Faltering
Chapter Nine

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.

#

They sent Sasaki to Vladivostok right after lunch, and he went toward a battle unlike the ones we'd fought before. The Angels had stopped trying to provide cover for the walkers and their kin. Rather than liquefy major cities, the Angels had targeted military installations and major industrial sites.

Vladivostok Island was one of those sites: a major port in the Russian Far East, it was the main route for Japanese exports to get to Russia and Europe beyond. And of course, the Russians gave us something in return: food.

Vladivostok was vital to us, vital enough to send Sasaki in the afternoon and risk leaving him in Russia overnight if need be, and we needed our best chance to win with him. That meant putting a voice in his ear that he was used to—Asuka. She'd trained him in the backup control room while Nozomi and I worked together, and since she'd run him through the morning exercises, it was a no-brainer. Asuka would be his handler for this mission, and I'd sit beside her to cover another shift or offer advice and support.

Until then, we could only watch and wait.

Something I learned quickly on this job was that the new pilots had to deal with situations I'd never encountered. In this war, there was only one Eva under our control, and so there was only one pilot at any given time. Nozomi couldn't rely on her peers for support, and the same was true for Sasaki. They were competition, and none of the others could really understand.

In this war, the enemy wouldn't come to us, either. The new Angels attacked lands surrounding Japan but never came to our doorstep. That meant hours of isolation and waiting.

That wait could be grueling. Somehow, Nozomi managed to sleep on most of those flights, but Sasaki couldn't. He was wide awake all throughout the plane ride. He'd get out of his seat and swim around the entry plug every now and then, but for the most part, he sat ready to go, even knowing there were hours before he might see action.

On occasion, he would talk to us. "What is it like?" he asked us at one point.

Asuka and I looked at each other, both of us shrugging, and she replied, "It's not like anything else. You're one with the beast, right? You feel what it feels. It's beautiful. It's terrifying. It's painful. But, if you do it right, it's also amazing."

Sasaki looked straight ahead, sighing, and said, "That's not likely for me, though."

"Not with that attitude it's not!" said Asuka, scoffing.

Sasaki took one look at the camera, said nothing, and glanced forward again, looking about as cheerful as a monk at a funeral.

I got on the microphone. "Sasaki," I said, putting on a smile, "you've trained for this. You know how this works. You can do it, and we'll be watching over you. Just listen to Asuka and trust in yourself."

"I'll try," he said, still looking ahead.

That was the best I could get out of him.

Once Sasaki arrived over Vladivostok, he landed in a cargo storage area for the port. Two Angels were already destroying the harbor facilities: the Mist Angel's tendrils corroded the port's machinery while a new Angel—a four-legged beast with an eyeless face and wide, downturned jawline-devoured shipping containers like a wolf gorging itself on a carcass.

Russian forces were on the scene to help us out. They planted explosives throughout the maze of shipping containers. From the harbor, a Russian destroyer fired shells into the port, harassing the Angels from afar.

Beyond that, it was up to Sasaki to kill the Angels. He surveyed the landscape—one of narrow walkways between stacks of shipping containers—and asked,

"Okay, what do I do here? What's the plan?"

Asuka and I pored over an overhead view. The Quadruped Angel hid behind a wall of containers, shielded from ship-based fire.

Asuka got on the radio. "Ahead, and then left," she said. "Stop at the corner after that, and we'll blow a placed charge to confuse it."

Unit-14 crept around a wall of containers, but its steps rattled the whole loading area. "Right here?" asked Sasaki. "Is that right?"

"Perfect," said Asuka. "Now just sit right there, and—"

BANG! Metal twisted and tore, and a series of smaller thuds rattled the port.

"What was that?" demanded Sasaki, hands clenched around the controls.

On the overhead view, the Quadruped Angel burst through a wall of containers, ripping through the metal like it was wet paper. A line of destruction trailed from the Angel, pointing straight to Unit-14's position.

"Sasaki," said Asuka, "target's coming to you, on your left."

Sasaki nodded and gulped. "Are you going to blow a charge?"

Asuka looked to Hyuga, who got on his headset in turn. "Liaison, we need our distraction in a different spot."

"Standby, Sasaki," said Asuka. "We're trying to get the Russians to change it now."

BANG! Another wall of containers crumpled. "Yah!" cried Sasaki, and he recoiled in his seat, but he took two deep breaths and steadied himself. "Just, um, let me know when you know, then!"

Asuka took her finger off the transmit switch and glanced at me. "What do you know?" she said with a smile. "He's learning."

I nodded. "You're doing a good job holding him together. Keep doing that. Don't let him have time to be afraid or hesitant."

She gave me a faux salute. "Yes, sir, Commander Ikari, sir!" she said.

"Asuka." Hyuga came over with a folder and a map of the port. He pointed out a position on the map. "Russians are going to blow two charges here," he said, "on our signal."

Asuka nodded, and she got on the radio again. "Okay, Sasaki, we've got some charges ready to go. On my count—ready?"

His eyes went wide. "Uh…"

"Three," said Asuka, "two, distraction blast…"

A dull thud rattled the port, and a puff of smoke rose some distance away from Sasaki's position.

"And go!" cried Asuka.

Sasaki clenched his jaw, and he pushed forward on the controls. Unit-14 drew a pallet rifle and lowered its shoulder. It barreled through the wall of shipping containers and came out firing: it blasted the Quadruped with a volley of pallet rifle rounds. The Angel's AT field held, but the beast turned tail and scampered around a short wall of stacked containers.

"You've got it," said Asuka. "Get your knife, and let's see if we can corner it for the engine."

A prog knife popped out of the Eva's right shoulder pylon, and Unit-14 attached the knife to the pallet rifle's barrel, using it as a makeshift bayonet. Unit-14 pressed forward like a hunter cornering prey. It backed the Quadruped Angel into a short, enclosed space, surrounded by containers on all sides.

But the Quadruped—its skin shifty and shimmering—crouched down and bit through the short wall of containers. It burst through the hole and scampered away.

It had help, too: as Sasaki gave chase, the Mist Angel harassed him. Its corrosive tendrils cut through shipping containers effortlessly, spilling thousands of ball bearings about the port grounds. Sasaki slashed at the Mist's tendrils, but his slices came up with empty air.

I nudged Asuka's arm, and she nodded without looking at me.

"Don't get sidetracked," she said over the radio. "That thing can't hurt you as badly as the other one."

"Okay, okay," said Sasaki, "but—"

"But what?"

"Where did it go?"

Asuka looked back at the second monitor, where the overhead feed was, but the Quadruped Angel was gone. There was a trail of wreckage leading to another wall of containers, but that was all.

"Stand by for engine activation," said Asuka, rising. Her eyes darted across the projector screens and her monitor. Her jaw clenched. "When we have visual on the target," she said, "you're on."

The port grounds rattled; that Angel had to be around somewhere, but for all we knew, it was invisible. The control room didn't like that one bit: it was our job to know everything that was going on at any given time.

"Where's our target?" Hyuga called out, and he went over to the detection controller. "Infrared?"

The rightmost panel on the front screen switched to a grayscale image. From a high-altitude plane, an infrared camera panned over the port from above, with only intermittent cloud cover blocking the view. Still, even that didn't tell us very much: both the Mist Angel and Unit-14 were blinding white glows, and by comparison, each of the metal shipping containers was totally opaque.

But one place did catch my eye: within the wall of containers, there was a hot spot—something far warmer than anything else in the area.

And that hot spot was on its way to Sasaki.

Asuka jammed the transmit button on her headset. "Sasaki, your five o'clock! In the containers!"

Unit-14 turned, and—

Ka-TCHEW! The Quadruped burst through; it chomped on Unit-14's right arm, and the pair tumbled toward water. Containers fell off their stacks and rolled near ships in port, with some of them splashing down mere meters from ships' hulls.

Unit-14 and the Quadruped thrashed about, dodging cargo cranes as they fought. The Quadruped Angel kept Unit-14's right arm firm in its maw, but Sasaki punched and kicked against it in a vain attempt to break free.

'I'm gonna use the engine!" cried Sasaki, cradling his arm next to his chest.

"Do it!" said Asuka.

He reached over with his left hand and flipped the toggle on the right control lever. The Eva tossed its pallet rifle aside, and Sasaki guided Unit-14's left hand into an AT-field-shattering jab!

The punch smashed the Quadruped's face in, sparking a cascade of color throughout the creature's skin. The beast staggered, and it fled down the pier, making for firmer ground.

But Sasaki gave chase. As the creature wove between cargo cranes, Unit-14 barreled through them, wrecking the machinery. Lifting arms snapped and fell to the dock.

"Careful!" cried Asuka. "You're making a mess!"

"It's too fast!" said Sasaki, leaning his body back and forth as the Eva ran. "I can't keep up with it!"

CRUNCH! A crane toppled to the sea, scraping against the side of an oil tanker. Black goo squirted from the gash in the hull, and a small crew of sailors scrambled to the railing to assess the damage.

At that, Misato rose from her station, having been quiet thus far. "Ops," she said, "is that Angel wounded enough that we can leave it be, for now?"

Major Hyuga watched the Quadruped flee on the central projection screen. "It may be," he said. "We'll have to keep an eye on it."

"Do that," said Misato. "For now, I think we have a threat to the harbor that goes beyond Angels. Do you agree?"

"I do."

"Let's take care of it, then."

Hyuga nodded, and he went to Asuka. "Let's get him to help out with the spill," he said. "We'll keep an eye on the Angels from here."

Asuka let out a breath, shaking her head, but she relayed the instructions to Sasaki faithfully. Sasaki helped the tanker's crew contain the growing disaster—the disaster he had caused.

And for my part, I sat there, waiting in case I was needed, under Misato's impassive gaze.

#

Sasaki and Unit-14 stayed on site for the spill cleanup, ensuring the harbor would stay clear and that the Angels could do no more to the city without Unit-14 responding. When the Angels fled for the night, we had Sasaki recalled back to Japan.

Just because the operation was over didn't mean it was forgotten, though. Bright and early the next morning, I got a phone call in my quarters:

"The general would like to see you both at 0800," said the voice on the phone.

Misato's requests are never refused on her base. Asuka and I reported to Misato's office, along with Hyuga. The general's office was a little more hospitable than the last time I'd been there: a photo of us on an aircraft carrier decorated one corner of her desk, and the microwave in the back was gone.

Even so, Misato was armed with a stack of folders for evidence, all leading to one inescapable conclusion: she plopped down a folder with Sasaki's dossier and said,

"This kid is not ready." She looked between the three of us. "Why isn't he ready?"

"His synch ratio, for starters," said Hyuga.

"Out of our control," said Misato, steepling her fingers. "He may never have the feel that Nozomi has, but he should be prepared nonetheless." Her gaze fixed on me. "Why isn't he prepared? He seems about the same as he was when Hyuga and I were training him ourselves."

"I—" I looked aside for a moment. "Look, he's erratic. He doesn't listen consistently. I haven't figured out how to keep him steady yet, but we've been working with him!"

"Have you?" asked Misato, raising an eyebrow. "How was he at exercises yesterday?"

Asuka cleared her throat. "I oversaw most of that."

"You did?"

"I did."

Misato shut a folder. "And where was Shinji for this?"

I sat a little taller in my seat. "I was being short with him; I wasn't in a good state of mind. It wasn't helping him."

"Is that right?" Misato took a long, hard look at me, but after a moment, she sighed and slid the dossier to the edge of her desk. "Well, we're all trying to make the best of this, aren't we? What more do we need to do to get this kid ready?"

On that we were short of ideas. "More training," Hyuga offered, but Misato shook her head.

"We've done the training," she said. "We've been doing it. We can't do more of the same. It needs to be better, smarter."

"He is smart enough," said Asuka. "He doesn't have trouble grasping instructions. He just hesitates sometimes, or he improvises without communicating."

"And in doing so, he ends up spilling half a tanker's worth of oil into Golden Horn Bay." Misato tapped her temple. "That's up here, isn't it?" She looked to Major Hyuga. "Talk to his therapist; figure out what we can do to build his confidence. Maybe dial back his exercises a bit; make sure he can get good, successful repetitions. Then turn up the difficulty."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good. I'd like Shinji to stay a moment; Hyuga and Asuka, you're dismissed."

My mouth hung open, but I was in no position to protest. Asuka touched a hand to my shoulder as she left, and I nodded in acknowledgement, and the two of them left us alone.

Misato closed the folder in front of her, and she put on a motherly smile. "So!" she said, her voice going up a few pitches. "A little short with Kazuto, huh—that what you said?"

"Mm," I said, nodding. "Like I said, I wasn't in a great state of mind at the time."

"Is it about Nozomi?"

"Yeah." I sat back, staring at the ceiling. "One day she's fine, and the next—basically out of her mind."

Misato smiled sadly. "That's the cost of Eva."

"And we're doing it again." I rubbed the back of my neck and turned my head left and right, trying to work out a kink that just wouldn't go away. "We did it to Nozomi, and now we're doing it to Sasaki. Where does it end?"

Misato sighed, and she leaned forward, catching my gaze. "We ask a lot of them," she said seriously. "Maybe the only good thing right now is that Kazuto can take some of the load for Nozomi. She doesn't have to suffer all of it, and she doesn't have to suffer alone, either."

"I hope that's worth it," I said.

"Me too." Misato looked downcast for a moment, but she shook the dour mood off with a clap of her hands. "Hey, look on the bright side."

"What bright side is that?"

"At least it's not you and Asuka trying to raise three pilots at the same time?"

I laughed, caught off guard more than anything. "With Asuka—can you imagine?"

Misato smiled, and she reached across the desk to take my hand. "It's good you can laugh," she said. "It means you're still here."

"I'm doing what I can," I said.

"I know." Her gaze turned serious, and her hold on my hand tightened. "But Shinji: you don't have to do too much. Nozomi is in good hands. There are other pilots—other people who can shoulder the burden, and they do need you."

I frowned, and I leaned forward, too, hands folded in each other. "Misato," I said, "This isn't just about pilots. Was I just a pilot to you, back then?"

She smiled to herself, and she shook her head.

"That's why I want to see her get well," I said. "It's important to me."

"I'd like to see that, too, but we do need you here. We need you with Sasaki. Asuka is still learning. You have things to teach both of them. We still have to get through all of this. You understand?"

I nodded. "That's why there are exercises scheduled in an hour."

"Bright and early," said Misato, and she let me go. She leaned back in her chair with a yawn. "Good man. Now, get something to eat, hm?"

I rose, but I left her with one last comment:

"I like this photo," I said, taking the picture frame from the corner of her desk. "Did you have it just lying around somewhere?"

"Oh heavens no," she said, shaking her head in exasperation. "You wouldn't believe what kind of digging it took to find that. Two years out, and everything is still a mess."

"But you found it." I put the photo of us—Asuka, Toji, Kensuke, Kaji, Misato, and me, all on the edge of the aircraft carrier—back on the corner of Misato's desk. "I might like one for myself. It's nice."

Misato smiled at that, and she touched the corner of the picture frame, turning the photo toward her slightly. "I think so, too."

#

After a short breakfast, I headed back toward my office. There was some preparation I wanted to do before training Sasaki that morning. I laid out all of Sasaki's documentation—his personal dossier, reports from his therapist, and even interviews with his teachers in middle school. All of this described a person who was intelligent and capable of piloting an Eva, but he was also timid, moody, and occasionally combative.

Now, you tell me: how do you make that into a good pilot? How do you mold that into something that won't break down under pressure?

I sat staring over the papers for some time, trying to answer that very question, but as I sifted through those reports and records, searching for some nugget of inspiration, the office phone rang.

"Hello, Ikari here."

"It's me."

Horaki.

"I just heard from the infirmary," she said. "Nozomi's awake. Would you—do you want to see her?"

I let the handset drop a little from my ear, and I stared over the mess of papers on my desk. I had a boy's whole life scattered over that desk, staring back at me in black and white type. You'd think that would come with a little understanding. Maybe it did, but that would be like understanding the instructions to building a computer. I might've been able to understand the individual words and phrases, but if I wanted to change the thing—improve upon it, make it better—that was another matter entirely.

"Ikari?" asked the voice on the phone.

"Sorry," I said, "I was just thinking about something."

"Oh, I see. Well, about Nozomi—"

"I'm on my way."

"Okay, see you soon."

I hung up, and I shuffled all the papers on my desk into a single pile.

When the folders and paper edges were aligned, I pulled out another set of papers from the drawer—sketches of the movie theater—and headed out the door.

#

The thing that unsettles me most about hospitals is when a person wakes up.

Waking up in a hospital changes people. It's like a piece of the soul escapes during treatment. Maybe the surgeons cut it out by mistake. Maybe it gets filtered out during dialysis. Either way, people don't wake up the same as they were before. I'd seen it many times: in Ayanami, in Asuka, and in myself. Sitting at someone's bedside, you never know what person is going to wake up.

So, when I saw Nozomi up and drawing in the infirmary, I let myself be relieved. Art and Nozomi were inseparable. If that had changed, I truly wouldn't have known her.

Nozomi was sitting up halfway in her bed and drew on the back of a food tray. Everything else going on around her was mere distraction. I watched her from around the edge of the privacy curtain, but Nozomi caught me peeking.

"Ikari." She didn't even raise her eyes, but somehow, she knew.

Well, there was no point in being sneaky after that. I stepped inside. "You're feeling better."

She shrugged. "Pretty sure if I were feeling worse, I'd be dead, right? So I should hope so."

I gawked at her, but Nozomi cracked a small smile.

"Relax, Ikari," she said, laughing softly to herself. "I still feel like ass, but I'm here. I'm doing better—not perfect, but better."

She wasn't wrong. There was an edge to her efforts to draw: she focused on the back of the lunch tray quite intently, following the drawn lines with her eyes. It was as though the whole sketch might disappear if she looked away from it.

But she was still there, holding on to something in her mind and refusing to let it go.

I glanced through the gap in the curtain, meeting Horaki's gaze, and I gave her a nod. "That's good to hear—that you're feeling better," I said, not looking at Nozomi. "You know, now that you're awake, you have to deal with a parade of visitors. It's one of the perks of being ill."

"A 'perk,' huh?" she quipped.

Horaki came forward, and at the sound of footsteps, Nozomi's pencil stopped moving.

"Who's that?" she asked, peering around me. "Hikari?"

Horaki came up next to me, showing a sheepish smile. "Got it in one," she said. "Can't get something like that past you, can we, Nozomi?"

Nozomi sat up a little straighter, and she put the drawing pencil into the lip of the tray. "Hey," she said. "You got down here fast. I haven't been awake that long."

"I've been here since yesterday," Horaki explained. "Ikari was nice enough to arrange that."

Nozomi's eyes flickered to me. "So this is your doing, huh?"

I shrugged and laughed. "Guilty as charged."

Nozomi didn't laugh. She just looked back at Horaki for a time—a few seconds of abject silence.

"So," she said at last, "how's Kodama?"

"Fine, fine. I talked to her last night. Left some food for her so she wouldn't starve." Horaki laughed. "Things are busy at work. I think that helps her, though."

"If there's nothing you can do, it not so bad to be busy."

"Yes, I think so, too."

Silence again. Nozomi's stare was fixed on her sister—expectant, penetrating. It asked if Horaki were finished or if there were more she had to listen to.

Horaki looked to me, and I nodded again—just once. Horaki closed her right hand into a fist, and she asked,

"How are you feeling, Nozomi?"

"Me?" Nozomi looked to the ceiling idly before refocusing on us. "I'm hanging in there. Bad dreams. Those things get into your head. It's all expected, though. They're gonna give me nice drugs. That should help."

"That's good. You can come home for a few days, if you like—while you're on the mend, at least."

"Maybe. I'll think about it."

Horaki stiffened, but her tone didn't falter. "Whatever you decide, you should take care of yourself, Nozomi. Ikari and General Katsuragi need you in good shape. I'm sure Ikari would be happy to take care of anything you need. Isn't that right, Ikari?"

I nodded. "I'd do my absolute best."

"And if there's something he can't do," Horaki went on, "Sister and I would do our best as well."

Nozomi looked away, studying her sketch. "Yeah, I know that," she said. "Thanks, Hikari. Thank Kodama for me, too."

Horaki nodded, and she leaned to the left. With her weight on one leg, she hovered for a moment. A few more steps would've put her in Nozomi's gaze, but Horaki didn't follow through. She evened out her footing, and she smiled briefly. "Well, I can't stay," Horaki explained, "and I know you have work to do. I'll be back in a day or two to bring some things and visit, though."

Nozomi nodded at that. "Okay."

With that, I escorted Horaki out—past the blue curtain, past the head corpsman's desk and into the off-white hallway, overrun with pipes and valves.

Horaki stopped at the corner and let out a heavy sigh. "What do you think? Was that enough for you?"

She didn't face me, but even so, I nodded—on reflex more than anything. "I think so—maybe," I said.

Horaki glanced over her shoulder at me, and she smiled—for real, this time, though she was no happier for it. "I hope so," she said. "Good luck."

"You're okay getting out on your own?"

"Yes, I'll be fine. Let me know what happens, all right?"

"I will, absolutely."

"Thanks." She started down the corridor, but she called back over her shoulder. "I'll tell Asuka to do you a favor for me!"

She'll tell you to do it yourself, I thought, but I didn't say it. Sometimes it's better not to question the thanks people would give you, after all.

And besides—Horaki seemed genuinely happy at the idea, at least for the moment.

I let Horaki go, and I turned around to head back into the infirmary. I took the manilla folder out from under my arm, and I paged through the contents one last time. Nozomi's sketches of the theater flashed before my eyes like still frames from an animated film. I flipped through them all once more, and I went back inside.

Nozomi's curtain was still drawn partway, so she caught my footsteps as soon as I was a meter in the door.

"Forget something?" she called out.

I huffed at that, but I didn't answer until I was closer. I made it back to her bedside, and I pulled up a chair from next to the bank of instruments and sensors. I sat down at her side, folder closed in my lap.

"No," I said, "there's just some stuff I didn't get to say."

"Yeah? What about?"

I sighed, and I glanced to the ceiling. The tiles there weren't unique in any way. Perhaps each one was subtly different, sporting distinctive patterns of black speckle, but those patterns didn't matter in any way. One may as well have been the same as any other. At best, you might get used to a particular pattern above you—when you sleep in quarters you call your own, for instance.

I looked to that ceiling, then back to Nozomi, and I opened the folder.

"We went through your room," I said. "We found the drawings."

Nozomi glanced at the stack of drawings, and she turned slightly aside. "You did, did you? So? What about them?"

I showed her the top sheet from the folder: the sketch of the stranger sitting in the front row of the theater, facing back at the page—staring without eyes.

"I've seen this person before," I said.

"Really?" Nozomi faced me again, and she moved over in the bed, coming closer to me. "Who is it?"

"I don't know, but I've seen that person—and the movie theater and Ayanami. I see her in my dreams whenever she wishes to speak to me. This?" I held up the sheet in front of her. "This is not something that just came up in your mind. This is something she brought you to. This is something she put inside you. It's not a coincidence."

Nozomi took the sketch in hand, studying it up and down. "So this is just what I've gotta deal with, huh?" She handed the sheet back to me and closed her eyes, as if ready to sleep. "That's not so bad, then. If something wants to keep me up with nightmares, at least I know they're not really mine."

"It rattled you, didn't it?"

"I'm here, right?" She shrugged, even with her eyes closed. "Pretty silly of me to get spooked by something that wasn't real, though. Just gotta learn to deal."

"And what was it that spooked you?"

She opened one eye. "Don't worry about it, Ikari. That thing tried to rattle me. I won't let it. It's fine. Whatever that thing was, it has no power over me."

"Even when she looks like this?" I took out the second sketch, with Horaki in place of the stranger.

Nozomi shut her eyes tight, and she turned her body away. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"That person—that thing—came to me looking like my father once. We were in battle, and she stood in front of my station and talked the way my father would. She used his face and his voice. She said things that I…couldn't handle. That time we dropped a rod on you—you remember that?"

She nodded slightly, even as she faced the bank of sensors and monitors.

"And do you remember," I said, my voice quivering, "that I didn't come back to the base for a while—that someone had to come knocking on my door to get me to face up to what I was afraid of and do the job right?"

Nozomi sighed and turned back around to face me. "Ikari—"

"Nozomi," I butted in, "I've seen how you are with Horaki. There's a wall between you still—a line neither of you will cross. You say it has nothing to do with what happened before, but if so, then what is it? I don't understand; I really don't. And then I see her in your sketches, the way that thing appeared to me like my father, and—"

I shuddered. I wiped my face clean, along with the surface of the folder. You can't get those things wet; they just warp and never recover.

"Ikari, come on." She reached out from under the sheets and caught my wrist, steadying me. "It's not like that. You don't need to get involved in this."

"But I do." I smiled and dabbed the last tear away with my collar. "I don't know much about things, but I've been a pilot. I didn't care for it, but I know you do—for some reason. And if you care about being a pilot, I can't let this be. If what's between you and your sister can get in the way, I shouldn't let it be because I've been there, and it destroyed me." I held back another sob, and I ran my fingers through my hair, shaking my head. "It destroyed half the world, Nozomi. I don't want to see that happen again."

"Ikari…" She let go of my wrist and shook her head, staring at the ceiling. She laughed bitterly. "We're not the same," she said at last. "We're really not. You were a pilot once, and I am now, but we're not the same."

"Why not?"

"With you and your father, you tried to live up to what you thought he wanted, right? You tried to be someone he could love, right? You didn't do anything wrong. You didn't do anything wrong to him, did you?"

I leaned forward, trying to catch her eye. "What—what are you saying?"

She met my gaze then, and there was something…different about her in that moment. There was usually something very casual about Nozomi: something indifferent, even flippant, sometimes. Perhaps the only time I'd seen her emotional—before this whole thing, anyway—was when she'd come to my penthouse and given me a talking-to. Even then, her anger carried more than a tinge of disbelief and disappointment, but she never let that get to her in a personal way—in a way that showed real hurt or pain.

But as she looked back at me from her hospital bed, I saw something quite different in her. I saw something more like the manic, disoriented girl who'd drawn over everything in her quarters. Those two big, dark eyes of hers had a little more shine to them than I'd come to expect, and she said,

"Ikari, what kind of person do you think I am?"

"You are—you are…" I fumbled for words. "You're…far braver than I ever could be. That much I know."

She scoffed, shaking her head. "You think I'm brave?"

"You don't even batt an eye doing it," I said, gaping. "You—"

"Come on. You of all people should understand."

"Understand what?"

She stared at the ceiling—her expression blank, as though someone had taken all the emotion inside her and crushed it in a black hole.

"It's not bravery if you don't really care what happens to you," she said.

I sat there, with the folder quivering in my hands and my mouth open. Nozomi's pulse—as the EKG machine announced it with rhythmic beeps—was totally steady. How different it would've sounded if it had been hooked up to me.

I got up from the cold metal chair, and I walked out. I went out straight away, and I made for the nearest washroom. I put the folder on top of a hand dryer, but it was unstable and fell over, scattering the sketches on the tile floor. I didn't bother to pick them up.

I just looked in the mirror. I looked at my face—a face that was looking more and more, every day, like my father's.

I ran the sink for cold water, and I splashed some over my face. Anything to wash that sight away. Anything to wash those feelings away.

"You're wasting time here."

The only thing cooler than that water was the steady voice of Rei Ayanami.

She appeared before me in the mirror, with her red eyes sharp and focused—squarely on me.

"You should be working with someone who can pilot right now," she said.

"And just leave her behind?" I scoffed. "No way."

"Who are you trying to help?"

"Her, me, everyone!" I beat my fist on my chest. "We all need help!"

"You can't do that," said Ayanami. "That's not something anyone can do. You have to choose. What is most important to you?"

I buried my face in my hands, hiding in the last droplets of cold water. "Lots of things are important to me, Ayanami. 'Responsibility is a fire that burns inside the heart,' isn't it?" My head snapped upright. I glared at her in the mirror. "What is it you want me to do? How am I supposed to do all this? Tell me!"

Ayanami hesitated before answering. "You—you and General Katsuragi—were destroying all the bonds you had with other people to see this through. I won't ask you to do that, but no one will be left if you fail, Ikari."

"I understand that, but—" I hissed, and I pulled on my hair. "I don't know how to do this."

"I've felt that way before." She took a step closer in the mirror. If she were really there, she would've been just behind me. "I could show you."

"Show me what?" I demanded.

"Go outside," she said, smiling a little. "I'll be waiting for you."

I wiped my face clean, and I stepped over the scattered sketches, making for the door. I turned the handle, and I stepped into a corridor—a corridor far different from Manoah Base, for the ceilings boasted two continuous strips of fluorescent lights, and the hallway itself seemed to be made of interchangeable, rectangular sections.

"Samael."

It was Ayanami's voice, but it was not Ayanami. This person wore a white lacboat—as did the others who followed her, who walked past me: Kaworu, Asuka, Nozomi, Toji, and Horaki.

The seven of us stood in a hallway of Nerv Headquarters.

"Samael," Ayanami said again, "are you coming?"

I swallowed and nodded, and I let Lilith lead the way.

#

Throughout the story I've told so far, I've talked about Ayanami even though that name is a fiction. She was a person created from salvaged DNA and a borrowed soul. Few other people bothered using that name. To everyone else in the world, she was Lilith.

I didn't know Lilith, though. How much that person who appeared to me was Lilith versus Ayanami I couldn't know. Even the ghost who appeared to me was different from the woman in the past—the one in the false vision Ayanami showed me. In the past, she was idealistic, full of drive and compassion. The ghost I'd come to know wasn't so loud about her intentions. If the past version of her was a bright and boisterous flame, the ghost in the present was more of a steady ember.

I didn't know what Ayanami meant to show me with this second vision of the past, but whatever she intended, there was something else I wanted to learn, too. Lilith wasn't the only person there, after all. I was in the company of Adam, too, and the others—the ones who looked at me with the faces of Asuka, Toji, Nozomi, and Horaki, as well as "Samael," whose role I played in this fantasy. The seven of us formed the core of the plot to save their people.

The seven of us walked down one of the corridors in "Nerv Headquarters." The halls were lit by only red emergency lighting. Our footsteps and chatter between us were the only sounds that could be heard.

"Samael." The one with Horaki's face called to me, and I hesitated when she fell into step beside me. She had the gentle look of Horaki—when Horaki could be kind instead of demanding, at least. It wasn't a look that fit her. Someone like her shouldn't have looked so kind.

"What's the matter?" she said, frowning. "Did I startle you?"

I looked ahead and stared steadfastly at the end of the hallway. "No, sorry. Just have some things on my mind."

"I thought so," said the thing with Horaki's face. "You've been very quiet lately. Anything specific?"

"Ah, no," I said, laughing nervously. "I guess it's just the totality of it all—everything we're doing. It's a lot to think about."

"It is, isn't it." The thing with Horaki's face looked forward with a distant stare. "Perhaps I should cross you off the list of people I'm worried about, then."

"Why's that?"

She jerked her head forward, where Kaworu was talking with an animated Asuka and Toji. "So you put in a failsafe," Asuka said confidently, "just in case there's any navigational error. That shouldn't be difficult."

Horaki didn't like what she was hearing with that. She shook her head, saying to me, "I'd rather not assume anything is simple at this stage."

"Do you—do you think something might go wrong?" I asked.

"Not in so many words. But it'll be a real pity if we go through all this…" She opened her arms, gesturing to the facility around us. "If we go through all this and accomplish nothing, then what's the point?"

Yeah, what was the point? Why would she want to go through all of this just to see it dismantled and destroyed?

"That's why you have a list?" I asked. "Trying to make sure nothing's wrong before we commit to the plan?"

"That's right, and if you're just trying to weigh the enormity of all this, that's fine." She nodded ahead. "I think someone's got a bit more on her mind than that, though."

Ayanami walked in the middle of the pack, between us and Kaworu's group. She was isolated despite being at the center of us.

"Why's that?" I asked.

Horaki looked at me quizzically. "Because of the contact experiment?"

Up ahead, I saw an elevator with a grated door. There was only one such elevator in all of Nerv Headquarters—-only one elevator that went all the way to the very bowels of the facility: the one that led to Terminal Dogma.

"Oh, of course!" I said, slapping the side of my head. "Of course."

Horaki eyed me from the side, but she said nothing more. Her concern and confusion were unsettling. It was strange to be in the position of knowing something she didn't.

The seven of us filed into the elevator with the grated door. The others—Nozomi and Toji, mainly—kept talking throughout, mostly about extracting the souls of their people for the plan. Nozomi felt it had to be done en masse. "Give no one any chance to complain"—that was the way she put it.

But I didn't pay them too much mind, for the scene around us was far more distracting. As we descended, the bowels of the Geofront raced past—innumerable levels and layers of machinery, of discarded rock and flesh.

That was the worst part: the flesh. In some levels of the Geofront, there was material that had once lived—or that was still alive in some way. We felt waves of humidity as we passed those levels, and the walls themselves radiated warmth.

After a few levels of that, I decided not to look outside; I watched Ayanami instead. While the others talked and discussed their plans, Ayanami was silent. She stared outside, as stoic as ever. She stood at the front-left corner of the elevator, where she didn't have to meet anyone's gaze. She stayed that way even once we reached bottom.

The end of the shaft led to cavernous structure. There was a lake of LCL on one side of the chamber, and a few in the group went to the fluid's edge to take samples, but Ayanami went off by herself. She approached a red cross, on which a white creature hung. The beast had rolling, blubbery flesh, and it wore a purple mask over its face. The mask had holes for seven lifeless eyes. Ayanami craned her neck, looking upward at the creature—which did not move, nor did it acknowledge her in any way. It stared lazily across the cavern, and each eye blinked independently of the others.

"All right, then." Kaworu clapped his hands and rubbed them together, and the sound echoed through the cavern. "Let's get started, shall we?"

With that, the others went to work. There was a small control room built into the wall of the cavern, and Nozomi and Toji headed there, sitting down to watch some monitors. Kaworu and Asuka lugged out boxes of cables and other devices, and the two of them attached sensors to the creature's body. Horaki worked on some cameras, setting up tripods at various positions and distances. I did my best to pretend to be useful, carrying tripods out to where Horaki told me, but it was difficult to play the role: at one point, Horaki just looked at me and said, "We just went over this last night. Ten, twenty, and forty meters, right?"

I smiled and nodded, saying I was a little distracted. That wasn't all wrong, either, for once we started on the second set of cameras, Ayanami closed her eyes, bowed her head, and walked away from the giant.

"Lilith?" Horaki spotted it, too. "Where are you going?" she called out.

"Around," said Ayanami. "You guys need some more time, right?"

"Maybe twenty minutes," said Kaworu, who attached another sensor pad to the giant from atop a ladder. "Check back in then, all right?"

Ayanami waved a hand in acknowledgement, but she said nothing more and kept walking.

I set up another tripod, but I fumbled with putting out the legs. I wasn't looking at the floor. I was watching Ayanami's every step.

"Samael." That was the thing with Horaki's face again. "What do you think about that?" The eyes that looked like Horaki's followed Ayanami as well.

"I think," I said after a time, "I'm not sure if she should be alone right now."

Looking stone-faced, Horaki said, "No. Let's go."

"Go?"

At that, Horaki flashed a coy smile. "You're not helping me much here, are you?"

I laughed nervously, and I bowed my head in understanding. Horaki led the way, and we followed in Ayanami's tracks.

Ayanami had headed down a series of tunnels. These passages were hexagonal in shape, and their intersections were unusual—three-way junctions at 120-degree angles.

These were the guts of the Geofront. The whole area hummed with the sounds of machinery—fans, pumps, and the like. Despite all that noise, Ayanami's footsteps echoed. Her strides were steady and even, and thanks to that, we were able to keep up with her.

Horaki and I dared not exchange words. She pressed a finger to her lips at one point—what a childish gesture; did she think she could fool me?—but our footsteps could still be heard. If Ayanami recognized we were following her, she didn't seem to care. As long as Horaki and I didn't say a word, we could all pretend Ayanami was alone, with only the echoes of footsteps to accompany her. Perhaps the illusion of being alone was all she wanted.

That illusion couldn't hold forever. Ayanami's trail came to a halt as she reached a dead end. Horaki and I followed her to an airlock. Horaki slid open a control panel, and she navigated a computer-controlled input system with one hand. After a few touches, the door opened, leading to another chamber with more controls, as well as a series of symbols I didn't understand—dots and lines that gave an impression of writing or numbers, but they were gibberish to me.

The door behind us shut, and Horaki started working the controls within the chamber, opening the second door, which lead to a void. Ayanami was there—-half in light, half in shadow. The light shined on from the outside, showing a rough, irregular rock face with some glittering specks in the stone. Ayanami sat at the airlock's edge, with her legs dangling off the side. She looked over her shoulder at us.

"You want to sit?" she asked.

Horaki scoffed, even as she sat down next to Ayanami. "You're playing with your life here," she said. "but I take it you've been here before?"

Ayanami nodded. "I've come down here a few times," she explained. "There's not that much difference between what we've built here and the rock face outside—just a meter or two, right? Just this strut separates them."

Ayanami tapped her foot on a thick metallic shaft that extended from below the airlock door to the rock face, ending in a triangular pad.

"And yet," she went on, "we designed this thing to last billions and billions of years. Even when the world is gone, what we've built here will still exist. Amazing, isn't it?" She glanced over her shoulder again. "Don't you think so, Samael?"

"Amazing," I said, standing behind her and Horaki. "Amazing and a little frightening."

"Frightening, yes." Ayanami kicked her feet back and forth. "It's more than a little frightening. I'm glad someone else sees it that way."

"We all know this is a tremendous responsibility," said Horaki, who leaned forward to catch Ayanami's eye. "It's bound to be frightening."

Ayanami laughed. "Agrat doesn't think so. Never mind Adam. I think he likes that part of this." She frowned. "I heard the two of them talking about a microwave background experiment that required fifteen billion years to carry out. They talk about it like it's nothing."

"This is a big deal," said Horaki.

"A huge deal," said Ayanami.

"A gigantic deal."

"An enormous deal."

"A gargantuan deal."

Horaki and Ayanami stopped, and they looked at each other. Ayanami burst out laughing. " 'Gargantuan'? Really?"

Horaki scowled in mock anger. How bizarre. They were treating each other like dear friends. Why on earth?

And yet, to Ayanami, that sentiment was real enough. Her expression was something I had seldom seen from her. She was awash with laughter, but her gaze was still distant and yearning, desperate for relief.

Ayanami wiped her eye, and Horaki took her hand.

"Do you want to go through with this?" asked Horaki.

"What?" Ayanami blinked. "What do you mean?"

"It's a lot to ask of anyone," said Horaki. "Why put yourself through that? The six of us could handle it." Horaki looked to me. "We're up for it, right, Samael?"

"If, uh…" I pulled on my collar. "If Lilith wants to stay behind, I'm sure we could make it work."

I climbed down and sat between the girls. I kicked my legs in the cavernous void beneath us and frowned. As much as I'd been unnerved by this thing with Horaki's face, no doubt Ayanami—the Ayanami I knew, back in my place and my time—had something else in mind for me to consider.

I leaned forward, catching Ayanami's gaze. "It has to be something you want to do, right?"

"That's true." Ayanami rose. She held on to the edge of the doorway, and she stepped out, into the dark.

"Lilith!" cried Horaki.

"Relax." She took two steps onto the support strut and shot us a disapproving look. "I'm fine."

Even so, I peered around her to watch her footing, but she stepped confidently across a metal strut—a beam that stuck out from the Geofront's surface into the surrounding rock. She walked the beam with the ease and skill of a gymnast. With one foot in front of the other, she stopped at the end of the strut, and she felt the rough face of the rock outside.

"Have you ever touched the ground and just felt it, Eisheth? Samael?" she asked.

Eisheth. Yes, that's right. That was her name. She'd said it before, at the presentation. Her name was Eisheth.

The thing with Horaki's face—Eisheth—looked like she was going to have a heart attack. Wincing, I said,"I don't think so, no."

"The earth has a heartbeat," said Ayanami. "It pulses because stuff flows inside of it: liquid rock circulates through the mantle, bringing heat from the core. That sustains volcanoes and fuels the magnetic field."

"Even that would slow and stop with time," said Horaki, rising to her feet. "Now get back here!"

Ayanami waved a hand at her like a headstrong child. "It might," she said,"but until then, you can still feel it. You can feel the warmth in the ground. It's still alive, in a way. We're all alive. We're connected that way."

"Connected?" I said.

"Yes, connected: bound together by what keeps us going, by what keeps us alive." She smiled at that, and she rubbed her fingers on the rock face. "I have no doubts about what I'm doing here. I know it's scary; I know it's frightening, but we're all going through it together, and we won't be alone, will we?"

I opened my mouth. My head titled, and I shot her a quizzical look. Horaki had a more composed answer:

"No," said Horaki. "Not alone. Even if it takes us a little while to meet again, we will not be alone. We're doing this together."

Ayanami nodded at that, smiling, but her expression turned pained again as she rubbed a hand on the rock face. "Still," she said, "I'm going to miss stuff like this. Something like the earth's heartbeat—we're not going to get to feel it again with our own skin."

"But you will feel it again." Horaki reached a hand over the gap, offering to pull Ayanami back onto the main structure. "Even if it's never the same, or if it takes a billion billion years, we'll make sure of that."

Ayanami took Horaki's hand, and she climbed back onto the Geofront's main structure.

"Yeah," she said. "I know we will."

You see, even though she had doubts, Ayanami had a great deal of conviction for what they were doing—more than I would've had, at least. She trusted in them—all of them—that it would turn out well in the end, and that they would do it together.

How sad it was, then, that she and the others were betrayed.

When Ayanami was finished, we headed back to the main chamber. By that point, the others were ready for the experiment. Horaki and I joined them in the observation room, watching from the giant's left. Ayanami, in turn, removed her clothes and stood before the giant. Dwarfed as she was by that thing, she faced it down steadily and didn't tremble in the least.

"Lilith." Kaworu spoke through a microphone, and his voice resonated throughout the room. "You may proceed when ready."

She took a breath, and she stepped forward. She approached the giant's leg, and she turned around, putting her body to it back-first.

And when she touched it, the giant's skin pulled at her. It pulled her a centimeter off the ground, and her body sank within it like a coin in a fountain.

She shut her eyes tight, and the giant's white flesh enveloped her whole.

The other's among the seven were as enthralled with the scene as I was. Kaworu had to remind the others to monitor their consoles for data: "What's the electrical activity like?" he asked of Nozomi. "The thermal profile?"

But after a time, the readings on those consoles steadied. The giant was intact and alive. The others looked among each other and decided: so far, so good.

Kaworu got on the microphone. "Lilith," he said, "can you hear me?"

The giant's head turned, facing us, and its seven eyes—each blinking independently of the others—came to focus.

Yes, Adam. I'm here.

#

I woke up back in the base, underneath the exposed pipes that ran along the ceiling and harsh fluorescent lights. I opened my hand in front of me and wiggled my fingers. The base was a very different place from that version of Nerv Headquarters; for starters, it was alive with running water and circulating air. People passed by with idle chatter and the like. The installation I had seen was more of an empty shell, where even isolated sounds stood out like they didn't belong.

"She believed in it."

That was Ayanami. She stood beside me, in front of the washroom door, and she stared down the hallway, not meeting my gaze.

"She believed in it with all her heart," said Ayanami. "Don't you agree?"

"She did, and she was betrayed." I followed Ayanami's gaze, but the hallway just went on down before turning a corner. There was nothing there to look forward to. "Wasn't she?" I asked.

She said nothing.

"Ayanami, listen—"

I tried to touch her shoulder, but my fingers went through her like putting a hand in front of a movie projector.

Ayanami looked away. "It would be dangerous if I could touch you. She would be able to touch you as well. That's something I've given up."

I wiggled my fingers, and I balled my hand into a fist at my side. "You've given up a lot," I said.

She nodded. "Some of that can never be recovered, but if we win—if she relents…" She brought a finger back through my hand, and she rested her arm at her side. "…maybe then."

"I am still here, right now," I said. "We're all here for you."

"You are here," she said, smiling a little, but that smile was short-lived. "You're here—for now."

"Ayanami—"

"You're in danger, Ikari," she said, eyes hard and focused. "You're all in danger. I asked General Katsuragi for her help. If you're not here for that, then what are you here for? Who are you here for?"

Her red eyes bored into me like lasers.

"I need a part of you to believe in it. If there's something you could do and you leave it undone, then you betray me a little bit, too."

Try as I might to speak, no words came from my throat. I shut my eyes tightly, and I clawed at the top of my head, as though I could pull some explanation from my brain with nothing more than my bare hands.

I sighed, shook my head, and mustered only, "Ayanami, it's not like that; I—"

I looked up, and she was gone.

Ayanami left me there, with the sounds of water flowing through pipes and air through ductwork—in a machine that was alive, but with no other soul around to share that feeling with me.

#

After speaking with Ayanami, I headed back to my office. The morning schedule was busy, with more training for Sasaki on deck.

I went over the agenda of exercises—three different scenarios for fighting Angels in locations all around Asia, but it was all the same. None of it really changes between one situation to the next. Three Angels, coastline environment? Check. Two Angels, mountain environment? Check. All the same. Pointless details that don't mean anything.

I shut the folder, tucked it under my arm, and went out the door. I headed downstairs and across the base.

To the pilot locker room.

"Sasaki?" I pushed the door open, greeted by rows of lockers in metallic gray. "Are you in here?"

"Yes, sorry," a voice called back. "I'll be down in just a minute!"

"No, that's fine. There's something I wanted to talk about before we got started." I came around the corner, and there was Sasaki:

In white underwear with his plugsuit hanging from the locker door.

"Uh…" He turned redder than a tomato. "Do you mind?"

"Why?" I asked. "There's no modesty when you pilot Eva. Everything you have is laid bare. Get dressed."

Sasaki gawked at me, and after a moment, he sighed and turned around as he continued getting dressed. "What is it, Ikari?"

"I wanted to ask you," I began, "what are you doing here?"

"I'm trying to get dressed, but there's this guy staring at me…"

"That's not what I meant."

"Yeah, I know." He started putting his legs into the suit. "I guess I don't know what you mean," he went on. "Your people asked me to do this. You came to my family and said I could be a pilot. After that…" He sighed, and he looked into the mirror on the locker door, meeting my gaze in the reflection. "It's been over a year now. I don't think about it a lot anymore."

"But let's say you could quit, right now," I said, leaning forward, "what then?"

"Who would do that?" He stared at me over his shoulder. "I'm the next one up; I couldn't do that."

"We can move on—right here, right now, if you tell me this is something you don't want to do."

The boy hung his head, even as he continued to put the suit on. "It's not like this is something I want to do," he said, "but somebody has to do it, and I've been trained to do it, so…shouldn't I?"

"For what?" I stepped forward. "To save the world?"

"Of course."

"You want to save the world? That's why you're here?"

"Doesn't everybody?"

"No! No no." I laughed. "Most people don't, and neither do you. If you wanted to save the world, you wouldn't be so tentative and erratic in that chair, Sasaki."

"I'm trying; I—"

"I don't need you to try," I said, standing just a step behind him. "I need you to believe in something. I need you to feel that conviction and have it fuel you. Who do you want to save—your family?"

"Yes, of course."

"Prove it to me."

His brow furrowed, and he gawked at me. "Prove? How?"

"Say it."

"I want to save my family?"

"Louder."

"I want to save my family!" he cried, eyes wide, looking back at me in the mirror.

"Do you believe it?" I took a step even closer, looking right over his shoulder. "Do you really?"

"Ikari…" He shook his head, shying away from me. "I don't—"

"I need you to believe it," I said, watching him. "If you don't believe it, if you don't feel it in your heart, you're going to suffer!" I banged my fist on the adjacent locker, and Sasaki shuddered, but I went on. "Do you understand? You're going to suffer piloting Eva, and none of it will mean anything if you don't want to do it. So, you tell me you want to do it. You tell me you want to endure this."

"I do, Ikari!" He turned around, facing me with the plugsuit hanging at his ankles. His eyes hardened, and he went on. "I want to do this—for my family, for the world. I really do."

I took him by the shoulder, shook him, and smiled. "Good," I said. "Now get dressed."

"We're going training?" he asked.

"Yes. We're going to train you right this time. We're going to train you like we've never trained anyone before."

#

Sasaki and I spent most of the next two days training, and we developed a much better rapport. We were united in a manner of thinking and acting that Nozomi and I had never experienced. We had a common purpose and a shared ideal.

I understand people might find that statement unconvincing. Let me tell you about just one example of us working together, working as one.

It was near noon, two days after Sasaki's shaky performance in Russia. After spending most of the morning on scenarios with two Angels to fight, Major Hyuga and I decided to shake things up a bit.

"Okay, Sasaki," I said, standing at my station in the control room, "we're going to add a third Angel here."

The boy on the screen pulled at his plugsuit's collar and sighed. "Ikari, do you think that's realistic? What chance do I really have against three Angels at once?"

"A better chance if you practice than if you don't," I said, and I tapped a pen on the edge of my monitor to stress the point. "Now, who decided you should be here?"

He gulped and composed himself. "I did."

"Then what are you going to do?"

"As long as I choose to be here, I'll give everything I've got."

"Good boy," I said. "Now, here's your situation: three Angels are attacking a desert airfield. Do what you can to protect the aircraft on the runway. Deter or kill the Angels as needed. Got it?"

"And the enemy?"

"The two you've been fighting and the disc-shaped Angel from Africa."

He nodded at that and took a deep breath. "Okay. I'm ready."

I nodded in turn to Hyuga. "We're ready."

"Good," said Hyuga. "Let's begin."

The simulation coalesced; digital wireframes aligned themselves into hangars and control towers. The color of the earth grew out of the wireframe landscape like boils—brown and sandy. Though mountains loomed in the distance, there was nowhere to hide in this place: Angel or Eva, you could be seen for kilometers all around.

The Mist Angel swarmed in the sky, teeming and alive like a cloud of bees. The Quadruped rampaged through the base, smashing buildings with its feet and chomping down on aircraft like they were toys for a dog. The Disc Angel from Africa rolled over the landscape. A yellow, swirling froth of energy, it was bound together by unseen walls, and it shattered runways underneath its weight.

Unit-14 approached the base with nothing but flat land behind it, and the Angels took notice. The Disc turned about, and it raced toward Unit-14. The spinning creature kicked up sand and dirt in a V-shaped wake.

Major Hyuga gave the first order. "Don't give it time to react," he said. "Outmaneuver it."

Sasaki was a better pilot by that point. He'd learned to be confident as well as to listen. I relayed the major's instructions, and Sasaki did what he was told. He was a very good boy.

Unit-14 charged the Disc. The lumbering bear lurched forward with its two rows of eyes and its perpetual, sinister grin, as though it relished the chance for battle and bloodshed, but Sasaki kept cool. He ran the Eva straight at the Angel, planted the Eva's left foot in the dirt, and jumped away. The Angel sped past, and Unit-14 rolled to its feet and dashed onward to the base.

He was desperately needed there. The Quadruped tore through a hangar, warping and twisting the metal roof as though it were thin plastic wrap. Unit-14 turned to meet the Quadruped, but the Mist Angel intervened. It formed a corrosive curtain, blocking one whole side of the base from the Eva.

"It's all right," I said in the microphone. "Try to cut a gap and barge through it."

Unit-14 drew its prog knife, and it cut a gash in the curtain. The gap was narrow, and the Angel's corrosion ate at the Eva on both sides, but the Eva's AT field held, and Sasaki broke through.

But what he broke through to wasn't a safe place at all.

"Watch out!" I cried.

The Quadruped tackled Unit-14; it chomped on the Eva's torso, and its maw put pressure on the Eva's AT field and abdominal armor plates underneath.

"Urk!" grunted Sasaki. "Ikari—Ikari, what can I do here?"

The Eva writhed and punched helplessly at the Angel, but the Quadruped's jaw held on. The Angel thrashed about, slamming the Eva into the ground like a dog with a child's doll.

I looked to Hyuga, who watched with narrowed eyes. "Can't activate the engine," he said. "He'd be crushed. Just let it play."

I took a breath, planting a hand on my desk, and I said, "Okay, Sasaki, just ride it out. It can't hold on to you forever."

He cast a surprised look at the camera. "I'm supposed to just let it keep eating me?"

"It can't eat you," I said, "if you're stronger than it is. You're here, and you're in control. Remind me: what do you need to do?"

"Give everything I've got."

"Can you say that again?"

"Give everything I've got!"

"Give everything you've got," I said, pumping a fist for the camera, "and it can't beat you. If your soul is stronger than that thing's, it can't beat you."

So Sasaki held fast. He took the punishment the Angel dished out. The simulation shot pain into his stomach from the maw's pressure, and the beast beat Unit-14's legs into the ground.

But try as it might, the Quadruped couldn't break through the Eva's AT field. It clenched its jaw and pressed down, but the barrier held in place, spraying the light of the soul through the desert. The light cast long shadows from the hangars and blinded the virtual camera.

The Angel gave up, and it spat Unit-14 out. The Eva tumbled over a runway, and it landed half-draped over a heading sign.

"Now, get up!" I said, pounding my fist on the table.

Unit-14 rose, wobbling on its feet. Sasaki squeezed the controls tightly, and he asked, "Can we go for the kill?"

It was more of a statement than anything. I don't know if he would've relented if I'd said no.

"Take it out," I said, grinning.

Unit-14 charged. It lead with the prog knife as though holding a spear, and the Angel, growling and chomping at the bit, answered in kind: it leapt into action, kicking up dust as it ran. It came at the Eva with an open, frothing maw.

"Okay, engine activate!" I cried.

Sasaki pushed the switch on the activation lever, and Unit-14 left its feet. The AT fields collided in a shower of light and then reconnected with a snapping sound: TSCH!

And Unit-14 barreled through the maw of the Angel, coming out knife-first through the Angel's back.

"Good job!" I said, grinning. "Now, next target!"

The next target was the Disc Angel, which had circled around and was bearing back on Sasaki's position. He turned the knife over in the Eva's right hand, so that it pointed downward or to the outside of his body. As the golden disc blazed toward Sasaki, Unit-14 ran and picked up speed as well. Sasaki raised the Eva's arm to stab in a side-to-side, left-to-right motion, and—-

The scene froze. The Angels turned to wireframes, and the environment vanished.

"What?" cried Sasaki.

"That's time." Hyuga tapped on his watch. "Get something to eat, gentlemen. And your break needs to be one full hour this time, not fifty-nine minutes in a pinch. Those are the regs."

I looked up at the clock: ten seconds past noon. I sighed, and I got on the headset. "Good work still, Sasaki. We'll work on the rest of that scenario after lunch."

"Got it. See you at mess." He shot me a confident smile, and I returned the gesture. The boy really was coming into his own.

I started packing up my things, but Hyuga was already ahead of me, and I had some business with him, so I hurried to get the folder of exercises under my arm. "Ah, Hyuga!"

He stopped in the control room doorway, and I ran up to him. "Yes? What is it?" he asked.

"I was wondering, about the afternoon session—"

He frowned. "Do you need the full time again?"

"Yes, I think we do," I said, "but that's not what I wanted to ask about."

"No?"

"No, I was wondering what we have in terms of four-Angel scenarios."

He rubbed his brow and shook his head. "Shinji, there aren't four Angels in this hemisphere. I'm not sure that's something we should spend a great deal of time on. You've got the three-Angel scenarios. Those could take all day today, and tomorrow."

"Yes, I understand," I said, "but still—if an Angel from the Americas were to come here, I'd like to work on it." I took out a folder and started flipping through it, showing him the papers inside. "I have some ideas about it, actually."

"For tomorrow?" he asked.

"Or the next day?"

Hyuga looked at me with an intense, inscrutable expression. He looked between me and then Sasaki on the projector screen. Watching Sasaki, he said,

"I'll look into it."

I thanked him for that, and I told him I'd see him at lunch once I'd put my materials away. He seemed to understand, though I think he wasn't listening very carefully.

#

What I was building with Sasaki wasn't something everyone else understood. Hyuga definitely didn't understand it, and he wasn't the only one. I heard from another of those people when I got back to my office: as I put down my folder and locked up my drawers to go to lunch, I noticed a few missed calls on my office phone—from Horaki.

I sighed and shook my head, but I picked up the phone. There's nothing to be gained by avoiding someone, so I called her.

"Horaki residence," she answered.

"Hi, Horaki; you were looking for me?"

"Ah, Ikari, yes. Do you have a minute?"

"Only one, maybe two. It's lunchtime, and I don't want to lose my place." I leaned on one foot as I stood by the phone. "What's going on?"

"It's about Nozomi: I'm told they're releasing her today, and they're going to let her go home to recuperate. I want to do what I can to help her here; I was wondering if she told you anything else."

I scratched the back of my head and sighed. "I'm sorry, Horaki, but I haven't spoken to her since just after you left."

"Not at all?"

"No, sorry. I've been very busy trying to get Sasaki up to speed. He was way behind; he's better now. Hopefully I'll have more time later."

"How much later is that supposed to be? It's been three days."

"Sasaki's progress has to be my priority right now; if I can make him half as good as Nozomi, that'll be a big relief for everybody here. I'm just trying to make sure I have an opportunity to help her later, that I'm still going to be here later." I smiled even though she couldn't see me. "I know it's hard. I just…I just don't see how else to do it, you know?"

"So, you'll be up here to check up on her, right—at some point?"

I glanced at the clock. "At some point, yes, definitely."

"All right, then," she said. "Go on to lunch. Tell Asuka to call me, okay?"

"Of course. Thanks, Horaki."

She didn't answer. She didn't really understand. She just pretended to.

I didn't blame her for that. Few people could really appreciate the gravity of the situation. After all, Japan had been untouched to that point. We were all safe and comfortable—minus some shortages of supplies. Those who'd lived to see Tokyo-2's Angel invasion were a small minority, and they were inclined to just forget.

#

Sasaki and I worked through scenarios for the rest of the afternoon. There was no shortage of Angels to try him against or battlefields to drop the Eva into. It was work we couldn't have done without a lot of other people programming the simulations and setting the parameters for each exercise. It would've been a waste to leave their work unused, after all.

Around six, we came up on our mandatory break again, timed to coincide with dinner, and that was fine by me. Hours and hours of time in the simulator helped Sasaki learn how to react and make decisions, but there was only so much that could be seen in real time. We recorded each exercise for later review and analysis, and just before dinner, I snuck to my office to check some film. Sasaki had been fighting the Disc Angel in the simulator and got his foot run over, and I replayed some footage to see if he had a chance to dodge.

As I was going frame-by-frame through a clip, there was a knock on the door. It was Asuka.

"Hey," she said, wearing a red sweater and brown slacks. "You coming to dinner?"

"Ah, yeah, just needed a minute," I said, going back to my computer to lock it. "Sorry about that. Hyuga isn't mad, is he?"

Asuka shrugged. "Actually, I told him we might go out tonight."

"Yeah? Where to?"

"Prigioni's?"

I winced. "That's a bit of a hike."

"Too busy for a romantic Italian dinner, huh?"

I glanced at the phone, with its blinking light and pixellated display of missed calls.

"All right," I said, smiling. "Prigioni's it is."

#

Let's make one thing clear: Asuka wasn't the type to plan something like this for her own sake. She enjoyed the glow of the spotlight, but she wanted other people to be the ones to point it her way. One time, the Japanese government asked us to participate in a dinner honoring us and Misato. I didn't want to go, but Asuka was into it at first. She signed up in a heartbeat, but when they asked her what kind of food she wanted, or if she'd accept a statue or just a plaque or whatever, Asuka hissed at the phone and said,

"Isn't that your job to decide? Surprise me!"

And she hung up the phone and got back on her laptop to work.

I didn't bring that up while we were on the way to Prigioni's, but it was in the back of my mind. Asuka wanted my time, and I saw no need to refuse her.

It was warm and muggy as we left the Defense Agency building in National Square, and the Square itself was alive, just like the insects that chirped and buzzed about. Reconstruction efforts in the square had seen the old fences taken down and most of the walkways and facades repaired, but the fountain was still cracked and drained of water—a reminder of what had happened, of what couldn't be allowed to happen again.

Prigioni's was in the old city, where bus service was spotty and some of the smaller buildings and homes had fallen into disrepair. Even so, Signora Prigioni kept hold of her old restaurant even after Instrumentality. It wasn't much to hold on to—an open kitchen on the left side with just a small handful of tables against the wall on the right—but it was hers, and she wasn't letting go.

Only one couple was seated there when we arrived. A young man, seated facing the door, noticed us right away. He met Asuka's gaze and touched his partner's hand, but Asuka quieted him down:

"Shh," she said, putting a finger to her lips and winking. "Can you keep a secret?"

The man nodded at that, and his companion smiled and nodded as we passed. Asuka didn't miss a beat, leading us to the table at the back-right corner of the room. She drew a red curtain behind me, and I sat in front of it, with Asuka facing the door. She exhaled and relaxed visibly as she sat.

"Nice to see the sun again," she said. "I think I'm getting too pale—sitting under those fluorescent lights all day long."

True, it was a change from the base. Instead of plastic and metal and cool white lights, we had the warm glow of fake candles and the rough, irregular texture of a wooden table and chairs.

But we didn't have a lot of time to enjoy the scenery: a stout woman with a wart on her nose came to our table. With a red apron over her clothes and a notepad in hand, she was all business until she looked up and saw our faces.

"Ah, you're back! You're back, my dears!" She hugged Asuka with one arm. "How have you been?"

"Good, very good, Signora," said Asuka. "How's Alessandro?"

"Oh, he's being a bum," said the signora, scowling. "He's taken up with a woman—a police officer. She's nice—too good for him, really—but now he has ideas of becoming a police officer himself! Can you imagine?"

I winced. "Is he losing weight?"

The signora shook her head, eyes wide. "I wish! For his sake, I wish. That might be the only good thing to come of this." She reached out a hand to me. "And how are you, Dear?"

"Hanging in there," I said, grasping her hand for a moment. "It's nice to get out and see you."

"You two are always welcome," she said with a smile. "But!" She clapped her hands, and she picked her notepad up from the table. "I know you must be busy. Do you need menus, or do you already have something in mind?"

"For times like these," Asuka began, "it's nice to get something you know. Seaweed spaghetti for me, please."

"Meatballs and rice, please," I said.

"You got it," she said, jotting down our orders, and she disappeared back into the kitchen.

A server soon came by with a pot of tea, and Asuka poured out a cup for herself.

"Isn't this nice?" she said. "Nice to see the signora again, right? Or to spend time with people you care about?"

I coughed. "Asuka…"

"What?"

"Did you talk to Horaki?"

At that, Asuka's smile vanished. She slid her teacup aside, folded her hands, and leaned forward. "Yes," she said. "I talked to Hikari. Don't you think it'd be nice to take her here—her, and Suzuhara, and Nozomi?"

I sat back, watching the specks of tea leaves in my cup. "I think Nozomi would feel like a fifth wheel there."

"That's not the point!" Asuka tapped her finger on the table. "What's the deal, Shinji? What's got into your head all of a sudden? I thought you and Nozomi were close."

A server stopped by again with some bread and oil. I took a slice and dipped it into the saucer of oil. I shook it so any loose droplets would fall away, and I said,

"I thought so, too, but…" I sighed. "…there's been a lot Nozomi's kept from me. I'm not sure what I can do about that right now."

Asuka's expression softened at that, and she ran a finger around the rim of her teacup. "So, that's why you're doing double doses of exercises with Sasaki now?"

I shrugged. "I have to do something."

"You chose to be here."

"So I need to give it everything I've got, yes."

Asuka nodded at that absently, still running her finger around the teacup rim. "So I've heard." She folded her arms, and she leaned forward again. "That's a nice-sounding sentiment, but I think you need to be careful, Shinji—with yourself and with Sasaki."

"How's that?"

"You never really wanted to be a pilot. I always did." She put a hand to her chest—to the ribbed fabric of her red sweater. "I was gonna be the one to save the world, and I pushed myself to make that happen. But I think you and I both know that girl didn't really care about saving the world—not the way she should've, anyway." She took a slice of bread from the basket and held it up for both of us to see. "Just like if you're an Italian chef, you probably don't care about the bread, but people expect you to care, so you do what you're supposed to do."

I frowned. "You think I don't really believe in this?"

"You do, or you don't. If you do—if you really do—then don't worry about it." She shrugged. "No sense in doing otherwise, right?"

"I don't want to be better than other people," I said.

"I know that. That's not you."

"But I don't want to stay the way I am," I went on. "There are lots of people out there—like you, or Misato, or Hyuga, or everyone else in the base—and they're all working hard. They're working so hard. I won't betray them."

Asuka raised an eyebrow. "So you need to do more?"

"Yes."

"And how much is that?"

My mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out. Thankfully, I wasn't on the hook for very long: the signora came by again. "Food's almost ready!" she told us, and we both smiled at her.

The reprieve was short-lived, though, as Asuka's penetrating gaze settled back on to me. The best I could do was say,

"Asuka."

"Yes?"

"Why spaghetti with seaweed?"

She let out a sharp breath, shaking her head. "Well, if you must know, it was something Mama used to make. How she got good seaweed outside of Japan I'll never know."

"It's pretty good," I said.

"I think so, too."

"What was it—the last time we were here, I tried it?"

She nodded.

"Thanks," I said, "for introducing it to me."

I touched her fingers, and she closed her hand over my own.

"You're welcome," she said, smiling. "That's what I'm here for."

#

Late the next day, we got word that the Angels were making for Shandong Island, an important Chinese port.

Sasaki was dispatched straight away, and as afternoon turned to evening, I stayed on the line with him. Piloting an Eva at night is ten times worse than in the daylight: without the grounding of a horizon and scenery, it's a easier to get lost in the beast. Keeping a voice in his head was a way to make sure he'd stay in his own mind.

"How is it in there?" I asked at one point.

Sasaki cast a silent, exasperated look at the camera. Unit-14 was strapped to an airplane once again, and you can't exactly take a book to read on the way over. Sasaki's arms floated in the LCL, but he was buckled in place. The result was not a happy image.

"Yeah," I said, "that's about what I thought, sorry."

"Maybe next time," he suggested, "you guys can let me out of the harness? It'd be nice to go for a swim every once in a while. I'm feeling a little stiff."

I looked to Hyuga, who shook his head. "Turbulence."

"No go on that," I said over the radio. "You could take a bump."

"Thought so." He sighed.

"Well," I said, "look at it this way: get an Angel killed today, and there will be one less left to worry about. Then it'll all be over soon."

He nodded at that but said nothing, and I took my hand off the transmit switch. It was a break in the conversation, and that was a good time for a sip from a can of coffee. Who knew if the Angel would even dare to engage us at night? Sasaki could have to spend the whole night outside of Japan—and in Chinese hands, no less.

"Ops," said a controller, "we're seeing a drop in RPMs on engine number three."

I put down my coffee.

"Any word from the pilots?" asked Hyuga, trotting over to the far side of the room.

A flight controller pressed down on her headset earphone. "No, we have no communication with the flight crew for the last six minutes."

I got on the radio. "Sasaki," I said, "do you think anything's wrong here? Have you heard anything? Seen anything?"

He held out his hands and shook his head. "Ikari, I can't even crane the Eva's neck. What am I going to see?"

Not much, admittedly, but he did have a forward-facing view. For most of the flight, we kept the Eva's eyes closed to protect from wind damage, but Sasaki opened the Eva's eyes, which flooded the entry plug visualization system with twilight.

"Exterior floods?" I suggested.

A pair of shoulder-mounted lights came on, showing the top of the aircraft and the wing surfaces.

As well as a pair of dark shapes that crawled along the top of the wing.

"Major!" I yelled. "Major, what is that?"

Hyuga grimaced as he saw the images on the front projector, and he raced to the front. "We need those floods rotated; what do we have here?"

Another controller worked his console, and the flood lights turned to illuminate the enemy: two shriekers. They stared back at us with their triplet eyes, their mouthparts spinning in alternating directions. The shriekers clung to the top of the starboard wing. Exposed by the light, they swung underneath the airframe, and two cones energy blasted through the number four engine, furthest to the Eva's right. Two of the engines were smoking husks, and the plane began to drift.

A clamor went through the room, but Hyuga was on the case.

"Okay, people," he said, raising a hand. "Okay, listen, listen up. Let's get the full staff on scene, right now. This plane is going down. Navigation and Launch Systems, we need to get the Eva clear and to a safe splashdown point. Liaison, we need the PLA, SDF, and any other friendly forces on scene for recovery and defense. Everyone else, do what you need to do to preserve functionality for a wet landing. This Eva is going down.' He clapped his hands. "Now, let's get to it!"

The room went abuzz. Guards opened the doors for additional staff and controllers to make their way in.

"Ikari!" cried Sasaki. "What's happening? What do I do?"

I leaned forward as I pressed on my transmitter. "Sit tight," I said. "The plane's going down; we're going to do everything we can to get you home safely."

"How is that going to happen?" he asked.

I slid my can of coffee aside, and I stared at the overhead image of the plane veering further and further to its right—and all over dark blue water.

"I don't know yet."