Part Five: What You Leave Behind
27. Faltering
It was during the war that I tried learning to draw.
By that point, I wasn't nearly as good as Nozomi. The faces I made were angular and jagged. I struggled with finding the right size for eyes, but I worked at it every now and then. If I had ten or fifteen minutes to kill, I'd pull out a sketchpad and do my best imitation of an artist.
I won't pretend I was any good, but I did find it helpful for focus, and to unwind. Typically, I tried to draw something that had happened so I could better understand what went on and whether I wished something had gone differently. The sight of Asuka leading Nozomi to victory in Beijing was one of those, and of course, I didn't wish for any of that to change.
People were difficult for me, though—especially their faces. I could get the general shape of people just fine, though, so I gravitated to scenes where the faces weren't so important: for instance, the sight of seven figures in my father's office, sitting at table while they proposed to change the fate of their people.
In that case, I ignored their faces because I knew those faces were fake anyway. What they looked like didn't matter. What mattered was what those seven souls decided to do.
Ayanami came to us because of what those seven decided to do.
The Angels came to us because of that, too.
We existed—we lived and breathed and died—because of them.
There were seven of them: one who went by the name Rei Ayanami, another by the name Kaworu Nagisa, and five others still—with names in their native tongue—whom I didn't know as well. I drew them with shaded, black faces, in part because the glare of light from outside—shining through vast windows that circled the whole room—drowned out their features.
I drew most of them with their eyes focused on the audience, but one of them looked back through the fourth wall, as if to stare directly into my soul.
"That's not bad."
So said Hyuga, who peered over my shoulder.
I flipped the page, presenting him a blank slate, and I put the pencil aside. "I need more practice," I said.
"Well, I guess we know exactly the person to teach you."
We were in the control room, which sat empty but for the two of us—a typical setup for a morning of simulation training. Hyuga nodded to the front screen, which showed a wireframe entry plug—also empty.
"You think dinner didn't agree with her?" he asked.
I winced. "Did it agree with you?"
"I think anyone who could get along with that meal deserves a Nobel Prize. I was at war with it all night."
I laughed, and I picked up my sketchbook to go check on Nozomi. Sure, maybe I was a little too self-conscious about it in front of Hyuga, but that's typical, right? You naturally want to keep something away from other people until you're satisfied with it, and I wasn't yet. I could still do better. Nozomi would've been the first to say so—and also the first to congratulate me when I showed progress. I admit, I was looking forward to some more of that, too.
Maybe that was the most unexpected thing, for me: I've never had a lot of people I looked forward to seeing. That's just not my personality, and I think, at the time Misato roped me into all this, I probably wasn't in the state of mind to try to make new friends.
Yet somehow, after a rough start, I managed to make friends with this standoffish girl—even though I didn't want to bring anyone else into my life, even though she thought I was pathetic. It could've been a lot worse: sometimes, her artwork was the easiest thing to read about her.
One thing I knew for sure, though, was that she didn't tend to run late, so I went to her quarters and knocked. "Hey, it's me," I said. "Everything all right in there?"
After a few moments, the door creaked open—just by a sliver. Nozomi peered out with strands of disheveled hair in front of her eyes. "Hey," she said weakly. "Sorry, must've lost track of time."
"Are you sick?" I asked. "If you need the infirmary—"
"No, no, I'm good! I'm good." She wasn't looking at me. She had her sketchpad in hand. She was drawing even as she talked to me.
I pushed on the door. "Nozomi—"
"No, Ikari—"
There were pages on the floor.
There were pages and pages and pages of drawings on the floor, ripped out from the sketchpad's binding with frayed edges. They covered the room like a carpet—one decorated in huge, sweeping pencil strokes and jagged lines.
"Stop looking!" cried Nozomi. "You don't need to see!"
Even then, she was still sketching.
I pulled on her sketchpad, and it slid out of her hands. I took the pencil, too, but her arms and hands stayed in place. They made phantom sketching motions in the air, and Nozomi's eyes stayed on the place where the sketchpad had once been.
"You don't need to see," she said, shaking. "Stop looking. You don't need to see…."
I knew this would happen.
This is what happens to people who pilot Eva. They go out and fight, and then they break. It was only a matter of time. I'd pretended I could stop it. I wanted to believe I could make the difference. I, and I alone, could step in and keep Nozomi whole. That was a big reason why I agreed to be her handler in the first place.
How hopelessly naive I was, right? I never had a chance of keeping her together, but I could hold her up—I could carry her—even when the weight of the world pressed her down.
And that's what I did. I carried Nozomi. I carried her to the infirmary. She was in no state to walk—nor even to break away from me even if she resisted. And sadly, it wasn't difficult, either. Nozomi was quite light.
When we arrived at the infirmary, the staff had me lay her on a bed. They closed a privacy screen and worked on her. Even so, I stood outside the infirmary door, and I listened.
"Hey, Nozomi?" asked one of the medics. "Nozomi, how are you doing? Are you with me?"
A pause.
"Good, that's good. We're just gonna have you get some rest and get some fluids in you, all right? Sound good? Great. Just relax. There you go. Relax."
Another pause. The medic's chipper voice lowered considerably.
"Okay, what do we have?"
"160 over 100," said another medic. "Pulse 96."
"Right, let's settle her down then. Get her some rest, and I'll get the captain."
The head medic emerged from the privacy screen, and his gaze met mine. "We'll know more when the captain is here," he said. "Right now, she's stable."
"That's good," I said, "thank you."
He peered out the doorway, clipboard in hand. "Do you want to come in? Sit down?"
"Is there anywhere?" I asked.
He shook his head. "If anything serious happens, we have to convert the exercise room into triage space. They have us crammed in here pretty tight."
I nodded. "That's all right then."
The medic gave me a respectful nod in return, and he took a seat at his desk. The infirmary staff had it under control: they were monitoring Nozomi's vitals, and they were calling for the head doctor to come take a look. She'd be in good hands. They'd take care of her. If she were bleeding somewhere or just hadn't eaten, they'd fix that. They could fix a lot of things like that.
Even so, I paced about the outside of the infirmary. I clenched my hand into a fist and opened it, feeling the muscles contract and the bones shift within my arm.
I took a peek inside the infirmary door. The blue privacy sheet blocked me from seeing Nozomi. The only evidence she was alive was the rhythmic beeping of the EKG. It beeped and beeped, slow and steady—no doubt thanks to the drugs they'd given her to make her sleep.
But I wasn't asleep. I was still there. I was still awake. I couldn't dismiss this as something hypothetical, as a bad dream.
It was inevitable, right?
Piloting Eva breaks you one way or another—in body or mind. Perhaps both. Piloting Eva had broken Nozomi into pieces, yet I was still there—still whole, still intact. I clenched my hand and felt all of that. Eva broke her and cursed me to still be there, to still be alive.
I took that hand—the hand with all its muscles and bones enslaved by my brain—and punched an exposed pipe on the corridor wall.
CLANG!
The head medic peered out of the doorway, phone and clipboard in hand. He put the handset aside, asking,
"Are you all right?"
I nodded, gritting my teeth, and I wriggled each of my fingers. "I'm good!" I said. "Just fine!"
The medic frowned at that, but he said nothing more about it. "Sorry to interrupt," he said, "but the general's calling for you."
Wringing my hand, I followed him inside, and he offered me his desk and the phone. He disappeared down the row of beds, and I put the handset to my ear.
"Hello?" I said.
"Hey," said Misato. "Our girl's not doing too well, is she?"
I glanced at the blue curtain. "No, she's not. I don't know what happened. I just found her like this—shaken."
"That's rough. Are you hanging in there?"
I huffed, and I wiggled the fingers on my hand again. "That's not that important right now, is it?"
"It is a little," she said. "We've got to have someone who can train pilots, after all. Angels don't wait for a fair fight, do they?"
I sighed. "No, they don't."
"Kazuto is on the way to simulation," she said. "Are you up for it?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'll be there."
"All right. Let me know how it goes."
I hung up. It was quiet then, in the infirmary, with only Nozomi's heartbeat breaking the silence.
I drummed my fingers, sore as they were, on the head medic's desk. I watched the privacy screen ripple slightly—from Nozomi's breath, I wondered, or was it just an air current?
I sighed, and I picked up my things—my sketchpad and pencil. I went to that curtain and slid it open.
"Oh, hello there." That was the second medic, who was measuring out some fluids for an IV bag. "Do you need a minute?"
I shook my head, and I just looked Nozomi over for a moment. The medics had already cut her clothes off and put her in a hospital gown. They'd taken her hairband too, so her short ponytail was totally undone, leaving stray hairs scattered about her pillow. Her mouth was open slightly as she slept, exposing a few millimeters of her front teeth—probably the only time I'd seen those teeth, considering she seldom smiled wide enough to bare them.
I took Nozomi's hand for a moment, and I admit I was foolish enough to look at the EKG display and hope her heartbeat might change, but it didn't. She was still out.
"I'm still here," I said to her, forcing a smile to my lips.
And I tucked my sketching pencil into her hand.
Our primary backup pilot was Kazuto Sasaki.
Sasaki had several aspects of his personality and talent working against him. He was introverted. His synch rate was a few points lower than Nozomi's, and he could get flustered in complex situations, particularly if he made a mistake.
In spite of all that, Sasaki was our best option. He was intelligent, and his synch rates didn't fluctuate much on a day-to-day basis. He had family support for him being a pilot as well. I hoped that meant he would not succumb to stress over the short term. We only needed him to be the pilot as long as Nozomi was laid up.
To meet Sasaki for his first exercises as pilot number 1, I trudged upstairs to the control room level, and when I swiped in to open the doors, Hyuga was quick to greet me.
"I heard about Nozomi," he said. "I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault," I told him, and I plopped into my station's chair. I tossed my sketchpad on my desk and traded it for a folder of exercises. "Sasaki's coming to take her spot, right? Has he been briefed about the exercise agenda?"
A voice beside me answered, "We just went over it."
Asuka. She turned around in her swiveling chair and held up a folder identical to mine.
"Hey there," she said, shooting me a sheepish grin. "You okay?"
"I'm fine, really," I said, laughing it off. "People are looking at me like I'm sick or something, but I'm fine. Look, see?" I flexed my arms. "If you look hard enough, you can almost see muscle!"
Asuka folded her arms and shot me a faux-cross look. "This is not helping."
"It's not? I'm really proud of this!"
She hissed at that, shaking her head, and she slapped me on the back with her folder. "If you're fine, then let's get to work, Muscle Man. Are we ready to go?"
I put on my headset and settled into my seat. "Let's find out." I pressed the transmit button on the cord. "Hello, Sasaki? Are you with us?"
A boy's image appeared on my monitor and the middle projector screen at the front of the room. Sasaki was already strapped into a simulation entry plug. His hair was sandy in color and cut into a bowl. He was small for a boy his age, and for this reason, the plug chair seemed like an uncomfortable fit for him. He shifted in his seat several times even in the span of a single conversation, like this one.
"I—I'm here, Ikari," he said. "I can hear you."
"That's good," I said, standing at my station. "Sorry we asked you down here on such short notice."
"It's all right." His eyes went back and forth. "Um, is it true—about Horaki?"
"She might be out for a while, yes," I said. "It's likely you're going to be the pilot for the next mission."
He looked aside—forward in the entry plug, but away from the camera. "Right away?" he said.
"We have Angels in the Russian Far East, so it could be anytime," I said. "Let's see if we can get you up to speed, all right?"
Sasaki nodded at that, gripping the controls tightly. "Okay, I'm ready."
"Good," I said, and I flipped through the exercise folder to the first scenario. "All right, this is an extraction scenario. You've engaged the enemy but have been damaged. Your right arm will not work for the duration of the scenario. Get to the extraction point before it's overrun. Got it?"
He gulped and nodded.
I looked to Hyuga, who gave me the OK sign, and I started counting down. "Exercise begins in three, two, one, start!"
The screens came to life. A virtual cityscape formed, and the virtual Unit-14 stood among the buildings. Its right arm was bent, broken at the forearm, and Sasaki cradled the wound.
"Extraction waypoint is up now," I said. "One kilometer south by southeast. Sixty seconds until the extraction point is overrun. Go!"
Sasaki made a move down one of the city streets, but he faced resistance: the Mist Angel. The Mist floated above Unit-14, spreading its airy tendrils across the buildings' faces. Where the Mist touched, metal corroded and withered, like plants exposed to acid rain.
Unit-14 drew a prog knife with its left hand, and it barreled down the cramped street blade-first. It cut through the mist with repeated slicing motions, and the remains of each corrosive tendril was like a spray of confetti against the Eva's AT field.
But Sasaki could only cut where he could see.
CLANK! A white mass attached to Unit-14's head: a three-winged shrieker, which transformed out of its disc-like flying state to clamp down on the Eva's helmet. Two more shriekers latched on to the back and side of the helmet, as though they were magnets to a giant lump of iron. The shriekers spread their wings, blocking Sasaki's vision forward, above, and to one side, and they pressed their round mouthparts against the Eva's armor, drilling into the metal plating.
"Okay, uh, Ikari? Ikari?" Sasaki recoiled from the creatures that were just in front of the Eva's face. "What can I do here?"
Asuka and I exchanged a glance. Asuka shrugged, shaking her head.
I said, "It's all right; just fight them off. They're not strong enough to stay attached if you resist."
"Okay, I'll do that." Sasaki put the prog knife back in the Eva's shoulder pylon, and he started pulling the shriekers off like ticks.
"No, wait!' I cried. "Without your knife, you don't have anything to fight off the tendrils!"
Sure enough, Sasaki plucked two of the shriekers off the Eva's face, but a pair of tendrils grabbed the Eva, taking it by the legs and neck. They carried the Eva skyward, wrapping it up in burning mist—like a frog suspended in boiling water.
An alarm sounded, and the virtual cityscape and Angel vanished.
"Okay," I said, "you didn't make it to the extraction point in time. It was overrun, and you were stranded. We need to find a way not to get held up under fire like that."
"Yeah, you're right," said Sasaki. He shook his head, blinked, and let out a heavy breath. "What do I need to do differently this time?"
"Your knife is the best protection you have against those tendrils," I said. "That's in the briefing, right?"
"Sorry," said Sasaki. "I didn't get a good look at it before I sat down."
Asuka snorted, shaking her head, and she idly flipped through the pages of the exercise regimen.
"Well," I said, after that pause, "now you know. Keep that knife out at all times. If you let that Angel surround you, you're dead. Understand?"
"Yeah." Sasaki nodded. "I think. I got it. Definitely."
I looked to Asuka, but she merely shrugged. "He's gotta go out and do it," she said. "No substitute for that."
Sighing, I scratched my head, rolled my shoulders, and leaned forward at my station. "All right," I said. "Let's do it again. Hyuga?"
He pressed a few keys on his keyboard. "Clock's running."
I nodded. "Three, two, one, go!"
Take two. The virtual cityscape assembled itself from wireframes and polygons, and Sasaki wasted no time in making for the extraction waypoint—he went after it even before the marker appeared on his screen. Down one alley and up another, he ran Unit-14 at a dead sprint, crushing cars and alien walkers underfoot without remorse or regret.
He was prepared for the enemy, too: he drew his prog knife straight away. A tendril formed behind him, but he sliced it in two before it could make a move. When a band of shriekers latched on to the Eva's face, he pried them free with the knife's tip, keeping his vision clear.
"Okay, good," I said, "that's good, we—"
CRUNCH! A section of street collapsed, and from the pit emerged the third alien species: the diggers. Their hollow, tubelike bodies moved by rippling contractions along their lengths, but when they left the earth, their torsos split along a single line, exposing a series of interlocked finger-like appendages—strong enough for walking and dextrous enough to manipulate manhole covers and fire hydrants.
The diggers collapsed one street, burrowing into the pavement and soil beneath, and they wrecked whole city blocks around by releasing water from the mains, rendering footing there treacherous at best.
"Okay, Sasaki, stand by," I said, and I released the transmit switch. "Asuka, what do you think?"
She sat back in her seat, arms folded with a sour expression. "It blows. You might be able to jump the gap, but if he doesn't make it—well, if you do want him to jump it…" She zoomed out on the overhead camera feed, and she pointed out two areas on the screen with the eraser end of a pencil. "Have him back up to here, and maybe try to make it to this building on the left? It would be easier as two—" She stopped. "Whoa, what is he doing?"
Sasaki was already backing Unit-14 up—as far back down that road as he could go without turning a corner.
"Sasaki," I said, "what are you doing?"
"We're out of time, right?"
"Look, stand by means—"
He bolted. Unit-14 charged down the street like a bull.
"Wait!" I cried. "Sasaki, wait!"
The Eva leapt over the sinkhole!
THUD.
But not, you know, all the way over the sinkhole.
The Eva fell into the pit, and the diggers dogpiled Sasaki, burying him in their own flesh. At that point, it was just a matter of letting the clock run out.
Simulation failed. If that had been an arcade game, we'd have lost a good hundred yen by that point.
I shook my head, and I let the headset dangle around my neck. I ran some fingers through my hair, took a breath, and said into my microphone,
"Sasaki, what was that?"
I clicked a button on the communication control panel, so that Sasaki's voice would go through the whole speaker system of the control room. His reply was,
"We were running out of time, right?"
I rubbed my forehead and brushed some stray hairs out of my eyes. "We were working on a solution down here," I said. "That's what we do. We talk to people and try to work things out, so you can focus on the situation in front of you, but that means you've got to wait for us to get there."
"But—" Sasaki looked aside, fumbling for words. "Did you guys have a plan, or not?"
"Yes," I said, "we had a plan!"
Asuka put her headset down. "Shinji…"
"This was the plan," I said, and I took a pencil and my sketchpad to illustrate. "Here's the street, right? And here—" I drew a crude rectangle next to some parallel lines. "Here is a building on the left side of the street. Instead of jumping the whole length of the sinkhole, you jump to the building on the left, then all the way across. This is what we worked out; it takes ten, maybe fifteen seconds to figure out."
"Shinji…" said Asuka.
"So all you have to do," I said, keeping my eyes on Sasaki, "is wait for us and listen to us when we ask you to. You have to trust us and not try to deal with something all by yourself even when we offer help. Do you understand?"
Sasaki stared back at me like a squirrel in front of a busy highway. "Uh, yeah, I—"
"Do you?" I demanded, slapping the sketchpad down on my desk. "Are you sure?"
At that, Asuka reached over, into my side of the cubicle, and she clicked the mute button on the transmit control.
"Do you need a minute?" she asked.
"Do I need a minute?" I echoed.
"Yeah, do you?" Her eyes were steady and stern.
I looked to Hyuga, but he was thoroughly avoiding both of us—he flipped through the folder of exercises, despite it being upside-down.
I looked to Sasaki, who could see us but not hear. He was still sitting at the controls for the simulation, and he trembled—not a lot, since he had a vice's grip on the actuation levers, but that just put more of the shaking into his body. He blinked as he watched us—the way a gazelle on the African savannah dares to blink only when it knows it's safe, for a moment.
"Yeah," I said, bowing my head. "Maybe I need some time."
"Okay." Asuka put a hand on my shoulder. "I'll see you a little later, right?"
"Yeah." I didn't meet her gaze. I just picked up my sketchpad and spare pencil to go.
As I cleared out of the control room, Asuka and Hyuga got started on the next simulation. Asuka took her place at my station, put on my headphones, and got to work talking to Sasaki.
"Okay," she said. "You heard the man. If you hear standby, you'd better be damn sure of yourself before you go against that order, got me? We've got to work as a team here. If you're not sure what to do, just ask. There's no harm in that. If you haven't heard from us in a while, ask. We're probably trying to figure things out. Okay? Got that?" A pause. "Good, now let's try it again, all right? From the top!"
I drifted back to my office, and I shut the door behind me. There was a stack of papers on my desk—reports, briefings, and the like—but I took one look at them and pushed them as far aside as I could.
I think I came to understand Misato a bit more in that moment. What must she have felt the times when I threatened to leave, or when I became trapped in the Eva? The work has to go on, but the bond we shared outside of that—outside of a pilot and his superior—couldn't be dismissed. It was there. It mattered to us. Having it severed was like feeling my own umbilical cord cut.
I didn't know how Misato coped with that in her time (no, cases of Yebisu don't count as coping). All I knew was that I knew nothing. We hadn't even been on a mission for a couple days. The Eva was undergoing repairs. How could this have happened?
To find an answer, I went back through combat footage. I put on my headphones, watched, and listened:
"I'm going to be bean paste here if I don't get an answer!"
That was Nozomi's voice on the footage. I reviewed film from the entry plug and exterior cameras of this battle and others, from when Nozomi used the puncture engine or did not.
The Angels had touched Nozomi's mind. They had always tried to do this, and the puncture engine enabled that effort—at least at one point.
But Nozomi had been examined and cleared. I laid out her brain scans in front of me, but the folds and lobes of her brain told me nothing of what was going on within them.
As I paged through these files, I left entry plug footage playing in the background. Eventually, I came back to the beginning: Nozomi's pilot profile. It showed a photo of a girl without a smile, who was "private and unsociable" and "frank to the point of causing offense," but also "cool under pressure and totally undeterred by adversity."
It amazed me, really: someone on this base had reduced her, along with each of the rest of our pilot candidates, to a few short phrases.
That was how I was meant to get to know them.
That was how I was supposed to learn who they were.
"Okay, yeah," said the voice on the tape. "What am I looking at here?" A pause. "Your 'best guess'?"
That was the Nozomi who existed outside of short dossier: she watched her surroundings with a steady, discerning gaze, and when her handler on the radio put forward a marginal piece of information, she wasn't shy to express her irritation with that.
But there was a Nozomi who existed outside of that video footage, too: the one who gave me my own sketchpad and who taught me how to draw.
That dossier—it was like a photograph of a jigsaw puzzle from a distance. You could glean major features from it, but when the cameraman zoomed in, you'd see that some of the pieces were missing or that others didn't fit the way you thought they did.
I didn't know much more about how to study photographs than I did about art or drawing, so after some time, I paused the cycle of entry plug footage on my workstation, and I piled up all the papers, test results, medical records, and all the rest of that into a neat stack.
I picked up the phone, and I dialed an increasingly familiar number.
"Horaki residence," said a voice.
"It's me," I said. "Have you heard?"
"I have. Is she awake?"
"Not yet, but—would you come down?"
"For Nozomi?"
"Yes."
There was a long pause.
Then, finally, she said,
"I'm on my way."
I waited for Horaki at the blast door. By the time she arrived, it was late morning, so traffic on the train was nonexistent. That was hardly unexpected: the train only went between National Square and the mountain, and base personnel typically ate on-site, with only a few venturing back downtown for a change of pace.
In a way, I felt bad for making the base staff open the blast door in the first place. Sure, it may have been a nice break in the monotony of standing watch, but it was still a favor of sorts—for Nozomi, and for me. As much as they may have understood Horaki being there, it was still something I had asked for.
When the blast door opened, Horaki came through, thanked the operator, and fell into step beside me. "Sorry I took so long," she said. "How are you, Ikari?"
"I'm…trying," I said, leading her up the dark, rocky tunnel to the base. "That this happened to Nozomi so suddenly…." I shook my head. "What about you?"
"Well…" Horaki sighed. "Nozomi's in good hands. What else can I do?"
I nodded at that. "It's hard, isn't it? Still, thanks for coming. I think Nozomi would appreciate it."
"Really?" She looked straight, her gaze serious and full of deliberate intent. But, after a moment, her eye caught mine from the side, and she smiled slightly. "Thank you for that," she said. "I'm glad you called me down here. This is a tough time—for all of us, right?"
I put on a smile, laughed slightly, and said nothing more for a time. I walked Horaki up the tunnel to the base, and I swiped us into the civilian and officer quarters. Since Nozomi was still under sedation, we headed for her quarters. In my haste, I'd left the door open—a security oversight that turned out to be convenient. Nozomi had left a mess of broken pencils and discarded sketches, many of them ripped straight from her drawing pad. I hoped Horaki might have some insight into Nozomi's art, enough to make sense of what had happened to her.
"I see she made a mess," Horaki said when we arrived. She sighed and shook her head. "That's very Nozomi."
"It is?" I said.
"Hm, well—it's not that she's messy so much as indifferent, sometimes. She cleans when it suits her."
"And when is that?"
"Your guess is as good as mine."
I might have been overly optimistic about this idea. As I rummaged through the scattered papers, Horaki took to tidying up Nozomi's suitcase and dresser drawers. Nozomi had left a pile of clothes on top of her suitcase, and Horaki packed them up for the base laundromat.
"Has she been busy?" asked Horaki.
I stared at her, open-mouthed.
"Sorry." Horaki touched two fingers to her temple and shook her head. "I just meant that, even in a normal situation, Nozomi tends to make herself busy."
"Doing what?"
"Drawing, of course." She put a foot down on the top of the suitcase and used her weight to press it flat and zip the bag up. "All day and all night, she's searching for something. She'll go out to the train tracks and try to catch the cars in motion. I don't know how you can draw a train when it's a blur going by, but she tries anyway." Horaki stood the suitcase upright. "She doesn't have as much time for that here, does she?"
I shook my head, and I picked up another two pages of discarded sketches. "No, we spend a lot of time in the simulator—when she's not on missions, that is. We practice a lot."
"And she handles that?"
"She does. She doesn't complain. She just works on getting better."
Horaki wheeled the suitcase to the door. "Strange thing to take pride in."
"I'm not sure pride is the reason."
"Then what?"
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came to mind, and I shrugged helplessly.
"That's Nozomi," said Horaki, nodding.
So it was. Our jigsaw puzzle had missing pieces, and there was only a chance some of them might have been scattered among the pages left on Nozomi's floor.
We collected the sketches and sketch fragments, and we went through them one sheet at a time, paging through drawings of the Horaki house and surroundings, the tunnel leading to the base, and the Angels Nozomi and I had fought. We pried through Nozomi's inspirations with neither remorse nor hesitation. We scoured everything that had made an impression on her heart.
Such as a movie theater.
"Ikari?" asked Horaki. "What is it?"
The wrinkled wad of paper quivered in my hand, and I grabbed my wrist to steady it. On that crumpled sheet, with pencil lines smeared and blurred, was a sketch of a movie theater. The point of view was from the front, looking to the left down that row. The seats were in a stadium configuration, with each row much higher than the one before it. Nozomi captured it all, right down to the fuzz on the seat cushions.
And just a couple seats away from the virtual camera sat something that looked like Hikari Horaki.
There were few sketches like these, though—each with variations on the scene. In one, for instance, Ayanami appeared to step between them—an intervention without success, I'm sure. In another, the three of them sat before the theater screen and watched Angel battles around the world.
"Is it a dream?" asked Horaki. "I don't remember visiting a theater like that. I don't know why Nozomi—"
"No," I said, putting the stack of sketches on the nightstand. "It's not a dream, and that's not you in it."
"But it looks just like me, doesn't it?"
I took the top sheet and made for the door. "Give me a minute."
"Ah—okay?"
I went out into the hallway and shut the door behind me. I smoothed out that piece of paper on the wall, and there was no mistake: from the size of the screen, to the position of the projector, to the velvet felt on the seats.
And Ayanami, too—she had been there.
"Ayanami," I said to the ceiling, "I need to talk to you."
"Do you?"
And there she was. She appeared behind me, and I spun around to meet her. She stood there, under the white fluorescent lights of the base corridors, but she wasn't really there. Her gaze was sharp and penetrating, but I could see through her, too. What stood in front of me was no more than a translucent figure in the shape and colors of Rei Ayanami.
Still, while those penetrating eyes were intimidating, I balled a hand into a fist at my side, and I said to her,
"I do; I need to talk to you." I showed her the sketch of the theater. "And to her."
"That," said Ayanami, her eyes narrowing slightly, "is not something you should want."
"If this is the enemy's doing—"
"And if it is, what would you do? What could you say to stop it?"
"I—"
"Your pilot is asleep," said Ayanami. "Isn't there someone else you should help now?"
"Yes, but—"
"Or is this about helping yourself?"
She froze me with her implacable stare, and I stood paralyzed in front of her, like a newborn chick who couldn't even chirp.
"Ikari?" Nozomi's door opened, and Horaki peeked into the hallway. "What's going on?"
I tensed up. "Uh—you see, Ayanami is…well…"
"Ayanami?" asked Horaki. "What about her?"
I looked back down the hallway. Ayanami was gone.
I made my apologies to Horaki for the confusion, and I made arrangements for her to stay in Nozomi's room for the time being—at least while Nozomi was in the infirmary. We caught up with Asuka on the way to lunch—at which Horaki would be our guest. Asuka wasn't in a great mood.
"Way to leave me stuck with that kid, Shinji," she said, wiping some sweat from her brow. "Here I am, trying to teach him how to handle real action, and you're seeing my best friend behind my back, huh?"
My eyes went wide. "It's not like that!"
The girls burst out laughing, though Asuka's was a little wearier than Horaki's. "Relax," said Asuka, but she went serious again. "Still, we're gonna have to hope for the best with that kid."
"I'll take over for the afternoon session," I told her. "I know there are exercises we still need to work on."
Asuka raised an eyebrow. "Not gonna be time for that."
"Why not?"
"Hyuga got word during the session: Angels are headed for Vladivostok. We could be seeing battle as soon as this afternoon."
No sooner than she said that we ran into Sasaki near the officers' mess door. That made it official: he was the pilot, but the way he used his bowl of sandy hair to hide from us, you might not have believed it.
"Sasaki," I said, putting on a reassuring smile, "it's going to be fine."
I caught only one eye of his under his hair, and he gave me just a slight nod before heading inside. Asuka and Horaki followed him in, and I brought up the rear.
" at the end of that post. I guess maybe I should have.
