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
Oh my~, Shinji!