The Second Coming [NGE]

[Muphrid]

11. Sisters

Why did you become an Eva pilot?

I've heard that question a lot—sometimes even from my own lips.

Some people want to hear that I chose to save the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's a huge difference between knowing what the right thing to do is and having the courage and temerity to do it. And even if it's right to be an Eva pilot, right to try to save the world, that doesn't mean it's wrong not to be one. Or at least, it's no so wrong. If there's someone else who can do it almost as well, and if they want to do it more than you do, then why not?

But I did become an Eva pilot. Maybe I would've felt like scum if I made someone else do it instead—especially if that person were bloodied and weak. But, looking back on that, I realize now I was manipulated. You see, my father may have needed me to be an Eva pilot, but that's not the same as wanting me. When you're wanted, people try to please you and validate your efforts. When you're only needed, validation like that is just a tactic that can be employed. When that need is merely material, there's no way you can feel wanted, and if you refuse to do what's asked of you, those people who need something will find a way to make you give it up.

Children can't always recognize that. No, adults don't always recognize that, either. It's one of the easiest ways to manipulate someone, though: if you can convince someone they're wanted even when they're not, they'll do anything.

They'll climb into a monstrous machine and fight for you.

They'll face horrors from beyond and expose their souls for you.

And the worst part of all that?

If they think you want them badly enough, they'll do all of this with a smile on their face. If you call them up and just say, "You did a good job," they'll take on ten time that much suffering in a heartbeat.

My father, you see—he was a master of that.

And maybe that's just the nature of people: we often invest ourselves in others without getting back exactly what we want.



"Isn't that a bit warm?"

Such were the first words from Hikari Horaki's mouth when I showed up on her doorstep.

I can't blame her for them, really. It was thirty degrees outside, and there I was in a green hood, with sweat running down my face.

The only solace there was the long shadow the building cast over me. The Horaki home was a large, squareish building with thin, white, painted blocks making up its facade. It stood clean and pure on a street corner while the house across from it bore the scars of time: broken windows, peeled paint, and more. Most of the houses in Azumino were like that one, not like the Horaki family's.

Then again, I expect most homes weren't maintained by people like Horaki.

"Ah, forgive me," she said, a little color coming to her cheeks. She stepped aside, making the doorway clear. "Please, come in. Nozomi's gone out, so it should be just the two of us. Sister won't be off work for an hour at least."

I peeled off my hood and sunglasses and stepped in. The wooden floor of the entryway gleamed, and my hand left fingerprints on the steel door handle. All that could only be the former class rep's work, and when I reached the main room, I saw more of the same: spotless white carpet, seat cushions that were perfectly circular, and framed sketches and photos that lined up level within fractions of a degree.

Her sister Kodama may have been the breadwinner of the house, but the middle sister maintained it with meticulous care. Indeed, no sooner did I sit down than Horaki had ducked into the kitchen and returned with a tray of tea, traditional sweets, and a warm, damp towel.

"Sorry, Ikari, but you're bleeding." She scratched at her own neck and offered the towel.

Frowning, I wiped up and down my throat and found the cloth stained a faded red. I folded up the used towel, which she took away just as quickly.

"Did you cut yourself?" she asked from the kitchen.

"I must've," I said, feeling the smooth skin of my cheeks. "Sorry about that."

"Don't worry about it. It means you're ready to help Nozomi, right?"

Indeed, as soon as she came back from washing her hands, she bombarded me with a barrage of thoughts on the matter:

"So, where do we begin?" She pulled a notepad from under the table. "I know Nozomi is stubborn, but she does listen to reason. Just knowing that you've come here should help convince her you're serious about this. She needs to understand that people can have a tough time coping with this sort of thing." She nodded to herself, proud of her own thoroughness. "If Nozomi can grasp that, then I don't think there should be any problem with you two working together again."

I sat frozen, eyes wide, holding my teacup a centimeter from my lips.

"No?" Horaki blinked, and she put the notepad down. "You don't think so?"

I cleared my throat and set the teacup aside. "Sorry, it's not that. I'm not here to talk about getting back in Nozomi's good graces—though I do think I'll need to do that, at some point."

She closed the notepad and slid it under the table, eyeing me curiously. "What did you want to talk about, then?"

"Do you remember the last battle—the one in Germany?"

"Of course."

"The Angel paralyzed Nozomi with something—some sort of vision, something that penetrated her mind."

Horaki looked to her left, and she scooted a couple centimeters away from the table.

"Do you know what that could be?" I asked.

Her eyes locked on me. "Why do you want to know?"

"It's something the Angel could use against her again," I said, leaning forward, "or it's something another Angel could use against her, too."

Horaki pressed two fingers to her temple and closed her eyes. "Yes, and?"

I glanced aside, and I said, "Nozomi told me you had something to do with it."

"She did not!" Horaki's eyes snapped open, and she sat straight and tall. "She absolutely did not! She wouldn't."

I stared back at her, saying nothing, and Horaki let out a breath, composing herself. "Honestly…" she muttered, shaking her head. "Is this really what you want to do?" Her eyes hardened, and she stared me down. "You want to come into our house, take the unpleasantness we've buried in the past, and put it all out on the driveway for everyone to see? Is that what Nozomi wants to do?"

I winced. "Okay, no, not exactly…"

"It isn't?"

"No. I mean, I don't know. But she didn't do anything to make me think so."

Horaki eyed me through a narrowed gaze, raising an eyebrow. "If you hadn't said that, I'd have thought you were taking after your father."

I winced at that, and I looked away. Horaki refilled our cups, and for a while, that was all to be heard between us. I looked anywhere but her, really. I rubbed at a strip of stainless steel on the table, smearing a spot away. The lights in that room were so very white—blue, I think they say, but only to mean that it's not yellow, not like the sun.

"Is it cold in here?" I remarked.

Horaki put her cup down and nodded. "It is, a little. It's the way it was when we got here, unfortunately. Not a lot of people around who can fix a thermostat without making a bigger mess."

"You might be able to find a working one elsewhere."

"Perhaps." Horaki sipped her tea, thinking for a moment. "But that's a bit unseemly—crawling through other people's houses trying to take what they don't use anymore. It's not so bad. We make do with what we have."

I nodded. "You could say that about a lot of things."

At that, she let out a small laugh. "I suppose so. A home, family, friends—sometimes you end up with things you didn't expect."

"Like you and Asuka?"

A tinge of color came to her cheeks. "I wouldn't say that. We're not so different."

I raised an eyebrow and stifled a smile. "So you don't know anything about 'thermal expansion'?"

Her gaze hardened. "Don't you start, Shinji Ikari."

A shiver went down my spine, and I straightened up in my seat. "Yes, ma'am."

"Good." At that, she smiled slightly, and she relaxed. "I admit, Asuka throws me off sometimes, too. I don't know if her behavior is a Western thing or just an Asuka thing, but Asuka is like a small bird—she chirps for attention if you're not giving it to her, but if you do, she's fine.

"I remember, when she came to our house in Tokyo-3 before, she shut herself in my room and played videogames all night, and she was…well, not completely all right, but she was normal, I think. Asuka has a tendency to act larger than life, but that week, she was more…" Horaki pursed her lips and glanced at the ceiling. "She acted within herself. She was no more—and no less—than what you'd expect from a fourteen-year-old girl."

"That's rare for her."

"It is. I hadn't seen that from her in quite a while. She changed. Even over that short time, those weeks and months, she changed."

"We all did."

"Yes, yes you did." Horaki glanced at one of the sketches on the wall. "So," she said, "I guess we should do something. We don't exactly have a lot of time."

"We don't?"

"Nozomi will probably be back soon for dinner. I have enough for an extra plate. It's not much, but—"

I winced. "Ah, no, this is more than enough. I couldn't."

"Of course you can. It's no trouble."

"No, that's not what I mean." I rose, tugging at my sweater to keep it from bunching up. "Thanks for the tea, but I don't think I'm needed any longer. You know there's something wrong. You and Nozomi can work it out. I just needed to make sure you understood."

"Really?" Horaki frowned, and she slid her teacup aside. "All right. I'll do my best, then, to make sure Nozomi is ready for this. After that, I'll be trusting her to your care again."

I shook my head. "I'm just here to nudge her in the right direction every once in a while. That's all."

At that, Horaki rose as well, and she eyed me with a steady stare. "What happened that day? In the control room?"

I glanced aside. "I'm not asking about what's between you and Nozomi."

"No, you're not." Her stare broke, and she looked at the teacups on the table. "I appreciate that. It's easier that way, isn't it?"

"It is," I said, nodding. "Thank you for the tea."

Horaki pressed a hand to her face, with one eye shut. She didn't look at me, so I drifted to the entryway, left the guest slippers at the edge, and made for the door. I was halfway there when a voice called after me,

"It happened in October."

I turned around. Horaki was there, watching me from the threshold to the rest of the house.

"It happened in October," she said again. "October, two years ago."

I looked aside. "I don't need to know this."

"I know. It would be easier if you didn't, but…" She smiled. "There's still some tea, you know."

I turned my back on her. I sped for the door and flung it open. A wave of heat engulfed me; the sun glared at me from across a weed-ridden field.

And all I had to do was take one step—one step into that unmaintained wild, where rain had washed away all the tire tracks on the gravel road, where overbearing light had peeled the paint of the house across the way.

That was the nature of man's struggle, you see: the struggle against nature, nature that was ever-encroaching on civilization. And there, at the Horaki home, they had built up an island fortress of civilization to hold nature at bay. They defended that fortress with metal shaped by machines—the sharp, angled door handle, the strips of steel on the dining room table, and the like. Everything about that place was artificial, with the lights too blue to feel cozy, the corners too pointed to feel at ease.

And yet Horaki stayed there anyway. She wasn't one to be satisfied with how that house was.

And though that place was still inhospitable, though it was still cool for my taste, I closed the door in front of me, shutting the warmth and light of the outside away. I bowed my head, watching her from the corner of my eye, and said,

"Would you tell me about it—about October?"

Horaki smiled. "Okay."



By the dining room table, Horaki told me her story. I'll try to keep it as much in her words as possible.

"It happened in October," she said, sitting straight and tall, "but I didn't realize it until later.

"The day I understood it? That was a cooler day. Overcast, as I remember it. I was taking a walk by the rice paddies. I needed to get out, you see. We shared the house with another family at that time. They were difficult people. Their things were theirs, and our things were theirs, too, if they wanted it that way. We didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. Where else could we go? That's what we thought. So when a cooler day came, without the oppressive, overbearing sun, I took the opportunity.

"I was about a kilometer down the road when I heard the screams. At first, it was just one girl running by the train tracks. She was so far away, it was a faint cry, but no less shrill or upsetting. That's when I really noticed how empty the whole area was: there was no traffic, and except for that girl, there was no one else walking around, either.

"I hurried home, but the door was locked when I got there. I pulled on the handle; I rang the bell and cried out for someone to answer, but no one came. I thought about going around to the back, maybe to tap on a window or something, but someone stopped me: my mother."

"Your mother?" I scanned the decorations about the room: the photos and sketches and such. "Is she…?"

Horaki shook her head sadly. "No, she's not. And that should've tipped me off, right? In my head, I knew there was something wrong, but there she was. She was smiling. Her arms were wide and open. I have her freckles, you know. Father used to say that all the time.

"My mother beckoned me, and I felt drawn to her, like a compass needle to the north pole, like a moth to light. I felt only love coming from her, so I hugged her, and…well…"

"That's when you found out," I said, "about Nozomi?"

Horaki nodded, casting her eyes down. "I found out about a lot of things. I found out someone used to wish I hadn't been born. That explained a lot. I found out someone didn't feel quite the same way I felt toward them, but they were willing to see things change between us. That was good. It was hard to keep secrets there, wasn't it?"

"Impossible," I said, looking at my own reflection in the teacup.

"Impossible." Horaki nodded, and she sipped her tea. "I think so, too." Horaki put the cup down and stared at it, too. She felt along a line that ran down the cup's side, and she turned the cup in place, putting that line out of view. Still, she rubbed her thumb along the cup's surface, where the line should be, with an intense expression.

"Horaki…," I said.

"It happened in October." Her eyes—steady and brilliant—locked on to mine. "I only just realized it months later. Right?"

I nodded, and Horaki went on, letting her eyes drift away from me.

"I saw, in that dream, what happened from Nozomi's view. I was in the kitchen. I had been for most of the afternoon. There was something I needed to do, you see. It was a silly thing, right? You think if you do things for people without asking them what you really want, they'll just give it to you? But that's how we all were back then. We hoped for a lot.

"I was in the kitchen, but I wasn't cooking. I stared out the window in a daze, and the phone lay on the counter beside me, buzzing with that incessant sound. Nozomi heard it, you see. She found me there, by the dirty pots and pans, by the stack of four lunchboxes with no one to take them all.

" 'Hey, Hikari?' That's what she said. She looked into the kitchen and called to me, but I didn't answer. I just squeezed the edge of the countertop. I squeezed it so hard that part of the surface snapped off underneath, but I kept holding it anyway.

"So Nozomi—she came into the kitchen and poked me. She poked me! With the eraser end of a pencil. She poked me on the end of my shoulder, and I jumped half a meter into the air!

"She scampered back, the way a small dog might run away if you yell at it. She hovered by the door, looking at me from the side, and said, 'Sis, what's wrong?' " Horaki wiped at her eye. "Do you know what I said to her?"

"Not what you wish you would've said, I guess."

"Aha!" Horaki laughed. "No, definitely not. I, um, I stood upright, and I smoothed out some wrinkles in my apron. It wasn't wrinkled—not one bit—but I smoothed it out anyway. And I asked her, 'Are you finished with your homework?'

"She said, 'I don't see how that's important right now….'

"I put my hands on hips and said, 'You can't afford to slack off, you know. It's going to be hard, getting into a good high school around here. Make sure you take the washroom trash out before dinner, too. You understand?'

"Nozomi stared at me open-mouthed, saying, 'Are you really doing this?'

"And I said, 'Homework. Washroom. Go get it done before dinner.'

"She watched me for a long time at that, with small eyes and a cold expression, and all she said was,

" 'Okay, Hikari.' And she left, and only then did I lean against the counter and cry.

"But those words stuck with me. I heard them a lot from Nozomi, in the weeks to come. I'd ask her to come to dinner, and she'd say, 'Okay, Hikari.' I'd ask her to be careful on the road to school, and she'd say, 'Okay, Hikari.' And she'd always show me the same face, too: blank and hard, like a slab of rock.

"I saw that over and over—in the real world, and in the time after 'Mother' came to me. That horrible movie reel played in front of my eyes without end, and each time I heard those words again, it was like getting stabbed in the gut. It all made me want to curl into a ball and run away from people, run away from everyone else.

"But then, after hours or days or I don't even know how long, someone came to me in that dream: Nozomi. I tried to apologize to her, but Nozomi didn't want that. She wanted to know if I would go back.

" 'Do you dare seek the hope that we can understand each other?' she said, 'even though one day, you might be betrayed, and that hope may yet abandon you?' "

I twitched, and some drops of tea spilled from my cup. " 'Betrayed'? She said that?"

"I remember it very well," said Horaki, nodding with her eyes closed. "It was strange enough to hear that I can't ever forget it."

I glanced at the ceiling, but there was nothing there: just a smooth, white surface, with a soft gradient of light from the lamp in the corner. Horaki went on.

"Nozomi came to me, asking me to meet her again, and I accepted. I came back. I found myself in the ocean, and it took weeks to get back inland. But when I got here, there they were—my sisters. We'd lost some things in that time, but we still had a house to call home, and a family to keep it together. And I—I tried to make sure it would stay that way."

"Is that so?" I asked. "I mean, after all that, after what Nozomi asked you to do, didn't you…?"

Horaki gaped at me. "Ikari, what kind of person do you think I am?"

"I'm sorry."

"No, no, it's all right." She poured me another cup of tea. "I did make my apology to Nozomi, you see. It was the first thing I did when I could get her alone."

"And she accepted it?"

"I thought she had." Horaki frowned. "The way she's been acting toward me lately, I'm not as sure anymore. I hoped it was something else, or that if she were angry with me, she would say so instead of stew about it." She met my gaze. "Stuff like this should be in the past by now, right?"

Maybe not for Nozomi. Maybe she was the kind to isolate herself and be angry, to wait day after day for the person who'd wronged her to realize it, the kind to take yearning for love and affection and twist it into hatred and displeasure because what she sought wasn't being given, and while she was needed, she wasn't needed the way she wanted to be.



I thanked Horaki for telling her story, and I left. Horaki offered to make me a place for dinner, but I declined, and Horaki showed me out. When that heavy steel door shut behind me, and I stood on the stoop alone, I shaded my eyes from the setting sun and looked out, over the weed-ridden rice paddies and untilled fields.

And I sat down.

I sat down and winced, for the rough concrete of the stoop wasn't too pleasant to sit on, but it was what it was. I sat there, eyes closed, until the sound of gravel crunching underfoot roused me.

"What are you doing here?"

That was Nozomi. She kept her sketchpad tucked under her arm, and her foot dragged on the driveway only a little. She stopped in front of me, looking me up and down, and said,

"You look like you're ready for a ski trip in Hokkaido."

I pulled my sunglasses off and took my hood down. "Most people at least do a double-take when they see me like this."

Nozomi rapped a pencil on her sketchpad's binding. "I'm not most people."

"No," I said, laughing to myself, "no you're not."

"Ikari." She tapped her foot, frowning. "What are you doing here?"

"I—well, that is, uh…"

My gaze drifted off her, but I found something else that was impossible to ignore. Behind Nozomi, at the edge of an abandoned rice paddy, the red-eyed ghost of a girl stood, watching us both with her unblinking gaze. Stoic and unblinking she was, unwavering in her gaze.

I cleared my throat and started again. "I came because I hoped we could understand each other, even knowing that someday I might be betrayed, and that hope would abandon me."

"What are you talking about?" asked Nozomi, raising an eyebrow.

The red-eyed ghost didn't move, either, and I smiled to myself, going on.

"I spoke with your sister," I said. "We talked for a long time, about your problems with her."

"You did?"

"Yes."

Nozomi turned her head slightly, eyeing me askance. "Because of me?"

"That's right."

Nozomi's eyes narrowed, and her lips pressed together tensely. With the sun setting behind her, she was like a magnifying glass for all that light and heat, intense enough that I pulled on the neck of my sweatshirt for relief, and I blurted out,

"Nozomi—"

"Ikari—"

We stared at one another, blinking, open-mouthed. I bowed my head. "You go first."

"All right." Nozomi tucked her pencil behind her ear, and she flipped through her sketchpad, not watching me. "You know, Ikari—I got pretty pissed at you yesterday."

"You don't say."

Her eyes flickered to me, even as she kept shuffling through the pages. "You're not funny," she said, even as the ends of her lips curled upward in a smile. Her eyes went back to the sketches. "You were really acting like a wimp, you know."

"I've been called that a lot," I said, looking away.

"I bet." She ripped a page out of the sketchpad, and she offered it to me. "But I never asked you not to be that way before."

The pencil drawing showed a boy facing a TV screen, putting his back to the girl who sat across from him. Even as she slammed her hands on the table, the boy looked only at the screen. Who knew what the boy was feeling in that moment? The sketch depicted his face wholly in shadow.

"I'm sorry," said Nozomi. "Really."

I took the sketch by the corner of the page, and Nozomi let it go. She sat beside me on the concrete stoop, and her whole body sagged as she came down.

"Feeling relieved?" I asked.

"A little." The fire came back in her eyes, though, and she said, "But let's not get complacent—not you and not me. You've gotta hold on to that sketch, Ikari. Hold on to it, so we can look back on it later and say, 'I'm glad we're not like that anymore.' Got it?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said, and I touched my hand to my forehead in salute. Nozomi huffed at that, but she said nothing.

We sat there in silence, for a time. I smoothed out the wrinkled piece of paper in my lap, admiring the level of detail. She even got the grain of the wooden table right. I could tell because there was a visible knot on one of the legs that I'd long been bothered by. More than that—it was a knot on my side of the table.

"You're making me feel guilty," I said, laughing a bit. "All I did was get the security people to take me up here. As an apology, this is a lot better than anything I could do."

"You don't have to apologize for anything. I get it."

"You do?"

"Yeah." Nozomi held up her head up with one hand, using her knee as a support, and those cool, dark eyes locked on to me. "You hate the person you used to be, don't you, Ikari?"

"Ah—uh—" I choked on these half-formed syllables, and I stared into the trees that surrounded the driveway.

"And I get that," said Nozomi. "You just need to find a way to change yourself into something you'd like."

I hissed at that. My hands came up on their own, like signal flags, broadcasting what I couldn't say. "I don't—I don't really—I'm just trying to help you get through this. That's all. Really."

Nozomi laughed and shook her head. "Well, I guess I'm okay with that. For now." She put one shoe to the concrete and rose, and I scrambled to my feet, too.

"Ah, wait!"

"What?"

"I'm trying to help you with all this—that means you need to know."

She eyed me askance again. "Know what?"

"Your sister told me what happened between you."

Nozomi pulled her sketchbook closer to her body. "She did?"

"Yeah—about October, about how she tried to reconcile with you when she came back, all of it."

"Oh, that." Nozomi brushed a couple stray hairs from her eyes. "Is that what she told you?"

"It is. So, Nozomi…." I climbed to the top step, watching her the whole time. "Is that what's been bothering you??"

Nozomi shook her head, pressing her pencil eraser against her temple. "Look, Ikari—"

"It's okay if you don't answer right now," I said, smiling. "I just might need to know. Sometime."

"No, no, look—I forgave Hikari for that a long time ago."

I raised an eyebrow. "You did?"

"Yeah. It was a tough time. She was stressed out, and people make mistakes when they're not really thinking about other people, you know?" She closed her sketchpad cover and tucked the book under her arm. "I know that. You know that. I'm not holding that against her."

"Then what is it that you saw from the Angel?"

"I saw…" Nozomi looked aside. "I saw myself."

"Yourself?" I said, frowning.

"Yeah. Do we have to do this now?" She drummed her fingers on her sketchpad's binding, and she leaned on her left foot.

"No," I said. "One step at a time, right?" I moved aside, clearing the way to the door. "We don't have to figure it all out now."

"Thanks for that." She stepped inside. "So, that means we're working together again, right? There's still an Angel to kill."

I glanced to the horizon and the setting sun. "Yeah. Count on it."

Nozomi looked at me from the side. "You sure? For real this time? I don't want to find you moping around again, Ikari."

"I—" I frowned, and I bowed my head. "It's hard for me, but—" I met her gaze. "I'm going to keep trying. I mean that."

She gave me a slight nod. "I understand. Night, Ikari."

"Good night, Nozomi."

The door closed, and I folded the sketch into quarters to keep in my sweatshirt's pouch—it was either that or let it flap around and bend in the wind, so that was an easy decision. I left the front steps and headed down the gravel driveway, with the sun casting the shadow of the mountains before me—a dark void that swallowed the cities and towns beyond.

But from that void, spots of red shined at me: a pair of spots from the red-eyed ghost who looked like Rei Ayanami.

And in her shadow stood the figure in white and gold, hooded so that their eyes couldn't be seen at all.

From the edge of the overgrown rice paddy, they watched me—and the Horaki family as well.

More and more, I began to feel that we were pawns to them—too small to appreciate their motives, too simple-minded to understand their plans.

The hope that we can one day understand each other.

To many of us—to me, and to Horaki—that was a hope we had no choice but to pursue. To refuse it would be nothing less than losing ourselves to a dream.

So I walked the road under their watchful gazes. I walked it, knowing different person would finish that journey.

And unlike a boy I'd known in the past, I was determined to come to love him, knowing I would accomplish nothing if I did not.

 

[Muphrid]

12. Mirror Image

That person I'd become would be forged from fire—from the crucible of an Angel attack. The Angel, you see, was still out there.

When I headed back to the base, the information was waiting for me at my desk. That was clear as soon as I opened my office door.

"Well hello there!"

The information just so happened to be ingrained into Misato's head. She sat at my desk, propping her feet up on the corner.

"These digs are nicer than mine, you know," she said, rubbing a finger on the desk's edge. "Usually reserved for visiting generals and such. I was thinking about taking it for myself."

I narrowed my eyes, but Misato just raised her eyebrows.

"Oh, do you want it back?"

"I do, yes."

"Do you, or don't you?" She took her feet off the desk and sat upright, looking every bit like the general she was supposed to be. "Because if you leave this space open again, I will take it for myself. It's too nice to waste, you know."

"I'm sure."

"Are you?" Misato looked straight at me, and she lowered her voice. "You don't have to be here, you know."

"I don't?" I scoffed at that. "You've been pressing pretty hard."

Misato sighed. "Too hard?"

"You said it, not me," I told her.

She rubbed her eyes, and she sat back in my chair. "All right, I deserve that," she said. "I'm sorry. Let me just say it then: I don't think it's good for you to sit in your apartment and only go out with a hood over your face. I'm not asking you to be famous. I'm not asking you to speak to the world. But staying that way—you're weren't making a future for yourself. So when I saw the chance to change that, I took it. The rest is up to you."

Misato laid a hand on the desk, palm up. I stepped foward, to the desk's edge, and I took her hand in mine.

"I'm going to try it again," I said, putting on a hesitant smile. "I like Nozomi, and I think I can make a difference with her."

Misato smiled widely, and her hand tightened around mine. "You absolutely can," she said.

"That's only part of why I'm here, though," I said.

"What?"

I wiped some dust off the computer monitor's top edge. "What would you do with a computer in your office, anyway?"

Misato's jaw dropped at that. Her cheeks flushed, and she scowled. She wagged a finger at me and vacated the seat. "I am not a dinosaur, you know."

"So, you weren't friends with Ritsuko just for her skills with technical support?" I said, grinning like a loon.

"That wasn't the only reason." Misato dragged one of the visitor chairs in front of the desk, and she sat down, too. She flipped a file folder around to face her, and she laid out the contents. "So, if you're going to use this office, we're going to have you do some work with it."

I sighed, and I sat back in my chair. "Where's the Angel?"

Misato smiled slyly, and she shuffled one page in particular to the top of the stack. "Glad you're here, Shinji," she said, and she gave me a kiss on the cheek. I gave her a look to make sure she understood one thing, though: that wasn't going to make up entirely for what she was asking me to do. Still, Misato scampered out before I could make that message hit home.

With Misato gone, I started scanning through the briefing. The Angel was on the way to America. After taking the better part of a week in the upper atmosphere to heal its wounds, the Angel was on the move, and both Germany and Japan would send their Eva to kill it. The three Eva would combine forces, and if that didn't repel the Angel, nothing would.

Nozomi was already on the way again, headed across an ocean to pit her soul against the beast's, and I was meant to help her.

I put on footage from the last two battles, shut my eyes, and listened to Nozomi's voice. That steady cadence of hers—she could get tense, but never hurried. There was an even quality to her demeanor, even under pressure—somewhat like Ayanami, at least in that narrow respect. It was like work to her, wasn't it? She spoke the same way you would if you were lugging a wagon of paint cans around. Where do you need to go? Turn left? Turn right? Up that hill? Okay, let's get on with it. The weight isn't going anywhere by itself.

Why would you want to carry that weight?

Why did Nozomi want to carry that weight?

When the thought came to me, I swept the file folder aside, and the papers within scattered. I buried my face in my hands, and I sat there, for a time, rocking back and forth in my chair. The footage ran to the end of the video, leaving me with nothing but cold silence.

So at some point, I turned off the monitor and took a walk.



It was late on the base, but if you didn't know how the base worked, you might not have known it. The corridor lighting never dimmed, and there were guards posted at all times. You might notice fewer people moving through the halls, but only the civilian scientists on base kept to a daytime schedule.

Even that was…flexible, and not just when the Eva was in operation, either.

It might be tempting to think of Manoah Base as this giant, sprawling complex underground. Nerv Headquarters had over twenty stories above the Geofront floor and a few times that beneath the surface to Terminal Dogma. But that was then. In this day and age, with time limited and money hard to come by, Manoah Base had separate buildings with only a few floors. Getting around was like navigating a small hotel or apartment building—except the base was far more cramped than anything above-ground.

So, with the base as small as it was, it didn't take me long to get to the research labs.

The labs there were all hidden away, tucked behind numbered doors with only military-style paint to distinguish them. I tracked the numbers as I walked by: J-107, J-109, …

J-111. I tapped my key card on the reader, and it flashed: red and green, alternating.

Well it couldn't be that easy, could it. I sighed, and I knocked instead. The lock turned, and a bleary-eyed redhead peered out.

"Shinji?" She frowned, folding her arms. "Well look who it is."

I winced. "Uh, um, how's the work going?"

"It's not bad," she said with a shrug, but that momentary reprieve gave away to a hard stare. "I've been working. Unlike some people."

I laughed nervously, and I looked around her into the lab. There was a cubicle in plain view, but no one was at home. "Should I…?"

She propped the door open and jerked her head toward the interior. I followed her in.

Asuka blew right by the office space, showing me through an open door into the laboratory proper: a series of chambers with transparent walls, connected by a narrow observation hallway. Asuka dragged a rolling chair from one of the consoles and sat down at another, leaving me to sit in front of a powered-down computer while she went back to work.

And what was she working on, you ask? An unholy mass of flesh and cabling—no more than an Eva's torso being kept alive by machines.

Asuka tugged on her labcoat's collar as she sat down, and she typed in her credentials to access the console computer. "So, what made you come back?"

"It's important to Nozomi, and it's important to me," I said.

"And you just decided to show up here? All of a sudden?"

"I'm sorry. I'll make you some sausage."

She looked at me with one eye. "Real sausage or Chinese sausage?"

It wasn't like you could just go to any market in Japan and find pig intestines. Not in that time, anyway.

"That's what I thought," she said, but her lip curled up in a smile. "So you're okay with Nozomi now?"

I nodded. "She was…pretty forgiving. We're going to fight the Angel again, soon."

"You're ready for that?"

"I need to be."

Asuka pushed the keyboard aside, and she turned her chair toward me, letting it drift to a stop. "You need to be, huh?" she said, looking up. "Well, damn right you do. You two kill the Angel and save the world. That's what we're here for. What's the problem?"

Inside the test chamber, some bubbles passed through a transparent tube, into the simulation body.

"It's not going to be easy," I said. "Not for her, not for me."

"Of course it won't be easy. She's going to suffer. A lot. But it'll help more people avoid that suffering. It's a win."

"And what should she do after that?" I asked.

Asuka laughed. She sat back in her chair, with one leg crossed over the other, and shook her head. "Don't get ahead of yourself, Ikari. It's far too early to worry about what might happen if you win when she might not survive at all."

I tensed up. "What?"

"It's natural, isn't it? There's no small chance that she dies, or that she doesn't come back as something human, or the like."

"That—" I bit my lip and shuddered.

"Shinji…"

Asuka reached out to me, but I waved her off.

"That is what I'm afraid of," I said. "How—how am I supposed to stop that from happening?"

"You might not be able to. It could be it was never possible." She shrugged. "So why worry about it? Just do what you can."

"But I can't!" I cried. "I—I don't understand her! How can I? I don't know anything about art, which she loves. I don't understand why she's so cold to Horaki; I don't know how she stays so cool under pressure. I just—I don't know!" I buried my face in my hands. "Maybe she doesn't care. Maybe she doesn't care about anything, and she's just going along because we asked her to. How am I supposed to help that?"

Asuka pulled on the back of my chair, drawing us closer, and she wrapped an arm around me. "Do you understand me, Shinji?"

"A lot more than I did—"

She locked her eyes on me. "Do you understand me, Shinji? Completely, utterly, truly, without a shadow of a doubt?"

My mouth hung open, and I didn't answer.

"I don't understand you either, sometimes," she said, her eyes drifting to the half-formed creature through the window. "You sat around and moped and I couldn't reach you. That's like stabbing me in the heart, you know. That fucking hurts. What a bastard you are."

"I'm sorry; I just—"

She touched a finger to my lips. "But we're both bastards, so I can decide if I want to live with that." She smiled. "And we've been just fine, even if it does hurt sometimes."

I relaxed at that, settling into Asuka's arms. "I really do owe you some sausage."

"Misato has connections; get her to make it happen."

"I'd rather do it myself."

"I won't stop you." Asuka pulled on her labcoat with her free hand, closing it up against the lab environment. With a blank expression, she stared into the chamber.

"How's work coming?" I asked.

She jolted a bit, even though she was still holding on to me, but a trademark grin came back to her. "Good!" she said. "We've been using the simulation body to probe the effects of the engine. It's not perfect, but the results are promising. We could be installing it in the Eva within a few weeks."

"How does it work?"

She scoffed. "Do you really want to hear it?"

"Humor me."

"You'll still owe me some sausage."

"That's fine."

Asuka caught a lab notebook on the console with her fingertips, and she flipped it open to some arcane drawings of occult, paranormal rituals—metaphysical biology at its most complex.

"Eva, Angels, and humans alike all generate AT fields and use their AT fields to penetrate other AT fields, if they're forceful enough." She said this like a professor at a classroom lectern. "But it doesn't need to be that way, does it? AT fields are fields—wavelike phenomena that obey the laws of quantum mechanics. Rather than overpower an AT field directly, an opposing field of the right amplitude and phase will cause destructive interference with the first field, completely canceling the other out. That's what the puncture engine does—or that's what it's supposed to do, anyway. The reality of making that work from inside an Eva takes a rather ingenious solution that Maya doesn't entirely appreciate…"

As Asuka explained all the cleverness of her approach, we sat in the lab, side by side, long into the night.

And though the simulation body behind the glass was hideous, neither of us wanted to move.



The battle took place late the next night.

I reported to the control room around eleven, just as final operations were underway to prepare for launch and combat. Misato's staff kept a close eye on the situation on the ground, and it wasn't good: Unit-16, the American Eva, had led a morning-long defensive stand outside the old Nerv-Boston base. When I arrived, the beast already seemed tired, breathing heavily as it waited for its instructions. Its blue-and-white striped armor showed the signs of battle: chips and dents marred the color scheme, and its left shoulder pylon had snapped in two.

You see, Unit-16 had squared off against the Angel with no support and no help since dawn. American tanks and missiles? They hardly made a dent. Their rods of death from high orbit? Useless. How do you expect to hit a moving target from a dozen kilometers away, with nothing but tiny fins attached to a dumb metal rod?

That's not to say the Americans didn't try it anyway. No, the charred craters and smoke in the sky said so: the Americans would try, even if they had no chance to succeed. Why not? If it distracted the Angel for a minute or two, if it kept the walking creatures' advance from the American base a little longer, then why not? What was a little metal in payment for that? What was a little fire to scorch the trees and homes for kilometers around?

But Unit-16 couldn't hold forever, nor did it need to. The Germans and the Japanese were on the way, and we would all face the enemy—together.

"All right, we're go for launch," said Hyuga, standing at his position next to me. "Start the clock at T-8 when Eva-15 has deployed."

The middle screen at the front of the room went to one of the transport planes. The jet seemed like a lumbering animal, lugging Unit-15 on its back, for the clouds behind it hardly drifted by. On another screen was Unit-14, also hitching a ride, and on my own monitor was the camera into the entry plug. Nozomi sat with her eyes closed, and she tapped her thumb on the controls as she waited.

"You're not scared," I observed.

She opened one eye, the one visible to the camera. "You kidding? This is pretty weird stuff we get into. I think most people should be scared."

"You don't show it very much, I mean."

She closed her eyes again, shrugging. "Nothing I can do about it."

"That's no less worthy of admiration. You didn't have to be here."

"Pft." She snorted. "This is what anybody should do."

"Maybe."

I glanced over my shoulder. Just as before, the Horaki family waited in the observation lounge, taking up the two corner seats while generals and politicians alike watched with stiff, stern faces.

"Have you thought about talking to your sister?" I asked.

"Dunno what I could say." Her thumb tapped on the controls, never missing a beat. "It's hard, you know?"

"That I do know," I said, laughing to myself. "We can talk about it when you get back, yeah?"

"Getting a little ahead of yourself, Ikari," she said, stifling a smile.

"I'm not. This is something I know."

She nodded at that, and she said nothing more. Her eyes were fixed forward. She settled into the zone, focusing on the timer.

I glanced up, above the projector screens in the front of the room. The clock on the wall read -00:00:08.000 and held there, as the Germans on the radio read the time down for their launch. "Drei, zwo, eins…"

The German Eva separated from its transport, which pitched down and out of the way, and a wing apparatus folded out along the Eva's arms, letting it glide into the battlefield.

"Start the clock!" said Hyuga.

Nozomi tightened her grip on the controls, and I sat up, too. It was what she'd trained to do, right? And for me? It's what I'd been asked to do, despite having little training at all. I only knew what it was like to be in that chair. The one I was sitting in then—with foam cushions and a rolling wheels—was a far cry from the hard plastic plug seat.

So it would've been weird to be less comfortable in that chair than the Eva's. It would've been very weird. I don't think you could blame the armrests for that, and yet…I squirmed in that chair. I squirmed and repositioned myself for the whole countdown. Nozomi separated from the transport and jolted, and there I was, struggling with the rolling wheels of my chair. She swayed and bounced around as turbulence shook the Eva's improvised gliding rig, and I? I fiddled with the height adjuster on my seat, but it wouldn't put me in a good spot. It was always too high or too low, too cramped with the keyboard or too far above the monitor to see properly.

And that was how it was.

I gave up trying to adjust the chair. The keyboard would just have to be inconvenient. Nothing could keep me from watching Nozomi as she flew toward battle.

And that battle was underway. The Angel—that impossible ball of spinning rings and warped space—chewed through American tanks on its way to their base. It sucked in fighter jets and strung out their metal and glass into streams of crushed white mass, spitting them out like strands of steel spaghetti.

And when Eva-16, in white and blue, dared to stand toe-to-toe against its foe, the Angel pulled the Eva off the ground by the pull of false gravity. It tossed the Eva aside like a doll. An Eva isn't meant to plow into the ground or smash into the ocean like a stone. Even with the most intrepid pilot, it couldn't help but wear down.

That's why Eva-15 came to its aid.

Ka-WHAM! A streak of red, black, and white smashed into the Angel! AT fields burst from the impact in shimmering red and orange light; Eva-15's momentum carried the Angel along with it, dragging the Angel from the American Eva.

And that's where Unit-14 and Nozomi swooped in, making a graceful, rocket-assisted landing at the American Eva's side.

"I'm good!" cried Nozomi, striking a combat-ready stance.

"Qanan Base, Qanan Base, this is Manoah Base Control," said one of our communication controllers in English. "Eva Unit-14 is in position."

With that, the battered American Eva withdrew. Bits and pieces of armor sloughed off like necrotic flesh, and the Eva lumbered inland, stepping over a swath of barbed wire fencing.

But the Angel gave chase. It rose high off the ground, carrying the German Eva long by false gravity, and it bolted for the American Eva and base. The ground split apart beneath the Angel's trail.

TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK-TACK! Sparks shot off the Angel's AT field. White beams of energy sliced through the air, leaving shimmering wakes of heat and smoke behind.

"You think I got its attention?"

That was Nozomi, who crouched her Eva like a soldier providing covering fire, except her rifle wasn't anything a human being could wield. Calling it the Type 21 Positron Rifle would make it sound complicated and strange.

It fired bolts of high-energy particles, going just shy of the speed of light. It was complicated and strange.

Yet limitless in ammunition it was not—Nozomi fired off a burst of three shots, stunning the Angel, but the trigger clicked harmlessly after that.

And that's when the Angel—that swirling ball of light with semi-transparent, crystalline rings—focused its energy on Nozomi. It froze her within a spotlight once more. Nozomi let out a stifled groan, and she pressed a hand to her head, gritting her teeth.

"Nothing has changed."

That was the specter—the thing that looked like my father—looming over my station with cold, wide eyes. The rims of "his" glasses cut across his pupils; the red lenses stood in stark contrast against the whites of his eyes.

"You're still helpless," he said. "Helpless to change the present or the past."

I sat back in my chair, sipped my flavorless tea, and smiled. "Not this time," I said, and I pressed the switch on my headset's cord. "Nozomi, fire when ready."

"Okay…" she grunted. "Firing…"

The specter's brow furrowed, and behind him, on the front projector screen, the Eva's back end lit with fire. Rockets hurled the Eva free of the Angel's spotlight, and Nozomi zoomed around the Angel, reloading the positron rifle on the fly. In the entry plug, she lowered the targeting scanner back over her eyes, took aim, and—

FWOOM! The Angel shot past her with criminal disregard for the laws of inertia, and its spinning gravitational wake carried Nozomi and the American Eva along, as though they were helpless asteroids in the presence of a larger body. Nozomi tumbled; her rockets fired in spurts, pushing the Eva end-over-end. She lurched against her seat restraints, and the targeting scanner smashed into her temple, drawing blood.

"Okay, that didn't work!" cried Nozomi, who pushed and pulled at the Eva's controls, to no avail. "Do we have a plan to get me out of this thing's pull or what?"

Hyuga grimaced, and he put a hand over his headset microphone, saying to me, "Tell her we have something; it'll just take a second."

I clicked the switch on my microphone, and I said, "We're putting something together right now."

"Is that coming? Soon?"

I nodded frantically. "Yes, soon! Very soon!"

But that wasn't soon enough. The Angel darted skyward, dragging the three Eva along, and it flung them back downward like pellets from a slingshot.

THUD, THUD, THUD! They smashed into the ground, taking trees and fencing along with them. And where the wounded beasts lay in craters, the enemy army—the faceless walking creatures—came for them like vultures sniffing carrion. The walkers pricked and pulled at each Eva's armor, puncturing the metal plates with their needle-like fingers.

THWACK! Unit-14 swatted two of the creatures with its arm, leaving nothing but orange goo in their place.

"Not soon enough, Ikari," muttered Nozomi, who brought the Eva lumbering to its feet.

I looked to Hyuga. "We'll try to do better next time," I said.

"You do that," said Nozomi.

Hyuga grimaced. "What else can we do?" he asked the room.

I faced the monitor once more, saying nothing.

The scene there wasn't improving, though. The Angel descended back to Earth like a god from heaven. It shined its searing light on the other Eva—first the lanky German Eva in red and orange, then the shorter American Eva in blue and white stripes. The light never lingered on them for long, however.

It only stayed for more than a few seconds when it found Unit-14 and Nozomi.

"How about now?" she said, straining against the light's pressure. "We got a new plan for this or what?"

Hyuga looked to me and nodded, and I said, "Yes, it'll just be a minute."

One of the controllers rose from her seat. "Not enough propellant," she said. "The engines will fizzle out before we get even 90 degrees around, and the Angel will just reacquire the Eva in its gaze."

"ETA on the backup rifle?" asked Hyuga.

"Four minutes, Ops—the platform couldn't stay on station with the Angel in the air."

"How much propellant do we have?"

"Fifteen seconds at full burn, sir."

On and on the dialogue went. That's what adults do; they work on things. Ibuki and her scientists were working on it in the back room, no doubt, with Asuka and a small handful of their colleagues relaying information back to them by the second. The technicians and systems controllers were working on it, with people going back and forth between stations. Hyuga left his station, holding his headset by its cord, as he spoke with the technicians about a solution.

And Misato? She presided over the whole affair in silence, not even looking up from her monitors.

"Ikari?"

That was Nozomi. She held the Eva's arms in front of her, as though blocking a little of that light would protect her. With the Eva paralyzed and Nozomi struggling against the pain, the walkers climbed up the Eva's legs and back, ripping at its armor. Nozomi clenched her teeth so hard I thought they would crack.

"Haven't you got something for me?" she cried out. "I'm not gonna let this thing just push into me without putting up a fight!"

Hyuga stormed back to his position next to me. "She needs to just hang on."

"Just hold on a little longer," I said.

She hissed, shaking her head. "Hold on for what, Ikari? How long do you guys think I have?"

"I know this is frustrating; I know it's hard to hear that we don't have any answers for you. I—" I ran my hand through my hair. "I'm sorry. I know we asked you to do this, and now we're asking you to sit out there and wait to be hurt or killed. I know it's awful. I don't know what else to tell you."

"That's really how it is?"

I bowed my head. "Yeah, it is. I'm sorry."

Nozomi grunted, and she made a show of releasing the controls. She looked right at the camera, with one eye shut and the other straining to stay open, and said,

"You don't have to apologize, Ikari. That's for trying. I'm glad you've been here."

"You are?"

"Yeah," she said, flashing her trademark small smile. "Thanks for looking out for me."

The Eva shuddered, and Nozomi grabbed at the base of the seat to steady herself.

"But if you can figure something out pretty soon, that'd be okay, too!" she said, and she flashed the camera a pained smile.

I sat back in my seat, mouth hanging open. There was that girl, mustering all the will she had to hold the Angel's probing mind at bay, and she had the temerity to smile, to announce to the world that she was there to save it, knowing what it might cost her. And she would do this, had done all this, with little more than an indifferent shrug, as though she could agree to it and go back to sketching on her pad without a second thought.

That was Nozomi Horaki.

I knew what it was like to sit in that chair, to fight Angels and hope for something more.

I didn't know that girl just by virtue of her sitting in that chair, but I knew something that could help her.

I could help her.

I, of all people, could help her.

And as Nozomi groaned and gritted her teeth, my eyes lost focus. I saw, in the glossy sheen of the monitor, not Nozomi.

I saw a boy, a boy who'd grown halfway into a man, who grew stubble when it suited him and shaved it off when it felt unfitting.

I saw a boy, a boy who'd grown the chin and nose of his father, yet who shied away from the image of that man, even as that image stared him down.

"Your flesh is helpless," said the image. "It is weak and prone to fear and doubt. You are a mistake. You cannot fight the nature of what you are."

My eyes flickered to that image, to the ghostly, twisted image of my father. But that thing was not my father.

Perhaps that's why I could stand up to it.

Yes, that's right. I stood up, and I looked that thing right in the eye.

"I may have been a mistake before," I said, "but I am not a mistake now!"

The room stared at me—the thing that looked like my father, the other mission controllers, and Misato alike. But I ignored them. I tightened my headset over my ears, and I hit the switch to transmit.

"Nozomi, we're gonna get you out of this," I said.

"You are? How?"

"We're gonna find a way, and you're going to get out of this. You're going to get out of this because you're the one sitting in that chair, and you can do it." I balled my hand into a fist. "Isn't that right?"

She looked aside, into the light, and for the first time, it didn't seem to pain her.

"Damn right we are. What's the plan?"

I took my hand off the transmit switch and leaned around the cubicle wall. "Do we have a plan yet?" I asked Hyuga. "Do we?"

"Yes!" Hyuga came around to my station with a tablet, drawing out the strategy. "This is the plan: fire the rockets as long as they can go, keep her on a straight line, and—"

He drew a single path from the ground to the center of a circle.

I scoffed. "Are you serious?"

"She needs her knife."

He was serious!

I rubbed my forehead and shook my head. I looked to Misato, but she just nodded once, not even moving from her seat.

I let out a breath, and I switched on the transmitter once more. "Okay, Nozomi," I said. "We're going for the kill. Draw your prog knife. Hyuga will have your boosters fire on a countdown. Just keep the Eva steady and go straight into the heart of that Angel. Do you understand?"

Hyuga covered his microphone. "With the rings, the frame dragging…" He shrugged. "It's the best we can do."

"We don't have anything else for you. It might not work, and you could be killed. I'm sorry."

"Do you think it'll work?" she asked.

I sighed, watching the battle on the large screen at the front of the room. The walkers had wrenched off one of Unit-14's leg armor plates. The German Eva was trying desperately to keep the Americans' protected, as warped space flung trees, tanks, and unspent artillery shells in their direction.

"We're gonna make it work."

Nozomi smiled at that, and she gripped the controls. "All right. Just say when."

Hyuga held up five fingers.

"Draw your knife," I said. "Five."

The knife popped out of Unit-14's right shoulder pylon, and the Eva drew it cleanly.

"Four, three…"

The rockets flickered to life, burning one of the walkers and shooting it away.

"Two, one…"

The Eva crouched slightly, and—

"Go!"

It jumped!

PAAAAM! The rockets fired, and the Eva shot down the center of the spotlight.

"Stay like that," I said. "Ah—watch it, you're drifting!"

Unit-14's right leg swung off to the side, countering the Angel's spin and keeping Nozomi on line. That left just one big obstacle:

"Dodge the rings!" I cried. "Throttle down and dodge!"

Nozomi cut the power and contorted the Angel's body, dancing around the outer ring like a gymnast, but the second, inner ring—spinning vertically—clipped the Eva's foot.

"AGH!" she yelped, and she bit down so hard her lip bled.

"Stay with it!" I shouted. "You're close!" I covered the microphone and looked to Hyuga. "Don't lower her rates!"

"We're leaving them!" he said, raising both hands and backing off.

That was good, but the Eva had started tumbling back to Earth.

"You can do this!" I said. "It's not your body, but you're in control of it! Get it under control and finish this!"

The Eva steadied itself in midair like a skydiver, and the rockets fired again. The Angel shot skyward, but Nozomi gave chase, leading with the tip of the prog knife as she disappeared into the blinding white light, the glow around the Angel's core.

And in that glow, the Eva disappeared; the entry plug feed pixellated and turned to blank, solid blue.

"Nozomi!" I shouted, pressing a headset speaker to my ear. "Can you hear me? Nozomi!"

And then there was light.

Brilliant, blinding light overloaded every screen, with only the silhouettes of rings flying off in all directions to punctuate the whiteness.

"Nozomi? Do you read me?"

There was a burst of static over the radio. An image flickered into place on my monitor: it was still pixellated and blocky, but the entry plug was intact, and Nozomi, limp in her seat, cast a weak, lazy eye toward the camera.

"Did we get it?" she mumbled.

The light on the main screen cleared. The overhead view showed a crater where the battle had taken place, with Unit-14 thrown clear by about half a kilometer, into some flattened woods. The creatures on the ground? They were in retreat, and they disappeared into the sea, not to be seen again, at least not that day.

"Yeah," I said with a smile. I turned to the observation balcony and showed Horaki and her sister a thumbs-up, and the girls hugged each other right then and there. "You got it, Nozomi."

"No, that's not—" She pulled herself upright, fumbling for grip in the darkened entry plug. "That's not what I said. We got it."

I grinned. I grinned like a silly child. "Yeah. We got it."

"You bet we did. And Ikari?"

"Yes?"

"I don't know what you were like before," she said, "but it wouldn't be so bad, to end up like you."

I laughed at that, and I dabbed at my eye. "Thank you."

"Welcome. Now, can I come home?"

I glanced over my shoulder to Misato, who sat back in her seat, sipping her coffee with a satisfied grin. She nodded at me and raised her cup.

And I couldn't help but smile, too.

"Yeah, Nozomi," I said. "Come home. Your friends and family are waiting."

The Sixth Child
The Second Coming Part Two End​

 

[Muphrid]

Part Three: Cherry Blossoms in Faded Gold

13. From Hell's Heart

With the Angel dead, we relaxed for a time. The alien creatures were still out there, still a threat, but without the Angel's protection, they were little more than durable animals. They could get up from spectacular damage, but for each of them on Earth, there were hundreds of bullets primed and ready to fight them off.

So for a time, a short time, we let ourselves enjoy our victory.

After that…



"Eva-14, three targets incoming! Defend!"

The Eva scrambled behind an eight-story building, and a group of spiked orbs ground into the glass, plaster, and metal beams inside. The spiked orbs shot out from the impact craters and headed back where they came:

To a translucent, spider-like Angel, with dozens more orbs whirling around it in an impenetrable shell.

And then five of those orbs froze in place.

I jammed the switch on my headset microphone. "Positron Rifle ready!" I cried. "Prepare to fire!"

The Eva raised the weapon's sights to its eye. It braced itself against the crippled building.

"Fire!"

Unit-14 spun around the building corner, and five dazzling shots rang out like lightning bolts. They blinded the close-in camera; only the alternate, wide-shot feed showed the bolts cutting through the Angel's orbs. One, two, three, and four disintegrated, but the last shot grazed its target, which barreled toward the Eva, and—

The spiked orb stuck through the Eva's chest.

"Wow," said the girl beside me. "That's gotta sting a little." She leaned forward, placing her elbow on top of a blank, unruled page of a pad, and she pressed her thumb on her headset's transmit switch. "Hey, Sasaki—how does that feel?"

"Not too good." A boy with a bowl cut and sandy blond hair stared back at Nozomi through the monitor. He looked back at Nozomi with a sickly, pained gaze—and then he gaped. "Horaki…"

"Yeah?"

"Do you have your feet on the table?"

Nozomi sat with her bare feet on the corner of the cubicle's table. She wiggled her toes and said,

"Nope."

Our downtime was over. There were more enemies coming. It was only a matter of time, and not a day went by without more training exercises. It wasn't just Nozomi, either: Sasaki was but one of the other pilot candidates. Nozomi's battle experience was valuable—when she wasn't goofing around, anyway.

"All right, enough of that," I said. "Sasaki, you need to stay steady through that last shot. Angels are moving targets. They won't stay still for you."

"Okay, okay, I got it."

"And you've gotta adjust for the recoil," said Nozomi. "It's not a lot, but where does it tend to drift?"

"To the right," said Sasaki.

"To the right," said Nozomi. "So go take care of it, yeah?"

Sasaki looked ahead, forward in the entry plug and away from us. "Okay," he said. "I'll try to take care of it."

I moused over to an interface control panel on one of my monitors. "I'm going to start it again," I told him.

"All right. I'll do what I can." He tightened his grip on the Eva controls. "Ready."

I hit enter, and the Angel disappeared. The building morphed back into working order, and Unit-14 rematerialized half a kilometer across the battlefield.

"Again," I said. "Go!"

The Eva trotted across the pixellated, polygonal landscape. Rifle in hand, it peered around buildings and scanned the hills.

Nozomi took her headset off partway, and though she was leaning back, she started sketching on her pad. "Who's next? Terada?"

I nodded. "Terada. If he shows."

"He'd better. He's not gonna say he'll try to take care of the recoil."

"Tell his father that."

"Oh, I did."

I stared. "You did what?"

"I talked with his dad." Nozomi kept sketching. "Nice guy. Too bad he's a moron."

"You can't make people give up their children for this."

"No, you can't make people do the right thing, or the smart thing." She gestured with her pencil's eraser at the screen. "That's why this is a waste of time."

"You want to take care of this all by yourself?"

"Yeah?" she said with a shrug. "You think you can train someone like him?"

I sighed. "I don't know."

"You don't know very much, do you, Ikari?"

"I know my top pilot has a tongue as sharp as her pencil."

"Ooh, nice." Nozomi nodded in approval. "You're getting up to my speed, Ikari."

I shot her a look, but Nozomi didn't even bother to look back. She just smiled to herself and kept drawing new lines on her sketchpad, as though nothing in the world could be wrong.

That was a far cry from what was happening on the monitor. Sasaki and Eva-14 destroyed three of five targets—so Eva-14 limped away with spiked orbs through its chest and right leg.

"Sasaki, recoil," I said.

"Yeah, I know about the recoil! I just…" He threw the controls aside and hissed. "It's not so easy, you know!"

Nozomi put her pencil down and refit her headset speaker over her ear. "Not so easy? You don't say."

Sasaki looked aside, bowing his head. "Sorry, Horaki. Three mils on the scope, right?"

"Five for a rapid shot like that one."

"Five mils. Five. Okay." Sasaki nodded, and he gripped the controls once more. "Again, Ikari?"

The clock on the wall ticked the seconds by: a seven-segment display, showing twenty minutes to noon.

Twenty minutes to noon on 9/29.

"Why don't we take a break for lunch?" I said.

Sasaki was already halfway out of his seat restraints by the time the Angel and the landscape disintegrated into pixels and wireframed polygons. I started putting the console into standby mode, but Nozomi said,

"Hey, tell your lunch date Hikari wants to game store tomorrow."

I scoffed. "Why? Is there something new?"

Nozomi shrugged, all while working her pencil across the sketchpad. "Beats me. And remember, we've got a date, too."

"We do?"

Only that got Nozomi's eyes to leave the sketchpad. Two raised eyebrows told me uncertainty wasn't the right answer.

"All right, all right!" I said, laughing nervously. "What do I need? A sketchpad? Pencils? Erasers?"

"Stuff you're gonna find will be crap. I'll take care of the supplies. You just focus on what's important."

I pressed two fingers to my temple. "I'm not creative. I'm not an artist. The best I could do is go through the motions."

"It's not about being creative. Just try to capture something—something you think matters."

"How would I know what that is?"

She scoffed and shook her head. "You're better at that than you think, you know?"

I laughed, more to myself than to anyone else, and I gave her a short bow. "See you in a bit."

"Mm-hmm." She shot me a sidelong glance, picked up her pencil again, and started sketching again, feet still curled over the edge of the console's table. Hyuga would surely have something to say about that.

With that thought in mind, I left—at nineteen minutes to noon.

Nineteen minutes to noon on 9/29.

To that point, that day had been typical of most days since the Angel's death. There was a great deal of time spent training—training Nozomi, as the primary pilot, or training the small handful of backup pilots should she falter. And there was something out there. The largest telescopes on Earth were watching.

But for all that training, things had relaxed a bit on base. The control room was recording our training sessions, yes, but most of the staff had other duties to attend to. Not knowing when and where the enemy would return, it was natural—maybe inevitable—that we would settle into a pattern.

And I wasn't immune to that. Once a week, I would head out to lunch, leaving by way of the underground train. The blast door in the train tunnel would open every half hour for people to go back to National Square.

The train ride was uneventful, I was back in the square in short order; the only holdup was the guards wouldn't let us leave all at once, lest we attract attention.

It was a sunny day, so there were a lot of people out and about. The square was packed, bustling, lively. It's natural that there would be a lot of people there. It's a natural thing that anyone would've expected.

Most of all at five minutes to noon on 9/29.

I found my date by the trees at square's edge. She'd already claimed a stone table there, in the shadows where fewer people would notice us. I'd made the lunches, but she'd laid them out for both of us to eat. I remember she was too, too beautiful that day—in a tight red, buttoned shirt that didn't seem safe to wear around chemicals or corrosive fluids, but her labcoat wasn't far from her: a spare coat stuck out of her bag, though you might not have known it by just the small patch of cloth you could see.

"Your friends are back," she said, grinning, and she jerked her head toward the creek.

Sure enough, my "friends" were walking about the edge of the water: two geese and a group of goslings. I fished through our bag and pulled out a bag of seeds.

"Here you go," I said softly. "Come on!"

Most of the birds went after only the furthest flung seeds, but one gosling trotted up, closer to us, with one of the adults shadowing it from a short distance.

"Aren't they cute?" I said, beaming, and I offered the seed pouch to Asuka. "Come on, try it—just this once?"

She shook her head. "Birds really aren't my thing, unless they're on a plate."

"Asuka!"

"I'm serious! They smell; they make these terrible noises—" She put her water bottle down, watching me with both eyes. "Be careful, Shinji, or she might sucker you into taking her in."

"The gosling? The little goose?" I scoffed. "How do you even know it's a girl?"

She eyed the gosling carefully, as though it were a snake waiting to strike instead of a small goose trying to pick up seeds off the ground.

"Intuition," said Asuka, not even breaking her glare.

I folded my arms and raised an eyebrow. "Well, I think it's cute. What if I did want to take one in?"

At that, Asuka smiled slyly. "I'm not saying I oppose it categorically. I'm just saying if I were to allow such a thing, I expect…consideration."

"What—what kind of consideration?"

"Hm, maybe a real bed? Human beings were not made to sleep less than ten centimeters off the ground!"

"We've slept on the ground for at least ten thousand years!"

"And how many of those years did we actually have sausage, hm?" Asuka picked through her boxed lunch and munched on a piece of radish. "We were goddamn barbarians ten thousand years ago, and you know it! A civilization without real sausage or proper beds? Goddamn barbarians."

"I have real sausage for you, dear."

She grinned. "Like I said: goddamn barbarian."

I reached across the table and grabbed the corner of her boxed lunch. "That's right; I'm a barbarian, and if our kind of sausage isn't good enough for you, I'll just have some more."

She pulled back, wide-eyed. "Let—let's not be hasty here! Shinji!"

"Oh, no, it's the food of barbarians. It must not be worthy of you; I'll take care of it."

"No, it's mine!"

"Mine!"

Back and forth the box went, and in all that chaos, my elbow toppled Asuka's water bottle, drenching her from the waist down.

"Ah—" I stood there, frozen, staring, but Asuka?

She laughed.

"Well, I guess we both got a little carried away there," she said, pulling up her soaked pants from her skin. "We're gonna need some towels."

I overturned our bag for the lunches; there were some recycled paper napkins, but not nearly enough to deal with this mess.

Asuka rose, drying herself off as best she could. "I'll go to the cafe and get some more napkins. Stay here and watch our stuff? Play with the goslings; they're bound to leave town soon, right?"

I shook my head. "Asuka—everyone's going to notice you."

"As they should."

"I've got my glasses."

"Like that makes a difference when you have to push your way through the Diet cafe!"

I pulled out a pair of sunglasses and pulled the blue hood of my sweatshirt over my head, and I rose to go, but I gave her one more look.

"All right," she said with a sigh. "Sorry about this."

"It's okay. Just feed the gosling a little, won't you?"

Asuka nodded, and she dragged the seed pouch to her side of the table. She took a handful of seeds and tossed them—far, far from the table, so the nearby gosling and its parent trotted toward the creek again.

"And how's your gosling doing, anyway?" she asked.

"She's fine. She says you have to go to a game shop tomorrow?"

"Ah!" Asuka snapped her fingers. "They must have some used Vita games in. Awesome!"

Asuka threw another handful of seeds toward the geese, this time with a higher arc and wider spray, and I let her be with the geese. That one little gosling that stopped by? It watched me go for a while, only turning around when one of the parents herded it back to the rest of the group.

I think it's nice we could worry about such trivial things: about fighting over food for laughs, or taking care of some wild geese that probably wouldn't stick around later in the year, or the like.

You see, even though we knew more Angels would come, I think we were optimistic. We believed we would win. We had the Eva on our side. We had Misato and her vast expertise. And the Angels—they'd have to come to our world, beat our might and ingenuity with no place of respite to retreat to.

And we had Ayanami on our side. Ayanami, who watched over us.

Ayanami, who stared at us from a distance.

Ayanami, who stared at me right then.

Ayanami, who stared at me at one minute to noon on 9/29.

At one minute to noon on 9/29, with the wind rustling in the trees, the geese took flight and cried out for all their kin to follow.

Ayanami, of course, was ummoved by all of this. She stood before the National Diet Building, right at the base of the steps. Her eyes bored into me, and her head moved, side to side, not more than a centimeter in either direction.

I scanned the square for—what? There were people everywhere. People in suits, ties, or hats. SDF officers milled about near the fountain, with a couple Americans tossing coins in. Capitol police manned the top step of the Diet building, with metal detectors and who even knew what else waiting to scan, poke, and prod anyone going inside.

I looked back to Asuka, who had just gone back to her lunch. Still, she was watching me, though. She must've noticed I was looking back, for she rose from her seat. Her red top shined in the sunlight, and—

EEEEEEEE!

The sound didn't even register to my ears. I felt it more than I heard it. Once the blast reached me, I didn't hear anything at all.

Not the chatter of people in the square.

Not the cries of birds that fled the scene.

I heard none of these things. Just high-pitched hiss in my ears.

I stood, arms crossed over my face, as the National Diet Building bled smoke and flame.

I stood there while a dozen others around me had been flattened and shoved to the concrete walk beneath us.

I stood there with a wake of white concrete behind me, while everything else in front and to the sides carried a dark film of smoke and soot.

Ayanami was gone, but I was there, you see?

I was there at noon on 9/29.

 

[Muphrid]

14. Ground Zero

What I remember most about that day—about the first minute after the bombing—was the stillness.

My ears rang, drowning everything else out. Neither screams nor sirens reached me, so the scene there played out like a silent film.

Some people picked themselves up off the square's concrete surface, and they limped toward the nearest road. Others streamed out of the other buildings—the Defence Agency, the Public Safety Bureau, and the like. They formed a procession in neat, orderly lines, headed by their bosses, as though it were a mere evacuation drill.

"Shinji!"

Asuka grabbed me by the shoulders, and I jolted, heart racing.

"Are you hit?" she asked.

I shook my head. "No…"

"You sure?"

I nodded, and Asuka let out a breath. "Jeez, you scared me!" she said, laughing with relief. Her hands curled around my shoulders, but her eyes flickered past me, and she paled. "My God…"

Breaking away, Asuka laid down her bag and unzipped it, and she crouched next to a man not two meters away from me. The man was awake and wide-eyed. He was alive.

He had to be, for the blood was still pulsing out of his chest.

Asuka went to a knee and cradled the man's head. "Hello, sir? Sir? Are you with me?"

The man nodded weakly, and he coughed. Blood sputtered to his lips. "Not for much longer, maybe," he said.

"I wouldn't say that just yet!" Asuka ripped at his shirt, tearing off the buttons, and she flicked his tie aside. The wound was somewhere on his lower torso, but in the mess of blood, it was hard to make out the exact spot.

"Shinji, I need some cloth!"

I stared at that bloody mess. I felt my cheeks and my chest. I took a deep breath. The air went in an out. It wasn't even a struggle. It all happened without an ounce of effort.

"Shinji!"

"Hm? What?" I said.

"Cloth! We've got to stop the bleeding!"

I sat down next to the bag and fished through it for something, anything. The only thing it carried that was helpful? Asuka's white labcoat.

"Are you serious?" cried Asuka.

I balled up the labcoat and stuffed it back in the bag, and I yanked off my sweatshirt instead. Asuka pressed it against the man's wound, and the blood seeped into the green fabric, turning it a dark, sickly color.

"Agh," the man moaned. "It hurts…"

"It's gonna hurt until they can look at you," said Asuka. "You might still have some shrapnel inside, so try not to move, you understand?"

The man closed his eyes, nodding ever-so-slightly. "I guess I'm lucky it isn't worse…"

I took one of the water bottles out of the bag and offered the man a sip. "Lucky?" I said.

"Lilith must've been watching over me."

I drew the water bottle away, and I saw it: the man's silver necklace, shaped like half a face with a dark eye. You could go to the crater where Tokyo-3 used to be, and you'd see a face like that staring back at you from the water. The government let people camp out on the beach and hold rallies, distribute texts…

Or make necklaces.

"I could've been halfway up the Diet steps," the man went on, laughing to himself. "I dropped my briefcase on the way out of the train, and all my papers went everywhere. If not for that—"

"That was a coincidence," I said, dabbing at the man's mouth to take the blood away.

"Why do you say that?"

I caught the man's eye and stared him down. "Maybe Lilith was watching over someone, but it wasn't you. She let this happen. She let people do this. And you know what happened?"

"Shinji—" said Asuka.

"You can't see it right now," I said, gesturing to the rest of the square, "but there are a lot more people out here, and that's just who I can see—"

"Shinji!"

Asuka grabbed the water bottle in my hand, and her little finger came to rest over mine.

"Maybe you want to take it easy for a bit," Asuka said softly. That was a torture. With the hum in my ears, I could hardly be sure that's what she said at all, but the pained look on her face was clear enough.

I went aside, sat with my head down, and waited.

I waited for the police to arrive and secure the scene.

I waited for the paramedics to follow them and make their rounds—first to the critically wounded, then to those less injured, then to even Asuka and me, unharmed as we were. Even the two of us couldn't escape examination, couldn't escape their questions. "How close were you to the blast? Do you feel anything in your chest or airway?" You see, a blast can injure you without leaving a mark. The pressure can tear you up inside, and you might not even realize it.

Only after that were we allowed to leave the square. The police asked us questions, of course. Did we see anything? Anything out of the ordinary? I told them I was on my way to the cafe, and that I stopped for a moment because I thought I'd forgotten something. Nothing like Rei Ayanami could've appeared in front of me. That would just sound crazy and suspicious.

They let us go home after that. Of course, there was no easy way from the square at that point. The trains were closed, and the streets were jammed with patients still in need of triage. The police were kind enough to offer us a ride home, but we could've walked faster, really. Between the tents on the street for triage, the ambulance procession leaving the scene, and the two dozen police cars establishing a barricade around the square entrances, getting back home was no easy feat.

The first thing we did when we got home? We bagged up our clothes. I never got my sweatshirt back, but my undershirt bore spots from the man's coughs. Asuka had it worse: though she'd rolled up her sleeves, blood had found a way to her pants and the end of her shirt. All of it had to go.

"It's the one time maybe I should've worn a skirt to the lab, hm?" Asuka remarked.

"I guess." I took the bag and tossed my own clothes in as well.

Asuka shot me a sidelong glance. "Shinji."

"What?"

"I'm making dinner."

The bag slipped from my grasp. "You want to do what?"

"You heard what I said." Asuka was in her yellow pajamas by then, and she started tying an apron around her waist. "How does it look?"

"It looks fine. Now get the other apron; I'm helping."

"You are not!" She wagged a finger at me. "Sit down. Be a good boy."

I scoffed. "Am I a dog now?"

"That might be fun." Asuka smiled slyly, setting up behind the kitchen counter. "Come on. Put something on TV and relax."

I shook my head, pulling on my hair. "I can't do that, Asuka. I—I just—I can't. Let me help with dinner."

Hands on her hips, Asuka looked me up and down. "All right," she said. "You can help. A little."

I helped a lot. I did want to eat well that night, after all. Teaching Asuka the finer points of cooking would take more time than that.

We did eat well, as well as we could in those days. Asuka didn't hesitate to break out the catfish fillet, and we made tempura. I tried to keep things simple for her: measuring ingredients, mixing up the tempura batter, and the like. Chemistry and cooking, I learned, aren't so different in that respect.

And it took over an hour. That was an hour spent worrying about cracking eggs and cutting the fish into evenly sized pieces—instead of worrying about anything else.

But those worries weren't far from our home, either. Once dinner was served, we turned on the TV to fill the apartment with some life, but as we scanned through the channels, we found images of the bombing, counts of casualties, and the like. Asuka didn't want to deal with that for very long, and she flipped through the channel list to find anything else to watch.

She skipped past an image of a triangle with five eyes.

"Wait!" I cried, and my chopsticks clattered down on my plate.

Asuka sighed, but she hit down on the remote. The emblem returned to the screen, with a news anchor saying,

"…fighters have claimed responsibility for the attack, though these claims are uncomfirmed at this time. Nevertheless, the bombing has spurred increased pressure on the Chinese government to scour the unsecured, occupied territory of Myanmar for militant groups. Chinese president Chen Zhu issued remarks earlier today, downplaying the need for extra security…"

A round-faced man in a black suit stood before a podium, and as he spoke in Chinese, a translator said,

"The security situation in the Myanmar Territory is not ideal, but we are confident we can cleanse the region of these vile terrorists and alien worshippers who seek little more than destruction and nothingness." The general secretary shifted his weight, cleared his throat, and went on, saying, "Their ideas are repugnant and dangerous, and we will destroy these cretins and make their ideas die with them. We need no outside assistance to do this. Germany, Japan, and the United States should worry about their Evangelion units. After all, that's what they've trusted themselves with."

Asuka scoffed, and she hit the mute button. "Yeah, right," she said, and she munched on a piece of fried fish. "If you were going to take care of it, you would've done it a long time ago." She hissed. "Can you believe those people? Idiots, right?"

I watched the TV screen as the Chinese president kept talking, even though I couldn't know what he was saying.

"Yeah," I said. "Unbelievable."

We went to bed soon after that. We didn't have much choice, really. All our work was still at the base, and while we could pass time by reading, making music, or the like, none of that really felt right.

But lying in bed with incessant buzzing in your ears? That wasn't a great idea, either. It left me staring at the ceiling, into the formless, shifting void of retinal cells misfiring. At least they were firing. At least I was still alive.

It's not enough to just be alive.

I got up. I slid out from under Asuka's arm. I felt the carpet between my toes. I put on a blue hooded sweatshirt and clipped my sunglasses to the collar. I headed downstairs, and when the security guard in the lobby asked where I was going, I said,

"To work. I had to leave some things with all the commotion today. Can't sleep. Might as well be productive."

The guard narrowed his eyes. "Be safe, sir."

I nodded and thanked him, and I went out. I caught a cab, and while the driver did a double-take at a boy in a hood and sunglasses, he shook off the surprise and asked me, "Where to?"

"Embassy Row," I said.



Embassy Row was one of those shiny new neighborhoods—a place all to itself, with the buildings and homes boasting expansive grounds. Even after old Tokyo was destroyed, Japan still desired prestige and respect from the international community. It offered vast tracts of land for foreign governments to use as they wished, and they took advantage. You could count on a formal party happening on Embassy Row every week, with suits and ties, alcohol dating back no less than a hundred years, and hors d'ourves enough to feed a homeless man for two months straight.

And that hadn't changed after Third Impact, either. Though property was widely available, the reconstituted government was quick to kick out squatters in ambassadorial residences. Those houses' gates never went long without a new paint job, and an army of groundskeepers worked those lawns and gardens as though the fate of the world rested on trimming a few ill-behaved bonsai.

The Chinese ambassador's residence was no different than the others in this respect. The pool on the side of the house was a favorite gathering spot during his parties, but it was cramped and dangerous. A drunk Argentine diplomat had once knocked Asuka into the pool because there wasn't enough space to walk around. But the ambassador was very fond of that pool, enough to keep it well lit even in the dead of night.

It was by those cool blue lights that I found my way to the residence's gate, and I rang the buzzer inside the corner of the surrounding stone wall.

"Yes?" said the voice on the other end.

"I'd like to speak with the ambassador, please."

"…it's midnight, sir."

"I know that. With as much as I had to pay the cab, you'd think I'd know that, right?"

"The ambassador is unavailable," said the voice on the other end of the line.

I hunted around the gate's entranceway. There was a dark, glassy dome at the top. I looked right at it, took off my hood and sunglasses, and said,

"Do you know who I am?"

"…the ambassador is still unavailable. If you would like to speak with him, you can make an appointment with his secretary. Office hours are 0700 to 1900—"

"I don't want an appointment in the morning!" I slammed the side of my fist on the archway. "I want one now!"

Silence. The red light on the intercom panel turned on as I pressed the button, but there was no answer.

"Hello?"

No answer.

"Hello!"

No answer. Not a light came on in the house. I was just left there, at the gate, with impassable silence. I wasn't even worth the breath of someone to argue against me.

"Hey!" I yelled, and I kicked the gate. "You can't do this! You murderers! Come out and face me! Come out and face the people you've killed!"

A pair of lights came on behind me, and a car pulled up to the curb. Two figures got out of the car; they pinned me down with flashlights, and a lightbar painted the street in a red strobe effect.

"What's the problem here?" said one of the officers.

I brushed a couple stray hairs from my face, standing straight and tall. "I'm here to speak with the ambassador."

The officer and his partner looked at each other, and the second officer said, "Do you have business with him? At this hour?"

"I do. It's urgent business."

"What business is that?" she asked.

I pointed through the gate. "I need to talk to him about the people he's killed!"

"Ikari, would you come with us, please?" The first officer lowered his flashlight, letting me see his face. "We'll give you a ride home."

I shook my head, and I faced the gate once more. The gate itself was wrought iron, and along the top of the stone wall and the gate itself, there were no defensive measures—no razor wire, nothing. Crossbars on the gate were obvious points to make a foothold.

I grabbed one of the bars and climbed.

"Ikari, stop!" cried the female officer. "If you continue, you'll be trespassing on property of the Chinese government. We will be forced to intervene."

I climbed up another step. "Do what you have to do."

And they did. A hand ripped me from the gate, and a pair of arms caught me, binding me like a bear trap. The officers pinned me against the stone entryway and wrenched my wrists behind my back.

"Agh, stop it!" I cried. "I didn't—I didn't do anything!"

They responded with an elbow planted firmly in the small of my back. That held me in place, and two cold steel cuffs bound my wrists together. The officers dragged me to the cruiser and forced my head down to fit me inside. They fit me in there like a monkey going into a cage.

I cast one more glance at the ambassador's residence, and I lay down in the back seat of the cruiser. It was, strangely enough, easier to rest there than at home. The lightbar had a high-pitched hum about it that dwarfed the ringing in my ears, and as the officers radioed back for instructions, it was like falling asleep to a TV drama—to a story.

That's what children do, after all, isn't it?

They wake up, and they get dressed, but the parents take care of breakfast, of putting a roof over their heads, and the like. Parents take care of all the important things. Children just play in a sandbox of what parents allow them to do. There's not much that can be made out of sand, except a big mess. And that just means someone has to come clean up after them.

I was no exception to that. Someone came to clean up after me, too.

She came in her fancy car, something that had been modern only forty years before. She was in uniform when she arrived, and as she spoke with the police officers, the officers' flashlight beams reflected off her hat. The emblems there gleamed in the light: the ivy branch and the cherry blossom in the shape of a star, a cherry blossom in faded gold.

It's said that the use of a cherry blossom for a star represents the fragility of those who serve in SDF. Those people should be admired for their service, for that service could be snuffed out in a heartbeat, just as cherry blossoms are ephemeral in the springtime. But to me, a cherry blossom represents all the time spent cultivating the tree, selecting for the right genes, and providing the water and nutrients for it to flower. People, too, are products of all that is put into them.

She definitely was. Whatever she'd been before, she'd become the woman who could wear that hat and represent it well.

"I'm sorry he's caused you trouble," she told the officers. "He's been through a lot today; I hope that's understandable."

"Whether it's understandable or not, it's our duty to protect the ambassador's residence," said the female officer. "Just keep him away from here, and it's fine. Is that something we can trust to you, General?"

"Of course." The woman in green clicked her heels together. "You have my word as an officer."

The policewoman opened the cruiser door and undid the cuffs. They presented me to Misato, and they went on their way.

Only when the cruiser was out of sight did Misato speak to me. She clicked her tongue in displeasure, saying, "Well, look at you—making me get all dressed up at this time of night. Usually when I get dressed for a man I get a happier time than this."

"I'm sorry," I said, and I plopped into the passenger seat of her car. "I'll make dinner next time."

She scoffed, shaking her head, and she closed the door behind me. She climbed into the driver seat, but she spun her keyring around her finger, staring down the road.

"You know…"

I leaned against the armrest, away from her. "What?"

"What did you think you'd accomplish here?"

"I'm sorry."

"That's not what I'm asking."

"I'm sorry, okay?" I turned my back to her, facing out the window. "I just want to go home and forget about it."

"It is stupid, you know—to go yelling at a gate in the middle of the night."

"I get that!" I said, propping my chin up with my arm as I looked away.

"But that's not as stupid as protecting some territory you claimed from the outside world, even as goddamn terrorists take up residence there, all because you're too embarrassed to ask for help."

I looked at her from the side. "Some people don't see it that way."

She caught her keys in hand and started the car. The engine hummed, and the lights on the instrument display came to life. "Well, they're wrong, but if you want to change their thinking—"

She revved the engine, but we went nowhere.

"Ah, sorry. Always forget to take off the brake."

She disengaged the parking brake, but with her hand hovering on the gear shifter, she said,

"If you want to change their thinking," she went on, "you have to do more than just make a lot of noise, you know?"

I buckled my seat belt. "What do you have in mind?"

"Are you really interested in the answer?" she said, eyes on the road, impassive, focused.

I looked down the road, too. My ears rang still, with that incessant high-pitched hum that blared through them no matter how I turned my head, but the car's engine competed with that sound. It was a solid undertone while that ringing in my ears by itself was nothing but a distraction. The engine was like music by comparison.

It was noise with a purpose.

"I'm willing to listen," I said.

Misato smiled to herself. "That's my boy," she said, and she shifted the car into first to take us away.

 

[Muphrid]

15. 9/30

Misato had a plan for me, you see. She'd always had plans for me. I could be an instrument, a tool, a weapon—and in this case, I didn't mind it one bit. Yes, it could be dangerous. It could be uncomfortable.

It was uncomfortable, for the day she asked me to act, I did a stupid thing: I tied my necktie too tight.

I waited in the lobby of my building the next morning, the day after Misato rescued me from the law. I watched the seconds tick away on my phone. I fidgeted with my tie and with the shirt button under my neck. My shoes were well-polished but ill-fitting. There's nothing more unsettling than wearing someone else's suit and feeling dwarfed by it.

I checked the time on my phone and paced within the lobby. It was light outside, with long shadows from the east, but flashbulbs cut through the darkness. The police had cleared a path from the building door to the street, but all along the sides of that route, reporters lined up for the perfect shot.

At nine o'clock sharp, a black car pulled up to the curb, and I readied myself to go. I tugged on my sleeves; I stood straight and tall. I put one hand on the frame of the revolving door. I took a breath.

And I went out among the crowd. I walked with a steady step down the concrete stair with a hand on the railing, and the reporters opened up with their salvos.

"Ikari, why the change of heart?" one asked. "What do you plan to say? Are you getting involved in politics now?"

They were all like that. They clamored for news from me—for a word, a look, a hint of what I meant to do. The reporters on the front of the barricade pushed and jostled amongst each other. They reached out with their microphones as far as they could.

I didn't have much to offer them, really. I just gave them a nod and went on my way.

I made for the car and hurried to go. A policeman opened the door for me, and I climbed into the back seat. The police cleared the way for us, and the driver shifted into gear.

There was just one thing that caught my eye, though, before we left. It wasn't the crowd of reporters and onlookers—at least, not all of them. Rather, it was just one person, one man who stood near the fringe of the crowd.

Shigeru Aoba looked on in casual clothes. He followed the car with his eyes and held a mobile phone to his ear.

But we left Aoba and the crowd behind. We left them all in the morning's long shadows. And after that, there was just the soft hum of the tires on asphalt.

Until we reached a stoplight.

The driver shifted into park, and she looked straight at me. "Ready, sir?" she asked.

I gulped, and I told her I was. The driver flipped a switch on the front control panel, and the floor in the back seat slid aside, opening a hole. Beneath the car was a manhole, which opened up from below, too. From the sewer crawled a person in a gray suit and red tie. I offered that person a hand to help her into the car.

"I don't have anything on my jacket, do I?" she asked. It was Maya Ibuki.

I told her there was nothing to worry about, and she seemed relieved—too relieved. She put on a pair of sunglasses. "What do you think?" she asked, and she lapsed into a husky, low voice. " 'Hello, I'm Ikari. I wear sunglasses even in the morning.' "

I pressed my lips together, trying not to react. It was to be expected, right? If someone's going to pretend to be you, you'd better expect they'll do everything you do—and they'll never let you forget they were more believable as you than you were. And Maya did look a lot like me in that suit. Maybe I did need to put on some muscle, or grow a beard. Asuka hadn't liked the idea, though. Apparently it tickles.

Anyway, with Maya taking my place, she gave me her hardhat, and I headed down the manhole into the sewer. Thankfully, the sewer had been fairly dry—it had been designed for monsoons for before Second Impact, so it was well under capacity. The last thing I needed was to fight through sludge in a rented suit.

It was about a kilometer underground until I reached the drain to the river. I escaped up another manhole, one that had been left open, and a white van was waiting for me at the road. A friendly face was on the line for a video call as soon as I took my seat. Misato was waiting for me on the monitor. She took one look at me and said,

"You know, you're gonna have to pay for the dry cleaning fees for that suit."

I couldn't believe it. "This isn't covered?" I cried.

At that, Misato grinned. I'd taken her bait.

I'd taken her bait just like Seele had. "Relax," she said with a wink. "You just helped capture a Selee terror cell. I think we can forgive a spot or two."

I sat back, undid my tie, and breathed easy. If I had to drop ten thousand yen getting the smell out of this suit, so be it. It would be money well spent.

By the end of the day, ten Seele terrorists would be in Japanese custody, and I had been a part of it.



Word of the operation was already the talk of the base. Misato's people took me straight to the mountain (which was no short trip!) since an attempt on my life easily justified cancelling my appearance—yes, even though I was never in any danger. So we made for the base, and once I was through the security checkpoints, the guards' behavior made it clear: those in the security substation were all watching the news.

"Seele assassination attempt foiled; suspects in custody."

It was a good day.

The news was the only topic of conversation at lunch, too. I headed to the officers' mess as soon as I could change out of that suit, and everyone there was watching reports of the operation. Of course, when I took my seat at the table, I couldn't avoid a little attention for it. Asuka called me a spy in training and gave me a peck on the cheek for a reward. Captain Hyuga was also quite proud: he slid a card with a series of letters and numbers over to me.

"That's the discretionary fund for mess," he told me. "Treat yourself to something. You've earned it."

So I could buy an extra dessert for lunch? What a treat!

I took to the meal card to start picking out my lunch, but there was time. It was still ten minutes to noon, and most of the other officers—or other civilian members of the mess—were coming in or filling out their cards, too. Just as I picked out some green tea ice cream for myself, someone plopped down beside me: Nozomi. She slipped her sketchpad into a bag and hunched over the table to fill out a meal card. I said hello to her, but she didn't look back.

"Hey. Nice job, Ikari." That's all she said.

That was odd. It was a Sunday. Even without the attack the day before, Sundays had been Nozomi's day off. I asked her about that, and she just shrugged, saying,

"Just figured I'd see if there was work to do. Got stood up on a date this morning."

Asuka slapped me on the side of the head, and I hung my head low for a good half a minute after that. After all that had happened—no, even in spite of that, I shouldn't have forgotten. I asked her if we could try again the next week, but Nozomi wasn't about to let me off that easily. She had new pencils, after all, and to let me break them in could be a waste. I had to put my hands together and beg. "Please, Teacher!" I said. "Please let me learn from you!"

That, at least, got a smile out of her. "Okay, relax," she said. "Next week is fine."

That was a relief, and with my punishment over, we got to lunch. Talk of the operation was still the only thing going at the table—despite a standing rule about work-related conversations over food. Overall, the table was optimistic. We were making headway against Seele, and this operation was just the beginning. Already there was talk that one of the Seele operatives had a Chinese passport, furthering the clamor for action against China or Myanmar.

That was worth a scoop of green tea ice cream for my trouble. No doubt about that.

And yet, I left lunch wanting a little more.

I went to my office afterward, but I can't say I was very productive. It's not that I didn't have a lot of work to do: no, there was a pile of file folders on my desk, ranging from pilot performance reports to simulation schedules. Blame it on how connected we'd become as a society, but I found myself watching more footage from the operation. TV news stories, cell phone camera footage, all of it.

These images were like a drug to me, and even now, it's hard for me to explain why. It's not like I enjoy scenes of military action. I'm not like Kensuke. But maybe it's because I could've been there. I could've been in Ibuki's place, had we not swapped places for my own protection. I could've been right there.

They didn't go down without a fight, you know. The news footage showed a couple cars sideswiped on a city street, broken windows, and the like.

It was those bastards' fault, right? They were the ones who put up a fight. They could've just surrendered. They were criminals. They all knew it. We had the force of law on our side. It's our job to enforce the law, and we can't be held responsible for what happens when people refuse it, right?

Right?

At some point, I grew tired of thinking that way. I turned my monitor off and locked up my office behind me. I headed upstairs—all the way upstairs. There was only one office on the top floor, with an SDF staffer seated outside it to direct traffic and manage appointments. The secretary took one look at me and held up a hand. She got on the phone to ask if I would be allowed in.

I was, and the door clicked open.

The general's office was spartan and functional. The white walls had no pictures, diplomas, or other decorations. A cardboard box with folders, papers, and the like sat at the foot of her desk. The only personal item was a small brass stand at the front of the desk, on which hung her cross-shaped pendant—stained with her own blood.

Misato was right at home, though: she was eating some artificial salmon rolls. The tray was perched precariously on the desk corner, but Misato didn't mind it. She popped one in her mouth and chewed.

"Well!" said Misato, still chewing. "How does it feel to be a hero for a day?"

It felt good, but I didn't want to bask in that feeling without knowing there was substance behind it. "Maybe I'm a hero today," I said, pulling up a chair, "but what all did we accomplish?"

Misato put down her chopsticks, and she shuffled a file folder aside. Ten terrorists captured, two dead. They were being interrogated as we spoke.

And what did it cost? Not too much: a little property damage, yes. There had been a brief standoff, but they'd stood down without a lot of extra bloodshed. That was the good thing (the only good thing) about Seele: they didn't like to play by the suicide bomber handbook. They wanted paradise to be for them, too.

The only other casualty was Maya Ibuki, who'd come up limping after her car was rear-ended. Misato assured me it was probably a sprain, but, in her words, "You can't be too careful with this sort of thing."

I didn't feel that way. I shook my head, looking to the ceiling. "We have to get these guys for this."

"Patience, young man," were Misato's words of wisdom. She slid her lunch aside and sat back in her chair, hands folded. We were in this for the long game. "I've been working toward this for two years," she told me. "You can't worry about one day too much."

I asked her about that. For all two years? From the beginning? She told me it was so. Almost from the moment she came back from the sea, she'd been working toward securing the new world.

"You know why I came back?" she asked me. "It was Rei. She asked me to."

Maybe Misato would've come back on her own, in time, but Ayanami—she asked Misato first.

"The world needed a warrior," Misato told me.

And there she was. She knew Eva, and she knew Angels. She smiled as she thought back, remembering those early days after we returned from the sea. It had been a surprise, to me at least, that they made her a general, but Misato understood it well: they didn't have anyone else. Who else could they turn to? Who else had the experience and was willing?

And Misato was more than willing.

"I jumped at the chance," she told me. Misato leaned forward and turned the cross-shaped necklace in her hand.

It was what she'd been born to do—ever since she went to Antarctica. She said there were great and powerful things out there. " We're so small compared to them, but we can stand against them if we have the will, and the determination, to do what we must to survive."

Not everyone has that. I wasn't sure I did, even.

"Don't sell yourself short," she told me, but beyond that, she sighed, looking away, and agreed. There were a lot of people like that out there. "They stick their heads in the sand and pretend it's not their problem. The Chinese are like that." Her face twisted bitterly. "Some people these days. They came back from the sea, but now they just want to hold on to what they have."

"So we have to be better," I said, nodding to myself. "We have to prove that, every day."

She reached across the desk and tussled my hair. "That's what I like to hear." She smiled. "Don't forget that. We're the ones who can save the world. Probably a thousand people worked on building this bunker, and a thousand more worked on the machines those people used—they're all asking us to save them. This is what we choose to do. This is what we strive for."

With that, she shot me a wink.

"You and me both, right?"

Such was the strength of Misato's convictions. Such was the effortlessness with which she announced them. And you know what? I admired that. I definitely admired it. Misato—she pulled herself together from the sea, and she went to work. She didn't wait. She didn't wallow in the mistakes she'd made in the past. She knew the weight of the world would rest on her shoulders, if she were willing to take it on, and she did.

And I had that opportunity, too.



A few days later, the investigation into the detained terrorists brought up an encouraging lead:

"Keel Lorenz."

Misato showed me on a map, pinpointing a location in the mountains of Myanmar.

"Maybe he's moved, maybe not, but if he's still there, then we have him."

Of course, the Chinese were obstinate about the whole thing. They didn't believe Lorenz would stay in the same location for long, and even if he did, they said it was their matter to take care of. They wanted the intel with no promise that they would act on it. Like that would mean very much anyway.

So Misato hatched a plan: she would send a contingent of SDF members undercover to capture Lorenz at his hideout and take him back to Japan, where he could be interrogated for his network's secrets and tried for his crimes. The only problem, in Misato's mind, was finding a way to get these Japanese special forces so far inland without the Chinese knowing about it.

"Of course," she remarked to me, "if they could get into the country under pretense of ordinary, official business—like service staff for a celebrity and a humanitarian—that would smooth things over nicely."

When exactly had I become a humanitarian?

"Semantics!" she'd argued when I pointed this out. "You go to Myanmar; they pose as your bodyguards and support staff. Problem solved."

Problem not solved. If I were caught and detained in China, I could be tried for espionage or worse. Even if I suffered no consequences, if the Chinese ever found out about it, that would be the start of an international incident.

So we just had to make sure we wouldn't get caught.

I discussed the idea with Asuka later that night, and she was cautiously receptive about it. "Somebody's gotta get that clown," she said, speaking of Lorenz. "But this week? It's Mama's birthday on Friday."

I winced. There was food to prepare, clothes to wear, phone calls to be made. All of that would be derailed by me taking a trip.

But Asuka thought about it for a time, and she relented. "It's not like she's going anywhere," Asuka argued. "If you're comfortable with it, Shinji, then go for it. We've got to win against these bastards—these killers."

That's right. They were killers.

And I headed to Myanmar two days later.

 

[Muphrid]

16. Myanmar

Naypyidaw was a ghost town.

The new Myanma capital had been built up over the last fifteen years, and not without reason. With the flooding of Yangon after Second Impact, there was need for a new capital, just as the destruction of old Tokyo had demanded, but the Myanma government, in a time of strife and economic uncertainty, had poured vast sums of money into a lavish, ostentatious new city where none had existed before. That wasn't like Japan, where Tokyo-2 had expanded on old Matsumoto, or how Tokyo-3 used old Hakone and the Geofront. Yes, we claimed to have built the Geofront, and maybe that pushed the Myanma to build something equally grand, but that was all a lie anyway. We didn't spend that money.

They did, and that money was wasting away every day.

It was wasting away in the hands of an occupying government. After Third Impact, the Myanma government simply ceased to be. What leaders returned from the ocean couldn't consolidate their power, and after a few months, the Chinese intervened. The occupation secured their border, or so they said. Maybe it just kept an anti-Chinese government from securing power, or perhaps it secured a historically fertile ground for rice cultivation at a time when global food production had halted. There are many shades of "security," you see.

Whatever the reason, the Chinese were in place, in nominal control of Myanmar, and we had to work through them to get to Lorenz.

We arrived in Naypyidaw and took a caravan to our hotel, but it was a conspicuous journey. Our convoy probably made up half the vehicles on the road at any given time. There were copious amenities, but I can't imagine there were many people around to take advantage of them.

Because of that, my escort started getting ideas. His name was Ishikawa, and he was my liaison to the Chinese. He was a bit young, and he had a wide grin like he was too full of himself. He had the nerve to ask the Chinese if we could get a round or two at the golf course while I was visiting. Never mind that I don't play golf. The Chinese, of course, were not amused.

"Perhaps if the governor invites you," said the Chinese aide, when Ishikawa kept pressing him.

Ishikawa asked if the governor really would, but the Chinese aide just looked up him and down and said, "No."

That was Naypyidaw: concerned about appearances. The hotel was much the same. It looked grand and expensive on the outside, with three fountains to greet us, but inside? The whole place smelled of mold. Hot water was lukewarm at best (and definitely not if someone was using it next door).

Then again, there weren't that many people staying in town, either. Our group—about twenty of us in all—had a floor all to ourselves, and that was just fine for us. It gave our party the chance to get squared away. A group of Japanese consulate members came by with bags of essentials: travel materials, maps, dining guides…

Along with disassembled assault rifles, flashbang grenades, and night vision goggles.

The leader of the team, Captain Suzuki, was a stern-faced woman—all business. She was the first to put a rifle together, testing the alignment of the sights and how easily the magazine could be ejected and replaced.

And she shook her head, muttering in frustration. She rattled off a litany off mistakes and problems with just that one rifle, insisting that a subordinate mark them down, and she instructed the rest of her men to start examining the rifles, too. "Go over every single one," she told them. Nothing could be left to chance. She was stickler for detail that way.

She wasn't very forgiving, either, for once she was done giving those instructions, she took my friend Ishikawa aside for a few words. Ishikawa was more than just a liaison, you see—or I should say, he was more than just a local Japanese go-between. The guns were his responsibility, and since they were faulty, that meant it was his head on the line for it. Ishikawa had his hands up the whole time Suzuki ripped him for the problems.

"Well, I'm sorry," he told her, and he took a rag to one of the magazines to clean it off. "This was the best we could do."

Suzuki wasn't having any of it. "Do better next time," she said.

Ishikawa laughed nervously at that; Suzuki had a good two centimeters on him, and she wasn't shy about standing close enough to make that clear. Ishikawa backed away like a rat, and the two let each other be. Ishikawa complained about Naicho not having enough money to do much better—and he actually asked me if I could "talk to a few politicians" and make something happen for him.

I told him I'd have to think about it—about when I might have the desire to talk to politicians, anyway.

Luckily, there was real business to take care of. Ishikawa had brought us more than just guns and ammunition. When Suzuki's team was done fixing what the spies had done wrong, Ishikawa briefed us on the situation on the ground. Naicho agents, under the guise of appraising real estate, had gathered intelligence on Lorenz's compound. That intelligence was crucial to verifying Lorenz was present and where he was hiding.

Lorenz had a compound several kilometers west of the capital, in the suburb of Pyinmana. The house was some ways from any major roads, with a perimeter of high walls, all lined with barbed wire for good measure. And with a privacy wall blocking the view into the house, no one had seen Lorenz personally, nor had they heard his voice through surveilance. The house had no telephone nor Internet connection, just a satellite dish for television reception. The theory was that Lorenz would see what was going on from television, and he would record a statement to espouse Seele propaganda to the world.

That was his undoing.

Naicho planted an acoustic device in one of the compound's grocery shipments. The device wasn't a radio receiver, so routine checks for bugs wouldn't pick it up. It just broadcast a particular frequency—inaudible to human ears—that could be picked up by a videocamera. Naicho verified the presence of this particular frequency in Seele propaganda video featuring Lorenz earlier that morning.

In other words, the man just couldn't shut up for his own good.

All we had to do then was get Captain Suzuki's team to Pyinmana and arrange the raid. The plan for this was simple: we'd go to Pyinmana, and the team would sneak away at dusk, traveling down the road by foot to attack the compound. Cars arranged by the consulate would be waiting to take the assault team back to the capital once the operation was completed.

I just had to go to Pyinmana and survey the conditions. Captain Suzuki's team would be my escort, and we only had to delay long enough to justify being there at dusk. I was supposedly a humanitarian. That would be easy enough.

If we didn't need permission, anyway.

"We'll need authorization from the governor to leave the city proper." Captain Suzuki's eyes flickered to me. "You'll have to make a request."

I gulped at that, and I tightened my necktie.



If you thought the hospitality quarter of Naypyidaw was bizarre, you hadn't seen anything yet.

The ministerial quarter embodied everything about the top-down design of the city, except cranked up to an even more absurd degree. A twenty-lane freeway sat empty but for my car. The ministry buildings along the road all looked the same: off-white walls topped by diamond-shaped, burgundy roofs. Those buildings could've come off an assembly line.

And even the governor's mansion—formerly, the Presidential Palace—shared this color scheme. It was classical in style, with pillars along the front and gigantic windows all along its street-facing side. The road alongside it had striped caution markers along the curb in red and white, like a racecourse. I guess with no one in town, a lonely diplomat or security agent might take to blazing down that road at 200 kilometers per hour, just for something to do.

The governor might've been the same way. Our Chinese driver stopped us at near one of the fountains, where an older man walked, flanked by a team of four security people. His hair was white, and he was balding, but she shot the two of us—my translator and I—a wide smile. He was Xu Biming, proclaimed governor of the "Protected Territory of Myanmar." He was friendly at least, offering a hand to Ishikawa, and then to me.

"So here is the boy," he said, a glint of true recognition in his eye. "It's an honor to meet you."

I said is likewise an honor for me, too, and I put on a face that I might've even believed.

But despite my doubts about Governor Xu, he was very welcoming, even charming. When Ishikawa mentioned that we wanted to go to Pyinmana, the governor laughed.

"You just arrived and already you want to go to Pyinmana?" he said. "Not enough for you to see here?"

He gestured at the fountains and the empty roadway, continuing to laugh. It was a joke: the grand joke that was Naypyidaw. In his words, the city had been built "for no one but the government officials who ordered it made." He shook his head at that. "Believe me," he went on, "I would rather be in Pyinmana."

The governor handed our itinerary over to an aide, instructing him to see to it, but even while we waited for the aide to call in some information, the governor insisted on chatting with us. Governor Xu was an older man, and there was some amount of weariness in his eyes. Weariness from looking over an empty city every day? Maybe that wasn't quite it. Maybe what lay outside the city frightened him more.

"Ikari," he said to me, "I'm hopeful you can show the world what's going on here in Myanmar."

The Chinese government, of course, insisted that Myanmar was under control. All the governor asked was that, if my experiences happened to bear that out, I would say so.

"And if my experiences don't bear that out?" I asked him, watching his face like a hawk.

The governor smiled coyly, like a child caught with their hand in the candy jar. "Then I hope you would say so," he said.

When the governor's aide came back with our itinerary stamped for approval, I offered my hand to the governor, and we shook on that.



If Naypyidaw was an example of a city built whether people wanted to live there or not, Pyinmana was its opposite: a city built because people needed to work and live there, even if that wasn't the case any more. If Naypyidaw was a model, kept pristine and perfect through copious effort, Pyinmana was reality: dirty, lived-in, and decaying.

Little wonder someone like Lorenz would set up shop in Pyinmana. What few people were still around inhabited ramshackle buildings, with peeling paint and rotting planks of wood. They peered out at us like rats, hiding from the headlights when our vehicles went by. And oh, there were real rats, roaming the streets in droves. More than once, the Chinese rerouted us to keep us from being buried in a sea of tails and teeth. I had never seen a whole four-lane road completely overrun with rats before. I hope never to see it again.

Luckily, we weren't there to sightsee for very long. Captain Suzuki quickly led our caravan to the edge of town, and there, we parted ways. As dusk set in, Suzuki and her men changed to combat gear and abandoned two vehicles with just a driver and a lookout to keep watch.

And I?

I headed back to Naypyidaw. My bodyguards and staff were having a night out, I would say. Maybe no one would believe it—what was there to do in Naypyidaw?—but it was something.

Now, I won't dare suggest that it was hard waiting for word of the operation. It certainly wasn't harder than what the soldiers were doing. But it wasn't easy, either. Every sound—every creak of the floorboards, every chirp of insects in the trees—rattled me a bit. Were they back yet? Were they coming through that door?

Were the Chinese coming through that door instead, having found us out?

No, it was just a housekeeper passing our rooms in the hallway.

I tried to settle down—using puzzles, or by trying to remember pieces of music I'd learned for the cello—but it wasn't until a couple hours in that I first got word. My satellite phone rang. The exchange was scripted, but it went something like this:

"It's Suzuki," said the voice on the other end of the line. "We found the candy you were looking for, sir."

I shot up. "You're sure? It's still in stock?"

"We're bringing a pack for you now," she said.

We got him.

We actually got him. We got Keel Lorenz. That scourge upon the earth would walk free no more.

And you know what? I celebrated. I pumped my fist in the air, and I opened a complimentary bottle of wine, drinking straight from the bottle (the SDF team were constantly on duty and wouldn't be allowed to drink anyway).

I was in such a good mood that, when there was a knock on my door, I didn't even bother to check who was outside. I went to the door with the bottle in hand, and I cried out, "You guys had an easy time of—"

WHACK!

The butt of a rifle smacked me across the forehead, and the bottle of wine tumbled to the floor.



A strange voice in stilted Japanese roused me. "Good morning, Ikari," it said.

I woke up slumped in a metal chair, with my hands tied around the back of it. The room was gray, with a mirror across from me. Two Chinese policemen guarded the door. A third stood off to the side.

And in front of me? The governor of Myanmar territory rubbed his glasses with a cloth.

We exchanged pleasantries for a short time. He asked if I'd slept well (I hadn't). He remarked that a Chinese jail cell was no country inn. I think, if a truck had careened through the building, he would've said that someone must've gone off the road.

As we talked, I sat upright, and I tried to scoot the chair closer to the table, but it wouldn't move: it was bolted to the floor.

The governor noticed this, and he narrowed his eyes. Pleasantries were over. "Why did you come here?" he asked me.

I said nothing.

"Ikari, please," he said, moving forward with folded hands. "We both know why you're here."

I said nothing. I closed my eyes, and I tapped the tip of my shoe on the floor. One; one, two; one, two, three; one, two, three, four.

THUD! The governor slammed his hand on the table, and I lost count.

"Are you listening?" he asked me.

I tapped my foot again. One; one, two; one, two, three—

"Do you not understand, Ikari, that this can go only one of two ways?" he asked me. "You can confess your involvement in a conspiracy to violate Chinese sovereignty. If you do, we will show leniency and repatriate you to Japan in exchange for considerations from your government. If you do not…you will leave us no choice but to convict you of your crimes and imprison you for them. Do you understand?"

Just focus—that's all I had to do. Focus on the rhythm. Focus on the beat. The words could all get drowned out, as long as I focused on it. I kept counting to myself: One, two, three, four, five, six; one, two—

"Don't you want to go home again, Ikari?"

I shut my eyes tight. —four, five, six, seven, one—

"Don't you have a girlfriend?" A chair squeaked against the floor. "Don't you want to see her again before you're an old man?"

I trembled in the seat, but I had to keep my count. I had to keep my count. Asuka would kill me if I didn't keep my count. —eight, nine; one, two, three, four, five, six—

The door opened. Another police officer came in and whispered something to the governor. He shot the officer a cross look and said something in Chinese, but the officer just repeated the message, and the governor grimaced.

"Ikari," he said, "our time grows short. You didn't play a big part in this. But my government demands that you concede that wrongdoing was done. Without that—" He paused, and stood in front of my chair. "Without that," he went on, "you have no future as a free man."

A pause. He stared at me.

"Do you have anything to say?" he asked.

He stood there, with the felt cloth for his glasses sticking out partly from his coat pocket. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he glanced at his watch.

And just who was this man? A career politician, no doubt, and not a very good one, considering he'd ended up in Myanmar. Someone must not have liked him very much, and yet there he was, trying to save his job, trying to save his position in the government with my confession. Never mind that we did what his government couldn't.

I understood him. I really did. He was someone who set out on a path, right? He must've set out on a path and gone with the flow for so long he had no idea how to do anything else. He would do anything to cling to what he knew, to who he was.

But you can't do that forever.

So I looked the governor in the eye…

And I tapped my toe on the floor behind me.

Sighing, he gave some orders to the policemen, and the two guards yanked me from the chair. They took me by the arms and out the door, into the light. One of them drew a knife, and—

Snip.

They cut my plastic bindings loose.

"Please check your bags to make sure everything is in order, Ikari," said one of the governor's aides.

I turned around and bumped into them—two traveling suitcases were lined up next to the wall.

And beyond them was a grand view: a view over the runway at Naypyidaw Airport as two jet liners taxied on their way to the terminal.

"Your party is waiting for you at Gate 11," said the aide, and she gestured across the concourse. Sure enough, at Gate 11—not more than twenty meters across from us—stood Captain Suzuki and the rest of the team. Suzuki herself nodded at me, stone-faced and professional.

I took my bags in hand, but the governor stood in front of me. He wiped the sweat from his brow, and he jerked his head at the policemen, making them back off out of earshot.

"We—" he said, in halting Japanese, "we fight the same war. Seele terrorists and murderers—we fight the same war against them. Why would you do this—bring violence and strife to my country? Why, Ikari?"

I looked across to our party before meeting the governor's gaze. I tilted my head slightly, and I smiled a little, saying,

"Your people didn't do enough. You know that, Governor. You didn't do enough, so I'm not sorry if something we do to stop them inconveniences you. I was there when Seele bombed Tokyo-2. That was much, much more than a mere inconvenience to me, or to the twenty-two people who died there."

The governor looked aside, staring out the windows to the runway. "That was a tragedy, but we did not have to be adversaries now."

"You could've done more. You should've done more."

He met my gaze again, and his head shook a little. "And you couldn't have?"

I didn't answer. I picked up my bags and bowed, and I left the governor there to get on my plane. I took my seat on the private jet and lay back in cushioned, relaxed comfort. There could be nothing better than that after a night of hard sleeping.

Well, except for turning around and seeing Keel Lorenz handcuffed to a seat.

"Good morning, Chairman," I said with a faux salute. "I hope you like Japanese food. You'll be visiting for a while."



The official story was that the Chinese performed the operation to capture Keel Lorenz. Acting on Japanese intelligence, they were the ones who raided his safe house, and as part of an "agreement," they turned him over to us. No JSDF members had set foot in Myanmar. Such a thing would've been an embarrassing violation of Chinese sovereignty—almost as embarrassing as the suggestion that the Chinese had failed to act against a known terrorist hiding out on their own soil. "Officially" such a thing never happened. Misato made sure to negotiate it that way.

And I was fine with that because, in the end, we still came away with Lorenz. The Chinese could save face all they wanted. We were the ones putting Lorenz in a cell hundreds of meters beneath a mountain. The guards wouldn't even let him see where he was going: they walked him through the buildings with a hood over his head, but you knew it was him. He wouldn't shut up about it.

"How smug and confident you are," he said at one point. "The confidence of ants against a man with a garden hose."

If only we could tape that hose to his mouth and run the water. I'm sure he wouldn't have had a smart remark for that.

Though I'd done only a little to help see it through, I'd had a hand in it. I helped provide the SDF members cover to get into the country, after all.

No one would know, of course—not until much later, anyway. For the moment, it was a small footnote in the news that I'd even made a trip to Myanmar. The most anyone else would read about it was that Lorenz was captured, and that his aides and confidants were taken or killed in the raid.

We got Keel Lorenz. We made a difference in the world. We gutted the cult of personality that had grown around him. We cut out the weeds. That felt good.

And yet, it wasn't enough. There were a few bad patches lingering in the landscape of mankind, and I met them first-hand.

It was the day I'd returned from Myanmar. Misato had flown us straight back to Manoah Airfield, and after locking Lorenz away for hopefully the rest of eternity, I was on my way home. I came back through National Square—through corridors of opaque fencing that cordoned off the rubble—and left through an improvised security checkpoint.

And those people were there. They demonstrated in front of National Square with signs and placards. There were even a couple Lorenz impersonators—replete with visors and motorized chairs. The crowd beat down an effigy of an Evangelion, leaving pillow stuffing on the street.

The monster of Seele had gone down, but they weren't about to let him be forgotten.

"The Angels are coming back!" a man with a megaphone cried. "What are we fighting for? Nothing!"

"Nothing!" the crowd roared. "Nothing!"

I passed them by, in my hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, as I made for home that evening. I kept my fist at my side and my head down. I hid behind the wall of police officers that guarded the entrance to the Square.

"Stop the Eva program!" they shouted. "Let us all go back to the sea!"

Those people—why did they have to be there? Why did they have to exist? There was nothing stopping them from going back to the sea on their own. All they had to do was wade in the water and want to die. Then they wouldn't be our problem. They wouldn't be anybody's problem, but that wasn't good enough for them. They just had to make it all miserable for the rest of us. Humanity was an orchestra to them, and all of us who wanted to stay on earth were a missing section.

Well, my cello and I were staying on Earth, and I had no interest in being a part of their sad song, but there was no getting away from it fully. Their footsteps were the drumbeat of that wretched symphony. Their chants were the sounds of a choir singing for all the world to hear.

"Lay down your arms!" cried the man with the megaphone. "Join us in eternal salvation!"

I stopped to watch them about a hundred meters from the security checkpoint. A line of police officers stood at the sidewalk's edge while the demonstrators marched down the street. I stood there, peering between the bodies of the officers and beyond their wooden barricades. Those barricades and the police were all that kept me from those idiots marching down the road.

I pulled off my sunglasses. I folded them up and slid them into my sweatshirt pocket. I took a step toward the barricade.

"Don't," said a voice.

A flat voice, quiet and steady.

The voice of Rei Ayanami.

She stood further down, toward the security checkpoint.

"What do you want?" I said. "I'm busy. I have people to talk to."

"Confronting them will do no good," said Ayanami.

I scowled, but she was probably right. One of the police officers glanced over his shoulder and met my gaze. He alerted some of his comrades. "You can't stay here," he told me. "It's not safe if they recognize you."

Sighing, I put my sunglasses back on, tightened my hood, and went on down the road. "You've saved me again, Ayanami," I muttered. "Anyone else you want to save sometime soon?"

Ayanami fell into step beside me. "My actions have consequences."

I scoffed, and I watched the crowd of demonstrators. I watched them and not her. Ayanami had no business being there, no business stopping me. "She" was just the thing that was parading around in my dreams and hallucinations. What gave her the right to lecture me? If I were really so flawed, so imperfect, then maybe she should've found someone else to save. There were a lot of people out there. Some of them had probably done something good once in their lives.

But Ayanami wasn't giving it up. "Your actions have consequences, too, Ikari," she said.

I waved a hand in dismissal. "I did the right thing."

"You had an enemy before," said Ayanami. "How many more do you have now?"

"What else should we do?" I slapped my hand against the chain-link fence. "Do you see what happened here?"

"They want to divide people. They've done that. You took that man, but those people are still here."

"I don't care." I pulled on my sweatshirt hood, hiding my face from the crowd. "We got the guy. The Chinese were the ones too stubborn to see it our way."

And yet, Ayanami was dissatisfied. Her expectant stare told me that: what we'd done wasn't enough.

I scowled. I walked faster, letting my steps and the crowd's chants drown out everything else, and I left that ghost behind. Ayanami, with her soft voice, couldn't possibly speak over that—not unless she shouted.

"Ikari!"

Or yelled.

I froze. I took two small steps, turning around. My mouth hung open. I pulled my sunglasses off, seeing her for the pale specter she was.

Her red eyes shined so brightly then.

"You need to be careful, Ikari," she said. "Responsibility is a fire that burns inside the heart. If all you see in others is darkness, you will fan your own flames until you burn yourself out."

"You sure about that?" I asked her curtly.

Her eyes flickered off me, and she sagged a bit. "I'm still here," she said, back in her normal tone and volume.

I wiped my forehead and hissed at myself. "I'm sorry," I said, looking away. "I really am."

"I worry, Ikari," she said, her eyes snapping back to me. "It's easy to let those embers spill over without realizing it."

"What happened to you?" I asked her.

Ayanami gaped. "I can't explain. Not…easily."

I nodded, and I tugged on my sweatshirt hood, drawing it further over my forehead. I flipped out the temples of the sunglasses, and I put them back on. "Thanks anyway, Ayanami," I said.

"But, I can show you."

She took a step toward me—one step to bridge the gap between us. A pair of officers even walked through her, and she flickered out of existence for a time.

But she was still there, staring with her stark red eyes. Those eyes wavered as they watched me.

For a ghost or hallucination of Rei Ayanami, she was doing a pretty good job of looking the part. Ayanami would never have bawled or screamed her head off in pain. She held things like that in, but even the most closed-off person can't hold in real agony or anguish.

The Rei Ayanami who stood before me that day—on the sidewalk outside Ground Zero—was wounded. Her illusionary body didn't show a gash or cut, but there was pain in her eyes. It was something she fought to hold in.

So I turned back. I turned back against the tide of demonstrators. I put the man with the megaphone behind me.

"What do you need me to do?" I asked her.

"Close your eyes."

I did. And I tensed up as Ayanami's steps came closer.

"Open."

I opened my eyes, and there was light—light with yellow and orange hues. Real light. Not that otherworldly glow of the theater. No, this was…a kitchen? With a Western style table and chairs, with beer cans everywhere…

Beer cans everywhere?

I raced into the main room. The television, the curtains—they were all in place.

This was Misato's apartment.

I opened the curtains, and there it was: the city of Tokyo-3, with skyscrapers towering and majestic.

The city that should not be stood again.

 

[Muphrid]

17. Progenitors

I took a few minutes to study my surroundings, and I soon realized something:

This place may have looked like Tokyo-3, but it wasn't the city I remembered living in.

The first sign of that was the smog. Tokyo-3 had been a pioneer for clean energy, but a haze hung over this city as far as the eye could see. It was a thick cloud—you couldn't see above it.

Then there was the matter of my clothes: I was wearing a black robe and headdress—like something nomads or desert people might wear. The headdress came with facial covering, too, leaving only a slit for the eyes.

And even despite this, my skin was sticky with sunscreen: I found four bottles of sunscreen in the washroom, with two more empty ones in the trash. "Official government issue," the bottles read. "SPF 300."

No, I hadn't heard of SPF 300 before either. Couple that with the form-fitting goggles, double-layered gloves that tied to the robe, and long socks, and I think the picture became very, very clear.

You might think I'd be crazy to go outside at all under those conditions, but I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to do that. There was a note on the refrigerator:

"Presentation: Monday, Headquarters, 09:00."

The crosses on the calendar told me it was indeed Monday—the first of nine days in a week—and the clock on the wall read 08:15.

There was only one place in town that could be called headquarters, and Ayanami—she must've wanted me to see something—so I headed out.

The way to Central Dogma's street entrance was an unsettling hike. The buses didn't seem to be running, for one, and there was hardly any traffic on the roads. Some cars sat abandoned, with paint peeling off them or blistering. I walked the whole way, but the air had a foul stench about it, tingling the roof of my mouth. At first, my skin felt alive with pinpricks all over, but after a few minutes that sensation faded to a numb buzz. One could only hope I'd feel anything at all when I got inside.

After a good twenty minutes, I made it to the train station, and thankfully, the trains were still running. I didn't have to worry about finding a seat, either: there was hardly anyone else waiting.

The train got me to the Central Dogma street entrance. I did have an ID card to swipe at the gate, but when the blast doors opened and I stepped through, a voice called to me.

"Ah, hold the gate!"

I hesitated. Two other figures—clad head to toe in black—were at the card reader. My hesitation was enough for the first, the woman who'd called to me, to step through and straddle the seal, holding the gate open.

"Hurry up!" she called back to the second figure.

"I'm hurrying!" The second woman fished through a handbag for her ID card. All the while, the gate buzzed unpleasantly, with flashing lights and an audible countdown.

"This gate must close as a security precaution. Please clear the area. Authorities will be contacted in ten seconds if the gate is not closed. Ten, nine…"

At last, the second woman swiped in, and she scampered through the gate, too.

"Sorry about that," she said, bowing to me in gratitude. "Thanks for holding up; those things take so long to open up again, right?"

"Altogether too long," said the first woman. "Honestly! All the money they spent on this—you'd think they'd have come up with a better checkpoint system!"

"What can you do?" said the second. "It's bureaucracy in action."

"I know! It's awful." The first woman rolled her eyes.

Her stark red eyes.

"Ayanami?" I said.

"Huh?" She eyed me strangely; she raised an eyebrow. "What did you say?"

I flinched. "Oh, uh, I don't—sorry, I must be confused, I—"

"Samael?"

"Huh?"

She pulled back her headdress and took off her goggles. Sure enough, there she was—the girl with red eyes and pallid skin. But there, the similarities ended: this girl clucked in disappointment, like an older sister chiding me. "Come on, it's us," she said. "Who else would it be?"

The second woman pulled her hood back, too: it was Horaki. She eyed me strangely, too. "Maybe the sunscreen's getting to him?"

"It'd better not!" said Ayanami, and she looked at me crossly. "Samael, are you feeling all right?"

I laughed nervously, taking off my hood and goggles, too. "I'm fine," I said. "I just have a lot on my mind, I guess."

Ayanami nodded, pursing her lips. "We all do, don't we." She let out a heavy breath, and she looked to the distance—far down the giant escalator to Nerv Headquarters. "But!" she said, brightening, "that's what we're here for, right? We're going to help change that."

"We'll try," said Horaki.

"We will." Ayanami smirked. "Count on it."

What strange and bizarre alternate universe had I walked into?

I struggled with that question as Horaki, Ayanami, and I boarded the escalator down to the heart of Nerv. The girls went back and forth for a bit longer, with Ayanami confident that we would succeed and Horaki more measured and cautious about…well, whatever it was they were talking about. I couldn't really follow everything they were saying, but just how they carried themselves and behaved spoke volumes: this Ayanami spoke with sweeping gestures, but she looked directly at who she was speaking to and nodded along as she listened, never missing a word.

And she laughed.

Horaki said something funny, and Ayanami giggled. She even wiped at her eye to make sure she wasn't crying. What a sight that was to behold.

I can't say I remember what it was Horaki said, but I remember well what happened next: once Ayanami calmed down and caught her breath, she was…different, again. She got a distant look in her eye, and she asked Horaki,

"Do you think they'll go for it?"

Horaki started to look back, but she hesitated. "There's a chance," she said at last.

Ayanami frowned at that, irritated. "They ought to," she insisted.

"Yes," said Horaki, nodding. "They ought to." But she knew those people—whoever they were—might not.

There was a silence for a time. Ayanami closed her eyes, and her irritation turned to pain. She slumped a little bit. The weight of the world was on her, and she could be forgiven for buckling a tiny bit under it.

But she did bear that weight. She gripped the escalator railing, let out a breath, and opened her eyes. She stood straight and tall, and she looked on, eyes unblinking and cool, silent but watchful.

Horaki started talking again, and Ayanami said nothing. She kept that unflinching gaze, and a word—a name—sputtered from my lips.

"Lilith?" I said.

"Yes?" said Ayanami.

My mouth hung open. A faint sound came from my throat, but it was nothing resembling a word.

"Something wrong, Samael?" she said.

I shook my head, but she narrowed her eyes. "Are you sure? You've been awfully quiet."

"It's nothing, really!" I raised my hands. "Honest!"

"Okay…" She kept watching me. "If you say so."

I spent the rest of the escalator ride silent, with Ayanami and Horaki chatting away.



There were seven of us.

Horaki, Ayanami, and I headed to an elevator. Four others were already waiting there: people with the faces of Asuka, Nozomi, Toji, and Kaworu Nagisa. They waved to us, and we boarded the elevator without a word. Kaworu, with his white hair and red eyes, let everyone else on ahead of him. He stood at the front of the elevator cabin. He seemed to be in charge. He wanted to make sure everything was in order. He asked Horaki about some details, for instance:

"Did you make changes to the talk?" he asked Horaki.

"I did." Horaki handed him a flash drive. "Just a few tweaks to my part. I'll handle it."

"Very good." He tugged on his shirt, straightening out a few wrinkles, and he put on a smile for the group. "Everyone ready?" he asked.

"We'd better be," said Toji, who rubbed his arm up and down. "I'd hate for all that pokin' and proddin' to have been for nothin'."

Ayanami laughed. As serious as the mood was, she took it upon herself to lighten it. She sidled up to Toji and shot him a sly look. "So concerned about wasting your DNA all of a sudden? That's not what I've heard."

Who was this person?!

Toji reacted, too, albeit for a different reason. He put both hands in the air, saying, "I ain't got any idea what you're talking about." He snuck an irritated glance at me. "It can't be somebody like Samael's been spreadin' rumors—totally untrue rumors—can it?"

Well, I certainly didn't have anything to do with it.

"I didn't say Samael had anything to do with it," said Ayanami, with a smile that showed Samael had everything to do with it. I could only be glad I wasn't actually Samael, or I would've been in trouble. "Besides," she told Toji, "you should be proud. Survival of the fittest and all that."

Toji's face went through three or four different contortions before settling on a tentative grin. "Yeah!" he said. "Yeah. I should be proud. I am proud. Time like this, if you can help propagate the species and satisfy people doin' it—why not?"

"I don't know if satisfaction is what I've been hearing," said Ayanami, stifling a laugh.

"Hey!"

They went back and forth like this for a short time, with Toji getting increasingly flustered about the whole thing, at least until Nozomi decided to step in—perhaps even in Toji's defense.

"Easy, Lilith." Nozomi touched Ayanami on the shoulder. "He knows your weakness."

"He does?" Ayanami went pale—well, paler than usual. "No he doesn't. Not a chance."

At that, Toji grinned. "Something from Enoch's Bakery? A high-priced, fancy—"

"Don't!" Ayanami pointed a finger at him. "Let's agree to let it go, all right? I don't have a problem with that, and you don't have a problem with spreading your DNA around. Right?"

"This ain't fair when everyone knows about me and I can't say the word cup—"

"Take it easy, both of you," said Horaki, shooting them a stern look. "A little levity is fine, but let's not get carried away."

Ayanami did a faux salute. "Yes, Mom! No joking around, and no cupcakes later!"

Horaki flushed a bit. "Let's not be hasty here. If we can get the Council to go along with the plan, I think one cupcake is only fair, don't you?"

"You two are hopeless," said Toji, and Horaki bowed her head and nodded in reluctant agreement, to the chuckles and laughter of the rest of the room. Ayanami even patted Horaki on the shoulder in joking consolation.

"Let's put on our professional faces, hm?" That was Kaworu, who nodded toward the counter above the elevator door. Sure enough, there was a ding sound, and the doors opened…

To a wide platform with various and strange markings on the floor. Grand windows opened to the rest of the Geofront, with light pouring in from the outside.

This was—in another world—my father's office.

It wasn't my father's office there, though. In that world, rows of chairs had been placed, with no small audience sitting in them. My father was among them, but he was just one of many—which included Ritsuko, Maya, and more.

And from the front row, Misato rose, addressing the seven of us.

"Adam," she said, nodding in acknowledgement. "Thank you for bringing this plan to our attention."

"Of course, Madam President," said Kaworu. "I hope we can explain it clearly for you and for the assembled Councilors."

Two guards near the elevator showed us to a table with seven seats. Asuka took the first seat, then Kaworu, Nozomi, Toji, Horaki, me, and then Ayanami. There was a laptop in front of Kaworu's seat. He slotted in the flash drive Horaki had given him, and to the table's right (as we faced the crowd), a hologram materialized. The image was one of a planet, Earth-like in look—with landmasses and oceans and clouds—but the continents were different.

Kaworu took a handheld clicker in hand, and he circled around the table to the holographic projector. He addressed the room, saying,

"Ladies and gentlemen, Madam President, and members of the Council, good morning. My name is Adam. Our world and our people are in a dire situation, and I know there is not a soul left who doesn't eagerly await a solution, or who isn't working toward one.

"I'm pleased to present a proposal, one that our group at the Global Institute for Metaphysics has painstakingly developed over the past few months from technologies at hand." He gestured to our table. "A few of my colleagues are here today to help discuss the proposal and answer questions."

He clicked on his remote, and the hologram switched to some text.

"Now," he continued, "let me begin. I'll outline our current estimates for the Mainline Geofront proposal, including some of the shortcomings we hoped to address. Then, I'll hand off to one of my colleagues to discuss the Seed proposal we're presenting here, including the timeline for relocation. At the end of the talk, we'll answer your questions.

"But first," he said, clicking his remote once more, "let's discuss the Mainline Geofront proposal."

I won't pretend to be able to keep up with material such as this or to understand all the words. Still, I can tell you what I saw and what I did understand.

What I saw was a world that had been scarred—blasted, as though some angry god had held a burning candle to its side. Kaworu talked over this hologram projection, discussing the loss of entire species on the "irradiated hemisphere" of the planet. He spoke of an increase of cancer incidence worldwide, of crop failures due to a worldwide haze. It would take years—decades, or even more—for the ecosystem to recover.

But they had the Geofronts. They could go underground and save some of their people. They could grow food there and produce enough artificial light to sustain themselves through the dark times above ground.

But, large though an individual Geofront may have been, it was only so big. They could save people—some people. Millions, perhaps. Maybe even a billion or two.

In a world of many billions of people, that is a great sacrifice. And there would be no guarantee that civilization would recover even when the dark night passed.

"So you see," Kaworu concluded, "we at the Global Institute for Metaphysics were tasked to find a new solution, one that could save more lives—without requiring such a steep sacrifice or the inherent unfairness of selecting only a few of out every thousand people to continue civilization. For that explanation, I turn things over to one of my colleagues."

I looked down the right side of the table, toward the projector. Horaki rose, and she circled around the table's front. Kaworu handed over the remote. Then Horaki, standing with poise and solemnity, faced down the crowd.

"Good morning. I'm the lead scientist for Soul Transference Programs and Research at GIMP. My name is Eisheth."

She clicked a button on the remote, and the hologram switched back to a view of the planet, with splotches of light and dark red on the landmasses.

"The red color you see here," said Horaki, "is population density. All of these…"

She clicked the remote again, and dozens and dozens of spheres—filled with red—appeared on the projection.

"These are just a fraction of the Geofronts we'd need to protect ourselves until the ecosystem stabilizes. We don't have the time to invest in that. But, what we can do…"

Click. Back to the world in red.

Red and awash in crosses.

"What we can do," said Horaki, "is store the souls of our people in the Geofronts we already have."

They were madmen. That's what they were. They were going to let themselves all die, harvest their own souls, and find somewhere else to be reincarnated. They'd take the Geofronts to the stars, each with a fraction of their people's souls. The Geofronts carried with them the foundations for life: amino acids, proteins, all of it.

And then, they would wait. They'd wait billions of years for life to evolve from there, for something intelligent enough to take shape. Then, their program would resume: they'd imbue those dumb apes with souls and hijack those animals' primitive lives to carry out this mad survival plan.

Madmen—all of them. People die all the time. It's just a matter of when and how. To force yourself into an alien shape—a container? The idea alone made me shake.

I wasn't the only one who felt this way. Some in the room were skeptical, even hostile. One man, who looked like Professor Fuyutsuki, stood up to pose a question to us, saying,

"You're asking us to accept artificial reincarnation into bodies we can't even imagine right now." He shook his head, baffled with the very concept. "Why would we want to accept that? Many of us have lived good lives. Save the children and those who are absolutely needed to carry on our people. Have you seriously considered how many more Geofronts could be built before we run out of essential supplies?"

Horaki glanced toward my end of the table, and Ayanami rose. "Seven, maybe eight Geofronts," said Ayanami. "That's the best we can do, but Councilor, this question isn't about mathematics, is it?"

At that, the man looking like Fuyutsuki stood there for a moment before nodding in agreement.

"I didn't think so," said Ayanami, who circled the table to stand with Horaki. "This is about something else: about what we want our future to be. I want us to have a future. I want all of us to have a future."

She paced about the projector, peering at a projection of a globe. "I've been around the world," she said. "I've visited people affected by the burst." She put her finger into the projection, touching one spot, one location. "I've been here," she said. "There were some nice people there. I met a family with a boy who wants to be a sprinter." She faced the crowd again. "They know what's going on. They know that, if there's a lottery, there's a low chance they would be saved. They asked me if there were a chance their son could be saved anyway. 'So he can grow up and run,' is what they asked me."

She pressed a hand to the side of her head, as though the memory were a migraine she couldn't shake. That let the crowd chew on the story for a moment, too.

"I don't know how you feel about that," said Ayanami, still holding her head, "but I can't accept that. I can't stand it."

She let out a breath, collecting herself, and put her hand to her side. She froze the room with a hard stare.

"And I won't stand for it, either. I refuse to ask people to lay down and die for their children. What Eisheth and Adam have described to you—our proposal—is a fair solution. It is as fair as it possibly can be. Nearly everyone will bear an equal burden, and an equal chance of living on."

" 'Nearly'?" said Fuyutsuki.

Ayanami held out a hand to Horaki, who handed over the remote. Ayanami flipped through several projections until a white giant with seven eyes appeared on the hologram.

"Someone has to be the shepherd for the souls of our people," said Ayanami, "in bodies that can last the test of time—as long as it takes. These people—these volunteers—should have an understanding of basic metaphysics and metaphysical biology, but more importantly, they should be ready and willing to wait through the long night for this plan to go through."

She waved her arm toward the table.

"Like we are," she said.

My heart clenched. All I could think was no, no, no.

But that was so very like her, wasn't it? As much as it pained me to admit it, it made sense. Even before she ever heard the name Rei Ayanami, she was like that. She did something she thought selfless or necessary, with no regard to how it might hurt herself—or even her friends and family around her. What did they think about that? Had she even asked them?

No, I didn't think she had. Ayanami wasn't one to ask before she made sacrifices. When you believe in something like that—when every cell in your body calls on you to act, to do something—you don't ask other people. You tell them you're going to do it, and only after you're done do you ask them.

You ask for their forgiveness.

Ayanami asked for no forgiveness that day, even as the rest of the politicians and scientists hotly debated the proposal. Eventually, they sent us away to deliberate in private. I'm sure it was important to them, even though I already knew what their decision would be.

With the meeting closed to outsiders, the seven of us went back down on the elevator and toward the Geofront's exits. I followed Ayanami and Horaki the way we came; Kaworu and the others went their separate ways.

Ayanami, for her part, was much quieter than on the way in. She took the lead, standing two steps ahead on the escalator.

"I think that went well," I offered at one point, peering around the side to catch a glimpse of her face.

"Mm, yes," she said, smiling slightly. She looked back at me with the corner of her eye. "I think so, too. I hope so. It's what we need, to give everyone a chance. I hope they can understand that."

"They're not happy about handing things over to us." Horaki stared up the escalator intently. The wheels were turning in her mind. "Even though they should," she said at last. "It's not like we're getting a good end of the deal."

"We're going to help our people survive—all of them," said Ayanami, who looked ahead, too. "What could be more right than that?"

"Saving everyone, including ourselves," said Horaki.

Ayanami rolled her eyes. "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?" said Horaki.

"Being super serious."

"Somebody has to balance you out, you know."

"I was super serious earlier!" said Ayanami, who stomped her foot on the escalator step for good measure.

"Yes." Horaki smiled slightly. "I know."

Ayanami laughed—she giggled, even, and she leaned along the escalator railing, letting some of the weight on her shoulders float away, at least for a time.

And, to tell the truth, I wouldn't have minded to see her like that every once in a while. If I'd had that chance before, I would've enjoyed it.

But Horaki didn't let me enjoy it then—not for long, anyway. She came down one step of the escalator. She touched my shoulder and whispered into my ear. "Don't let that fool you," she told me. "Lilith knew full well what it meant to become a Seed of Life—to give everything of herself for her people."

I sighed, and I looked up the escalator, at Ayanami. "I know she does," I whispered. "I've seen it."

"You have, haven't you?" said Horaki. "That's good. You should learn from the past, Shinji Ikari."

I jolted. I did a double-take. I tried to look back at Horaki, but the escalator was gone. The inside of the Geofront was gone. I was on my own two feet, with hard, immobile sidewalk beneath me. The only thing that moved was the march of demonstrators on the road: they circled National Square with their signs bobbing up and down as they walked. The lead demonstrator kept the crowd chanting blasphemy.

The only being in front of me was the ghost who wore a satin hood.

"You should learn from the past," she said, facing me—though her eyes were covered by the hood. "Seven hearts burned for their brothers and sisters, but all this?" She waved with her sleeves—her hands weren't visible. She waved at the earth and sky. "This didn't fill the holes in their hearts. You're the same, Shinji Ikari."

I looked past the stranger. Ayanami was there, too, watching from a distance, but she was silent. She let me refute the stranger on my own terms.

"I'm trying not to be," I said at last.

The stranger pursed her lips, and she nodded once in deference? Or was it respect?

"You can try," she said, "for all the good it will do, but this is how you were made, how the people who made you were made." She turned her head slightly, indicating Ayanami behind her. "People like Lilith. You can try to overcome that, but you shouldn't be surprised if you don't succeed."

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I glanced at the fence—at the black fabric that let only sporadic dots of light come through. I cleared my throat, and I said,

"I don't believe—"

But she was gone. They were gone—Ayanami and the stranger both.



I headed directly home after that, putting the demonstration of Seele sympathizers and visions of…whatever that was behind me. We had Keel Lorenz. It was our job to look forward, to make sure those who identified with him couldn't hurt us, and to prepare for whatever else might come.

I headed to the kitchen, and I started laying out some onions and radishes for a meal. I turned on the TV while I worked. Asuka would be home within the hour.

But what I heard on the TV made my heart sink.

You see, Ayanami showed me something—and it wasn't just her past. It was a lesson to learn, a lesson she and the hooded stranger both thought important: when you act rashly to plug a hole in your heart, you might stop the bleeding there, but something else might fail instead.

Lilith and her colleagues saved their people, but did they think their sacrifices through? Did they sacrifice themselves for the right reasons? Were their actions truly for the best?

And what about me, or Misato? I helped capture Keel Lorenz, but did I really stop to consider everything that might result from that? Misato sent me there to make the world safe again, but did we actually accomplish that?

No, we hadn't. We acted, and we got Lorenz, but there is a saying, right? "Cut the head of a hydra, and two shall take its place?" I don't like to think that evil can never be extinguished, but one must be careful. If you're going to cut the head of a hydra, you should cauterize the wound when you're done.

Misato and I hadn't done that. When I got home and saw the news, I finally understood.

"Late this afternoon," said the presenter on the TV, "officials at the Japanese Consulate in Myanmar confirmed that Kyoji Ishikawa, an employee at a consulting firm in the protectorate, was arrested by Chinese authorities on charges of espionage."

 

[Muphrid]

18. The Cross

After dinner, Asuka and I watched the news for a time.

The prime minister promised great intelligence from Lorenz, and that interrogators would be working "day and night" to gain information that would dismantle Seele.

Seele put out a propaganda video claiming that even without Lorenz, they would show us the true way and all that.

But what struck me most was footage of SDF guards standing watch at National Square. Two guards stood at the gate with their rifles strapped over their shoulders. They faced straight ahead in the fading light, as rows of protestors decried them and hurled all manner of insults at them.

After all, those men were trained to stand there and be unflinching.

And there was no shortage of pundits to talk about the arrest of Kyoji Ishikawa. Would Japan offer a swap of spies to mollify the Chinese? Would they disavow him and leave the man to face trial and possible execution to protect a covert operation?

I left Asuka to work and watch the news on her own, and I retired to the bedroom once more. I turned the light on at my desk. I drummed my fingers on the desk's edge for a time.

I picked up the phone. I dialed, but the answer on the other end wasn't what I was looking for.

"Hello, you've reached the private line for General Katsuragi," the machine said in Misato's voice. "I'm not home right now, but you can leave a message after the tone, and the next time we talk, I promise you more—"

I hung up. Where exactly would she be at that time of night?

I went to the closet and put on my jacket. There was a torrent coming down out there, after all. Asuka wondered where I was going. I told her I left something at the base.

" 'Something,' huh?" was the response she gave me. She closed the lid on her laptop, staring at me. "Is that it?" she asked.

I nodded, and I said I'd call her when I got there.

She frowned, but she angled the laptop lid back open and said nothing more. Only then did I breathe again. Only then did I dare to go.

And so I headed out, down the elevator and through the lobby to street level, and like the SDF members at Ground Zero, I braved the darkness, too.



It's very different, going to the base at night.

In peacetime, the base was like any other office building—putting aside that it was underground, of course. A few people might've been working overtime, and there was a small team on watch in the control room, keeping the lights on and the coffee makers hot, but beyond that, it was quiet. The hallway lights hadn't dimmed, but when you can hear your own footsteps echoing, you just know you're far, far more alone than you should be.

I stopped by the general's office. The lights were off on the lobby—no doubt the secretary had long since retired for the day—but there was a glow from underneath Misato's door. I knocked.

A pen was put down, and four quick steps signaled the occupant's approach.

"Shinji?" She blinked a couple times. "What are you doing still here?"

I could've asked her the same question, but I let it be. I told her I'd accidentally taken a sensitive file and needed to return it, and I'd "just noticed" that her light was on. "Still got work to do?" I asked her.

Misato sighed at that, and she started rubbing her neck. "It's about that Naicho agent," she explained to me. Ishikawa's capture was still rippling through the Japanese government, and Misato had no kind words for the Chinese about it. "They're being remarkably petty, considering we did them a favor."

"Anything you can do to get him out?" I asked her. "He seemed decent."

She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. For the moment, it was up to the diplomats, but Misato wasn't confident they'd make much headway. "They'll soon realize the Chinese aren't interested in an amicable solution…" Misato folded her arms and leaned against the doorframe. "Then it'll be my turn to negotiate." She smirked. "And we'll put the screws to them; don't you worry. I'll see to that."

I peered around her. There was a cup of soup steaming on the desk's corner. A stack of papers went half a meter high. Misato was more than prepared to spend time getting Ishikawa back or sticking it to the Chinese. She was there, wasn't she? She was there to fight the good fight and all that.

"Maybe you could stand a break?" I offered.

Misato glanced at her soup cup on the desk corner. "Probably a good idea, right?" She waved me inside. I took the seat across from her, and we talked. We talked a lot, and it was, perhaps, the first long talk we'd had since Instrumentality's end. I learned a great deal about Misato that evening—stuff I never would've imagined before, and I'd known her for almost three years by that point. For the first time, I really saw her as a general. It was easier for me to see that when I wasn't the one she was commanding—not directly, anyway. Before, we'd worked as a team to fight Angels. Here, she had a much larger battle to fight. I saw how that affected her, from the emptiness of her office to how deliberately she stirred her soup.

We talked about matters of little consequence for a time. Misato told me a bit about how interrogations of Lorenz and his men were going. She was a frustrated that they were so tight-lipped, but she took no small amount of glee at the idea of coercing them into spilling their secrets.

"The best part," she told me, "is when you can convince them that telling you something is in their interest. Everybody wants something: fine food, contact with loved ones—something." She pointed a finger at me, as though I were a student who'd do well not to forget. "You give them that. That's your word, after all. But you make sure that whatever you're giving them is a small price to pay—for us, anyway. A bigger price for them." She sat back in her chair and grinned wildly. "And never forget the look on their faces when they realize the price they had to pay, hm?"

She delighted in it. She relished it. Perhaps it's natural, but human beings should not take glee in such things, I think. I would've much preferred to hear that she'd found joy in nighttime drives outside the city, or something to that effect, but that wasn't how she was—not when left to her own devices, anyway.

But, if someone offered her a way out, maybe she would take it. I asked Misato to dinner, and she about dropped her soup spoon.

"Dinner?" she said, laughing in surprise. "What did you have in mind?"

"Just, you know," I said with a shrug. "Something simple: you, me, and Asuka—just like old times. I'll cook."

"Aha!" Misato laughed, and she wagged a finger at me. "That'd be a nice blast from the past, right? But really now, you're adults. Maybe not in the eyes of the law, but you've gone through enough to deserve it. You two don't need a guardian barging in on what you do anymore."

But I didn't accept that. I kept pressing. I said she could make it a date--take Hyuga, say. He was good company, right?

She wasn't biting. She was evasive. She left her spoon in the cup and started scanning through a file folder. "There's really no telling when this will let up," she said.

I scoffed. "How long is that going to be? Months? Years? You can't just work-work-work nonstop until then."

"Of course I can," she said, not even looking up. "I'm a soldier."

She was a soldier. A soldier didn't have time for games. A soldier didn't have time to act out the fantasy of a lovestruck schoolgirl. Those could wait until the war was over.

And I—I just couldn't accept that. I refused to accept it. I rose from the guest chair and I said it right to her face! "Misato," I told her, "you're not alone in this."

She looked at me with a gram of surprise, but she just shook her head. She shook her head like I was a child, and compared to her, I was.

"No, Shinji." She closed a folder, and she opened her arms wide. "Look around," she said. "Is your father here? Is the vice commander here? Or Ritsuko? No, no, and no. They all left. They all stayed in the sea." She put a hand to her chest. "I'm here."

"And so am I," I told her.

"And I'm thankful for that," she said, smiling in gratitude. "But Shinji, there are a lot of people out there who just don't get it yet."

Like the Chinese. Didn't I remember them? Didn't I remember the ambassador's gate I'd started breaking down with my own hands? The Chinese government didn't take the threat seriously. And they weren't the only ones.

"There are a lot of people out there who'd rather bury their heads in the sand," said Misato. "They're worse than the likes of Seele, and you know why? Because Seele at least understands that what's coming is the apocalypse."

She shook her head and exhaled—a tired, weary response. She took in hand her cross pendant, which had been hanging around the desk lamp. She rubbed her fingers along the bloody spot on the pendant, and she said,

"Don't worry about me, Shinji. You have a life to live. Most of what I once had—that's already been taken away. There's a disease of denial running rampant through this world, and if it comes down to someone like me to spread the cure, that's not such a bad thing, is it?"

"Misato—" I began, but she put a finger to her lips and shushed me.

"You have a life to live," she insisted. "Me? Death has been etched into my mind since I was younger than you. If one of us here has to put their life on hold for this, it should be me, don't you think?"

"And after this?" I asked her. "After the Angels are gone again, what then?"

Misato stared at me for a moment, wide-eyed. She looked around, as though there could be an answer in the walls, but none was forthcoming. Instead, she glanced at the open folder on her desk, straightened herself up to read it, and pretended to begin.

"I'm a soldier," she said, scanning over a report. "I'm just a piece in this game. Who cares what happens to me?"

Who cared indeed?

Let's say there was one person—one person in the whole world who cared what became of Misato Katsuragi. Would that person have left a cup of soup half full to go cold? Would that person keep working at twenty minutes to midnight in a cool, deserted building hundreds of meters underground? Would that person have nothing of personal value on her desk but the pendant that put her on this path oh-so-many years before?

No, not at all. That pendant was stained in her blood, and she kept going anyway. If there were one person in the world who cared what became of Misato Katsuragi, then there's one thing that could be sure:

It wasn't Misato Katsuragi herself.

And if that was how she wanted to be, what could I do to stop her?



So I left her there. I left Misato to her work, and I headed home—back along the empty train to National Square and then through the rain above ground. When I got back to our apartment, I flung my jacket's hood back and cast off the water. I hung it up to dry and traded my shoes for slippers, trudging back into the apartment.

The lights were off in the main room, so I went to wash up for the night. I squirted a blob of toothpaste on my brush and did that whole routine. Stroke, stroke, stroke. I bet nobody even thought about that, at the time. Is it really a priority to fight tooth decay when you're fighting a war against Angels for your very survival? Not a chance. It's almost pointless. It doesn't matter, but someone will complain about your breath if you don't.

"Did you get that thing?" Asuka's voice called to me from the dark bedroom. "Or whatever it was."

I put the toothbrush down and leaned with both hands on the counter, bowing my head. "No," I said.

"Was anybody there? Misato?"

"Yes, Misato was there."

"Working, right?"

"Yes, she—" I choked on my words. I shuddered. I put both hands on the counter to support myself.

Sheets rustled in the bedroom, and Asuka climbed out of bed, leaning on the washroom doorframe. Her mouth was slightly open, and she peered at me in the mirror.

"Shinji?"

"Sorry. Misato—she's—" I coughed. "I'm not sure she's doing too well."

"I know." Asuka put a hand on my shoulder. "It's pretty obvious." She smiled sadly. "Come to bed."

"Asuka…"

"What is it?"

I took her fingers in my hand. "How was your mom's birthday?"

Her breath caught, and Asuka took me in her arms, holding me from behind. "Not bad," she said wistfully. "I thought it'd be nice to hold a special dinner."

"You made fish buns?"

Asuka flinched. "No!" she insisted.

I shot her a look, and she glanced away.

"I am going to make something else!" Her eyes wandered about the washroom as she thought. "Something…next year."

"Do you want me to teach you?" I said, chuckling.

She pouted. "You can teach, but I will make something for my mother by myself, when the time comes. Deal?"

"Deal. You want to do that soon? This weekend, maybe?"

"Oh God no. I'm not going near the kitchen for a month if I can help it. The stove is trying to kill me; I'm sure of it."

"It's not alive!" I said with a laugh. "But fine, something else then?"

Asuka cocked her head. "Could go to the arcade. Make it a party—get Nozomi and Hikari, Aida and Suzuhara and his sister. Let's have a good time, right?" She smiled. "Just see people," she said. "See people, and have a good time. We can do that—you and me, and everyone else."

I nodded. "Thank you, Asuka. I needed that."

Asuka leaned in, and she whispered in my ear, "This is what I can do for you, Shinji. It's okay if you need me for that. I'll be here."

She gave me a quick peck on the cheek—just in case I didn't get the message.

"Now finish what you're doing and get to bed, huh? It's late."

I started washing the toothbrush in the sink, and Asuka headed back to the bedroom.

"Oh, and Shinji?" she called back.

"What?"

"Was I right about this, or was I not?"

I froze. "Does this count for that?"

"It does."

I winced. "Do you want to tonight?"

"I've got to be at the base early. You?"

"Same."

"Tomorrow, then. Make sure you clean that thing right this time. Last time it was your turn, I found stuff on it and had to fix that before we got started."

I hung my head at that. "I'll take care of it!"

"Good."

I took one look in the mirror, eyes wide, and I squeezed out another dollop of toothpaste to brush my teeth again.



The next day, Asuka and I arrived at the base around 0630, and already the general was in her office working, with her secretary on duty and all.

Truth be told, I spent most of the day looking forward to the evening. We had more pilot training to do—both with Nozomi and with the backups—and I struggled to stay with it at times. I made some mistakes, like telling the Mitsuzuri boy to attack his simulation target instead of evade. I could write that off as a worthwhile test, sure, and no one else seemed to mind too much.

You don't have to be perfect in this line of work. We strove to be good and be right, but you could spend a lot of time in search of perfection and not get anywhere. And after all I'd done, do you think a day of being a little off could be excused?

What I was looking forward to—aside from Asuka exercising her privileges for being right—was a trip to the arcade with Nozomi.

I stopped by the arcade to make arrangements for our party. I wasn't sure if the arcade would accommodate us because, in that time, the arcade was very popular. I'm not really sure why. You wouldn't think it'd make sense for people to throw money away regularly at those rigged UFO capture games, or for precious materials and electricity to be spent on running an arcade or making the prizes.

But in spite of the facts, I'd heard from Kensuke that the place was often packed, and that day was no exception. Students from a half-dozen schools seemed to make the arcade a second home. Adults stopped by, too, either to accompany children or to try their hand at the games themselves. I remember one man in rags trying desperately to win some snacks from the claw machine. He did win, on his third try, and the look on his face as he bit into the candy bar was one of sweet relief. The place was a salvation, in that sense, and the spectacle of flashing lights and triumphant chimes gave the arcade a friendly feel. It was, perhaps, the only place in Tokyo-2 that really felt alive.

Then again, maybe it's telling that the only such place was one populated by virtual characters and artificial voices.

But for an afternoon, I thought it'd be a nice reprieve, and it gave me a chance to spend time with Nozomi again.

Nozomi, for her part, seemed a little less than at ease amid all the flashing lights and the cacophony of sounds. Every time something unexpected happened, she twitched or jumped in surprise.

"You know, Ikari," she said, steering clear of a game of Mortal Wombat, "I'm not sure arcades are really my thing."

That would've been a shame. Asuka and I had really hoped that it would be fun for her. A party with all of us was, well, long overdue, really.

"Not sure I'm much help for party planning, either," she said, ducking around a server with a stack of pizza boxes. "If you brought me here for feedback, I don't think I have much."

"If you want to go somewhere else, we can," I offered.

"Don't you have a party to plan?"

"Planning can wait if it needs to."

At that, Nozomi cracked a smile. "You're too old for me, Ikari."

I gawked. "Nozomi…"

"I'm just saying, Ikari, if you wanna take a girl on a date, you could ask her where she wants to go." She twirled a pencil between her fingers idly. "And as far as where I would want to go, you still owe me some time as my student."

"I won't miss it this time; I promise."

"You sure?"

I put my hands in my pockets and looked around. "Yeah," I said. "I shouldn't have forgotten in the first place. I let something else get in the way. I'm sorry."

Nozomi sighed and nodded. "Thanks," she said, "and now forget about it. You've got a party to plan, and since I'm already here…" She glanced around the arcade. "I'm gonna scout out some good places for photos. Aida's been doing some of that; I think he'd like it if we had some good positions in mind."

"You're the best, Nozomi," I said, nodding in thanks.

She scoffed at that, and she waved her pencil in mild disagreement as she went off to scout. "Maybe," she said.

I let Nozomi do a round or two around the arcade, and I went back to my own business. I asked the manager about having a small party at the arcade, and he seemed receptive to the idea. All we had to do was pay a small fee in advance. He seemed agreeable enough, but given the cross look he gave to some customers milling about, I can only guess he felt a lot of people came in without spending as much as he would've hoped.

I told the man I'd get back to him about the exact number—we still had to see if Toji would bring his sister—and I left the counter to track down Nozomi. I hoped we'd find a good spot for the party to take place. If games we liked were too far away, it would be inconvenient, but if there were no place to sit and talk while we ate, that'd be even worse.

But as I searched for Nozomi, I overheard a boy and girl at one of the light gun games:

"Okay, when we get to this next part," the boy began, "take care of everything on the right. There will be two zombie walkers, three shooters, and a crane throwing an exploding barrel. Got it?"

"Got it," said the girl, raising the plastic gun's sights to her eye.

The game's next sequence started, and both players sprayed the screen with invisible bullets. The girl, despite her inexperience with this game, handled her assignment well: bang-bang-bang-bang. Four shots destroyed the zombie walkers, and she lined up a quick hit to the exploding barrel; it detonated, and a handful of shooters disintegrated in a toxic green flame.

But the boy? He took two claws to the face, and his screen started counting down as it asked for more money.

"What happened?" asked the girl.

"I sucked." The boy dropped the light gun back into its holder with a showy, exaggerated motion. "Damn runners."

"Runners? Why didn't you say that before? I could've helped."

"You would've fallen behind."

The girl fired off three shots, and a behemoth zombie toppled over, rattling the screen as it disintegrated. The stage was cleared, and the game started tallying up the score. The girl took her eye off the screen, shooting her friend a look as she brought the light gun to her waist.

The boy looked aside, hands in his pockets, and said nothing.



The party was something welcome to look forward to, but everything else that was going on in the world was not. When I got to my office the next morning, I found out just how bad the situation had become: Misato and the Chinese had resorted to playing an international game of chicken. Misato had arranged for MSDF ships to pass near artificial islands the Chinese had built, deliberately skirting the edge of a disputed territorial waters claim. The Chinese, in turn, had sent more than one naval group right up to Japan's territorial waters. The two sides were intent on daring the other to respond with force, hoping that the international community would side with them as an "innocent" actor in this nonsense.

I can't speak for what the Chinese were thinking, but Misato's reasoning was clear: the Chinese were at fault. If we'd violated their sovereignty, it was for an act in service of mankind, and the Chinese should've been grateful. Instead, they'd abducted one of our people, and Misato wasn't going to let that go, even if it meant going to the brink of war.

"Never forget," she said at one briefing, "if the Chinese attack our forces or violate our territory, they will have more than just SDF to reckon with. The might of a god is on our side."

The Eva. She meant to use the Eva—not to fight a ground war in China, but as a defense, as a weapon of last resort to punish Chinese aggression. She could cloak her intentions in defensive words like "protection" and "deterrence," but even a shield allows a knight to pick fights he might otherwise avoid.

Misato's course was etched in stone, with the grooves filled in with molten steel for good measure. I wasn't the only one who tried to reach her. Asuka spent a good hour at lunch one day trying to shift Misato's thinking. It was no use. The conflict Misato had prepared for seemed inevitable, and she would go into it ready—professionally and personally—to sacrifice whatever was necessary to achieve her ends.

And since Asuka and I had both struck out with Misato, I turned to the only other person who could reach her. As I sat in my office with file folders about Chinese ships and naval helicopters, I said a name out loud, even though no one else was in the room with me.

"Ayanami."

Silence.

"Ayanami," I said again, staring past my computer monitor. "I know you can hear me. I know you're watching."

Nothing. The air was still. A speck of dust floated in front of me.

"Ayanami," I said once more, rising from my seat, "if there is a lesson Misato should learn from you, maybe you need to tell her that. If there's a piece of you that is the same as the Ayanami from before—if you meant to ask her and Horaki and me to come back for something—I think you should follow through with that. Don't let us go the wrong way."

And still, there was only the sound of my computer's fan humming.

I sat back down, sighing, and I closed the folder on my desk to go to the next: a briefing on maritime Eva operations. I flipped open the folder and began, but my eyes didn't process the dry descriptions of military hardware. Instead, a set of words flashed into my mind.

I won't abandon you.

I glanced around. There was no sign of her, and yet the impression was clear to me.

And that wasn't the only one.

You could destroy yourselves otherwise.

And though I scowled upon understanding that second impression, there was a hint of truth to it as well. I wouldn't have admitted it to anyone, but we were sitting on a precipice, and we could easily fall.

A Chinese submarine breached Japanese territorial waters the next day.

 

[Muphrid]

19. Whole Heart

The Chinese sent a fleet to the edge of the 12-mile limit of Japanese territorial waters. They were done trading provocations and slights; they moved on to demands. They insisted on inspecting Japanese ships for possible smuggling in or out of Myanmar, including weapons or intelligence equipment.

MSDF's fleet went to meet the Chinese, and for 24 hours, the standoff was nerve-wracking. The constant threat of action made us sleep at the base. It meant sending Nozomi out with the Eva to Okinawa and training sessions to play hopscotch on natural and manmade islands. Let me tell you: you do not want to be responsible for keeping an Eva above the surface of the water. You just don't.

For a time, we hoped that these exercises with the Eva would be enough of a deterrent to keep the Chinese in check. If the Eva could deploy to the ocean safely (whether above the surface or below it), then trying to fight against it would be suicide. And if they dared to try anyway, Nozomi could easily cripple any ship.

But part of the battle was playing out in the media, too. The Chinese screamed for all the world to hear. "Look at the Japanese!" they said. "They're ready and willing to use the Eva as a weapon of war against humanity."

Never mind that the Eva hadn't left Japanese territory. And no, we weren't going to go claiming new territory to make that work, either.

Despite all this tension, the two sides held their fire, maintaining a standoff until the other made a mistake. All it would take was the slightest justification, and there would be open war, but without that, no one wanted to look like the aggressor.

The base stayed on high alert throughout this time. Teams of controllers and engineers stood watch in the control room for regular shifts—Asuka and me included. So every four or eight hours, we'd head into the control room and catch a glimpse of the situation: had the ships changed positions since we were last on watch? Were there more of them? Was Nozomi sleeping? Was the Eva ready for combat? Did we need to perform more exercises?

If that sounds busy, it really wasn't. I wish we'd had more to do. If you ran out of tasks, the best you could do was stare at the situation map on one of the front projector screens, wondering if one of those red or blue blips—theirs or ours—would cross over that imaginary line in the sea.

And when that didn't happen, what could we do? We'd go to eat in the officers' mess, with only half the room full. I'd head back to my office to review exercise results, and Asuka would restart one of her experiments. And then at night, we'd sleep on the base, captives to the rumblings of the mountain.

That is until the loudspeaker went off in our quarters.

"Attention, attention. Operations Team One, report to the control room in Building Bravo. This is not a drill. Attention, attention…"

The call went out, and Asuka and I sprang from the bed. We splashed some water on our faces and threw on two sets of clothes that had been draped over a chair. We were out of our quarters inside of two minutes, just in time to join the procession of combat controllers on their way to battle. We filed into line, and when we made the control room, we sorted ourselves among the rows of stations with mechanical precision.

Once everyone was seated, the briefing began.

"Good morning, everyone."

That was Hyuga, standing at his station with a laser pointer and clicker in hand. He clicked the remote once, and the left projector screen at the confrol room zoomed in on the border to international waters. A red blip appeared just inside the line, fading in and out.

"Here's the situation: JDS Takanami detected a probable submarine contact shadowing MSDF Escort Flotilla 6 at 0410 JST. Contact is intermittent; we suspect it's a Type 095 nuclear-powered attack submarine, too quiet for our sonar to reliably detect, and the submarine has not responded to hails."

Hyuga clicked his remote again, and a group of blue blips surrounded the fading red one. "Three MSDF destroyers—Takanami, Kirishima, and Makinami—are firing anti-submarine torpedoes and mines along probable trajectories back across the territorial line, but in all likelihood, the Type 095 will escape if we do not provide assistance."

Another click. A blue wedge zoomed in from the northeast. "Our mission is to catch the Chinese submarine before it can escape to international waters. Unit-14 will deploy aerially with Type Mikasa equipment. Controllers, start on your Airborne Vehicle Attachment and Type Miskasa Equipment checklists. Our target is takeoff from Okinawa by 0430. Let's go!"

Hyuga clapped his hands together, and the room went to work. I put on my headset and pulled up the entry plug feed on my monitor. Nozomi was inside already, holding on for dear life as the Eva contorted and twisted to mount the launching aircraft.

"You look like hell, Ikari!" she cried, gripping the controls like a vice.

I laughed, rubbing at my eyes and blinking, but they came up open and wide. "I'm more awake than I should be at this time of morning." I glanced at Hyuga, then back at her. "Type Mikasa Equipment?"

Nozomi winced. "It's not my favorite thing in the world. It's like fighting through soup."

"I wish I'd used it once, so I'd know what to tell you." I sighed. "But we'll make do, right?"

"It's that, or I go down like a rock."

"Nozomi!"

She shrugged. "I mean, that's exactly what's gonna happen if this doesn't work."

"It's going to work."

"Maybe."

Her weight shifted; the Eva turned over and was encased in the launcher envelope—a black sleeve that kept the arms and legs together in an aerodynamic package. A crane came in to attach the envelope to the launching aircraft. Only once she was secure did Nozomi let go of the controls—and speak again. She looked right at the camera port, saying,

"So this is it? We're going to war?"

I nodded solemnly.

"Then this had better work," she said, "because I sure don't want to be the first casualty."

"We've trained for this."

Nozomi raised an eyebrow.

"I mean, not exactly this, but stuff like this?" I said, wincing.

"Yeah." She looked around me, to the last station at the rear of the room. "The two of us—we've trained together. You and me. Not all of us. You and me."

I followed her gaze to Misato's cubicle, where the general presided over the affair with an array of monitors to advise her.

"Right," I said, nodding. "You and me."

Besides, the general had business of her own to take care of. The Chinese and Japanese defense forces were frantically communicating over the incident. I couldn't hear the other side of these conversations, but Misato's was clear. On the phone with a Chinese general, she said,

"If it's not your sub, then you have no problem with us throwing the world's supply of anti-submarine torpedoes at that thing until it surfaces, do you?" She sat back in her chair with a knowing grin. "…that's what I thought. Let me be clear, General: if someone wants to fight with Japan, we will strike back with all due force. Whether that's you or someone else is a matter for us to find out when we force that sub to surface."

With no going back from those words, Misato saw the operation go forward. The deployment aircraft reached the combat zone, and Misato herself ordered the Eva's launch. "Show them we will not back down from our mission," she said, "for all mankind."

The launch envelope separated from the aircraft, and like a missile, Nozomi and Unit-14 shot into the fray. A hundred meters above the ocean's surface, the black casing split apart, and Unit-14 dove underwater. It sank for a few moments, but then—

KA-WHOOSH!

The sound echoed through the entry plug, and Nozomi's body slammed against the back of her chair. Two jets of pressurized water boosted Unit-14 forward, into the dark sea.

"This is not ridiculous," said Nozomi as she worked the controls. "This is not ridiculous. This is not ridiculous—"

A fish crashed into the Eva's helmet and bounced off.

"This is goddamn ridiculous!" cried Nozomi, her eyes wide as saucers as she dove through the dark water. "I'm gonna die out here!"

"It's going to be fine!" I said. "Well, I think so."

"You think?!"

Hyuga passed me a piece of paper.

"Ah, Nozomi—waypoint on your display," I said, reading off the note. "Last fix on the submarine. Do you have it?"

Her eyes flickered aside. "Got it. On the way." She shook her head. "This was a terrible idea—trying to dive underwater before dawn. I want you to know that; I want it recorded. I want it played back the next time someone has a bright idea like this, just so everyone knows—"

I winced. "We got it."

"Do you?" she snapped. "Are you sure?"

"Waypoint One ETA is, uh, time plus 03:31. Do you have it?"

Nozomi's breathing slowed, and she wiggled her fingers around the control sticks. "Time plus 3 minutes and 31 seconds here. Okay."

Footsteps behind me. Misato came to my station and peered over my shoulder. "Does she feel the wake?"

"How does it feel out there, Nozomi?"

She grinned. "I've got them. They're mine."

She turned to her right and down, diving deeper. She shot through the submarine's turbulence and heated wake, stalking it like an African lion after an antelope.

But Unit-14 was nowhere near as stealthy or quiet as a lion on the hunt. The jets were like a heavy metal performance underwater—loud enough for all to hear. The sub turned its rudder hard and tried to evade the incoming Eva. It powered up its engines to full speed, and a pair of torpedoes shot out its aft tubes.

"Jets off!" I cried. "Brace!"

Nozomi stopped in the water. She curled into a ball, turning her back to the torpedoes, and—

Static. The Eva's telemetry went out; the screens pixelated.

"Nozomi!" I shot up. "Nozomi, answer me!"

"I'm here—sorta." The feed came back to life, but the entry plug's running lights flickered in and out, and Nozomi bled from her lip. "That was a hell of a bang."

"Ops." Asuka rose from her station. "We've got damage to the Mikasa neural interlock. Left jet thruster inoperable; right one showing intermittent signal."

"Nozomi," I began, "can you maneuver?"

She put her hands back on the controls and grimaced, but the Eva just spun around in circles. Even then, the right jet thruster cut out now and again.

"Try to limp back to Makinami; she should be able to recover you," ordered Misato. "Ops, do we have firm contact?"

Hyuga checked on his monitors. "Yes, Kirishima and Takanami have acquired the Type 095. She's steaming at flank speed for the territorial line, but Kirishima has launched her Apaches. The sub is surrounded."

"Get me on the horn," said Misato. "Underwater telephone."

Hyuga nodded, and Misato herself spoke to the enemy.

"Unidentified submarine," she began, "this is General Misato Katsuragi, Supreme Commander of Project Manoah. On behalf of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, we order you to surface immediately and stand down. Failure to do so will be met with complete and total destruction. You have twenty seconds to begin surfacing. Do not keep me waiting."

I took a deep breath and watched the submarine's track on the left projector screen. Even after Misato's message was sent, the submarine stayed on a beeline for international waters.

"So this is it," I said, throwing a pen aside. "This is how we go to war."

"They fired first," said Misato, staring coldly at the screen. "We're justified in doing whatever we want now."

I nodded. That was true; it didn't make it feel any better, though.

The last few seconds ticked away. Hyuga touched his earpiece and looked to Misato, who gave a single nod.

"All right," said Hyuga. "Envoy, notify Takanami. We're sinking that boat."

The middle projector screen turned to a night-vision image of the water. The submarine raced for international waters, but the destroyer Takanami and its attack helicopters were on the scene. All they had to do was launch a couple anti-submarine torpedoes, and that would be it. Once Chinese equipment was discovered in the wreckage, there'd be no turning back.

But as the submarine made the border to international waters, Takanami did not fire.

Hyuga sat back down at his station, poring over the information on his screens.

"Talk to me, people," said Misato. "Why is that boat still floating?"

"Control, message from attack helicopter Takanami-H018," said Hyuga. "Takanami is not responding to communications."

"Is she intact?"

The satellite view panned northwest. The destroyer Takanami was a modern naval ship, first of her class, with a large electronics mast, missile launchers, and a 127-millimeter gun near the bow. She was sleek, modern, and alive—alive with infrared signatures all over her length, the signs of her sailors keeping her afloat and combat-ready.

So why were these heat signatures fighting each other?

"We want a visual," said Misato. "How did the Chinese get a boarding party over our water without us noticing? Get Makinami and Kirishima over to assist."

"Envoy, get the Americans on the horn," instructed Hyuga. "We need a visual wavelength satellite image of Takanami's position."

The communications envoy got on the line, and the last of the three projector screen panels flipped to a globe mockup, with an American satellite coming turning to get an image momentarily.

"Ikari." That was Nozomi, stuck in the flickering light of the entry plug. "What's going on?"

"Can you get to the surface?"

"With or without losing my lunch? I'm going in circles here."

"Any way you can. Something's wrong. Get to Takanami."

The satellite image came up a few lines at a time on the right projector screen. The destroyer's electronics mast was bent, and in the glow of the deck lights, MSDF sailors took arms against the boarders.

But those guns were ineffective, for the white, pasty creatures just shrugged off bullets and invaded the sailors' minds with their needle-like fingers.

"Ikari…" Nozomi drew her prog knife. "We've got problems here!"

The walkers. They materialized out of the water—the red, LCL-tainted water. As Nozomi and Unit-14 bobbed out of the water—the green, black, and white Eva looking like a fat, deflated beach ball—the creatures materialized around the Eva. The creatures clung to the Eva's armor. The poked and pried at the Eva's back—where two bulbous buoyancy tanks attached to the Eva's frame.

"Reports coming in from the fleet, Ops," said the envoy officer. "Alien boarding parties attacking all ships within six nautical miles of Takanami. Kirishima reports alien forces attacking propellers."

Misato hurried back to her station, taking in the flurry of reports. "All right, let's get Makinami to Unit-14 for recovery. Let her know that 14 is engaged with the Zenunim. Kirishima needs to fight her way to Takanami, and let's get some more air support from Naha." She looked over the whole room. "Buckle down, people. This is far from over."

I got on the headset to the Eva. "Nozomi, you need to get away. Fall back to Makinami."

"Fall back?"

She worked the controls wildly. The creatures crawled all over her, and just when she sliced one in two, another alien grew out of the water and took the other's place.

"You got an idea for that?"

"You think they can hang on if you go full thrust?"

"I can't go straight!"

I pressed my palm to my forehead and groaned. "You—you, uh—" I snapped my fingers. "You've got a knife for a rudder!"

Her eyes widened. "You're not serious."

"Do you think I'm joking?"

Mouth half agape, she stuck the knife in the water behind her, and she flipped a pair of switches on the controls, and she hung on for dear life.

KA-WHOOSH! The Eva skipped across the ocean, churning the water into a frothy wake. Some of the creatures lost their grip and disintegrated once they hit the water, but some hung on to hack and pick at the Eva's equipment, and one of those aliens' needle-like fingers jabbed into the Eva's back armor.

"Left buoyancy tank pierced!" one of the controllers cried. "We're not going to be able to dive again!"

Not like anybody wanted to dive right then!

"I'm coming up on Makinami here," said Nozomi, "but nobody's answering me to lower the island."

Unit-14 came up on the destroyer, but though the lights were on, the only sounds from above were the waves crashing against the hull and gunfire. The Eva floated—if you could even call it that—with a heavy list. The jet intake on the Eva's right side was forced out of the water, rendering it sputtering and useless. Nozomi stabbed and kicked away the creatures that harassed her, for that was all she could do.

"What's our time of arrival?" asked Misato. "Unit-14 is going to be a fancy seabed ornament at this rate."

"Aircraft from Naha on station in eight minutes," reported Hyuga. "Ise is scrambling two Seahawks escorting a Merlin with portable flotation, ETA five minutes."

Misato slammed a hand on her desk. "We don't have that much time," she muttered, pressing two fingers against her temple. "Let's get Takanami's Seahawk over there. Have it strafe the water to try to get Unit-14 some cover."

I took one ear of my headset off. "You're going to have them shoot the Eva?"

"The Eva has an AT field, and its flesh and blood can be regrown."

"Not if Nozomi takes a machine gun round, or if the buoyancy tank is ruptured!"

"I don't see—"

"Control, incoming message from the Chinese," said the communications envoy.

Misato scowled. "What do they want?"

"They want…to assist."

Raising an eyebrow, Misato rose from her station and came around, standing with Hyuga and me. "Assist?"

"They're offering to send boats with marine detachments to fight off the aliens. They also advise running at full steam to make it more difficult for the aliens to board."

"They're being boarded, too?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the envoy.

"We'd have to let their boats close to our ships," noted Hyuga. "What's to stop them from trying to commandeer one of ours in the confusion?"

"Too much of a risk," said Misato. She looked to the communications envoy. "Tell them we decline. We've got this under control."

I shot up from my station. "Misato!"

She glared, folding her arms. "What is it, Plugcom?"

"We do not have this under control!" I pointed at the monitor. "Nozomi is about to sink. Help is not going to get there in time. Two ships are overrun by the creatures, and a third is losing power. They're offering to help!"

"Are they? Are you sure?" She gestured to the projector screen. "You see that thin line up there? That is the only thing protecting us from them invading with everything they've got. If we give them permission to come across, then the floodgates are open. There's no stopping it. Just because they say they want to help doesn't mean they do! They just fired on Nozomi not five minutes ago!"

"I know that!" I bowed my head, and I hissed, forcing air between my teeth. "I know that, but—" I balled my fist. "Misato, let them show you we're not alone in fighting this war." I looked up to her, and I lowered my voice to a whisper. "You don't have to do this alone. You don't have to shoulder all of the burden. You don't have to carry the memories of the dead like a yoke. You don't have to punish yourself to feel better about still being here while your father and Kaji aren't."

Her eyes flashed. "Shinji—"

"This is what you want, right?" I said, unwavering. "You want them to stand up and do the right thing, don't you? You want them to fight on our side against the enemy—the real enemy—don't you?"

Misato stared at me. Her hand clenched the cubicle divider between my station and Hyuga's. Her knuckles were white and tense. "No," she said at last. "We're not taking that chance. We—"

She stopped abruptly, in mid-sentence. She looked past my station, but there were only an empty cubicle and an aisle there.

"Misato?" I asked, rising, but she raised a hand and silenced me. She looked past the empty cubicle for several seconds, but what she was focused on I couldn't discern. It was as if a gnat were flying around the control room, its pitch so high and faint that only she could hear it.

"Hyuga," she said at last.

"Yes, General?"

"Get the Chinese. Tell them they can send boats only. Our choppers will give escort. If they so much as move a ship one centimeter over the line, sink them."

Hyuga let out a small breath in relief. "Yes, General. We're on it." He nodded across the aisle at one of the officers. "You heard the general, didn't you?" he said.

The officer nodded hastily and got on the radio. Within minutes, a group of Chinese patrol boats journeyed across the line into undisputed international waters. Two went to the aid of Takanami and Kirishima. The rest came for the Eva. The Chinese gunners peppered the creatures with barrages of bullets, driving them off the Eva's back, and they threw ropes around the Eva to keep it on the surface, even at the risk of their own boats sinking if it should lose buoyancy. They did this even as the creatures tried to crawl onto their boats. The Chinese lobbed hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the water just to keep the creatures at bay.

And they succeeded. They kept the creatures down long enough for Ise's pack of three choppers to arrive with large buoys, keeping Nozomi afloat., The Chinese teams boarded Makinami, helping the defenders retake the bridge and the engine room.

"Manoah Base, Manoah Base, this is Makinami," the radio cried. "The ship is partially secured; the aliens are being driven down toward the lower levels. We've reclaimed the deck and are working to bring Unit-14 in as we speak. Our Chinese…comrades have been a great help. Surprisingly."

The crewmen of Makinami deployed the artificial island—a netting underlain by a half-dozen buoys and crossbeams for the Eva to ride upon—and Nozomi gladly took refuge there. With her engine room cleared, Makinami made full speed away from the battle zone. The creatures in the water couldn't grab on fast enough, and those still aboard ship were cut down and filled in with sand, just in case they had the idea to reconstitute.

The Battle of the East China Sea was a victory after all, just not over the enemy we expected.

And you know what? I think that was far sweeter than the victory we'd hoped for. I know it to be true, for I remember the relief on Nozomi's face when we sent the Chinese back on their way. She sat back in the entry plug chair, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to rest.

I remember Misato's reaction, too, when the Chinese left peacefully. She stood between Hyuga and me, at the divider between our stations, and she said, "Envoy?"

The communications officer met her gaze.

"Get a message the Chinese commander."

"Yes, General?"

Misato pursed her lips for a moment. She stared at the map of Japan and China, and she said,

"Tell the commander we look forward to fighting alongside them."

The envoy relayed the message in Chinese, and Misato went back to her station, hands folded, staring beyond the projector screens, and shortly after came the reply.

"They say, 'Likewise,' General."

At that, Misato dared to smile, just a little.



The next day, Asuka and I went to the arcade.

"This thing's gotta be rigged!"

That was Toji. You didn't think Asuka and I went alone, did you?

Toji was locked in an epic battle between man and machine—man and claw machine, that is. His quest to pick out a plush rabbit from the bin had cost him a thousand yen with no end in sight. When the rabbit's head slipped out of the claw's grasp once again, Toji slapped the side of the machine in frustration.

"It's rigged!"

At that, Horaki stepped in. "Maybe it's time someone else had a try?"

"I dunno if both of us should waste our money on this thing…"

Horaki laughed to herself at that. "Humor me, Suzuhara."

Toji made a show of stepping aside, and Horaki put in her coins to start the machine. She guided the claw to a second plush rabbit, further in one of the corners, that sat higher on the prize stack than the first. She pressed a button, and the claw descended, grabbing the plush rabbit in one go.

When the rabbit fell into the award bin, Horaki presented it to Toji. "I believe this is what you were looking for?"

Toji bowed his head, put his hands together, and begged, "No, please, keep it, but teach me your ways, Master!"

Kensuke slapped him on the shoulder. "Man, weren't you going to give that to your sister?"

"It's fine!" Toji barked back. "I needed to win two of them!".

"Two?" At that, Horaki beamed, and she tucked the plush rabbit under her arm. "I see. Well, I think I can help with that. Let's try again, shall we, Suzuhara?"

Kensuke frowned. "But what about the first one? Don't you—"

Toji slapped the back of his head.

"Oh!" cried Kensuke. "I get it!"

The girl beside me shook her head at that. "Now he gets it? Just now?"

That was Nozomi. We sat together at one of the concession tables, just a few meters from Toji, Kensuke, and Horaki—though the din of games awarding prizes and such made it difficult to hear them, sometimes.

"So, Ikari," said Nozomi, "let's see what you have."

What I had was a rudimentary sketch of the arcade. I'd tried to ignore the people, just focusing on the shapes and sizes of the arcade games, the shadows they cast in the overhead lights, and so on, but I wasn't too impressed. The angles didn't all seem right, the sizes were inconsistent with each other, and the lines weren't even straight.

"Hmm." Nozomi tapped her pencil on the side of her sketchpad. "Maybe we should start with something simpler. Just one game, even. Try using short strokes instead of long, straight lines. Do it lightly, so you can connect them later, and no one will really notice."

Short strokes, huh?

I flipped the page and started again, picking out just the claw game's outline. With light, dashed strokes, I put down a rectangle for the box's nearest face.

"Not bad," said Nozomi. "Now, one thing you'll have to keep in mind here is perspective. The sides of the game are angles compared to your viewpoint, and the left side is going to be angled more. But both those sides should seem to angle towards a point straight ahead of you, far into the distance."

She touched her pencil to my page at a single spot near the top middle.

"Try angling them toward that."

I added sets of dashes from the top and bottom of the game's box, the furthest left more angled than the others.

"Good. Now you just connect them at the top and back, and you're getting started."

"I see," I said, frowning. "So to begin, it's all more technical than it is artistic, isn't it?"

"A little bit is, yeah," said Nozomi, going to her sketch. "But once you have a handle of the technical side, you can decide you don't want something photorealistic. You can decide to pretend you're not as good for effect, you know?"

I peered at her sketch. Her technique was usually perfect, but this time, she cast most of the people in the arcade as shaded, undetailed forms. Only Horaki, Toji, and Kensuke had proper faces.

"So this is what it means," I said, "to draw."

"At least to learn," she said.

"Yeah," I said, hunkering down over the sketchpad again. "To learn."

By the end of that hour, I had a decent framework for an arcade game's box, at least. And you know what? I felt accomplished for that. It took work and some trial-and-error, but I did it. It was mine, done with my own hand. And Nozomi and I? We did it together.

But after a while trying that, I got up and went around the arcade for a bit, looking for…inspiration, perhaps. Something I couldn't capture in just a simple arcade box was the lively atmosphere of the place. All the lights and noise made the place feel like a living creature in its own right. Each different section of the place was like an organ, fulfilling its own function and servicing different needs.

"Hey, Shinji!"

A voice called to me from the air hockey tables. Maya waved with one of the knockers in her hand, and her opponent—Aoba—gave me a respectful nod as well.

"It's a wonderful party!" Maya called out.

I waved back to them, and they went about their game. You see, not everybody likes air hockey, but those two did, and that part of the arcade served them.

"Everyone's having a good time, eh?"

And that was Kyoji Ishikawa. His hair was a mess, and as usual, he didn't look serious enough or professional enough to be a spy. If anything, he looked the part of an overgrown child enjoying himself in an arcade. The huge stick of cotton candy in his hand probably reinforced this notion.

"Thanks for the invite," he said, nodding to me.

"I'm glad you could be here," I told him.

The mood was much the same with other areas of the arcade. The shooting games tended to appeal to the SDF types, for instance. I caught Captain Suzuki blasting dinosaurs back to the Jurassic period in one game, for instance. In another part, the SDF members in the party were holding an impromptu tournament of sorts, seeing who could get the high score in the zombie shooter.

Naturally, the last man standing there was the last woman standing.

"You think you're all that? You think you can touch me?"

Bang-bang! Misato disintegrated two zombies without blinking, and as the game tallied up her score for the level, she blew at the tip of the light gun, as though she were an American gunslinger.

"That's right, folks, the general is in, and she's taking no prisoners! Who thinks I'm gonna hit 300,000 points in this game?"

There were some scattered cheers, but Misato scowled.

"Well, then you're wrong because I'm gonna hit 400,000 in the blink of an eye!"

That got more applause, but the cheers were short-lived.

"Sorry, General?" Hyuga cut through the crowd. "Sorry, there's a matter that requires your attention."

The bystanders griped over this, appealing to Hyuga to let it go. "Come on. Can't it wait for a few minutes?" one officer said.

"I'm afraid it shouldn't," said Hyuga. "Sorry."

Misato made an exaggerated sigh. "Someone wanna keep the gun warm for me?"

"I've got it!" Raising a hand, Asuka stepped forward. "Nothing's getting past me, Misato."

Misato presented the orange light gun with a bow. "My game and score are in your hands, Asuka."

"I'll serve them well," said Asuka, returning the gesture.

"Hey, what about the high score list?" asked someone in the crowd.

"We don't need scores to know who's the best at this," said Asuka, keeping the light gun down while a cutscene played. She looked to me. "Shinji! Get over here!"

"Me?" I said.

"Yeah, you! You're done trying to be an artist for a bit, right? Then you're mine now!"

I gave a fake salute. "Yes, ma'am." And I took up the second light gun, saying, "We need to be careful here. Enemies come in from both sides."

"If you need help, yell." She winked. "I'll do the same."

I smiled at that, but a few words caught my ear from nearby:

"…just past Pluto?"

Misato and Hyuga were discussing something, but I couldn't make out the rest. Misato's face was tense, though, and she pressed two fingers to her temple.

"Shinji?" Asuka tapped my arm. "Game's on."

I shot two zombies without even thinking, and I didn't let my eyes wander from the screen for the rest of the game.

Asuka and I only held out for a few more minutes—Misato had advanced deep into the game, and we were both in over our heads at that point. We tried a game of our own, but that didn't go much of anywhere, either.

By the time we were finished, Misato and Hyuga had spread the word for everyone in the party to gather. The remaining members of Project Manoah grouped up in the main dining area for the arcade, and Misato stood on top of a table to address us all. She was glad so many of us had come out for this day—a day of rest and relief after the hardships of an invasion and terror. That we could stand there and enjoy ourselves, even for a brief moment, made us special:

"You're a testament to what makes SDF—and all humanity—great," she said, beaming. "Take pride in that, and remember: though we've faced many tragedies, we've endured. And though our world still needs rebuilding, though we must defend ourselves from those who'd send us back to the sea, I urge all of you to make time for days like these. The fire of duty burns inside each and every one of you." She smiled as she looked over the crowd. "I see it clearly, but make sure you see it in others, too, and don't let it consume you."

I tensed up. I glanced around, but there was nothing out of place. The arcade cabinets glowed, casting the room in an otherworldly light. A few children tried their hands at a claw game.

"Don't let that fire consume you," Misato said again, holding a hand over her chest. "This world is not saved without you to inhabit it, too."

She glanced in my direction, and I nodded to acknowledge her. She smiled, and she said at last,

"Never forget that, everyone. Never."

The general descended to hollers and cheers from the assembled SDF members. And though the party was breaking up, Misato was not yet done enjoying herself. She made her way back toward the zombie shooter game, where Asuka and I had come from. Misato slapped me on the shoulder as she passed me by. "High score yet?" she asked.

I shook my head. We hadn't come close.

"You can't leave without getting a high score," she said, winking. "It's a rule."

I raised two eyebrows. "Is it now?"

She nodded vehemently, and she looked to Asuka. "Can I borrow your man?"

"Only if you can teach him how to shoot," said Asuka.

"Done and done." Misato circled in front of me. "Well, Shinji—what do you say?"

What could I say?

That depended on who was asking. Was she the woman who raised me for the better part of a year, who mothered me when I had neither mother nor father to turn to?

Was she the woman who kept her father's cross on her desk as a constant reminder of something lost?

Was she the woman who wore the cherry blossoms in gold on her shoulders, even in the wee hours of the morning?

Or was she just another woman in an antiquated arcade, searching for solace and companionship in a world that pierced our hearts so often?

I looked around as I tried to decide whether to humor her with another game. After all, I hadn't done too well in my first round. My gaze wandered the room, happening upon the far wall of the arcade. There were glowing figures that didn't belong there—the figures of Ayanami and the stranger in the satin hood.

Their gazes pierced me—even the gaze of the stranger whose eyes could not be seen. Their gazes went right through the holes in my own heart.

It was a sharp reminder, I believe, that such holes should be mended truly, not plugged up with deeds we tell ourselves are for others.

And so, I joined Misato Katsuragi. I joined her because she was all of those things I said before, not just one of them more than the others. She was a mother and a general, an orphaned daughter and a grown woman all in one.

I wanted to see her happy, and not just because it would help her. It made me happy, too.

So Misato and I lined up at the zombie shooter once more, and we went at it for hours. Misato was a much better shooter than I, and we must've spent the first hour just trying to get my posture right for firing a light gun. Even then, we'd get devoured every so often. Those games were notoriously random and unfair.

Maybe it was silly, to put so much energy into an arcade game. It was a momentary respite. It wasn't meant to last. We'd be back at the real war soon enough, after all.

But silly or not, Misato and I kept plugging away, and when the night was done, we left with the second high score.

And I don't regret that.

Cherry Blossoms in Faded Gold
The Second Coming Part Three End​

 

[Muphrid]

Part Four: The White Coat

20. Black Moon's Arrival

If you didn't experience it, if you weren't around for it, I wonder—can you imagine something everyone on Earth would watch?

A lot of people might watch a World Cup or a US presidential election, but those events don't interest everyone. They don't even interest most people.

But I haven't yet spoken to someone—if they had a television, or knew someone who owned one, or knew somewhere they could see one—who didn't watch the Black Moon's arrival.

As TV cameras tracked a fireball in the sky, occasionally the telecast would switch to scenes from Japan and around the world. In Tokyo-2, traffic came to a standstill. People stood in the streets—in the middle of the street!—watching the Black Moon's descent on skyscraper video boards. In Los Angeles, Berlin, and London, the scene was the same. For a few minutes, all the world stopped in awe, trepidation, and horror.

I can only imagine what it was like to be there—to stand on the beach at Nigercoil, at the southern tip of India, and to marvel at the fire in the sky.

No one I know was there. Misato didn't dare send the Eva against an unknown threat. Only a few scout cutters from the Indian Navy dared approach the projected splashdown point.

But the Black Moon didn't land there: it hovered over water with supernatural lightness, casting a shadow over the Indian ships.

I've sometimes wondered what those sailors felt as that sphere passed over them and blotted out the sun. Were they afraid? Did they tremble as an artificial mass nearly fifteen kilometers in diameter hovered overhead?

Or were they angry and defiant, manning the cutters' guns and training lead on the enemy?

I don't know if anyone who wasn't there knows the answer, actually.

I've yet to meet any of those sailors.

I doubt anyone has, for once the door to the Black Moon opened…

The beasts of the underworld poured out and melted them all.



How do you sleep after something like that?

The reality is that you don't sleep very well.

The next morning I spent most of the wee hours staring at the ceiling above my bed. Every so often, I glanced over at the clock on our nightstand to see what the time was. 3 o'clock passed, then 4, then 5. After a while you wonder where the time went, even though it feels like eternity too. Time still passed. We just weren't doing anything with it.

"This sucks," said Asuka at one point. She pounded her fist into the pillow in frustration, but it didn't do any good. Asuka was more restless than I—she tossed and turned all the time, trying to find some way to sleep. I just lay there, knowing that it was useless.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, it does."

I shut my eyes anyway, but only for a few minutes. 5:00 turned to 5:03--then 5:06, 5:10, 5:15…

So the minutes went until 5:30. The alarm went off for about a half-second before my finger was on it and our attempt to sleep was over. We were up.

Lights came in with the flick of a switch—not that there was much to see in our base quarters. The ceiling was just generic, speckled tile panels.

Clothes? No issue. Mine were folded up at the desk, and Asuka had a hanger set up with brown pants, a sweater, and a cleaned laboratory coat. We cleaned our teeth in a flash and were out of the room by 5:32.

Our first stop was the officers' mess. Breakfast was already on the table when we got there, with eggs, natto, miso soup, rice, and tofu all available, plus a few SDF mess staff available to cook eggs or tofu for you on the spot. Far from a pleasant sit-down breakfast, though, it was more of a quick stop: officers were constantly in and out of the mess at various times. Hyuga himself stopped by only for a piece of toast and coffee. He shot us both an apologetic look before leaving his cup at the head of the table.

"Better to be early, right?" said Asuka between bites of scrambled egg.

"Yeah," I said, nodding, and like the rest of the officers and civilians, we made quick work of our breakfast, too.

Our rushed morning's final destination was the control room. At 15 minutes to the hour, it was only partially staffed, with positions sitting open and staffers filing in and out with paperwork, reconnaissance, and other material.

I dare say the only one who didn't seem rushed or hurried to get ready was the commander herself: Misato sat back in her high chair, eyes shut and breathing slowly, but as soon as I sat down, she said,

"Are you ready to save the world, Mister Ikari?"

And yes, she did say Mister, in English. I don't know why, but it stunned me long enough to be caught by Misato and the one eye she opened to look at me.

"Well?" she said. "Are you?"

"That depends," I said, putting on my headset. "What are we up against?"

Misato sighed at that, looking aside. "An unfair fight—what else would it be? Recon's on your desk."

I scooted forward and flipped through the folder on my desk. I saw the photos. I glimpsed the enemy and read what it was capable of.

I shut the folder and hissed. "Does she know?" I asked, glancing over my shoulder.

Misato nodded. "She's not happy."

"She usually isn't."

"She's less happy than usual."

Sighing, I typed at the computer in front of me, logging into the communications system.

"Shinji."

"Yes?"

"Stay cool, now."

I smiled to myself. "You're setting a good example there."

"It's something I'm trying to learn."

I peeked over my shoulder, but the general in green had her eyes closed again. She nodded with her breath steady as the time to launch ticked away.

That couldn't be said for our pilot. I brought up the entry plug camera, and Nozomi was contorted over the entry plug's seat like a gymnast trying a surreal trick.

"Be glad you never had to do this, Ikari," she said.

"Are you hanging in there?" I asked.

She huffed at that. "I'm hanging from something all right."

I glanced at the feed from an exterior camera: Eva-14 was clamped to the belly of a jet airliner. At least it wasn't too uncomfortable for Nozomi—in air launch configuration, the entry plug seat was rotated to keep the blood rushing from her head. Still, just knowing you're strapped to the belly of an aluminum bird isn't the most comforting thing in the world.

"Sorry," I said. "Let's go with, uh, how are you holding up?"

"I'm not holding up. I'm being held up."

I raised both eyebrows and stared at her. "Nozomi."

"Sorry, just a little worried about this I guess." Nozomi sighed, and she started looking forward again. "Have you seen the briefs, Ikari?" she asked.

I nodded, averting my gaze.

"You got any ideas?"

"I don't, really."

"Big help," she said, huffing. "Why's that?"

"Usually," I said, "we outnumbered the Angels when we fought them."

"Fair." She pulled herself up in her seat, and she grasped the controls, ready for action. "You ready?"

"Nope, but I'll try anyway."

She huffed again, breaking into a wry smile. "I've heard of worse plans."

We said nothing more for a time, not until Eva-14 flew over the target.

The place was Ho Chi Minh City. A coastal town, Ho Chi Minh City was a prime target for the enemy. The walkers—those ghastly, nigh-unkillable beasts with needle-like fingers—had materialized from the ocean and pushed into the city. They liquefied civilians one at a time, and all it took to dissolve a man was a stab to the head, held long enough to torment the victim until he or she gave in. They were like raging bulls, and every man, woman, and child in their way may as well have been wearing red.

That's not to say no one tried to put the bulls down. The People's Army rolled into town from the north, and as sectors of the city fell, the PAVN resorted to bombarding the city with artillery. Nothing short of obliterating the enemy would do—otherwise, they would just regenerate and come back fighting—so the PAVN made the city burn. In some places, they didn't even bother waiting to hear all the civilians had escaped or been taken. A dark haze hung over the city, with fires starting at the water and petering out further north.

Yet where men dared make camp to rain fire and metal on the enemy, there was no true safety.

Why, you ask?

Because an Angel came after them.

It was like a snowflake, or a fractal: a repeating, geometric pattern branched out from its center, shrinking with each iteration so that the very edge of the Angel was really an infinite number of smaller branches tapering out, each built on top of another. The Fractal Angel floated over the northern suburbs of the city, gutting buildings, artillery, and tanks without truly touching them. It just floated nearby and cut anything in the vicinity in two.

The Angels had come again, and there was nothing else to do but rush headlong into battle and hope for the best.

"Separation in ten, nine…," one of the controllers announced.

If the enemy loomed on our doorstep, our only option was to take the fight to them before they breached the gate.

"Eight, seven, six…"

Standing at his station, Hyuga counted down to separation. Nozomi Horaki flew in Eva-14, latched to the back of a cargo plane. She hung on for dear life, and all of us—all humanity—clung to our hopes with her.

"Five, four, three…"

From Misato, who sat at the rear of the control room floor, overseeing its every move; to Asuka and the gaggle of scientists and engineers monitoring the Eva's heartbeat, nerve impulses, and more; and to me in my stuffy cubicle, with just a few monitors around me and file folders laid out like a photographer's portfolio.

So we had gathered—dozens of us, maybe fifty in all—to try to save the world.

"Two, one, separation!"

The cargo plane dove down, and Eva-14—wielding a black airfoil on each arm—glided over water to the battle site.

What awaited the Eva was shrouded in smoke. A city by the ocean burned, and though Nozomi couldn't see around the smoke, our satellites could. As the Eva flew toward battle, new fires broke out in the city every few seconds, for a constant barrage of small explosions peppered the beach and the streets nearby—not to destroy the buildings or the people.

You see, there were no more people left there. There were only those things. The bulls ran the streets, as it were. That's what the bombardment was meant for. It was the only thing that could slow them down. It may have kept the walkers at bay, but the Fractal Angel was undeterred: it flew over the ground with supernatural flight, and as it did so, it cut anything and everything beneath it. Buildings? Gutted. Tanks? Split in two. Artillery pieces? Mangled beyond all recognition.

So you see, when Nozomi and Eva-14 emerged from the cloud of smoke over the city, when she sighted the Snowflake Angel in the distance, she banked the launch envelope's airfoils, turning her toward the Angel.

But as the Angel helped the walkers invade the city, the Angel had help for it, too.

THUD! Nozomi rocked in her seat, and the Eva pulled down on one side, tilting off course.

"What was that?" I cried, rising from my seat. "Nozomi!"

She winced, and she popped the prog knife through a slot in the launch envelope.

"It's hanging on to my back…"

It was a white, leathery-winged creature, and there were many more like it. Unit-14 flew through a flock of them, and they didn't "fly" so much as spin to maintain altitude. These three-limbed creatures floated like frisbees, with each limb holding the fleshy part of an adjacent wing to form a disc.

Only when one landed, like one did on Unit-14's back, did we get a good look at its face: its three-eyed face with gnashing fangs.

The creature clung to the launch envelope's right wing, and no matter how Unit-14 twisted and stabbed at it, the beast wouldn't let go.

"Nozomi, hard impact!" I said. "Release!"

"Urgh." Nozomi jammed a switch on her controls, and the launch envelope blew apart. She curled the Eva into a ball, grabbed the levers tightly, and—

Ka-PANG! Unit-14 skidded on the soft ground, rolling along the side of a road. It smashed into a two-story building and stopped halfway through the structure, lying in a heap of splintered wood and shattered glass.

"Okay…" Nozomi slid back into her seat, pressing a hand to her chest where the restraints had caught her. She winced. "That sucked. Can we not do that again?"

There was a rumbling beneath the Eva's feet. Broken light fixtures snapped off the ceiling and fell to the ground.

"Ops, pattern white signal is closing on Unit-14's position," said one of the controllers.

I pressed down hard on the transmit switch on my headset. "Nozomi, second Angel is coming your way!"

The Eva—big, round, and lumbering as it was—pulled itself to its feet. "It's underneath me right now," said Nozomi, as the Eva swayed to keep its balance, "isn't it?"

I looked over the wall of my cubicle at the detection controller, who nodded twice, grimly.

"You're not going to let that get in your way, are you, Nozomi?" I said.

She smirked at that. "Nope."

The Eva bolted. It dashed over the soft, wet ground, making a beeline for the Snowflake Angel. As the Eva kicked up divots and left gashes in its steps, Nozomi bared her prog knife and rushed past the front line of artillery pieces. Soldiers and vehicles alike scampered out of her way.

But the ground quaked and trembled before Unit-14, and from the depths of the earth emerged the second Angel: a giant worm. It slithered out of the ground and wrapped up Unit-14 the way a constrictor might kill a rabbit or a hen. Three times the size of the Eva, the Worm Angel wrapped Unit-14 up and had room to spare to press its mouthparts against the Eva's AT field. Those mouthparts had several independent rings, each spinning opposite the other, and together, they drilled into Unit-14's AT field, shedding bolts of energy as they ripped the AT field apart.

"Ops," said the detection officer, "pattern red is retreating, but S2 engine output is increasing."

"Ops," said Asuka, "Unit-14 is showing one AT field layer breached. Synch rate cut to 50%. Significant stress on the left ankle and ribcage. We've got to get her out of there soon."

Hyuga looked back, to Misato, but the general shrugged her shoulders. "Your show, Captain," she said, "but I'd consider getting her out of that pickle before worrying about what the first Angel is doing."

Hyuga nodded at that, and he tapped his fingers on the top of the cubicle wall.

"All right," he said, "Shinji, break out the emergency maneuvers. We can't let Unit-14 become compromised in this position."

I got on the radio. "Nozomi, what can you do to break free?"

"From this position?" Nozomi swayed left and right in her seat, but no matter how she angled herself, the Worm Angel's body blocked her view. "Is that a serious question?" she asked.

"What about the—the, uh—" I frowned, and I tapped the side of my head with a pen. "The Cyclops Maneuver?"

The Eva twisted and shuddered; the Worm's grip tightened, and Nozomi grabbed her wrist, wincing. "I'll—" She bit down on her lip. "I'll face up—just try to get it to back off. A direct attack could backfire, right?"

"Yeah, I agree."

"Okay." Nozomi nodded, and she started breathing more heavily. "Let's do it. Have them dial it up. Are we good?"

I looked to Hyuga, but he didn't seem to be on board: his eyes were narrow and his jaw clenched. "That's dangerous at this range," he said.

"She can pull it off. We've practiced it more than enough."

He sighed with his mouth closed and stared at the middle screen on the wall, on which Unit-14 was having the life squeezed out of it.

"All right," he said, announcing over the communications loop for all to hear. "Cyclops Maneuver. Let's go."

The room erupted with a flurry of chatter between controllers, but one voice stood out over the rest: Asuka's.

"Increasing plug depth," she said, standing over the virtual gauge on her monitor. "110% normal depth, 120%…"

"Gah!" Nozomi convulsed. Her hands clenched the controls, and a piece of plastic failed under that force, cracking along a seam.

"Is it bad?" I asked, rising.

"It's like—" She was hyperventilating. "It's like getting trapped in quicksand!"

"That's because you are getting trapped," I said, keeping my eyes on the entry plug feed. "The Eva has you. Do you feel her? She's speaking to you. She speaks to you, and you don't even know what she sounds like because she sounds like you. You sound like the Eva in your mind, and she sounds like you. Right?"

She went strangely calm then. She stared right at the camera, eyes wide.

"We sound the same." Her eyes flickered away and stared into space. "We are the same?"

I bowed my head, let out a breath, and stared at my desk as I opened the radio line again. "Yes, you are the same. And it—it hurts, doesn't it? It hurts to be together, and what the Angel is doing hurts, too." I peeked up. "Right?"

The Worm Angel's grip tightened further, bending the Eva's arms away from its body, yet Nozomi didn't react immediately. She just sat a little more upright in her seat and cast her arms away from her, like the Eva's, as though connected to the creature through a puppeteer's strings.

"We don't want this to hurt anymore." Her eyes narrowed, and her whole body trembled. "No more."

"Do you see what's hurting you?"

She nodded.

"Make it go away."

Nozomi set her sights on the Worm Angel, and—

TCH-CHEW!

A light blasted through the Worm's body; it shot across the whole battlefield and cut through the haze of smoke above. The Eva's eyes—all six of them—glowed a bright and dangerous red.

Though its armor charred from the blast, the Eva stepped through the hole in the Worm's body on its own two feet, grabbed the severed tail of the Worm, and promptly started smashing the Worm's head part with the bleeding tail. It bashed the enemy a hundred times over in seconds, attacking with inhuman speed: its arms blurred, and Unit-14 panted and growled with an animalistic heaving.

"Wake up, Nozomi!" I cried. "I have some graphite pencils for you! Graphite! Graphite!"

"Graphite sucks!" She shook herself and slapped her cheek, shaking off her trance. "It sucks! Do you hear me?" Her body lost its tension, and she sagged over the plug controls, panting. "They suck, right?" she said, laughing to herself.

"Yeah," I said, smiling in turn. "They suck. Good work, Nozomi."

"It's not time for 'good work' yet." Misato rose, leaning over her desk to supervise the room. "What's the story with the first Angel?"

The Fractal Angel had retreated about a kilometer and a half from Nozomi's position, but it had stopped right there, on the outskirts of town. "S2 engine output is 220% of baseline and rising, and the Angel's AT field wavevector is fluctuating," one of the controllers explained. "It could be an inversion."

"A wavevector inversion?" Hyuga stormed over to the controller's station. "Are you sure?"

"No, sir, that's the worst case," said the controller, pointing with her hand at the monitor's readouts. "I can't tell if an inversion is likely, but it's possible, and at this range and S2 engine output level—"

"Then Nozomi is goo," muttered Hyuga. He balled his hand into a fist. "Shinji, get her to that Angel. We're running out of time."

"Nozomi." I pressed the earpiece so hard it hurt. "Get to the Fractal. Waypoint's on your screen. Go, now!"

Unit-14 dashed across the soft land near the river delta. It ran on all fours like a bear, and the ground rumbled with each of the Eva's heavy strides.

But the Eva wasn't the only beast to roam the city outskirts. A brown tendril shot out and grabbed Unit-14 by the ankle.

"Oh no you don't!" Nozomi sliced the tendril clean, but though the Eva picked itself up from the ground, it had already lost time: the Worm Angel was in pursuit. Shorter and stubbier than it had been before, it was no less quick to slither and crawl over the muddy ground, using its tendrils to fling itself forward when needed.

"Don't let it slow you down," I instructed over the radio. "It's a distraction. Get to the Fractal!"

"Total wavevector inversion!" one of the controllers cried. "S2 engine output at 1000% baseline!"

"All right," said Misato, sitting forward from her seat above the control room. "Asuka, get Captain Ibuki on the horn."

Asuka typed at her console, and she unplugged her headset. "You're on, Misato."

"Ibuki," said the general, "what is the minimum safe distance for Unit-14?"

"We're working on that right now, Control," said Maya. "We have—let's see, safe distance for AT field inversion at 100% baseline power is 800 meters, and the distance doubles for every factor of four in power above that. 1000% should be…about 2.5-kilometer blast zone."

"1600% baseline now," said the detection controller.

Hyuga covered his microphone. "Control, I think we have to assume the Angel's goal is to liquefy the whole city. It's not going to settle for taking out a handful of city blocks."

Misato narrowed her eyes, staring at the front screens. "Is she going to make it?"

Unit-14 batted away another pair of tendrils as the worm gave chase. It hopped over two-story buildings, collapsing the ground behind them as it ran.

Nozomi set her sights on the Fractal angel, which sat unnaturally on a point of its spiky body pattern, but the Angel glowed, brimming with energy. Its light cast shadows across the cityscape and blinded me even through the entry plug camera.

"100,000% baseline!" cried the detection controller.

The Worm Angel burrowed into the ground.

"Nozomi, get down!" I yelled.

Unit-14 skidded to a halt. It curled into a ball, and—

The light exploded. A wall of glowing octagons held between Unit-14 and the blast wave, but overwhelming light surrounded the Eva, searing it from all sides.

"That's enough!"

Misato rose, and she looked to the ceiling.

"We're not losing Unit-14 today, not on my watch. Rei!"

The room went quiet, save for Nozomi's struggles against the blast.

"Misato," I stammered, "Ayanami is—"

"Here."

It was a soft, quiet voice, and yet it felt as though it could be heard no matter how far you were away from it.

Something looking like Rei Ayanami stood at the front of the room, just underneath the center projector screen. Her head was in line with the image, and yet it didn't cast a shadow. Her whole body was translucent and shimmered with an ephemeral glow.

"My God," cried Asuka, "the geist is alive!"

Ayanami's eyes flickered to Asuka, who shrank and turned aside in her seat, but the two didn't exchange words. Instead, Ayanami met Misato's gaze. "What do you want, General Katsuragi?" she asked, her stare impassive and steady.

"Evacuate Unit-14 to safety," said Misato. "You can do that much, can't you?"

"And give the enemy the power to do the same, or worse?"

Misato barged down the central aisle of the control room, standing face-to-face with Ayanami. "That's in the future," she said. "This is right now. You asked me to do this. I'm asking you for one thing now."

"One act," said Ayanami. "That's all I will do for you."

"That's all you'd give us?"

Ayanami looked away—meeting my gaze. "That is all that can be afforded," she said.

She closed her eyes, and two of the projector screens went blank: the entry plug feed, along with plots and graphs of telemetry, went out for five full seconds.

And then…

"Control," said the telemetry officer, "we have reacquisition of signal from Comm Relay Nagano."

The center and right screens flickered back to life. The Eva was still alive, and the view from its eyes showed a mountainous forest.

"Okay…" said Nozomi, gawking. "Somebody want to tell me what just happened?"

"It was—" I looked to Misato and Ayanami, but already, the ghost of that girl was gone, leaving only the general to stand there with the light of the projector reflecting off her hair. "It was…something," was all I could muster.

"Yes, yes it was," said Misato, hearing me.

She craned her neck to look at the leftmost projector screen—the view of the battlefield Nozomi had left. The unnatural light faded away, and all was quiet. Neither the enemy, nor humankind, walked the streets of the city. The artillery cannons were silent, and not even a bird flew over the scene.

Only the Fractal angel floated slowly over the wasteland, as though nothing were wrong at all.

"This is what we're up against, people," said Misato, "and if you weren't sure what the enemy would bring against us, now you know. And you know we weren't ready."

She turned a hard eye to the control room, and she said,

"We got our asses kicked."