lava flow.
"I'm so glad," the man said. "That makes this easier."
"Wha—why?" I cried. "I told you exactly what you wanted to hear!"
But the man was implacable. With narrow, focused eyes, he offered neither answers nor mercy. He towered over me by the kitchen island, and he leveled the revolver on me again. My eyes crossed to see the tip of the barrel, and all else about the scene—the splatter of blood on those stainless cabinets; the gunman's steady, emotionless face—faded from view. There was just the tip of the barrel left in my sight.
And a glow—the glow of a girl who shouldn't be. From the far corner of the kitchen, she watched us, a silent observer of history.
Rei Ayanami watched us—the girl who never should've been, in the green-and-white uniform of a school that no longer existed.
How fitting it was, that the girl who had lived and died for us would reappear as a phantom, a mirage of my pain and suffering, just as I was about to die, too.
And like a good assassin, the gunman didn't make me beg for my life. He aimed for my forehead, and—
BANG!
I shut my eyes, then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about shutting my eyes.
Then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about not having time to think about shutting my eyes, definitely.
So why was I still alive?
The gunman seemed as perplexed as I was. He turned the revolver aside, opened the chamber, and spun it. He snarled, gritting his teeth, and he shot again:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
Four ear-splitting shots—they swamped my hearing with a high-pitched hiss. I was half-deafened, but I was still alive.
The gunman snarled. He turned the gun over, holding it by the barrel. He raised the gun overhead and turned grip down to club me into submission.
Thud! There was a thud, but I couldn't find it with the noise in my ears. My eyes darted about the room, and then, I saw it: the double doors to the cafeteria had slammed on their hinges. Taniguchi barged in. He swung the soup pot like a meteor hammer!
The pot struck the gunman's head and rattled in Taniguchi's hand.
"It's all right; we got him! We got him, Ikari!"
My body slid down along the back cabinets. Somewhere, Taniguchi was yelling for police and paramedics. The shooter lay on his side and clutched his head woozily.
Rei Ayanami? No one saw anyone like her.
As for me, I lay there, among the cold metal cabinets and utensils, as my blood seeped away. I'd given my body for the world before. What was a little blood?
Unfortunately, the paramedics arrived shortly and thought I didn't need to give any more. They stuck me with needles to take care of the pain, and they wheeled me past the shooter to an ambulance, but I tugged on one of the medic's sleeves as we went by.
"Sir?" said the medic.
"I'd like to speak to someone," I said.
The police had taken the shooter to the main cafeteria. With a dark blue bruise on his forehead, he sat with his head hanging low and his hands cuffed behind his back.
My throat was dry, but I cleared it and said, "Why did you do this?"
The shooter looked up, through the strands of hair that had fallen around his face, and he spat on the floor.
But in doing so, he exposed some black ink on the side of his neck.
One of the officers pulled down the man's jacket collar, showing the tattoo for all to see: a triangle, upside down, with two sets of eyes in columns running through it—two on the left and three on the right.
The mark of Instrumentality's architects, of Seele.
"Take care, Ikari," he said, grinning. "Our eyes are watching you."
Some things can't be put behind you because you'd rather forget them, you see. You can run away from them and put those memories in the past, but if you're not careful, those things you flee from will grow and grow in the dark, into a cancer that reaches out from where you cannot see.
Part One: The Boy Who Became a Legend
1. Two Years Later
People ask me, sometimes, if there's anything I regret about my life. I try not to have regrets—or if I do, I try to learn from them, to learn how not to make the same mistakes. "But is there anything you would change?" they say. "Is there anything you wish were different?"
There was one thing, actually. I used to wish I could pass people on the street without being noticed. I used to wish I could make eye contact with a stranger and just walk on by. I used to wish I could meet someone for the first time without them saying,
"You're that boy…."
That boy. They might not have known my name, but they knew my face. They knew what I looked like and how I carried myself, and the glint of recognition in their eyes—it was unmistakable.
Like me, I guess.
But you see, some things can't be put behind you just because you'd rather forget. I learned that well one day.
I was working in a soup kitchen at the time. We were chronically short-staffed, with people coming and going on a daily basis. We had people burn themselves on the pot handles or pour out too much stock for a given meal. That was the way things were. We had people come in with the qualifications to be literary critics or materials scientists. That didn't help them learn how to bring broth to a simmer.
The newest recruit was a middle-aged man named Taniguchi. I met him on an afternoon shift at the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.
"You're that boy, aren't you? You are!"
I sighed, shook my head, and said, "My name's Nakai. Nice to meet you. Do you understand?"
He nodded eagerly, beaming. It was like how, if you told a friend in school that you were interested in a classmate—that you liked her—and asked them not to say anything, they'd smile and nod and grin at you knowingly. Taniguchi's smile was like that.
"So, what do I need to do, uh, Nakai?"
He learned fast, too—not just what to say, but how to cook. He may have been unkempt—with a scraggly beard and disheveled hair—but Taniguchi cared for the soup gently, moving the ladle with deliberate caresses as he stirred.
"It's not bad, you know?" he said, once I showed him the ropes. "It's nice to make something other people will appreciate."
I laughed to myself at that. "You haven't seen the ingredients."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
I tore open a gray paper packet and dumped the contents into the broth. Dried seaweed floated in a clump on top of the broth, and a few cubes of tofu followed.
"You're kidding," he said, scoffing.
I opened a cupboard, showing him dozens of those gray paper packets.
"Take five more of these per pot. That's the standard batch."
He shook the packet with two fingers. "How many people is this pot supposed to serve?"
"Thirty, if you can stretch it that far."
Shaking his head, Taniguchi tore open another packet and stirred the seaweed and tofu into the pale yellow broth.
"Didn't used to be this way…," he muttered.
He was right about that. It didn't used to be that we had to stretch out instant soup packets to feed the hungry. It didn't used to be that a boy not even out of high school and a salaryman would cook up soup for people in a school kitchen, but that was reality. We were two men in a spacious, shiny middle-school kitchen, surrounded by polished steel stoves and ovens. The white fluorescent lights cast a glare from those surfaces, as though the past itself were looking back at us with an unwavering gaze. If you looked hard enough, you might see the distant memories of children stopping by to pick up lunches and chat with their classmates. They would've eaten just through the double doors to the cafeteria, day in and day out, never paying any mind to the food service workers in the kitchen.
As Taniguchi tended to the soup, I peered through a tiny, circular window in the double doors. There were few children in the cafeteria that day. There were mostly adults in rags or tattered clothes. Open sores and boils festered on their skin. A stereo in the corner played a tape of '70s pop music. A couple people rocked to it, but mostly, the patrons stared at the cafeteria walls, thinking nothing and feeling nothing.
"Ah, Nakai? I think the soup is ready? What do we do now?"
Taniguchi leaned over the steaming broth and turned his head sideways, watching bubbles form on the surface.
"It is ready, right?" he said.
I looked over the edge of the pot and nodded. "You can take it outside. Bowls should be under the table."
"You're not coming with me?"
"Someone has to clean the kitchen," I said with a shrug.
He frowned, but I offered him a pair of mitts to hold to carry the pot with, and he went on his way. The patrons would form a line in front of the soup pot, never sniffing with joy the food before them, never smiling as they filled their bellies.
For all their infected sores and brittle bones, they were alive, right? And I—I did my part to provide for them, unseen and unknown. I stayed behind in the kitchen, and to the beat of a distant, archaic eight-track, I straightened up the boxes of seaweed and tofu packets. I ran water—spurting, irregular water—to clean bowls from the morning meal. And if the kitchen looked clean, that was only to the untrained eye. Tiny yellow spots dotted the area around the sink and even past that. I found a few stains on the center island, too, and I kneeled down to wipe them away.
That's why, when the double door opened, I didn't see who came in. I just said, "If you need more bowls, I'll be through with them in a minute."
"Sorry, I'm not hungry."
I shot up. It was a man—a stranger in a dirty green jacket two sizes too small. Despite his haggard appearance, the man's gaze was steady and even.
As steady as the revolver at his side.
"I see," I said. "What do you want? We don't have a lot of money."
The man huffed, shaking his head. "This isn't about money."
"What then?"
At that, the man made no reply, at least not at first. Instead, he wandered the kitchen for a bit. He ran a finger over the countertop, picking up loose droplets of soup. He admired his own reflection in the dangling pots and pans.
"Why here?" he asked at last. "What are you doing here?"
"It, uh…" I backed away from him. He circled the kitchen island, following me, and I backpedaled to match his strides. "It helps people," I said.
"Does it?"
I reached for the edge of the island behind me. "I like to think so."
"It doesn't help me," he said, keeping up with me with long steps.
"It could." I gestured to the doors leading into the cafeteria. "Are you hungry?"
He shook his head. "I don't need help. If you want to help someone, help my wife."
I frowned. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could speak, the doors to the cafeteria opened. Taniguchi came in with an empty pot.
"I can't believe we got that much out of that one packet," he muttered. "All right, so, I think we might need another—oh."
The stranger hid his hands behind his back, nodding in apology. "Sorry, I was just talking with my friend here," the stranger explained. "We go way back."
Taniguchi frowned. "Is that true?" he asked me.
My eyes flickered to the revolver behind the stranger's back. There were less than two meters between Taniguchi and the stranger—a short enough distance for one man to tackle another in a couple steps, and short enough that a shot from that range would be fatal.
"It is. It's, uh, been a long time, so we're just trying to catch up."
"All right. I'll leave you two alone, okay?"
I nodded. "Great!"
Taniguchi left us, though not without one last look at the stranger. When the door shut, the stranger put the revolver at his side again. He stared at the door with narrowed eyes.
And while he was doing that, I slipped a pot from the rack above me and hid it behind my back.
"Your wife, was it?" I said, breaking the silence.
The stranger's eyes snapped back to me. "Yes," he said. "She's had a hard time finding a job. We both have."
I nodded. "I could help you with that. We know some people, recruiters—"
"No, no." The man shook his head and looked aside. "She's gone now."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"She walked into the ocean and didn't come back."
The stranger pressed the gun to the side of his head.
"And you were right here," he said. "You weren't there for her."
I put out a hand, trying to calm him down. "Hey, wait a minute. I've been trying to help; I—"
"Help? Like this?" He tapped a couple pots with the grip of his revolver and scoffed. "Does this look like helping to you? Look at all this. Look at this mess! We needed you, and you hide here. You don't even show your face! You're not helping anyone!"
"I am!" I said, stomping my foot on the floor.
"You're not." The man put the gun back to his temple. "And you can't help someone like me."
"No, that's not—" I shuddered. "That isn't—that's not fair!"
"Not fair?" The man laughed. "Does something about this seem like it should be fair to you?"
I shuddered again. I ran my fingers through my hair. "You come in here—you tell me I'm not helping people—and you don't give me a chance to make it right?"
The man tilted his head slightly, and the barrel of the gun moved a few millimeters from his skin. "What can you do?" he asked.
I circled back toward the man, approaching him between the island and the oven rack. "I don't know what exactly," I admitted, "but I can try. I can try to find a way to make things better."
"You promise that?" he asked. "You promise to try, no matter how hard it gets?"
"I do, absolutely." I nodded twice, keeping my eyes steady on him.
The man shook his head, breaking into a coy grin. "No, don't mess with me, kid. You're just saying that. You gave up on us a long time ago."
I winced. "That's not it! Honest! I did what I could when there was an opportunity. I haven't been able to do that in a while, but maybe. I didn't want to lead everyone back out here to something hopeless. I didn't want…" I gestured to the cafeteria outside. "I didn't want to lead people to just this. It needs to change; I know that. We need to make things better. I don't know how, but it has to happen."
"Better how?" he yelled.
"I don't know how, but it needs to be good enough that…" I looked aside, fumbling for words. "That people feel they can stay in this world!"
The man raised an eyebrow. "I see. So that's what you think, huh?" He laughed, taking his eyes off me. "I thought so. All you needed was a little push, and you'd show what still mattered to you. Good. I'm glad for that."
"I'm glad too," I said, daring to smile. "So—"
The man raised the gun.
He raised the gun and pointed it at me.
He lined up his eye to the barrel, and he put his finger on the trigger.
I shrank down; I threw the pot from behind my back and crouched!
BA-CLANG!
Metal ripped at my shoulder; I fell back into the row of cabinets behind me. The pot fluttered across the room and clattered on the tile. My arm burned like a lava flow.
"I'm so glad," the man said. "That makes this easier."
"Wha—why?" I cried. "I told you exactly what you wanted to hear!"
But the man was implacable. With narrow, focused eyes, he offered neither answers nor mercy. He towered over me by the kitchen island, and he leveled the revolver on me again. My eyes crossed to see the tip of the barrel, and all else about the scene—the splatter of blood on those stainless cabinets; the gunman's steady, emotionless face—faded from view. There was just the tip of the barrel left in my sight.
And a glow—the glow of a girl who shouldn't be. From the far corner of the kitchen, she watched us, a silent observer of history.
Rei Ayanami watched us—the girl who never should've been, in the green-and-white uniform of a school that no longer existed.
How fitting it was, that the girl who had lived and died for us would reappear as a phantom, a mirage of my pain and suffering, just as I was about to die, too.
And like a good assassin, the gunman didn't make me beg for my life. He aimed for my forehead, and—
BANG!
I shut my eyes, then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about shutting my eyes.
Then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about not having time to think about shutting my eyes, definitely.
So why was I still alive?
The gunman seemed as perplexed as I was. He turned the revolver aside, opened the chamber, and spun it. He snarled, gritting his teeth, and he shot again:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
Four ear-splitting shots—they swamped my hearing with a high-pitched hiss. I was half-deafened, but I was still alive.
The gunman snarled. He turned the gun over, holding it by the barrel. He raised the gun overhead and turned grip down to club me into submission.
Thud! There was a thud, but I couldn't find it with the noise in my ears. My eyes darted about the room, and then, I saw it: the double doors to the cafeteria had slammed on their hinges. Taniguchi barged in. He swung the soup pot like a meteor hammer!
The pot struck the gunman's head and rattled in Taniguchi's hand.
"It's all right; we got him! We got him, Ikari!"
My body slid down along the back cabinets. Somewhere, Taniguchi was yelling for police and paramedics. The shooter lay on his side and clutched his head woozily.
Rei Ayanami? No one saw anyone like her.
As for me, I lay there, among the cold metal cabinets and utensils, as my blood seeped away. I'd given my body for the world before. What was a little blood?
Unfortunately, the paramedics arrived shortly and thought I didn't need to give any more. They stuck me with needles to take care of the pain, and they wheeled me past the shooter to an ambulance, but I tugged on one of the medic's sleeves as we went by.
"Sir?" said the medic.
"I'd like to speak to someone," I said.
The police had taken the shooter to the main cafeteria. With a dark blue bruise on his forehead, he sat with his head hanging low and his hands cuffed behind his back.
My throat was dry, but I cleared it and said, "Why did you do this?"
The shooter looked up, through the strands of hair that had fallen around his face, and he spat on the floor.
But in doing so, he exposed some black ink on the side of his neck.
One of the officers pulled down the man's jacket collar, showing the tattoo for all to see: a triangle, upside down, with two sets of eyes in columns running through it—two on the left and three on the right.
The mark of Instrumentality's architects, of Seele.
"Take care, Ikari," he said, grinning. "Our eyes are watching you."
Some things can't be put behind you because you'd rather forget them, you see. You can run away from them and put those memories in the past, but if you're not careful, those things you flee from will grow and grow in the dark, into a cancer that reaches out from where you cannot see.
Last edited:
1.2 Tokyo-2
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
2. Tokyo-2
It amazes me still—how quickly most people put themselves back together, how quickly they got back to their lives.
After all, how many people did it take to crew an ambulance? To drive it? To maintain it when it leaked oil or needed new tires? To tell the driver where to go? To give it a place to stay when it wasn't needed?
That's a lot of people, and they all came out to see me. The doctors bowed before me, promising a full recovery within a week—not a difficult promise, considering I'd only been grazed. The nurses asked if I had any special requests for food or entertainment. Even the cleaning staff took care to wipe down my suite's washroom by hand. They all asked questions when they thought there was a free minute: "What have you been doing since we got back? I never see you on the news." "Did you get together with the redhead?" Stuff like that.
I thought they were just paying me too much attention, but it was more than that. When I took a look around the hospital, just to stretch my legs, I passed rows of empty beds and vacant suites. On my floor, the only other soul was a young girl with a broken leg.
The hospital had been built for a different time. Like I said, it amazes me how many people put themselves back together and got back to their lives, for I know how many people didn't come back, and it would've been far easier for most of us to have stayed behind.
After that walk, I made it known I'd be checking out as soon as I was healthy enough to do so.
"But Ikari," said the doctor, "someone just tried to kill you. Don't you think it'd be wise to wait a while? Or to ask for some protection?"
"I'm a private citizen. I work for no one, and the police have better things to do."
The doctor gawked at me, but he wrote down some notes on his pad, shook his head, and went on his way. And for a while, I was naive enough to think it was that easy.
By early evening, I walked out of the hospital with a sling around my arm. I shaded my eyes from the sun and crossed a large parking lot—one large enough for a hundred cars, yet there were less than twenty taking up space there.
And as I came upon the sidewalk and the nearest street, a white car rolled up. The window started to roll down. There was a glint of light, a reflection from inside.
My heart turned cold. I raised my good arm over my face—like that would stop a bullet!—and the driver of the car said,
"What the hell? I actually went to the trouble to look pretty for you today."
Misato Katsuragi peered over her sunglasses at me, and she leaned across the width of the car to open the passenger-side door, grinning like an imp.
"Or did you think I was here to kill you?"
I shrugged. "It wouldn't be the first time in the last day or two." I glanced back at the brown hospital building. "Did my doctor call you?"
"Yeah, you know, I should be irritated about that. I was told working at this level would keep random people from calling me up at any time of the day or night. I think someone overstated the benefits of this job."
I laughed a bit and climbed inside. Misato pointed out the seat belt—which she was definitely not wearing, but she drummed her fingers on the gear shifter until I was buckled in—and she said,
"Sorry I'm late."
"Late? I wasn't waiting."
"I know." She smiled to herself. "Just seems appropriate, somehow."
That was the nice thing about Misato: some people didn't come back from the sea quite the same, but Misato hadn't changed. Her idea of "looking pretty" was a tiny touch of lipstick and tangled hair; she drove faster than was sane.
And, of course, she would drive an old friend of hers home from the hospital to protect him from an assassin. These were all aspects of her personality, none of them any more (or any less) real than the others. They were all parts of her.
And I was glad that something somewhere saw fit to bring her back from the dead for us.
"I didn't die!" she said once. "I was just momentarily less than alive!"
That was her usual protest if the topic came up, anyway, and looking at her then, you'd have never known she'd died in the first place. Despite her knotted hair, she looked quite at home in her uniform—the green officer's dress of the Ground Self-Defense Force, even if she wasn't entirely happy with her job.
"It's a little dull," she bemoaned, and she took her displeasure out on a traffic cone, squibbing it behind us. "Believe me, the PM isn't interested in hearing advice from an upstart like me. He'd make me General of the Arctic if it would put me in charge of absolutely nothing."
"You like to stay busy."
"Damn right I do. Work hard, sleep hard, drink hard, bang hard. You've got to go at life full-tilt, or life will tilt you instead."
I made a face. "Is that so?"
She shrugged, but she did let off the gas a little. "Okay, maybe there's room for a little moderation now and then. I came back with a new liver; I'm trying to live with it for at least the next ten years. That's a goal, right?"
"You need to take care of yourself, Misato."
"Same for you, I should think." She slammed on the brakes at a stoplight, and when I was done getting the seatbelt out of my chest, Misato said, "So, what happened?"
I turned aside, facing the window. "You already know, don't you?"
"I know what I've read and what I've heard. I'm asking you."
"The man had a Seele tattoo."
She nodded. "Yeah, I know." She took out her frustrations on the accelerator. "I wasn't looking forward to hearing from those guys again, but it was just a matter of time!" She turned a curve at 1.5g just for the hell of it. Thank goodness my left arm still worked, or I would've been pinned against the window. "Men like them prey on the downtrodden and hopeless. That's why we have to fight them by rebuilding this world, one day at a time."
We hit straight, level road, and I relaxed.
That word Misato used—rebuilding—I'm not sure it was the right one. We came back to the real world with the world already built up. Beyond the Crater, most cities were still standing. Nature had hardly encroached upon them, despite the time that had passed while we dreamed. Truly, there wasn't much we needed to build. How could there be? Just on that drive, Misato and I passed a boarded-up grocery store, with broken windows and graffiti sprayed over the walls. Nature and time hadn't caused that damage. That was humanity.
"So, we'll put something together to go punch those guys in the face. They're the last thing we need to deal with now."
"Is that really SDF's job?"
"I mean the government. I'm part of the government now—as useless as my so-called job might be."
"You might need to find another job, if you're so bored right now."
Misato smiled, and she shifted into a higher gear. The car accelerated, and I sank a little deeper into my seat.
"You might say I have some prospects," she said.
"That's good."
"It is. And what about you?"
"Me?"
"Are you intent on working in soup kitchens and charity shops for the rest of your life?"
I drummed my fingers on the armrest, looking away. "Until I can go around without being recognized anymore."
"That right? Well, maybe that's for the best. You've done more than anyone could've expected of you. It's not unreasonable to rest on your laurels. It's our turn now."
Misato's grip on the steering wheel was firm and steady, and she navigated the next curve gently. She turned just enough to guide us through the ninety-degree bend, and she let the wheel slip through her fingers until it was straight and level again. All throughout, her expression was focused and serious. She watched the road with unwavering eyes. She never even glanced at me.
"Right?" she said.
"Mm," was all I could say.
Misato dropped me off at my building in the New City. I invited her over for dinner, but she wouldn't stay. Always some other meaningless task for the PM—that's what she said. As much as she complained, Misato zipped off in that horrifically expensive sportscar. Or at least, it would've been expensive before. Maybe, after Third Impact, it didn't have an owner anymore.
Apartments in the New City were mostly high rise buildings. They stuck out on the Tokyo-2 skyline like needles from a pin cushion. Old Matsumoto had been a rather small city (or perhaps, a large town), with few buildings tall enough to block a view of the mountains in the distance. But from the top of my building, you could be forgiven for thinking you were taller than the mountains. My penthouse there was my perch, my eye on the world beneath me. The world below was a jungle, and I was a monkey clinging to the highest branch I could.
In front of my door was a red sack of mail. The sack was property of Japan Post, and we had to leave it out each morning for the mailman to pick up. Our mail demanded thorough and intense screening for hazardous substances. Anthrax, ricin—you name it, they scanned for it, or purged it with radiation, or something. I never really knew the details there. The government said the mail was safe, and we hand-picked the postman who would deliver the mail for us each day. That way, we could tell ourselves it was all safe.
I still wonder, though: how fortunate were we, that someone came back from the LCL sea and wanted to be a mailman? Or he felt willing enough to do it? Willing to deliver threats like they were nothing? Dangerous packages and contaminated letters like they were no big deal?
People should be more appreciative of their mailmen, I think. There are so many tough, unglamorous jobs like that, jobs that simply need to be done. The world wouldn't go forward without people to deliver mail and packages. It wouldn't go forward without someone like me to cook food now and again, as I did that evening, despite the sling on my arm. It's a challenge to get water boiling, to boil noodles, or to cut mushrooms with just one good hand, but I did what I could. Because people carry mail or cook food for others, it frees everyone else to fight wars, make art and music, or do science.
Asuka was a great example of that.
She came home around eight that night. She kicked off her shoes and thrust her hands into the pockets of her labcoat. She took one look at me, and she said,
"What the hell? That's just a graze?"
I pulled on my sling. "It's basically a graze, yeah."
"Says you! Get away from that counter. I'm taking care of this."
"So, you want to take care of me? Or do you want to enjoy your dinner?"
She folded her arms and glared, but she relented. "Fine. But if there's anything that takes two hands, I'm helping."
With Asuka's help carrying the soup pot and chopping mushrooms, making dinner went a lot faster, and once Asuka was over the shock of my injury, she settled down enough to tell me about her day.
"Oh, it was awful. Damn undergrad contaminated a trial, so we had to do everything over. I would've been home an hour ago if not for that. Guy's gotta get his head on straight. His own dad died from heart failure; you'd think that'd give a guy motivation!"
At that time, Asuka worked on growing synthetic organs and limbs from an LCL base. As the stuff of primordial life itself, the LCL in the ocean could be harvested and "coerced" into shapes and forms people needed. Apparently this coercion took some combination of electric shocks and threaded scaffolds to make the organs take shape, or something. I was never real clear on the details, but it was impressive work—work people needed to see done.
"Don't be too hard on him," I told her. "People make mistakes sometimes."
Asuka put her soup spoon down and dabbed at her lip. "Mistakes are costly. Some people go off by themselves all alone, even when they get a kilo of hate mail every day. That could've been a very costly mistake." Her eyes snapped up to mine, and she said, "You need to get some protection. Or stay home."
"Protection would draw attention. And I won't stay home and do nothing."
"You don't get to have it both ways. If you do something that matters, people are going to notice you."
"Not if they don't know I'm there."
Asuka made a face at that, like I'd just started speaking Arabic, but her cell phone rang, interrupting us. She grumbled to herself in German and answered.
"Yeah? What? No, we tried the concentration at 0.35 for this batch. What? Okay, let me look."
Phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, Asuka climbed up from the dinner table and trotted into the bedroom. She came back with a laptop under her arm and set it up on a spare cushion.
"Hm, we could increase the thread density and worry about how to remove them later? No, let me pull those up. That was maybe three months ago? I don't remember what we saw then, but I should have it written down here somewhere…."
That conversation went on for over half an hour. Asuka worked on her soup now and then, but she she still had about a third of her bowl left when I washed my bowl out. I left her at the dinner table as she chatted with her colleague over charts and graphs. The work of advancing science doesn't rest when you get home to eat, you see.
Like Asuka, I tried to stay busy, too. I retired to the study and opened the red sack of mail. I had a special set of stationery for responding to these letters, though it wasn't very fancy: just my name in the letterhead, really. The first few letters weren't anything unusual: "My husband had been depressed lately. Do you think Lilith has forsaken us? Why does she let us endure all this suffering, after she promised us salvation here?" Stuff like that.
I'd never been a student of religious theory, and I didn't remember Ayanami promising us anything like salvation in this world, but letters like that weren't so bad. I could say, "We only thought it would be better in this world, to talk to people and meet them, even if they might hurt us, too." That any of us came back at all—that was a decision made by people, and people can be wrong, after all. That doesn't mean the decision was made in bad faith.
That was one of the easier ones. Letters like, "You were wrong, Ikari! You were naive and ignorant! Why would you lead people back into a world of starvation, disease, and death? A world where people can't even find relief on a beach without smelling of blood? What were you thinking?"
I put that letter aside, on a stack of a dozen others, and went on as best I could. Yes, it's hard to deal with letters like that, but at least they're individual people giving their honest thoughts. I couldn't say that about a lot of other people: the vultures who constantly rang our phone off the hook, for instance.
That's not to say the calls didn't bother Asuka and me; we'd put in a switch to disable the ringer if we needed to, and we had a caller ID system installed, too. Right then, all incoming calls to the apartment just lit up a red light on the phone base, and the incoming call number showed in black against a lit background.
And when one of those numbers called, I let the red light blink away until it fizzled out. What happened to us wasn't any of their business. No, what happened to me wasn't any of their business. Asuka was a scientist. She worked for the greater good of humanity. Me? I was a private citizen, nothing more. Unless one of them wanted to talk to me about security near soup kitchens, what happened to me shouldn't have mattered to anyone.
I went back to my letters:
"Ikari, you may not remember, but this isn't the first time I've written to you. I enjoyed your letter from before, but it amazes me that I heard from you at all. What's happened to you? What have you been doing? Everyone says you're a shut-in now, and I don't understand why you'd do that. You helped show everyone we'd lose something if we stayed in the sea. Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?"
I mean, on the face of it, it wasn't true. I still saw people from time to time. I saw Asuka almost every day. I worked in the soup kitchen and had good relations with the other staff there. I knew over a dozen of the kitchen's patrons by sight. I'd heard about where they lived, their past histories, and their future dreams. I met people. I was meeting people. And I had never objected to meeting people—not most people, anyway.
It was the people who'd call my home phone at all hours of the day or night, who'd flash the red light there even when it was dark—all because we couldn't stand to leave the ringer on and hear them wailing at us—those were the people I'd shut out of my life, and there were a lot of them.
But when I put that letter aside, I put my pen down and slid my stationery away, too. The red light on the phone base blinked incessantly, and I snatched up the handset to snuff it out.
"Yes, who is it?" I snapped.
"Hm?" said the man on the other end. "Oh, wow, uh, good evening. Is this Ikari?"
"Speaking."
"Ah, yes, this is Itsuki Miyamoto from—"
I glanced at the number on the caller ID. "From Yomiuri News."
"Yes, yes. I, uh, I wasn't expecting to reach you…."
"What do you want?"
"Well, as you can imagine, there's wild speculation and rumor surrounding the attempt on your life."
"And?"
"…ah, well, I would go over the details of the attack with you? The police report is rather sparse."
"A man entered the kitchen with a revolver. He tried to shoot me, but he only shot once before the gun misfired. That's all."
"That's all? Really? What about the lack of bullets? What about the five-eyed tattoo on the man's neck?"
A chill ran down my spine, and I brought the handset closer to my mouth.
"What do you know about that?" I said.
"It's from the new Seele, Ikari. Haven't you heard what they're up to?"
I balled my hand into a fist. "What those people choose to do with their lives is no concern of mine."
"Until they shoot at you. That makes them a threat, doesn't it?"
I drummed my fingers on the handset. "I don't have anything else to say. Leave us alone. Goodbye."
"Wait, WAIT! Just one more thing, and that's all. Please understand; my boss would have my ass if I didn't get at least one more thing out of you. One question, and that's it. I promise."
I straightened out the last letter on my desk. "One question."
"You've got dozens of people—not just in my paper but in every newspaper in the country—hanging on your every word. You could use that to speak out against militaristic buildup, or to push for better social services for the poor and hungry. You could condemn Seele publicly, but you do nothing. So, I must ask you: why do you stay silent?"
I hissed, forcing air through my clenched teeth. "I never asked anyone to follow me," I said curtly. "I made a decision for myself. Don't look to me for answers; I don't have any, so just leave me alone, all right?"
"Maybe you're right about that, but right or wrong, Ikari, people aren't going to leave you alone just because you ask them nicely."
No, people were too stubborn, too insistent for that. And for that matter, they wouldn't refrain from shooting you just because you told them what you thought they wanted to hear.
"Hello?" said the reporter. "Are you still there?"
I jerked in my seat. "Um, yes, I'm still here."
"Okay. Well, thank you for your time."
"No, wait."
"What?" A pause. "What is it?"
"I might have more to say to you," I said, glancing at the unlit red light on the phone base, "if you can give me some information in return."
"I'm listening."
"What do you know about Seele these days?"
"That depends, Ikari. Are you telling me it was a tattoo of a triangle and eyes on the shooter's neck?"
I smiled to myself, and for the first time that whole conversation, I sat back in my chair.
You see, people did more than just get back to their lives after Instrumentality. They moved forward. They dedicated themselves to building the future they wanted to see, however beautiful or horrific it was.
Seele was like that. For the next week or so, I let the hate mail pile up on my desk as I looked into Seele. They were organized, I found, and very good at propaganda. They had their own website dedicated to putting out their twisted views. "Mankind will destroy itself without Instrumentality!" That's what they said, in blinking red text that scrolled across the page. As secretive as they were, I guess they didn't believe in subtlety.
They wanted to get their message across to the world, too. They recorded a broadcast each week to their followers, in English, German, Japanese, and French. "Fear not, brothers and sisters, for though Adam and Lilith have failed us, there is still salvation to be found, and it is coming—soon."
The promise of that "salvation" inspired Seele to go to war—and they interpreted the actions of legitimate governments as preparations for that coming battle, too. Now, you should be skeptical of evidence that comes from terrorists. Photos of armies on exercises, or warplanes being built, don't really tell you anything. Countries do that all the time anyway, and they would do it just to protect themselves from each other than to defend against some Fourth Impact Revolution.
Still, I asked some people I knew to check the evidence and look on their own for information, which turned up a few leads. For instance, the Defense Agency had requested significant sums of money for various projects—mostly in the name of "emergency preparedness." I thought that was vague enough to investigate, though I hadn't thought much would come of it.
Until I got a phone call from an old friend.
"Hey, Shinji, did you ask Kensuke to do some snoopin' about some SDF money?"
Toji Suzuhara, an old friend and fellow Eva pilot, called me up on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, as I'd been listening to another Seele broadcast. I put my headphones aside and pressed the phone handset closer to my ear. I lowered my voice and said, "Yes, why?"
"I just got a call from his dad a little while ago; PSB just barged in and snatched him up! With no warning! What the hell did you get him involved in?"
That's what I wanted to know!
I made a few calls and found out that my friend and contact—Kensuke Aida—had been taken to Metro Police headquarters in National Square for questioning. I showed up there and spoke with some of the officers in charge, trying to get Kensuke off the hook, but the officer in charge was adamant:
"Look, Ikari, you really shouldn't say anything more to me," said the inspector. "Your friend is in possession of classified material. The PSB's duty to investigate this is paramount. I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do here."
"Not even for me?"
In came Misato, who gave the inspector a polite bow while I stared dumbstruck.
"I'm sorry, General," said the inspector, "but if you think SDF can intrude on a police matter, you're quite mistaken."
"Haven't you heard?" said Misato, showing him an award-winning smile. "SDF is an extension of the police. You and I are the same."
The inspector chuckled politely. "I doubt that."
"Oh? Well, maybe this will change your mind." Misato handed over an envelope. The inspector furrowed his brow as he pored over each line in the memo.
"You can't be serious!" he said. "You can't do this!"
"I think you'll find that letter has the PM's signature on it, yes? That means I can do anything. If it said I could put you and your officers on vacation, I could do it. If it said I could turn the fountain outside into a swimming pool, I could do it. If it said I could requisition some pizza and beer for staff productivity, I could damn well do it." Misato snapped her fingers and frowned. "Damn. Why didn't I ask him for that?"
The inspector balled up the letter and hurled it into a trashcan, shaking his head. He conferred with one of his officers, and Kensuke was shown the way out from an interrogation room.
"Hey! About time you showed up! I thought they were gonna waterboard me!"
He pulled on his collar, adjusting his plaid red tie. One of the officers handed Kensuke's black blazer back to him, and Kensuke carried it over his shoulder as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.
"Don't be silly," said Misato. "We have much more effective methods than that."
Kensuke paled, laughing stiffly. "Uh…huh?"
"Don't do it again, and don't look into these matters any further, Aida." Misato winked. "That's an order, okay?"
Kensuke stiffened, standing straight and tall. "Yes, ma'am!"
"Good! Now, do you need a ride home?"
"Ah, no, I'll catch the train. It's not a big deal." Kensuke turned to me. "Shinji—first time I've seen you in months, and you get me involved in some military conspiracy! What gives?"
I bowed in apology. "Sorry. I shouldn't have gotten you wrapped up in this."
"You kidding? Military Club's gonna go wild over this!"
Misato cleared her throat and raised both eyebrows.
"Or they would go wild over this," said Kensuke, slapping his forehead with a sigh. "Ah well. Thanks for calling in the cavalry to spring me."
I glanced at Misato, and she put on the smile of an innocent schoolgirl. Kensuke didn't notice, continuing on:
"Stay in touch a little more, okay? Toji and I are doing a weekly tournament at the arcade. You should drop by."
"I'll try to pop in," I said.
"Don't just promise; be there, yeah?"
Misato cleared her throat again. "Aida, maybe you want to get home before you worry your father?"
"Ah!" Kensuke checked his watch. "You're right. Thanks again!"
With that, he ran off, leaving Misato and me alone. We followed Kensuke outside, into the open air. It was only as we cleared the lobby doors and entered the sunlight that I spoke to Misato.
"How did you know?"
"I'm nothing if not well-connected. Working for the PM does that, after all."
"I'd understand that if you pulled it off after the fact, but I hadn't told anyone Kensuke was arrested. How did you find out so fast?"
"Why is it you're looking into SDF troop movements and Seele activities?"
I looked out, over the square in front of us. It was a large greenspace with criss-crossing sidewalks and a central fountain. The surrounding buildings had all the features of regal governance: metal domes, classical pillars, tall and narrow windows, and the like. This was National Square, the heart of the Japanese government. SDF officers milled about in uniform. Lawyers and politicians crossed the grounds in their suits, all working toward the efficient operation of the country.
It's easy to be cynical about politicians and the like, but I'd learned over the previous two years that most politicians believe in what they're doing. They have conviction that they need to win and gain power to steer the nation toward safety and prosperity. People like them don't like to sit idly by.
And neither did Misato.
"You don't just work for the PM, do you?" I asked.
Misato shook her head.
"Are we safe?" I went on. "Are we safe from them?"
"I'm working to make us all safe."
I stepped in front of her, trying to catch her eye. "What can you do? If an assassin corners you in a kitchen, what can you do? If a suicide bomber takes out a ship, what can you do?"
Misato folded her arms. "Seele's just a group of people. I'm not worried about what people do. We can handle them."
"So there's nothing to worry about? No cause for concern?"
"I didn't exactly say that." She smiled bitterly, and she touched my shoulder—the shoulder of mine that supported my sling. "Sorry. That's all I can tell you, right now."
" 'Sorry'?" I jolted away from her. I pulled on the strap of the sling and let go. It snapped back against my body. "Look at this: this is what they did to me, and all you can say is sorry? Come on. Tell me: why are they making a move now?"
"Why do you ask?"
I shuddered, gawking at her. Misato's stare pierced me like a blast of x-rays.
"Do I need to say it again?" she said. "Why do you want to know?"
"Be—because I deserve to know!" I sputtered.
"And if you'd regret finding out? What then?"
"I should be the one to decide that."
We stared at each other for a time, and Misato was first to break: she sighed, shaking her head, and headed down the steps into the square.
"Come on, then," she said.
Misato led me across the square, into a building I wasn't familiar with. SDF guards manned the lobby, but Misato flashed them an ID card and nodded at me, and the guards stood down. One of them even said,
"Nice to see you here, sir."
I gave a polite smile in return, and that was all.
We took an elevator down several floors to an underground train station. I call it a station, but it was much smaller than any public train or subway station, with only a handful of guards on duty and no passengers in sight. The traincar itself was a curved, glossy white vehicle, like something out of the future—too pristine and neat to be part of the real world.
"Are you coming?" Misato stood between the sliding doors, holding them open.
My mouth hung open. I glanced down both ends of the tunnel, but the lights beyond were dim and unhelpful.
I tugged at the sling on my shoulder. I swallowed, and I said,
"Yeah."
Misato stood aside and waved me inside, and I sat down with her. The train doors closed, and we sped down a tunnel of gray rock and fluorescent lights to parts unknown.
It amazes me still—how quickly most people put themselves back together, how quickly they got back to their lives.
After all, how many people did it take to crew an ambulance? To drive it? To maintain it when it leaked oil or needed new tires? To tell the driver where to go? To give it a place to stay when it wasn't needed?
That's a lot of people, and they all came out to see me. The doctors bowed before me, promising a full recovery within a week—not a difficult promise, considering I'd only been grazed. The nurses asked if I had any special requests for food or entertainment. Even the cleaning staff took care to wipe down my suite's washroom by hand. They all asked questions when they thought there was a free minute: "What have you been doing since we got back? I never see you on the news." "Did you get together with the redhead?" Stuff like that.
I thought they were just paying me too much attention, but it was more than that. When I took a look around the hospital, just to stretch my legs, I passed rows of empty beds and vacant suites. On my floor, the only other soul was a young girl with a broken leg.
The hospital had been built for a different time. Like I said, it amazes me how many people put themselves back together and got back to their lives, for I know how many people didn't come back, and it would've been far easier for most of us to have stayed behind.
After that walk, I made it known I'd be checking out as soon as I was healthy enough to do so.
"But Ikari," said the doctor, "someone just tried to kill you. Don't you think it'd be wise to wait a while? Or to ask for some protection?"
"I'm a private citizen. I work for no one, and the police have better things to do."
The doctor gawked at me, but he wrote down some notes on his pad, shook his head, and went on his way. And for a while, I was naive enough to think it was that easy.
By early evening, I walked out of the hospital with a sling around my arm. I shaded my eyes from the sun and crossed a large parking lot—one large enough for a hundred cars, yet there were less than twenty taking up space there.
And as I came upon the sidewalk and the nearest street, a white car rolled up. The window started to roll down. There was a glint of light, a reflection from inside.
My heart turned cold. I raised my good arm over my face—like that would stop a bullet!—and the driver of the car said,
"What the hell? I actually went to the trouble to look pretty for you today."
Misato Katsuragi peered over her sunglasses at me, and she leaned across the width of the car to open the passenger-side door, grinning like an imp.
"Or did you think I was here to kill you?"
I shrugged. "It wouldn't be the first time in the last day or two." I glanced back at the brown hospital building. "Did my doctor call you?"
"Yeah, you know, I should be irritated about that. I was told working at this level would keep random people from calling me up at any time of the day or night. I think someone overstated the benefits of this job."
I laughed a bit and climbed inside. Misato pointed out the seat belt—which she was definitely not wearing, but she drummed her fingers on the gear shifter until I was buckled in—and she said,
"Sorry I'm late."
"Late? I wasn't waiting."
"I know." She smiled to herself. "Just seems appropriate, somehow."
That was the nice thing about Misato: some people didn't come back from the sea quite the same, but Misato hadn't changed. Her idea of "looking pretty" was a tiny touch of lipstick and tangled hair; she drove faster than was sane.
And, of course, she would drive an old friend of hers home from the hospital to protect him from an assassin. These were all aspects of her personality, none of them any more (or any less) real than the others. They were all parts of her.
And I was glad that something somewhere saw fit to bring her back from the dead for us.
"I didn't die!" she said once. "I was just momentarily less than alive!"
That was her usual protest if the topic came up, anyway, and looking at her then, you'd have never known she'd died in the first place. Despite her knotted hair, she looked quite at home in her uniform—the green officer's dress of the Ground Self-Defense Force, even if she wasn't entirely happy with her job.
"It's a little dull," she bemoaned, and she took her displeasure out on a traffic cone, squibbing it behind us. "Believe me, the PM isn't interested in hearing advice from an upstart like me. He'd make me General of the Arctic if it would put me in charge of absolutely nothing."
"You like to stay busy."
"Damn right I do. Work hard, sleep hard, drink hard, bang hard. You've got to go at life full-tilt, or life will tilt you instead."
I made a face. "Is that so?"
She shrugged, but she did let off the gas a little. "Okay, maybe there's room for a little moderation now and then. I came back with a new liver; I'm trying to live with it for at least the next ten years. That's a goal, right?"
"You need to take care of yourself, Misato."
"Same for you, I should think." She slammed on the brakes at a stoplight, and when I was done getting the seatbelt out of my chest, Misato said, "So, what happened?"
I turned aside, facing the window. "You already know, don't you?"
"I know what I've read and what I've heard. I'm asking you."
"The man had a Seele tattoo."
She nodded. "Yeah, I know." She took out her frustrations on the accelerator. "I wasn't looking forward to hearing from those guys again, but it was just a matter of time!" She turned a curve at 1.5g just for the hell of it. Thank goodness my left arm still worked, or I would've been pinned against the window. "Men like them prey on the downtrodden and hopeless. That's why we have to fight them by rebuilding this world, one day at a time."
We hit straight, level road, and I relaxed.
That word Misato used—rebuilding—I'm not sure it was the right one. We came back to the real world with the world already built up. Beyond the Crater, most cities were still standing. Nature had hardly encroached upon them, despite the time that had passed while we dreamed. Truly, there wasn't much we needed to build. How could there be? Just on that drive, Misato and I passed a boarded-up grocery store, with broken windows and graffiti sprayed over the walls. Nature and time hadn't caused that damage. That was humanity.
"So, we'll put something together to go punch those guys in the face. They're the last thing we need to deal with now."
"Is that really SDF's job?"
"I mean the government. I'm part of the government now—as useless as my so-called job might be."
"You might need to find another job, if you're so bored right now."
Misato smiled, and she shifted into a higher gear. The car accelerated, and I sank a little deeper into my seat.
"You might say I have some prospects," she said.
"That's good."
"It is. And what about you?"
"Me?"
"Are you intent on working in soup kitchens and charity shops for the rest of your life?"
I drummed my fingers on the armrest, looking away. "Until I can go around without being recognized anymore."
"That right? Well, maybe that's for the best. You've done more than anyone could've expected of you. It's not unreasonable to rest on your laurels. It's our turn now."
Misato's grip on the steering wheel was firm and steady, and she navigated the next curve gently. She turned just enough to guide us through the ninety-degree bend, and she let the wheel slip through her fingers until it was straight and level again. All throughout, her expression was focused and serious. She watched the road with unwavering eyes. She never even glanced at me.
"Right?" she said.
"Mm," was all I could say.
Misato dropped me off at my building in the New City. I invited her over for dinner, but she wouldn't stay. Always some other meaningless task for the PM—that's what she said. As much as she complained, Misato zipped off in that horrifically expensive sportscar. Or at least, it would've been expensive before. Maybe, after Third Impact, it didn't have an owner anymore.
Apartments in the New City were mostly high rise buildings. They stuck out on the Tokyo-2 skyline like needles from a pin cushion. Old Matsumoto had been a rather small city (or perhaps, a large town), with few buildings tall enough to block a view of the mountains in the distance. But from the top of my building, you could be forgiven for thinking you were taller than the mountains. My penthouse there was my perch, my eye on the world beneath me. The world below was a jungle, and I was a monkey clinging to the highest branch I could.
In front of my door was a red sack of mail. The sack was property of Japan Post, and we had to leave it out each morning for the mailman to pick up. Our mail demanded thorough and intense screening for hazardous substances. Anthrax, ricin—you name it, they scanned for it, or purged it with radiation, or something. I never really knew the details there. The government said the mail was safe, and we hand-picked the postman who would deliver the mail for us each day. That way, we could tell ourselves it was all safe.
I still wonder, though: how fortunate were we, that someone came back from the LCL sea and wanted to be a mailman? Or he felt willing enough to do it? Willing to deliver threats like they were nothing? Dangerous packages and contaminated letters like they were no big deal?
People should be more appreciative of their mailmen, I think. There are so many tough, unglamorous jobs like that, jobs that simply need to be done. The world wouldn't go forward without people to deliver mail and packages. It wouldn't go forward without someone like me to cook food now and again, as I did that evening, despite the sling on my arm. It's a challenge to get water boiling, to boil noodles, or to cut mushrooms with just one good hand, but I did what I could. Because people carry mail or cook food for others, it frees everyone else to fight wars, make art and music, or do science.
Asuka was a great example of that.
She came home around eight that night. She kicked off her shoes and thrust her hands into the pockets of her labcoat. She took one look at me, and she said,
"What the hell? That's just a graze?"
I pulled on my sling. "It's basically a graze, yeah."
"Says you! Get away from that counter. I'm taking care of this."
"So, you want to take care of me? Or do you want to enjoy your dinner?"
She folded her arms and glared, but she relented. "Fine. But if there's anything that takes two hands, I'm helping."
With Asuka's help carrying the soup pot and chopping mushrooms, making dinner went a lot faster, and once Asuka was over the shock of my injury, she settled down enough to tell me about her day.
"Oh, it was awful. Damn undergrad contaminated a trial, so we had to do everything over. I would've been home an hour ago if not for that. Guy's gotta get his head on straight. His own dad died from heart failure; you'd think that'd give a guy motivation!"
At that time, Asuka worked on growing synthetic organs and limbs from an LCL base. As the stuff of primordial life itself, the LCL in the ocean could be harvested and "coerced" into shapes and forms people needed. Apparently this coercion took some combination of electric shocks and threaded scaffolds to make the organs take shape, or something. I was never real clear on the details, but it was impressive work—work people needed to see done.
"Don't be too hard on him," I told her. "People make mistakes sometimes."
Asuka put her soup spoon down and dabbed at her lip. "Mistakes are costly. Some people go off by themselves all alone, even when they get a kilo of hate mail every day. That could've been a very costly mistake." Her eyes snapped up to mine, and she said, "You need to get some protection. Or stay home."
"Protection would draw attention. And I won't stay home and do nothing."
"You don't get to have it both ways. If you do something that matters, people are going to notice you."
"Not if they don't know I'm there."
Asuka made a face at that, like I'd just started speaking Arabic, but her cell phone rang, interrupting us. She grumbled to herself in German and answered.
"Yeah? What? No, we tried the concentration at 0.35 for this batch. What? Okay, let me look."
Phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, Asuka climbed up from the dinner table and trotted into the bedroom. She came back with a laptop under her arm and set it up on a spare cushion.
"Hm, we could increase the thread density and worry about how to remove them later? No, let me pull those up. That was maybe three months ago? I don't remember what we saw then, but I should have it written down here somewhere…."
That conversation went on for over half an hour. Asuka worked on her soup now and then, but she she still had about a third of her bowl left when I washed my bowl out. I left her at the dinner table as she chatted with her colleague over charts and graphs. The work of advancing science doesn't rest when you get home to eat, you see.
Like Asuka, I tried to stay busy, too. I retired to the study and opened the red sack of mail. I had a special set of stationery for responding to these letters, though it wasn't very fancy: just my name in the letterhead, really. The first few letters weren't anything unusual: "My husband had been depressed lately. Do you think Lilith has forsaken us? Why does she let us endure all this suffering, after she promised us salvation here?" Stuff like that.
I'd never been a student of religious theory, and I didn't remember Ayanami promising us anything like salvation in this world, but letters like that weren't so bad. I could say, "We only thought it would be better in this world, to talk to people and meet them, even if they might hurt us, too." That any of us came back at all—that was a decision made by people, and people can be wrong, after all. That doesn't mean the decision was made in bad faith.
That was one of the easier ones. Letters like, "You were wrong, Ikari! You were naive and ignorant! Why would you lead people back into a world of starvation, disease, and death? A world where people can't even find relief on a beach without smelling of blood? What were you thinking?"
I put that letter aside, on a stack of a dozen others, and went on as best I could. Yes, it's hard to deal with letters like that, but at least they're individual people giving their honest thoughts. I couldn't say that about a lot of other people: the vultures who constantly rang our phone off the hook, for instance.
That's not to say the calls didn't bother Asuka and me; we'd put in a switch to disable the ringer if we needed to, and we had a caller ID system installed, too. Right then, all incoming calls to the apartment just lit up a red light on the phone base, and the incoming call number showed in black against a lit background.
And when one of those numbers called, I let the red light blink away until it fizzled out. What happened to us wasn't any of their business. No, what happened to me wasn't any of their business. Asuka was a scientist. She worked for the greater good of humanity. Me? I was a private citizen, nothing more. Unless one of them wanted to talk to me about security near soup kitchens, what happened to me shouldn't have mattered to anyone.
I went back to my letters:
"Ikari, you may not remember, but this isn't the first time I've written to you. I enjoyed your letter from before, but it amazes me that I heard from you at all. What's happened to you? What have you been doing? Everyone says you're a shut-in now, and I don't understand why you'd do that. You helped show everyone we'd lose something if we stayed in the sea. Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?"
I mean, on the face of it, it wasn't true. I still saw people from time to time. I saw Asuka almost every day. I worked in the soup kitchen and had good relations with the other staff there. I knew over a dozen of the kitchen's patrons by sight. I'd heard about where they lived, their past histories, and their future dreams. I met people. I was meeting people. And I had never objected to meeting people—not most people, anyway.
It was the people who'd call my home phone at all hours of the day or night, who'd flash the red light there even when it was dark—all because we couldn't stand to leave the ringer on and hear them wailing at us—those were the people I'd shut out of my life, and there were a lot of them.
But when I put that letter aside, I put my pen down and slid my stationery away, too. The red light on the phone base blinked incessantly, and I snatched up the handset to snuff it out.
"Yes, who is it?" I snapped.
"Hm?" said the man on the other end. "Oh, wow, uh, good evening. Is this Ikari?"
"Speaking."
"Ah, yes, this is Itsuki Miyamoto from—"
I glanced at the number on the caller ID. "From Yomiuri News."
"Yes, yes. I, uh, I wasn't expecting to reach you…."
"What do you want?"
"Well, as you can imagine, there's wild speculation and rumor surrounding the attempt on your life."
"And?"
"…ah, well, I would go over the details of the attack with you? The police report is rather sparse."
"A man entered the kitchen with a revolver. He tried to shoot me, but he only shot once before the gun misfired. That's all."
"That's all? Really? What about the lack of bullets? What about the five-eyed tattoo on the man's neck?"
A chill ran down my spine, and I brought the handset closer to my mouth.
"What do you know about that?" I said.
"It's from the new Seele, Ikari. Haven't you heard what they're up to?"
I balled my hand into a fist. "What those people choose to do with their lives is no concern of mine."
"Until they shoot at you. That makes them a threat, doesn't it?"
I drummed my fingers on the handset. "I don't have anything else to say. Leave us alone. Goodbye."
"Wait, WAIT! Just one more thing, and that's all. Please understand; my boss would have my ass if I didn't get at least one more thing out of you. One question, and that's it. I promise."
I straightened out the last letter on my desk. "One question."
"You've got dozens of people—not just in my paper but in every newspaper in the country—hanging on your every word. You could use that to speak out against militaristic buildup, or to push for better social services for the poor and hungry. You could condemn Seele publicly, but you do nothing. So, I must ask you: why do you stay silent?"
I hissed, forcing air through my clenched teeth. "I never asked anyone to follow me," I said curtly. "I made a decision for myself. Don't look to me for answers; I don't have any, so just leave me alone, all right?"
"Maybe you're right about that, but right or wrong, Ikari, people aren't going to leave you alone just because you ask them nicely."
No, people were too stubborn, too insistent for that. And for that matter, they wouldn't refrain from shooting you just because you told them what you thought they wanted to hear.
"Hello?" said the reporter. "Are you still there?"
I jerked in my seat. "Um, yes, I'm still here."
"Okay. Well, thank you for your time."
"No, wait."
"What?" A pause. "What is it?"
"I might have more to say to you," I said, glancing at the unlit red light on the phone base, "if you can give me some information in return."
"I'm listening."
"What do you know about Seele these days?"
"That depends, Ikari. Are you telling me it was a tattoo of a triangle and eyes on the shooter's neck?"
I smiled to myself, and for the first time that whole conversation, I sat back in my chair.
You see, people did more than just get back to their lives after Instrumentality. They moved forward. They dedicated themselves to building the future they wanted to see, however beautiful or horrific it was.
Seele was like that. For the next week or so, I let the hate mail pile up on my desk as I looked into Seele. They were organized, I found, and very good at propaganda. They had their own website dedicated to putting out their twisted views. "Mankind will destroy itself without Instrumentality!" That's what they said, in blinking red text that scrolled across the page. As secretive as they were, I guess they didn't believe in subtlety.
They wanted to get their message across to the world, too. They recorded a broadcast each week to their followers, in English, German, Japanese, and French. "Fear not, brothers and sisters, for though Adam and Lilith have failed us, there is still salvation to be found, and it is coming—soon."
The promise of that "salvation" inspired Seele to go to war—and they interpreted the actions of legitimate governments as preparations for that coming battle, too. Now, you should be skeptical of evidence that comes from terrorists. Photos of armies on exercises, or warplanes being built, don't really tell you anything. Countries do that all the time anyway, and they would do it just to protect themselves from each other than to defend against some Fourth Impact Revolution.
Still, I asked some people I knew to check the evidence and look on their own for information, which turned up a few leads. For instance, the Defense Agency had requested significant sums of money for various projects—mostly in the name of "emergency preparedness." I thought that was vague enough to investigate, though I hadn't thought much would come of it.
Until I got a phone call from an old friend.
"Hey, Shinji, did you ask Kensuke to do some snoopin' about some SDF money?"
Toji Suzuhara, an old friend and fellow Eva pilot, called me up on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, as I'd been listening to another Seele broadcast. I put my headphones aside and pressed the phone handset closer to my ear. I lowered my voice and said, "Yes, why?"
"I just got a call from his dad a little while ago; PSB just barged in and snatched him up! With no warning! What the hell did you get him involved in?"
That's what I wanted to know!
I made a few calls and found out that my friend and contact—Kensuke Aida—had been taken to Metro Police headquarters in National Square for questioning. I showed up there and spoke with some of the officers in charge, trying to get Kensuke off the hook, but the officer in charge was adamant:
"Look, Ikari, you really shouldn't say anything more to me," said the inspector. "Your friend is in possession of classified material. The PSB's duty to investigate this is paramount. I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do here."
"Not even for me?"
In came Misato, who gave the inspector a polite bow while I stared dumbstruck.
"I'm sorry, General," said the inspector, "but if you think SDF can intrude on a police matter, you're quite mistaken."
"Haven't you heard?" said Misato, showing him an award-winning smile. "SDF is an extension of the police. You and I are the same."
The inspector chuckled politely. "I doubt that."
"Oh? Well, maybe this will change your mind." Misato handed over an envelope. The inspector furrowed his brow as he pored over each line in the memo.
"You can't be serious!" he said. "You can't do this!"
"I think you'll find that letter has the PM's signature on it, yes? That means I can do anything. If it said I could put you and your officers on vacation, I could do it. If it said I could turn the fountain outside into a swimming pool, I could do it. If it said I could requisition some pizza and beer for staff productivity, I could damn well do it." Misato snapped her fingers and frowned. "Damn. Why didn't I ask him for that?"
The inspector balled up the letter and hurled it into a trashcan, shaking his head. He conferred with one of his officers, and Kensuke was shown the way out from an interrogation room.
"Hey! About time you showed up! I thought they were gonna waterboard me!"
He pulled on his collar, adjusting his plaid red tie. One of the officers handed Kensuke's black blazer back to him, and Kensuke carried it over his shoulder as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.
"Don't be silly," said Misato. "We have much more effective methods than that."
Kensuke paled, laughing stiffly. "Uh…huh?"
"Don't do it again, and don't look into these matters any further, Aida." Misato winked. "That's an order, okay?"
Kensuke stiffened, standing straight and tall. "Yes, ma'am!"
"Good! Now, do you need a ride home?"
"Ah, no, I'll catch the train. It's not a big deal." Kensuke turned to me. "Shinji—first time I've seen you in months, and you get me involved in some military conspiracy! What gives?"
I bowed in apology. "Sorry. I shouldn't have gotten you wrapped up in this."
"You kidding? Military Club's gonna go wild over this!"
Misato cleared her throat and raised both eyebrows.
"Or they would go wild over this," said Kensuke, slapping his forehead with a sigh. "Ah well. Thanks for calling in the cavalry to spring me."
I glanced at Misato, and she put on the smile of an innocent schoolgirl. Kensuke didn't notice, continuing on:
"Stay in touch a little more, okay? Toji and I are doing a weekly tournament at the arcade. You should drop by."
"I'll try to pop in," I said.
"Don't just promise; be there, yeah?"
Misato cleared her throat again. "Aida, maybe you want to get home before you worry your father?"
"Ah!" Kensuke checked his watch. "You're right. Thanks again!"
With that, he ran off, leaving Misato and me alone. We followed Kensuke outside, into the open air. It was only as we cleared the lobby doors and entered the sunlight that I spoke to Misato.
"How did you know?"
"I'm nothing if not well-connected. Working for the PM does that, after all."
"I'd understand that if you pulled it off after the fact, but I hadn't told anyone Kensuke was arrested. How did you find out so fast?"
"Why is it you're looking into SDF troop movements and Seele activities?"
I looked out, over the square in front of us. It was a large greenspace with criss-crossing sidewalks and a central fountain. The surrounding buildings had all the features of regal governance: metal domes, classical pillars, tall and narrow windows, and the like. This was National Square, the heart of the Japanese government. SDF officers milled about in uniform. Lawyers and politicians crossed the grounds in their suits, all working toward the efficient operation of the country.
It's easy to be cynical about politicians and the like, but I'd learned over the previous two years that most politicians believe in what they're doing. They have conviction that they need to win and gain power to steer the nation toward safety and prosperity. People like them don't like to sit idly by.
And neither did Misato.
"You don't just work for the PM, do you?" I asked.
Misato shook her head.
"Are we safe?" I went on. "Are we safe from them?"
"I'm working to make us all safe."
I stepped in front of her, trying to catch her eye. "What can you do? If an assassin corners you in a kitchen, what can you do? If a suicide bomber takes out a ship, what can you do?"
Misato folded her arms. "Seele's just a group of people. I'm not worried about what people do. We can handle them."
"So there's nothing to worry about? No cause for concern?"
"I didn't exactly say that." She smiled bitterly, and she touched my shoulder—the shoulder of mine that supported my sling. "Sorry. That's all I can tell you, right now."
" 'Sorry'?" I jolted away from her. I pulled on the strap of the sling and let go. It snapped back against my body. "Look at this: this is what they did to me, and all you can say is sorry? Come on. Tell me: why are they making a move now?"
"Why do you ask?"
I shuddered, gawking at her. Misato's stare pierced me like a blast of x-rays.
"Do I need to say it again?" she said. "Why do you want to know?"
"Be—because I deserve to know!" I sputtered.
"And if you'd regret finding out? What then?"
"I should be the one to decide that."
We stared at each other for a time, and Misato was first to break: she sighed, shaking her head, and headed down the steps into the square.
"Come on, then," she said.
Misato led me across the square, into a building I wasn't familiar with. SDF guards manned the lobby, but Misato flashed them an ID card and nodded at me, and the guards stood down. One of them even said,
"Nice to see you here, sir."
I gave a polite smile in return, and that was all.
We took an elevator down several floors to an underground train station. I call it a station, but it was much smaller than any public train or subway station, with only a handful of guards on duty and no passengers in sight. The traincar itself was a curved, glossy white vehicle, like something out of the future—too pristine and neat to be part of the real world.
"Are you coming?" Misato stood between the sliding doors, holding them open.
My mouth hung open. I glanced down both ends of the tunnel, but the lights beyond were dim and unhelpful.
I tugged at the sling on my shoulder. I swallowed, and I said,
"Yeah."
Misato stood aside and waved me inside, and I sat down with her. The train doors closed, and we sped down a tunnel of gray rock and fluorescent lights to parts unknown.
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1.3 Project Manoah
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
3. Project Manoah
The train arrived at another platform, identical to the first. The guards saluted when Misato walked out, and their eyes followed me as we entered the rest of the facility. Misato explained it used to be a bunker for the government. "Politicians spare no expense to make sure they'll survive," she quipped. But since learning of Seele's "salvation," SDF had converted the bunker into a base of operations.
We headed down a rocky tunnel, which let to buildings, of all things. They sat on springs, but they were buildings nonetheless: underground buildings, complete with fluorescent lighting, speckled ceiling tiles, and fake wood trim. If not for the occasional window that showed the rock tunnel, we could've been above ground for all I'd have known.
Misato led me to one of those false mahogany doors in particular. She took her ID in hand, but her hand hovered over the card reader.
"You know," she said, not facing me, "you can go back at any time."
"I know," I said.
Misato nodded, and she swiped her card in the reader. The lock clicked open, and Misato pushed the door inward, revealing…
An array of cubicles?
Misato went inside, and I scampered in as the door closed automatically behind me. I stared, open-mouthed, as I took in the sight around me: SDF officers manned the workstations, looking entirely too mundane as they chatted on headsets and moved windows around on their dual-monitor setups.
More exotic were the three large screens at the front of the room. They were lit by projectors in the back. The left screen had a map of the world with three stars on it: one in Germany, one in America, and one in Japan. The middle screen had some image I couldn't quite make out—a round object with a series of rings around it. The edges were irregular and pixellated, however.
Finally, the rightmost screen showed a graph of some kind: distance to earth in light-minutes versus time. The distance of what wasn't made clear.
"Well, it's about time!"
I jerked in surprise. A man in thick, black-rimmed glasses approached us with a clipboard—he was the former Lieutenant Hyuga with Nerv, and since then, it seemed he'd switched to GSDF, too.
"Nice to see you again, Shinji," he said, offering a hand. "We'll be glad to have any help you can give us."
I shook his hand weakly, laughing to myself. Misato caught Hyuga's gaze and shook her head.
"Sorry, I guess I misunderstood," said Hyuga, wincing. "General—should I give you these some other time?"
"No, that's all right. I'd like to review everything as soon as I'm done giving the grand tour. Anything I should know about in particular?"
The two of them went over some information I didn't completely understand—at least, not at the time. There were new measurements from the National Observatory that Hyuga wanted to go over. Some object they'd been monitoring was only two hundred light-minutes away. Misato and Hyuga discussed the issue while studying a graph on one of the projector screens. The curve on that graph had been steeper at one point. It was leveling off, but it still made an inexorable mark toward zero.
While they were talking, I looked more closely over the room. There was something primitive and minimalistic about it The sloped ceiling gave it a claustrophobic feel, and the grid of cubicles—each with a nameplate reading Telemetry or Liaison—seemed remarkably low-tech compared to what I was used to.
Misato must've caught me looking around, for she leaned over my shoulder, saying, "Not really that much to see, is there? Well, let's get to something exciting, hm?" She nodded to Hyuga. "We're going downstairs."
Misato led me from the control room out another door. We went down a few hallways to an open elevator—one with an empty, honeycomb wire lattice for walls. Beyond those walls lay a large chamber. An unusual warmth and humidity emanated from that chamber. It felt like standing a few meters from an open sauna door, or from a hot spring. That heat and humidity pushed against me like a surging tide—a tide with the smell of iron.
"What is it? Don't you want to see?" Misato flipped a switch on the elevator, holding the doors open.
"No, I—I don't need to see that."
"No? All right. Is there anything else you want to see, then?"
I shook my head.
"So, what do you plan to do now?" Misato folded her arms, and she leaned back against the metal railing that reinforced the elevator. "Do you regret knowing what you know now?"
I stared at the floor. "So what if I do? There's nothing I can do about it."
"That's not true. You could work here."
My head snapped up, and my hand clenched into a fist. "No! I won't! Not again!"
"That's fine. We don't need you to do that."
A small sound came out of my mouth, but it was nothing sensible. I stared at her, at a loss.
"We have candidates already," she explained. "They would benefit from your experience, your wisdom, your strength—if you're willing to offer it. You don't need to do anything now. You just need to show them who you are—or who you were."
"And who is that?"
"A hero, right?"
I shook my head. "That would be a lie. I'm not that. I was never that."
Misato raised an eyebrow at me, but she said nothing. She pushed off the railing of the elevator, flipped the switch on the controls, and stepped out, letting the elevator doors close. She took a heavy breath, watching me with steady eyes, and said,
"If you say so."
And with that, the tour was over. Misato took me back to the train, and we parted ways on the other side, back in town. Though I set foot on the platform, she stayed aboard the train, leaving me with these words:
"Seele's wrong about a lot of things. They're wrong about the way the world should be, or what humanity should do from here on. But they're not wrong about one thing."
"What's that?" I asked her.
"Something is coming. It's out there, and it's not going to turn around and go back the way it came. You can either do something about that or do your best to stay out of the way."
And with that, she left me. Misato had to make the future she wanted to see become reality, and if she didn't work for it, that reality would crumble around us soon.
Misato and Seele both set goals for themselves—goals meant to change the world.
And I?
The best goal I had was to get dinner started before Asuka came home.
I'm not sure if there's a place in the world for people like me—or like how I was, at that time. Either you help turn the present into the future, or you get left behind as you try to take refuge in the past. Looking at it that way, I guess there's always a place for people in some world—just not the world of what's yet to come.
Asuka wasn't like that. As soon as I told her what Misato was doing, she got on the phone with the general, looking for a job. "I have experience with this, Misato! Not just experience, but the technical expertise to be useful. Now, tell me: how did you guys manage to build another one, let alone three?"
Misato was vague on details—especially over the phone—but she invited Asuka for a meeting, and things moved along there quite quickly. I didn't pay attention to the exact details there. They'd get it all figured out on their own, and I had letters to respond to.
It turned out I had more time to respond to letters than I'd realized, too. A couple days later, I went back to the soup kitchen—the abandoned school—to work my usual shifts again. I went to change my shoes at the shoe lockers, but I found a note in mine:
Ikari, we've always valued your contribution to our cause here, but the staff are concerned that your presence constitutes a safety risk that we—
I balled up the note and chucked it aside. Sighing, I leaned back against the lockers, closed my eyes, and shut it all away.
I wandered the area around the school for a time. It was a hot and uncomfortable walk, as I wore a green, hooded sweatshirt to help hide my face. Sunglasses protected my eyes, and they gave the world around me an unrealistically vibrant hue. I hate that about sunglasses. Everything looks more real, more full of life, through those lenses. And then you take them off, and the real world is pale and withering in the sun. Grass that looked a healthy green is actually dying and losing color. Stuff like that. Sunglasses make the world look better than it really is.
I ripped those sunglasses off my face and forced that withered world into my eyes. I stomped my foot on the sidewalk, and it cracked just a little. The world was broken. Its people were broken. Their lives and their homes were full of ghosts.
And one of those ghosts—one of those faults or defects—stared back at me.
It took the form of a person. It stood at the end of the middle school access road, and it watched me. It dressed in all white; its robes shined with the gloss of satin. The thing stared at me without eyes, for its hood covered its face—all the way to its nose.
I did a double-take when I ran into that thing. I glanced back down the other end of the road, but no one else was around.
And when I looked back at it, the hooded stranger was gone.
I stayed home for the rest of the week. I still had a backlog of letters to respond to, and it was a rule of mine that no letter should take more than a week to deal with—either to respond to, or to put aside.
Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?
I twirled a pen in my hand as I stared over that letter, but after a few minutes to think on it, I stood at my desk, twisted a bit funny to line up my sling over the paper, and wrote,
"No, I like being up here. I like seeing all the lights in the city as they come on at night. I like knowing that people are recovering, a little bit at a time. People are doing just fine now, but don't worry. If the time comes that I need to be there, that I need to say something, I'll be there. That's a promise."
I stared at that for a moment before crumpling up the stationery and pulling out a new sheet.
But just as I put pen to paper, a voice called to me from the main room.
"Hey! Do you see what's going on outside?"
I trotted from the bedroom to meet Asuka. She stood at the sliding glass door that opened to our balcony. It was nighttime, and there was a steady, rhythmic clatter on the balcony.
"It's raining," I said.
"Is it?"
I stepped out on the balcony. It was raining. There was no question of that.
It was raining red splotches of viscous goo.
You know, I lied before when I said there's not much I regret. I regret a lot.
I regret being the boy who drifted aimlessly for two years.
I regret stuffing myself in that penthouse to look down on the world, as though I weren't a part of it. There's no place in the world for people who act like that yet expect the world to not pass them by. Those who try to make their own futures won't always succeed, but they have more control than someone like me, than anyone like who I was at that time.
I won't say I was ready to start swimming against that inexorable current of the future others make.
But, as the bloody rain came down on Tokyo-2, I put on my green hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. I packed a backpack with crackers and bottles of water.
And I took with me a sheathed kitchen knife, to help steer the current in my favor.
The train arrived at another platform, identical to the first. The guards saluted when Misato walked out, and their eyes followed me as we entered the rest of the facility. Misato explained it used to be a bunker for the government. "Politicians spare no expense to make sure they'll survive," she quipped. But since learning of Seele's "salvation," SDF had converted the bunker into a base of operations.
We headed down a rocky tunnel, which let to buildings, of all things. They sat on springs, but they were buildings nonetheless: underground buildings, complete with fluorescent lighting, speckled ceiling tiles, and fake wood trim. If not for the occasional window that showed the rock tunnel, we could've been above ground for all I'd have known.
Misato led me to one of those false mahogany doors in particular. She took her ID in hand, but her hand hovered over the card reader.
"You know," she said, not facing me, "you can go back at any time."
"I know," I said.
Misato nodded, and she swiped her card in the reader. The lock clicked open, and Misato pushed the door inward, revealing…
An array of cubicles?
Misato went inside, and I scampered in as the door closed automatically behind me. I stared, open-mouthed, as I took in the sight around me: SDF officers manned the workstations, looking entirely too mundane as they chatted on headsets and moved windows around on their dual-monitor setups.
More exotic were the three large screens at the front of the room. They were lit by projectors in the back. The left screen had a map of the world with three stars on it: one in Germany, one in America, and one in Japan. The middle screen had some image I couldn't quite make out—a round object with a series of rings around it. The edges were irregular and pixellated, however.
Finally, the rightmost screen showed a graph of some kind: distance to earth in light-minutes versus time. The distance of what wasn't made clear.
"Well, it's about time!"
I jerked in surprise. A man in thick, black-rimmed glasses approached us with a clipboard—he was the former Lieutenant Hyuga with Nerv, and since then, it seemed he'd switched to GSDF, too.
"Nice to see you again, Shinji," he said, offering a hand. "We'll be glad to have any help you can give us."
I shook his hand weakly, laughing to myself. Misato caught Hyuga's gaze and shook her head.
"Sorry, I guess I misunderstood," said Hyuga, wincing. "General—should I give you these some other time?"
"No, that's all right. I'd like to review everything as soon as I'm done giving the grand tour. Anything I should know about in particular?"
The two of them went over some information I didn't completely understand—at least, not at the time. There were new measurements from the National Observatory that Hyuga wanted to go over. Some object they'd been monitoring was only two hundred light-minutes away. Misato and Hyuga discussed the issue while studying a graph on one of the projector screens. The curve on that graph had been steeper at one point. It was leveling off, but it still made an inexorable mark toward zero.
While they were talking, I looked more closely over the room. There was something primitive and minimalistic about it The sloped ceiling gave it a claustrophobic feel, and the grid of cubicles—each with a nameplate reading Telemetry or Liaison—seemed remarkably low-tech compared to what I was used to.
Misato must've caught me looking around, for she leaned over my shoulder, saying, "Not really that much to see, is there? Well, let's get to something exciting, hm?" She nodded to Hyuga. "We're going downstairs."
Misato led me from the control room out another door. We went down a few hallways to an open elevator—one with an empty, honeycomb wire lattice for walls. Beyond those walls lay a large chamber. An unusual warmth and humidity emanated from that chamber. It felt like standing a few meters from an open sauna door, or from a hot spring. That heat and humidity pushed against me like a surging tide—a tide with the smell of iron.
"What is it? Don't you want to see?" Misato flipped a switch on the elevator, holding the doors open.
"No, I—I don't need to see that."
"No? All right. Is there anything else you want to see, then?"
I shook my head.
"So, what do you plan to do now?" Misato folded her arms, and she leaned back against the metal railing that reinforced the elevator. "Do you regret knowing what you know now?"
I stared at the floor. "So what if I do? There's nothing I can do about it."
"That's not true. You could work here."
My head snapped up, and my hand clenched into a fist. "No! I won't! Not again!"
"That's fine. We don't need you to do that."
A small sound came out of my mouth, but it was nothing sensible. I stared at her, at a loss.
"We have candidates already," she explained. "They would benefit from your experience, your wisdom, your strength—if you're willing to offer it. You don't need to do anything now. You just need to show them who you are—or who you were."
"And who is that?"
"A hero, right?"
I shook my head. "That would be a lie. I'm not that. I was never that."
Misato raised an eyebrow at me, but she said nothing. She pushed off the railing of the elevator, flipped the switch on the controls, and stepped out, letting the elevator doors close. She took a heavy breath, watching me with steady eyes, and said,
"If you say so."
And with that, the tour was over. Misato took me back to the train, and we parted ways on the other side, back in town. Though I set foot on the platform, she stayed aboard the train, leaving me with these words:
"Seele's wrong about a lot of things. They're wrong about the way the world should be, or what humanity should do from here on. But they're not wrong about one thing."
"What's that?" I asked her.
"Something is coming. It's out there, and it's not going to turn around and go back the way it came. You can either do something about that or do your best to stay out of the way."
And with that, she left me. Misato had to make the future she wanted to see become reality, and if she didn't work for it, that reality would crumble around us soon.
Misato and Seele both set goals for themselves—goals meant to change the world.
And I?
The best goal I had was to get dinner started before Asuka came home.
I'm not sure if there's a place in the world for people like me—or like how I was, at that time. Either you help turn the present into the future, or you get left behind as you try to take refuge in the past. Looking at it that way, I guess there's always a place for people in some world—just not the world of what's yet to come.
Asuka wasn't like that. As soon as I told her what Misato was doing, she got on the phone with the general, looking for a job. "I have experience with this, Misato! Not just experience, but the technical expertise to be useful. Now, tell me: how did you guys manage to build another one, let alone three?"
Misato was vague on details—especially over the phone—but she invited Asuka for a meeting, and things moved along there quite quickly. I didn't pay attention to the exact details there. They'd get it all figured out on their own, and I had letters to respond to.
It turned out I had more time to respond to letters than I'd realized, too. A couple days later, I went back to the soup kitchen—the abandoned school—to work my usual shifts again. I went to change my shoes at the shoe lockers, but I found a note in mine:
Ikari, we've always valued your contribution to our cause here, but the staff are concerned that your presence constitutes a safety risk that we—
I balled up the note and chucked it aside. Sighing, I leaned back against the lockers, closed my eyes, and shut it all away.
I wandered the area around the school for a time. It was a hot and uncomfortable walk, as I wore a green, hooded sweatshirt to help hide my face. Sunglasses protected my eyes, and they gave the world around me an unrealistically vibrant hue. I hate that about sunglasses. Everything looks more real, more full of life, through those lenses. And then you take them off, and the real world is pale and withering in the sun. Grass that looked a healthy green is actually dying and losing color. Stuff like that. Sunglasses make the world look better than it really is.
I ripped those sunglasses off my face and forced that withered world into my eyes. I stomped my foot on the sidewalk, and it cracked just a little. The world was broken. Its people were broken. Their lives and their homes were full of ghosts.
And one of those ghosts—one of those faults or defects—stared back at me.
It took the form of a person. It stood at the end of the middle school access road, and it watched me. It dressed in all white; its robes shined with the gloss of satin. The thing stared at me without eyes, for its hood covered its face—all the way to its nose.
I did a double-take when I ran into that thing. I glanced back down the other end of the road, but no one else was around.
And when I looked back at it, the hooded stranger was gone.
I stayed home for the rest of the week. I still had a backlog of letters to respond to, and it was a rule of mine that no letter should take more than a week to deal with—either to respond to, or to put aside.
Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?
I twirled a pen in my hand as I stared over that letter, but after a few minutes to think on it, I stood at my desk, twisted a bit funny to line up my sling over the paper, and wrote,
"No, I like being up here. I like seeing all the lights in the city as they come on at night. I like knowing that people are recovering, a little bit at a time. People are doing just fine now, but don't worry. If the time comes that I need to be there, that I need to say something, I'll be there. That's a promise."
I stared at that for a moment before crumpling up the stationery and pulling out a new sheet.
But just as I put pen to paper, a voice called to me from the main room.
"Hey! Do you see what's going on outside?"
I trotted from the bedroom to meet Asuka. She stood at the sliding glass door that opened to our balcony. It was nighttime, and there was a steady, rhythmic clatter on the balcony.
"It's raining," I said.
"Is it?"
I stepped out on the balcony. It was raining. There was no question of that.
It was raining red splotches of viscous goo.
You know, I lied before when I said there's not much I regret. I regret a lot.
I regret being the boy who drifted aimlessly for two years.
I regret stuffing myself in that penthouse to look down on the world, as though I weren't a part of it. There's no place in the world for people who act like that yet expect the world to not pass them by. Those who try to make their own futures won't always succeed, but they have more control than someone like me, than anyone like who I was at that time.
I won't say I was ready to start swimming against that inexorable current of the future others make.
But, as the bloody rain came down on Tokyo-2, I put on my green hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. I packed a backpack with crackers and bottles of water.
And I took with me a sheathed kitchen knife, to help steer the current in my favor.
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1.4 Blood Rain
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
4. Blood Rain
Looking back, I realize now that Second and Third Impact left a great scar on us—on Japan, and on humanity as a whole. I don't mean just the people who died and left us—though that affected us, too. I mean how prepared we were for disasters, how we'd come to expect them to happen—maybe not in our minds, but in our hearts.
I saw it that night, as the bloody rain fell outside. Asuka and I headed down to the basement utility plant, and there, we found our neighbors taking refuge. Residents camped out under pipes or near water boilers. They filled every nook and cranny, sitting with backpacks or luggage full of the essentials—crackers, water bottles, and the like. A network of lanterns lit the maze-like room, casting the whole floor in an artificial white glow. One of the residents had set up a radio for updates and news, not that it was very helpful:
"Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates to this notice will be issued every quarter-hour. Repeat: this is a precautionary safety notice. Do not be alarmed; this is only a precaution. Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates will be issued every quarter-hour—"
You get the idea. The reactions to this message were about as you'd expect, too:
"Precautionary for what?" said a teenaged boy by the radio. "What's so dangerous that they can't even tell us what's happening?"
"I'm sure the government would tell us what's going on if it made sense to do so," said the boy's mother.
"The same government that lied to us about the Angel attacks?"
"No, no, it's a different government now."
We were prepared for disasters, but that didn't mean we accepted them. There's an undeniable weight to it, the resignation that your fate is out of your control and that the best you can do is cope. Some of the residents set up games to pass the time—I spotted a group of four at mahjong and another pair halfway through a game of go. Others read books or comics by the poor light of flashlights or lanterns. What else could we do?
Asuka and I settled into a damp spot under some leaking pipes—I'm sure that had nothing to do with why that spot was open—and sat down with the rest of our neighbors to watch, listen, and wait.
Or at least, that's what I did. Asuka had other ideas. She propped up a writing pad on her knees and wedged a flashlight between some pipes to keep light on the pad as she wrote. I peered over to look at one point, but all I could make out was a mix of German and mathematics—an incomprehensible combination if I'd ever seen one.
"It's simple," said Asuka. "If it rains about one centimeter of LCL in total, as measured by a rain gauge, then all you need to know is the total area being rained on to estimate the volume of the Angel, give or take an order of magnitude."
"And how big is that?" I asked.
"What?"
"How big is the Angel, then?"
Asuka frowned, and she twirled a pencil between her fingers. "Well, if you say Japan is 3000 kilometers by 1500 kilometers, we're talking about something maybe 5 kilometers in diameter?" Asuka pursed her lips, and she put an eraser to the piece of paper. "No, that can't be. Must be off by an order of magnitude somewhere…"
But at least she tried. Even in captivity like this, Asuka was trying to figure out something about our situation. The most I could do was watch and listen. I watched her jot down estimates of rain gauges and city areas. I listened to our neighbors talk about petty, meaningless things—like who had died recently in a daytime drama, or which of their neighbors set off the smoke alarm that week.
"It was the Tendo family for sure." One of the residents near us talked with her family in a low voice. "No sense of urgency with them. Have you seen seen them down here yet?"
Asuka took notice of that. She put her pencil down and got up, approaching the other family. Honestly, that was so impolite of her, and she was always like that. Maybe that's what people do in Germany, or in the West, but if you do stuff like that here, people are going to be annoyed with you.
Then again, Asuka was never one to care much about that. If there was something she wanted to know, she'd ask about it, and she did there. She went up to the other family next to us and said,
"Someone you know hasn't come down yet?"
Our neighbors took one look at her and exchanged a few glances. Even in the dim light, Asuka's bright red hair was hard to miss. Still, the mother said, "I'm sure they're on their way down soon. I'm sorry if we were too loud."
Asuka shrugged. "You weren't, really. What was the name? Tendo? And what room are they in?"
The mother stiffened.
"I'm not asking your names or anything."
The mother and her children exchanged some glances, and at last, she said, "They're in 446."
"Great, thanks!" Asuka tucked her notepad under her arm and set off with a flashlight.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Looking for some people named Tendo. It sounds like they might not have taken the air raid siren seriously. Maybe because they don't really know what it's about, you know?"
"But, but, what am I supposed to do?"
"You could stay here, if you want? Would be easier that way. Watch our stuff, yeah?"
I frowned at that, and I handed Asuka's knapsack over to her as I put on my own backpack. Asuka smiled slyly as she slung the knapsack onto her back.
"You know, I like it when you get surly like this."
"I'll be more than surly if the Angel attacks while we're walking around, or if some pipes or ductwork fall on top of us in the chaos."
"Come on; the odds of that have to be a hundred million to one."
"Give or take an order of magnitude?"
"Shut up," she said with a dour expression, but at the same time, she pulled me by the shoulder, helping me squeeze through a narrow part channel between some pipes. "You know," she muttered, "I'm just going to ask some questions. If people knew what was coming, they wouldn't wait to get down here, right?"
I nodded.
"Are you okay with that?"
I scratched the back of my head and sighed. "With the sirens going off like that, who would stay in their own apartment right now anyway? Why do we have to be the ones to take care of this?"
"That's not an answer."
"I know."
Asuka rubbed my back, and she pulled on the hood of my sweatshirt. "Put this up," she said, "and put on your sunglasses. Nobody has to know. I'll do all the talking."
I nodded, and I hid behind a veil of green fabric and dark lenses, looking upon the dim world through a filter that was all the dimmer.
True to her word, Asuka did all the talking. She made a round through the whole utility plant, asking about the Tendo family. Did people know them? Did they know what they looked like? All that sort of thing.
Of course, the residents knew Asuka. The glimmer of realization lit up their eyes when they saw her, and even as I hid in a hood and sunglasses, I bet they knew who I was, too. But Asuka shrugged off their stares. "Do you know the Tendo, or not?" she asked one woman. "This isn't the time for staring. Spit it out!"
But no one in the utility plant had seen that family. Asuka and I even stood at the stair back to ground level for a while, inspecting every newcomer to the basement, but after fifteen minutes with no one else arriving, Asuka grew restless. If the family wasn't in the utility plant, they could still be on the way, and if the Angel attacked in that time…
"Maybe we should go take a look," she said, glancing up the stairwell to the ground floor.
"And if we don't find them?" I asked. "Then what?"
"Then we did all we could."
"Friends of theirs might not see it that way."
Asuka climbed the first step of the stair, not even looking to see if I'd follow. "Then they'd be wrong," she said.
That was Asuka all right—very black and white, very certain about things. Even to this day, I'm not sure if she actually thinks that way or, if instead, she just puts on a show of it to justify what she thinks is best. Either way, not everyone can do that, I think. Some people let their doubts get to them in situations like these, or worse—they make snap decisions on instinct instead, with lives hanging in the balance.
In any case, Asuka hiked upstairs without even ten seconds of hesitation, and I followed after her, holding on to my sunglasses as we went. We swept the stairs with our flashlights to see the way. It wasn't much of a climb to the fourth floor anyhow.
With darkness around us, our flashlights made the walls seem unnaturally white. They glowed and reflected light, drowning out the rest of the hallway in glare—at least until we angled our lights further down, at any rate. I learned quickly to shine the light on the carpet instead. The carpet was dark, so the light coming off it was gentler.
And as we walked on that carpet, dark fluid seeped from Asuka's shoe impressions.
"Asuka," I said.
She glanced over her shoulder. "What?"
"Look."
I shined my flashlight at Asuka's feet. Her white shoes were practically bleeding the stuff.
"God!" Asuka kicked some of the LCL off, splattering it on the walls. "Somebody think it was clever to track all this in?" She waved for me to follow. "Come on, Shinji. I'm not getting much more of this goo on me. Let's go!"
She ran down the hallway, and I jogged after her, flashing my light on the door numbers. 434, 436, 438…at last, 446. Asuka stopped dead in her tracks there, shining her flashlight on the doorknob.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
Asuka touched the doorknob with her pinky finger, and the door creaked open. She flicked her flashlight to the threshold, where a trail of LCL led from inside to the hallway carpet.
"We should go," I said. "There's nobody left inside. There can't be."
Asuka frowned, and the spot of her flashlight made small circles as she thought. "You sure about that?"
"Asuka…"
She crept inside, shining her flashlight at every corner or niche. I sighed, and I followed after her.
A wooden entryway led to the main room. Around the dinner table were three sets of plates and cushions. There were even some chopsticks and rice still left there. I shined my flashlight under the table, finding nothing but dust.
"Don't worry about that." Asuka waved her flashlight across the floor, casting light on a trail of amber droplets. They led through the main room, into the rear of the apartment. Asuka motioned to me to follow, and she took the lead. Each step she took was slow and careful—one foot in front of the other, from a three-quarters crouch.
We tracked the trail of LCL into a bedroom. A whipping wind poured in through a shattered window. It howled and roared, spitting drops of LCL onto the walls.
Despite the wind, the room felt damp and muggy. Humidity clung to my skin, and my nose went slick with sweat and oil.
Where was all that humidity coming from, you ask? The bed. It was dripping LCL onto the floor and soaked throughout. It was like someone had taken a two-liter bottle of the stuff and poured it all on the mattress. That's how sopping wet it was.
And sitting atop this dripping heap was a stuffed bear, with a white patch of fur tinted orange-yellow from the LCL.
Asuka trotted around the bed, checking beneath it. She slid the closet door open gently, flashing her light through a half-dozen plaid skirts and powder-blue blouses, but her search came up empty, save for a picture frame that she plucked from the dresser.
"Take a look," she said.
The frame was metallic, copper in color with engraved ridges. The subjects were a woman, a teenaged boy, and a younger girl, all posed with snow-capped mountains in the distance.
"It's pretty, isn't it?" said Asuka. "It'd be a shame if a family like that just disappeared, with no one ever knowing what happened to them."
I put the picture frame back on the dresser. "Let's hurry. It's drafty in here."
She put her hand up to her forehead in a faux salute. "Yes, Commander Ikari."
With a wink, Asuka headed back out to the hallway, following the trail of LCL to the washroom. Asuka's flashlight scanned over the sink and mirror, and the light reflected off a half-dozen hygienic tools that had been scattered over the floor: a nail file, a pair of nail clippers, a hair dryer, and so on. All of them shined with dried LCL splattered on top of them.
And further into the washroom, that LCL thickened into a quivering puddle. That puddle enveloped a pair of washroom slippers, a blue bathrobe, stained white socks…
"Shinji."
"What?"
Asuka shined her light on the door to the bath proper. It was a couple centimeters open, with trails of LCL running down its height.
"You want me to get it?" she asked.
I shook my head, and I drew the kitchen knife from my sweatshirt pocket. I shined my light on the gap, turning my body back and forth to move the flashlight in my sling-bound hand. I stuck the nail file into the gap, and with it, I forced the door open!
Revealing nothing but a half-full tub of water.
"Jesus Christ!" Asuka let out a heavy breath. "People should never leave their doors closed like that!"
"So people like us will know that there isn't a monster hiding behind it?"
"Yes, that! Exactly that!"
There was nothing else to find in that washroom, but I kept the knife out just in case.
We scoured the rest of the apartment over the next fifteen minutes, finding a pile of LCL-soaked clothes in the kitchen and another within the sheets of the sopping wet bed we'd seen earlier. Three piles of clothes—that accounted for everyone in the apartment. As for who or what had done this, Asuka had a few theories:
"Maybe it's not the Angel's work," she said as we were leaving. "Maybe those Seele wackos found a way to replicate what First did."
We entered the main stairwell again, and our voices echoed throughout the building.
"How would they do that?" I asked her.
"Beats me. But if there's an Angel here, and if Misato is able to build another Eva, it's not out of the realm of possibility."
I opened my mouth to speak, but a clunk-clunk-clunk sound reverberated through the stairwell from above.
Asuka turned her light upward. "Somebody's here," she whispered.
The heavy, almost metallic footseps remained steady. Asuka climbed up a flight, and her light scanned across something. She didn't catch it, but the glow cast the thing's shadow—a deformed, inhuman shadow.
"Asuka…"
The shadow's master jumped over a stairwell railing and dashed down the staircase above us.
I tugged on Asuka's sleeve. "Go?"
"Yeah, go!" she said, taking off. "Let's go!"
We raced down the stairs. Asuka slid on a railing but tumbled and slammed into a wall. Her flashlight clattered and blinked out, and we left it behind. The last I saw of it, the creature must've kicked it as it passed, for the light spun end over end as it fell down the stairwell shaft.
On the basement floor, Asuka slammed the stairwell door shut behind me.
"Hey, we need something to block the door!"
The residents looked back at us indifferently. No one even moved.
"I'm serious!" cried Asuka. "There's a thing coming; it—"
The doorknob turned; the creature reached the gap with its hand—a "hand" of long, needle-like fingers, arranged radially like a starfish. They gnashed together like an insect's jaws.
"Eugh!" Asuka threw her weight against the door, and I joined her, trying to shove the door shut. "We need some help here!" she yelled.
At last, some of our neighbors came to help. A man and a woman ran up and started pushing back on the door, too; we pinched the creature's arm inside the gap, and it gave off this incoherent shriek, too high in pitch for any of us to make sense of. The sound pierced us, and Asuka threw her shoulder against the door, so she could cover an ear with her hand. The door inched wider, and the creature's fingertips glowed with a rainbow light.
I turned the knife over in my left hand and stabbed!
"Go back where you came from!" I yelled, and I drove the knife into the fleshy part of the creature's arm. It shrieked, recoiling, and the arm retreated.
With that, a couple residents dragged a crate into place and sat on it, keeping the door closed.
For the moment, at least, for even as they sat there, the creature banged and pounded on the outside, and if you looked hard enough at the metal door, you might've seen a slight dent.
Looking back, I realize now that Second and Third Impact left a great scar on us—on Japan, and on humanity as a whole. I don't mean just the people who died and left us—though that affected us, too. I mean how prepared we were for disasters, how we'd come to expect them to happen—maybe not in our minds, but in our hearts.
I saw it that night, as the bloody rain fell outside. Asuka and I headed down to the basement utility plant, and there, we found our neighbors taking refuge. Residents camped out under pipes or near water boilers. They filled every nook and cranny, sitting with backpacks or luggage full of the essentials—crackers, water bottles, and the like. A network of lanterns lit the maze-like room, casting the whole floor in an artificial white glow. One of the residents had set up a radio for updates and news, not that it was very helpful:
"Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates to this notice will be issued every quarter-hour. Repeat: this is a precautionary safety notice. Do not be alarmed; this is only a precaution. Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates will be issued every quarter-hour—"
You get the idea. The reactions to this message were about as you'd expect, too:
"Precautionary for what?" said a teenaged boy by the radio. "What's so dangerous that they can't even tell us what's happening?"
"I'm sure the government would tell us what's going on if it made sense to do so," said the boy's mother.
"The same government that lied to us about the Angel attacks?"
"No, no, it's a different government now."
We were prepared for disasters, but that didn't mean we accepted them. There's an undeniable weight to it, the resignation that your fate is out of your control and that the best you can do is cope. Some of the residents set up games to pass the time—I spotted a group of four at mahjong and another pair halfway through a game of go. Others read books or comics by the poor light of flashlights or lanterns. What else could we do?
Asuka and I settled into a damp spot under some leaking pipes—I'm sure that had nothing to do with why that spot was open—and sat down with the rest of our neighbors to watch, listen, and wait.
Or at least, that's what I did. Asuka had other ideas. She propped up a writing pad on her knees and wedged a flashlight between some pipes to keep light on the pad as she wrote. I peered over to look at one point, but all I could make out was a mix of German and mathematics—an incomprehensible combination if I'd ever seen one.
"It's simple," said Asuka. "If it rains about one centimeter of LCL in total, as measured by a rain gauge, then all you need to know is the total area being rained on to estimate the volume of the Angel, give or take an order of magnitude."
"And how big is that?" I asked.
"What?"
"How big is the Angel, then?"
Asuka frowned, and she twirled a pencil between her fingers. "Well, if you say Japan is 3000 kilometers by 1500 kilometers, we're talking about something maybe 5 kilometers in diameter?" Asuka pursed her lips, and she put an eraser to the piece of paper. "No, that can't be. Must be off by an order of magnitude somewhere…"
But at least she tried. Even in captivity like this, Asuka was trying to figure out something about our situation. The most I could do was watch and listen. I watched her jot down estimates of rain gauges and city areas. I listened to our neighbors talk about petty, meaningless things—like who had died recently in a daytime drama, or which of their neighbors set off the smoke alarm that week.
"It was the Tendo family for sure." One of the residents near us talked with her family in a low voice. "No sense of urgency with them. Have you seen seen them down here yet?"
Asuka took notice of that. She put her pencil down and got up, approaching the other family. Honestly, that was so impolite of her, and she was always like that. Maybe that's what people do in Germany, or in the West, but if you do stuff like that here, people are going to be annoyed with you.
Then again, Asuka was never one to care much about that. If there was something she wanted to know, she'd ask about it, and she did there. She went up to the other family next to us and said,
"Someone you know hasn't come down yet?"
Our neighbors took one look at her and exchanged a few glances. Even in the dim light, Asuka's bright red hair was hard to miss. Still, the mother said, "I'm sure they're on their way down soon. I'm sorry if we were too loud."
Asuka shrugged. "You weren't, really. What was the name? Tendo? And what room are they in?"
The mother stiffened.
"I'm not asking your names or anything."
The mother and her children exchanged some glances, and at last, she said, "They're in 446."
"Great, thanks!" Asuka tucked her notepad under her arm and set off with a flashlight.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Looking for some people named Tendo. It sounds like they might not have taken the air raid siren seriously. Maybe because they don't really know what it's about, you know?"
"But, but, what am I supposed to do?"
"You could stay here, if you want? Would be easier that way. Watch our stuff, yeah?"
I frowned at that, and I handed Asuka's knapsack over to her as I put on my own backpack. Asuka smiled slyly as she slung the knapsack onto her back.
"You know, I like it when you get surly like this."
"I'll be more than surly if the Angel attacks while we're walking around, or if some pipes or ductwork fall on top of us in the chaos."
"Come on; the odds of that have to be a hundred million to one."
"Give or take an order of magnitude?"
"Shut up," she said with a dour expression, but at the same time, she pulled me by the shoulder, helping me squeeze through a narrow part channel between some pipes. "You know," she muttered, "I'm just going to ask some questions. If people knew what was coming, they wouldn't wait to get down here, right?"
I nodded.
"Are you okay with that?"
I scratched the back of my head and sighed. "With the sirens going off like that, who would stay in their own apartment right now anyway? Why do we have to be the ones to take care of this?"
"That's not an answer."
"I know."
Asuka rubbed my back, and she pulled on the hood of my sweatshirt. "Put this up," she said, "and put on your sunglasses. Nobody has to know. I'll do all the talking."
I nodded, and I hid behind a veil of green fabric and dark lenses, looking upon the dim world through a filter that was all the dimmer.
True to her word, Asuka did all the talking. She made a round through the whole utility plant, asking about the Tendo family. Did people know them? Did they know what they looked like? All that sort of thing.
Of course, the residents knew Asuka. The glimmer of realization lit up their eyes when they saw her, and even as I hid in a hood and sunglasses, I bet they knew who I was, too. But Asuka shrugged off their stares. "Do you know the Tendo, or not?" she asked one woman. "This isn't the time for staring. Spit it out!"
But no one in the utility plant had seen that family. Asuka and I even stood at the stair back to ground level for a while, inspecting every newcomer to the basement, but after fifteen minutes with no one else arriving, Asuka grew restless. If the family wasn't in the utility plant, they could still be on the way, and if the Angel attacked in that time…
"Maybe we should go take a look," she said, glancing up the stairwell to the ground floor.
"And if we don't find them?" I asked. "Then what?"
"Then we did all we could."
"Friends of theirs might not see it that way."
Asuka climbed the first step of the stair, not even looking to see if I'd follow. "Then they'd be wrong," she said.
That was Asuka all right—very black and white, very certain about things. Even to this day, I'm not sure if she actually thinks that way or, if instead, she just puts on a show of it to justify what she thinks is best. Either way, not everyone can do that, I think. Some people let their doubts get to them in situations like these, or worse—they make snap decisions on instinct instead, with lives hanging in the balance.
In any case, Asuka hiked upstairs without even ten seconds of hesitation, and I followed after her, holding on to my sunglasses as we went. We swept the stairs with our flashlights to see the way. It wasn't much of a climb to the fourth floor anyhow.
With darkness around us, our flashlights made the walls seem unnaturally white. They glowed and reflected light, drowning out the rest of the hallway in glare—at least until we angled our lights further down, at any rate. I learned quickly to shine the light on the carpet instead. The carpet was dark, so the light coming off it was gentler.
And as we walked on that carpet, dark fluid seeped from Asuka's shoe impressions.
"Asuka," I said.
She glanced over her shoulder. "What?"
"Look."
I shined my flashlight at Asuka's feet. Her white shoes were practically bleeding the stuff.
"God!" Asuka kicked some of the LCL off, splattering it on the walls. "Somebody think it was clever to track all this in?" She waved for me to follow. "Come on, Shinji. I'm not getting much more of this goo on me. Let's go!"
She ran down the hallway, and I jogged after her, flashing my light on the door numbers. 434, 436, 438…at last, 446. Asuka stopped dead in her tracks there, shining her flashlight on the doorknob.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
Asuka touched the doorknob with her pinky finger, and the door creaked open. She flicked her flashlight to the threshold, where a trail of LCL led from inside to the hallway carpet.
"We should go," I said. "There's nobody left inside. There can't be."
Asuka frowned, and the spot of her flashlight made small circles as she thought. "You sure about that?"
"Asuka…"
She crept inside, shining her flashlight at every corner or niche. I sighed, and I followed after her.
A wooden entryway led to the main room. Around the dinner table were three sets of plates and cushions. There were even some chopsticks and rice still left there. I shined my flashlight under the table, finding nothing but dust.
"Don't worry about that." Asuka waved her flashlight across the floor, casting light on a trail of amber droplets. They led through the main room, into the rear of the apartment. Asuka motioned to me to follow, and she took the lead. Each step she took was slow and careful—one foot in front of the other, from a three-quarters crouch.
We tracked the trail of LCL into a bedroom. A whipping wind poured in through a shattered window. It howled and roared, spitting drops of LCL onto the walls.
Despite the wind, the room felt damp and muggy. Humidity clung to my skin, and my nose went slick with sweat and oil.
Where was all that humidity coming from, you ask? The bed. It was dripping LCL onto the floor and soaked throughout. It was like someone had taken a two-liter bottle of the stuff and poured it all on the mattress. That's how sopping wet it was.
And sitting atop this dripping heap was a stuffed bear, with a white patch of fur tinted orange-yellow from the LCL.
Asuka trotted around the bed, checking beneath it. She slid the closet door open gently, flashing her light through a half-dozen plaid skirts and powder-blue blouses, but her search came up empty, save for a picture frame that she plucked from the dresser.
"Take a look," she said.
The frame was metallic, copper in color with engraved ridges. The subjects were a woman, a teenaged boy, and a younger girl, all posed with snow-capped mountains in the distance.
"It's pretty, isn't it?" said Asuka. "It'd be a shame if a family like that just disappeared, with no one ever knowing what happened to them."
I put the picture frame back on the dresser. "Let's hurry. It's drafty in here."
She put her hand up to her forehead in a faux salute. "Yes, Commander Ikari."
With a wink, Asuka headed back out to the hallway, following the trail of LCL to the washroom. Asuka's flashlight scanned over the sink and mirror, and the light reflected off a half-dozen hygienic tools that had been scattered over the floor: a nail file, a pair of nail clippers, a hair dryer, and so on. All of them shined with dried LCL splattered on top of them.
And further into the washroom, that LCL thickened into a quivering puddle. That puddle enveloped a pair of washroom slippers, a blue bathrobe, stained white socks…
"Shinji."
"What?"
Asuka shined her light on the door to the bath proper. It was a couple centimeters open, with trails of LCL running down its height.
"You want me to get it?" she asked.
I shook my head, and I drew the kitchen knife from my sweatshirt pocket. I shined my light on the gap, turning my body back and forth to move the flashlight in my sling-bound hand. I stuck the nail file into the gap, and with it, I forced the door open!
Revealing nothing but a half-full tub of water.
"Jesus Christ!" Asuka let out a heavy breath. "People should never leave their doors closed like that!"
"So people like us will know that there isn't a monster hiding behind it?"
"Yes, that! Exactly that!"
There was nothing else to find in that washroom, but I kept the knife out just in case.
We scoured the rest of the apartment over the next fifteen minutes, finding a pile of LCL-soaked clothes in the kitchen and another within the sheets of the sopping wet bed we'd seen earlier. Three piles of clothes—that accounted for everyone in the apartment. As for who or what had done this, Asuka had a few theories:
"Maybe it's not the Angel's work," she said as we were leaving. "Maybe those Seele wackos found a way to replicate what First did."
We entered the main stairwell again, and our voices echoed throughout the building.
"How would they do that?" I asked her.
"Beats me. But if there's an Angel here, and if Misato is able to build another Eva, it's not out of the realm of possibility."
I opened my mouth to speak, but a clunk-clunk-clunk sound reverberated through the stairwell from above.
Asuka turned her light upward. "Somebody's here," she whispered.
The heavy, almost metallic footseps remained steady. Asuka climbed up a flight, and her light scanned across something. She didn't catch it, but the glow cast the thing's shadow—a deformed, inhuman shadow.
"Asuka…"
The shadow's master jumped over a stairwell railing and dashed down the staircase above us.
I tugged on Asuka's sleeve. "Go?"
"Yeah, go!" she said, taking off. "Let's go!"
We raced down the stairs. Asuka slid on a railing but tumbled and slammed into a wall. Her flashlight clattered and blinked out, and we left it behind. The last I saw of it, the creature must've kicked it as it passed, for the light spun end over end as it fell down the stairwell shaft.
On the basement floor, Asuka slammed the stairwell door shut behind me.
"Hey, we need something to block the door!"
The residents looked back at us indifferently. No one even moved.
"I'm serious!" cried Asuka. "There's a thing coming; it—"
The doorknob turned; the creature reached the gap with its hand—a "hand" of long, needle-like fingers, arranged radially like a starfish. They gnashed together like an insect's jaws.
"Eugh!" Asuka threw her weight against the door, and I joined her, trying to shove the door shut. "We need some help here!" she yelled.
At last, some of our neighbors came to help. A man and a woman ran up and started pushing back on the door, too; we pinched the creature's arm inside the gap, and it gave off this incoherent shriek, too high in pitch for any of us to make sense of. The sound pierced us, and Asuka threw her shoulder against the door, so she could cover an ear with her hand. The door inched wider, and the creature's fingertips glowed with a rainbow light.
I turned the knife over in my left hand and stabbed!
"Go back where you came from!" I yelled, and I drove the knife into the fleshy part of the creature's arm. It shrieked, recoiling, and the arm retreated.
With that, a couple residents dragged a crate into place and sat on it, keeping the door closed.
For the moment, at least, for even as they sat there, the creature banged and pounded on the outside, and if you looked hard enough at the metal door, you might've seen a slight dent.
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1.5 The Governance of Men
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
5. The Governance of Men
It's amazing what people can do when their lives are on the line. They'll throw their own bodies at maintenance closets to break the doors open. They'll rip apart wooden pallets with their bare hands, using the boards to barricade themselves.
They worked tirelessly—and so did the enemy. The creature gathered friends to help break our defenses. As we collaborated and discussed defensive strategies, the creatures exchanged shrieks and squeals. As we piled anything and everything in the basement to barricade the door, they used anything and everything in the building to break our defense. At one point, they banged on the door with metal and plaster. Sparks showered the base of the door, casting an irregular light through the gap there. The creatures wedged pieces of stairwell railing underneath, using them as levers. Some of our neighbors took apart a battery-powered lantern and rigged it to deliver a mild shock. A creature yelped in pain and dropped the railing piece straight away, but that didn't stop them for long. Eventually, they settled for just beating down the door with some kind of ram. The steady, unyielding rhythm of the ram became the ticking clock for our demise. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang.
Asuka knew the situation was untenable. She made an appeal to the residents: "Does anyone have a radio?" she called out. "Anything at all?"
"Here!" A man pushed his way to the front of the room, holding up a satellite phone. "There's just, you know, one problem."
He showed us the face of the phone. No signal.
Going higher up in the building was right out. There was another door to the rest of the building, sure, and once the first barricade had been finished, our neighbors had started building up another at that exit as well, but we wer uneasy about using it. No one wanted to risk running into one of those things in tight quarters. The stairwell offered too few options for retreat or defense.
That left outside. There was an exterior door that we worked to block off as well, but we hadn't heard any creatures outside trying to break it down, and overall, we felt better about the idea of trying to escape through the alley.
For that reason, Asuka asked the group for volunteers. "Is there anyone who'd be willing to go with this man? Anyone with combat experience who'd help protect him? For your families' sakes?"
"I would." A woman stepped forward, in short hair and with a silver necklace. "Whatever it takes to protect ourselves from those things out there."
"Good. Anyone else?"
The total lack of movement in the room said no, and Asuka scowled.
"Really? You can hear those things coming."
Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. The door budged slightly, and Asuka kicked at a box to press back against it.
"You see it?" she said, pointing at the pile of junk. "The enemy is at the gate, and we have nothing else to stop them. You can't just sit there!"
"If we go outside, we make ourselves targets," said a man in a business suit. "The best thing to do is make ourselves too difficult to attack. Let those creatures go after easier prey. We just have to stall until the police or SDF can get to us."
Asuka shook her head at that. "How are they even going to know we're here, that we need help, if we don't tell them?"
The man in the business suit ignored Asuka, taking apart a piece of metal pipe and placing it with the pile of boxes and other scrap.
"That's the most useful thing we can do right now," he said, "unless you think you can kill one of those things with a pipe. That's all we have: pipes and wrenches and screwdrivers."
Well, that wasn't true at all. We had hammers, too. If nothing else, the utility plant had a wide array of tools to use, once we'd broken into some of the maintenance closets. Asuka armed the woman volunteer with a firefighter's axe. Asuka herself took a bottle of hot water and a hammer.
"You're going, too?" I asked.
"Of course." She shrugged it off like she was going to the store. "Someone has to have the pull to get help over here fast. If they know it's me on the line, that should do something." Asuka squeezed the water bottle, spraying a trail of water and steam across the floor. "Or do you want to go instead?"
I shook my head at that. "You'd leave me alone? Here?"
She touched my shoulder and smiled. "There's no way I'm letting a bunch of aliens stop me from getting back here. Just hold the fort while I'm gone."
Hold the fort. That meant keeping everyone calm and steady as the creatures beat down our barricade. That meant trying to convince people of what to do when the boxes budged.
My eyes narrowed a bit, as I looked over the mass of people in the plant—the families who settled under ducts or crammed themselves between boilers and water treatment machines. "But why can't I go with you?" I asked.
Asuka eyed me from the side. "You want to go?"
"Yeah." I took my knapsack off and wrapped the straps around one arm, holding it as a shield. "I'm ready to go."
She poked her fingers at my sling-bound shoulder. I winced.
"You're not 100%," she said, rubbing the wound to soothe it. "Just relax; I'll be fine. Keep everyone's spirits high. We'll be back before you know it."
I gulped, and I nodded. "Okay. If you say so."
The residents broke down the barricade on the external door to the building's alleyway, and Asuka, the man, and the woman headed out, into the night.
While Asuka and the others searched to make contact with the outside world, the residents focused their efforts on bolstering our defenses. In Asuka's stead, much of that responsibility fell elsewhere. At first, there was some confusion about what to do and who would manage the situation, but after some time, a leader emerged.
"We'll need something stronger than this." A woman in a business suit pulled out a piece of plastic pipe from the main door barricade, and two levels of piled up junk shifted and collapsed. "Let's get some metal pipes here," she said, tossing the plastic one aside. "There's no time to waste."
The woman was a cabinet minister: the Minister of Consumer Affairs and Food Safety—or food unsafety as we had said in the soup kitchen sometimes. Though her qualifications to reinforce a defensive "bunker" like ours may have been suspect, she didn't hesitate to dole out responsibilities among the residents.
But were the residents listening? That was another story. Sure, there were a few that piled on crates, pipes, or ductwork for the barricade, but many others sat around and watched without interest or care.
"We're gonna die here no matter what you do," said one man, who preferred to read a book by flashlight than lift a finger to help with the barricade.
The cabinet minister took exception to that. Hands on her hips, she stormed up to the man with the book. "Help's on the way," she said. "We could use someone else working to keep us alive long enough for that help to get here."
The man eyed the cabinet minister, and he very deliberately turned a page in his book, continuing to read.
Many others in the room were the same way. A mother declined to help, wanting to stay with her children and keep them from panicking. Others still put in only a token effort: work on the exterior door barricade stalled as two residents argued over the use of some paint cans. The two men bickered incessantly for the better part of fifteen minutes while the other residents around merely sat down and looked away.
To her credit, the cabinet minister recognized the problem. She did her best to intervene in the dispute, but her efforts were in vain: she was an administrator, not a diplomat. When the two men refused to back down, the cabinet minister tried to pick up the slack herself, but she couldn't keep that up for long. She wasn't a young woman: stacking up a bunch of paint cans didn't agree with her back. Organizing and leading were the things she could do.
But persuading people to follow her—to heed her call? That was difficult, too.
The minister pulled me aside at one point to talk about just that. We ducked between a pair of boilers, and she said,
"You know, I think we could use your help."
I offered her my lame arm. "I could try, but I'm not sure how useful I'd be."
The minister laughed. "That's not what I mean." She gestured to the rest of the room—mostly of our fellow residents camping out under lantern light. "Look, people are scared right now. Scared people don't work well and don't think clearly. We need all hands on deck."
"You're absolutely right, but…" I shrugged again. "What am I supposed to do about that?"
The minister looked over her glasses at me. "I'm not asking you to get up and lead the troops into battle yourself. Just talk to people. Tell them this is important. Tell them they can make a difference, like you did."
My mouth hung open at that, but the minister wasn't about to listen to an argument. She slapped me on my shoulder—my bad shoulder, and I winced when she did—and she went on her way, seeing to the construction of some traps, should the enemy breach the barricades.
I pulled on my collar and rolled my neck. I let out a breath, and I approached one of the families near the boiler: a man, a woman, and two children. The woman was reading a story about a stuffed rabbit to the children, but I caught the man's eye and crouched down beside him.
"Hello," I whispered. "Uh, are you all doing well?"
"Yes, thank you," said the man. He had a thermos in hand, and he swung it in small circles, letting the liquid slosh inside. "The children are a little frightened, but their mother is keeping them calm, I think." He smiled at the woman, and the woman smiled and nodded in turn, all without missing a line in the story. "What can we do for you?" asked the man.
"We need volunteers to work on the defenses." I pointed out the entrances to the floor. "Barricades, traps—we need every able-bodied person not otherwise occupied."
The man frowned, looking at me from the side. "These are my children, Ikari. This is my family!"
"I know, I know," I said, showing him both hands to calm him. "But you can do something to protect them."
"Can I?" The man huffed. "I don't know anything about building things. I don't know anything about traps." He felt the grit on the utility plant floor and rubbed it between his fingers. "Here we are, reduced to grime and dirt and under siege from who-knows-what. What am I going to be able to do, really?"
"I—I—" I bowed my head. "I don't know."
The man nodded at that and raised both eyebrows, punctuating his point. I got up, and I let him be.
It's true he wasn't strictly needed. No one person—no particular person—was needed. And with that attitude, that fatalism, he might not have been that useful anyway.
I went back to our stuff—my spot with Asuka's and my bags. I camped out there on a beach blanket under the leaky pipe. I sat with my arms over my knees, taking up as little space as possible, and I waited.
I didn't talk to anyone else.
Until there was a banging on the alleyway door.
"Hey, it's us! Let us in!" came the muffled call.
A gaggle of residents, led by the cabinet minister, gathered at the barricade. The cabinet minister herself put an ear to the wall. "What's all that noise out there?"
"It's Soryu!" said the muffled voice. "We made contact with SDF, but the creatures are after us! Open the door!"
The cabinet minister started pulling paint cans from the stack, but she was alone: the other residents were like an army of garden gnomes.
"Hey!" she yelled. "Let's go; we've got neighbors out there!"
I joined the minister, pulling paint cans off the stack one at a time, but no one else stepped up to help.
"Please!" I said to them, putting two cans down to the side of the door. "This is my girlfriend; these are our friends and neighbors! They have the satphone! Please!"
One woman broke ranks with the rest of our neighbors, taking down some wood planks from the other side of the barricade, but for a long time—too long—it was just the three of us trying to take down the blockage. The cabinet minister had us work from the side, trying to cut a way through as soon as possible, but moving all that material took effort, and time.
"Hurry up!" yelled Asuka. "They're coming!"
We shifted one large barrel of industrial soap, and that cleared the way for the door to swing open—not a lot, but enough for a person to squeeze through.
"There, it's open!" the minister shouted back. "Come in, come in!"
The man with the satphone came first. It was a tight fit for him; the door's latch ripped his shirt, but the minister and the woman bystander took him by the arm and yanked him through.
The woman who'd gone outside came next. She slipped through more easily.
Asuka was last. She popped in without any trouble at all.
But something came after her. It darted halfway through the door, and though the woman who'd gone outside tried to close the way, the door slammed against the creature's body and bounced off.
That was my first good look at the thing: a white, pasty imitation of a man. It stood a head taller than anyone else there; its hulking body was pure muscle. It looked like it could rip a man in two with its bare hands.
And it had no mouth or nose—just a bony purple mask with five eyes.
The necklace woman tried to push again on the door, hoping to pin the beast there, but it had a hand free.
"Urk." A needle-like finger went through the woman's head.
Most of the residents ran or screamed, but the minister, the satphone man, Asuka, and I came to the woman's aid. Strangely, the wound didn't bleed; the "finger" was so narrow and sharp that the stab was like nothing at all. The woman's eyes still moved.
And she shrieked. "Ah…AHH!"
POP!
She burst like a water balloon. She burst into reddish goo, and her firefighter's axe clattered on the floor.
Then there was nothing and no one holding the door.
Asuka raised a hammer high in the air; she yelled and hollered and charged at the creature. The beast swiped at her, and its needle-like claws caught a tuft of Asuka's hair. Asuka stumbled; she hammered on the creature's arm and threw her body against the beast, pinning its wrist against the wall.
Others joined in the fray, too: the satphone man took up the dropped firefighter's axe and gashed the creature's shoulder.
Howling in agony, the creature presed a hand to its wound, and it melted. It dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL, splashing my shoes and Asuka's alike with droplets of reddish-orange goo.
The group relaxed. The satphone man turned his axe over on its head and leaned on it like it was a walking stick. Asuka dropped her hammer and let out a heavy breath. She went to shut the alleyway door.
But the puddle of LCL was moving. It frothed and bubbled. The creature grew back out of it fully formed—and whole.
Asuka tried to shove the thing back out. "Don't you know how to die?" she cried.
She didn't have leverage, though; she struggled to push it back through the doorway.
So I ran in there. I barreled into the thing and drove it outside. In the alley, the moon and the building's shadow casting us in alternating light and black, I wrestled with the creature. "Shut the door!" I yelled, pinning the creature on its back. "Don't let it back in!"
"Don't be stupid!" cried Asuka. "We're not leaving you with that thing!"
"Asuka, don't argue! Just—urk."
I shuddered.
Something hurt me.
Something hurt in my head.
It was one of those needle fingers. It went through my forehead, just above and between my eyes.
The creature's gaze betrayed nothing. Its eyes expressed no emotion; it didn't even have a mouth to smile with.
But in that moment, I was connected with it. The thing injected terror, loss, and pain into my mind: visions of death on lonely battlefields, sounds of babies crying without parents to care for them.
The sight of my father, staring at me and not bothering to fake a smile.
I shut my eyes and groaned, but then, I heard something else.
"Ikari."
The voice of a ghost. The voice of Rei Ayanami.
Ayanami stood before me, in her green and white middle school uniform, in black socks halfway to her knees and white shoes. It was a ridiculous image. It didn't belong there, but there she was.
And unlike the times I'd seen her before, this vision of Ayanami was different.
She offered a hand to me.
Her expression was no different—blank, like an unflinching observer studying traffic patterns or insect migrations. But still, her hand was there, and I accepted it. I reached out for her ghostly, glowing hand. Our fingertips met.
Squish!
My arm burst into fluid, and the rest of me followed soon after. The world went black.
The world went black, but I still heard something:
A humming sound.
It was the rhythmic, mechanical hum of a movie projector.
The world had gone black, but it was lighter than true darkness: it was the black that you only see on a movie screen that is still being lit up, even though there's nothing on the film.
I was sitting. The seats were velvety and dark magenta in color. The cup holders were black plastic, with a rough, bumpy texture on the outside.
I started; I pushed up to leave, but a hand caught me. A hand squeezed my own.
It was a pale hand, paler than any person's should be.
"It's all right." That was Ayanami; she sat next to me. "You're all right. You're safe."
I stammered. "But—but—what's going on? What is this place?"
She smiled. "You're here with me now."
"Ayanami…"
I trailed off, staring at her, but the thing that looked like Rei Ayanami paid me no mind. She waved a hand, and the movie screen came to life. It showed a moonlight alleyway with a puddle of LCL near a door. A green hooded sweatshirt, a sling, and a knife lay in the puddle. A white creature stalked about a nearby stairwell, looking for prey.
"Don't be afraid," she said, watching the scene. "You don't have to go back there anymore."
It's amazing what people can do when their lives are on the line. They'll throw their own bodies at maintenance closets to break the doors open. They'll rip apart wooden pallets with their bare hands, using the boards to barricade themselves.
They worked tirelessly—and so did the enemy. The creature gathered friends to help break our defenses. As we collaborated and discussed defensive strategies, the creatures exchanged shrieks and squeals. As we piled anything and everything in the basement to barricade the door, they used anything and everything in the building to break our defense. At one point, they banged on the door with metal and plaster. Sparks showered the base of the door, casting an irregular light through the gap there. The creatures wedged pieces of stairwell railing underneath, using them as levers. Some of our neighbors took apart a battery-powered lantern and rigged it to deliver a mild shock. A creature yelped in pain and dropped the railing piece straight away, but that didn't stop them for long. Eventually, they settled for just beating down the door with some kind of ram. The steady, unyielding rhythm of the ram became the ticking clock for our demise. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang.
Asuka knew the situation was untenable. She made an appeal to the residents: "Does anyone have a radio?" she called out. "Anything at all?"
"Here!" A man pushed his way to the front of the room, holding up a satellite phone. "There's just, you know, one problem."
He showed us the face of the phone. No signal.
Going higher up in the building was right out. There was another door to the rest of the building, sure, and once the first barricade had been finished, our neighbors had started building up another at that exit as well, but we wer uneasy about using it. No one wanted to risk running into one of those things in tight quarters. The stairwell offered too few options for retreat or defense.
That left outside. There was an exterior door that we worked to block off as well, but we hadn't heard any creatures outside trying to break it down, and overall, we felt better about the idea of trying to escape through the alley.
For that reason, Asuka asked the group for volunteers. "Is there anyone who'd be willing to go with this man? Anyone with combat experience who'd help protect him? For your families' sakes?"
"I would." A woman stepped forward, in short hair and with a silver necklace. "Whatever it takes to protect ourselves from those things out there."
"Good. Anyone else?"
The total lack of movement in the room said no, and Asuka scowled.
"Really? You can hear those things coming."
Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. The door budged slightly, and Asuka kicked at a box to press back against it.
"You see it?" she said, pointing at the pile of junk. "The enemy is at the gate, and we have nothing else to stop them. You can't just sit there!"
"If we go outside, we make ourselves targets," said a man in a business suit. "The best thing to do is make ourselves too difficult to attack. Let those creatures go after easier prey. We just have to stall until the police or SDF can get to us."
Asuka shook her head at that. "How are they even going to know we're here, that we need help, if we don't tell them?"
The man in the business suit ignored Asuka, taking apart a piece of metal pipe and placing it with the pile of boxes and other scrap.
"That's the most useful thing we can do right now," he said, "unless you think you can kill one of those things with a pipe. That's all we have: pipes and wrenches and screwdrivers."
Well, that wasn't true at all. We had hammers, too. If nothing else, the utility plant had a wide array of tools to use, once we'd broken into some of the maintenance closets. Asuka armed the woman volunteer with a firefighter's axe. Asuka herself took a bottle of hot water and a hammer.
"You're going, too?" I asked.
"Of course." She shrugged it off like she was going to the store. "Someone has to have the pull to get help over here fast. If they know it's me on the line, that should do something." Asuka squeezed the water bottle, spraying a trail of water and steam across the floor. "Or do you want to go instead?"
I shook my head at that. "You'd leave me alone? Here?"
She touched my shoulder and smiled. "There's no way I'm letting a bunch of aliens stop me from getting back here. Just hold the fort while I'm gone."
Hold the fort. That meant keeping everyone calm and steady as the creatures beat down our barricade. That meant trying to convince people of what to do when the boxes budged.
My eyes narrowed a bit, as I looked over the mass of people in the plant—the families who settled under ducts or crammed themselves between boilers and water treatment machines. "But why can't I go with you?" I asked.
Asuka eyed me from the side. "You want to go?"
"Yeah." I took my knapsack off and wrapped the straps around one arm, holding it as a shield. "I'm ready to go."
She poked her fingers at my sling-bound shoulder. I winced.
"You're not 100%," she said, rubbing the wound to soothe it. "Just relax; I'll be fine. Keep everyone's spirits high. We'll be back before you know it."
I gulped, and I nodded. "Okay. If you say so."
The residents broke down the barricade on the external door to the building's alleyway, and Asuka, the man, and the woman headed out, into the night.
While Asuka and the others searched to make contact with the outside world, the residents focused their efforts on bolstering our defenses. In Asuka's stead, much of that responsibility fell elsewhere. At first, there was some confusion about what to do and who would manage the situation, but after some time, a leader emerged.
"We'll need something stronger than this." A woman in a business suit pulled out a piece of plastic pipe from the main door barricade, and two levels of piled up junk shifted and collapsed. "Let's get some metal pipes here," she said, tossing the plastic one aside. "There's no time to waste."
The woman was a cabinet minister: the Minister of Consumer Affairs and Food Safety—or food unsafety as we had said in the soup kitchen sometimes. Though her qualifications to reinforce a defensive "bunker" like ours may have been suspect, she didn't hesitate to dole out responsibilities among the residents.
But were the residents listening? That was another story. Sure, there were a few that piled on crates, pipes, or ductwork for the barricade, but many others sat around and watched without interest or care.
"We're gonna die here no matter what you do," said one man, who preferred to read a book by flashlight than lift a finger to help with the barricade.
The cabinet minister took exception to that. Hands on her hips, she stormed up to the man with the book. "Help's on the way," she said. "We could use someone else working to keep us alive long enough for that help to get here."
The man eyed the cabinet minister, and he very deliberately turned a page in his book, continuing to read.
Many others in the room were the same way. A mother declined to help, wanting to stay with her children and keep them from panicking. Others still put in only a token effort: work on the exterior door barricade stalled as two residents argued over the use of some paint cans. The two men bickered incessantly for the better part of fifteen minutes while the other residents around merely sat down and looked away.
To her credit, the cabinet minister recognized the problem. She did her best to intervene in the dispute, but her efforts were in vain: she was an administrator, not a diplomat. When the two men refused to back down, the cabinet minister tried to pick up the slack herself, but she couldn't keep that up for long. She wasn't a young woman: stacking up a bunch of paint cans didn't agree with her back. Organizing and leading were the things she could do.
But persuading people to follow her—to heed her call? That was difficult, too.
The minister pulled me aside at one point to talk about just that. We ducked between a pair of boilers, and she said,
"You know, I think we could use your help."
I offered her my lame arm. "I could try, but I'm not sure how useful I'd be."
The minister laughed. "That's not what I mean." She gestured to the rest of the room—mostly of our fellow residents camping out under lantern light. "Look, people are scared right now. Scared people don't work well and don't think clearly. We need all hands on deck."
"You're absolutely right, but…" I shrugged again. "What am I supposed to do about that?"
The minister looked over her glasses at me. "I'm not asking you to get up and lead the troops into battle yourself. Just talk to people. Tell them this is important. Tell them they can make a difference, like you did."
My mouth hung open at that, but the minister wasn't about to listen to an argument. She slapped me on my shoulder—my bad shoulder, and I winced when she did—and she went on her way, seeing to the construction of some traps, should the enemy breach the barricades.
I pulled on my collar and rolled my neck. I let out a breath, and I approached one of the families near the boiler: a man, a woman, and two children. The woman was reading a story about a stuffed rabbit to the children, but I caught the man's eye and crouched down beside him.
"Hello," I whispered. "Uh, are you all doing well?"
"Yes, thank you," said the man. He had a thermos in hand, and he swung it in small circles, letting the liquid slosh inside. "The children are a little frightened, but their mother is keeping them calm, I think." He smiled at the woman, and the woman smiled and nodded in turn, all without missing a line in the story. "What can we do for you?" asked the man.
"We need volunteers to work on the defenses." I pointed out the entrances to the floor. "Barricades, traps—we need every able-bodied person not otherwise occupied."
The man frowned, looking at me from the side. "These are my children, Ikari. This is my family!"
"I know, I know," I said, showing him both hands to calm him. "But you can do something to protect them."
"Can I?" The man huffed. "I don't know anything about building things. I don't know anything about traps." He felt the grit on the utility plant floor and rubbed it between his fingers. "Here we are, reduced to grime and dirt and under siege from who-knows-what. What am I going to be able to do, really?"
"I—I—" I bowed my head. "I don't know."
The man nodded at that and raised both eyebrows, punctuating his point. I got up, and I let him be.
It's true he wasn't strictly needed. No one person—no particular person—was needed. And with that attitude, that fatalism, he might not have been that useful anyway.
I went back to our stuff—my spot with Asuka's and my bags. I camped out there on a beach blanket under the leaky pipe. I sat with my arms over my knees, taking up as little space as possible, and I waited.
I didn't talk to anyone else.
Until there was a banging on the alleyway door.
"Hey, it's us! Let us in!" came the muffled call.
A gaggle of residents, led by the cabinet minister, gathered at the barricade. The cabinet minister herself put an ear to the wall. "What's all that noise out there?"
"It's Soryu!" said the muffled voice. "We made contact with SDF, but the creatures are after us! Open the door!"
The cabinet minister started pulling paint cans from the stack, but she was alone: the other residents were like an army of garden gnomes.
"Hey!" she yelled. "Let's go; we've got neighbors out there!"
I joined the minister, pulling paint cans off the stack one at a time, but no one else stepped up to help.
"Please!" I said to them, putting two cans down to the side of the door. "This is my girlfriend; these are our friends and neighbors! They have the satphone! Please!"
One woman broke ranks with the rest of our neighbors, taking down some wood planks from the other side of the barricade, but for a long time—too long—it was just the three of us trying to take down the blockage. The cabinet minister had us work from the side, trying to cut a way through as soon as possible, but moving all that material took effort, and time.
"Hurry up!" yelled Asuka. "They're coming!"
We shifted one large barrel of industrial soap, and that cleared the way for the door to swing open—not a lot, but enough for a person to squeeze through.
"There, it's open!" the minister shouted back. "Come in, come in!"
The man with the satphone came first. It was a tight fit for him; the door's latch ripped his shirt, but the minister and the woman bystander took him by the arm and yanked him through.
The woman who'd gone outside came next. She slipped through more easily.
Asuka was last. She popped in without any trouble at all.
But something came after her. It darted halfway through the door, and though the woman who'd gone outside tried to close the way, the door slammed against the creature's body and bounced off.
That was my first good look at the thing: a white, pasty imitation of a man. It stood a head taller than anyone else there; its hulking body was pure muscle. It looked like it could rip a man in two with its bare hands.
And it had no mouth or nose—just a bony purple mask with five eyes.
The necklace woman tried to push again on the door, hoping to pin the beast there, but it had a hand free.
"Urk." A needle-like finger went through the woman's head.
Most of the residents ran or screamed, but the minister, the satphone man, Asuka, and I came to the woman's aid. Strangely, the wound didn't bleed; the "finger" was so narrow and sharp that the stab was like nothing at all. The woman's eyes still moved.
And she shrieked. "Ah…AHH!"
POP!
She burst like a water balloon. She burst into reddish goo, and her firefighter's axe clattered on the floor.
Then there was nothing and no one holding the door.
Asuka raised a hammer high in the air; she yelled and hollered and charged at the creature. The beast swiped at her, and its needle-like claws caught a tuft of Asuka's hair. Asuka stumbled; she hammered on the creature's arm and threw her body against the beast, pinning its wrist against the wall.
Others joined in the fray, too: the satphone man took up the dropped firefighter's axe and gashed the creature's shoulder.
Howling in agony, the creature presed a hand to its wound, and it melted. It dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL, splashing my shoes and Asuka's alike with droplets of reddish-orange goo.
The group relaxed. The satphone man turned his axe over on its head and leaned on it like it was a walking stick. Asuka dropped her hammer and let out a heavy breath. She went to shut the alleyway door.
But the puddle of LCL was moving. It frothed and bubbled. The creature grew back out of it fully formed—and whole.
Asuka tried to shove the thing back out. "Don't you know how to die?" she cried.
She didn't have leverage, though; she struggled to push it back through the doorway.
So I ran in there. I barreled into the thing and drove it outside. In the alley, the moon and the building's shadow casting us in alternating light and black, I wrestled with the creature. "Shut the door!" I yelled, pinning the creature on its back. "Don't let it back in!"
"Don't be stupid!" cried Asuka. "We're not leaving you with that thing!"
"Asuka, don't argue! Just—urk."
I shuddered.
Something hurt me.
Something hurt in my head.
It was one of those needle fingers. It went through my forehead, just above and between my eyes.
The creature's gaze betrayed nothing. Its eyes expressed no emotion; it didn't even have a mouth to smile with.
But in that moment, I was connected with it. The thing injected terror, loss, and pain into my mind: visions of death on lonely battlefields, sounds of babies crying without parents to care for them.
The sight of my father, staring at me and not bothering to fake a smile.
I shut my eyes and groaned, but then, I heard something else.
"Ikari."
The voice of a ghost. The voice of Rei Ayanami.
Ayanami stood before me, in her green and white middle school uniform, in black socks halfway to her knees and white shoes. It was a ridiculous image. It didn't belong there, but there she was.
And unlike the times I'd seen her before, this vision of Ayanami was different.
She offered a hand to me.
Her expression was no different—blank, like an unflinching observer studying traffic patterns or insect migrations. But still, her hand was there, and I accepted it. I reached out for her ghostly, glowing hand. Our fingertips met.
Squish!
My arm burst into fluid, and the rest of me followed soon after. The world went black.
The world went black, but I still heard something:
A humming sound.
It was the rhythmic, mechanical hum of a movie projector.
The world had gone black, but it was lighter than true darkness: it was the black that you only see on a movie screen that is still being lit up, even though there's nothing on the film.
I was sitting. The seats were velvety and dark magenta in color. The cup holders were black plastic, with a rough, bumpy texture on the outside.
I started; I pushed up to leave, but a hand caught me. A hand squeezed my own.
It was a pale hand, paler than any person's should be.
"It's all right." That was Ayanami; she sat next to me. "You're all right. You're safe."
I stammered. "But—but—what's going on? What is this place?"
She smiled. "You're here with me now."
"Ayanami…"
I trailed off, staring at her, but the thing that looked like Rei Ayanami paid me no mind. She waved a hand, and the movie screen came to life. It showed a moonlight alleyway with a puddle of LCL near a door. A green hooded sweatshirt, a sling, and a knife lay in the puddle. A white creature stalked about a nearby stairwell, looking for prey.
"Don't be afraid," she said, watching the scene. "You don't have to go back there anymore."
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1.6 Vision
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
6. Vision
When you've been involved with Eva at some point, something about it stays with you—even when you try to rest, even when you try to sleep. There's something infectious about it that stays in your mind. It takes form in your dreams, and once grown this way, the idea of Eva—and all that comes with it—never truly leaves you.
To me, being involved with Eva used to be very claustrophobic and confining. It's little wonder that, in my dreams, those feelings took the form of a train. Trapped within an empty traincar, with blinding sunlight streaming in across from me, that traincar was my cage. I spoke with an Angel there. I spoke with friends there. During my time as an Eva pilot, that traincar never let me go.
So used to the traincar was I that, well, I was a little surprised not to be there again.
The theater wasn't unusual in any way. Granted, a mechanical projector struck me as a little old-fashioned, but the seats were typical—even a bit uncomfortable. The seat only went about halfway up my back, for instance.
If I even had a back that could feel uncomfortable.
No, whatever that place was, the sensations there were real. The roughness of the cup holders irritated my fingertips, for instance.
And the pale hand that held mine was hot to the touch.
"Excuse me," I offered weakly, and I pulled my hand away.
Ayanami turned slightly, looking at me with one eye. "Good morning."
I raised an eyebrow. "Is it morning?"
Her eyes fell off me; she went back to watching the screen.
I looked her up and down. From her red eyes and blue hair, she was without a doubt the image of someone I'd known once—whatever that meant in this world.
"So," I said, fumbling for words, "you're alive?"
"No," she said, with a slight shake of the head.
"You're not?" I raised an eyebrow.
"I am everywhere and nowhere," she said, staring at the screen. "Past and future are the same to me."
Try as I might, I couldn't catch Ayanami's gaze. She studied the movie screen with analytic intent.
I followed her eyes. The camera looked from overhead at the building's alley. One of those creatures beat mercilessly on the alleyway door, but the door held firm: inside, the barricades were back in place. Our neighbors were safe.
Asuka was safe.
"I guess I should thank you," I said.
Ayanami looked at me with one eye again, saying nothing.
"For saving me," I explained.
She broke her gaze once more, staring ahead. "You are a friend."
The scene shifted—to another block, another city?—as uniformed SDF members took the battle to the creatures. In silence, they fired their guns, tossed grenades, and marked hordes of creatures with lasers for distant bombardment, but it was largely for nothing. Mobs of the manlike aliens overran humvees and armored vehicles, ripping metal apart with their bare hands.
Just as one of those creatures pried open a tank hatch, I turned aside.
"What's going on here?" I muttered. "Why is this happening?"
Ayanami bowed her head. "I'm sorry. You can watch something else if you like."
"No, it's fine, really," I said, pulling on my collar and gulping. "I just wanted to know, I guess, for when I go back."
Ayanami's mouth hung open a little. "You want to go back?"
I scratched the back of my head. "Of course. Asuka's there. Misato is there. I can't leave them."
She shook her head, and she stared at the screen again. "I can't protect you indefinitely. Everything I do has a cost."
"A cost?" I said.
Ayanami waved her hand, and the scene before us shifted and blurred. An image formed of some SDF members holding a bridge against the creatures. A spray of bullets rang out; SDF members fired in bursts, but the creatures advanced anyway. One creature cleaved through an SDF member's rifle, reducing the man to firing with his pistol. From point-blank range, he fired into the creature's chest:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
And nothing happened. The creature didn't even flinch. The SDF member turned his pistol aside and fled, but the creature stabbed him in the head with its needle-like fingers, and with a cry and shriek of terror, the SDF member dissolved.
The sounds of battle faded out, rendering the remaining fight in a slideshow of light and color, nothing more.
"Do you see now?" asked Ayanami, still watching the scene.
I gulped and nodded, averting my gaze.
"If you go back," she said, "there may be others I can't save."
"So I'm supposed to stay here?" I beat my fist on the armrest. "I'm supposed to stay and wait in safety, to watch while everyone else goes to fight? No way. I know how to fight."
"Like you did just now?"
I nodded—once, twice, several times. "If that's what it takes."
At that, Ayanami hung her head, and she gripped her armrest a little tighter. "You aren't a fighter anymore. You don't have Eva to protect you. You have courage, but you don't have the means to fight."
I sighed, pressing my hands against my head. "Then what am I supposed to do?" I said.
"I don't know." She stared ahead with narrowed eyes. "I can protect you, even if you can do nothing. I can protect you, even at the cost of others. Is that what you want?"
I scoffed, looking over the scene before us. The pale creatures stalked innocent people in their homes, dissolving them at will. Creatures roamed the streets in gangs. They cast long shadows of the moon on the roads, and when those shadows passed, everything human fell apart behind them.
And Ayanami watched this unfold, unfazed and unmoved.
"This is impossible!" I said, turning away. "How can you look at that? Why even watch?"
"These are my children," she said, "and I watch over them."
I shied away from her, scooting aside in my chair. "Ayanami?"
She closed her eyes. "No."
"No?" I shuddered. "Then you are—"
Her eyes snapped to me, and my throat closed up.
"I am not the person you knew." Her tense expression melted; she broke into a smile. "But I am me. I am myself, and I am still your friend. That is my promise to you."
I looked into her eyes for a time and nodded. Ayanami hesitated for a moment before turning back to the view. In that silence, I cleared my throat, saying,
"So you watch over us, as a mother would."
She nodded.
"Then how can you stand this?" I gestured at the screen. "How can you bear to watch as people are fleeing and hiding in panic? How can you sit there as they're reduced to liquid?"
Ayanami pressed her lips together for a moment. "I'm trying to stop it."
"That's good for you, then," I said, running my fingers through my hair and staring at the ceiling. "I'm glad someone can do something about this."
"So can you." She watched me with one eye, but as soon as that red iris settled on me, I shook my head.
"No, no, absolutely not. I'm not that kind of person."
She cocked her head. "Then why do you read their letters?"
"Because they're desperate!" I slammed my fist on the armrest, and it bounced off its hinge. "They're desperate and unhappy, and why? Because I put them there!" I slapped my chest. "I put them there, and I don't have the answers to get them out." I sighed, and I buried my face in my hands. "I'm just a kid. I'm just a kid, all right? I don't have what you have; I can't do what you can do. I'm just a kid. I didn't try to make a decision for everyone else; I just wanted to do what was right for me."
"So it's not right for them?" Ayanami leaned closer, over the armrest. "They would be better off in the sea?"
I turned away. I dug my hands in my pockets and kicked at the floor, hoping there'd be some popcorn I could shuffle around, but there wasn't.
Ayanami sat back in her chair, but she was still looking at me. "I didn't ask people to look to me for guidance," she said, "but they do."
My head rose. "What are you saying?"
"People will write letters to you, whether you want them or not."
I shook my head. "The people who write to me—they don't really want letters in response."
Ayanami raised an eyebrow.
"I can't give them what they want." I threw my hands at my thighs and ran my fingers down to my knees and back again. "They want to know it's going to be all right. I can't give them that."
Ayanami turned an eye to me. "But you'd fight anyway?"
"Of course!" I said, nodding.
"Then tell them what you feel," she said, facing forward again, "and that you'd fight anyway."
I frowned. "Even though I have doubts?"
"That's the first thing you should say. They have doubts, too."
"Really?"
She nodded. "And so do I."
I sighed, and I looked up, to the dark, formless ceiling—then to the light of the projector at the back of the room. They say light gives hope, right? Perhaps that was true in the real world, but here, the projector's light left me wanting more. There was a great neutrality in it. It was whatever you wanted to make of it. It was hope and warmth if you wanted it to be. It was cold and emotionless if you feared it would be.
Maybe that was true of a lot of things. You had to make of them what you wanted to make, or else they'd turn to everything you dreaded instead.
My eyes turned forward again, to the screen—to the faded image of a city under siege, with gunfire punctuating the night.
"Ayanami," I said, "I can't stay here."
She nodded. "I know."
"Will I see you again?"
"Yes." She smiled, ever-so-slightly. "That's a promise, too."
I smiled too, but it wasn't my place to stay. Ayanami had her work to do, and so did I. I admit, though, I thought Ayanami had it easier than I did. She had power. She had the ability to see, the prescience to know what was in people's hearts. I had no such luxury.
I took one last look around the theater—the peculiar place I hoped never to visit again—and I saw something I'd missed on my first glance:
A figure in a satin hood.
It sat at the end of the row, far from us. It watched the film as well. It didn't move a muscle. It didn't say a word.
"Ayanami," I whispered, leaning closer to her, "who is that?"
"Me," she said.
I spun around, but again, Ayanami wasn't even looking at me. Her eyes were fixed on the screen.
"Pardon?" I said, incredulous.
"Someone like me," she said.
And she gripped the armrest a little tighter.
When I came to, water dripped off me. I shivered, gasping for breath. I rolled over, climbed to my feet, and beat my fist on the door.
"Hey!" I whispered, trying not to make too much noise. "Anybody in there?"
"Shinji?" That was Asuka. "You got popped, didn't you? How…?"
I shivered again. My skin was sticky; my clothes were drenched. "It's a long story," I said. "Can I come in?"
It took a little while, but our neighbors disassembled the barricade and let me sneak inside. Asuka draped me in a towel, which helped immensely. A hug on top of that wasn't unwelcome, either.
"Welcome home," she said softly, and she planted a kiss on me for good measure.
Then she made a face.
"What?" I said.
"You taste a little like blood."
"Oh, so no more kisses for me?" I complained.
She scoffed. "Please. I didn't say that."
Only Asuka could manage to kiss me, pin me against a wall, and rub my hair clean of LCL all at the same time. She was a wonder all right.
Unfortunately, she couldn't hold that kiss forever. "Okay, that'll have to do," she said when she pulled away. "We've got work to do."
I blinked. "We do?"
Asuka's eyes flickered aside, to the door on the other end of the floor. Three men were putting all their body weight against the barricade, but the pile was still sliding back in fits and spurts . We'd have to make a stand there, in the utility plant, until help arrived.
Asuka and the consumer affairs minister took the lead again, coordinating the residents in an organized defense plan—no longer would we just try to hold the creatures at bay. They were coming in, and we'd have to fight them on our turf.
That was our advantage, Asuka pointed out. We could prepare the battlefield for them.
We set up a kill zone around both the interior door (leading to the rest of the building) and the exterior door (leading to the alley outside). The bulk of the residents relocated outside the kill zone, huddling in corners or under pipes. We extinguished our lamps there, leaving only the kill zone lanterns lit: our enemies would be visible for all to see, while we lurked in the shadows.
And we armed ourselves with tools: wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, and the like. I'd left my knife outside, and no one was about to open the door to let me get it. Asuka handed me a metal-encased flashlight, instead. "Use it to surprise them," she said, "or use it as a club."
"As a club?" I said, and I swung feebly with my left arm. It wasn't a coordinated motion by any means.
"Something wrong with your other arm?" She squeezed my right shoulder, and I flinched—I flinched without pain. I opened my hand and wiggled my fingers, staring at them.
"Your arm looks good to me," said Asuka. "I guess reverting to LCL every now and then can be good for your health."
I rolled my shoulder around a bit. I switched the flashlight to my right hand and felt the weight of it. For the moment, that flashlight was nothing but a cold, useless shell of metal. There was nothing to be done with it while we sat and waited for the enemy to come.
And they did come.
They broke the door off its hinges and burst through the pile of junk. They stood strong and tall. There was something bizzarely beautiful about them. Great, hulking muscles gave them an athletic look. They were perfect physical specimens that way, and as they walked, their spongy toe-pads gave them springy, fluid steps, as though they were always in total balance.
Three creatures pushed through the barricade, and they fanned out through the kill zone. In the darkness, a group of us lay in wait as one of the creatures came our way. It tip-toed down a passage between water treatment machines, looking back and forth as it went along. Its eyes scanned back and forth—a surreal sight against the three false eyes on its facial mask. Those eyes never moved.
Not even when the creature fell flat on its face.
The creature writhed and shrieked, sloshing about on the ground. It tried vainly to scramble to its feet, but each time it tried, its toe pads slipped, kicking up dark fluid.
Ah, the wonders of machine oil, right?
The creature's two comrades raced to its aid, but they hesitated at the edge of the passageway, just outside the slick of oil. That was all the time we needed, for two of our residents lined up on the opposite end with a heavy metal bucket. Wearing thick rubber gloves, they splashed liquid down the whole passageway, and the creature fizzled and burned, and the two residents admired their work.
"Hey!" cried the cabinet minister, watching from behind. "Don't stand there and watch. Reload the drain cleaner!"
That was our work: with only a couple buckets capable of holding such corrosive chemicals, we had to be cautious. Each pair of bucket operators had a third resident to sort through drain cleaners, bleach solutions, and other industrial chemicals we had access to. These creatures were still flesh and blood, after all. They could burn and writhe just as well as we did.
But with the creature's two companions standing over their fallen comrade, the cabinet minister thrust her arm out, stopping the bucket carriers.
"Wait!" she said. "Watch what they do."
The creatures—each one indistinguishable from the others—never even made a move as their comrade shrieked and screamed in pain. Its high-pitched warbles rang through the room like a tinny piano.
The creature dissolved itself, but its LCL still bubbled as acid intermixed with it. That tinny shriek? It lingered in the room, even once the creature had gone.
And the other creatures ignored their comrade's plight. They chattered with one another in their unintelligible tongue, and they left, for a moment.
"What are they doing?" said one of the residents. "Going back outside?"
Asuka shook her head. "Don't think they're the type to say, 'Fuck it, we're outta here,' " she quipped, and she went back for another bucket.
And she was right. The creatures came back with a full wooden crate. They shoved it into the oil slick, displacing black goo from the floor. Then, they went back to the barricade for another crate.
Asuka tapped one of the chemical handlers on the shoulder and passed the bucket ahead. "When they come back with that box, hit them again."
The chemical handler nodded, and the pair took another loaded bucket, swinging it back and forth to gain momentum for the toss.
The creatures hurled another create down the passageway, and one of them leapt from dry floor to one box, to another, and across to our safe side of the passage, towering over the bucket handlers.
The rest of the residents fled, and Asuka, the cabinet minister, and I brought up the rear. "Hit it!" cried the minister. "Hit it now!"
The bucket handlers splashed the creature at point-blank range. Acid splattered everywhere, even…
Well, there's just no avoiding some of a bucket full of acid when you're splashing something right beside you. Even with rubber gloves, there's no way.
For that, I'm thankful the creature—even as the acid burned through its skin—took the time to dissolve both the bucket handlers before it melted in turn.
That's the only thing that saved us from our neighbors' screams.
After that, our carefully plotted defense effort crumbled. We fled down the passageway to another chokepoint, where the cabinet minister had set up a second oil slick. We overturned the oil and left the way behind us impassable—for a while, at least, but there was still one creature lurking. I shined my flashlight on it, and we all saw: it crossed the first slick easily, but without more boxes or other tools to get after us, it darted down another hallway, searching for a way around.
"Everybody behind the second level!" Asuka called out. "Fall back and regroup!"
"Regroup for what?" asked one of our neighbors, the man who preferred to read rather than help build the barricade. "That thing will just find another way to get at us."
"We still have plenty of drain cleaner," said the cabinet minister, her brow furrowed as she thought. "We can put together another defensive stand."
A man in our group didn't see it that way. He stopped walking.
"This is pointless," he said. "I'm tired; I'm not running anymore."
"Come on!" cried Asuka. "It's not much further!"
But the man stood firm. "I don't have to listen to you! You're not a leader, Soryu!" He glared at her, then at the cabinet minister. "And what do you know?" he demanded. "You're a politician; you deal with nutrition requirements and workplace safety rules! If we're going to be dissolved again, I'm going to meet that on my terms!"
The cabinet minister narrowed her eyes, but Asuka got a word in first.
"If you think they're going to win and give up fighting them, then they've already won!" Asuka called down the hallway. "You chose to come back, didn't you? Stand up and fight for it!"
The man snarled. "Fight for it? The way your boyfriend has? All he can do—all any of us can do—is throw ourselves at those things until they take us all out." The man met my gaze. "You know it, don't you?"
Asuka pulled on her own hair and scowled. Some others in the group started to follow the man, and they had every reason to.
"Forget about them," said the minister, turning her back on the rest. "We have to take care of ourselves now."
A pit in my throat choked me, leaving me open-mouthed and staring dumbly. I looked both ways down the hallway. I had a sense of something—of Ayanami? Was she there? Was she watching us, even then? No, there was no sign of her, but I felt Ayanami must've been there anyway. I could imagine her watching over us the way she had on that fantastic tower, the tower that didn't connect to the ground, that lay beneath a pure white sky. Her stare never wavered.
"Stop!" I shouted.
That word fell from my lips, and with it, all our neighbors stopped to look at me. The cabinet minister gaped in surprise. Even the angry man glanced at me from afar.
"Stop!" I said again. "So what if the only thing we can do is throw ourselves at those things? That doesn't make it wrong to try."
"There is no point in trying something that's futile," said the man, shaking his head and he headed further down the hall. "We can't beat them!"
"I'm not asking you to beat it," I said, storming after him. "Asuka isn't asking you to beat it. The minister isn't asking you to beat it. We're asking you to show you still believe in standing here!" I stomped my foot on the floor. "Stand here!" I said, "with your own two legs!" I clasped my hands together, begging. "As long as you believe that, then what they're doing doesn't matter. We can come back from it."
"You believe that?" asked the concerned father, scoffing. "Or are you just saying it?"
"I don't know this is better, but…" I scanned the hallway. One of the residents had left a sledgehammer behind, but it was still intact, still a good weapon. I picked up the sledgehammer and thrust it into the angry man's hands. "Take the opportunity to find out," I told him.
Asuka trotted after me. Without a word, she put a hand on my shoulder and smiled, but the other residents' reactions were mixed. Some of them shook their heads and moved on. Others, like the angry sledgehammer man, hesitated a bit.
They wouldn't have long to think about it.
"EEYAH!" A scream echoed through the halls. "They're coming through the middle passage!"
Asuka grimaced, and she drew her ball-peen hammer, raising it overhead. "All of you—come with us or go. It's up to you and what you can live with. Come on, Shinji!"
She ducked down a side passageway, hopping over a pair of ducts that ran across the path, and I went after her. We ran to the intersection of the middle passageway with this path, where the cabinet minister had another group of residents together. In the faint light of a lantern, they cowered and ran from the creature—which moved freely through the halls like a panther scouring the jungle for prey.
"Watch out!" cried one of our neighbors. "Spilled acid down there!"
Acid had eaten through one of the floor ducts, leaving an oval-shaped gap, as though a giant had bitten down and chewed on part of the tubing. Asuka sized up the gap and leapt gingerly over it, and I did the same.
Just in time to face the last creature.
"Get down!" cried Asuka.
I ducked, and the creature's needle-like fingers sank into the wall. Asuka swung her hammer head at the creature, but the beast yanked its hand free and scampered back, only to be cut off by another group of residents wielding mops and brooms. That kept the creature at some distance, but with one swipe of its claws, it shattered two broom handles, spraying us with a shower of splinters.
Even those shattered handles—they made my flashlight look pathetic by comparison. The short metal casing hardly had any reach! I looked down to the flashlight in my hand, and I laughed to myself. I laughed, and I turned the flashlight around. I fingered the rubber switch and pressed down.
That's how a human being—a thinking, rational creature—uses a tool.
A spot of light blanketed the creature, and it shied away from the beam with its arm covering its eyes.
"Everyone!" I called out. "Get some flashlights; get some light on it! Don't let it look any direction without some glare!"
At once, the dark hallways of the utility plant came to life, with beams of light criss-crossing the array of pipes, ducts, and metal walkways. From each direction, we slathered the creature in blinding, focused light, and as it cowered and shielded its eyes, our neighbors beat and stabbed the creature. It bled sticky LCL that oozed from each wound, but I kept my light on it, despite the stomach-churning image in front of me.
That was, at least, until the creature swung blindly at me, knocking my flashlight to the floor. The metal case clattered on the floor, and the light reflected harmlessly off a steel pipe. And with the light from my end pointed away, the creature lowered its arm, blinked, and saw Asuka and me clearly.
I turned to run, but I stumbled over the damaged duct on the floor. I scrambled for footing, but the creature lurched after me, its needle-like fingers shining in the others' lights.
WHAM!
A sledgehammer head bashed the creature aside, hurling it against some machinery.
"Sorry I'm late," said the angry man, resting the sledgehammer on his shoulder. "Did I miss much?"
The creature, wounded beyond saving, dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL. That didn't mean it gave up; it tried to grow back even from that state, but we threw some lye on the remains for good measure. That, we discovered, was a good way to make one of those thing stay dead.
SDF arrived not much later, bearing food, water, and canisters of sand to keep to make sure the creatures, once "killed," would never return. The SDF members swept the rest of the building for threats and stayed on the city block for the rest of the night, maintaining security and safety against the threat.
As for what that threat was, I didn't find out until morning. The power had yet to come back, but the SDF members were kind enough to give Asuka and me access to a radio once the area had been cleared. We crouched within an SDF armored vehicle and shared a headset, and that was the first time that night we heard from a friend.
"I'm sorry you've had such an eventful night," said Misato, her voice crinkling with static. "Are you both okay?"
"Shinji's better than he was before," said Asuka, poking at my shoulder. "But Misato—what about that Angel?"
"The Angel's still on the loose, spreading as many of those creatures as it can across the earth. Now that Tokyo-2 is secure, for the moment, we're getting ready to launch an operation to take that Angel down. Hopefully it won't lead to more adventures for you two."
Asuka rapped her knuckle on the radio casing. "Hopefully it does! No way we're lying down while Angels invade again! Get these people of yours to take us over there. We're helping with this. Even if I have to scrub a goddamn toilet in your base, we're helping with this."
"Is that true?" asked Misato. "Shinji, do you feel that way, too?"
A silence. Asuka looked to me, but she looked aside just as quickly. I sat back, staring through the front windows of the vehicle as the sun rose over Tokyo-2, and I frowned.
I said before that Third Impact left a scar on us. Scars don't heal completely, and I think that was true then, too. The damage we suffered from that time—from having everything inside us laid bare—could never be undone. Because of that, we'd come to expect disasters and unhappiness.
Maybe we'd become too comfortable with it—too adjusted, too well-adapted.
Maybe what we needed was the courage to make sure the next disaster never came. Either that, or the hope that we could affect the wide and inhospitable world, in spite of everything.
"Yes, Misato," I said. "Whatever I can do, I want to be a part of this."
I couldn't see Misato's face through the radio, of course, but she responded with the kind of unbridled warmth and optimism that I hadn't even realized I'd missed.
"In that case," said Misato, "let's go save the world."
The Boy Who Became a Legend
The Second Coming Part One End
When you've been involved with Eva at some point, something about it stays with you—even when you try to rest, even when you try to sleep. There's something infectious about it that stays in your mind. It takes form in your dreams, and once grown this way, the idea of Eva—and all that comes with it—never truly leaves you.
To me, being involved with Eva used to be very claustrophobic and confining. It's little wonder that, in my dreams, those feelings took the form of a train. Trapped within an empty traincar, with blinding sunlight streaming in across from me, that traincar was my cage. I spoke with an Angel there. I spoke with friends there. During my time as an Eva pilot, that traincar never let me go.
So used to the traincar was I that, well, I was a little surprised not to be there again.
The theater wasn't unusual in any way. Granted, a mechanical projector struck me as a little old-fashioned, but the seats were typical—even a bit uncomfortable. The seat only went about halfway up my back, for instance.
If I even had a back that could feel uncomfortable.
No, whatever that place was, the sensations there were real. The roughness of the cup holders irritated my fingertips, for instance.
And the pale hand that held mine was hot to the touch.
"Excuse me," I offered weakly, and I pulled my hand away.
Ayanami turned slightly, looking at me with one eye. "Good morning."
I raised an eyebrow. "Is it morning?"
Her eyes fell off me; she went back to watching the screen.
I looked her up and down. From her red eyes and blue hair, she was without a doubt the image of someone I'd known once—whatever that meant in this world.
"So," I said, fumbling for words, "you're alive?"
"No," she said, with a slight shake of the head.
"You're not?" I raised an eyebrow.
"I am everywhere and nowhere," she said, staring at the screen. "Past and future are the same to me."
Try as I might, I couldn't catch Ayanami's gaze. She studied the movie screen with analytic intent.
I followed her eyes. The camera looked from overhead at the building's alley. One of those creatures beat mercilessly on the alleyway door, but the door held firm: inside, the barricades were back in place. Our neighbors were safe.
Asuka was safe.
"I guess I should thank you," I said.
Ayanami looked at me with one eye again, saying nothing.
"For saving me," I explained.
She broke her gaze once more, staring ahead. "You are a friend."
The scene shifted—to another block, another city?—as uniformed SDF members took the battle to the creatures. In silence, they fired their guns, tossed grenades, and marked hordes of creatures with lasers for distant bombardment, but it was largely for nothing. Mobs of the manlike aliens overran humvees and armored vehicles, ripping metal apart with their bare hands.
Just as one of those creatures pried open a tank hatch, I turned aside.
"What's going on here?" I muttered. "Why is this happening?"
Ayanami bowed her head. "I'm sorry. You can watch something else if you like."
"No, it's fine, really," I said, pulling on my collar and gulping. "I just wanted to know, I guess, for when I go back."
Ayanami's mouth hung open a little. "You want to go back?"
I scratched the back of my head. "Of course. Asuka's there. Misato is there. I can't leave them."
She shook her head, and she stared at the screen again. "I can't protect you indefinitely. Everything I do has a cost."
"A cost?" I said.
Ayanami waved her hand, and the scene before us shifted and blurred. An image formed of some SDF members holding a bridge against the creatures. A spray of bullets rang out; SDF members fired in bursts, but the creatures advanced anyway. One creature cleaved through an SDF member's rifle, reducing the man to firing with his pistol. From point-blank range, he fired into the creature's chest:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
And nothing happened. The creature didn't even flinch. The SDF member turned his pistol aside and fled, but the creature stabbed him in the head with its needle-like fingers, and with a cry and shriek of terror, the SDF member dissolved.
The sounds of battle faded out, rendering the remaining fight in a slideshow of light and color, nothing more.
"Do you see now?" asked Ayanami, still watching the scene.
I gulped and nodded, averting my gaze.
"If you go back," she said, "there may be others I can't save."
"So I'm supposed to stay here?" I beat my fist on the armrest. "I'm supposed to stay and wait in safety, to watch while everyone else goes to fight? No way. I know how to fight."
"Like you did just now?"
I nodded—once, twice, several times. "If that's what it takes."
At that, Ayanami hung her head, and she gripped her armrest a little tighter. "You aren't a fighter anymore. You don't have Eva to protect you. You have courage, but you don't have the means to fight."
I sighed, pressing my hands against my head. "Then what am I supposed to do?" I said.
"I don't know." She stared ahead with narrowed eyes. "I can protect you, even if you can do nothing. I can protect you, even at the cost of others. Is that what you want?"
I scoffed, looking over the scene before us. The pale creatures stalked innocent people in their homes, dissolving them at will. Creatures roamed the streets in gangs. They cast long shadows of the moon on the roads, and when those shadows passed, everything human fell apart behind them.
And Ayanami watched this unfold, unfazed and unmoved.
"This is impossible!" I said, turning away. "How can you look at that? Why even watch?"
"These are my children," she said, "and I watch over them."
I shied away from her, scooting aside in my chair. "Ayanami?"
She closed her eyes. "No."
"No?" I shuddered. "Then you are—"
Her eyes snapped to me, and my throat closed up.
"I am not the person you knew." Her tense expression melted; she broke into a smile. "But I am me. I am myself, and I am still your friend. That is my promise to you."
I looked into her eyes for a time and nodded. Ayanami hesitated for a moment before turning back to the view. In that silence, I cleared my throat, saying,
"So you watch over us, as a mother would."
She nodded.
"Then how can you stand this?" I gestured at the screen. "How can you bear to watch as people are fleeing and hiding in panic? How can you sit there as they're reduced to liquid?"
Ayanami pressed her lips together for a moment. "I'm trying to stop it."
"That's good for you, then," I said, running my fingers through my hair and staring at the ceiling. "I'm glad someone can do something about this."
"So can you." She watched me with one eye, but as soon as that red iris settled on me, I shook my head.
"No, no, absolutely not. I'm not that kind of person."
She cocked her head. "Then why do you read their letters?"
"Because they're desperate!" I slammed my fist on the armrest, and it bounced off its hinge. "They're desperate and unhappy, and why? Because I put them there!" I slapped my chest. "I put them there, and I don't have the answers to get them out." I sighed, and I buried my face in my hands. "I'm just a kid. I'm just a kid, all right? I don't have what you have; I can't do what you can do. I'm just a kid. I didn't try to make a decision for everyone else; I just wanted to do what was right for me."
"So it's not right for them?" Ayanami leaned closer, over the armrest. "They would be better off in the sea?"
I turned away. I dug my hands in my pockets and kicked at the floor, hoping there'd be some popcorn I could shuffle around, but there wasn't.
Ayanami sat back in her chair, but she was still looking at me. "I didn't ask people to look to me for guidance," she said, "but they do."
My head rose. "What are you saying?"
"People will write letters to you, whether you want them or not."
I shook my head. "The people who write to me—they don't really want letters in response."
Ayanami raised an eyebrow.
"I can't give them what they want." I threw my hands at my thighs and ran my fingers down to my knees and back again. "They want to know it's going to be all right. I can't give them that."
Ayanami turned an eye to me. "But you'd fight anyway?"
"Of course!" I said, nodding.
"Then tell them what you feel," she said, facing forward again, "and that you'd fight anyway."
I frowned. "Even though I have doubts?"
"That's the first thing you should say. They have doubts, too."
"Really?"
She nodded. "And so do I."
I sighed, and I looked up, to the dark, formless ceiling—then to the light of the projector at the back of the room. They say light gives hope, right? Perhaps that was true in the real world, but here, the projector's light left me wanting more. There was a great neutrality in it. It was whatever you wanted to make of it. It was hope and warmth if you wanted it to be. It was cold and emotionless if you feared it would be.
Maybe that was true of a lot of things. You had to make of them what you wanted to make, or else they'd turn to everything you dreaded instead.
My eyes turned forward again, to the screen—to the faded image of a city under siege, with gunfire punctuating the night.
"Ayanami," I said, "I can't stay here."
She nodded. "I know."
"Will I see you again?"
"Yes." She smiled, ever-so-slightly. "That's a promise, too."
I smiled too, but it wasn't my place to stay. Ayanami had her work to do, and so did I. I admit, though, I thought Ayanami had it easier than I did. She had power. She had the ability to see, the prescience to know what was in people's hearts. I had no such luxury.
I took one last look around the theater—the peculiar place I hoped never to visit again—and I saw something I'd missed on my first glance:
A figure in a satin hood.
It sat at the end of the row, far from us. It watched the film as well. It didn't move a muscle. It didn't say a word.
"Ayanami," I whispered, leaning closer to her, "who is that?"
"Me," she said.
I spun around, but again, Ayanami wasn't even looking at me. Her eyes were fixed on the screen.
"Pardon?" I said, incredulous.
"Someone like me," she said.
And she gripped the armrest a little tighter.
When I came to, water dripped off me. I shivered, gasping for breath. I rolled over, climbed to my feet, and beat my fist on the door.
"Hey!" I whispered, trying not to make too much noise. "Anybody in there?"
"Shinji?" That was Asuka. "You got popped, didn't you? How…?"
I shivered again. My skin was sticky; my clothes were drenched. "It's a long story," I said. "Can I come in?"
It took a little while, but our neighbors disassembled the barricade and let me sneak inside. Asuka draped me in a towel, which helped immensely. A hug on top of that wasn't unwelcome, either.
"Welcome home," she said softly, and she planted a kiss on me for good measure.
Then she made a face.
"What?" I said.
"You taste a little like blood."
"Oh, so no more kisses for me?" I complained.
She scoffed. "Please. I didn't say that."
Only Asuka could manage to kiss me, pin me against a wall, and rub my hair clean of LCL all at the same time. She was a wonder all right.
Unfortunately, she couldn't hold that kiss forever. "Okay, that'll have to do," she said when she pulled away. "We've got work to do."
I blinked. "We do?"
Asuka's eyes flickered aside, to the door on the other end of the floor. Three men were putting all their body weight against the barricade, but the pile was still sliding back in fits and spurts . We'd have to make a stand there, in the utility plant, until help arrived.
Asuka and the consumer affairs minister took the lead again, coordinating the residents in an organized defense plan—no longer would we just try to hold the creatures at bay. They were coming in, and we'd have to fight them on our turf.
That was our advantage, Asuka pointed out. We could prepare the battlefield for them.
We set up a kill zone around both the interior door (leading to the rest of the building) and the exterior door (leading to the alley outside). The bulk of the residents relocated outside the kill zone, huddling in corners or under pipes. We extinguished our lamps there, leaving only the kill zone lanterns lit: our enemies would be visible for all to see, while we lurked in the shadows.
And we armed ourselves with tools: wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, and the like. I'd left my knife outside, and no one was about to open the door to let me get it. Asuka handed me a metal-encased flashlight, instead. "Use it to surprise them," she said, "or use it as a club."
"As a club?" I said, and I swung feebly with my left arm. It wasn't a coordinated motion by any means.
"Something wrong with your other arm?" She squeezed my right shoulder, and I flinched—I flinched without pain. I opened my hand and wiggled my fingers, staring at them.
"Your arm looks good to me," said Asuka. "I guess reverting to LCL every now and then can be good for your health."
I rolled my shoulder around a bit. I switched the flashlight to my right hand and felt the weight of it. For the moment, that flashlight was nothing but a cold, useless shell of metal. There was nothing to be done with it while we sat and waited for the enemy to come.
And they did come.
They broke the door off its hinges and burst through the pile of junk. They stood strong and tall. There was something bizzarely beautiful about them. Great, hulking muscles gave them an athletic look. They were perfect physical specimens that way, and as they walked, their spongy toe-pads gave them springy, fluid steps, as though they were always in total balance.
Three creatures pushed through the barricade, and they fanned out through the kill zone. In the darkness, a group of us lay in wait as one of the creatures came our way. It tip-toed down a passage between water treatment machines, looking back and forth as it went along. Its eyes scanned back and forth—a surreal sight against the three false eyes on its facial mask. Those eyes never moved.
Not even when the creature fell flat on its face.
The creature writhed and shrieked, sloshing about on the ground. It tried vainly to scramble to its feet, but each time it tried, its toe pads slipped, kicking up dark fluid.
Ah, the wonders of machine oil, right?
The creature's two comrades raced to its aid, but they hesitated at the edge of the passageway, just outside the slick of oil. That was all the time we needed, for two of our residents lined up on the opposite end with a heavy metal bucket. Wearing thick rubber gloves, they splashed liquid down the whole passageway, and the creature fizzled and burned, and the two residents admired their work.
"Hey!" cried the cabinet minister, watching from behind. "Don't stand there and watch. Reload the drain cleaner!"
That was our work: with only a couple buckets capable of holding such corrosive chemicals, we had to be cautious. Each pair of bucket operators had a third resident to sort through drain cleaners, bleach solutions, and other industrial chemicals we had access to. These creatures were still flesh and blood, after all. They could burn and writhe just as well as we did.
But with the creature's two companions standing over their fallen comrade, the cabinet minister thrust her arm out, stopping the bucket carriers.
"Wait!" she said. "Watch what they do."
The creatures—each one indistinguishable from the others—never even made a move as their comrade shrieked and screamed in pain. Its high-pitched warbles rang through the room like a tinny piano.
The creature dissolved itself, but its LCL still bubbled as acid intermixed with it. That tinny shriek? It lingered in the room, even once the creature had gone.
And the other creatures ignored their comrade's plight. They chattered with one another in their unintelligible tongue, and they left, for a moment.
"What are they doing?" said one of the residents. "Going back outside?"
Asuka shook her head. "Don't think they're the type to say, 'Fuck it, we're outta here,' " she quipped, and she went back for another bucket.
And she was right. The creatures came back with a full wooden crate. They shoved it into the oil slick, displacing black goo from the floor. Then, they went back to the barricade for another crate.
Asuka tapped one of the chemical handlers on the shoulder and passed the bucket ahead. "When they come back with that box, hit them again."
The chemical handler nodded, and the pair took another loaded bucket, swinging it back and forth to gain momentum for the toss.
The creatures hurled another create down the passageway, and one of them leapt from dry floor to one box, to another, and across to our safe side of the passage, towering over the bucket handlers.
The rest of the residents fled, and Asuka, the cabinet minister, and I brought up the rear. "Hit it!" cried the minister. "Hit it now!"
The bucket handlers splashed the creature at point-blank range. Acid splattered everywhere, even…
Well, there's just no avoiding some of a bucket full of acid when you're splashing something right beside you. Even with rubber gloves, there's no way.
For that, I'm thankful the creature—even as the acid burned through its skin—took the time to dissolve both the bucket handlers before it melted in turn.
That's the only thing that saved us from our neighbors' screams.
After that, our carefully plotted defense effort crumbled. We fled down the passageway to another chokepoint, where the cabinet minister had set up a second oil slick. We overturned the oil and left the way behind us impassable—for a while, at least, but there was still one creature lurking. I shined my flashlight on it, and we all saw: it crossed the first slick easily, but without more boxes or other tools to get after us, it darted down another hallway, searching for a way around.
"Everybody behind the second level!" Asuka called out. "Fall back and regroup!"
"Regroup for what?" asked one of our neighbors, the man who preferred to read rather than help build the barricade. "That thing will just find another way to get at us."
"We still have plenty of drain cleaner," said the cabinet minister, her brow furrowed as she thought. "We can put together another defensive stand."
A man in our group didn't see it that way. He stopped walking.
"This is pointless," he said. "I'm tired; I'm not running anymore."
"Come on!" cried Asuka. "It's not much further!"
But the man stood firm. "I don't have to listen to you! You're not a leader, Soryu!" He glared at her, then at the cabinet minister. "And what do you know?" he demanded. "You're a politician; you deal with nutrition requirements and workplace safety rules! If we're going to be dissolved again, I'm going to meet that on my terms!"
The cabinet minister narrowed her eyes, but Asuka got a word in first.
"If you think they're going to win and give up fighting them, then they've already won!" Asuka called down the hallway. "You chose to come back, didn't you? Stand up and fight for it!"
The man snarled. "Fight for it? The way your boyfriend has? All he can do—all any of us can do—is throw ourselves at those things until they take us all out." The man met my gaze. "You know it, don't you?"
Asuka pulled on her own hair and scowled. Some others in the group started to follow the man, and they had every reason to.
"Forget about them," said the minister, turning her back on the rest. "We have to take care of ourselves now."
A pit in my throat choked me, leaving me open-mouthed and staring dumbly. I looked both ways down the hallway. I had a sense of something—of Ayanami? Was she there? Was she watching us, even then? No, there was no sign of her, but I felt Ayanami must've been there anyway. I could imagine her watching over us the way she had on that fantastic tower, the tower that didn't connect to the ground, that lay beneath a pure white sky. Her stare never wavered.
"Stop!" I shouted.
That word fell from my lips, and with it, all our neighbors stopped to look at me. The cabinet minister gaped in surprise. Even the angry man glanced at me from afar.
"Stop!" I said again. "So what if the only thing we can do is throw ourselves at those things? That doesn't make it wrong to try."
"There is no point in trying something that's futile," said the man, shaking his head and he headed further down the hall. "We can't beat them!"
"I'm not asking you to beat it," I said, storming after him. "Asuka isn't asking you to beat it. The minister isn't asking you to beat it. We're asking you to show you still believe in standing here!" I stomped my foot on the floor. "Stand here!" I said, "with your own two legs!" I clasped my hands together, begging. "As long as you believe that, then what they're doing doesn't matter. We can come back from it."
"You believe that?" asked the concerned father, scoffing. "Or are you just saying it?"
"I don't know this is better, but…" I scanned the hallway. One of the residents had left a sledgehammer behind, but it was still intact, still a good weapon. I picked up the sledgehammer and thrust it into the angry man's hands. "Take the opportunity to find out," I told him.
Asuka trotted after me. Without a word, she put a hand on my shoulder and smiled, but the other residents' reactions were mixed. Some of them shook their heads and moved on. Others, like the angry sledgehammer man, hesitated a bit.
They wouldn't have long to think about it.
"EEYAH!" A scream echoed through the halls. "They're coming through the middle passage!"
Asuka grimaced, and she drew her ball-peen hammer, raising it overhead. "All of you—come with us or go. It's up to you and what you can live with. Come on, Shinji!"
She ducked down a side passageway, hopping over a pair of ducts that ran across the path, and I went after her. We ran to the intersection of the middle passageway with this path, where the cabinet minister had another group of residents together. In the faint light of a lantern, they cowered and ran from the creature—which moved freely through the halls like a panther scouring the jungle for prey.
"Watch out!" cried one of our neighbors. "Spilled acid down there!"
Acid had eaten through one of the floor ducts, leaving an oval-shaped gap, as though a giant had bitten down and chewed on part of the tubing. Asuka sized up the gap and leapt gingerly over it, and I did the same.
Just in time to face the last creature.
"Get down!" cried Asuka.
I ducked, and the creature's needle-like fingers sank into the wall. Asuka swung her hammer head at the creature, but the beast yanked its hand free and scampered back, only to be cut off by another group of residents wielding mops and brooms. That kept the creature at some distance, but with one swipe of its claws, it shattered two broom handles, spraying us with a shower of splinters.
Even those shattered handles—they made my flashlight look pathetic by comparison. The short metal casing hardly had any reach! I looked down to the flashlight in my hand, and I laughed to myself. I laughed, and I turned the flashlight around. I fingered the rubber switch and pressed down.
That's how a human being—a thinking, rational creature—uses a tool.
A spot of light blanketed the creature, and it shied away from the beam with its arm covering its eyes.
"Everyone!" I called out. "Get some flashlights; get some light on it! Don't let it look any direction without some glare!"
At once, the dark hallways of the utility plant came to life, with beams of light criss-crossing the array of pipes, ducts, and metal walkways. From each direction, we slathered the creature in blinding, focused light, and as it cowered and shielded its eyes, our neighbors beat and stabbed the creature. It bled sticky LCL that oozed from each wound, but I kept my light on it, despite the stomach-churning image in front of me.
That was, at least, until the creature swung blindly at me, knocking my flashlight to the floor. The metal case clattered on the floor, and the light reflected harmlessly off a steel pipe. And with the light from my end pointed away, the creature lowered its arm, blinked, and saw Asuka and me clearly.
I turned to run, but I stumbled over the damaged duct on the floor. I scrambled for footing, but the creature lurched after me, its needle-like fingers shining in the others' lights.
WHAM!
A sledgehammer head bashed the creature aside, hurling it against some machinery.
"Sorry I'm late," said the angry man, resting the sledgehammer on his shoulder. "Did I miss much?"
The creature, wounded beyond saving, dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL. That didn't mean it gave up; it tried to grow back even from that state, but we threw some lye on the remains for good measure. That, we discovered, was a good way to make one of those thing stay dead.
SDF arrived not much later, bearing food, water, and canisters of sand to keep to make sure the creatures, once "killed," would never return. The SDF members swept the rest of the building for threats and stayed on the city block for the rest of the night, maintaining security and safety against the threat.
As for what that threat was, I didn't find out until morning. The power had yet to come back, but the SDF members were kind enough to give Asuka and me access to a radio once the area had been cleared. We crouched within an SDF armored vehicle and shared a headset, and that was the first time that night we heard from a friend.
"I'm sorry you've had such an eventful night," said Misato, her voice crinkling with static. "Are you both okay?"
"Shinji's better than he was before," said Asuka, poking at my shoulder. "But Misato—what about that Angel?"
"The Angel's still on the loose, spreading as many of those creatures as it can across the earth. Now that Tokyo-2 is secure, for the moment, we're getting ready to launch an operation to take that Angel down. Hopefully it won't lead to more adventures for you two."
Asuka rapped her knuckle on the radio casing. "Hopefully it does! No way we're lying down while Angels invade again! Get these people of yours to take us over there. We're helping with this. Even if I have to scrub a goddamn toilet in your base, we're helping with this."
"Is that true?" asked Misato. "Shinji, do you feel that way, too?"
A silence. Asuka looked to me, but she looked aside just as quickly. I sat back, staring through the front windows of the vehicle as the sun rose over Tokyo-2, and I frowned.
I said before that Third Impact left a scar on us. Scars don't heal completely, and I think that was true then, too. The damage we suffered from that time—from having everything inside us laid bare—could never be undone. Because of that, we'd come to expect disasters and unhappiness.
Maybe we'd become too comfortable with it—too adjusted, too well-adapted.
Maybe what we needed was the courage to make sure the next disaster never came. Either that, or the hope that we could affect the wide and inhospitable world, in spite of everything.
"Yes, Misato," I said. "Whatever I can do, I want to be a part of this."
I couldn't see Misato's face through the radio, of course, but she responded with the kind of unbridled warmth and optimism that I hadn't even realized I'd missed.
"In that case," said Misato, "let's go save the world."
The Boy Who Became a Legend
The Second Coming Part One End
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2.1 Angel Attack
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
Part Two: The Sixth Child
7. Angel Attack
You know, Nerv had to be out of their minds to trust mankind's fate to middle-schoolers like us.
We were young, damaged, sexually confused teenagers. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea who we really were or what we wanted out of life. And yet, Nerv trusted us to take care of humanity. I have to wonder: were they that desperate? Or were they looking for soldiers who still had a chance to win yet were young enough and immature enough to be controlled, or broken, when the time for Third Impact came?
Knowing my father, I can only think it was the latter, but he didn't have full control over our fates, either. Still, if you didn't live in that time, it must be unfathomable to think that we ever put humanity's future in the hands of children.
It must be even more unfathomable to think that we did it twice!
You have to realize something about children, though: I'm not sure children really understand bravery. They know the concept, and they know it's something good, but piloting Eva—it's not a snap decision. It's not something you can decide to do with courage in your heart and then be done with it. Bravery is a rush of emotion that ebbs away with time. Piloting Eva is a grind. It's not something a child can be brave for.
It's something a child convinces herself to do.
For my part, I was just floored that we still had to use children at all, but the truth of the matter sunk in as we were on the way to the bunker. Misato explained what she could over the radio, and when she told me there was another pilot—someone else like Asuka and me—I couldn't believe it. Why, after all we'd gone through, did she subject someone else to that, too?
"What would you rather do?" Misato argued, her voice tinged with static. "Would you trust all our lives to some mindless clone? I wouldn't. I admit it's difficult and painful, but I will do everything I can to shield a pilot from hardship. I do that because I'd rather put my faith in people."
People. Despite the bloody rain that had fallen on the capital, people were everywhere. Our motorcade took us past armed checkpoints with dozens of SDF members standing by. It took us by tents where thirsty civilians sought water and safety. Teams of men and women patrolled the streets, filling in puddles of LCL with sand. Survival was a cooperative effort, and all mankind was involved in it.
That was the case at our destination, as well: National Square. SDF manned several tents there for coordination and logistics, and at least three convoys of infantry and refugees arrived just while we made our way through. For the moment, our place wasn't with the refugees and aid workers. I could not help pass out water or meal packets. I was needed elsewhere.
Our escort took us to the Defense Agency building, and from there, we headed downstairs to the secret train station. The place was as inhospitable and bleak as ever. The lights in the train tunnel were as white and harsh. The SDF members who rode with us weren't very chatty, either.
"We're just here to escort you to the general, sir," said the leader.
And so we rode on, in uncomfortable silence, to the bunker with no name.
Unlike the first time Misato showed me around, that day the base was bustling. Armed guards stood watch at every stairwell entrance. Fireteams in full armor and combat gear stormed through the halls, as though they had appointments with the aliens and were running late. I can't remember the soldiers' faces, though. Like those featureless cream-colored walls, they all blended together after a while.
The busy atmosphere had taken hold in the control room, too. People shuffled in and out with binders and notebooks. Misato had a group of four staffers hanging on her every word, scribbling down orders, and flipping through pages upon pages of reports and communiques. Only when Hyuga waved for her attention did she notice we were here.
"Oh thank goodness," she said, pushing through the crowd of staffers. "Now I can do some actual work for a change. Shinji, Asuka, good to have you both helping us. Ready to stave off the end of the world?"
"Whatever it takes," said Asuka. "Where do you want us?"
"Here." That was Maya Ibuki, who offered Asuka a seat at one of the cubicles on the right side. "We'd really appreciate your help giving a pilot's insight into the technical side of things. That combination of experience is a luxury here."
Asuka took her seat and looked over the readouts. "There are only two experienced Eva pilots left in this world, so of course I'm a rare commodity. Isn't that obvious?"
Maya chuckled nervously, looking to Misato for help. Misato nodded.
"I see someone's confidence hasn't diminished," said Misato. "Hold on to that and make yourself useful. You work for me now. Understand?"
Asuka did a quick salute, even as she moved windows around on the touch-screen panels. Really, she seemed to fit rightin, while I—I was still standing up. I caught Misato's eye, and she winced.
"Sorry, Shinji. We have something in mind for you, too."
Misato handed me a headset and motioned to the back of the room, where there was an elevated platform and station. Misato sat down at that station with an array of four monitors in front of her. Hyuga and I took seats in the row just in front of her. Hyuga logged me into the system with a few keystrokes, and I plugged my headset into the front panel of the computer case. At that moment, though, the default feeds on the monitors were completely blank, save for one panel with an array of different listings: Master, Operations, Neural, and Plugcom. Each loop managed a different set of controllers and systems. Hyuga explained that I would have access only to the Operations and Plugcom loops.
"Where does Plugcom go?" I asked.
Hyuga laughed, but when he saw I was serious, he explained it simply:
"To the pilot, Shinji."
My eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets, but Hyuga put his own headset on and took his seat. That's when Misato spoke up.
"Good morning, everyone," she said, just one seat behind me. "Shall we get started?"
Her voice came through the headset just a fraction of a second after I heard her behind me. Surely there had to be some way to fix that? I fumbled through the controls looking for some setting as Misato went through numerous safety checks and status reports before launch. Everything from armor integrity to temperature regulation—the works.
Midway through the checklist, I finally heard the person on the other end of the radio loop. Misato finished checking in with the Telemetry controllers, and she looked to Hyuga and me.
"Plugcom?" she asked.
Hyuga tapped his monitor and depressed a switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, Control."
A girl's voice answered him—a steady, even bored voice. "Hi there. Oh, what was it I'm supposed to say? Hi Control? Something like that?"
Laughing, Hyuga sat back in his chair. "Something like that, yes. How are you doing?"
"I'm breathing warm liquid that smells like blood, so I think I've had better days. Can we go?"
Hyuga looked back to Misato, both of them chuckling.
"Honestly, that girl," said Misato, shaking her head, but when she flipped the switch on her headset line, she was all business, with only a hint of levity in her voice. "Plugcom is go," she said. "Give me aerial on screen one, cage on two, and launch site on three, please."
The three main screens at the front of the room flickered to life. On the far left was a plot of green lines that I couldn't quite understand, but the middle screen was a video feed of some mountainside, with a large, cleared area—a square concrete pad with a seam running down the middle. "Danger - Elevator," it read, with the words stenciled in red, but the platform opened up, revealing a shaft beneath.
And lastly, there was the Evangelion on the launch catapult.
Unit-14—a dark behemoth. Where the Eva I had known had been lithe to a fault—too tall by proportion to be truly human—Unit-14 was a shorter, burly creature. The spikes on its helmet were almost as tall as its head and neck. If my Eva and Asuka's had been like lean predators—like birds of prey, or hunting cats—Unit-14 was like an entirely different beast:
It was like a bear.
A bear in shiny, forest green armor, with only hints of black accents near its joints. Its six eyes—in two rows of three—were the only bright things about it. They glowed with a pure, searing white, a shade of white that was murderous for its penetrating power.
And the time had come for Unit-14 to kill.
"Start the clock," said Misato.
On Misato's command, one of the master clocks at the front of the room reset to thirty seconds and counted down. The controllers went through their final checks during the launch process—checking that the launcher motors had warmed up correctly and such. The digits on the clock ticked down, and when they hit zero—
SHING! The Eva vanished up the launch chute, and when the cage elevator reached the surface, it lurched slightly against the restraints, which released with explosive blasts. The Eva stumbled off the launch platform, like a child coming off an exciting ride. Well, if that child was a hulking beast looming over a mountainside, anyway.
"All right," said the pilot. "Where am I going?"
"We're getting you navigation data right now, Fourteen, standby," said Hyuga, who glanced back to Misato.
"Give her some waypoints," Misato said on the master loop. "Put navigation on one and give me target visual on two."
The first screen flickered to a topographical map with a route through the mountains back to town. The second screen changed to an airborne camera, which captured within a pair of crosshairs the Eva's target:
A massive, gyroscopic Angel.
It spun incessantly. Its outermost ring tumbled forward slowly, and then second ring turned perpendicular to it. Each ring further in spun faster than the last, to the point that the innermost rings were just blurs to human eyes, or even seemed to spin the wrong way—at least according to the camera. The Angel floated over roads and forest, with its spinning rings kicking up a breeze as it passed.
The Angel's target was an artillery battalion. Capital Perimeter Defense had started fighting back a horde of creatures along the Nagano Expressway, and the Angel flew to intercept this battle. The controllers guided the pilot to do the same.
"Defend the battalion from the Angel's attacks," said Hyuga, "and let's all go home safe."
"You're making it sound easy, Control," said the pilot.
Hyuga bowed his head and fought back a smile. "Would you like it better if we sounded more desperate down here?"
"Maybe."
The Eva lumbered toward its target at a steady pace—thump, thump, thump. It crossed rivers and valleys in deliberate, measured leaps, never seeming to exert itself, never seeming to be in a great hurry. With that deathly stare on its face, you couldn't mistake this for laziness or indifference. No, the Eva's arrival was inevitable, and as it had barreled across the countryside effortlessly, it would push through the Angel just the same.
But confident though the pilot may have been, Angels have a way of surprising you.
When the Angel approached the artillery batteries, the artillery commanders didn't even seem fazed. They kept firing off their shells, laying waste to hills and the advancing throng of creatures, of "walkers," that advanced on their position. Plane-mounted cameras showed us the creatures suffering from the bombardment. The explosions ripped their bodies apart, and when they tried to reform, another cluster of impacts would tear them back down again.
But the Angel inserted itself between the artillery and their targets. Though shells passed through gaps in its rings harmlessly, the Angel whirled and spun. It spun so fast that all its rings blurred.
To the camera's eye, even the images of clouds and mountains behind the Angel twisted and bent.
Artillery shells warped through the Angel and came back around, blasting the ground far short of their targets. And the Angel? The Angel advanced on the artillery battalion, kicking up dirt and trees in an earthen wake. The battalion retreated, turning their barrels around and breaking down the highway on their tank-like tracks.
But a fast getaway for those self-propelled howitzers was something like forty kilometers per hour. They strained and lurched for speed on the empty highway, but the Angel ground up pavement and cement bridges behind them, ripping asphalt from the ground without even touching it. One of the artillery pieces spun out, tumbling, and—
A flash!
A white, saturating flash blinded the camera, leaving only a few misplaced crosshairs behind. Static and low-frequency warblings burst through the radio, and readouts of the Eva's telemetry went blank.
"Fourteen?" cried Hyuga, pressing his headset to his ear. "Fourteen, do you read?"
The light faded, leaving a barrier of concentric octagons between the Angel's outer ring and the hand that held that ring in place:
The Eva's hand.
"I'm a little busy here, Control!" the pilot said. "Is there something you wanted to say?"
Hyuga stared at the image on the middle screen, and he shook his head. "No, Fourteen. Carry on."
The Eva punched at the AT field, but the Angel twisted and spun, wrenching itself free. Its AT field came back together whole, and it zoomed backward. Ripples of air and light coursed through the environment, and even the airborne camera wobbled as they passed by.
But as the Angel gave ground, the Eva took advantage of all the space it ceded. Unit-14 charged and leapt after the Angel with all the grace and dexterity of a circus acrobat or a ballet dancer—a strange image given the Eva's lumbering shape. As the Angel fled down the highway, the Eva gave chase, bounding over road signs and across highway dividers. It was a coordinated, deliberate pursuit.
"She's good," I said to myself.
"She'd better be," said Misato. "It'd be a shame if all that simulation time didn't translate to the real thing."
Whether in simulation or reality, the pilot knew how to fight an Angel. Hyuga sat back, scrutinizing the displays in front of him, but he said nothing. The pilot had no need of his advice or guidance. She knew the stakes, and she knew how to fight, and for the moment, Hyuga was redundant. The most he could do was sit back, watch, and hope he would be needed again, if at all.
That didn't look like it would happen soon, though. The Eva grasped at the Angel, catching the outer layer of the Angel's AT field. The pilot pushed the Eva's fingertips through the barrier, like pencils punching holes in a piece of paper, and she clawed to catch the spinning ring.
"Careful," said Hyuga. "It might have something up its sleeve this time."
But the pilot pulled the Angel in for a punch anyway, and this time, the Angel shot itself at her like a shell out of a canon.
Crack! The Angel's outer ring smashed the Eva's right forearm.
"Fracture detected!" cried one of the controllers. "Right radius, transverse open fracture."
"Right forearm armor plating displaced."
Misato rose. "How is she doing?"
Hyuga got up as well, and the two of them studied the forward projector screens together. "Fourteen, Control," said Hyuga. "Your right arm is broken. How does it feel?"
"It's not—too bad," the pilot offered through gritted teeth. "Maybe a little smashing into an easel."
"Let's take her plug depth down; ease her off the pain," said Misato.
"Let's lower the synch rate to 35%," said Maya, overseeing a group of technicians on the right side of the room. "We can then ease her back up to her normal levels over the next few minutes."
"And raise it back?" Misato shook her head. "That's not standard procedure."
"But it would help." Asuka rose from her position a few rows down. "Fighting at a low sync rate is like walking through mud. She's going to notice it, and she's not going to be as effective while that's in place, but we can reintroduce full synch and she'll hardly notice the pain. She'll be too busy to notice."
Misato frowned, so Asuka added,
"It's what I wish you guys had done when I was a pilot."
Holding on to her headset cord, Misato only looked to Maya and made her wishes known with a slight nod. "Go ahead, and let's get her on VOX. If she's straining too hard, we're aborting."
Hyuga hit the switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, we're going to have you on VOX."
The Eva chased after the Angel, making a one-handed swipe, but the Angel propelled itself free and zoomed down the road, making for the retreating artillery pieces. The Eva ran after the Angel, and the pilot grunted with each step.
"Oh, so that means I can't gripe about you guys when you're not on the line?"
"I'm afraid not," said Hyuga, who paced next to his station as he watched. "You feel all right with that arm? Well enough to continue?"
The Eva opened and closed its fist gingerly. "I guess it'll have to do," said the pilot.
Hyuga smiled. "Time for round two, then. See if you can chase it down and hold on to the AT field with both hands. I know your arm is weak, but you might be able to kick through the AT field and get some damage on that ring. All right?"
"It'll be a lot harder to get after that thing on a broken leg if this doesn't work," said the pilot.
Hyuga looked back to Misato, who only nodded. "That's a risk we'll have to take," he said.
So the Eva gave chase again, but this time, its strides weren't quite as graceful. The Eva's feet sank into the pavement in places, and it stumbled over cracks in the road. It carried on like a bull, charging toward its target with reckless abandon.
It grabbed the Angel's AT field again, but the Angel whirled and spun. Dragging space itself around it, the Angel ripped up the highway, bombarding the Eva with strips of asphalt.
"I don't think I'm holding on to this thing!" cried the pilot.
"You can," said Hyuga. "You don't need to penetrate it with your hands; just don't let it go. Kick through it."
With only one hand to hold on, the Eva raised its right leg and kicked upward, but the leg just bounced off the Angel's AT field.
And worse than that, both the Eva's legs rose from the ground as debris around the Eva rocketed upwards.
"Fourteen, let go!" Hyuga rose from his seat. "Let go, let go!"
The Angel shot for the sky with unreal speed, and though the Eva broke free, the warp of space dragged it into the clouds with the Angel. The Eva tumbled. The pilot grunted and groaned. And when the Angel spat the Eva out like a flavorless wad of gum, the Eva splatted on the side of the road, lying flat on its face.
Warning lights flashed. Alarms rang out. The controllers bombarded the master audio loop with reports.
"Multiple ribcage fractures. Upper body strength strongly compromised."
"Three armor plates displaced."
"LCL temperature up to 30C."
Misato rose from her chair. "All right, all right," she said, leaning over the table as she addressed the room. "Let's settle down, everyone. Liaison, relay to the regulars that Eva-14 is partially damaged and may not continue operations today. Systems, what can we do in the next minute or two to repair those displaced plates?"
Misato's staff worked feverishly to come up with solutions, but amid all this commotion, the pilot's labored, pained breaths came over the radio. The Eva stood up, staggering to its feet, and it set its sights on the Angel.
"Fourteen, Control. Stand by while we assess the damage."
"Damage?" the pilot said, despite her haggard breaths. "I feel fine."
"That's adrenaline. You won't feel fine in a while, and the last thing we need is for you to black out from the pain mid-battle. Stand by."
But the Eva took a tentative step, and then another. It trotted along the side of the road, building up to a sprint. In the distance, its target floated over the highway, bending the light of the setting sun into a warped ring, but the Eva gave chase.
"Fourteen! Do you read me?"
One of the controllers a few rows down looked back to Misato. "We still have her telemetry. Comms should be functional."
Misato huffed. "This isn't about the comms not working. Plugcom, give her to me, please."
Hyuga tapped one of the controls on his monitor and slid back from his station. Misato tightened her radio headset and flipped the switch to transmit.
"Fourteen, this is the General. You are ordered to stand down until further notice. Do you understand me?"
"Why? Is it that bad?"
Misato and Hyuga exchanged a glance like they'd just seen a unicorn fly through the room. "That's what we're trying to figure out!" cried Misato.
But did we have the time for that? Not really. On the far right main screen, the Angel ripped one of the artillery pieces off the highway and flung it aside like a toddler throwing away a toy. We all saw it. So did the pilot, who said,
"You guys figure it out. I feel fine."
Misato narrowed her eyes. "You operate only with this installation's consent. If you take that Eva on an unauthorized action, we will shut you down. Am I clear?"
"Do whatever you have to do."
"So be it," Misato said to herself. "All right, people, listen up! I want the tow on station in ten minutes. Commence emergency shutdown procedures and hold at S2 shutdown. Let's go!"
And so, in a flash, the pilot and her commanders lost faith in one another. The room went abuzz with controllers going over their shutdown checklists. Some of them, having little else to do, sat away from their stations. Asuka was one of those. She met my eyes from a distance and shook her head, baffled. I could only shrug.
The remaining controllers watched the battle unfold, as the pilot confronted the Angel without support. She bashed and swatted at the Angel's AT field, letting out grueling shouts and cries each time her fists failed to break through.
I turned aside, to Hyuga, and said, "She's not going to do anything that way."
Hyuga covered his microphone. "She needs to do what we were doing to begin with: hold on to it and try to break it, one AT field layer at a time."
I scoffed in frustration. "Shouldn't we tell her that, then?"
Behind me, Misato put down her headset. "You think she's going to listen?"
I spun in my chair, facing her. "I think we should try, yeah."
"Why?" Misato folded her arms. "What makes you think you can reach her now, where all other efforts have failed?"
I glanced at the middle front screen, where the Eva and Angel did battle. I closed my eyes, listening to each blow. I felt those punches as though they came from my own hands.
"Because I've been there," I said. "I know what it's like to sit in that chair."
Misato came around her table to my station. "Are you prepared to tell her that?" Misato's eyes were steady and sure; they locked me in place, and I could only look away.
"I…I guess so?" I said, retreating back in my chair.
"Show me, then." Misato clicked the Plugcom button on the transmission panel, and when the system complained, she entered her password to override it. She held up the transmission switch on my headset cord. "Ready?"
I nodded weakly, and Misato threw the switch. There was a slight hiss, and all I could get out was, "Um, hello? Pilot—Pilot, can you hear me? This is, uh, this is…"
Laughter. She was laughing at me. "I know who you are." The Eva backed off, watching the Angel but otherwise unmoving. "How long have you been there?"
"The whole time," I said.
"Really? You got some advice for me there? Here to tell me to shut up and listen or something?"
"No, I, uh—" I gulped, and I took a breath. "I just wanted to say, you're a lot braver than I was."
"You're kidding," said the pilot.
"I'm not." I scooted forward in my chair, and I leaned on the desk as I spoke to her. "I never had the courage to fight through pain. I just got too tired to take it anymore."
A brief silence. "I'm not being brave either," said the pilot. "It hurts, yeah, but so what? You guys asked me to do this job. I'm trying to do it."
"You don't have to try so hard. Really. You don't have to put it all on your shoulders." I ran my fingers through my hair, and I watched the camera views of the Eva on the front projectors—as if I could catch the pilot's eye by looking at it. "I know that trying to protect so many people is hard. I've been there. I know. Let the people here do their jobs and help you. Please."
The Eva kept its guard up, but as the Angel drifted off to chase the artillery pieces again, the Eva held fast.
"I still feel fine," said the pilot, "but what do you have for me?"
Misato sighed, and she got Hyuga's attention. "Get her on track, and we can salvage this thing."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, adjusting his headset. "All right, Fourteen. We have some procedures for you. We need you to snap your right wrist armor plates back into place. Can you do that?"
The Eva pushed the armor plates flat, and the pilot let out a noticeable hiss each time. "Okay," she answered. "Now what?"
"We're going to throttle up your sync rate to give you full functionality with that arm—as much as we can given the break. Ready?"
"Yeah, go for it."
Hyuga nodded to Asuka, and the pilot grunted.
"Okay, maybe not quite as fine!" She wiggled the Eva's fingers. "But that's a lot more responsive, sure. What do you want me to do, Control?"
"Hold that AT field with both hands and break through with whatever you have," said Hyuga, pumping his fist toward the floor.
The Eva charged down the road. As the Angel gobbled up another artillery piece and flung it around to crash, the Eva caught up and latched on to the Angel's AT field. The Eva dug its fingers into the orange barrier. The Angel lurched and threw itself against the Eva, but the pilot spun the Angel around like a matador turning away a bull.
And with a mighty yell, the Eva ripped the AT field open! It charged head-first into the exposed space!
Ka-WHONG!
The Angel's outer ring broke on the Eva's AT field; the ring shattered, showering the expressway and countryside in chunks of alien, blue-white material. The Angel flew back in a wandering, irregular path. It headed for the sky, where the Eva could not reach, and it retreated behind the clouds.
Though the technicians in the control room clapped and sat back in relief, Misato kept them all on point: "Don't celebrate yet, people. Let's keep eyes on that Angel. But Fourteen, nice work." Misato covered her microphone. "And nice work from our assistant Plugcom, as well, hm?"
It's nice to be able to celebrate a win, no matter how mild or temporary that victory may be. For the moment, the Angel fled, and since it was far out of reach of the Eva's grasp, Misato ultimately recalled Eva-14 to base. The controllers closed out their consoles.
And I? I went to visit with the pilot. That was Misato's idea, too, really. "You're going to be working together a lot, I think. Make sure some of your experience rubs off on her."
We waited outside the cage elevator—Asuka and I, that is. Asuka had a full clipboard of information from Ritsuko about working on an Eva, manning one of the technical stations, and so on.
I took one look at that stack of papers, and I offered Asuka a sympathetic smile. "You have a lot on your plate."
"Hm?" She looked up absently. "Oh, I guess I do. I can't really think about it right now, though."
I put an arm around her shoulder. "Why's that?"
Asuka looked away and sighed. "Because of the pilot, you know."
"What about her?" I asked, frowning.
Clang. The cage elevator reached our floor, and out walked the pilot. Her plugsuit was mostly white, with just a few hints of green and black around her shoulders and feet. Her hair was dark and kept in a ponytail, which extended just to her shoulders. She was somewhat short but lithe in step.
Her gray eyes flickered to Asuka. "They have you here, too?"
Asuka nodded. "Yeah. You okay?"
The pilot shrugged, and her eyes went to me. "Guess we should shake hands or something? What you said out there helped, I think. Thanks."
She offered a hand, and I took it, though my eyes went back and forth between her and Asuka.
"What am I missing here?" I said.
Asuka rubbed her temple, looking away. "Shinji, this is—"
"Nozomi." A girl in a red tie and brown vest turned the corner. Her uniform was foreign to me, but her short pigtails and freckles were unmistakable.
Her name was Hikari Horaki.
"How was it?" asked Horaki, still standing at the corner of the hallway. "Everything went well?"
"Yeah, fine," said the pilot, Nozomi, who shrugged again. "It's all fine."
Asuka let out an irritated sigh, saying,
"Shinji, this is Nozomi Horaki, Hikari's little sister."
7. Angel Attack
You know, Nerv had to be out of their minds to trust mankind's fate to middle-schoolers like us.
We were young, damaged, sexually confused teenagers. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea who we really were or what we wanted out of life. And yet, Nerv trusted us to take care of humanity. I have to wonder: were they that desperate? Or were they looking for soldiers who still had a chance to win yet were young enough and immature enough to be controlled, or broken, when the time for Third Impact came?
Knowing my father, I can only think it was the latter, but he didn't have full control over our fates, either. Still, if you didn't live in that time, it must be unfathomable to think that we ever put humanity's future in the hands of children.
It must be even more unfathomable to think that we did it twice!
You have to realize something about children, though: I'm not sure children really understand bravery. They know the concept, and they know it's something good, but piloting Eva—it's not a snap decision. It's not something you can decide to do with courage in your heart and then be done with it. Bravery is a rush of emotion that ebbs away with time. Piloting Eva is a grind. It's not something a child can be brave for.
It's something a child convinces herself to do.
For my part, I was just floored that we still had to use children at all, but the truth of the matter sunk in as we were on the way to the bunker. Misato explained what she could over the radio, and when she told me there was another pilot—someone else like Asuka and me—I couldn't believe it. Why, after all we'd gone through, did she subject someone else to that, too?
"What would you rather do?" Misato argued, her voice tinged with static. "Would you trust all our lives to some mindless clone? I wouldn't. I admit it's difficult and painful, but I will do everything I can to shield a pilot from hardship. I do that because I'd rather put my faith in people."
People. Despite the bloody rain that had fallen on the capital, people were everywhere. Our motorcade took us past armed checkpoints with dozens of SDF members standing by. It took us by tents where thirsty civilians sought water and safety. Teams of men and women patrolled the streets, filling in puddles of LCL with sand. Survival was a cooperative effort, and all mankind was involved in it.
That was the case at our destination, as well: National Square. SDF manned several tents there for coordination and logistics, and at least three convoys of infantry and refugees arrived just while we made our way through. For the moment, our place wasn't with the refugees and aid workers. I could not help pass out water or meal packets. I was needed elsewhere.
Our escort took us to the Defense Agency building, and from there, we headed downstairs to the secret train station. The place was as inhospitable and bleak as ever. The lights in the train tunnel were as white and harsh. The SDF members who rode with us weren't very chatty, either.
"We're just here to escort you to the general, sir," said the leader.
And so we rode on, in uncomfortable silence, to the bunker with no name.
Unlike the first time Misato showed me around, that day the base was bustling. Armed guards stood watch at every stairwell entrance. Fireteams in full armor and combat gear stormed through the halls, as though they had appointments with the aliens and were running late. I can't remember the soldiers' faces, though. Like those featureless cream-colored walls, they all blended together after a while.
The busy atmosphere had taken hold in the control room, too. People shuffled in and out with binders and notebooks. Misato had a group of four staffers hanging on her every word, scribbling down orders, and flipping through pages upon pages of reports and communiques. Only when Hyuga waved for her attention did she notice we were here.
"Oh thank goodness," she said, pushing through the crowd of staffers. "Now I can do some actual work for a change. Shinji, Asuka, good to have you both helping us. Ready to stave off the end of the world?"
"Whatever it takes," said Asuka. "Where do you want us?"
"Here." That was Maya Ibuki, who offered Asuka a seat at one of the cubicles on the right side. "We'd really appreciate your help giving a pilot's insight into the technical side of things. That combination of experience is a luxury here."
Asuka took her seat and looked over the readouts. "There are only two experienced Eva pilots left in this world, so of course I'm a rare commodity. Isn't that obvious?"
Maya chuckled nervously, looking to Misato for help. Misato nodded.
"I see someone's confidence hasn't diminished," said Misato. "Hold on to that and make yourself useful. You work for me now. Understand?"
Asuka did a quick salute, even as she moved windows around on the touch-screen panels. Really, she seemed to fit rightin, while I—I was still standing up. I caught Misato's eye, and she winced.
"Sorry, Shinji. We have something in mind for you, too."
Misato handed me a headset and motioned to the back of the room, where there was an elevated platform and station. Misato sat down at that station with an array of four monitors in front of her. Hyuga and I took seats in the row just in front of her. Hyuga logged me into the system with a few keystrokes, and I plugged my headset into the front panel of the computer case. At that moment, though, the default feeds on the monitors were completely blank, save for one panel with an array of different listings: Master, Operations, Neural, and Plugcom. Each loop managed a different set of controllers and systems. Hyuga explained that I would have access only to the Operations and Plugcom loops.
"Where does Plugcom go?" I asked.
Hyuga laughed, but when he saw I was serious, he explained it simply:
"To the pilot, Shinji."
My eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets, but Hyuga put his own headset on and took his seat. That's when Misato spoke up.
"Good morning, everyone," she said, just one seat behind me. "Shall we get started?"
Her voice came through the headset just a fraction of a second after I heard her behind me. Surely there had to be some way to fix that? I fumbled through the controls looking for some setting as Misato went through numerous safety checks and status reports before launch. Everything from armor integrity to temperature regulation—the works.
Midway through the checklist, I finally heard the person on the other end of the radio loop. Misato finished checking in with the Telemetry controllers, and she looked to Hyuga and me.
"Plugcom?" she asked.
Hyuga tapped his monitor and depressed a switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, Control."
A girl's voice answered him—a steady, even bored voice. "Hi there. Oh, what was it I'm supposed to say? Hi Control? Something like that?"
Laughing, Hyuga sat back in his chair. "Something like that, yes. How are you doing?"
"I'm breathing warm liquid that smells like blood, so I think I've had better days. Can we go?"
Hyuga looked back to Misato, both of them chuckling.
"Honestly, that girl," said Misato, shaking her head, but when she flipped the switch on her headset line, she was all business, with only a hint of levity in her voice. "Plugcom is go," she said. "Give me aerial on screen one, cage on two, and launch site on three, please."
The three main screens at the front of the room flickered to life. On the far left was a plot of green lines that I couldn't quite understand, but the middle screen was a video feed of some mountainside, with a large, cleared area—a square concrete pad with a seam running down the middle. "Danger - Elevator," it read, with the words stenciled in red, but the platform opened up, revealing a shaft beneath.
And lastly, there was the Evangelion on the launch catapult.
Unit-14—a dark behemoth. Where the Eva I had known had been lithe to a fault—too tall by proportion to be truly human—Unit-14 was a shorter, burly creature. The spikes on its helmet were almost as tall as its head and neck. If my Eva and Asuka's had been like lean predators—like birds of prey, or hunting cats—Unit-14 was like an entirely different beast:
It was like a bear.
A bear in shiny, forest green armor, with only hints of black accents near its joints. Its six eyes—in two rows of three—were the only bright things about it. They glowed with a pure, searing white, a shade of white that was murderous for its penetrating power.
And the time had come for Unit-14 to kill.
"Start the clock," said Misato.
On Misato's command, one of the master clocks at the front of the room reset to thirty seconds and counted down. The controllers went through their final checks during the launch process—checking that the launcher motors had warmed up correctly and such. The digits on the clock ticked down, and when they hit zero—
SHING! The Eva vanished up the launch chute, and when the cage elevator reached the surface, it lurched slightly against the restraints, which released with explosive blasts. The Eva stumbled off the launch platform, like a child coming off an exciting ride. Well, if that child was a hulking beast looming over a mountainside, anyway.
"All right," said the pilot. "Where am I going?"
"We're getting you navigation data right now, Fourteen, standby," said Hyuga, who glanced back to Misato.
"Give her some waypoints," Misato said on the master loop. "Put navigation on one and give me target visual on two."
The first screen flickered to a topographical map with a route through the mountains back to town. The second screen changed to an airborne camera, which captured within a pair of crosshairs the Eva's target:
A massive, gyroscopic Angel.
It spun incessantly. Its outermost ring tumbled forward slowly, and then second ring turned perpendicular to it. Each ring further in spun faster than the last, to the point that the innermost rings were just blurs to human eyes, or even seemed to spin the wrong way—at least according to the camera. The Angel floated over roads and forest, with its spinning rings kicking up a breeze as it passed.
The Angel's target was an artillery battalion. Capital Perimeter Defense had started fighting back a horde of creatures along the Nagano Expressway, and the Angel flew to intercept this battle. The controllers guided the pilot to do the same.
"Defend the battalion from the Angel's attacks," said Hyuga, "and let's all go home safe."
"You're making it sound easy, Control," said the pilot.
Hyuga bowed his head and fought back a smile. "Would you like it better if we sounded more desperate down here?"
"Maybe."
The Eva lumbered toward its target at a steady pace—thump, thump, thump. It crossed rivers and valleys in deliberate, measured leaps, never seeming to exert itself, never seeming to be in a great hurry. With that deathly stare on its face, you couldn't mistake this for laziness or indifference. No, the Eva's arrival was inevitable, and as it had barreled across the countryside effortlessly, it would push through the Angel just the same.
But confident though the pilot may have been, Angels have a way of surprising you.
When the Angel approached the artillery batteries, the artillery commanders didn't even seem fazed. They kept firing off their shells, laying waste to hills and the advancing throng of creatures, of "walkers," that advanced on their position. Plane-mounted cameras showed us the creatures suffering from the bombardment. The explosions ripped their bodies apart, and when they tried to reform, another cluster of impacts would tear them back down again.
But the Angel inserted itself between the artillery and their targets. Though shells passed through gaps in its rings harmlessly, the Angel whirled and spun. It spun so fast that all its rings blurred.
To the camera's eye, even the images of clouds and mountains behind the Angel twisted and bent.
Artillery shells warped through the Angel and came back around, blasting the ground far short of their targets. And the Angel? The Angel advanced on the artillery battalion, kicking up dirt and trees in an earthen wake. The battalion retreated, turning their barrels around and breaking down the highway on their tank-like tracks.
But a fast getaway for those self-propelled howitzers was something like forty kilometers per hour. They strained and lurched for speed on the empty highway, but the Angel ground up pavement and cement bridges behind them, ripping asphalt from the ground without even touching it. One of the artillery pieces spun out, tumbling, and—
A flash!
A white, saturating flash blinded the camera, leaving only a few misplaced crosshairs behind. Static and low-frequency warblings burst through the radio, and readouts of the Eva's telemetry went blank.
"Fourteen?" cried Hyuga, pressing his headset to his ear. "Fourteen, do you read?"
The light faded, leaving a barrier of concentric octagons between the Angel's outer ring and the hand that held that ring in place:
The Eva's hand.
"I'm a little busy here, Control!" the pilot said. "Is there something you wanted to say?"
Hyuga stared at the image on the middle screen, and he shook his head. "No, Fourteen. Carry on."
The Eva punched at the AT field, but the Angel twisted and spun, wrenching itself free. Its AT field came back together whole, and it zoomed backward. Ripples of air and light coursed through the environment, and even the airborne camera wobbled as they passed by.
But as the Angel gave ground, the Eva took advantage of all the space it ceded. Unit-14 charged and leapt after the Angel with all the grace and dexterity of a circus acrobat or a ballet dancer—a strange image given the Eva's lumbering shape. As the Angel fled down the highway, the Eva gave chase, bounding over road signs and across highway dividers. It was a coordinated, deliberate pursuit.
"She's good," I said to myself.
"She'd better be," said Misato. "It'd be a shame if all that simulation time didn't translate to the real thing."
Whether in simulation or reality, the pilot knew how to fight an Angel. Hyuga sat back, scrutinizing the displays in front of him, but he said nothing. The pilot had no need of his advice or guidance. She knew the stakes, and she knew how to fight, and for the moment, Hyuga was redundant. The most he could do was sit back, watch, and hope he would be needed again, if at all.
That didn't look like it would happen soon, though. The Eva grasped at the Angel, catching the outer layer of the Angel's AT field. The pilot pushed the Eva's fingertips through the barrier, like pencils punching holes in a piece of paper, and she clawed to catch the spinning ring.
"Careful," said Hyuga. "It might have something up its sleeve this time."
But the pilot pulled the Angel in for a punch anyway, and this time, the Angel shot itself at her like a shell out of a canon.
Crack! The Angel's outer ring smashed the Eva's right forearm.
"Fracture detected!" cried one of the controllers. "Right radius, transverse open fracture."
"Right forearm armor plating displaced."
Misato rose. "How is she doing?"
Hyuga got up as well, and the two of them studied the forward projector screens together. "Fourteen, Control," said Hyuga. "Your right arm is broken. How does it feel?"
"It's not—too bad," the pilot offered through gritted teeth. "Maybe a little smashing into an easel."
"Let's take her plug depth down; ease her off the pain," said Misato.
"Let's lower the synch rate to 35%," said Maya, overseeing a group of technicians on the right side of the room. "We can then ease her back up to her normal levels over the next few minutes."
"And raise it back?" Misato shook her head. "That's not standard procedure."
"But it would help." Asuka rose from her position a few rows down. "Fighting at a low sync rate is like walking through mud. She's going to notice it, and she's not going to be as effective while that's in place, but we can reintroduce full synch and she'll hardly notice the pain. She'll be too busy to notice."
Misato frowned, so Asuka added,
"It's what I wish you guys had done when I was a pilot."
Holding on to her headset cord, Misato only looked to Maya and made her wishes known with a slight nod. "Go ahead, and let's get her on VOX. If she's straining too hard, we're aborting."
Hyuga hit the switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, we're going to have you on VOX."
The Eva chased after the Angel, making a one-handed swipe, but the Angel propelled itself free and zoomed down the road, making for the retreating artillery pieces. The Eva ran after the Angel, and the pilot grunted with each step.
"Oh, so that means I can't gripe about you guys when you're not on the line?"
"I'm afraid not," said Hyuga, who paced next to his station as he watched. "You feel all right with that arm? Well enough to continue?"
The Eva opened and closed its fist gingerly. "I guess it'll have to do," said the pilot.
Hyuga smiled. "Time for round two, then. See if you can chase it down and hold on to the AT field with both hands. I know your arm is weak, but you might be able to kick through the AT field and get some damage on that ring. All right?"
"It'll be a lot harder to get after that thing on a broken leg if this doesn't work," said the pilot.
Hyuga looked back to Misato, who only nodded. "That's a risk we'll have to take," he said.
So the Eva gave chase again, but this time, its strides weren't quite as graceful. The Eva's feet sank into the pavement in places, and it stumbled over cracks in the road. It carried on like a bull, charging toward its target with reckless abandon.
It grabbed the Angel's AT field again, but the Angel whirled and spun. Dragging space itself around it, the Angel ripped up the highway, bombarding the Eva with strips of asphalt.
"I don't think I'm holding on to this thing!" cried the pilot.
"You can," said Hyuga. "You don't need to penetrate it with your hands; just don't let it go. Kick through it."
With only one hand to hold on, the Eva raised its right leg and kicked upward, but the leg just bounced off the Angel's AT field.
And worse than that, both the Eva's legs rose from the ground as debris around the Eva rocketed upwards.
"Fourteen, let go!" Hyuga rose from his seat. "Let go, let go!"
The Angel shot for the sky with unreal speed, and though the Eva broke free, the warp of space dragged it into the clouds with the Angel. The Eva tumbled. The pilot grunted and groaned. And when the Angel spat the Eva out like a flavorless wad of gum, the Eva splatted on the side of the road, lying flat on its face.
Warning lights flashed. Alarms rang out. The controllers bombarded the master audio loop with reports.
"Multiple ribcage fractures. Upper body strength strongly compromised."
"Three armor plates displaced."
"LCL temperature up to 30C."
Misato rose from her chair. "All right, all right," she said, leaning over the table as she addressed the room. "Let's settle down, everyone. Liaison, relay to the regulars that Eva-14 is partially damaged and may not continue operations today. Systems, what can we do in the next minute or two to repair those displaced plates?"
Misato's staff worked feverishly to come up with solutions, but amid all this commotion, the pilot's labored, pained breaths came over the radio. The Eva stood up, staggering to its feet, and it set its sights on the Angel.
"Fourteen, Control. Stand by while we assess the damage."
"Damage?" the pilot said, despite her haggard breaths. "I feel fine."
"That's adrenaline. You won't feel fine in a while, and the last thing we need is for you to black out from the pain mid-battle. Stand by."
But the Eva took a tentative step, and then another. It trotted along the side of the road, building up to a sprint. In the distance, its target floated over the highway, bending the light of the setting sun into a warped ring, but the Eva gave chase.
"Fourteen! Do you read me?"
One of the controllers a few rows down looked back to Misato. "We still have her telemetry. Comms should be functional."
Misato huffed. "This isn't about the comms not working. Plugcom, give her to me, please."
Hyuga tapped one of the controls on his monitor and slid back from his station. Misato tightened her radio headset and flipped the switch to transmit.
"Fourteen, this is the General. You are ordered to stand down until further notice. Do you understand me?"
"Why? Is it that bad?"
Misato and Hyuga exchanged a glance like they'd just seen a unicorn fly through the room. "That's what we're trying to figure out!" cried Misato.
But did we have the time for that? Not really. On the far right main screen, the Angel ripped one of the artillery pieces off the highway and flung it aside like a toddler throwing away a toy. We all saw it. So did the pilot, who said,
"You guys figure it out. I feel fine."
Misato narrowed her eyes. "You operate only with this installation's consent. If you take that Eva on an unauthorized action, we will shut you down. Am I clear?"
"Do whatever you have to do."
"So be it," Misato said to herself. "All right, people, listen up! I want the tow on station in ten minutes. Commence emergency shutdown procedures and hold at S2 shutdown. Let's go!"
And so, in a flash, the pilot and her commanders lost faith in one another. The room went abuzz with controllers going over their shutdown checklists. Some of them, having little else to do, sat away from their stations. Asuka was one of those. She met my eyes from a distance and shook her head, baffled. I could only shrug.
The remaining controllers watched the battle unfold, as the pilot confronted the Angel without support. She bashed and swatted at the Angel's AT field, letting out grueling shouts and cries each time her fists failed to break through.
I turned aside, to Hyuga, and said, "She's not going to do anything that way."
Hyuga covered his microphone. "She needs to do what we were doing to begin with: hold on to it and try to break it, one AT field layer at a time."
I scoffed in frustration. "Shouldn't we tell her that, then?"
Behind me, Misato put down her headset. "You think she's going to listen?"
I spun in my chair, facing her. "I think we should try, yeah."
"Why?" Misato folded her arms. "What makes you think you can reach her now, where all other efforts have failed?"
I glanced at the middle front screen, where the Eva and Angel did battle. I closed my eyes, listening to each blow. I felt those punches as though they came from my own hands.
"Because I've been there," I said. "I know what it's like to sit in that chair."
Misato came around her table to my station. "Are you prepared to tell her that?" Misato's eyes were steady and sure; they locked me in place, and I could only look away.
"I…I guess so?" I said, retreating back in my chair.
"Show me, then." Misato clicked the Plugcom button on the transmission panel, and when the system complained, she entered her password to override it. She held up the transmission switch on my headset cord. "Ready?"
I nodded weakly, and Misato threw the switch. There was a slight hiss, and all I could get out was, "Um, hello? Pilot—Pilot, can you hear me? This is, uh, this is…"
Laughter. She was laughing at me. "I know who you are." The Eva backed off, watching the Angel but otherwise unmoving. "How long have you been there?"
"The whole time," I said.
"Really? You got some advice for me there? Here to tell me to shut up and listen or something?"
"No, I, uh—" I gulped, and I took a breath. "I just wanted to say, you're a lot braver than I was."
"You're kidding," said the pilot.
"I'm not." I scooted forward in my chair, and I leaned on the desk as I spoke to her. "I never had the courage to fight through pain. I just got too tired to take it anymore."
A brief silence. "I'm not being brave either," said the pilot. "It hurts, yeah, but so what? You guys asked me to do this job. I'm trying to do it."
"You don't have to try so hard. Really. You don't have to put it all on your shoulders." I ran my fingers through my hair, and I watched the camera views of the Eva on the front projectors—as if I could catch the pilot's eye by looking at it. "I know that trying to protect so many people is hard. I've been there. I know. Let the people here do their jobs and help you. Please."
The Eva kept its guard up, but as the Angel drifted off to chase the artillery pieces again, the Eva held fast.
"I still feel fine," said the pilot, "but what do you have for me?"
Misato sighed, and she got Hyuga's attention. "Get her on track, and we can salvage this thing."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, adjusting his headset. "All right, Fourteen. We have some procedures for you. We need you to snap your right wrist armor plates back into place. Can you do that?"
The Eva pushed the armor plates flat, and the pilot let out a noticeable hiss each time. "Okay," she answered. "Now what?"
"We're going to throttle up your sync rate to give you full functionality with that arm—as much as we can given the break. Ready?"
"Yeah, go for it."
Hyuga nodded to Asuka, and the pilot grunted.
"Okay, maybe not quite as fine!" She wiggled the Eva's fingers. "But that's a lot more responsive, sure. What do you want me to do, Control?"
"Hold that AT field with both hands and break through with whatever you have," said Hyuga, pumping his fist toward the floor.
The Eva charged down the road. As the Angel gobbled up another artillery piece and flung it around to crash, the Eva caught up and latched on to the Angel's AT field. The Eva dug its fingers into the orange barrier. The Angel lurched and threw itself against the Eva, but the pilot spun the Angel around like a matador turning away a bull.
And with a mighty yell, the Eva ripped the AT field open! It charged head-first into the exposed space!
Ka-WHONG!
The Angel's outer ring broke on the Eva's AT field; the ring shattered, showering the expressway and countryside in chunks of alien, blue-white material. The Angel flew back in a wandering, irregular path. It headed for the sky, where the Eva could not reach, and it retreated behind the clouds.
Though the technicians in the control room clapped and sat back in relief, Misato kept them all on point: "Don't celebrate yet, people. Let's keep eyes on that Angel. But Fourteen, nice work." Misato covered her microphone. "And nice work from our assistant Plugcom, as well, hm?"
It's nice to be able to celebrate a win, no matter how mild or temporary that victory may be. For the moment, the Angel fled, and since it was far out of reach of the Eva's grasp, Misato ultimately recalled Eva-14 to base. The controllers closed out their consoles.
And I? I went to visit with the pilot. That was Misato's idea, too, really. "You're going to be working together a lot, I think. Make sure some of your experience rubs off on her."
We waited outside the cage elevator—Asuka and I, that is. Asuka had a full clipboard of information from Ritsuko about working on an Eva, manning one of the technical stations, and so on.
I took one look at that stack of papers, and I offered Asuka a sympathetic smile. "You have a lot on your plate."
"Hm?" She looked up absently. "Oh, I guess I do. I can't really think about it right now, though."
I put an arm around her shoulder. "Why's that?"
Asuka looked away and sighed. "Because of the pilot, you know."
"What about her?" I asked, frowning.
Clang. The cage elevator reached our floor, and out walked the pilot. Her plugsuit was mostly white, with just a few hints of green and black around her shoulders and feet. Her hair was dark and kept in a ponytail, which extended just to her shoulders. She was somewhat short but lithe in step.
Her gray eyes flickered to Asuka. "They have you here, too?"
Asuka nodded. "Yeah. You okay?"
The pilot shrugged, and her eyes went to me. "Guess we should shake hands or something? What you said out there helped, I think. Thanks."
She offered a hand, and I took it, though my eyes went back and forth between her and Asuka.
"What am I missing here?" I said.
Asuka rubbed her temple, looking away. "Shinji, this is—"
"Nozomi." A girl in a red tie and brown vest turned the corner. Her uniform was foreign to me, but her short pigtails and freckles were unmistakable.
Her name was Hikari Horaki.
"How was it?" asked Horaki, still standing at the corner of the hallway. "Everything went well?"
"Yeah, fine," said the pilot, Nozomi, who shrugged again. "It's all fine."
Asuka let out an irritated sigh, saying,
"Shinji, this is Nozomi Horaki, Hikari's little sister."
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2.2 Character Sketch
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
8. Character Sketch
As a pilot, I didn't have to deal with family constantly worried about my wellbeing. I had family near me, but worrying about me was the last thing my father would've done. Though Misato tried to fill that gap in my life, I don't think I truly appreciated that at the time.
And there's still some difference, I think, between people you have to get to know and those you've known all your life. They worry about you and look after you somewhat differently. There are things only families know—that only people who live with you for years and years could ever know.
Asuka had the same experience. We were both kept away from the people we'd grown up with. And Ayanami? She didn't have any real family at all.
So I think you can imagine my discomfort, then, as I sat in a conference room with the Horaki sisters.
The head of the family was the eldest sister, Kodama Horaki. She sat at one end of the table, and with a notepad in hand, she followed everything Misato said. Kodama was a reporter, and she certainly looked the part. She was dressed precisely, in professional attire, and not a hair was out of place on her head.
Kodama grilled Misato about the nature of Nozomi's involvement in piloting. Up to this point, Nozomi had been involved only in "simulations."
"General," Kodama began, "under what authority did you recruit my sister for simulations that actually had to do with Eva piloting, and not virtual reality research?"
Misato fielded the question with composure, not even missing a beat. "The prime minister's authority," she said, sitting at the other end of the table with folders and notepads laid out in front of her. "If you like, you can ask him yourself. Shall I tell him you're having doubts about your sister's role in saving all of mankind?"
"Now, General, that's not what I said. I'm happy to see Nozomi take up this duty, but nevertheless…" Kodama glared over the rims of her glasses. "…you've deceived us, General."
Misato shrugged that cold stare off with a slight laugh, and though she continued to try to assuage Kodama's concerns, the eldest sister wasn't totally buying it. Finally, after several minutes of them going back and forth, Misato had to concede some defeat.
"Look," she said at last, "I'm afraid such secrecy was necessary. The last thing we wanted was word of the project leaking out. It's our best frontline weapon."
At that, the middle sister—Hikari Horaki—spoke up, watching Misato with a sidelong glance. "And that's where you plan for Nozomi to be—at the front lines."
Misato nodded. "There's no other place an Eva can be. Someone has to take the lead."
That didn't sit well with Hikari Horaki; the disquiet was all over her face. To tell the truth, it surprised me a little. The Horaki I'd known back in Tokyo-2 had been quite commanding. That had been fitting of her role as class president. I'd come to know Horaki a bit more on a personal level since then—usually, it would be four or five of us, with Asuka, Toji, and Kensuke rounding out the gang—and I'd seen that she wasn't so domineering in her personal life. At least, she wasn't so domineering when Toji was well-behaved.
But professionally? She was still a taskmaster. I'll never forget the party she'd planned for Aunt Kyoko's birthday the year before. Horaki put us through hell to make sure it was perfect.
That's why I was a bit surprised to see Horaki so pensive and measured at the meeting. She thought about what Misato had said before asking,
"There are no other candidates? Didn't you have clones or something?"
"The dummy plugs have…problems." Misato glanced at me, then back at Horaki. "You could ask around about that," she said. "I think it best not to get into it."
"I see." Horaki's jaw clenched, and her eyes flickered past all of us to the back wall. "Even so…" She looked across the table.
At Asuka.
"Is this something a person can handle, all by herself?" asked Horaki. "I've seen what this can do to pilots."
Asuka winced, and she waved her hands around, trying to put Horaki at ease. "This is different, really! Those old guys wanted us broken at the end. Misato isn't like that."
"Still," said Horaki, her gaze growing more composed and sharper by the second, "you're asking Nozomi to fight things that don't belong in this world. How can you be sure this will turn out any different from before?" Horaki glanced aside. "Nozomi, do you want to say something about this?"
Three seats away from anyone else at the table sat Nozomi. She had her knees up, cradling a large pad of unruled paper. She scribbled away at the pages without even looking up, saying,
"I dunno, do I?"
Everyone at the table stared.
With a slight laugh, Misato tried to regain control of the meeting. "At any rate, let me be clear about one thing." She leaned forward, folding her hands, and caught both Horaki and Kodama's eyes. "I understand perfectly the level of sacrifice and hardship we're asking of your family, and of Nozomi. I would not ask it if I did not think Nozomi could handle it, nor if I thought it unnecessary to help protect what little we've managed to rebuild. It's my hope we can make this as painless as possible for the days and weeks to come."
" 'Weeks'?" Horaki raised an eyebrow. "You think it'll take weeks to defeat that Angel?"
"Not that one, no." Misato clicked on a monitor behind her, and with a wireless keyboard and mouse, she brought up an image—an image of deep space, with stars in the background and a white-hot spherical blob.
There was something else out there—something in the Oort Cloud, where asteroids and comets live. And like the Angel that Nozomi had just fought, this thing was coming from outer space for us, too.
"So you see, we need a willing pilot and a family who will support her," said Misato as she flipped through various images of the object. "Nozomi is the best candidate we have. Her simulation scores top the group, and as you've seen, her feel for piloting Eva in combat is sound. All I need from you is your approval to make Nozomi the pilot on a permanent basis going forward."
Kodama frowned. With a sigh, she put her notepad and pen aside and leaned forward, looking down the table to Nozomi. "How do you really feel about doing this?"
The youngest sister flipped a sheet of paper around and shrugged. "Somebody's gotta do it, right?"
Hikari Horaki gaped. "Nozomi, this isn't about other people. This is about you. Do you want to pilot that thing?"
Still, Nozomi was not looking as she answered. "Would anyone in their right mind want to pilot it?"
It was hard to argue with that.
"It'll be fine," said Nozomi, sketching away at her pad on her knees. "Don't worry about it."
Nozomi wasn't the only one who had a job to do. Misato set up Asuka with Maya to learn the ropes of managing an Eva's technical systems. Hyuga coordinated our efforts with the rest of SDF, supplying an update on the Angel's position and trajectory.
The Horaki family went on their way, of course, with Nozomi last to go. That left only Misato and me, and I was fairly sure she already had a job, unlike me. As she scribbled on some forms and paperwork, Misato cracked a smile.
"It's quite a thing, isn't it?" she said.
I hovered in the doorway, mouth half-open. "I'm sorry?"
"What we're doing here. Hundreds of people all bound together by a singular purpose—really makes you appreciate the magnitude of what's being done, don't you think?"
"I guess," I said with a shrug.
"Such enthusiasm!" cried Misato, shaking her head. "You came to me asking to be a part of this."
"After you asked me first," I said, narrowing my eyes.
"Even so, there's no need to be skittish now. Take the bull by the horns, like you did this morning."
"How am I supposed to do that?"
Raising an eyebrow, she put her pen down. "Do exactly what you did for Nozomi earlier: be a guide, a role model—"
"Me?" I shook my head.
Misato shrugged. "It's you or Asuka. I don't think Rei's in any position to show her the ropes."
I looked away. "Still…"
Misato collected some folders in her hands, and she smiled again. "You're not alone here. We'll all have a hand in supporting Nozomi throughout. There are only two human beings left in this world who know the kinds of horrors Nozomi will endure."
"Two?" I frowned, and I started counting out on my hands. Nozomi was the sixth, Ayanami and Kaworu weren't around. If I hadn't completely forgotten my arithmetic, six minus three makes three.
Misato laughed, ceding the point. "I think he's suffered enough, yes?"
"And I haven't?" I said.
Flushing a bit, Misato continued on. "There are only two human beings left in this world who know the kinds of horrors Nozomi will endure long-term. You're one of them. Believe me—no, believe in the me who believes in you."
"You're too old to be quoting something like that," I said.
Her mouth hung open, and I could feel her irritation rising like a lava flow in a volcano. "However young I may be," she said, "that doesn't make me wrong, you know."
I rubbed my temple and sighed. "What do you need me to do?"
Beaming, Misato scribbled something else on a form and slid the paper across the table. "Take this to the security station in building four, and they'll give you a keycard."
"Why? For what?"
"For your office."
I can't say I thought I'd have my own office before graduating high school, before getting a job of my own, but that's what Misato gave me: an office with a metal desk, with two widescreen monitors casting the room in a faint blue glow.
It was a stark place, to be sure—there were no windows that far underground. But that was fine, really. The place wasn't meant to be comfortable. Aside from the main chair behind the desk, there was only one other chair. The office wasn't designed for many guests.
No, it was a place for doing work, and Misato had left me a great deal. A stack of manilla folders had taken root on the desk corner, and if I left it alone, it could easily grow to dwarf me. Aside from that, I took a look at the computer, which showed a list of hundreds of reports, graphs, plots, and studies—all about the pilot candidates, of course.
You see, Nozomi wasn't the only candidate. Far from it: Misato had rounded up almost a dozen children, all with desperate families in need of the financial support SDF could give. The names on those reports were depressingly familiar to me: Horaki, Suzuhara, and so on—all classmates of mine back in Tokyo-3. What kind of people did we have to be, to rely on the siblings of those who had already seen hell come to their doorsteps?
Desperate people, perhaps. In desperation, these children had become pilot candidates for money. Misato had involved them in regular simulations—walking, running, jumping, navigation of terrain, and the like—for the better part of a year. She knew these children better than she knew me, I expected. And more than just simulation results, Misato had compiled in-depth personality analyses and background material. She knew each child's favorite foods or which after-school clubs they attended.
All this she had done for the sake of putting the best pilot in the entry plug, and the best of them was Nozomi.
I pulled up her file, and right away, the girl's straight-ahead stare pinned me to my seat. It was just a photograph, but there was an edge to her look somehow, as though she could pierce me with just a glance. There was no arrogance or disdain in her eyes—no, it was more like the discerning gaze of a scientist or a security guard.
Or an artist. Yes, Nozomi was an artist. She belonged to the Art Club at her school, though the reports in front of me said that she hadn't made many friends there and was somewhat at odds with the club leadership. How they found that out I'll never know—did they plant agents in the school just to watch her?
Equally as strained was Nozomi's relationship with her family. Her eldest sister was an overworked journalist. The middle sister was in charge of the house. By all accounts, Nozomi shared few interests with the two of them.
And yet there she was—not just an Eva pilot, but a willing one. She hadn't yet hesitated. When more than a few people had gone back to the sea willingly, Nozomi not only stayed in this world but worked to defend it. It wasn't like her sisters' love rode on it—they didn't want her to pilot in the first place. But she wanted to be a pilot anyway.
To be honest, I began to feel Misato was mistaken. I couldn't be of much help to someone like Nozomi. She already had everything important figured out. She didn't need people to inspire her to fight. Maybe she'd benefit from a little advice on how best to pilot an Eva, but if that were all, I wouldn't end up with much to do.
And maybe that was for the best. I could sit back and let Hyuga and Misato do most of the work. If I made a small but positive contribution to the effort, no one would think any less of me. They weren't expecting me to change the face of this battle. Misato had been prepared to go on without me, after all. That I'd become involved at all—it was a courtesy.
I wasn't really needed at all.
And everything about that office was just decoration meant to hide the fact. When you give a person shiny monitors and 3d glasses, you're just giving them distractions. What matters are the words on a page, not what jazzes up their delivery. Tricks like those don't mean anything.
And the person who uses those gadgets and toys? He's insignificant, too, so long as he relies on them to do work in his place.
Or as long as he relies on other people to tell him about the girl he's supposed to guide.
Things weren't really back to normal in Tokyo-2 until a few days later. SDF crews roamed the streets, with combat engineers vacuuming up puddles of LCL or filling them in with sand. But cars rolled by, their drivers oblivious to the work being done, and the trains were back on schedule. There was no more sign of the Angel in Japan, and if you looked to the sky, you wouldn't have seen anything unusual. Clouds raced past without incident, and the gaps between them were as blue as ever.
I know because I did a lot of looking at the sky. Most middle schools don't have a place for visitors to be entertained.
When it was safe enough, and when the schools were open again, I took an afternoon to myself and headed to the town of Toyoshina. If you're not familiar with the area, Toyoshina was about ten kilometers north of downtown Tokyo-2. Back before Third Impact, Toyoshina had been a bustling community, all the more when refugees from Tokyo-3 came to the capital, looking for a place to stay.
That's why, as incongruous as it seemed, the Horaki family had come to settle down amid farmland.
The outskirts of Toyoshina had been part of the rice bowl of Nagano Prefecture, at least before Third Impact anyway. The middle of town was no different from Tokyo-2, really, but there was a clear dividing line between civilization and the sticks. That line was a mostly east-west road that set off Toyoshina proper from North Toyoshina—where the rice paddies began.
Or, I should say, where they used to begin. In the days since Third Impact, the paddies had become overrun with weeds—that was if they let anything grow at all. Without regular irrigation, many of the paddies had dried up, leaving only parched, cracking soil behind.
It was in front of one barren rice paddy that I waited, across the road from North Toyoshina Middle School. The road going by the school was cracked and uneven. The hedges in front were a sickly brown and unkempt. The white walls of the main building had yellow stains running from the roof, and the windows showed spots from a rainstorm.
I'd taken care to be early—enough not to miss anyone. Students trickled out of the school building as their clubs finished business, but they were few and far between. No more than two or three at a time left through the main gate, and they trudged from the building in slow motion—as though their bags were heavy, too full of books. Then again, even the ones with little to carry were lethargic, wading up the street as though the air were full of syrup.
Their eyes were dull and unresponsive, too. One of the students looked right at me and said,
"Aren't you a little old to have a girlfriend here?"
That was one of the few times I was sad to be unrecognized.
It was that way for about an hour and a half—I didn't see a single familiar face. By that point, I'd worn out the grass on the side of the road, and I'd had enough of that, so I headed away.
I trekked down road toward the train station, running across the only car I'd seen all afternoon: a white van with darkened windows.
I approached the van, tapping my knuckle on the window, and the driver rolled the window down. He was dressed inconspicuously, with a black buttoned shirt and black pants.
"Is something wrong?" he said.
"No, no. I was just wondering—do your people know where she is?"
The driver knocked on the divider that separated the front and rear compartments. "Open up the back," he called out. "He's taking a ride with us."
Unlike the driver, the personnel in the rear of the van openly wore green GSDF uniforms. They toiled over laptops with headsets, monitoring camera footage from the van and elsewhere. They were polite, offering me a seat while we were underway, but they didn't say much. They had jobs to do, after all. They couldn't afford to spend hours of their lives doing nothing.
The security detail drove me about a kilometer west, to a bridge over a small stream. There were other bridges in the area—for other roads, and a separate bridge for the nearby train line.
It was under the train tracks, about a hundred meters downstream, that Nozomi Horaki sat. The van stopped at the side of the road, and I headed down the sloped channel on my own. I liked to think Nozomi wouldn't notice me, but without even looking up, she said,
"You know, people are gonna get the wrong idea about you if you corner a girl under a bridge."
"That—that's not what I'm doing!" I said, putting my hands up.
"It's not?" She put her pencil down and shot me a knowing look. "You come all the way from Tokyo-2. You get your SDF friends to spy on me so you can figure out where I've gone. Isn't that what's happening here?"
I glanced up, out of the V-shaped channel. Another white van sat on the side of the road.
"No, because SDF was already watching you. I only asked them where you went."
At that, Nozomi huffed, shaking her head. "That's not a defense."
"I need a defense now?"
She shrugged. "I dunno, do you?"
I sat in the shadow of the railroad bridge, and Nozomi paid me no mind. She sat with her knees up, resting a pad on them as she sketched. The scene was the view downstream. We sat just low enough in the channel that most of the surrounding area was out of sight. Only the overgrown channel and stream were clear in the sketch. Everything beyond—farmhouses, and the like—disappeared from view. Only a few stray power lines hinted at what lay beyond.
I peered at the sketch once more and said, "So you like realistic art?"
"Sometimes," she said, focusing her attention on a flowery weed at the water's edge. "You can't be too realistic—you can't capture everything with pencil strokes, but you can get most of a scene. You can capture the essence of it well enough."
"What essence is that?" I asked.
She shot me a curious look. "Are you asking an artist what her work means?"
"Ah, uh…" I pulled at my collar and gulped. "It, uh—it seems like the thing to do, if you can't make sense of it otherwise." I nodded to myself. "Maybe I'm just really untrained in what it means to appreciate art, but if you asked me to look at that sketch right now, I'd say it's a pretty faithful recreation of the real world. That's all I could tell you."
She laid her pencil flat on the pad, holding it place with her thumb, and she looked at me. "You've never been into art, huh? Not even just a little?"
"Not visual arts, no. I did music when I was younger—cello, mostly. I can't say I had a feel for what music should feel like, just the technical aspects. I knew how to play, but not how to perform, I guess?" I laughed, scratching the back of my head. "So I'd appreciate it, if you could help me understand even a little."
She eyed me sidelong. "I can tell you about art, but only if you tell me something in return."
I winced.
"Relax," she said, scooting closer to me. She tucked her pencil into the spiral binding of her pad, and she flipped back a few pages. "What do you see?"
A bed of flowers, lining the side of a gravel path. Some bungie cord held a bicycle to a nearby tree. It was a picturesque scene, with dozens of six-petaled flowers in bloom. Pencil strokes captured even the central stripe on each petal, giving them definition and detail.
"A beautiful scene," I said.
"Right? You wouldn't want to miss out on that, right? If you knew it existed, you'd want to see it, wouldn't you?"
"Of course."
Nozomi rose, and she tucked her sketchpad under her arm. "Then let's go see it."
The site wasn't far—it was just beyond the road bridge, where my security detail had parked to watch us. We climbed out of the channel and set food on the gravel bike path. Things had changed since Nozomi had sketched the area, though: the bike was gone, leaving only a few stray nylon fibers on a tree. And something I hadn't made out on first glance caught me by surprise: a rectangular, stone monument. It sat about a meter high, with two iron plaques side by side.
The monument was easy to see, for the blooming flowers had all shed their petals, giving way to parched greenery instead.
Nozomi held up one shriveled, discarded petal. "They're daylilies," she explained. "During blooming season, they shed their petals each day and make new flowers. These were blooming earlier in the week, the day after those things came. I only caught them just as I was on the way home from…" She looked aside. "Well, you know. That was the last bloom of the year."
She laid the withered petal on the ground, and she glanced over the horizon.
"Most people around here probably didn't get to see it," she said.
I leaned around her, looking at her sketchpad. "But you captured them."
She shrugged, and she shook her head. "That's just for now. But in the end, paper rots. Pencil lines get smudged." She held up the pad. "This sketch? It's every bit as temporary as the daylilies themselves. It just takes a little longer for people to see that."
Well, the same could be said of anything in that scene. The stone monument must erode, in time. The gravel pathway could get washed out in a flood. And in the future, the sun will get hotter and hotter. It will burn off all the carbon dioxide plants need to survive, suffocating them and killing off all the animals in turn—those who eat plants to survive, those who eat those animals, and so on. Eventually, the Earth will turn to molten slag, and even further down the line, the sun will expand and swallow the Earth whole.
Such was the grim fate depicted in art of Nozomi Horaki, all conveyed in a simple sketch of daylilies.
"Nozomi," I said, "did you ever meet Toji?"
"Hikari's boyfriend?" She flipped through some sketches, showing me a drawing of Horaki and Toji walking side by side down a lonely suburban road. "He's a little easier to get along with since he got his leg back. He was kind of sour about it before. Hikari took it worse, though. Seemed like the two of them were just starting to get along when he was picked. You know what all that's about."
I nodded, pursing my lips, and looked away.
"Anyway…" Nozomi circled in front of me like a lion before a gazelle. "I think it's my turn now?"
I shuddered, bowing my head for Nozomi's mercy.
"Do you know Koizumi?" she asked.
I blinked. "Who?"
"He's an idol. Or he was, back before the last impact. Pretty tall? Brown hair? Likes glitter?"
I didn't know a lot of people like that then, and I don't know a lot of people like that now.
"It's not that strange for an idol, really! When I was ten, I was really into it. Too into it, really. I thought there'd be nothing more amazing than fucking that guy in a shower of glitter." She rolled her eyes and laughed. "Pretty ridiculous, right?"
My eyes bulged out of their sockets. "How old are you now?"
"Isn't that in my file?"
I winced, burying my face in my hands, and thankfully, Nozomi moved on.
"I still crushed on that guy pretty hard up until three years ago. He was a star, you know? Always looked perfect. Had a great singing voice and a real sense of aesthetics. Or maybe his staff did, and he was just out there doing what he had to do. I don't know, really.
"But about a year before the last impact, he retired from the idol scene. Said he wanted to make real music—whatever that is." She shook her head at that.
"That sounds admirable, though," I said. "Or ambitious, maybe."
"But is it really?" Nozomi squinted at the horizon. "I know what he meant; I'm just saying that all music is music. It's all just different, you know? But he retired. He shut himself in a cabin in Hokkaido and stayed there for about six months. Why do you think he did that?"
I rubbed a finger against my temple. I stared out over the landscape, but the only answers there were about drought conditions and weed management. "He didn't like the music he was making anymore?" I offered.
Nozomi bowed her head, and she shuffled her feet on the gravel road. "Maybe. But I always thought he just didn't like the lifestyle. He seemed into the music, at least to me. But going around, meeting fans, constantly being talked about—it didn't seem like his thing, you know?" She looked at me again. "So I feel like maybe that's it. Maybe he just needed to get away from the fame. What do you think?"
I scratched the back of my arm. "I don't know, really. I can't relate to that."
"How's that?"
"I never asked to be famous," I said.
Nozomi cocked her head, scrutinizing me. "Is that why you've been such a shut-in the last two years?"
I shrugged. "It's a reason."
Frowning, Nozomi adjusted the sketchpad that was tucked between her arm. "Well," she said, "I'm glad you're not doing that anymore. You don't need to pull a Koizumi and lock yourself away to find something more real, you know?"
"I'm just helping out for a little while." I opened and closed a fist at my side. The sun was hot. I wiped sweat from my neck. "Just until we're done with the Angels and all that. And then you'll be a student again, too. Or an artist, maybe, if you want to be."
Nozomi stepped up to me, staring like a statue of granite. Though she was a full head shorter than me, her gaze was no less intimidating.
"I'm still both of those," she said, "but I'm also trying to be something else now. You have to do shit like that sometimes."
She jerked her head toward the withered daylilies.
"There's no place in this world for things to just stay the same—not for flowers…"
She pressed an index finger to my breastbone.
"And not for people, either."
With that, she stepped past me, and she headed back the way we came along the gravel road.
"Nozomi!" I cried.
She pivoted on one foot, facing me wordlessly.
"I'm here now," I said. "As long as you have to pilot that thing, I'm here for you." I clenched my hand into a fist at my side. "That's something I'm trying to do now."
"You mean that?" she called back. "You promise?"
"I do."
"That's good." She looked up and smiled. "Thanks, Ikari."
She turned around to head home again, and I followed her from a short distance, saying nothing more.
It wasn't the magic connection I'd been hoping for, but I did come away from that conversation understanding a little more about Nozomi Horaki. Perhaps in the time we would spend together, we could learn to appreciate some things about each other, just as we both appreciated her sketch of the daylilies.
Still, there was much distance to cover between us. I could only hope we'd bridge that gap before the paper of that daylily sketch rotted, or before our partnership was dissolved.
In the end, people are spiny things, and getting to know another person is like digging your spines into them and vice versa. It hurts a little. You can't do it all at once.
But if you tell them you're willing to hurt a little, that helps. It helps a lot.
Or at least, I like to think so.
The next day, Nozomi was called upon to fulfill a pilot's duty once again.
The Angel had headed west over continental Asia, making a beeline for Germany. The Germans had an Eva of their own, but Misato had pushed to send Unit-14 over there, too. In her words,
"Why fight an Angel with one Eva if you can bring two?"
That meant Nozomi would have to fly—and fly for a while.
Manoah Base had its own airfield, where technicians hooked up the Eva to cranes and loaded it on the back of a modified cargo plane. There was just one runway. As long as it was, it seemed too small for the plane with the Eva awkwardly perched on top of it, but the pilots were already in the cockpit, running through takeoff checklists or talking to the tower, I'm sure. They certainly believed it could happen.
There were five of us at the side of the runway that day: the Horaki family—Nozomi, Hikari, and Kodama—along with Misato and me to see Nozomi off. Nozomi, for her part, marveled at the tremendous effort to attach the Eva to the cargo plane. "Is that thing really gonna fly?" she asked. "For real?"
"For real," said Misato, grinning. "Eva goes where it's needed, and right now, that Angel is heading west. Are you prepared for that?"
The pilot couldn't resist making a quick sketch of the scene. "It's what I'm here for."
Misato cocked her head slightly, staring back at Nozomi from under the bill of her officer's cap. "Is it now?" She sighed, shaking her head, before shaking herself free of any doubts or malaise. Her next words were much more enthusiastic: "Well! I don't want to draw this out. I'll give you all some time alone, hm? But don't take too long. We do need to get moving soon. Okay?" With a nod and a smile, Misato moved off, turning to a handheld radio to check on the operation's progress.
That left just the four of us—the Horaki family and me.
Naturally, most of the attention was focused on Nozomi. Her eldest sister, Kodama, approached her first, bearing an open backpack.
"These are for the trip," she said, and she pulled out some of the contents: an extra sketchpad, a box of pencils, and so on. "Sorry if they're not up to snuff. They're the best I could get on the way here from work."
Nozomi took the second sketchpad in hand, and she flipped to the first page. She rubbed her fingers over the paper and frowned.
"It's a little fine." Her frown softened. "But in a pinch it could be worse, right?"
Kodama nodded, and she stepped back, making way for the middle sister, Hikari. She carried herself steadily, and with both hands, she presented a pair of black lunchboxes.
"It's crucial to eat well when doing important work," said Horaki. "Hopefully these keep you in good spirits."
Nozomi took the two boxes and raised them overhead, as if to see whether sunlight would pass through them. "I dunno. Could make a mess on the plane."
"You want to give them back? It's tempura."
Nozomi tucked the two boxes under her arm, turning them away from Horaki.
"Thought so," said Horaki, smiling. "Take care, Nozomi."
"Thanks," said Nozomi, who nodded once to each of her sisters. "You, too." She started for the runway.
"Oh, Nozomi, one more thing." Horaki took a step after her, but when Nozomi turned to meet her gaze, Horaki stiffened.
"Yeah?" said Nozomi.
Horaki cleared her throat. "I asked the general if you'd have some way to call home. She said she could have her people connect their radios to a phone line. You can talk to Sister that way, if you like."
Nozomi looked up to her sister, but her expression and gaze were as telling as a piece of stone.
"Yeah," she said. "That'll be useful, I guess—especially since I dunno how long I'll be gone." Her eyes flickered to the elder sister. "Maybe after dinner each night? Or I dunno. I dunno what time it'll be over there."
"We'll figure something out," said Kodama, moving one step closer to Horaki. "We'll talk about it—the three of us."
Nozomi stared—first at Kodama, then at Horaki.
"Yeah," Nozomi said flatly.
Horaki let out a little breath at that, and Kodama put a hand on her shoulder.
"Be safe, Nozomi," said Kodama.
Nozomi nodded, and she looked to me again. "I guess we'll talk some more later, huh?"
"Probably, yeah," I said, waving. "Good luck, Nozomi."
She shot me an annoyed look. "I'm not looking for luck. Just be there like you said you would, and it'll all be fine, right? Whatever happens after that—well, as long as we've done all we could, it's fine. Yeah?"
"Yeah."
From ten or fifteen meters down the runway, Misato called out to us. "Nozomi! Are you ready?"
"Yeah!" Nozomi called over her shoulder, but she shot me a knowing look again before departing. "I'm holding you to that, Ikari. Don't forget."
I nodded, and Nozomi gathered her things—the bag of art supplies and the lunchboxes. She trotted off to join Misato and get suited up for the mission ahead. In turn, one of Misato's agents asked us to step back from the runway; at best, we could watch takeoff from a safe distance.
As we made our way to safety, Horaki walked up alongside me. "So, Ikari," she said, "you're going to be looking out for Nozomi?"
My breath caught. Her stare bored into me, and I sputtered, "I'm going to try my best. I know I'm new at all this, but…" I balled my hand into a fist at my side. "I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure she comes back safe, and sane."
She looked at me from the side. "You told her this?"
"I did."
"I see." Her eyes flickered straight ahead. "Be careful what promises you make to Nozomi."
"Why do you say that?"
She turned her head away from me, back toward the runway, and said,
"You need to be sure you can keep them."
I tried to keep those words in mind, even as the cargo plane's propellers threatened to drown them out.
As a pilot, I didn't have to deal with family constantly worried about my wellbeing. I had family near me, but worrying about me was the last thing my father would've done. Though Misato tried to fill that gap in my life, I don't think I truly appreciated that at the time.
And there's still some difference, I think, between people you have to get to know and those you've known all your life. They worry about you and look after you somewhat differently. There are things only families know—that only people who live with you for years and years could ever know.
Asuka had the same experience. We were both kept away from the people we'd grown up with. And Ayanami? She didn't have any real family at all.
So I think you can imagine my discomfort, then, as I sat in a conference room with the Horaki sisters.
The head of the family was the eldest sister, Kodama Horaki. She sat at one end of the table, and with a notepad in hand, she followed everything Misato said. Kodama was a reporter, and she certainly looked the part. She was dressed precisely, in professional attire, and not a hair was out of place on her head.
Kodama grilled Misato about the nature of Nozomi's involvement in piloting. Up to this point, Nozomi had been involved only in "simulations."
"General," Kodama began, "under what authority did you recruit my sister for simulations that actually had to do with Eva piloting, and not virtual reality research?"
Misato fielded the question with composure, not even missing a beat. "The prime minister's authority," she said, sitting at the other end of the table with folders and notepads laid out in front of her. "If you like, you can ask him yourself. Shall I tell him you're having doubts about your sister's role in saving all of mankind?"
"Now, General, that's not what I said. I'm happy to see Nozomi take up this duty, but nevertheless…" Kodama glared over the rims of her glasses. "…you've deceived us, General."
Misato shrugged that cold stare off with a slight laugh, and though she continued to try to assuage Kodama's concerns, the eldest sister wasn't totally buying it. Finally, after several minutes of them going back and forth, Misato had to concede some defeat.
"Look," she said at last, "I'm afraid such secrecy was necessary. The last thing we wanted was word of the project leaking out. It's our best frontline weapon."
At that, the middle sister—Hikari Horaki—spoke up, watching Misato with a sidelong glance. "And that's where you plan for Nozomi to be—at the front lines."
Misato nodded. "There's no other place an Eva can be. Someone has to take the lead."
That didn't sit well with Hikari Horaki; the disquiet was all over her face. To tell the truth, it surprised me a little. The Horaki I'd known back in Tokyo-2 had been quite commanding. That had been fitting of her role as class president. I'd come to know Horaki a bit more on a personal level since then—usually, it would be four or five of us, with Asuka, Toji, and Kensuke rounding out the gang—and I'd seen that she wasn't so domineering in her personal life. At least, she wasn't so domineering when Toji was well-behaved.
But professionally? She was still a taskmaster. I'll never forget the party she'd planned for Aunt Kyoko's birthday the year before. Horaki put us through hell to make sure it was perfect.
That's why I was a bit surprised to see Horaki so pensive and measured at the meeting. She thought about what Misato had said before asking,
"There are no other candidates? Didn't you have clones or something?"
"The dummy plugs have…problems." Misato glanced at me, then back at Horaki. "You could ask around about that," she said. "I think it best not to get into it."
"I see." Horaki's jaw clenched, and her eyes flickered past all of us to the back wall. "Even so…" She looked across the table.
At Asuka.
"Is this something a person can handle, all by herself?" asked Horaki. "I've seen what this can do to pilots."
Asuka winced, and she waved her hands around, trying to put Horaki at ease. "This is different, really! Those old guys wanted us broken at the end. Misato isn't like that."
"Still," said Horaki, her gaze growing more composed and sharper by the second, "you're asking Nozomi to fight things that don't belong in this world. How can you be sure this will turn out any different from before?" Horaki glanced aside. "Nozomi, do you want to say something about this?"
Three seats away from anyone else at the table sat Nozomi. She had her knees up, cradling a large pad of unruled paper. She scribbled away at the pages without even looking up, saying,
"I dunno, do I?"
Everyone at the table stared.
With a slight laugh, Misato tried to regain control of the meeting. "At any rate, let me be clear about one thing." She leaned forward, folding her hands, and caught both Horaki and Kodama's eyes. "I understand perfectly the level of sacrifice and hardship we're asking of your family, and of Nozomi. I would not ask it if I did not think Nozomi could handle it, nor if I thought it unnecessary to help protect what little we've managed to rebuild. It's my hope we can make this as painless as possible for the days and weeks to come."
" 'Weeks'?" Horaki raised an eyebrow. "You think it'll take weeks to defeat that Angel?"
"Not that one, no." Misato clicked on a monitor behind her, and with a wireless keyboard and mouse, she brought up an image—an image of deep space, with stars in the background and a white-hot spherical blob.
There was something else out there—something in the Oort Cloud, where asteroids and comets live. And like the Angel that Nozomi had just fought, this thing was coming from outer space for us, too.
"So you see, we need a willing pilot and a family who will support her," said Misato as she flipped through various images of the object. "Nozomi is the best candidate we have. Her simulation scores top the group, and as you've seen, her feel for piloting Eva in combat is sound. All I need from you is your approval to make Nozomi the pilot on a permanent basis going forward."
Kodama frowned. With a sigh, she put her notepad and pen aside and leaned forward, looking down the table to Nozomi. "How do you really feel about doing this?"
The youngest sister flipped a sheet of paper around and shrugged. "Somebody's gotta do it, right?"
Hikari Horaki gaped. "Nozomi, this isn't about other people. This is about you. Do you want to pilot that thing?"
Still, Nozomi was not looking as she answered. "Would anyone in their right mind want to pilot it?"
It was hard to argue with that.
"It'll be fine," said Nozomi, sketching away at her pad on her knees. "Don't worry about it."
Nozomi wasn't the only one who had a job to do. Misato set up Asuka with Maya to learn the ropes of managing an Eva's technical systems. Hyuga coordinated our efforts with the rest of SDF, supplying an update on the Angel's position and trajectory.
The Horaki family went on their way, of course, with Nozomi last to go. That left only Misato and me, and I was fairly sure she already had a job, unlike me. As she scribbled on some forms and paperwork, Misato cracked a smile.
"It's quite a thing, isn't it?" she said.
I hovered in the doorway, mouth half-open. "I'm sorry?"
"What we're doing here. Hundreds of people all bound together by a singular purpose—really makes you appreciate the magnitude of what's being done, don't you think?"
"I guess," I said with a shrug.
"Such enthusiasm!" cried Misato, shaking her head. "You came to me asking to be a part of this."
"After you asked me first," I said, narrowing my eyes.
"Even so, there's no need to be skittish now. Take the bull by the horns, like you did this morning."
"How am I supposed to do that?"
Raising an eyebrow, she put her pen down. "Do exactly what you did for Nozomi earlier: be a guide, a role model—"
"Me?" I shook my head.
Misato shrugged. "It's you or Asuka. I don't think Rei's in any position to show her the ropes."
I looked away. "Still…"
Misato collected some folders in her hands, and she smiled again. "You're not alone here. We'll all have a hand in supporting Nozomi throughout. There are only two human beings left in this world who know the kinds of horrors Nozomi will endure."
"Two?" I frowned, and I started counting out on my hands. Nozomi was the sixth, Ayanami and Kaworu weren't around. If I hadn't completely forgotten my arithmetic, six minus three makes three.
Misato laughed, ceding the point. "I think he's suffered enough, yes?"
"And I haven't?" I said.
Flushing a bit, Misato continued on. "There are only two human beings left in this world who know the kinds of horrors Nozomi will endure long-term. You're one of them. Believe me—no, believe in the me who believes in you."
"You're too old to be quoting something like that," I said.
Her mouth hung open, and I could feel her irritation rising like a lava flow in a volcano. "However young I may be," she said, "that doesn't make me wrong, you know."
I rubbed my temple and sighed. "What do you need me to do?"
Beaming, Misato scribbled something else on a form and slid the paper across the table. "Take this to the security station in building four, and they'll give you a keycard."
"Why? For what?"
"For your office."
I can't say I thought I'd have my own office before graduating high school, before getting a job of my own, but that's what Misato gave me: an office with a metal desk, with two widescreen monitors casting the room in a faint blue glow.
It was a stark place, to be sure—there were no windows that far underground. But that was fine, really. The place wasn't meant to be comfortable. Aside from the main chair behind the desk, there was only one other chair. The office wasn't designed for many guests.
No, it was a place for doing work, and Misato had left me a great deal. A stack of manilla folders had taken root on the desk corner, and if I left it alone, it could easily grow to dwarf me. Aside from that, I took a look at the computer, which showed a list of hundreds of reports, graphs, plots, and studies—all about the pilot candidates, of course.
You see, Nozomi wasn't the only candidate. Far from it: Misato had rounded up almost a dozen children, all with desperate families in need of the financial support SDF could give. The names on those reports were depressingly familiar to me: Horaki, Suzuhara, and so on—all classmates of mine back in Tokyo-3. What kind of people did we have to be, to rely on the siblings of those who had already seen hell come to their doorsteps?
Desperate people, perhaps. In desperation, these children had become pilot candidates for money. Misato had involved them in regular simulations—walking, running, jumping, navigation of terrain, and the like—for the better part of a year. She knew these children better than she knew me, I expected. And more than just simulation results, Misato had compiled in-depth personality analyses and background material. She knew each child's favorite foods or which after-school clubs they attended.
All this she had done for the sake of putting the best pilot in the entry plug, and the best of them was Nozomi.
I pulled up her file, and right away, the girl's straight-ahead stare pinned me to my seat. It was just a photograph, but there was an edge to her look somehow, as though she could pierce me with just a glance. There was no arrogance or disdain in her eyes—no, it was more like the discerning gaze of a scientist or a security guard.
Or an artist. Yes, Nozomi was an artist. She belonged to the Art Club at her school, though the reports in front of me said that she hadn't made many friends there and was somewhat at odds with the club leadership. How they found that out I'll never know—did they plant agents in the school just to watch her?
Equally as strained was Nozomi's relationship with her family. Her eldest sister was an overworked journalist. The middle sister was in charge of the house. By all accounts, Nozomi shared few interests with the two of them.
And yet there she was—not just an Eva pilot, but a willing one. She hadn't yet hesitated. When more than a few people had gone back to the sea willingly, Nozomi not only stayed in this world but worked to defend it. It wasn't like her sisters' love rode on it—they didn't want her to pilot in the first place. But she wanted to be a pilot anyway.
To be honest, I began to feel Misato was mistaken. I couldn't be of much help to someone like Nozomi. She already had everything important figured out. She didn't need people to inspire her to fight. Maybe she'd benefit from a little advice on how best to pilot an Eva, but if that were all, I wouldn't end up with much to do.
And maybe that was for the best. I could sit back and let Hyuga and Misato do most of the work. If I made a small but positive contribution to the effort, no one would think any less of me. They weren't expecting me to change the face of this battle. Misato had been prepared to go on without me, after all. That I'd become involved at all—it was a courtesy.
I wasn't really needed at all.
And everything about that office was just decoration meant to hide the fact. When you give a person shiny monitors and 3d glasses, you're just giving them distractions. What matters are the words on a page, not what jazzes up their delivery. Tricks like those don't mean anything.
And the person who uses those gadgets and toys? He's insignificant, too, so long as he relies on them to do work in his place.
Or as long as he relies on other people to tell him about the girl he's supposed to guide.
Things weren't really back to normal in Tokyo-2 until a few days later. SDF crews roamed the streets, with combat engineers vacuuming up puddles of LCL or filling them in with sand. But cars rolled by, their drivers oblivious to the work being done, and the trains were back on schedule. There was no more sign of the Angel in Japan, and if you looked to the sky, you wouldn't have seen anything unusual. Clouds raced past without incident, and the gaps between them were as blue as ever.
I know because I did a lot of looking at the sky. Most middle schools don't have a place for visitors to be entertained.
When it was safe enough, and when the schools were open again, I took an afternoon to myself and headed to the town of Toyoshina. If you're not familiar with the area, Toyoshina was about ten kilometers north of downtown Tokyo-2. Back before Third Impact, Toyoshina had been a bustling community, all the more when refugees from Tokyo-3 came to the capital, looking for a place to stay.
That's why, as incongruous as it seemed, the Horaki family had come to settle down amid farmland.
The outskirts of Toyoshina had been part of the rice bowl of Nagano Prefecture, at least before Third Impact anyway. The middle of town was no different from Tokyo-2, really, but there was a clear dividing line between civilization and the sticks. That line was a mostly east-west road that set off Toyoshina proper from North Toyoshina—where the rice paddies began.
Or, I should say, where they used to begin. In the days since Third Impact, the paddies had become overrun with weeds—that was if they let anything grow at all. Without regular irrigation, many of the paddies had dried up, leaving only parched, cracking soil behind.
It was in front of one barren rice paddy that I waited, across the road from North Toyoshina Middle School. The road going by the school was cracked and uneven. The hedges in front were a sickly brown and unkempt. The white walls of the main building had yellow stains running from the roof, and the windows showed spots from a rainstorm.
I'd taken care to be early—enough not to miss anyone. Students trickled out of the school building as their clubs finished business, but they were few and far between. No more than two or three at a time left through the main gate, and they trudged from the building in slow motion—as though their bags were heavy, too full of books. Then again, even the ones with little to carry were lethargic, wading up the street as though the air were full of syrup.
Their eyes were dull and unresponsive, too. One of the students looked right at me and said,
"Aren't you a little old to have a girlfriend here?"
That was one of the few times I was sad to be unrecognized.
It was that way for about an hour and a half—I didn't see a single familiar face. By that point, I'd worn out the grass on the side of the road, and I'd had enough of that, so I headed away.
I trekked down road toward the train station, running across the only car I'd seen all afternoon: a white van with darkened windows.
I approached the van, tapping my knuckle on the window, and the driver rolled the window down. He was dressed inconspicuously, with a black buttoned shirt and black pants.
"Is something wrong?" he said.
"No, no. I was just wondering—do your people know where she is?"
The driver knocked on the divider that separated the front and rear compartments. "Open up the back," he called out. "He's taking a ride with us."
Unlike the driver, the personnel in the rear of the van openly wore green GSDF uniforms. They toiled over laptops with headsets, monitoring camera footage from the van and elsewhere. They were polite, offering me a seat while we were underway, but they didn't say much. They had jobs to do, after all. They couldn't afford to spend hours of their lives doing nothing.
The security detail drove me about a kilometer west, to a bridge over a small stream. There were other bridges in the area—for other roads, and a separate bridge for the nearby train line.
It was under the train tracks, about a hundred meters downstream, that Nozomi Horaki sat. The van stopped at the side of the road, and I headed down the sloped channel on my own. I liked to think Nozomi wouldn't notice me, but without even looking up, she said,
"You know, people are gonna get the wrong idea about you if you corner a girl under a bridge."
"That—that's not what I'm doing!" I said, putting my hands up.
"It's not?" She put her pencil down and shot me a knowing look. "You come all the way from Tokyo-2. You get your SDF friends to spy on me so you can figure out where I've gone. Isn't that what's happening here?"
I glanced up, out of the V-shaped channel. Another white van sat on the side of the road.
"No, because SDF was already watching you. I only asked them where you went."
At that, Nozomi huffed, shaking her head. "That's not a defense."
"I need a defense now?"
She shrugged. "I dunno, do you?"
I sat in the shadow of the railroad bridge, and Nozomi paid me no mind. She sat with her knees up, resting a pad on them as she sketched. The scene was the view downstream. We sat just low enough in the channel that most of the surrounding area was out of sight. Only the overgrown channel and stream were clear in the sketch. Everything beyond—farmhouses, and the like—disappeared from view. Only a few stray power lines hinted at what lay beyond.
I peered at the sketch once more and said, "So you like realistic art?"
"Sometimes," she said, focusing her attention on a flowery weed at the water's edge. "You can't be too realistic—you can't capture everything with pencil strokes, but you can get most of a scene. You can capture the essence of it well enough."
"What essence is that?" I asked.
She shot me a curious look. "Are you asking an artist what her work means?"
"Ah, uh…" I pulled at my collar and gulped. "It, uh—it seems like the thing to do, if you can't make sense of it otherwise." I nodded to myself. "Maybe I'm just really untrained in what it means to appreciate art, but if you asked me to look at that sketch right now, I'd say it's a pretty faithful recreation of the real world. That's all I could tell you."
She laid her pencil flat on the pad, holding it place with her thumb, and she looked at me. "You've never been into art, huh? Not even just a little?"
"Not visual arts, no. I did music when I was younger—cello, mostly. I can't say I had a feel for what music should feel like, just the technical aspects. I knew how to play, but not how to perform, I guess?" I laughed, scratching the back of my head. "So I'd appreciate it, if you could help me understand even a little."
She eyed me sidelong. "I can tell you about art, but only if you tell me something in return."
I winced.
"Relax," she said, scooting closer to me. She tucked her pencil into the spiral binding of her pad, and she flipped back a few pages. "What do you see?"
A bed of flowers, lining the side of a gravel path. Some bungie cord held a bicycle to a nearby tree. It was a picturesque scene, with dozens of six-petaled flowers in bloom. Pencil strokes captured even the central stripe on each petal, giving them definition and detail.
"A beautiful scene," I said.
"Right? You wouldn't want to miss out on that, right? If you knew it existed, you'd want to see it, wouldn't you?"
"Of course."
Nozomi rose, and she tucked her sketchpad under her arm. "Then let's go see it."
The site wasn't far—it was just beyond the road bridge, where my security detail had parked to watch us. We climbed out of the channel and set food on the gravel bike path. Things had changed since Nozomi had sketched the area, though: the bike was gone, leaving only a few stray nylon fibers on a tree. And something I hadn't made out on first glance caught me by surprise: a rectangular, stone monument. It sat about a meter high, with two iron plaques side by side.
The monument was easy to see, for the blooming flowers had all shed their petals, giving way to parched greenery instead.
Nozomi held up one shriveled, discarded petal. "They're daylilies," she explained. "During blooming season, they shed their petals each day and make new flowers. These were blooming earlier in the week, the day after those things came. I only caught them just as I was on the way home from…" She looked aside. "Well, you know. That was the last bloom of the year."
She laid the withered petal on the ground, and she glanced over the horizon.
"Most people around here probably didn't get to see it," she said.
I leaned around her, looking at her sketchpad. "But you captured them."
She shrugged, and she shook her head. "That's just for now. But in the end, paper rots. Pencil lines get smudged." She held up the pad. "This sketch? It's every bit as temporary as the daylilies themselves. It just takes a little longer for people to see that."
Well, the same could be said of anything in that scene. The stone monument must erode, in time. The gravel pathway could get washed out in a flood. And in the future, the sun will get hotter and hotter. It will burn off all the carbon dioxide plants need to survive, suffocating them and killing off all the animals in turn—those who eat plants to survive, those who eat those animals, and so on. Eventually, the Earth will turn to molten slag, and even further down the line, the sun will expand and swallow the Earth whole.
Such was the grim fate depicted in art of Nozomi Horaki, all conveyed in a simple sketch of daylilies.
"Nozomi," I said, "did you ever meet Toji?"
"Hikari's boyfriend?" She flipped through some sketches, showing me a drawing of Horaki and Toji walking side by side down a lonely suburban road. "He's a little easier to get along with since he got his leg back. He was kind of sour about it before. Hikari took it worse, though. Seemed like the two of them were just starting to get along when he was picked. You know what all that's about."
I nodded, pursing my lips, and looked away.
"Anyway…" Nozomi circled in front of me like a lion before a gazelle. "I think it's my turn now?"
I shuddered, bowing my head for Nozomi's mercy.
"Do you know Koizumi?" she asked.
I blinked. "Who?"
"He's an idol. Or he was, back before the last impact. Pretty tall? Brown hair? Likes glitter?"
I didn't know a lot of people like that then, and I don't know a lot of people like that now.
"It's not that strange for an idol, really! When I was ten, I was really into it. Too into it, really. I thought there'd be nothing more amazing than fucking that guy in a shower of glitter." She rolled her eyes and laughed. "Pretty ridiculous, right?"
My eyes bulged out of their sockets. "How old are you now?"
"Isn't that in my file?"
I winced, burying my face in my hands, and thankfully, Nozomi moved on.
"I still crushed on that guy pretty hard up until three years ago. He was a star, you know? Always looked perfect. Had a great singing voice and a real sense of aesthetics. Or maybe his staff did, and he was just out there doing what he had to do. I don't know, really.
"But about a year before the last impact, he retired from the idol scene. Said he wanted to make real music—whatever that is." She shook her head at that.
"That sounds admirable, though," I said. "Or ambitious, maybe."
"But is it really?" Nozomi squinted at the horizon. "I know what he meant; I'm just saying that all music is music. It's all just different, you know? But he retired. He shut himself in a cabin in Hokkaido and stayed there for about six months. Why do you think he did that?"
I rubbed a finger against my temple. I stared out over the landscape, but the only answers there were about drought conditions and weed management. "He didn't like the music he was making anymore?" I offered.
Nozomi bowed her head, and she shuffled her feet on the gravel road. "Maybe. But I always thought he just didn't like the lifestyle. He seemed into the music, at least to me. But going around, meeting fans, constantly being talked about—it didn't seem like his thing, you know?" She looked at me again. "So I feel like maybe that's it. Maybe he just needed to get away from the fame. What do you think?"
I scratched the back of my arm. "I don't know, really. I can't relate to that."
"How's that?"
"I never asked to be famous," I said.
Nozomi cocked her head, scrutinizing me. "Is that why you've been such a shut-in the last two years?"
I shrugged. "It's a reason."
Frowning, Nozomi adjusted the sketchpad that was tucked between her arm. "Well," she said, "I'm glad you're not doing that anymore. You don't need to pull a Koizumi and lock yourself away to find something more real, you know?"
"I'm just helping out for a little while." I opened and closed a fist at my side. The sun was hot. I wiped sweat from my neck. "Just until we're done with the Angels and all that. And then you'll be a student again, too. Or an artist, maybe, if you want to be."
Nozomi stepped up to me, staring like a statue of granite. Though she was a full head shorter than me, her gaze was no less intimidating.
"I'm still both of those," she said, "but I'm also trying to be something else now. You have to do shit like that sometimes."
She jerked her head toward the withered daylilies.
"There's no place in this world for things to just stay the same—not for flowers…"
She pressed an index finger to my breastbone.
"And not for people, either."
With that, she stepped past me, and she headed back the way we came along the gravel road.
"Nozomi!" I cried.
She pivoted on one foot, facing me wordlessly.
"I'm here now," I said. "As long as you have to pilot that thing, I'm here for you." I clenched my hand into a fist at my side. "That's something I'm trying to do now."
"You mean that?" she called back. "You promise?"
"I do."
"That's good." She looked up and smiled. "Thanks, Ikari."
She turned around to head home again, and I followed her from a short distance, saying nothing more.
It wasn't the magic connection I'd been hoping for, but I did come away from that conversation understanding a little more about Nozomi Horaki. Perhaps in the time we would spend together, we could learn to appreciate some things about each other, just as we both appreciated her sketch of the daylilies.
Still, there was much distance to cover between us. I could only hope we'd bridge that gap before the paper of that daylily sketch rotted, or before our partnership was dissolved.
In the end, people are spiny things, and getting to know another person is like digging your spines into them and vice versa. It hurts a little. You can't do it all at once.
But if you tell them you're willing to hurt a little, that helps. It helps a lot.
Or at least, I like to think so.
The next day, Nozomi was called upon to fulfill a pilot's duty once again.
The Angel had headed west over continental Asia, making a beeline for Germany. The Germans had an Eva of their own, but Misato had pushed to send Unit-14 over there, too. In her words,
"Why fight an Angel with one Eva if you can bring two?"
That meant Nozomi would have to fly—and fly for a while.
Manoah Base had its own airfield, where technicians hooked up the Eva to cranes and loaded it on the back of a modified cargo plane. There was just one runway. As long as it was, it seemed too small for the plane with the Eva awkwardly perched on top of it, but the pilots were already in the cockpit, running through takeoff checklists or talking to the tower, I'm sure. They certainly believed it could happen.
There were five of us at the side of the runway that day: the Horaki family—Nozomi, Hikari, and Kodama—along with Misato and me to see Nozomi off. Nozomi, for her part, marveled at the tremendous effort to attach the Eva to the cargo plane. "Is that thing really gonna fly?" she asked. "For real?"
"For real," said Misato, grinning. "Eva goes where it's needed, and right now, that Angel is heading west. Are you prepared for that?"
The pilot couldn't resist making a quick sketch of the scene. "It's what I'm here for."
Misato cocked her head slightly, staring back at Nozomi from under the bill of her officer's cap. "Is it now?" She sighed, shaking her head, before shaking herself free of any doubts or malaise. Her next words were much more enthusiastic: "Well! I don't want to draw this out. I'll give you all some time alone, hm? But don't take too long. We do need to get moving soon. Okay?" With a nod and a smile, Misato moved off, turning to a handheld radio to check on the operation's progress.
That left just the four of us—the Horaki family and me.
Naturally, most of the attention was focused on Nozomi. Her eldest sister, Kodama, approached her first, bearing an open backpack.
"These are for the trip," she said, and she pulled out some of the contents: an extra sketchpad, a box of pencils, and so on. "Sorry if they're not up to snuff. They're the best I could get on the way here from work."
Nozomi took the second sketchpad in hand, and she flipped to the first page. She rubbed her fingers over the paper and frowned.
"It's a little fine." Her frown softened. "But in a pinch it could be worse, right?"
Kodama nodded, and she stepped back, making way for the middle sister, Hikari. She carried herself steadily, and with both hands, she presented a pair of black lunchboxes.
"It's crucial to eat well when doing important work," said Horaki. "Hopefully these keep you in good spirits."
Nozomi took the two boxes and raised them overhead, as if to see whether sunlight would pass through them. "I dunno. Could make a mess on the plane."
"You want to give them back? It's tempura."
Nozomi tucked the two boxes under her arm, turning them away from Horaki.
"Thought so," said Horaki, smiling. "Take care, Nozomi."
"Thanks," said Nozomi, who nodded once to each of her sisters. "You, too." She started for the runway.
"Oh, Nozomi, one more thing." Horaki took a step after her, but when Nozomi turned to meet her gaze, Horaki stiffened.
"Yeah?" said Nozomi.
Horaki cleared her throat. "I asked the general if you'd have some way to call home. She said she could have her people connect their radios to a phone line. You can talk to Sister that way, if you like."
Nozomi looked up to her sister, but her expression and gaze were as telling as a piece of stone.
"Yeah," she said. "That'll be useful, I guess—especially since I dunno how long I'll be gone." Her eyes flickered to the elder sister. "Maybe after dinner each night? Or I dunno. I dunno what time it'll be over there."
"We'll figure something out," said Kodama, moving one step closer to Horaki. "We'll talk about it—the three of us."
Nozomi stared—first at Kodama, then at Horaki.
"Yeah," Nozomi said flatly.
Horaki let out a little breath at that, and Kodama put a hand on her shoulder.
"Be safe, Nozomi," said Kodama.
Nozomi nodded, and she looked to me again. "I guess we'll talk some more later, huh?"
"Probably, yeah," I said, waving. "Good luck, Nozomi."
She shot me an annoyed look. "I'm not looking for luck. Just be there like you said you would, and it'll all be fine, right? Whatever happens after that—well, as long as we've done all we could, it's fine. Yeah?"
"Yeah."
From ten or fifteen meters down the runway, Misato called out to us. "Nozomi! Are you ready?"
"Yeah!" Nozomi called over her shoulder, but she shot me a knowing look again before departing. "I'm holding you to that, Ikari. Don't forget."
I nodded, and Nozomi gathered her things—the bag of art supplies and the lunchboxes. She trotted off to join Misato and get suited up for the mission ahead. In turn, one of Misato's agents asked us to step back from the runway; at best, we could watch takeoff from a safe distance.
As we made our way to safety, Horaki walked up alongside me. "So, Ikari," she said, "you're going to be looking out for Nozomi?"
My breath caught. Her stare bored into me, and I sputtered, "I'm going to try my best. I know I'm new at all this, but…" I balled my hand into a fist at my side. "I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure she comes back safe, and sane."
She looked at me from the side. "You told her this?"
"I did."
"I see." Her eyes flickered straight ahead. "Be careful what promises you make to Nozomi."
"Why do you say that?"
She turned her head away from me, back toward the runway, and said,
"You need to be sure you can keep them."
I tried to keep those words in mind, even as the cargo plane's propellers threatened to drown them out.
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2.3 Haunting
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
9. Haunting
While Nozomi was on her way to battle, it was time to settle some business at home. Misato had a whole bunker for the Eva—with labs for research and living quarters for all personnel to help them work efficiently.
Or to make sure they had no excuse to leave. Heh.
It was convenient, though, to have somewhere to sleep if we worked long days at the base, and since Asuka and I both had jobs there, that convenience was something Misato could offer us.
Unfortunately, convenience was the only thing she could offer. When Asuka and I first saw these quarters, the first thing out of Asuka's mouth was,
"What the hell is this?"
I didn't want to be picky. There was a bed for two, a dresser, a sink, and a private toilet and shower, too. That was a relief, really. Some of the junior non-officer personnel were packed in eight to a room or more, with no private toilet or bath at all.
But it was pretty bare-bones. The flooring was dark carpet, thankfully, but obviously we were so far down there could be no windows or external light. The sink was a purely metal fixture—all very functional and efficient, and that was all it was.
"We're going to go crazy if we stay here," said Asuka, walking in the narrow space between the bed and the hallway wall. "This is little more than a cage. And look!" She went up to the desk, which sat beside the dresser. "One desk for two people. Who thought of that?"
I put a bag down on the bed and started going through the contents: some toiletries, a few pairs of underwear and socks, and some outfits—enough to get through a couple days. "It's really not so bad," I said. "I'll be in my office most of the time, so I doubt I'd be using that desk very much."
Asuka snapped her fingers, looking aside. "That's what I need. Not just my own tiny cubicle. A personal office."
"Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?"
"Says the guy who has his own personal office already." She put her hands on her hips, frowning. "What did you say to get Misato to give you those nice digs, anyway?"
I piled two pairs of underwear on top of another. "I just said I would help Nozomi."
"That right." Asuka smirked. "Look at you—so devoted to work all of a sudden. Next thing you know, you'll be taking your work home with you."
I clutched a pair of socks in hand, freezing. "Why do you think I'd do that?"
"Oh, never mind," she said, shrugging, and her eyes went to the back of the room. "Man, I hope that shower isn't gross."
She slid past me to peer into the bathroom and toilet, and while her back was to me, I took a file folder from my bag and slipped it under a stack of base manuals and regulations on the desk. I checked back—no, she wasn't looking—and I said,
"How is it?"
She made a horrified grunt. "I think we should only stay here in emergencies. Let's go back home for the day, come back for the battle."
I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. "I don't know," I said. "I wouldn't want to be late."
"You worried about her?" she called out the washroom door.
Shrugging, I laid the underwear, socks, and shirts into the top dresser drawer. "What do you know about her and Horaki?"
Asuka came back out and plopped down on the sink counter with a sigh. She kicked her feet idly. "Hmm. I didn't speak to Nozomi very much when I stayed with them. When I did run into her, she was a little distant, yeah. I mean, I don't have any brothers or sisters. I figured most girls would be a little wary of their sisters' friends—well, unless they were trying to impress older kids and look cool. Nozomi definitely isn't that."
I closed the drawer, frowning. "Yeah, I know what she's not, but I don't really know what she is yet, either, or why she and Horaki seem strange around each other."
"Strange? How?"
"Horaki seems pretty stiff when it comes to her."
"Aha." Asuka shrugged. "Maybe she doesn't like Hikari? That girl can be hard to get along with sometimes. She can get pushy sometimes."
"Why are you friends with her, then?"
"She's not pushy with me, but that's something you just learn and get a feel for." Asuka hopped off the counter and stretched her arms. "I wouldn't worry about it. Some families, you know—they just have things going on with them that outsiders can't understand. Would anyone else have understood the distance between you and your father?"
I sat back down on the bed, staring at the wall. "That's different. My father was an exceptional man."
Asuka snorted. "An exceptional asshole, maybe."
I bowed my head, smiling. "I was going to say bastard, but that works, too."
"An exceptional jackass."
"An exceptional douchebag."
Snickering, Asuka sat beside me and rubbed my head. "Look at you—all foul-mouthed all of a sudden!"
"Maybe I just have my father to thank for that."
"Yeah, well…" She put an arm around me. "You can thank your father for a lot of things, but you turned out all right in spite of him, yeah?"
Maybe I had. I was there, and I was alive. I was in a position to make a difference—a real difference, not one I would just stumble upon. And I had friends to support me, like Asuka and Misato. What my father had done to me—what he had put me through—that was in the past.
It was a sobering thought, just to realize how much of my young adult life had been shaped by what my father ultimately had in mind for me. The isolation, the separation—these helped shape me into what my father needed, into the tool that would be too weak and starved for affection to resist being used. That's what I used to be.
But sitting there with Asuka, in that drab gray box far underground, I was my own person. I could make myself into whatever I wanted.
"Hey, what's this?"
From the stack of manuals and regulations on the wooden desk, Asuka pulled out the thin file folder.
"It's nothing!" I said, stiffening up. "Really, it's just a little thing!"
"Relax," she said, tossing the folder aside. "Like I'm one to talk about taking work home. Still…" She looked from me to the folder again, deep in thought.
"What is it?"
"Nothing." She broke into a smirk. "Maybe I should punish you anyway, though."
I zipped up the bag and laid it at the foot of the bed. "What kind of punishment might that be?"
Asuka pinched my nose and grinned.
I now know that, when you have to be at your station at 0130, it's probably not a good idea to exert yourself the day before. When the best coffee and tea you can get your hands on taste like caffeine-infused water more than anything else, it's definitely not a good idea.
So early the next morning, I tried to stay awake at my station as best I could. I read procedure manuals and technical specifications aloud—quietly, of course—just to keep myself going. Did you know that an Eva's armor plating is no less than three centimeters thick? Or that it's made of polymer-infused carbon fiber? I didn't either, until that morning. I remember thinking I'd have to ask Asuka about that.
"Shinji."
That was the man beside me, Major Hyuga. Unlike me, he looked like he was ready to deal with anything up to an including a nuclear strike. He was that steady, relaxed, and awake.
"We're coming up on the scheduled check-in," he said.
"Ah! Right!" I stiffened in my chair, sitting upright, and I worked the switch for the transmitter. "Eva-14, Eva-14, this is Manoah Base—"
"Easy, not yet," he said, amused. "Private Ikezawa is going to make sure we're routed properly. Ikezawa?"
"Yes, sir," said a woman further down the row. "We're just switching the encryption keys for the German network now."
Everything had to be done in a certain way and in a certain order, and there was a list of procedures and regulations a that could've filled the whole room if it were printed out. I didn't know about any of these things. They just asked me to talk to the pilot.
"Ops, we're connected," said the private.
"Very good." Hyuga touched the back of my chair. "You're on, Shinji."
I cleared my throat, sat back, and began again. "Eva-14, Eva-14, this is Manoah Base. Do you read me?"
The first thing I heard back on the line was laughter. "Wow, Ikari. They got you talking like you belong in SDF, huh?"
I went red in the ears. "They do not!"
"Do too."
I sat straight up in my chair. "Eva-14, do you read me? This is part of the scheduled check-in procedure. We have to go through the checklist."
"Yeah, yeah, I read you already."
"Okay, good. Now, we going to go through the Off-Base Startup - Telemetry Reconnection procedure. Can you bring that up for me?"
We didn't have entry plug video yet, but this should've consisted of Nozomi interacting with the holographic interface inside the plug and bringing up a window with a list of procedures.
"All right. Sequence 7-13?"
"That's correct."
"Okay, so we're starting with the telemetry frequency?"
The output telemetry frequency, the encryption key for the signal, the number of subchannels used for additional data transmission, backup frequencies in case of noise on the primary channel—she needed all of that, and then the same thing over again for the Eva to accept remote commands. And then all the separate sensors had to broadcast their total data history for us to have and make sense of since the Eva had been brought online.
But in the end, it was worth it, for reestablishing all the telemetry and secondary communication channels put a visual of the entry plug interior on my screen. Nozomi waved half-heatedly at the virtual camera.
"And I thought I didn't get much sleep," she mused, lying back in her seat.
"How long have you been in there?" I asked.
"A couple hours now. They put us down in Russia, I guess, and it took the better part of an hour just to get the plug out and get me inside it." She shivered, holding to her elbows. "Be glad you never had to do that. Going into cold goo that way—never again."
"I guess it's a lucky thing the worst I ever had to do was sit and wait for an Angel to come." I sat back in my chair, twirling a pen between my fingers. "It's not easy, is it—having nowhere to go and nothing to pass the time with?"
She shrugged, letting her arms fall listlessly on the plug controls. "Can't exactly draw when the stuff you breathe would soak through all your sketchbooks. Can't go anywhere, do anything. Can't go to the toilet…"
I winced. "Please tell me you went to the toilet before they loaded you in."
"First thing I did when we landed." She smiled slyly. "Why? Does that mean you had an accident in one of these before?"
"Absolutely not!"
She laughed again. "You're a terrible liar, Ikari."
I sighed. "And you're in a too good of a mood."
"Am I?" She drummed her fingers on the controls. "I'm just okay, really."
"Okay isn't a bad state of mind to be in right now. I'm glad for that."
She eyed the camera sidelong. "Really?"
"Really. It's good that it doesn't bother you too much. It always bothered me."
"Why's that?"
I turned about in my chair and glanced up. There was a windowed room overlooking the control center. Misato used it as a place for guests and dignitaries to observe ongoing missions and battles and the like. That day, the audience was none other than the Horaki family. Indeed, the eldest sister, Kodama, sat in the front row.
"I never had family supporting me," I said over the radio.
"Are they there?" Nozomi peered around me, as though that would help. "Are they watching?"
"Yeah. We've got a radio upstairs if you'd like to talk to them."
She frowned. "They're both there?"
The middle daughter of the Horaki family wasn't sitting with the others. No, she stood off to the side, right up against the glass. Our eyes met, and she waved politely at me. I returned the gesture, saying to Nozomi,
"Yeah, they're both here."
"That's okay, then." Nozomi turned aside, sitting straight in the seat—which meant looking away from the communication window. "I know there's not a lot of time before we get started."
I opened a file folder on my desk and looked down. "Somebody you don't want to talk to?" I asked.
"I didn't say that."
"Then what is it?"
Nozomi's eyes narrowed. "Look at you, trying to be sly." She stared out the front of the visual interface. "It's complicated," she said.. "Don't worry too much about it. I'm sure it's pretty stupid compared to what we've got to deal with."
Sighing, I moved my seat forward, shut the folder, and lowered my voice. "You need to be careful, Nozomi. Inside Eva, everything that haunts you becomes ten times worse. Problems with family, problems with friends—they're magnified inside that entry plug. That's the place where your soul and feelings are laid bare. You can't put off dealing with that stuff just to be a pilot. You can't be a pilot that way."
She sighed, drumming her fingers on the controls again. "I guess that is what they're paying you for, isn't it—to say uncomfortable stuff like that? The stuff I don't wanna hear that's also true?"
I smiled sympathetically. "If it's really going to be that bad, they need to pay me more."
She huffed at that, breaking into a small smile herself. "I'll try to deal with it, I guess. You're probably right about that stuff." Her eyes flickered forward, to another information screen. "But that's gotta wait. Tell me what I need to do here."
Kill an Angel and let us all go back to our lives—that would've been a good start. That's what we needed to do, but it wouldn't be easy.
The Angel had headed for Germany. Its reasons were unknown, but its destination was certain: Vetzillah Base, our German counterpart in Berlin. How the Angel knew to go there no one could say. Maybe it felt the presence of something like itself there. Maybe Seele had uncovered the knowledge and communicated it somehow. Either way, the Angel was headed for Germany, and we would have it face two Eva instead of one.
And that confrontation would have to come soon, for the Angel didn't advance on Berlin unaided. The creatures advanced from the north, pushing through a wooded area north of Berlin. The German defenders had set up artillery emplacements to slaughter the beasts, but try as they might, the Germans had a difficult time defending their guns. Just one or two of the creatures could match a half-dozen men, and what they lacked in range, they made up for in sheer resilience, shrugging off all but the most devastating, high-caliber bullet wounds with ease.
Just in the fifteen minutes before the operation began, we watched three German artillery pieces go dark, overrun by the creatures. Some of these firefights we witnessed live, but for most of the others, all we could do was track hotspots on a map overlay. It was like some cruel strategy game, with units duking it out in real time while we sat there, in our control room, helpless to do anything to change it.
And then the Angel came.
It rolled into the battlefield leisurely, as though it were on an afternoon stroll. As its rings spun around its body, their wake picked up trees and dirt from the soil, flinging material nowhere in particular. The Angel overflew an artillery emplacement, and the gun zipped off the ground as though it were made of paper.
"Isn't it about time we do something about this?" asked Nozomi.
I looked to the officer on my left. Hyuga sipped some tea, looking unmoved. "This is how the Germans want it. It's up to Eva-15 right now."
Eva Unit-15. It was a tall, lanky beast—but it was fast and agile unlike any person could be with those proportions. It dashed into view as a streak of white, red, and black. It let out a guttural, vicious cry, charged at the Angel, and lowered its shoulder for an ear-splitting blow.
CRACK!
AT fields smashed against each other, shimmering in the afternoon light. The hit repulsed the Angel, driving it away from its targets: a caravan of motorized artillery on a highway.
"Ops, are we cleared yet?" asked Misato, peering over her bank of monitors.
"Not yet, General," said Hyuga.
"What are they waiting for? Do they want that Angel to blow up half the forest and the city with it before they let us help out?"
"They're saying Eva-15 hasn't had enough opportunity to press an advantage."
Misato huffed. "It's a lot easier to press an advantage with two instead of one."
But for the moment, the Angel and Unit-15 squared off on the highway, at the edge of an expansive forest, with the German artillery pieces retreating down the road. If the Angel were angry about this, it didn't show it in any obvious way. After all, it had no eyes to show emotion with, no mouth to twist in rage. So though the Angel did spin up its rings, I can't say there was any emotion in it. Maybe there was, but since the Angel held still as it did so, I felt it was simply acting, without emotion or regard for what Unit-15 had done.
How easy it is to dehumanize what doesn't look or speak like us, right? In that, I was quite wrong.
The Angel barreled down the road, tearing asphalt from the ground, and it pulled Unit-15 into the air, too.
But Unit-15 was ready for that: it drew a rifle-like weapon from its vertical shoulder pylon. The rifle shot out a grappling hook that clawed into the Angel's AT field. The tether reeled the Eva toward the Angel, and the Eva's teeth sank into the AT field.
The Angel turned and drove the Eva into the highway surface. Like a farmer at a plow, the Angel pushed and pushed, and the connected mass barreled off the freeway, into the forest of tall, thin trees.
When the two finally lost momentum, the Angel bounced upward, ripping itself free of the Eva's jaws. The Eva lay in a newly-dug trench, surrounded by dirt, wood, and asphalt. It struggled to its feet, swaying for balance and footing.
"General," said Hyuga, "the Germans are giving us the green light."
"You don't say." Misato smiled, sitting back in her chair. "Took them long enough. All right, begin the separation sequence."
The controllers rolled through the procedure for an aerial launch, and as they were making their reports back to our commander, I got on the line to Nozomi. "We're on," I said. "Are you ready?"
Nozomi wrapped her hands around the controls and stared ahead. "Ready as ever,"
The controllers reported back with everything set, and Hyuga nodded. "We're go for separation. Optimal launch point expected in fifteen seconds."
Fifteen seconds to the maw of madness. Fifteen seconds to your heart racing at 130 beats per minute. Fifteen seconds to squaring off with something that should not be, from a place we should never have known.
I met Nozomi's eyes—for once, she looked directly at the virtual window. I gave her a smile to reassure her, but I think it must've had the opposite effect: she tilted her head down, looking at me from just under her eyebrows, and said,
"It's gonna be okay, yeah? Let's do this together."
I nodded, and I wiped some sweat from my brow.
"Separation in nine…" said Hyuga.
I looked around the room for one last moment, one moment of peace before the action began for real. From her position with the Eva technicians and engineers, Asuka gave me a quick wave. Others in the control room scooted forward and leaned toward their arrays of monitors.
And at the front of the room, just beneath the projector screens, a man with red glasses stared back at me.
"Separation in five, four, three—"
Even though he was looking straight at the left projector screen, counting off the seconds, Captain Hyuga didn't see that man.
Nor did I, when I looked at the front of the room again.
"Two, one, separation!"
Nozomi lurched against the belt seat restraint. Unit-14, encased in an aerodynamic launch vehicle, released from the top of its carrying aircraft and glided freely. The carrying aircraft pitched down and dove out of the way, leaving the Eva clear to fly into the battlefield as a fifty-ton missile of flesh, metal, and electronics.
When the Eva came close, the launch vehicle blasted itself apart, and Unit-14 drew its prog knife, leading with the vibrating tip. The knife touched the Angel's AT field, and—
TSSCH! Our monitors overloaded with digital static.
"Nozomi!" I leapt out of my seat, eyes glued to the front projector screens. "Nozomi, can you hear me!"
"Urk," she grunted, and against the background of white noise, an outline of her body in the entry plug faded into view. She held her arms over her face, and they cast long shadows over her chest and the seat behind her. "What is that?"
It was the Angel.
The Eva lay prone in a crater, with shattered trees lining the rim. The Angel hovered before Unit-14 at the other side, and its two orbiting rings had stopped and locked into place, aligned with each other. The Angel had flattened itself into a disc, showing a circular face to Unit-14, and in the center of that face, the Angel's white central body beamed with bright, radiant light. It bathed the Eva in its glow, and through the Eva's holographic interface, that light shone on Nozomi, too.
"Don't look directly into it," I said. "You can back off and let Unit-15 distract it for a while."
She gaped at me quizzically and looked directly into the comm window. She gestured forward with her arm. "You don't see that?"
"I know it's hard to look at, but—"
"There's a person in there, Ikari!"
A half-dozen heads turned my direction, but it's not like I had any answers. I saw what they were seeing—a bright light, blinding and intense, and that was all.
"What do you mean, Nozomi? What do you see?"
"It looks like a woman, or a girl? She—" Her eyes widened; her lips curled, and she pushed herself back in her seat. "Okay, Ikari, there's a person in there, and she's talking to me like she knows me. What the hell's going on here?"
My heart skipped a beat. "It may—it might be, well…" I wiped my eyelid clean, and I hunched over the keyboard. "It might be trying to make a connection with you, or distract you? Don't listen to it. Don't pay it any attention. Do you hear me?"
She clamped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes tight. "Kinda hard to do that when it's blasting my ears off!" she yelled.
"Nozomi!" I shook the monitor and camera perched atop it. "Nozomi, can you hear me?"
Wincing, she shook her head at the camera. "It's all noise here!"
I pounded my hand on the desk, and I called out over my shoulder, "Misato?"
Eyes narrowed, Misato drummed her fingers on her desk. "Hyuga, your recommendation?"
He took his headset partway off. "Unit-15 stalls, and if there's no improvement in the situation, go to Contingency Noah."
Misato grimaced, and she ran her hand through her hair. "Sell the Germans on it, then."
Hyuga got on the line to the Germans personally, giving them instructions in their native tongue. Unit-15, with its long, slender arms, wound up and stabbed and swiped at the Angel with a prog knife, but that only drew the Angel's ire. The Angel turned its outer ring 90 degrees, cutting its blinding gaze in two. The split beam froze both Eva, but while Nozomi struggled against that light, Unit-15 flinched only briefly. It shrugged off the attack and stabbed at the ring itself, and energy from the AT field radiated outward.
"That's a weak point," said Misato. "Get the Americans on the horn; we need those rods targeted at the Angel's rings. Time to impact?"
"Sixty seconds."
Misato's eyes fell to me. "Shinji, get her ready."
I scoffed. "How? I can't reach her."
She put on a sad smile. "This is the job we asked you to do, isn't it?"
I adjusted the headset over my ear. Nozomi was still doubled over in agony. The Angel's light cast her shadow along the back of the entry plug. There was no escaping its searing, screeching glare.
I pressed down hard on the transmit switch. "Nozomi, are you with me?"
She shook her head. "Sorry, what?" she shouted. "This thing is trying to rearrange my synapses here!"
"Try to shut it out, all right?" I pulled the camera from the top of my monitor and held it in my hand. "Nozomi," I said, "this is part of the job; I don't like that it's that way, but that's what it is. You need to get out of there. The Noah Contingency is in effect. Everything in the area is going to be a smoking ruin in less than a minute if you don't break free from that Angel and get out of there. Please!"
Her body contorted in unnatural shapes, as though she could drive out the voice in her head, the images in her mind, just by pressing hard enough with her hand. And the Eva? It mirrored her movements. The armor plates ground and scraped against each other in a warbling wail.
"I'm doing everything I can here, Ikari!" Nozomi cried out. "I don't know how!"
"Try harder!" I squeezed the armrest of my chair, and my fingers warped the cheap plastic. "Don't let it inside you! Push it out! It doesn't know you; it doesn't know who you are. Make yourself into a wall and don't let it in any further!"
She sat straight and tall, staring into the light. Her chest heaved with every breath, and her gaze bored into the center of that creature's glow. She growled, and that growl grew to a cry, then a cry to a guttural shout, blasting the radio with a coarse, throaty sound.
But the light pushed back at her, withering and implacable. Its force alone drove Nozomi and Eva-14 back and into the air, holding the Eva suspended like a ragdoll.
When Unit-15 bit at the Angel's AT field, the Angel spun around and dragged Nozomi along in the light like a wrecking ball. The two Eva's smashed into each other and tangled up, and Nozomi rattled against her seat restraints like a pinball against a maze of bumpers. Each blow zapped some life from her, and her shout faded to a whimper, punctuated by heavy breaths. She hung lifeless and limp against the restraints.
"Urgh, Ikari," she muttered. "Not sure I've got it in me to do any more than that…."
"But you need to try!" I said back. "Try anyway! Try harder! Do something!"
"She can't."
There was another voice that spoke to me—a voice that didn't belong in that room.
No, it was a voice that didn't belong anywhere. It was a voice that belonged to something that never should've existed.
The voice belonged to the stranger in the satin hood.
They (it?) stood beside my cubicle, between Major Hyuga's station and mine. They were dressed in pure white satin robes with dark purple trim—in a band that left a small gap of white at the edge of the fabric. On their hood, that trim went over the stranger's nose.
"She can't."
The stranger held their hands together in front of their chest and beneath their sleeves—if they even actually had hands at all.
"She can do nothing," said the stranger, in a voice that toed the line between masculine and feminine—indistinct, nondescript, echoing. "And you can't help her."
I swiveled to face forward, and I covered my microphone with my hand for a moment. "Watch me," I said.
"Watch you fail?"
That was not an indistinct voice.
I knew that voice. At one point I'd forgotten what it sounded like. I'd imagined hearing it, yes—in dreams I was too ashamed to admit to. But as with all things you imagine, if it's not reinforced by the real thing, you forget what it's really like.
I remember—the first time I heard that voice again, it took me a second to realize, yes, that's what my father sounded like.
The first time I saw those eyes—behind red, tinted lenses—it took me a second to realize, yes, that's what my father looked like.
So much of him had become unreal to me, a collection of faded memories recalled imperfectly, that I was surprised he would speak to me, surprised that I could see him at all.
Just as I was surprised then, to see him staring at me from beside my cubicle.
I stared at him, open-mouthed. Some little bone inside me shook with every word he spoke, like a glass in resonance with an opera singer's pure tone. Dial it up a little louder, and it would shatter.
"You can't reach her." His words were flat, his gaze unwavering. He didn't take the time even to blink, let alone breathe. "You can't reach her through the radio. You can't reach her through the air."
"Shut up." I mumbled that, shut my eyes tight, and turned my head away.
Hyuga peered through the clear plastic divider between our stations. "Shinji, what's wrong? What's happening?"
"She is alone," said my father. "She is alone, and there is nothing you can do to save her, Shinji."
There was a sound from the monitor; the beam of light pulsed, and when the disturbance reached Nozomi, she groaned. She tensed up. Every little touch, every sensation—they were like lightning to her, charged with the electricity of emotion. And the only way to keep those feelings out? Curl up into a ball. That's what she did.
"Control, minimal plug depth plus five percent," said one of the controllers.
"Understood," said Misato, who stood at her position, observing the whole of the room ahead and beneath her. She sighed at that before announcing to the room, "All right, we're doing this as we are. Ops, do what you need to do. Save the pilot, and save the Eva."
"Yes, General." Hyuga let me be. Standing beside his station, he commanded the rest of the room. "NCI, at impact minus five, let's remove the synch rate limiters. Systems, we'll move to combat plug depth at the same time. It's going to hurt, but anything we can do to help her defend herself from the blast. Let's go!"
The room erupted in a flurry of cross-talk and chatter, as individual controllers tweaked and adjusted the Eva for impact.
"Impact minus ten," said a controller.
Misato leaned forward, gripping the front edge of her station table. "Give us the wide shot on panel three," she said.
On the rightmost panel, the camera view changed to a long-distance shot parallel to the horizon. The Eva and the Angel? So far away they were but tiny blips near the ground, if that. No, they were insignificant compared to the bright white lines being traced out against the sky—from the sky to ground.
Unit-15 bolted from scene, leaping away like an expert hurdler. That left only the Angel and Nozomi at the impact point, with the clock ticking down.
"Impact in six, five—"
"Combat depth!"
"Limiters off!"
Nozomi shouted, eyes bulging from their sockets. She clamped her hands over her ears and pressed her head against the back of the plug seat.
And my father leaned over my shoulder, smiling. "You see?"
I tore my eyes away from him, and on the radio control panel, I muted the entry plug. I sat back, closed my eyes, and felt the glow of the impact when it washed over the main screens.
Project Noah, they called it—a clean, humane way to rain destruction on whatever so much as insults you. They took dense metal rods and dropped them from orbit, you see. At speeds unimaginable, they drove through whatever they were set upon, piercing and shattering the target or obliterating it with high-velocity molten tungsten.
It was a cleansing fire, that rain. It cleansed everything.
Everything where the rods struck.
Everything as far as the eye could see around that.
And when I opened my eyes again, that's all I saw. I saw fire.
The fire took my father away.
The smoke took the Angel away.
The charred earth took Unit-14 away.
A solid blue flame engulfed my monitor, taking Nozomi away, too.
I took off my headset and threw it aside, leaving it in a corner of my station. I sat back and let my emotions take me where they may.
Even though my tears could do nothing to put those flames out.
While Nozomi was on her way to battle, it was time to settle some business at home. Misato had a whole bunker for the Eva—with labs for research and living quarters for all personnel to help them work efficiently.
Or to make sure they had no excuse to leave. Heh.
It was convenient, though, to have somewhere to sleep if we worked long days at the base, and since Asuka and I both had jobs there, that convenience was something Misato could offer us.
Unfortunately, convenience was the only thing she could offer. When Asuka and I first saw these quarters, the first thing out of Asuka's mouth was,
"What the hell is this?"
I didn't want to be picky. There was a bed for two, a dresser, a sink, and a private toilet and shower, too. That was a relief, really. Some of the junior non-officer personnel were packed in eight to a room or more, with no private toilet or bath at all.
But it was pretty bare-bones. The flooring was dark carpet, thankfully, but obviously we were so far down there could be no windows or external light. The sink was a purely metal fixture—all very functional and efficient, and that was all it was.
"We're going to go crazy if we stay here," said Asuka, walking in the narrow space between the bed and the hallway wall. "This is little more than a cage. And look!" She went up to the desk, which sat beside the dresser. "One desk for two people. Who thought of that?"
I put a bag down on the bed and started going through the contents: some toiletries, a few pairs of underwear and socks, and some outfits—enough to get through a couple days. "It's really not so bad," I said. "I'll be in my office most of the time, so I doubt I'd be using that desk very much."
Asuka snapped her fingers, looking aside. "That's what I need. Not just my own tiny cubicle. A personal office."
"Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?"
"Says the guy who has his own personal office already." She put her hands on her hips, frowning. "What did you say to get Misato to give you those nice digs, anyway?"
I piled two pairs of underwear on top of another. "I just said I would help Nozomi."
"That right." Asuka smirked. "Look at you—so devoted to work all of a sudden. Next thing you know, you'll be taking your work home with you."
I clutched a pair of socks in hand, freezing. "Why do you think I'd do that?"
"Oh, never mind," she said, shrugging, and her eyes went to the back of the room. "Man, I hope that shower isn't gross."
She slid past me to peer into the bathroom and toilet, and while her back was to me, I took a file folder from my bag and slipped it under a stack of base manuals and regulations on the desk. I checked back—no, she wasn't looking—and I said,
"How is it?"
She made a horrified grunt. "I think we should only stay here in emergencies. Let's go back home for the day, come back for the battle."
I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. "I don't know," I said. "I wouldn't want to be late."
"You worried about her?" she called out the washroom door.
Shrugging, I laid the underwear, socks, and shirts into the top dresser drawer. "What do you know about her and Horaki?"
Asuka came back out and plopped down on the sink counter with a sigh. She kicked her feet idly. "Hmm. I didn't speak to Nozomi very much when I stayed with them. When I did run into her, she was a little distant, yeah. I mean, I don't have any brothers or sisters. I figured most girls would be a little wary of their sisters' friends—well, unless they were trying to impress older kids and look cool. Nozomi definitely isn't that."
I closed the drawer, frowning. "Yeah, I know what she's not, but I don't really know what she is yet, either, or why she and Horaki seem strange around each other."
"Strange? How?"
"Horaki seems pretty stiff when it comes to her."
"Aha." Asuka shrugged. "Maybe she doesn't like Hikari? That girl can be hard to get along with sometimes. She can get pushy sometimes."
"Why are you friends with her, then?"
"She's not pushy with me, but that's something you just learn and get a feel for." Asuka hopped off the counter and stretched her arms. "I wouldn't worry about it. Some families, you know—they just have things going on with them that outsiders can't understand. Would anyone else have understood the distance between you and your father?"
I sat back down on the bed, staring at the wall. "That's different. My father was an exceptional man."
Asuka snorted. "An exceptional asshole, maybe."
I bowed my head, smiling. "I was going to say bastard, but that works, too."
"An exceptional jackass."
"An exceptional douchebag."
Snickering, Asuka sat beside me and rubbed my head. "Look at you—all foul-mouthed all of a sudden!"
"Maybe I just have my father to thank for that."
"Yeah, well…" She put an arm around me. "You can thank your father for a lot of things, but you turned out all right in spite of him, yeah?"
Maybe I had. I was there, and I was alive. I was in a position to make a difference—a real difference, not one I would just stumble upon. And I had friends to support me, like Asuka and Misato. What my father had done to me—what he had put me through—that was in the past.
It was a sobering thought, just to realize how much of my young adult life had been shaped by what my father ultimately had in mind for me. The isolation, the separation—these helped shape me into what my father needed, into the tool that would be too weak and starved for affection to resist being used. That's what I used to be.
But sitting there with Asuka, in that drab gray box far underground, I was my own person. I could make myself into whatever I wanted.
"Hey, what's this?"
From the stack of manuals and regulations on the wooden desk, Asuka pulled out the thin file folder.
"It's nothing!" I said, stiffening up. "Really, it's just a little thing!"
"Relax," she said, tossing the folder aside. "Like I'm one to talk about taking work home. Still…" She looked from me to the folder again, deep in thought.
"What is it?"
"Nothing." She broke into a smirk. "Maybe I should punish you anyway, though."
I zipped up the bag and laid it at the foot of the bed. "What kind of punishment might that be?"
Asuka pinched my nose and grinned.
I now know that, when you have to be at your station at 0130, it's probably not a good idea to exert yourself the day before. When the best coffee and tea you can get your hands on taste like caffeine-infused water more than anything else, it's definitely not a good idea.
So early the next morning, I tried to stay awake at my station as best I could. I read procedure manuals and technical specifications aloud—quietly, of course—just to keep myself going. Did you know that an Eva's armor plating is no less than three centimeters thick? Or that it's made of polymer-infused carbon fiber? I didn't either, until that morning. I remember thinking I'd have to ask Asuka about that.
"Shinji."
That was the man beside me, Major Hyuga. Unlike me, he looked like he was ready to deal with anything up to an including a nuclear strike. He was that steady, relaxed, and awake.
"We're coming up on the scheduled check-in," he said.
"Ah! Right!" I stiffened in my chair, sitting upright, and I worked the switch for the transmitter. "Eva-14, Eva-14, this is Manoah Base—"
"Easy, not yet," he said, amused. "Private Ikezawa is going to make sure we're routed properly. Ikezawa?"
"Yes, sir," said a woman further down the row. "We're just switching the encryption keys for the German network now."
Everything had to be done in a certain way and in a certain order, and there was a list of procedures and regulations a that could've filled the whole room if it were printed out. I didn't know about any of these things. They just asked me to talk to the pilot.
"Ops, we're connected," said the private.
"Very good." Hyuga touched the back of my chair. "You're on, Shinji."
I cleared my throat, sat back, and began again. "Eva-14, Eva-14, this is Manoah Base. Do you read me?"
The first thing I heard back on the line was laughter. "Wow, Ikari. They got you talking like you belong in SDF, huh?"
I went red in the ears. "They do not!"
"Do too."
I sat straight up in my chair. "Eva-14, do you read me? This is part of the scheduled check-in procedure. We have to go through the checklist."
"Yeah, yeah, I read you already."
"Okay, good. Now, we going to go through the Off-Base Startup - Telemetry Reconnection procedure. Can you bring that up for me?"
We didn't have entry plug video yet, but this should've consisted of Nozomi interacting with the holographic interface inside the plug and bringing up a window with a list of procedures.
"All right. Sequence 7-13?"
"That's correct."
"Okay, so we're starting with the telemetry frequency?"
The output telemetry frequency, the encryption key for the signal, the number of subchannels used for additional data transmission, backup frequencies in case of noise on the primary channel—she needed all of that, and then the same thing over again for the Eva to accept remote commands. And then all the separate sensors had to broadcast their total data history for us to have and make sense of since the Eva had been brought online.
But in the end, it was worth it, for reestablishing all the telemetry and secondary communication channels put a visual of the entry plug interior on my screen. Nozomi waved half-heatedly at the virtual camera.
"And I thought I didn't get much sleep," she mused, lying back in her seat.
"How long have you been in there?" I asked.
"A couple hours now. They put us down in Russia, I guess, and it took the better part of an hour just to get the plug out and get me inside it." She shivered, holding to her elbows. "Be glad you never had to do that. Going into cold goo that way—never again."
"I guess it's a lucky thing the worst I ever had to do was sit and wait for an Angel to come." I sat back in my chair, twirling a pen between my fingers. "It's not easy, is it—having nowhere to go and nothing to pass the time with?"
She shrugged, letting her arms fall listlessly on the plug controls. "Can't exactly draw when the stuff you breathe would soak through all your sketchbooks. Can't go anywhere, do anything. Can't go to the toilet…"
I winced. "Please tell me you went to the toilet before they loaded you in."
"First thing I did when we landed." She smiled slyly. "Why? Does that mean you had an accident in one of these before?"
"Absolutely not!"
She laughed again. "You're a terrible liar, Ikari."
I sighed. "And you're in a too good of a mood."
"Am I?" She drummed her fingers on the controls. "I'm just okay, really."
"Okay isn't a bad state of mind to be in right now. I'm glad for that."
She eyed the camera sidelong. "Really?"
"Really. It's good that it doesn't bother you too much. It always bothered me."
"Why's that?"
I turned about in my chair and glanced up. There was a windowed room overlooking the control center. Misato used it as a place for guests and dignitaries to observe ongoing missions and battles and the like. That day, the audience was none other than the Horaki family. Indeed, the eldest sister, Kodama, sat in the front row.
"I never had family supporting me," I said over the radio.
"Are they there?" Nozomi peered around me, as though that would help. "Are they watching?"
"Yeah. We've got a radio upstairs if you'd like to talk to them."
She frowned. "They're both there?"
The middle daughter of the Horaki family wasn't sitting with the others. No, she stood off to the side, right up against the glass. Our eyes met, and she waved politely at me. I returned the gesture, saying to Nozomi,
"Yeah, they're both here."
"That's okay, then." Nozomi turned aside, sitting straight in the seat—which meant looking away from the communication window. "I know there's not a lot of time before we get started."
I opened a file folder on my desk and looked down. "Somebody you don't want to talk to?" I asked.
"I didn't say that."
"Then what is it?"
Nozomi's eyes narrowed. "Look at you, trying to be sly." She stared out the front of the visual interface. "It's complicated," she said.. "Don't worry too much about it. I'm sure it's pretty stupid compared to what we've got to deal with."
Sighing, I moved my seat forward, shut the folder, and lowered my voice. "You need to be careful, Nozomi. Inside Eva, everything that haunts you becomes ten times worse. Problems with family, problems with friends—they're magnified inside that entry plug. That's the place where your soul and feelings are laid bare. You can't put off dealing with that stuff just to be a pilot. You can't be a pilot that way."
She sighed, drumming her fingers on the controls again. "I guess that is what they're paying you for, isn't it—to say uncomfortable stuff like that? The stuff I don't wanna hear that's also true?"
I smiled sympathetically. "If it's really going to be that bad, they need to pay me more."
She huffed at that, breaking into a small smile herself. "I'll try to deal with it, I guess. You're probably right about that stuff." Her eyes flickered forward, to another information screen. "But that's gotta wait. Tell me what I need to do here."
Kill an Angel and let us all go back to our lives—that would've been a good start. That's what we needed to do, but it wouldn't be easy.
The Angel had headed for Germany. Its reasons were unknown, but its destination was certain: Vetzillah Base, our German counterpart in Berlin. How the Angel knew to go there no one could say. Maybe it felt the presence of something like itself there. Maybe Seele had uncovered the knowledge and communicated it somehow. Either way, the Angel was headed for Germany, and we would have it face two Eva instead of one.
And that confrontation would have to come soon, for the Angel didn't advance on Berlin unaided. The creatures advanced from the north, pushing through a wooded area north of Berlin. The German defenders had set up artillery emplacements to slaughter the beasts, but try as they might, the Germans had a difficult time defending their guns. Just one or two of the creatures could match a half-dozen men, and what they lacked in range, they made up for in sheer resilience, shrugging off all but the most devastating, high-caliber bullet wounds with ease.
Just in the fifteen minutes before the operation began, we watched three German artillery pieces go dark, overrun by the creatures. Some of these firefights we witnessed live, but for most of the others, all we could do was track hotspots on a map overlay. It was like some cruel strategy game, with units duking it out in real time while we sat there, in our control room, helpless to do anything to change it.
And then the Angel came.
It rolled into the battlefield leisurely, as though it were on an afternoon stroll. As its rings spun around its body, their wake picked up trees and dirt from the soil, flinging material nowhere in particular. The Angel overflew an artillery emplacement, and the gun zipped off the ground as though it were made of paper.
"Isn't it about time we do something about this?" asked Nozomi.
I looked to the officer on my left. Hyuga sipped some tea, looking unmoved. "This is how the Germans want it. It's up to Eva-15 right now."
Eva Unit-15. It was a tall, lanky beast—but it was fast and agile unlike any person could be with those proportions. It dashed into view as a streak of white, red, and black. It let out a guttural, vicious cry, charged at the Angel, and lowered its shoulder for an ear-splitting blow.
CRACK!
AT fields smashed against each other, shimmering in the afternoon light. The hit repulsed the Angel, driving it away from its targets: a caravan of motorized artillery on a highway.
"Ops, are we cleared yet?" asked Misato, peering over her bank of monitors.
"Not yet, General," said Hyuga.
"What are they waiting for? Do they want that Angel to blow up half the forest and the city with it before they let us help out?"
"They're saying Eva-15 hasn't had enough opportunity to press an advantage."
Misato huffed. "It's a lot easier to press an advantage with two instead of one."
But for the moment, the Angel and Unit-15 squared off on the highway, at the edge of an expansive forest, with the German artillery pieces retreating down the road. If the Angel were angry about this, it didn't show it in any obvious way. After all, it had no eyes to show emotion with, no mouth to twist in rage. So though the Angel did spin up its rings, I can't say there was any emotion in it. Maybe there was, but since the Angel held still as it did so, I felt it was simply acting, without emotion or regard for what Unit-15 had done.
How easy it is to dehumanize what doesn't look or speak like us, right? In that, I was quite wrong.
The Angel barreled down the road, tearing asphalt from the ground, and it pulled Unit-15 into the air, too.
But Unit-15 was ready for that: it drew a rifle-like weapon from its vertical shoulder pylon. The rifle shot out a grappling hook that clawed into the Angel's AT field. The tether reeled the Eva toward the Angel, and the Eva's teeth sank into the AT field.
The Angel turned and drove the Eva into the highway surface. Like a farmer at a plow, the Angel pushed and pushed, and the connected mass barreled off the freeway, into the forest of tall, thin trees.
When the two finally lost momentum, the Angel bounced upward, ripping itself free of the Eva's jaws. The Eva lay in a newly-dug trench, surrounded by dirt, wood, and asphalt. It struggled to its feet, swaying for balance and footing.
"General," said Hyuga, "the Germans are giving us the green light."
"You don't say." Misato smiled, sitting back in her chair. "Took them long enough. All right, begin the separation sequence."
The controllers rolled through the procedure for an aerial launch, and as they were making their reports back to our commander, I got on the line to Nozomi. "We're on," I said. "Are you ready?"
Nozomi wrapped her hands around the controls and stared ahead. "Ready as ever,"
The controllers reported back with everything set, and Hyuga nodded. "We're go for separation. Optimal launch point expected in fifteen seconds."
Fifteen seconds to the maw of madness. Fifteen seconds to your heart racing at 130 beats per minute. Fifteen seconds to squaring off with something that should not be, from a place we should never have known.
I met Nozomi's eyes—for once, she looked directly at the virtual window. I gave her a smile to reassure her, but I think it must've had the opposite effect: she tilted her head down, looking at me from just under her eyebrows, and said,
"It's gonna be okay, yeah? Let's do this together."
I nodded, and I wiped some sweat from my brow.
"Separation in nine…" said Hyuga.
I looked around the room for one last moment, one moment of peace before the action began for real. From her position with the Eva technicians and engineers, Asuka gave me a quick wave. Others in the control room scooted forward and leaned toward their arrays of monitors.
And at the front of the room, just beneath the projector screens, a man with red glasses stared back at me.
"Separation in five, four, three—"
Even though he was looking straight at the left projector screen, counting off the seconds, Captain Hyuga didn't see that man.
Nor did I, when I looked at the front of the room again.
"Two, one, separation!"
Nozomi lurched against the belt seat restraint. Unit-14, encased in an aerodynamic launch vehicle, released from the top of its carrying aircraft and glided freely. The carrying aircraft pitched down and dove out of the way, leaving the Eva clear to fly into the battlefield as a fifty-ton missile of flesh, metal, and electronics.
When the Eva came close, the launch vehicle blasted itself apart, and Unit-14 drew its prog knife, leading with the vibrating tip. The knife touched the Angel's AT field, and—
TSSCH! Our monitors overloaded with digital static.
"Nozomi!" I leapt out of my seat, eyes glued to the front projector screens. "Nozomi, can you hear me!"
"Urk," she grunted, and against the background of white noise, an outline of her body in the entry plug faded into view. She held her arms over her face, and they cast long shadows over her chest and the seat behind her. "What is that?"
It was the Angel.
The Eva lay prone in a crater, with shattered trees lining the rim. The Angel hovered before Unit-14 at the other side, and its two orbiting rings had stopped and locked into place, aligned with each other. The Angel had flattened itself into a disc, showing a circular face to Unit-14, and in the center of that face, the Angel's white central body beamed with bright, radiant light. It bathed the Eva in its glow, and through the Eva's holographic interface, that light shone on Nozomi, too.
"Don't look directly into it," I said. "You can back off and let Unit-15 distract it for a while."
She gaped at me quizzically and looked directly into the comm window. She gestured forward with her arm. "You don't see that?"
"I know it's hard to look at, but—"
"There's a person in there, Ikari!"
A half-dozen heads turned my direction, but it's not like I had any answers. I saw what they were seeing—a bright light, blinding and intense, and that was all.
"What do you mean, Nozomi? What do you see?"
"It looks like a woman, or a girl? She—" Her eyes widened; her lips curled, and she pushed herself back in her seat. "Okay, Ikari, there's a person in there, and she's talking to me like she knows me. What the hell's going on here?"
My heart skipped a beat. "It may—it might be, well…" I wiped my eyelid clean, and I hunched over the keyboard. "It might be trying to make a connection with you, or distract you? Don't listen to it. Don't pay it any attention. Do you hear me?"
She clamped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes tight. "Kinda hard to do that when it's blasting my ears off!" she yelled.
"Nozomi!" I shook the monitor and camera perched atop it. "Nozomi, can you hear me?"
Wincing, she shook her head at the camera. "It's all noise here!"
I pounded my hand on the desk, and I called out over my shoulder, "Misato?"
Eyes narrowed, Misato drummed her fingers on her desk. "Hyuga, your recommendation?"
He took his headset partway off. "Unit-15 stalls, and if there's no improvement in the situation, go to Contingency Noah."
Misato grimaced, and she ran her hand through her hair. "Sell the Germans on it, then."
Hyuga got on the line to the Germans personally, giving them instructions in their native tongue. Unit-15, with its long, slender arms, wound up and stabbed and swiped at the Angel with a prog knife, but that only drew the Angel's ire. The Angel turned its outer ring 90 degrees, cutting its blinding gaze in two. The split beam froze both Eva, but while Nozomi struggled against that light, Unit-15 flinched only briefly. It shrugged off the attack and stabbed at the ring itself, and energy from the AT field radiated outward.
"That's a weak point," said Misato. "Get the Americans on the horn; we need those rods targeted at the Angel's rings. Time to impact?"
"Sixty seconds."
Misato's eyes fell to me. "Shinji, get her ready."
I scoffed. "How? I can't reach her."
She put on a sad smile. "This is the job we asked you to do, isn't it?"
I adjusted the headset over my ear. Nozomi was still doubled over in agony. The Angel's light cast her shadow along the back of the entry plug. There was no escaping its searing, screeching glare.
I pressed down hard on the transmit switch. "Nozomi, are you with me?"
She shook her head. "Sorry, what?" she shouted. "This thing is trying to rearrange my synapses here!"
"Try to shut it out, all right?" I pulled the camera from the top of my monitor and held it in my hand. "Nozomi," I said, "this is part of the job; I don't like that it's that way, but that's what it is. You need to get out of there. The Noah Contingency is in effect. Everything in the area is going to be a smoking ruin in less than a minute if you don't break free from that Angel and get out of there. Please!"
Her body contorted in unnatural shapes, as though she could drive out the voice in her head, the images in her mind, just by pressing hard enough with her hand. And the Eva? It mirrored her movements. The armor plates ground and scraped against each other in a warbling wail.
"I'm doing everything I can here, Ikari!" Nozomi cried out. "I don't know how!"
"Try harder!" I squeezed the armrest of my chair, and my fingers warped the cheap plastic. "Don't let it inside you! Push it out! It doesn't know you; it doesn't know who you are. Make yourself into a wall and don't let it in any further!"
She sat straight and tall, staring into the light. Her chest heaved with every breath, and her gaze bored into the center of that creature's glow. She growled, and that growl grew to a cry, then a cry to a guttural shout, blasting the radio with a coarse, throaty sound.
But the light pushed back at her, withering and implacable. Its force alone drove Nozomi and Eva-14 back and into the air, holding the Eva suspended like a ragdoll.
When Unit-15 bit at the Angel's AT field, the Angel spun around and dragged Nozomi along in the light like a wrecking ball. The two Eva's smashed into each other and tangled up, and Nozomi rattled against her seat restraints like a pinball against a maze of bumpers. Each blow zapped some life from her, and her shout faded to a whimper, punctuated by heavy breaths. She hung lifeless and limp against the restraints.
"Urgh, Ikari," she muttered. "Not sure I've got it in me to do any more than that…."
"But you need to try!" I said back. "Try anyway! Try harder! Do something!"
"She can't."
There was another voice that spoke to me—a voice that didn't belong in that room.
No, it was a voice that didn't belong anywhere. It was a voice that belonged to something that never should've existed.
The voice belonged to the stranger in the satin hood.
They (it?) stood beside my cubicle, between Major Hyuga's station and mine. They were dressed in pure white satin robes with dark purple trim—in a band that left a small gap of white at the edge of the fabric. On their hood, that trim went over the stranger's nose.
"She can't."
The stranger held their hands together in front of their chest and beneath their sleeves—if they even actually had hands at all.
"She can do nothing," said the stranger, in a voice that toed the line between masculine and feminine—indistinct, nondescript, echoing. "And you can't help her."
I swiveled to face forward, and I covered my microphone with my hand for a moment. "Watch me," I said.
"Watch you fail?"
That was not an indistinct voice.
I knew that voice. At one point I'd forgotten what it sounded like. I'd imagined hearing it, yes—in dreams I was too ashamed to admit to. But as with all things you imagine, if it's not reinforced by the real thing, you forget what it's really like.
I remember—the first time I heard that voice again, it took me a second to realize, yes, that's what my father sounded like.
The first time I saw those eyes—behind red, tinted lenses—it took me a second to realize, yes, that's what my father looked like.
So much of him had become unreal to me, a collection of faded memories recalled imperfectly, that I was surprised he would speak to me, surprised that I could see him at all.
Just as I was surprised then, to see him staring at me from beside my cubicle.
I stared at him, open-mouthed. Some little bone inside me shook with every word he spoke, like a glass in resonance with an opera singer's pure tone. Dial it up a little louder, and it would shatter.
"You can't reach her." His words were flat, his gaze unwavering. He didn't take the time even to blink, let alone breathe. "You can't reach her through the radio. You can't reach her through the air."
"Shut up." I mumbled that, shut my eyes tight, and turned my head away.
Hyuga peered through the clear plastic divider between our stations. "Shinji, what's wrong? What's happening?"
"She is alone," said my father. "She is alone, and there is nothing you can do to save her, Shinji."
There was a sound from the monitor; the beam of light pulsed, and when the disturbance reached Nozomi, she groaned. She tensed up. Every little touch, every sensation—they were like lightning to her, charged with the electricity of emotion. And the only way to keep those feelings out? Curl up into a ball. That's what she did.
"Control, minimal plug depth plus five percent," said one of the controllers.
"Understood," said Misato, who stood at her position, observing the whole of the room ahead and beneath her. She sighed at that before announcing to the room, "All right, we're doing this as we are. Ops, do what you need to do. Save the pilot, and save the Eva."
"Yes, General." Hyuga let me be. Standing beside his station, he commanded the rest of the room. "NCI, at impact minus five, let's remove the synch rate limiters. Systems, we'll move to combat plug depth at the same time. It's going to hurt, but anything we can do to help her defend herself from the blast. Let's go!"
The room erupted in a flurry of cross-talk and chatter, as individual controllers tweaked and adjusted the Eva for impact.
"Impact minus ten," said a controller.
Misato leaned forward, gripping the front edge of her station table. "Give us the wide shot on panel three," she said.
On the rightmost panel, the camera view changed to a long-distance shot parallel to the horizon. The Eva and the Angel? So far away they were but tiny blips near the ground, if that. No, they were insignificant compared to the bright white lines being traced out against the sky—from the sky to ground.
Unit-15 bolted from scene, leaping away like an expert hurdler. That left only the Angel and Nozomi at the impact point, with the clock ticking down.
"Impact in six, five—"
"Combat depth!"
"Limiters off!"
Nozomi shouted, eyes bulging from their sockets. She clamped her hands over her ears and pressed her head against the back of the plug seat.
And my father leaned over my shoulder, smiling. "You see?"
I tore my eyes away from him, and on the radio control panel, I muted the entry plug. I sat back, closed my eyes, and felt the glow of the impact when it washed over the main screens.
Project Noah, they called it—a clean, humane way to rain destruction on whatever so much as insults you. They took dense metal rods and dropped them from orbit, you see. At speeds unimaginable, they drove through whatever they were set upon, piercing and shattering the target or obliterating it with high-velocity molten tungsten.
It was a cleansing fire, that rain. It cleansed everything.
Everything where the rods struck.
Everything as far as the eye could see around that.
And when I opened my eyes again, that's all I saw. I saw fire.
The fire took my father away.
The smoke took the Angel away.
The charred earth took Unit-14 away.
A solid blue flame engulfed my monitor, taking Nozomi away, too.
I took off my headset and threw it aside, leaving it in a corner of my station. I sat back and let my emotions take me where they may.
Even though my tears could do nothing to put those flames out.
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2.4 Fugue
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
10. Fugue
I've always liked the mountains, you know.
The mountains stand aside from everything beneath them. It's harder for living things to thrive and grow near the peak. It may be cold or windy at the summit, but that wind drowns everything else out, and the cold just tells you that you're far from the heat waves that had become the country's permanent climate. Those sweltering, year-long summers can't touch you at the top of a mountain.
It may come as no surprise, then, that I thought of my penthouse as my own private mountain, in a way. It sat at the top of our building, with a clear view of the city in all directions, obstructed by only a couple skyscrapers of similar size.
With a view like that, you know quite well—there's absolutely no one else around you.
It was morning, and that meant sunlight coming in through our bedroom windows. Those golden rays streamed through the bedroom door and into the main room, casting faint shadows in the outline of the doorframe.
I sat in the main room, with my neck and above in that shadow. You can't watch television with the sun in your eyes, after all.
"Do you see the cost of this war? Do you see how futile hopes poison the earth itself?"
I saw. I saw well. I saw on the screen vast clouds of smoke billowing into the sky. Fires clung to its fuel—a forest that had once expanded as far as the eye could see. But starting with an ashen crater, the fire had spread outward, casting the whole countryside under a dark haze.
"All this could have been avoided."
The camera cut away from this footage, showing the speaker: a man with an off-white visor for eyes. He stood beside a screen with the disaster footage playing on a loop and said,
"But this is only the beginning of what is to come, if mankind is stubborn enough to resist. Lay down your arms. Surrender yourselves and join us in paradise."
The screen switched to a woman at an anchor desk. "That message from Seele was uploaded and distributed sometime last night. As yet, Seele have not taken responsibility for the North Berlin Fire, but they've claimed to have sunk two South Korean warships in the past week, and they're widely believed to have bases and training facilities in the uncontrolled Hendguan Mountains of Myanmar.
"Now, in economic news this morning, the T2SE is down three percent already on the day, with losses worst in the agriculture sector, as several major fisheries on the Pacific Coast announced failures in their ocean reclamation efforts…"
I muted the channel and got up, stumbling to get my balance. I had to pee.
Why is it we have to pee, anyway?
Couldn't our single-celled ancestors have found some other way to deal with toxins? Why couldn't we just exude waste from our pores? We already sweat. Why should we have to do something that requires conscious effort? Why should we have to stop what we're doing just to rid ourselves of waste? Isn't that already a wasteful effort? It's time wasted simply to dispose of waste. That's a double waste. A double waste.
Yes, that's it. It was more than wasteful. When you pee, it's taking something out of you. Whenever fluids leave you, they're taking some of your spirit. That dark yellow fluid coming out of me? That was a sign of effort. All my body's effort to keep me alive, straining on scant drops of water, right? That effort poured from me, leaving me with nothing. When blood seeps from a wound, it takes the stuff of life with it: oxygen, to break down sugar and gain energy; iron, to bind it and deliver it; and so on. When semen oozes out of you, it takes away the stuff needed to make more life. There could've been a baby in that white film. Instead, it's just something you wipe away with a tissue. How disgusting.
On my way out of the toilet, I stopped at the washroom sink. There, in the mirror, I saw something else that seeps out of you: oil and sweat. Try as you might, those things don't go away entirely with soap and water. There's always a little there.
And it clings to hair, too. There was a lot of hair on my face. I felt it with one hand. The hair was still short and thin, but it was there, trapping those oils so they couldn't be washed away. Hair grows everywhere, if you do nothing to stop it. And even on top of a mountain, a face full of hair can still feel hot.
Bzzz! That was the special phone. Not the regular phone. The special phone. You see, we installed a switch in the regular phone to disable the ringer, but not for the special phone. That's why it was special. The special phone was the only one that could speak on its own.
Though, come to think of it, that should've made it a regular phone, and the other phone should've been the special phone. I can't believe we never thought of that.
The special phone was in the kitchen, hanging on the wall like something out of the '90s. Maybe that's why it was special.
I went to the kitchen and put the handset to my ear. "Yes?"
"Ah, hello. This is the door."
Yes, that's why he was talking to me on the special phone.
"There's someone here to see you."
"Who?"
"A girl—about 150 centimeters, hair in a short ponytail, slim build."
The phone slipped out of my hand, and I grabbed the kitchen counter to support myself.
"Hello?" came the faint voice from the special phone. "Are you still there?"
I fumbled with the phone cord, drawing the handset back to my ear. "Yes, yes, I'm here, sorry," I said. "Is there—ah, maybe this is strange. Is there another time?"
"She's very insistent, sir."
My eyes scanned across the penthouse—from the cushion in front of the muted television, to the table with plates of food still in their places, to the glimpse of the bedroom with disheveled sheets. I shut my eyes and sighed.
"All right, send her up."
"Very well, sir."
I hung up. An elevator ride isn't long enough to make tea. Besides, I doubted she was there to enjoy refreshments and make smalltalk. I put a pair of slippers by the door for her to use and sat in front of the television once again, taking in its silent images of war, politics, and idol rumors.
She knocked on the door, and I didn't move. "It's open," I called out.
She crept in gingerly and eased the door shut behind her. "'Scuse me," she said, kicked on the slippers I'd left for her, and stood in the entryway. "So, here you are."
There I was, and there she was—Nozomi Horaki. I might not have been a pleasant sight, but neither was she. Her hand was wrapped up in bandages, and the skin on one side of her face was red and irritated. One of her eyes wouldn't open all the way, and she dragged her right foot as she walked toward me. I was there, but not all of her was.
She took a seat at the table, cradling a sketchpad under her arm. She sniffed at the air, looked at me, and scooted her cushion to the far side of the table. She moved a couple plates aside, saying,
"Didn't like your breakfast?"
"Asuka needs it more than me. I might finish later, but I might not. I've been thinking about changing my look, you know? Lose weight. Grow a beard." I scratched under my chin. "Stuff like that."
She scoffed at that. "If you wanna grow a beard, you gotta do something clean and precise. This scruffy look?" She shook her head. "Not working."
I rubbed my hands over my cheeks. "You don't think so, huh?"
She rolled her eyes, and she put her sketchbook aside, staring me down with both eyes. "Come on, Ikari. We've got work to do. Let's go back to the base. We've got an Angel to kill."
I frowned. "We do?"
"Yeah? Yeah, we do. So let's go." She knocked on the table twice. "Let's go; let's go. It's on the move. We should be getting ready."
We should, should we? We should go back and do what we did before, right? With Nozomi's eye that wouldn't open all the way? With the burns and their tiny blisters on her cheek? With a hand so heavily bandaged she couldn't even hold a pencil, let alone the Eva's controls?
"After what you've been through?" I shook my head, and I took the remote to change the channel. "You can't seriously want to go fight that thing again."
"I'm not dead, am I?"
"Don't say that!" I slammed the remote on the table, and the battery cover went flying.
Nozomi bolted to her feet. She clutched her sketchbook close to her chest, like a piece of armor.
I bowed my head, turning aside. "Sorry. But Nozomi, there are worse things than being dead."
She crept back to the table, but she remained standing. "Yeah, well, I guess I gotta handle it, right?"
"You think you can? What about what the Angel showed you?"
"That—" She looked away, scoffing. "That's not that important right now, is it? It wasn't fun, but I'm not the one holed up at home, not having seen anybody in a week, not having bathed in—"
I planted a hand on the table and stared her down. "What. Did. You. See?"
Hey good eye, bright and steady, locked on mine, and she stiffened. "Why should I tell you? Was I shaken up back there? Yeah, I was. That thing—it tried to talk to me, okay? But you know what gets me way more than having some alien thing try to push itself into my head? After the rod hit, I might not have been able to move, but I could still hear. I could still speak. You know what I heard on the radio? I heard Katsuragi and Hyuga and all the rest of them. You know who I didn't hear?"
I faced forward again, letting the images on the TV screen blur into shapeless, blue-tinted ghosts. "I took my headset off."
"No shit! Why?"
"I have no interest in watching you be destroyed." I said. "Piloting Eva destroys a person. If it doesn't destroy your body, it destroys your mind." I laughed. "You don't even know it's happening, do you?"
Nozomi took her cushion and laid it beside me, forcing herself into view. "So what if it is? Somebody's gotta do it. If I don't, someone else will just take my place."
"Yeah, that's true." I smiled, eyeing her from the side. "And you can be a pilot, if you like. But Nozomi, someone else can take my place, too. I don't have to be there. I don't have to be part of that system—the system that will destroy you. I won't be a part of it."
She scoffed again, pressing a hand against the side of her head. "What the hell did you see?"
"Why should I answer that when you didn't?"
She narrowed her eyes. "So that's how you wanna be, huh?" She climbed to her feet—gingerly, for that was the best she could do on one wounded ankle. "Okay, Ikari," she said, kicking off her slippers at the threshold. "Whatever you feel like doing. But just so you know? I didn't ask you to protect me. I didn't ask you to save me from being a pilot. I didn't expect you would keep me from being battered, beaten, or broken."
"Then what do you want from me?"
"Just be there, like you said you would be. Try to do something. Try to be someone different from who you used to be." She looked me up and down. "Or don't, if that's how you want to be."
I climbed up after her. "Nozomi—"
"Bye, Ikari."
She disappeared down the entryway, and she slammed the door behind her.
Ah well. I didn't tend to like having guests around, anyway.
I headed to bed shortly after that. I was tired, for some reason. It must've been the news. There's nothing good on during the day, after all. The hours pass by faster if you're not awake to deal with them, anyway.
And then, I was in the theater.
The theater never changed. Its dark carpet didn't show footprints. The exit lights glowed unwavering.
I sat in the front row with Rei Ayanami, and we watched the world move on without us. The screen showed a forest on fire, bathed in smoke as firefighters battled to contain it, but as they sprayed countless liters of water on the blaze, their hopes flowed out too, only to fizzle and turn to hot air and steam.
"Am I supposed to feel bad about this?" I wondered aloud.
"That's your choice." Ayanami stared ahead, not even looking at me. "It is what it is."
The view before us shifted—to Asuka, standing before some kidney-shaped thing with vessels and tubes coming out of it. She and a half-dozen other scientists stood by with clipboards and tablets, watching it from beyond the walls of a glass enclosure.
The scene shifted again—to Misato in a situation room, standing over a virtual sand table, with holographic figures representing armies, tanks, planes, and Angels. She adjusted a large, black-and-green figure that towered over the others, changing its facing to the west on the map, but she stood over it, frowning, as the clock ticked incessantly, announcing that the morning was slipping away.
"They are who they are," said Ayanami, and with a wave of her hand, the scene shifted once more:
To Nozomi on a train.
There was no one else in the traincar, but she sat cradling her sketchpad on her knees anyway. Her left-handed strokes were laborious and coarse, but they traced out well enough the image in her mind: a boy sitting in front of a television, dwarfed by his own shadow.
"You're pushing her away," said Ayanami, eyeing me from the side.
I scoffed, turning away. "Why shouldn't I? It was stupid from the start. Just because I was a pilot before doesn't mean I can help her."
"That's why she's better off without your guidance?"
Down below, Nozomi limped off the train. With her sketchbook tucked under her arm, she emerged into the sparse environment north of town, with old farms overgrown and unkempt, with weeds running rampant and old roads falling prey to cracks and pits. She trudged along one of these old roads, with her foot dragging along at her side.
"No," I said, watching Nozomi's every step. "It doesn't matter what I do."
Ayanami left her seat, and she kneeled in front of me, forcing her body in front of my gaze. Her red eyes were hard and intent.
"She'll be destroyed," said Ayanami.
Even still, I looked away from her, knowing there was nowhere to hide. "You of all people should know…."
She nodded, and she looked to the screen again, with one hand on my armrest. "You might be right."
I cocked my head. "About what?"
"That you would not make a difference."
I sighed. "Then why am I here?"
"It's not enough."
The scene below shifted and blurred. Gray shapes coalesced into a human-like figure, arms spread at its shoulders. Tendrils held it by the wrists and ankles, suspending the thing in mid-air. Like roots into soil, those tendrils coursed through the creature's skin and armor—its black and green striped armor plating.
Over a serene environment of a forest and a lake, Unit-14 stood crucified, with the cross growing out of its own head and back, culminating in a thorny halo of brown tendrils perched around the Eva's skull.
For all this, labored breaths echoed through the area around us. In another section of the scene below, we saw directly into the entry plug. The tendrils had grown through the gap in the entry plug's door, gripping the pilot—Nozomi—just like the Eva had been. She hung her head down, and only her pained breaths testified that she was alive. The plug's virtual environment failed her, leaving Nozomi alone to struggle in dim, blood-red emergency lighting.
Outside, a jeep had parked at the base of the Eva. A pair of loudspeakers, tied to the back of the jeep with bungie cord, blared out words at the Eva.
"This is the natural order of things." Microphone in hand, the man with the white visor over his eyes stared up at the Eva. "Of the four knowledgeable races, each has brought itself to the brink of destruction. We annihilate each other with atomic power. The Zenunim? They fought genocidal wars with viruses tailored to the genes of their enemies. Such destruction is inevitable. Life itself is destructive. We are only trying to save humanity from itself—and we must."
On and on the dark sermon went. Lorenz bombarded Nozomi with tales of horror and death, painting his cause as the humane alternative.
I squeezed the armrests with both hands and stared into the sky. "What is this supposed to do? This is vile, Ayanami. Make it stop!"
"Do you trust me?"
I studied her from the side. The ghost had the look of Ayanami, yes. Every hair was in the right place, and her uniform was exactly the way it had been in Tokyo-3.
But she was still in an unreal place, doing unreal things. Those uniforms didn't exist anymore. She hadn't aged a day.
"Please don't ask me that," I said, looking aside once more.
She nodded at that, and she turned toward the screen again. "You don't have to listen to me," she said. "You only need to listen."
What I listened to was another voice—this one much fainter than the booming sermon from Keel Lorenz. Through intermittent static, Horaki's voice trickled into the entry plug.
"Nozomi? Nozomi—can you—me?"
The pilot's breath caught for a moment, but she let it all out again, head hanging low, and didn't respond.
"Nozomi," said Horaki, "I don't know if you can hear me. I don't—if you can answer, but you need to stay strong. Stay strong and don't stop fighting. Be a little stubborn. That suits you. Be stubborn, and there's nothing they can do to you, Nozomi. Do you hear me?"
That hopeful note rang through the entry plug, but Nozomi's labored breaths didn't waver.
I sighed, shaking my head. "So this is the future if I'm not there? This is our wonderful life ahead?"
"No," said Ayanami.
The entry plug radio crackled to life again. It was a boy's voice. "Nozomi," he said, "I hope you can hear me. I hope—you're still there."
My eyes widened, and I glanced at Ayanami.
"Look," she said, staring ahead, "and listen."
"I'm sorry," said the boy on the radio. "I knew something—might eventually happen. I don't know—enough to stop it. We put you through a lot. We put you through too much. I don't think any apology—make up for that. You don't deserve to be there. You don't—suffer like this. We want to get you out, but I can't ask anything more of you. It's your choice to keep fighting to hold on or not. If—we're coming for you. I want you to know that. We're coming for you, and we will not stop—back with us. Count on it, Nozomi."
I shook my head, and I left my seat like it was aflame. "That's the best I can do? Ayanami, those are empty words. They don't mean anything. They don't accomplish anything. They're just hollow hopes that have nothing to back them up!"
Ayanami closed her eyes, still kneeling serenely, almost like a monk in meditation. "Then you would deny her even that?"
On the screen, in the entry plug, Nozomi's head rose. It rose a slim centimeter, but it rose nonetheless. She wrapped her fingers around the tendrils holding her, and she squeezed. She gritted her teeth and squeezed. She let out a short grunt and squeezed some more.
It was futile, of course. Those tendrils were as hard as wood, and she breathed and strained even harder, for all her effort.
"If you would," said Ayanami, "then maybe you belong over there."
She looked past me, and I followed her gaze. At the far end of the row, the hooded stranger watched the scene, too, and the otherworldly glow of the screen shined off the stranger's satin hood.
It was light again. Sunlight permeated the room, and the skyscrapers outside cast long shadows toward the horizon—a far cry from the morning, when the sun's rays poured directly into the bedroom.
I lay flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling. In retrospect, it's not a good idea to sleep through the day. Strange things can visit you in your dreams.
"You'll suffer, too, if you try to guide her."
I scrambled upright. From the bedroom doorway, Rei Ayanami stared back at me.
"And it's true you don't deserve that," she said.
I stared, open-mouthed, struggling for words. "Is that—is that supposed to make me keep going the way I am?"
"It is what it is."
I scoffed, and I buried my face in my hands. "I don't understand," I said, wiping my face clean, and I opened my eyes again. "Ayanami—"
She was gone.
I climbed out of bed and peered through the doorway. In the main room, the TV kept chattering away about proceedings of the Diet. The plates on the table were where I'd left them.
I wandered back into the bedroom, and I plopped into the chair at my working desk. It was a nice, comfortable chair. It reclined. That's something you need, after all. You don't use it when you're working, granted—it's hard to write when leaning back—but when you need to take a break, it's a good thing to have.
The stack of letters was taller than ever, probably half a meter high. You couldn't get mail delivered to the base very easily—not even my mail, which was checked and scanned and sniffed maybe ten times over.
Aside from that stack, which I slid to the corner, there was the phone—that is, the regular phone. The great red light was silent, but the text 38 new messages was clear enough. I pressed down on the erase button. No new messages—that was always a welcome sight. If only life were like an answering machine, right? Then you could wipe the past away and start anew whenever you wanted.
And having started anew, I picked up the phone and dialed. The other end picked up immediately.
"Hello, Horaki residence."
I sat upright. "Ah, hello, Horaki? It's Ikari."
"Ikari? Well, this is a surprise. I thought you didn't want to talk to people right now."
Her voice cut through me like a knife. I laughed it off nervously.
"Sorry about that. I was a little short with Nozomi. I haven't adjusted to this well." I glanced out the window, at the mountains. "I know I need to do better."
Horaki sighed. "No, no, don't worry about it. This is difficult. How are you doing, Ikari? Are you feeling better?"
"I'm getting there, I think. Actually…" I scratched a fingernail in a groove of the desk's wood. "I think I might like to talk to you."
"About Nozomi?"
"That's right."
There was a long pause.
"Okay," she said. "But Ikari, I do have one condition."
"What's that?"
"Have you taken a bath lately?"
I sniffed at the air and winced. "I'll, um, make sure it's not a problem."
I've always liked the mountains, you know.
The mountains stand aside from everything beneath them. It's harder for living things to thrive and grow near the peak. It may be cold or windy at the summit, but that wind drowns everything else out, and the cold just tells you that you're far from the heat waves that had become the country's permanent climate. Those sweltering, year-long summers can't touch you at the top of a mountain.
It may come as no surprise, then, that I thought of my penthouse as my own private mountain, in a way. It sat at the top of our building, with a clear view of the city in all directions, obstructed by only a couple skyscrapers of similar size.
With a view like that, you know quite well—there's absolutely no one else around you.
It was morning, and that meant sunlight coming in through our bedroom windows. Those golden rays streamed through the bedroom door and into the main room, casting faint shadows in the outline of the doorframe.
I sat in the main room, with my neck and above in that shadow. You can't watch television with the sun in your eyes, after all.
"Do you see the cost of this war? Do you see how futile hopes poison the earth itself?"
I saw. I saw well. I saw on the screen vast clouds of smoke billowing into the sky. Fires clung to its fuel—a forest that had once expanded as far as the eye could see. But starting with an ashen crater, the fire had spread outward, casting the whole countryside under a dark haze.
"All this could have been avoided."
The camera cut away from this footage, showing the speaker: a man with an off-white visor for eyes. He stood beside a screen with the disaster footage playing on a loop and said,
"But this is only the beginning of what is to come, if mankind is stubborn enough to resist. Lay down your arms. Surrender yourselves and join us in paradise."
The screen switched to a woman at an anchor desk. "That message from Seele was uploaded and distributed sometime last night. As yet, Seele have not taken responsibility for the North Berlin Fire, but they've claimed to have sunk two South Korean warships in the past week, and they're widely believed to have bases and training facilities in the uncontrolled Hendguan Mountains of Myanmar.
"Now, in economic news this morning, the T2SE is down three percent already on the day, with losses worst in the agriculture sector, as several major fisheries on the Pacific Coast announced failures in their ocean reclamation efforts…"
I muted the channel and got up, stumbling to get my balance. I had to pee.
Why is it we have to pee, anyway?
Couldn't our single-celled ancestors have found some other way to deal with toxins? Why couldn't we just exude waste from our pores? We already sweat. Why should we have to do something that requires conscious effort? Why should we have to stop what we're doing just to rid ourselves of waste? Isn't that already a wasteful effort? It's time wasted simply to dispose of waste. That's a double waste. A double waste.
Yes, that's it. It was more than wasteful. When you pee, it's taking something out of you. Whenever fluids leave you, they're taking some of your spirit. That dark yellow fluid coming out of me? That was a sign of effort. All my body's effort to keep me alive, straining on scant drops of water, right? That effort poured from me, leaving me with nothing. When blood seeps from a wound, it takes the stuff of life with it: oxygen, to break down sugar and gain energy; iron, to bind it and deliver it; and so on. When semen oozes out of you, it takes away the stuff needed to make more life. There could've been a baby in that white film. Instead, it's just something you wipe away with a tissue. How disgusting.
On my way out of the toilet, I stopped at the washroom sink. There, in the mirror, I saw something else that seeps out of you: oil and sweat. Try as you might, those things don't go away entirely with soap and water. There's always a little there.
And it clings to hair, too. There was a lot of hair on my face. I felt it with one hand. The hair was still short and thin, but it was there, trapping those oils so they couldn't be washed away. Hair grows everywhere, if you do nothing to stop it. And even on top of a mountain, a face full of hair can still feel hot.
Bzzz! That was the special phone. Not the regular phone. The special phone. You see, we installed a switch in the regular phone to disable the ringer, but not for the special phone. That's why it was special. The special phone was the only one that could speak on its own.
Though, come to think of it, that should've made it a regular phone, and the other phone should've been the special phone. I can't believe we never thought of that.
The special phone was in the kitchen, hanging on the wall like something out of the '90s. Maybe that's why it was special.
I went to the kitchen and put the handset to my ear. "Yes?"
"Ah, hello. This is the door."
Yes, that's why he was talking to me on the special phone.
"There's someone here to see you."
"Who?"
"A girl—about 150 centimeters, hair in a short ponytail, slim build."
The phone slipped out of my hand, and I grabbed the kitchen counter to support myself.
"Hello?" came the faint voice from the special phone. "Are you still there?"
I fumbled with the phone cord, drawing the handset back to my ear. "Yes, yes, I'm here, sorry," I said. "Is there—ah, maybe this is strange. Is there another time?"
"She's very insistent, sir."
My eyes scanned across the penthouse—from the cushion in front of the muted television, to the table with plates of food still in their places, to the glimpse of the bedroom with disheveled sheets. I shut my eyes and sighed.
"All right, send her up."
"Very well, sir."
I hung up. An elevator ride isn't long enough to make tea. Besides, I doubted she was there to enjoy refreshments and make smalltalk. I put a pair of slippers by the door for her to use and sat in front of the television once again, taking in its silent images of war, politics, and idol rumors.
She knocked on the door, and I didn't move. "It's open," I called out.
She crept in gingerly and eased the door shut behind her. "'Scuse me," she said, kicked on the slippers I'd left for her, and stood in the entryway. "So, here you are."
There I was, and there she was—Nozomi Horaki. I might not have been a pleasant sight, but neither was she. Her hand was wrapped up in bandages, and the skin on one side of her face was red and irritated. One of her eyes wouldn't open all the way, and she dragged her right foot as she walked toward me. I was there, but not all of her was.
She took a seat at the table, cradling a sketchpad under her arm. She sniffed at the air, looked at me, and scooted her cushion to the far side of the table. She moved a couple plates aside, saying,
"Didn't like your breakfast?"
"Asuka needs it more than me. I might finish later, but I might not. I've been thinking about changing my look, you know? Lose weight. Grow a beard." I scratched under my chin. "Stuff like that."
She scoffed at that. "If you wanna grow a beard, you gotta do something clean and precise. This scruffy look?" She shook her head. "Not working."
I rubbed my hands over my cheeks. "You don't think so, huh?"
She rolled her eyes, and she put her sketchbook aside, staring me down with both eyes. "Come on, Ikari. We've got work to do. Let's go back to the base. We've got an Angel to kill."
I frowned. "We do?"
"Yeah? Yeah, we do. So let's go." She knocked on the table twice. "Let's go; let's go. It's on the move. We should be getting ready."
We should, should we? We should go back and do what we did before, right? With Nozomi's eye that wouldn't open all the way? With the burns and their tiny blisters on her cheek? With a hand so heavily bandaged she couldn't even hold a pencil, let alone the Eva's controls?
"After what you've been through?" I shook my head, and I took the remote to change the channel. "You can't seriously want to go fight that thing again."
"I'm not dead, am I?"
"Don't say that!" I slammed the remote on the table, and the battery cover went flying.
Nozomi bolted to her feet. She clutched her sketchbook close to her chest, like a piece of armor.
I bowed my head, turning aside. "Sorry. But Nozomi, there are worse things than being dead."
She crept back to the table, but she remained standing. "Yeah, well, I guess I gotta handle it, right?"
"You think you can? What about what the Angel showed you?"
"That—" She looked away, scoffing. "That's not that important right now, is it? It wasn't fun, but I'm not the one holed up at home, not having seen anybody in a week, not having bathed in—"
I planted a hand on the table and stared her down. "What. Did. You. See?"
Hey good eye, bright and steady, locked on mine, and she stiffened. "Why should I tell you? Was I shaken up back there? Yeah, I was. That thing—it tried to talk to me, okay? But you know what gets me way more than having some alien thing try to push itself into my head? After the rod hit, I might not have been able to move, but I could still hear. I could still speak. You know what I heard on the radio? I heard Katsuragi and Hyuga and all the rest of them. You know who I didn't hear?"
I faced forward again, letting the images on the TV screen blur into shapeless, blue-tinted ghosts. "I took my headset off."
"No shit! Why?"
"I have no interest in watching you be destroyed." I said. "Piloting Eva destroys a person. If it doesn't destroy your body, it destroys your mind." I laughed. "You don't even know it's happening, do you?"
Nozomi took her cushion and laid it beside me, forcing herself into view. "So what if it is? Somebody's gotta do it. If I don't, someone else will just take my place."
"Yeah, that's true." I smiled, eyeing her from the side. "And you can be a pilot, if you like. But Nozomi, someone else can take my place, too. I don't have to be there. I don't have to be part of that system—the system that will destroy you. I won't be a part of it."
She scoffed again, pressing a hand against the side of her head. "What the hell did you see?"
"Why should I answer that when you didn't?"
She narrowed her eyes. "So that's how you wanna be, huh?" She climbed to her feet—gingerly, for that was the best she could do on one wounded ankle. "Okay, Ikari," she said, kicking off her slippers at the threshold. "Whatever you feel like doing. But just so you know? I didn't ask you to protect me. I didn't ask you to save me from being a pilot. I didn't expect you would keep me from being battered, beaten, or broken."
"Then what do you want from me?"
"Just be there, like you said you would be. Try to do something. Try to be someone different from who you used to be." She looked me up and down. "Or don't, if that's how you want to be."
I climbed up after her. "Nozomi—"
"Bye, Ikari."
She disappeared down the entryway, and she slammed the door behind her.
Ah well. I didn't tend to like having guests around, anyway.
I headed to bed shortly after that. I was tired, for some reason. It must've been the news. There's nothing good on during the day, after all. The hours pass by faster if you're not awake to deal with them, anyway.
And then, I was in the theater.
The theater never changed. Its dark carpet didn't show footprints. The exit lights glowed unwavering.
I sat in the front row with Rei Ayanami, and we watched the world move on without us. The screen showed a forest on fire, bathed in smoke as firefighters battled to contain it, but as they sprayed countless liters of water on the blaze, their hopes flowed out too, only to fizzle and turn to hot air and steam.
"Am I supposed to feel bad about this?" I wondered aloud.
"That's your choice." Ayanami stared ahead, not even looking at me. "It is what it is."
The view before us shifted—to Asuka, standing before some kidney-shaped thing with vessels and tubes coming out of it. She and a half-dozen other scientists stood by with clipboards and tablets, watching it from beyond the walls of a glass enclosure.
The scene shifted again—to Misato in a situation room, standing over a virtual sand table, with holographic figures representing armies, tanks, planes, and Angels. She adjusted a large, black-and-green figure that towered over the others, changing its facing to the west on the map, but she stood over it, frowning, as the clock ticked incessantly, announcing that the morning was slipping away.
"They are who they are," said Ayanami, and with a wave of her hand, the scene shifted once more:
To Nozomi on a train.
There was no one else in the traincar, but she sat cradling her sketchpad on her knees anyway. Her left-handed strokes were laborious and coarse, but they traced out well enough the image in her mind: a boy sitting in front of a television, dwarfed by his own shadow.
"You're pushing her away," said Ayanami, eyeing me from the side.
I scoffed, turning away. "Why shouldn't I? It was stupid from the start. Just because I was a pilot before doesn't mean I can help her."
"That's why she's better off without your guidance?"
Down below, Nozomi limped off the train. With her sketchbook tucked under her arm, she emerged into the sparse environment north of town, with old farms overgrown and unkempt, with weeds running rampant and old roads falling prey to cracks and pits. She trudged along one of these old roads, with her foot dragging along at her side.
"No," I said, watching Nozomi's every step. "It doesn't matter what I do."
Ayanami left her seat, and she kneeled in front of me, forcing her body in front of my gaze. Her red eyes were hard and intent.
"She'll be destroyed," said Ayanami.
Even still, I looked away from her, knowing there was nowhere to hide. "You of all people should know…."
She nodded, and she looked to the screen again, with one hand on my armrest. "You might be right."
I cocked my head. "About what?"
"That you would not make a difference."
I sighed. "Then why am I here?"
"It's not enough."
The scene below shifted and blurred. Gray shapes coalesced into a human-like figure, arms spread at its shoulders. Tendrils held it by the wrists and ankles, suspending the thing in mid-air. Like roots into soil, those tendrils coursed through the creature's skin and armor—its black and green striped armor plating.
Over a serene environment of a forest and a lake, Unit-14 stood crucified, with the cross growing out of its own head and back, culminating in a thorny halo of brown tendrils perched around the Eva's skull.
For all this, labored breaths echoed through the area around us. In another section of the scene below, we saw directly into the entry plug. The tendrils had grown through the gap in the entry plug's door, gripping the pilot—Nozomi—just like the Eva had been. She hung her head down, and only her pained breaths testified that she was alive. The plug's virtual environment failed her, leaving Nozomi alone to struggle in dim, blood-red emergency lighting.
Outside, a jeep had parked at the base of the Eva. A pair of loudspeakers, tied to the back of the jeep with bungie cord, blared out words at the Eva.
"This is the natural order of things." Microphone in hand, the man with the white visor over his eyes stared up at the Eva. "Of the four knowledgeable races, each has brought itself to the brink of destruction. We annihilate each other with atomic power. The Zenunim? They fought genocidal wars with viruses tailored to the genes of their enemies. Such destruction is inevitable. Life itself is destructive. We are only trying to save humanity from itself—and we must."
On and on the dark sermon went. Lorenz bombarded Nozomi with tales of horror and death, painting his cause as the humane alternative.
I squeezed the armrests with both hands and stared into the sky. "What is this supposed to do? This is vile, Ayanami. Make it stop!"
"Do you trust me?"
I studied her from the side. The ghost had the look of Ayanami, yes. Every hair was in the right place, and her uniform was exactly the way it had been in Tokyo-3.
But she was still in an unreal place, doing unreal things. Those uniforms didn't exist anymore. She hadn't aged a day.
"Please don't ask me that," I said, looking aside once more.
She nodded at that, and she turned toward the screen again. "You don't have to listen to me," she said. "You only need to listen."
What I listened to was another voice—this one much fainter than the booming sermon from Keel Lorenz. Through intermittent static, Horaki's voice trickled into the entry plug.
"Nozomi? Nozomi—can you—me?"
The pilot's breath caught for a moment, but she let it all out again, head hanging low, and didn't respond.
"Nozomi," said Horaki, "I don't know if you can hear me. I don't—if you can answer, but you need to stay strong. Stay strong and don't stop fighting. Be a little stubborn. That suits you. Be stubborn, and there's nothing they can do to you, Nozomi. Do you hear me?"
That hopeful note rang through the entry plug, but Nozomi's labored breaths didn't waver.
I sighed, shaking my head. "So this is the future if I'm not there? This is our wonderful life ahead?"
"No," said Ayanami.
The entry plug radio crackled to life again. It was a boy's voice. "Nozomi," he said, "I hope you can hear me. I hope—you're still there."
My eyes widened, and I glanced at Ayanami.
"Look," she said, staring ahead, "and listen."
"I'm sorry," said the boy on the radio. "I knew something—might eventually happen. I don't know—enough to stop it. We put you through a lot. We put you through too much. I don't think any apology—make up for that. You don't deserve to be there. You don't—suffer like this. We want to get you out, but I can't ask anything more of you. It's your choice to keep fighting to hold on or not. If—we're coming for you. I want you to know that. We're coming for you, and we will not stop—back with us. Count on it, Nozomi."
I shook my head, and I left my seat like it was aflame. "That's the best I can do? Ayanami, those are empty words. They don't mean anything. They don't accomplish anything. They're just hollow hopes that have nothing to back them up!"
Ayanami closed her eyes, still kneeling serenely, almost like a monk in meditation. "Then you would deny her even that?"
On the screen, in the entry plug, Nozomi's head rose. It rose a slim centimeter, but it rose nonetheless. She wrapped her fingers around the tendrils holding her, and she squeezed. She gritted her teeth and squeezed. She let out a short grunt and squeezed some more.
It was futile, of course. Those tendrils were as hard as wood, and she breathed and strained even harder, for all her effort.
"If you would," said Ayanami, "then maybe you belong over there."
She looked past me, and I followed her gaze. At the far end of the row, the hooded stranger watched the scene, too, and the otherworldly glow of the screen shined off the stranger's satin hood.
It was light again. Sunlight permeated the room, and the skyscrapers outside cast long shadows toward the horizon—a far cry from the morning, when the sun's rays poured directly into the bedroom.
I lay flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling. In retrospect, it's not a good idea to sleep through the day. Strange things can visit you in your dreams.
"You'll suffer, too, if you try to guide her."
I scrambled upright. From the bedroom doorway, Rei Ayanami stared back at me.
"And it's true you don't deserve that," she said.
I stared, open-mouthed, struggling for words. "Is that—is that supposed to make me keep going the way I am?"
"It is what it is."
I scoffed, and I buried my face in my hands. "I don't understand," I said, wiping my face clean, and I opened my eyes again. "Ayanami—"
She was gone.
I climbed out of bed and peered through the doorway. In the main room, the TV kept chattering away about proceedings of the Diet. The plates on the table were where I'd left them.
I wandered back into the bedroom, and I plopped into the chair at my working desk. It was a nice, comfortable chair. It reclined. That's something you need, after all. You don't use it when you're working, granted—it's hard to write when leaning back—but when you need to take a break, it's a good thing to have.
The stack of letters was taller than ever, probably half a meter high. You couldn't get mail delivered to the base very easily—not even my mail, which was checked and scanned and sniffed maybe ten times over.
Aside from that stack, which I slid to the corner, there was the phone—that is, the regular phone. The great red light was silent, but the text 38 new messages was clear enough. I pressed down on the erase button. No new messages—that was always a welcome sight. If only life were like an answering machine, right? Then you could wipe the past away and start anew whenever you wanted.
And having started anew, I picked up the phone and dialed. The other end picked up immediately.
"Hello, Horaki residence."
I sat upright. "Ah, hello, Horaki? It's Ikari."
"Ikari? Well, this is a surprise. I thought you didn't want to talk to people right now."
Her voice cut through me like a knife. I laughed it off nervously.
"Sorry about that. I was a little short with Nozomi. I haven't adjusted to this well." I glanced out the window, at the mountains. "I know I need to do better."
Horaki sighed. "No, no, don't worry about it. This is difficult. How are you doing, Ikari? Are you feeling better?"
"I'm getting there, I think. Actually…" I scratched a fingernail in a groove of the desk's wood. "I think I might like to talk to you."
"About Nozomi?"
"That's right."
There was a long pause.
"Okay," she said. "But Ikari, I do have one condition."
"What's that?"
"Have you taken a bath lately?"
I sniffed at the air and winced. "I'll, um, make sure it's not a problem."
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