Eisheth
Chapter Two
About ten minutes after the paramedics came, police arrived to investigate the accident. They too recognized Shinji right away, and thanks to that, they instantly believed his story about a six-wheeled truck that simply veered off the road for no apparent reason. Shinji had been standing right there. If he didn't see her, how could she have been there at all?
Few people would believe him on the merits anyway. People in the Cult would take it as truth without questioning it. Skeptics would dismiss it as superstition and lunacy. Neither side could appreciate the true significance of the deed. Rei had saved Shinji from something strange and frightening, not just a quick death by the bumper of a speeding truck. Without a doubt, the giant with five eyes had had a hand in it, in trying to lure Shinji to the road where he could be slain.
And what was he to do about it? The night air was muggy; the stars were bright. When that mind no longer invaded his thoughts, he knew no way of finding it to confirm what he'd felt, what he'd seen. Hopefully Asuka would believe him, if she could take the time to step away from her microscope.
Beyond that, all Shinji could think to do was board the train for home and watch the lights go by in the window. They flew past rhythmically, casting a glow on the front edge, penetrating the cabin with a narrow beam, and fading away. Like a child listening to his mother's lullaby, Shinji leaned back in his seat, and exhaustion overcame him. If the five-eyed giant or its kin tried to make someone kill him, he could only hope Rei would wake him in time.
Really, he had no other way to oppose them otherwise.
#
A sound stirred him—a warbling, distorted bell. Shinji's eyes opened, and there was light. A burning yellow light poured through the windows of the traincar, so bright and blinding that Shinji could make out nothing through the glass, save for that uniform glow. The train was not as Shinji remembered it, either. Instead of rows of seats facing forward, the bench he sat on put him sideways to the train's length, with the great blinding glow through the windows right in his face. The floors were wooden, made of planks, with the edges between pieces visible.
And opposite him, on the other bench, sat a girl with golden locks and bright green eyes.
"Masuyo-san?" he said. "It's you, isn't it? The cultist girl from the train yesterday?"
She eyed him starkly, her gaze intense, not at all like the polite, sweet girl Shinji had met. Her clothes were different, too. She wore something suitable for winter—long white pants with tan boots, a matching jacket made of fuzzy cloth with the oversized black buttons lined up in columns—two on her right, three on her left.
"Why are you alive?" she asked. "Do you know? Do you know why you exist?"
Shinji looked away, finding her stare uncomfortable. "I'm here because I choose to be. That's all."
"No, Shinji. Your existence was preordained."
Frowning, Shinji glanced back at her quizzically, but what he saw across the traincar gave him pause. The cultist Masuyo's clothes had changed. She wore a purple skirt with white kneesocks. Her blouse was white, too, and short-sleeved, but where the buttons on her jacket had been, there were purple, horizontal diamonds instead, and in the same pattern: two on her right, three on her left, in perfect columns.
"You were created, and in being created, Lilith fulfilled her purpose," said the cultist Masuyo.
"I told you," said Shinji, "her name is Ayanami Rei."
"What is your purpose?" asked Masuyo. "You live, but what do you do with life?"
Shading his eyes from the glare through the window and Masuyo's gaze, Shinji pondered the question. "I know how, in searching for Ayanami, I was distracting myself before, but I can change that."
There was a sound of heels clattering on the wooden floor. The cultist Masuyo crossed the traincar and knelt before Shinji. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, and this time, she wore a simple pink dress with green gemstones in the fabric of the top—again, arranged in columns like the diamonds and the buttons before them. Shinji fixated on the pattern, wondering where he'd seen it before.
"You kill one another. You know strife and fear and panic. That is not what we were tasked to do. That is not life. That is misery. It's the antithesis of life."
"I've never done anything like that!" cried Shinji. "Please, Masuyo-san, you're too close…."
"You will see. When people are separate, they inevitably turn on each other. That suffering is contrary to life, and life is what you should be given, not suffering," she said. "That is my sister's true purpose."
The cultist Masuyo leaned closer, her lips inching toward Shinji's, but her eyes remained wide and tense. Pushing against the bench, Shinji turned his head away, but Masuyo took his chin in his hand, forcing him to meet her eyes.
Her five beady eyes as they stared at him through a purple mask.
'And it is my purpose, too.'
#
"GAH!"
Shinji snapped awake, panting. His sunglasses clattered on the floor, and he curled into a ball, trembling.
Stay out! he thought. Stay out of my head! My thoughts are mine. My thoughts are mine. My thoughts are mine. My thoughts are mine….
Feeling no words invading his mind, seeing no visions of alien LCL oceans, Shinji caught his breath and shuddered. He blinked twice, his eyes adjusting to the light. It was the traincar he should've been in, one made of metal with dark night outside, but instead of dimmed interior lights to let people sleep, Shinji found the cabin brimming with a halogen glow. From front to back, the traincar was alive with passengers talking or peering out the windows. Few others were even asleep, as he had been.
Shinji followed his fellow passengers' gazes, spying a set of stationary city lights in the distance. The train had stopped, though for what purpose Shinji could only guess. Unlike the mystery of the five-eyed giant, however, this was one question he could get answers to. Shinji stepped into the aisle, trying to flag down a nearby conductor.
"I'm sorry, young man, but unless you're headed for the toilet, it would be best if you retook your seat," said the conductor. "We could be back under way at any moment."
"I didn't mean to cause any trouble," said Shinji. "I was asleep, so I don't know what's going on. Why are we stopped?"
"Just a small problem with the track going into the capital," said the conductor. "Nothing to worry about."
Shinji frowned. That seemed an awfully brief explanation for a total stoppage of the train. He removed his sweatshirt hood and folded up his sunglasses, shooting the conductor a skeptical glance. "Is that really what's happened?"
The flash of recognition in the conductor's eyes told Shinji he really had the man's attention now, but the conductor had few answers for him. "The truth is I don't know much more than that story," said the conductor. "Word is all the lines into Tōkyō-2 are shut down. No one's going into or out of the city. In fact, we're just getting ready to reverse the line and head back east. It's a state of emergency out there, but for what…" The conductor shook his head. "I really can't say. I'm sure people already know that something's wrong. I'm just trying to maintain some calm here. Sorry I can't tell you more."
An emergency? What could it be? On the way back to his seat, Shinji tried to reason out an answer to that very question. Trains shut down, all travel to the capital restricted—it had to be some kind of a disaster. It couldn't have been an earthquake. They would've felt something, or at the least, it wouldn't have been kept secret. A terrorist attack or a riot were the first possibilities that came to mind, but Shinji asked around, finding that no one in the traincar had heard such a thing. From a generous fellow passenger, Shinji borrowed a cell phone—a relative rarity in post-Instrumentality world, for the manufacturers of sophisticated electronics had grown scarce or, in some countries, been nationalized to make military hardware. He dialed Asuka's lab, hoping to hear something from within the city.
"We're sorry, but the network is currently being utilized for emergency communications only. Please remain calm and try again later."
How assuring that was—to hear a machine telling him to "remain calm" while he sat totally isolated from the outside world. It was an empty, helpless feeling. Against the speeding truck with its blinding headlights, Shinji had done nothing. He'd hardly been able to hold his ground against the overpowering thoughts of the five-eyed giant. Only Rei's intervention had saved him, and here again, he was powerless and impotent. For all his lofty stories of having protected the world as an Eva pilot, when he had only his own mind and body, he was insignificant and small.
But when before he might've donned the earphones of his SDAT and distanced himself from a world, Shinji dismissed such a notion straightaway. The giant with five eyes could speak to him no matter how he'd try to keep it out. The world outside couldn't be ignored without consequences, and he refused to sit still, either. Some thing from across the universe had touched his thoughts—his dreams, too. That was no peaceful, introspective vision from that hellish train through his psyche. Only one person had protected him from the giant's madness, and that was Rei.
That she hadn't yet appeared in some way—or warned someone of danger—he took as a hopeful sign.
#
Hope doesn't answer questions, however. Nor does it put troubled minds at ease indefinitely. As the train reversed its course, the lights dimmed to comfortable nighttime levels. Anxious passengers briefly occupied the aisle, and in groups of two, the seats turned themselves around to face the new direction of travel. Shinji sat by the window once more and leaned back, hoping to rest and sleep in silence, but his eyes stubbornly remained open, looking out to the city lights in the dark. Though they grew smaller and more distant with each passing second, Shinji watched them anyway. They were something he could understand.
Unlike the eyes in the dark that watched him. Though no visions came to him, the weight of invisible stares was like an extra force pressing him to his seat, and whether it was real or imagined Shinji couldn't say. Still, he listened closely to his fellow passengers, and it seemed that they too felt that weight. Worse yet, they didn't know what it was or why they should be afraid. Rumors abounded through the traincar about the possible reasons for this evacuation. Some feared it was another nuclear bomb and recounted the chaos after Old Tōkyō had been destroyed. Others thought it to be a new Angel attack, but where such an Angel might come from or why was a mystery to them.
The why would be easy, thought Shinji, shuddering. You don't understand; you can't understand. There's something out there, watching me, watching all of us perhaps. Be thankful it's so far out there, though. Even the closest star is an impossible distance away.
True enough, that was the nature of the universe, of the galaxy—four years it would take as the photon flies to reach Proxima Centauri, our Sun's closest neighbor, and in just the Milky Way, over a hundred billion stars lay further than that. With the tremendous energy required to reach even a significant fraction of the speed of light, it would take decades, centuries, or even millennia just to get from one star to the next. That was basic physics.
Then again, what "basic physics" underpinned AT fields or synthetic humanoid fighting machines that should've collapsed under their own weight before they could take even a step? How could a five-eyed giant from outer space speak to him across the vast distances of the cosmos? Could he dismiss all that as undiscovered science he just didn't understand? Perhaps, but as Shinji gazed through the window at the lights and the stars, looking for solace, there was one thing he knew absolutely:
Stars on the horizon weren't supposed to visibly move.
Shinji wasn't the only one who noticed it. A number of people came across the aisle to see bright specks of light rise above the earth. At first, Shinji thought they were planes, but they were too bright and too numerous. Dozens of white dots hurtled toward the heavens, making for a surreal, slow-motion show.
"Are those rockets?" a man wondered aloud.
"Not just rockets," said another. "ICBMs—intercontinental ballistic missiles. If we aren't at war with someone, we will be very, very soon."
"With who?" asked a woman. "China? Russia? What could've happened in the time we've been on this train to justify that?"
"Wars start in seconds," was the answer she got. "Why else would they be evacuating the capital if they didn't think it was about to be blown up?"
"If we were the target of a first strike, we wouldn't even know it before the city had been vaporized. A missile submarine off the coast would launch a nuke on a depressed trajectory and totally evade detection, obliterating the capital in minutes."
"Wow, we have a real military geek in the house!"
Shinji tuned out this speculative chatter, drawing closer to the window to get a better look. The missiles streaked through the sky with surprising speed against the fixed star background. Shinji counted twenty missiles in the first wave before they became impossible to count, and dozens more launched in a second batch as well. They tracked upward, and Shinji slumped lower and lower in his seat to watch them until he saw, at the very top edge of the window, a solitary shooting star drifting across the sky. The first wave of launched missiles converged on this object, making a trail from the earth to the stars until the individual missiles could no longer be distinguished from each other.
This isn't a nuclear war, or if it is, it's not working like anything I've ever heard about. They're not attacking something on the ground. It's that shooting star they're trying to—
A flash! Brilliant and awe-inspiring, it lit up a swath of the night sky above and cast shadows from the faces of frightened passengers.
"Look away!" cried a man. "Look away, damn you! Do you want that kind of light searing your retinas? Get back from the window!"
Some of the passengers slammed the sunshades down in a panic, but Shinji was too curious for that. He did move over a seat, coming adjacent to the aisle, but he left the shade up and watched the countryside through the corner of his eye. Light pulsed through the window, for each distinct brightening of the atmospheric glow meant another missile had exploded silently, too far into space for Shinji and his fellow passengers to hear. Only after a couple minutes did the train feel anything at all—a faint rattling, with dust and other light debris spraying the windows.
But what was more, when the orange-red glow of the N2 missiles dissipated, the lone shooting star in the sky shone brighter than ever before.
"What could've survived that?" said one passenger. "A comet? An asteroid?"
"They threw three dozen ICBMs at that thing, and it did nothing," said another. "A pathetic last gasp for humanity."
"Mother," a little girl began, "if the big rock is coming for us, why can't we call Willis-san again like in the movie?"
"Because he's an actor and Cape Canaveral is underwater," said the second passenger. "It has been ever since 2000."
Not to mention a warhead of any kind—nuclear or not—was woefully insignificant against a sizeable meteor. Even a hundred or a thousand would never be enough to break something even a mile wide apart, but to blast away a small proportion of its mass, to alter its course by even a fraction of a degree…
Well, an asteroid on a path for Earth was something Shinji could understand as a reason for this sudden state of emergency. Detecting one on its way to impact had to be difficult still, and maybe it was just a lucky break that they found it before it could hit, when they could do something to try to change their fate.
Their fate to sit in one place and wait as something from the depths of space came out to touch them, to merge with the earth irrevocably.
And with that thought, a pit formed in Shinji's stomach. Logically, one would think this happening a mere coincidence. He could even question whether something from the depths of the cosmos had touched his mind at all, for he had no proof of it, only belief, but that belief was as solid as the meteor his fellow passengers feared might come.
But what frightened Shinji most was the thought, however faint in the back of his mind, that the tiny dot high above them wasn't an asteroid or a comet or anything so natural, so innocent. The thing that was coming for Earth could've been something artificial instead, something painted from top to bottom with the design of the five-eyed giant's purple mask.
Yet with that fear came determination and resolve, for Shinji refused to sit in that traincar and let something so dangerous come without knowing what he could do to prepare for it. He bolted from his seat, cut through the aisle to the lavatory at the front of the car, and shut himself inside. The space was narrow and smelly, but he needed the privacy—the chance to look in the mirror and speak his mind, for every time he'd been in mortal danger, someone had watched over him, and he hoped she was attentive enough to hear.
"Ayanami, I know you're listening," he began. "I want to talk to you. First, some alien that looks like you tries to speak to me, tries to kill me, and now I'm on a train going nowhere, with Asuka unreachable, a meteor or something coming, and no one knows what's going on. They're not connected, are they? Tell me they aren't."
A fly buzzed about the room, landing on Shinji's arm. It rubbed its front legs together and crawled toward his shoulder, and with a frustrated sigh, Shinji swatted at it, slapping only his own flesh instead. The buzzing was incessant, but he went on, looking straight ahead, into the mirror over the sink.
"You know I've been looking for you, right? I mean, I know I thought for a while it was a pointless search, that it was keeping me from doing something better for myself, but…" He let out a breath, puzzled, and scratched the back of his head. "I get along better with Asuka now. You must already know that. You've been watching me." He winced. "You haven't been watching for that, have you?"
Buzzing. Somehow, that incessant noise was worse than total silence. It seemed Rei wasn't at his beck and call. He couldn't summon her to allay his fears, not just by asking her to appear at least. She was leaving him alone to fight the five-eyed giant, to try to keep its thoughts out of his head. Though she'd saved him and he was at peace for the moment, nothing she'd done had blocked out the perverse vision of the cultist girl in his dreams.
With that in mind, an idea came to Shinji. He ran a hand through his pants pocket, finding a long, slender object with a thin shaft. He concealed it in his closed fist and raised the item to his neck, watching himself in the mirror. "Ayanami," he said coldly, "I have a needle in my hand here, so please, listen. I won't live with things talking to me in my head, sending me visions that make me sick. I need to know that's not going to happen again. I need to be sure, or I'll end it all now. Do you hear me?"
Buzzing.
"I'll do it!" he cried. "I didn't think I'd be betrayed this soon, but if this is all you can do for me, it's not enough! I'll stab myself in the neck and bleed out, Ayanami. Is that what you want to see? I'll die!"
Buzzing. The noise of the fly's wings sapped his resolve, his will. Frustrated, he tossed aside the object in his hand—a cotton-tipped swab—and hung his head. It was a pathetic ploy on his part, one Rei surely had seen through and disapproved of. She might not have been all-powerful like the cultists believed. Maybe she wasn't even omnipresent, either, but she surely had an eye on him. Whatever supernatural sight she had would've easily shown her that he'd never had a needle in his hand at all.
And so, Shinji was alone to face whatever was coming from the sky, yet that wasn't even his primary concern. Instead, he looked to the mirror once more, hoping his voice would be heard.
"You know, over these past two years, I've had a lot of time to think about what's changed. I don't know if Father's could come back—or even if he would. He did terrible things to me. He treated me like a thing that was outside himself, like something he didn't know how to deal with except through neglect, but I still would like the chance to make up with him. We never really had a chance. Misato-san came back, thankfully, though she's distant to me, and I don't really understand what she does. Kaji-san's gone. Ritsuko-san too. Asuka's happy, I think, but I'd like to see her more. I worry that she works so much because she doesn't know what else to do. As for me, I think I've learned to stand on my own a little more, but I could be wrong about that." He shrugged. "I guess what I'm trying to say is that all of us have changed—me, Asuka, her mother. You have too, haven't you? I'm not talking about whatever you became. Even when you died and came back, I never thought you would abandon me. I just didn't know if I could understand…"
He trailed off, watching his own reflection and finding no one looking back but himself.
With a resigned sigh, he undid the lock on the lavatory door, leaving the unused cotton swab behind.
#
As Shinji left the lavatory, the conductor from before approached him, walking down the aisle. "Ah, pardon me, sir," he said, "if I could just have a moment."
Not wanting to have a discussion in front of the other passengers, Shinji hung back by the lavatory door. "Yes?" he answered.
"Please forgive the intrusion, Ikari-san. It's just there's growing tension in the cabin. People are worried about what might happen, and as much as I've tried to keep everyone calm, it seems like a new voice might be helpful."
Shinji peered around the man, and from the lavatory at the front of the car, he saw the truth of the conductor's words. A woman in a nearby row wept endlessly, suffering in silence. A man took his son in his arms and stared out the window as the boy shook. Further down, an old woman babbled incoherently, so hysterical she couldn't be understood. The conductor was right, of course, but Shinji was no one to be telling these people to stay calm. He was a boy. A sixteen-year-old boy. What weight could his words carry? He told the conductor this, yet the man smiled as if Shinji had misunderstood.
"I don't know how you can say you're just a boy, Ikari-san. You've stood up and faced things I can hardly imagine. If there's even just one word you can say to assure the other passengers, I think it would do more than you know."
Shinji winced. Perhaps it was a mistake to have approached this conductor earlier and shown his face to him, for the man was asking Shinji for something impossible. To go out before a dozens of people and speak? With all those eyes on him? Every last man on Earth knew who he was. He had no protection of anonymity. If he took off his hood and folded up his glasses before them, they would know him right away, and their stares would tell plainly their opinions of him. Some would love him for having made a "courageous" choice. Others would think him a weak-willed fool who should've shown bravery instead of cowering and pitying himself. Others still would loathe him. They might wish he were dead. What could he possibly say to inspire such people? How could he go before them and be judged by them once again?
"I'm sorry," said Shinji. "I really don't know if I can do that. I'm no different from anyone else here. I can't tell people not to be afraid when that's what I feel, too."
The conductor nodded. "I understand completely. Well, at least I can take heart knowing I'm not the only one uncomfortable in this situation. You can go back to your seat, Ikari-san. I won't trouble you any further."
"Ah, actually, if you don't mind, please don't call me by name in front of anyone else. I know it's a strange thing to ask, but…"
"Not to worry, not to worry," said the conductor, chuckling. "To me, you're just another passenger on my train. Be safe, sir. The ride might get a little bumpy ahead."
With a polite nod, Shinji bade the conductor farewell, and he put on his sunglasses as he hurried back to his seat. Curious about the state of things outside, he peered through the window, but the view had grown distorted. A light shower fell on the train. Droplets accumulated on the windows, warping the light from outside. What once had been a sharp, clear image of the city in the distance became smeared and clouded. The rain picked up quickly, and soon enough, the downpour was as good as the sunshades for blocking out light.
In fact, with his sunglasses on, Shinji had trouble seeing into the night at all. Were it only for that, he wouldn't have minded the rain. Better not to know what was going on outside if he could do nothing about it, but a nearby passenger's alarmed cry roused him from his listless stupor.
"The hell?" said a man. "It's raining blood!"
Shinji yanked off his sunglasses, and he saw it, too. The passengers in the row ahead of him had taken a flashlight to the window, and with the bright yellow beam shining into the darkness, the crimson tint of the liquid outside was unmistakable. It wasn't blood. LCL, yes. In that way, the fluid was nothing foreign to them—except for one tiny problem.
LCL didn't evaporate. It stayed in the sea indefinitely, never tainting the clouds. It couldn't rain LCL. It never had and never would.
And everyone above the age of five in that traincar knew it, too.
"Ladies and gentlemen, please, don't be alarmed." The conductor scampered to the front of the car, raising both hands in an effort to keep the passengers at ease. "Stay in your seats. I'm sure this strange rainstorm will pass quickly."
" 'Pass quickly' my ass!" cried a man. "This is eight levels of impossible! If I'd known madness like this would happen after coming back, I'd have stayed in the ocean! We're like ants in some giant's playground, and I for one am tired of being sprayed with a cosmic garden hose just to see how fast I scurry to put the mound back together! No way, man! Game over! Stop this train; I'm getting off. Fourth Impact is coming, and I'm not staying to take it at two hundred kilometers per hour! Stop the train!"
"You think we're going to be safer stopping in this mess?" said a woman. "Even if we put on the brakes, we're going to be trapped here. I'm not walking out in that, not with my daughter!"
A half-dozen passengers rose from their seats, some arguing the woman's point, others continuing her line of thinking and begging for reason, for sanity. The dispute overflowed into the aisle. Calm voices rose to shouts. A man ripped the fire extinguisher from the wall, yelling, "Go for the emergency brake!"
The conductor blew at a high-pitched whistle, but the noise hardly slowed the commotion. Three men bowled over the conductor and crowded around the locked yellow box with the emergency brake lever.
"Wait!" Shinji sprang from his seat, but the aisle was awash with bodies. "Please, just wait a second! Let's think about this!"
The base of the fire extinguisher bashed against the padlock, but the metal held. The passenger raised the pressure vessel once more, preparing to deliver a shattering blow to the lock, and—
SCREECH!
Shinji's body lurched forward, pressing him against the back of the seat in the next row. From the overhead bins, luggage shifted and spilled out, bombarding the passengers like an avalanche. The brakes made an unholy cry, something between a scratch and a squeal, but the initial jolt quickly subsided, and the train glided to a halt.
At last, Shinji relaxed. His fingernails had dug into the soft material of the seat in front of him, and he breathed heavily, coming off a jolt of adrenaline. He stepped into the aisle, over a ripped suitcase and its questionable contents of Hawaiian shirts. At the front of the traincar, the angry mob's inertia had carried them forward even as the train beneath them slowed to a halt. A tangled mass of humanity crowded the aisle and the small open space around the emergency brake box—a casing of thin metal painted in yellow that was still very much intact.
"I don't understand," said a man. "We didn't break it open, so why…?"
Shinji knew. He felt it in his gut, along with the sensitive bruise there.
We panicked, and so did the people in the other cars. Someone else must've pulled the brake instead. They beat us to it.
And it had done them precious little good. So they were stopped, sitting on the tracks. That didn't shield them from the impossible rain. If anything, the downpour had strengthened—LCL streamed down the windows in a thick film, syrupy like molasses. So much LCL had already fallen that Shinji had to wonder: it took the equivalent of billions of people to tint the oceans red with LCL, so how many more would be needed to make this viscous layer on the outside of the traincar?
His eyes bulged slightly, and he went over that last thought again.
How many more…people?
Shinji put a hand to his head, feeling dizzy. How could he be realizing it only then? It was obvious! It made too much sense. The giant with five eyes had shown him its ideal world, right? In the vision he'd received by the crashed truck, all people turned back to LCL. If that giant had spawned life the same way Lilith had—the same way Rei had—then it must've had children, too.
Then the shooting star in the sky was a spaceship? A vessel that oozed with the stuff of life and rained that alien LCL over Earth? If all that were true, then Shinji could breathe easy. How much harm could some LCL do? Sure, it would contaminate the environment and disrupt the normal cycles of life for a few days, but there was one advantage of living in a world with red oceans: mankind had learned quickly how to clean up and filter LCL. The worst Shinji could imagine was that LCL making it to the sea and merging with the people still in water there. How bad could that be?
"Hey, do you see this? The power in the next car went out."
That, Shinji believed, was the universe answering him: it could be very, very bad. Pushing his way through the aisle, Shinji made his way to the front of the car, struggling to see through the small square window on the door to the next traincar. Sheltered between the two boxy metal cars, the window there was clearer than the sides'. Orange lights illuminated the back of the next car, but the view through their window was dark.
"'Strange." The conductor took position at one side of the door, taking a flashlight to the window. "I can't think of a reason we'd still have power while they don't."
"Maybe they decided the world was ending and they should have a dance party in the dark?" said a man.
Crunch. The traincar out the window rattled on the tracks.
"That doesn't sound like a dance party," said Shinji.
The growing crowd by the exit eyed Shinji incredulously for a moment, as if they couldn't believe just who'd spoken in their midst, and it was only for that silence that they could hear something else over the incessant downpour of LCL rain:
Screaming.
There was a rumbling and a series of dull bangs against the metal of the other car's walls, but the screaming was the most noticeable sound. It was muffled, of course. The distance, the glass, and the air all damped the cries, making them feel far away. The dark traincar rocked back and forth, but as the seconds passed, the movements settled, and the screams died out.
"What on earth was that?" said a passenger—a man in his thirties with a well-trimmed beard.
The way things have been going today, thought Shinji, I don't want to know.
WHAM! An object careened through the darkness, impacting the door to the outside. The crowd of passengers surged backward and spilled into the aisle like a tide flowing out.
"What was that, Mother?" asked the little girl in the car. "What was that thing outside?"
"That's not a thing!" The conductor shined his flashlight through the window, revealing the face of a young woman in the darkness.
"Help!" She banged on the window with her fist desperately, glancing over her shoulder. "Please, help me! Let me in!" Droplets of LCL ran down her face, but the color was weak and translucent, for the red liquid mixed with salt and water. She sobbed inconsolably, her breathing short, quick, and panicked, and she collapsed against the outside of the door in a daze.
"Miss, you need to step back!" The conductor jiggled the door handle, trying to push on the exit. "The door only opens outward, miss! Please, move back!"
"No, no! Don't tell me to go away, please! I can't go back in there! They came inside; they've killed almost everyone!"
"What happened?" asked the conductor. "Who came inside? Thieves? Hijackers?"
She shook her head frantically. "No, no, you don't understand! They came through the windows and cut open the ceiling! They don't have hands, you see? They don't have hands…."
The passengers by the door looked to one another. " 'They don't have hands'?" said a woman. "What does that mean?"
The conductor put his hand back on the handle and leaned into the door with his shoulder, but the man with the trimmed beard grabbed the handle, too.
"Hold on," he said. "If we let that girl inside, we're just inviting those things or whatever they are to come after us, too! Is that really what you want?"
Gripping his flashlight, the conductor stared back at the bearded man, shooting him an icy gaze. "My duty is to the safety and wellbeing of passengers on this train, sir."
"Your duty is to us, the people still alive in this car! How do we even know she's who and what she says she is? You'd really risk all of us for that one beat-up woman?"
"Every time!" cried the conductor, brandishing the flashlight as a baton. "Step aside, sir. Step aside, now!"
The eyes of the bearded man flashed; he seized the flashlight handle and grappled with the conductor for the weapon. A group of passengers joined the fray, some coming to the conductor's aid, others pulling on the exit door to keep it shut even as the girl on the other side clamored for them to open it.
"Hurry!" she begged them. "I can feel them coming; it's like they're tickling the back of my neck. Please, let me in! Let me in, let me in, let me—"
Ka-PANG! The door buckled inward, and a stained, cream-colored tentacle speared through the middle. Suction cups on stalks covered the appendage, standing up like hair and then flattening out in waves. At the end, five of these suction-cupped stalks came together like fingers, radially arranged around the tip. Just beyond the tentacle's grasp, hexagons shimmered in air, like a shell or shield. Their colors ran the gamut of the visible spectrum and shifted quickly, without apparent pattern or rhythm.
An AT field?
The tentacle slithered back through the gap in the door, taking with it red streaks of LCL, and the passengers and the conductor backed down the aisle just as cautiously.
"Mama." The little girl in the traincar whispered in a deathly quiet voice. "Where did the lady outside go?"
Against his better judgment, Shinji crept forward, weaving through the other passengers. He peered around them, trying to catch a glimpse of the shattered door.
"Boy, what are you doing? Are you mad?"
Perhaps he was, but something in the back of his mind nagged at him. The girl outside the door hadn't made a sound; maybe she'd died instantly, but Shinji didn't think so. There was hardly any blood on the white tentacle—not that it was easy to tell blood apart from LCL. Still, Shinji looked out the window, finding creamy white mass of suction cups and stalks, but the woman who should've been out there, speared on the outside of the door, was nowhere to be found.
Not an AT field. An AT field would've pulverized her, but she's just gone.
Gone, so that the only thing coming in from under the door was a seeping puddle of LCL.
But an anti-AT field—that would take us back to LCL, back to the sea.
And they wouldn't stop with just one traincar on a rural railway. All these people—Shinji included—were just ripe for popping.
SMASH! Windows shattered; sheets of metal ripped and tore like wrapping paper. The passengers shielded their heads with their arms in fear of falling debris, but all that fell through the gaps in the roof was the LCL rain. In flickering light, pools of LCL formed on the floor, and from those, white tentacled beasts grew. They were shaped like men, but suction cups covered their entire bodies, save for masks that obscured their heads. The masks were purple and bony, and while they had slits only for two eyes, three more had been etched on as decoration. Their legs terminated in hoof-like structures, circular in nature instead of like feet.
They wielded no weapons. They didn't need to. Anti-AT fields shimmered around their "fingertips."
That's when the last lights went out and the screaming began.
The sound of people bursting, losing all cohesion and reverting back to LCL, was something no man could forget. Try as he might, Shinji couldn't shut that sound out. The traincar disintegrated around him in rainbow-colored flashes, and on top of the impossible rain, LCL splattered over his face. A flashlight rolled along the floor, slippery with LCL, but the beam was the only light in the rain and darkness, so Shinji picked it up and left the switch in place.
And made himself a target for the creatures; a bright white flashlight was a conspicuous signal of his existence, but that was all right with him. The feelings of dread and panic, the surge of adrenaline in his veins—they were all familiar. Though over two years had passed since he'd piloted Eva, the sensation of fighting impossible monsters came back easily, and with it, Shinji found something deep inside him. Some might've thought it courage, but he knew that wasn't the right word. When an animal is cornered, facing predators on all sides, its ferocity isn't a calculated, conscious expression of its will. Rather, it fights because its reached an inviolable limit. That was all Shinji knew—to fight because the only other possibility he thought left was to die.
The others in the traincar knew it, too.
"Come, Matsuri!" A woman and her daughter fled down the remainder of the traincar. The mother shoved a man in her way aside, putting him squarely in the path of the creatures. When a tentacle ran him through and dissolved his body from the inside out, she hardly looked back.
Shinji couldn't be that ruthless, though. He couldn't be that cruel, and with his fragile, squishy human body, what could he do against soul-crushing aliens from another world?
He could find a weapon. He scanned the floor with the flashlight, and with luck, he found a rusted crowbar. He thought back, back to the times he'd sat in an entry plug and allowed himself to lose control. Whether it was the soul within the Eva—his mother's heart—that give him the strength or something in his own psyche he couldn't say, but he'd done great damage before. He just had to discover it within him to bring that out.
Like the battle with the Fourteenth Angel, the one called Zeruel, when all power left Eva-01 and Shinji pleaded helplessly for it to return to life, even as the Angel's tape-like appendages severed the Eva's arm…
Shinji gripped the crowbar and left the flashlight on the ground. He approached one of the creatures from behind, and with both hands, he swung the crowbar mightily at the creature's skull.
CLANG! The metal vibrated; the creature staggered, dazed, and this time, Shinji turned the crowbar around, so that the point of the end would form a claw.
Shink. The crowbar ripped at the creature's flesh, and with every slice, Shinji's attacks hastened. Grunting, he attacked his foe in a frenzy, casting aside pieces of suction-cupped skin like layers from an onion. Succumbing to Shinji's fury, the creature hunched over, gushing blood from its back, and melted into a puddle of LCL.
Panting, Shinji dropped the crowbar, letting it clang on the floor. He wiped bits of the alien's white skin from his face and stepped back. The rush of hormones ebbed off, if only for a moment, while he came to terms with what he'd done.
That's one, he thought. I killed one out of how many?
The puddle before him bubbled and frothed. The alien creature reformed itself from the LCL it'd become, and this time, it faced Shinji, spreading its suction-cup fingers like a pair of claws.
Shinji looked about. He listened. He gulped. The traincar was quiet. Any screams had long since been silenced. The flashlight he'd dropped flickered out, and a leg tentacle crushed it underfoot. He could run, but they'd catch him, wouldn't they? More of them would form from the otherworldly orange-red rain; with each step they would grow from nothing to hack and slash at his heels.
So he looked upon his would-be attacker. He looked it in the eyes and stood his ground. Dissolving into LCL—he'd done that before and come back. He wouldn't fear that again.
'No, Ikari-kun. You mustn't.'
Shinji snapped to attention. "Ayanami?"
Through the broken frame of the traincar, he spotted the glowing girl—the figure of a schoolgirl in the distance, radiating light against a dark backdrop. Her thoughts came into his mind silently, like words flashing on an empty screen.
'Run away.'
But where would he go? What would he do? Turning to LCL, at least Rei would come to him again if needed, so why would she—
There was a horrible sloshing sound, the sound of flesh sinking into flesh. He shuddered. A white, alien tentacle speared him through the gut, and he watched it, horrified, as the suction cups on its length twittered about. With his blood leaking out of him, staining his clothes, Shinji realized the truth, the only reason why Rei would warn him so.
The giant with may have wanted to reduce humanity to LCL, but for Shinji, it sought only his death.
The LCL rain turned cold—or was it his skin instead? In the body's attempt to redirect blood to vital organs, it was only natural…and futile. A haze settled in over his eyes, shrouding out all sights in the distance, but when a glow approached him, he saw clearly. Ayanami Rei stepped before him, facing the creature that'd speared him. She spread her arms, as if to shield Shinji long after he'd taken a mortal wound. The creature cocked its head, raised its remaining arm tentacle, and with shimmering rainbow hexagons, it thrust!
It thrust through Rei's ephemeral, translucent body, and the last thing Shinji saw was his torso turning to goo.
#
In the sea, Shinji had endured years of reflection and philosophical visions. He'd imagined himself as an angry child kicking over a sand castle shaped in the image of Nerv Headquarters. He'd explored alternate conceptions of reality. In one, he lived as a regular high-school student with the choice between childhood friend Asuka and the transfer student Rei. In another, he existed as a line drawing in an underfunded anime, wondering where the rest of the budget had gone. In another still, he watched as an invisible specter, looking on as the people he knew lived as common office workers. In that world, never touched by Angels, the people he cared about never knew him at all.
But in everything he experienced, the voices of others were never too far. Sometimes, they spoke to him directly—a hazy memory of Asuka looming over him with her skirt hiked up as Rei and Misato looked on came to mind. Other times, they were harder to hear but no less important and prying. Calling them "voices" didn't do them justice. They were more like impressions or feelings, akin to looking upon a painting with one's eyes crossed and out of focus: the colors came out well enough, but the fine details like brushstrokes escaped him.
That was what Shinji had become accustomed to in the sea, but all of that had come after the initial panic, after people had come to terms with the stress of being dissolved. What had transpired in that transition period before was something Shinji had seldom wanted to revisit. It wasn't that it was painful, that the others screamed or demanded that their minds be left to themselves, but they did know how they'd come to be there. They remembered, for example, hiding out behind a broken seat, only to have a sickly white tentacle tear through the fabric and turn their flesh to goo. Or maybe they ran instead, and in the bloody rain, a group of those things caught them and ripped them apart, liquefying their limbs one at a time. So many had had the barriers to their souls abruptly shattered. Shinji couldn't keep all of their experiences apart. Their voices began to creep into his thoughts—and they weren't just human voices, either.
The creatures were there, in that LCL puddle, and from their minds came familiar images to Shinji—the view of an endless LCL sea, ruled by the five-eyed giant that hovered over it like a god, seeing that it was good. There was no pleasure in that world; there was no pain, either. In that sea, there was existence and nothing more. People didn't need to feel or think. They'd stopped being separate beings long ago because the giant's thoughts had penetrated their minds, too.
'Ikari-kun…'
It called to them irresistibly, taking the appearance of someone they cared about, too.
'Ikari-kun…'
Shinji tried to shut it out, but he had no hands to cover his ears, no eyelids to block the his retinas. These impressions came to him directly, like a computer cable linked directly to his brain, and nothing could sever that connection, nothing could block out the silent voice of a giant that called to him, like—
"Ikari-kun."
It was a beach. Hey lay on his back, on warm sand, and sniffed a salty breeze. Short waves lapped at the shore. The water was blue and foamy. The sun shined from straight overhead. Sand extended as far as he could see in one direction, and seawater occupied the other. The only feature on that beach was the image of a girl, her skin unnaturally pale.
"Ayanami?" he said.
She sat by his feet with her back to him, and strands of her light blue hair fluttered in the wind. "I'm sorry," she said.
Shinji planted a hand in the sand, trying to sit up, but then he saw himself—and her back—more clearly. Going red in the cheeks, he lay back down, staring straight up at the sky. "I—I'm just glad to see—no, I mean, it's good to see you. Why should you be sorry?"
"Because I could've done more to keep you from this, but I didn't."
At that, Shinji had to sit up to watch her, awkward situation or no. As discreetly as he could, he studied her. Though it had been years since he'd looked upon her for longer than a fleeting moment, Rei hadn't changed at all. The cut of her hair, the shape of her torso—they were both very familiar. Indeed, she was still a fourteen-year-old girl in appearance, and that made their attire all the more uncomfortable for him. For that matter, Rei must've had complete control over what she looked like. Her physical body had long since petrified. It stood to reason that she'd choose something familiar, but this…
This was a little too familiar.
"What do you mean?" asked Shinji, glancing back to the sea respectfully.
"I knew she would come for you. I have known for some time."
" 'She'? The giant with five eyes?"
Rei nodded once.
"Who is she? What does she want with us, with me?"
"She is one of my people. She is…" Rei paused for a moment, considering her words. "She is similar to me. You know what she wants with humans."
"You didn't answer my other question."
Her head tilted slightly, and Shinji glimpsed part of her cheek moving. Though hard to tell from behind her, Shinji thought it was a hint of a wry smile. "You've changed, Ikari-kun," she said. "I'm sorry. It's easy for me to forget that."
"Why is that? Please, don't say things that just make me want to ask more questions. Look at me, Ayanami. What's going on here? What's going to happen to me? To all of us?"
"I cannot know the answers to those questions, but don't worry. I will not let you die, Ikari-kun. That outcome is unacceptable to me."
"But she's been trying to kill me for months now," said Shinji. "And all along, you've been watching me, but I never knew."
"I thought if I protected you from her long enough, she would lose interest in you. That was my mistake. I'm sorry."
"And people told me I say that too much." Shinji chuckled to himself. "Stop that, Ayanami. None of this is your fault, is it? It's not like you're the one trying to reduce us all to goo again. You've saved me at least three times now. I know you must be doing everything you can to keep us alive against that thing, whatever she is. There's no need to apologize for any of that."
She froze for a moment, but at last, Rei turned her head, just enough to put one of those stark red eyes on him, but at that moment, her gaze was soft and kind. "Thank you, Ikari-kun," she said, smiling slightly.
Shinji smiled too. Whatever else she was, Rei wasn't one to show false warmth. All along, she just had to learn how to express herself, that it was safe and good for her to do so.
And it was safe there, for on that infinite beach, nothing could intrude on them or disrupt the cool sea breeze.
"Ayanami," he began, "why are we here?"
"This is a sanctuary," she said. "In this place, you won't hear anyone else's thoughts. You can stay as long as you like. I can protect you here."
"From what? The creatures?"
"Perhaps. My sister must know how I tricked her children into violating your AT field instead of killing you, but she can't reach you here. You don't have to go until you're ready."
Averting his eyes, Shinji stared at the sand. "But why do we always have to be naked here?"
"There are no boundaries in this place except the distance between us."
That was hardly a comforting explanation when it was all he could do not to stare. How on earth did he deal with all this rampant sexuality when he was fourteen?
By locking the door to Asuka's hospital room, he thought with a shudder.
Shinji gazed upward, at the sky that was uniform in its blue hue. Clear skies certainly could put him at ease, and in a sense, it was real—in the sense that anything the mind imagines is real. Sights and sounds and the warmth of the sun on his skin meant nothing to Shinji, though. There was one meaningful thing in that fantasy world, and that was the person, the being, who'd helped create it—Ayanami Rei. But how could he reconcile her presence there when she'd gone to such lengths to avoid him? Even as she watched over him like a guardian angel, she'd refused to let him see her.
"Ayanami, you know what I said earlier, right? In the toilet on the train?"
"I see everything," she said.
"Everything?"
"I see you, Ikari-kun. I see you as a young boy, crying as the Commander sent you away. I see you standing by a public phone with a postcard from Captain Katsuragi in your hand. I see you on a beach next to her as waves of red water break on the shore, and it is impossible for me to know which Ikari-kun I should be talking to."
Shinji went cross-eyed. What did any of that even mean? That they were fundamentally different, that they couldn't possibly see the world the same way?
"My sister and I are in conflict. Where and when we are in conflict, what happens is uncertain. That is why I can't guarantee your safety outside of this place, Ikari-kun."
He shook his head. "I'll have to leave eventually. I can't stay here forever. I don't want to. I'm tired of living in my own private world, Ayanami. I almost started doing that again, too. Can I leave, or is it not safe?"
"It will always be unsafe. She is constantly searching for you."
Letting out a breath, Shinji took a handful of sand and let it run out between his fingers. "Then it doesn't matter when I go. One moment is as good as the next. Thank you, Ayanami, for making this safe place, but I don't need to be here any longer. I'm ready to go back."
She nodded. "I understand."
"But there is one thing," he went on. "I don't know how different we are now, but if you're always watching, then…I don't want it to be two more years before we speak to each other again."
"It isn't."
Shinji blinked.
"It won't be," Rei corrected herself. "I promise."
"I'm glad." Shinji glanced to the sky. "Now, to go back…"
"Think of what you have to go back to, what you can do only when you're a part of the world."
Shinji closed his eyes. What did he have to do in that world? Could he act as a harbinger for the coming threat? As the one person who understood why those alien creatures had come and what their purpose was?
No, he was one man—and only just barely that—but he'd stayed alive, kept going. He was the example people looked to, even though he felt he'd done nothing to deserve it, nothing special on his own. All he'd done was make a choice for himself; others decided for themselves whether they wanted to follow.
Others, like Asuka—the girl who took to life like a blazing flame, a flame that might burn too brightly and risk extinguishing it, but a beautiful flame nonetheless. Compared to her, he was a slow-burning brown dwarf to her blue supergiant. She understood scientific concepts that were well beyond him, and he enjoyed learning about them from her. He welcomed the push she constantly provided to do something bigger and better when, left to his own devices, he might choose to hide behind sunglasses and be left alone.
Sure, she might still be in her labcoat, toiling away at a sample while oblivious to the chaos that was unfolding outside her lab, but maybe that day would be the day she took a break. When he told her this story, she'd have to come home and hear it and listen. She would come home, and Shinji would be there to see her.
There was a cracking, breaking sound. Light poked through the sky, as if the bright, sunny day weren't bright enough. A white glow came through pinholes in the air, like tiny pricks cutting through a dome.
"Goodbye, Ayanami?" he said tentatively.
She shook her head. "Not goodbye. You taught me never to say that. When you go out into the world again, you will always have a friend to watch over you."
Shinji nodded, shutting his eyes, but the white glow came through his eyelids anyway. The fantasy world shattered like a hammer taken to precious glasswork, and—
#
And he sat upright, coughing furiously, drenched in cold LCL from head to toe.
"Colonel!" a voice called out. "He's over here!"
Shinji spat out residual fluid and rubbed his eyes. A view of the outside world came back to him in a fog. It was daylight—that much he could discern right away, and slowly, the rest of the world came into focus. In the broken hulk of a traincar, Shinji sat in the aisle. The car had broken in two, and in the bend, LCL had collected—the LCL from which he'd returned. Outside, a layer of overcast clouds glowed almost pure white. The brightness stung Shinji's eyes; he shaded them with his elbow as a woman called to him.
"Shinji-kun!"
Misato-san?
Combat boots thudded on the floor. Shinji blinked, and his eyes adjusted to the light. It was a different uniform for Misato—brown and green camouflage gear, with her hair pulled up and stuffed into her helmet. Instead of bright yellow pins, her rank insignia was stitched into her collar with dark thread: two stars side-by-side over two horizontal bars. They showed she was in command, and she had come armed for the task, with a rifle strapped over her shoulder. Men with rifles and combat gear was something Shinji had seen before, but to see Misato that way too was disorienting to say the least.
"What?" she asked him, offering a hand to pick him up. "Is there something on my face?"
He shook his head, beginning to laugh, and thanks to Misato's helping hand, he climbed to his feet. "It's just…I don't think I've seen you like this before. Slobby and with only short shorts and a muscle shirt? Yeah. Dressed up in a formal uniform, sure, but you look like you're ready to overthrow a small country."
"Japan's not as big a country as we might think," said Misato, "and we're not here to take it over, just to save it. Come on; there's a helicopter waiting. We need to get you out of here."
As if on Misato's cue, Shinji heard the hard thump-thump-thump of helicopter rotors. Misato led Shinji outside, and there, he glimpsed the full scale of the devastation: from end to end, the train had been gutted and the cars smashed, ripped, and broken like a giant's plaything. That was the damage the creatures had wrought, and around the tracks, the soil ran red with LCL as it seeped into the earth. So unsettling it was that Shinji hesitated to step on it.
"Don't worry; most of those slimy things have headed north," said Misato. "Their craft came down outside of Chino, and we think that's where they've retreated to, but it's hard to say. SDF have set up a safety zone around the object, just to be sure. We've been trying to rescue as many people as we can, but right now, it's more important that we get you far away from here."
As they left the traincar, Shinji saw more of what Misato meant. A squad of SDF members had secured the area and tended to survivors.
"Some people have managed to come back from having their AT fields dissolved," Misato explained, "but others…" She shook her head. "I think their encounters with the minds of the Zenunim have changed them."
A woman ran over to Shinji, grabbing his wrists. Disheveled and with her eyes wide, she shook his arms and stared, chanting nonsense. "Awth xmf heiniim hm cpiih lk dot! Awth xmf heiniim hm cpiih lk dot!"
Shinji struggled, but the woman's grip was like a vice. Only with Misato's help could he pry the crazed woman off him, and he rubbed his arms afterword, feeling soreness from her grasp.
"Corporal!" cried Misato. "Keep a closer eye on this one, all right?"
"Yes, ma'am!" An SDF member dashed after the crazed woman, who wandered aimlessly from Shinji, still chanting to herself the unintelligible phrase.
"What does that mean?" asked Shinji.
"I honestly don't know," said Misato. "There've been a couple like that, all saying the same thing."
"Not that," Shinji clarified. " 'Zenunim'—what does that mean?"
"Ah, that's what we've been calling the creatures. We figured we'd name them after their monster mother. The children of Lilith are Lilin, right? So in the same way, the children of Eisheth Zenunim are the Zenunim. Yes, I know; it's not very creative, but everything else I tried to come up with just didn't sound appropriate to me."
Shinji stared. "Eisheth…Zenunim…?"
Misato's mouth hung open for a moment, and she looked at him with a pitying gaze. "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought Rei told you. That's who she is—the giant that's like Rei but isn't like her. Eisheth Zenunim. That is her name."
There was a lot for Shinji to take in from that handful of sentences. The giant had a name—well, that was convenient. He was getting tired of thinking of her as only the five-eyed giant, but Misato had seen Rei? And she didn't tell Shinji? For how long? And why would she keep that secret from him?
"Oh—oh dear," said Misato, alarmed. "She didn't tell you anything, did she? Honestly! I'll have to give that omnipresent alien hybrid a piece of my mind! What is she thinking? I thought she would tell you everything that's happened before you came back." She sighed, shaking her head. "All right, listen, Shinji-kun. I don't know what you must be feeling right now, but I promise you we didn't keep you out of this beacause we didn't trust you. We absolutely do, but knowing that Eisheth was targeting you, we hoped that if you didn't know what Rei and I were planning, the five-eyed monstrosity would give up on trying to kill you and prioritize more important things. We thought ignorance would be your best protection—and Rei made sure to watch you constantly because of it—but despite our best efforts, Eisheth must see you as some kind of symbol. You represent everything she's trying to work against."
To protect him—Rei and Misato had tried to protect him the only way they knew how. Perhaps that explained why Misato had always been secretive with her work, but that didn't tell him why Rei had felt the need to watch him yet never show her face. No, there was something else there. What had she said? Something about not knowing which of him to talk to at any given time? The complexities of that made his head swim. He'd have to ask Rei about it later. She'd promised to see him, after all, so he went on faith that that would come sooner rather than later.
Shinji turned his attention back to Misato. "So, you've been working with Ayanami to fight the giant?"
"That's right. All this-everything you see here—is what I've been doing since I came back. Rei came to me; she knew that Eisheth would come and how long we'd have to prepare. My post with the prime minister's office, my position with the SDF—it's all for that. The human race's ability to determine its own future is at stake. That's why we need to get you out of here. I know some people resent you for the choice you made, but everyone else who has a lick of sense about them respects you and looks up to you, too."
Shinji chuckled to himself. "You don't have to convince me to save my own life. I think I've done enough to show I've grown past wondering if I should live."
Misato smiled, at last showing a little relief. "So you have."
The SDF helicopter—a massive, lumbering beast with two horizontal rotors, one near the front, the other at the back—landed about a hundred meters from the train tracks, and Shinji boarded as just one of a dozen refugees looking for sanctuary and relief. There was the addled woman from before; she sat alone, across from Shinji, chanting the same phrase or sentence over and over, and though the noise of the chopper's engines was deafening, the roar couldn't quite drown the words out.
"If she's going to just jabber in some alien language, why did she bother coming back?" wondered a man, another survivor who sat beside Shinji. "Maybe she's not a person at all. Maybe she's one of those those things come back in human form, just here to mess with us."
"I don't think they can do that," said Shinji, shouting over the rotors.
The man stared at him, a glimmer of recognition in his eye. "I guess you'd be one to know, if anyone, eh? Or does strangeness just follow you?"
"At this point, I'd say it's a little of both."
"Must be a wonderful curse." The man looked to his right, where a young boy sat under his arm. Though the child had earmuffs on for hearing protection, he pressed his hands over the cups, crying.
"Is that your son?" asked Shinji.
"Yes. We were on our way back from a job on the coast. I'm a carpenter; I was hired to do some repairs on a train platform. They needed a dozen of us to fix the damage from a group of rowdy cultists."
"You took your son with you?"
"His mother stayed in the ocean; I can't afford to leave him with a stranger. People are crazy these days. I don't let him out of my sight." The carpenter sighed. "I didn't, anyway, until last night."
Shinji winced. "The creatures came for you."
"Right. We tried to hide. I took him to the toilet and told him to keep quiet, even as other people in the car were practically beating down the door. The creatures didn't come after us that way, though. They ripped right through the skin of the car. I put Matsuo down and just threw everything I could at that beast. I ripped the toilet off the floor with my own bare hands; can you believe that? But one minute, Matsuo was beside me, and the next, he'd run off through the car. I tried to look for him, but I didn't dare call out. Those things were everywhere. I couldn't imagine that he'd survived without being liquefied. I ran outside instead, and I hid under the train. I didn't find him again until morning, when one of the SDF discovered him in a corner, wedged behind a seat. I don't know how he got there unharmed. There wasn't a spot of LCL on him! But he was covering his ears then, too. The earmuffs don't make a difference. He's not trying to keep the helicopter noise out."
The little boy Matsuo curled up by his father, his hands still clasped over the earmuffs. He seemed to shrink before Shinji, and he hid his face in the strands of his brown, bowl-cut hair.
"At least we stayed alive," said the carpenter, squeezing his son's shoulder. "We're not like that woman over there, babbling something incomprehensible, but…"
"But what, sir?" asked Shinji.
The carpenter shook his head. "I just feel like I let my son down. I should've gone out and tried to find him, whatever the risk. I'll never know what he saw last night, what I could've shielded him from, but I won't make that mistake again." He pinched the boy's cheek. "That's a promise, my son."
The boy stared into space, mute and unresponsive, and the carpenter sighed, patting the boy's head.
That was just one story, one of many Shinji heard from survivors on the ride back to Tōkyō-2, and their tales convinced him that he had to know more. He couldn't leave the details to someone like Misato, apt and capable though she may have been. He had a personal stake in what was happening—after all, the children of Eisheth had come to kill him, whatever else they intended toward the rest of humanity.
But what could he do? What more could he do than he'd already done? He'd resisted the silent thoughts that had invaded his mind, trying to get him killed. He'd withstood the creatures' attempt to impale him, as painful and traumatic as it had been. He still felt uneasy to his stomach, and when an SDF member offered him a hard nutritional bar, Shinji politely declined. As much as he could trust that all his insides were back, he didn't feel well enough to test that notion.
Regardless, Shinji had managed to escape with his life, but that was a far cry from what Misato had done. She had the resources of the Self Defense Force at her disposal, and she was using them to find survivors and organize the relief effort. She was in charge—the colonel with a radio headset, rattling off orders. It was her natural element, and in that helicopter, surrounded by armed SDF members, pilots, and survivors, Shinji was entirely in Misato's care.
Still, he felt safer, having her near. Surely, Misato wouldn't allow him or any of the other survivors to come to harm. They'd fly back to the capital, and then all this business about aliens and pasty white giants could be sorted out. They were safe, for the children of Eisheth couldn't possibly reach them there, hundreds of meters off the ground.
"Awth xmf heiniim hm cpiih lk dot!" The mad woman from before reached across the aisle of the cargo hold, snatching up Shinji's wrist. "Awth xmf heiniim hm cpiih lk dot!"
"Please, let go of me!" cried Shinji, trying to pull his arm away. "I don't know what that means!"
The woman looked pointedly down the aisle, and an icy chill went through the hold. Shinji turned his head slowly, peering from the corner of his eye. He himself saw nothing, but the mad woman stared at the rear of the craft, and her incomprehensible rambling turned to a shaky hiss.
"Her five eyes are watching you—the eyes of Eisheth Zenunim! She sees through your lies. She knows what you desire in your heart, and she offers peace and absolution to anyone who obeys her command."
"What command?" asked Shinji.
The mad woman curled her fingers, and the nails dug into Shinji's skin.
"To kill you," she said.
Shinji's head pounded with the rapid beating of his heart. "How? How will she have someone kill me here?"
"As Lilith merged with Adam, taking the Fruit of Life, so too has Eisheth consumed that gift. Five Seeds are one within her flesh. Her children are not the only ones who come for you. Those with the Fruit of Life withstand travel through space, ferrying those with Knowledge to this island in the void."
Fruits of Life? Adam? But that would mean…
He tore at the straps that fastened him to his seat, and only a lucky bout of turbulence wrenched him free from the mad woman's grasp. His forearm stung from where the woman had scratched him, but Shinji didn't bother to tend to his wounds. He made for the cockpit, where Misato and the two pilots stood watch.
"Misato-san!"
The colonel put a hand over her headset microphone. "Just a minute, Shinji-kun; we have a bit of a—" She glanced at the cuts on his arm. "What happened to you?"
"Never mind that; please, Misato-san, this may sound crazy, but hear me out: you said the children of the giant came in a craft, right?"
"That's right. There are probably fifteen government agencies trying to study it as we speak."
"But did you see it?"
"No, as soon as Rei told me you were out here, I made arrangements to come find you. What's all these questions about a ship?"
"That's the problem," said Shinji. "I don't think it was just a ship."
Misato's mouth hung open as she stared at him in surprise and horror. "Lieutenant," she said, regaining her wits, "put that object on our six. Run the engines until they explode if you have to. Contact Contingency Fourteen. Tell them the drop will occur on our position but only on my orders. Understand?"
"Wait, wait," said Shinji. "I don't understand. What's happening?"
"Some thing is blocking our radar returns, and it's coming this way." Misato huffed. "And here I hoped it was just a little bad weather. We're not that lucky today. Shinji-kun, how did you know about this?"
"The woman who grabbed me before—she started making sense. I wish she hadn't, but she does. She speaks for the giant."
"Then it's about time someone talked back to her." Taking Shinji by the hand, Misato marched back into the cargo hold. Two of her men had moved in on the mad woman, binding her hands with plastic ties and gagging her with a strip of black cloth stuffed into her mouth.
"Sorry, Colonel," said one of the men. "She just wouldn't shut up or sit still!"
"Don't worry about it," said Misato. "Keep her tied up, but let her speak."
The corporal yanked the cloth out, but the woman paid him no heed, staring at Misato with wide brown eyes instead. Her hair was black and cut just beneath her chin, but it'd become frazzled and wild with her thrashing. She moved her shoulders erratically, leaning in and out.
"You speak for Eisheth, do you?" asked Misato coldly.
"Her five eyes are watching you—the eyes of Eisheth Zenunim! She sees through your lies. She knows what you desire in your heart. She offers peace and absolution—"
"Hey, hey!" Misato slapped the woman lightly on the cheek. "We're not here for the orange juice sales pitch. What is it you want, you five-eyed monstrosity?"
"She wishes to preserve life," said the mad woman. "Yes, yes, that's what she wants. To preserve life—all your lives." She looked to Shinji. "But not this boy's. He would persuade all of you to leave the sea and experience fear and pain and strife. Only if you kill this boy will you know peace."
Misato stepped between the woman and Shinji, shielding him from her wide eyes and crazed stare. "And if we refuse?"
"Then this metal machine will be crushed like an empty soda can in a man's grasp," said the woman. "Her mercy is limited, and if you mean to test her benevolence…"
"What does that mean?" asked the carpenter, the man who'd sat next to Shinji. "Who is 'she'?"
"She is the sister of Lilith, the fifth Seed of Life, and she sends an Angel to kill the one foolish, haughty, stubborn boy. Kill the boy, or be killed with him!"
"Snap out of it, woman!" Misato slapped her again, more firmly this time. "Why do you speak for her? What has she polluted your mind with to make you her servant?"
" 'Polluted'?" The mad woman laughed. "She has freed me. I came back because of that boy, and to what? The life I knew no longer exists. My home lies beneath the sea. My friends and family had the good sense to stay liquid. She knows the futility and pointlessness of living in this world. In the sea, nothing will happen to us."
"That's sick and pathetic, and I hope you tell Eisheth that! Life isn't easy, but she's blinding you, don't you see? Nothing good will come of going back to the ocean, and we'll fight you to the last to prove it!"
"Is that your decision?" asked the mad woman.
"It is!"
"She isn't asking you." The mad woman turned her gaze across the aisle.
…where the carpenter snatched Misato's backup pistol from its holster and pointed it at Shinji's head.
"Carpenter-san?" said Shinji, eyes wide.
"I'm sorry, kid," said the carpenter. "I need to protect my son."
Misato's men turned their rifles on the man, and Misato borrowed a pistol to join them, but the carpenter yanked Shinji by the collar and spun him around as a human shield, pressing the tip of the pistol to the back of Shinji's head.
"Sir, I will shoot you if you don't stand down," said Misato. "I once gave my life for that boy you're holding there. There is nothing I wouldn't do for him, so stand down!"
"What choice do I have? We will all die if whatever Angel is coming decides to smash us into pulp! Please, just—I don't want to shoot him, you understand? I don't want to do this. Someone, get the kid a parachute! That thing won't kill us all if he's not in the chopper anymore. Then he'll have a chance of surviving! Isn't that the best thing for everyone? What else am I supposed to do?"
On the red canvass bench, the carpenter's son held his hands over his ears, but he looked on with uncertainty and fear in his eyes. The other survivors in the helicopter had mixed reactions. Some watched the unfolding scene intently; others shied away, simply counting down the seconds until a shot was fired or until an Angel loomed in the windows. The SDF members under Misato's command kept the carpenter in their rifles' crosshairs, but Shinji saw in them the rush of adrenaline, the anxiety inherent to their mission. They could receive orders to shoot, even if it would ultimately cost them their lives.
"Sir, I will not warn you again," said Misato, pulling the hammer back on her pistol. "This is an SDF operation, and I am in charge here. I will not sacrifice anyone to Eisheth, but I will absolutely shoot you if you don't put that weapon down!"
"It doesn't matter what you do to me," said the carpenter, pressing the gun against the back of Shinji's head. "None of that matters. Now I'm asking you nicely: get this kid a parachute pack. We don't need to do this here, you understand? Bring the kid a parachute, or I'll do it, in front of everyone, and then you'll have to shoot me, too!"
Shinji balled his hand into a fist, trying to be reasonable, trying to think. Not that it was easy to think while a gun was pointed at his head—he could hardly breathe without fearing a wrong move on his part would set the carpenter off—but still, something the man had said didn't quite add up to him. If the carpenter were so convinced he was right, why would he want to avoid shooting Shinji at all? Because he didn't want to make his son see it? Yes, that had to be it. The carpenter felt he'd failed his son, that he hadn't protected him. That regret had forced him into this snap decision, into something he didn't really want to do. He'd acted out of fear and panic; when those emotions drove men to act, the result was only feuding and strife. That's what the vision of the cultist had told Shinji, wasn't it? Fear, panic, and strife. Those were the flaws she'd found in humanity, and they were the same flaws she was manipulating even then, compelling a man to bring a gun to Shinji's head.
Shinji turned so the tip of the gun pressed against his temple instead.
"Shinji-kun, don't move!" cried Misato. "Any little thing, and he could—"
But Shinji calmed her with a raised hand. "It's all right. I know what I'm doing. I know why the carpenter has to do this."
"You do?" said the man.
"Yes, I understand completely. You're afraid, and that's all right. It's good to be afraid because it tells you when you're in danger, and we're all in danger right now. I've been afraid, too. I've been scared out of my mind. I've been brave once or twice, but I've been scared many more times than that. The thing that sent the Angel out there—it thinks all we can do is hurt each other, that there's no hope for living as individuals in this world, and all you're doing while you have this gun to my head is proving her right. If you shoot me here or if you force me out to go face my death, then we'll just be one step closer to falling apart and becoming LCL again. Isn't that what you wanted to protect your son from?"
The man faltered, at a loss, and gradually, his grip on Shinji's collar wavered. Shinji faced him, putting the tip of the gun right in the middle of his forehead.
"Shinji-kun, don't!" cried Misato.
"It's all right," he said, taking a shallow breath. "The carpenter here isn't going to kill me, and we're not all going to die."
The carpenter put both hands on the gun, gritting his teeth. "How can you say that? How can you stand there and talk so confidently? How?"
"Because I believe it. Because I believe in someone else watching us, someone who's doing everything in her power to keep us safe. Because Misato-san is here, and she's never failed me. But most importantly I, unlike the giant who sent that Angel, believe in the human race despite the wars we fight, the people we hurt, and the lives that we take. The giant spoke to me in my dreams; she thinks you'll pull that trigger. She thinks it's human nature to do so. I don't believe that. I believe you have a choice; we all do. We can have faith in the world we've tried to rebuild, or we can go back to the sea."
But for the thumping of the rotors, the helicopter was silent, and though Misato's men and the colonel herself swayed with the motions of the chopper as it maintained position in the Angel's grasp, the riflemen kept the carpenter squared away in their sights. Misato's index finger pulled at the trigger millimeters at a time…
And the tip of the carpenter's pistol came off Shinji's forehead. He looked away in shame and turned the gun over to one of Misato's men. They forced him down, strapped him to the bench, and bound his hands in plastic ties like the mad woman, but at no time did he resist. He stared into space with a dull expression, resigned to whatever fate would bring him. "I don't know how you can do it," he muttered. "How can you believe in mankind when some people out there would just as soon kill you for what you've done?"
Shinji let out a breath—the first breath he recalled taking in minutes. "I remember what happened when I stopped believing," he answered. "I thought there should be nothing but what I wanted, yet when I got that, it was all empty." He glanced over his shoulder, at the mad woman across the aisle. "Do you hear that, Eisheth? What you're trying to bring us is nothingness. We won't have it; none of us will!"
The mad woman smiled wide, like a child given a cone of ice cream. "Then you will find nothingness in death instead!"
"Colonel!" came a cry from the cockpit. "The bogey's on our six, thirty seconds out!"
"Radio in for the drop, and take us down, as low as you can!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
The chopper lurched forward, and Shinji strapped himself to the canvass bench beside the carpenter. He peered through the windows, looking to the back of the aircraft. Outside, a shadow crept over the landscape. It was broad and triangle-shaped, like a flying wing, but the leading edges fanned out like feathers into fingery appendanges. Shinji couldn't see all of the Angel's shape, but he heard its cry. He felt it.
SCREEE!
The helicopter rattled, bouncing back and forth in a pocket of turbulent air.
I know what I said, thought Shinji. I believed we could survive this, and I still do, but it'd help if I could see how. An Angel versus a helicopter is a fight that would end quickly. I know that well enough.
Faintly, a reflection appeared in the window—the image of a girl in a school uniform with short blue hair.
'It will not be easy, Ikari-kun, but help is coming. Your faith will be repaid.'
Shinji smiled. Thank you, Ayanami.
'You shouldn't thank me yet. Turn away from the window.'
Why?
The image of Rei vanished, and Shinji's eyes focused on the outside again, where one of those tough, gray, fingerlike appendages loomed. Short black hairs standing on end covered its surface, and it pulled back like a baseball bat in the hands of a cleanup hitter.
SMASH! The windows shattered; the frame of the chopper buckled and bent. Glass sprayed the cargo hold, and the whipping wind roared. The chopper tumbled, rolling chaotically. Shinji gripped the restraining straps, desperate to stay in place. The view through the windows alternated between blue sky, the dark shadow of the Angel, and green and brown earth. Trees and grasses spun by, and—
#
And then it all went black.
"Shinji-kun! Shinji-kun, wake up!"
He shook his head, trying to get the blur out of his eyes. Sticky fluid ran down the side of his face. He touched a finger to his temple, feeling a tender, open wound. If he'd hit his head on something, that had to be why the person talking to him—shaking him incessantly—appeared to be sideways, right?
"Dammit, if you're not going to answer, then I'll just carry you!" Misato cut at the restraints with a combat knife, and Shinji fell forward, into her arms. She carried him toward the front of the helicopter, where the side door by the cockpit was part of the ceiling instead. She and hoisted him through the gap, and lamely, he climbed onto the side of the downed chopper.
And he sat there, facing the Angel—the giant, flying wing with its hairy finger-like appendages. It stared at him with a single red eye on its underside, and it swooped in like a bird of prey against a small rodent in the grass.
TING! A wall of rainbow-colored hexagons lit up the surroundings. From a crouch, a single, man-shaped being stood in opposition of the Angel. It was plated in dark green armor, and the pylons on its shoulders bent outward at a slight angle. Shinji couldn't see its face, for it kept the helicopter at its back while it protected Shinji and the survivors from the Angel. It towered over the helicopter. Six-story buildings would've been like hurdles for the Eva to jump over.
"Hey, don't just sit there!" Misato climbed through the side doorway. "Give me a hand already! Unit-14 won't be able to hold that Angel there for long!"
"An Eva…?" muttered Shinji. "When did you…? How?"
"I don't think this is the right time to be asking that!"
Hurriedly, Misato and Shinji slid down the side of the chopper. Other passengers came out through the back as the SDF members blasted the cargo ramp off, and though the Angel assaulted the Eva's AT field with its hairy appendages, the sanctity of the barrier held.
I should've known. A secret project that Misato-san was working on—it could only be an Eva. She and Ayanami must've been working on this from the start, knowing that the giant would come.
And while the survivors fled the downed chopper, Eva and Angel traded blows. The Angel wrapped up the Eva's arms with its hairy appendages and tried to pull the Eva apart, but Unit-14 held together, snapping the bindings instead. Angel blood spewed from the wounds, and a horrific cry rang out over the countryside.
"The pilot is pretty good," Shinji mused, glancing over his shoulder to watch. "Who is it?"
"There is no pilot," Misato whispered.
And that explained it: the Eva's brutality. Shinji had thought himself out of control and crazed sometimes when he'd piloted Eva, but one of the worst moments in his memory was when he'd had no control at all. Under the dummy plug's influence, Unit-01 had mutilated Unit-04 ruthlessly, indifferent to saving the pilot inside. Unit-14 was the same way—untethered by the pilot's restraint, it assaulted the Angel in an uninterrupted flurry. It leapt high and forced the Angel down with a monstrous kick.
The earth shook; the Angel plowed into the ground. Shinji and Misato wavered on their feet, letting the shockwave pass, and a cloud of dust rose into the sky.
But the Eva wasn't finished there. It yanked on one of the Angel's fingery appendages used that as a tether to swing the Angel about, flipping it onto its back. The Eva pounced atop the Angel's red eye—the core—and pounded on it. It stomped on this precious spot like a frenzied child throwing a tantrum, and its kicks flashed with the collsions of AT fields. The Angel tied up Unit-14 once more, however, and this time, it didn't bother to try to rip the Eva apart. It gathered the Eva close to its body and wrapped around it into a ball.
"Get down!" cried Misato.
Shinji crouched in place, and Misato shielded his body with her own. A searing pink flash penetrated his closed eyelids. A pressure wave picked him up off his feet and threw him like an action figure in a toddler's backyard. He hit the ground hard, rubbing his palms raw as he tried to break his fall. Shinji rolled onto his back, blinking the dust from his eyes.
"Misato-san?" he called out. "Where are you?"
"Here!" The colonel picked herself up off the ground slowly, spitting out dirt.
Shinji worked his jaw, trying to clear his ears. The other survivors were scattered about in various states of shock and injury, but in large part, they'd withstood that last blast to look upon the scene of the battle with awe and horror. Where the Angel had been, a mammoth pink cross burned, looming over the landscape and casting dark shadows despite the morning sun. The Eva walked from this persistent explosion in silhouette, like a monster retreating to darkness.
"Let's go, Shinji-kun," said Misato, motioning for him to follow. "This fight is over. It's time to go home."
Home—a place of rest and sanctuary, yet Shinji expected neither. As he followed in Misato's footsteps, he glanced back, over his shoulder, at the cross-shaped tower of pink energy. The Eva stomped into the distance, its steps rhythmic and even, but something else caught his eye. In the middle of the nowhere, he spotted her: the image of a cultist with golden locks and bright green eyes. She stared at him, her glare unwavering, but it wasn't her eyes he couldn't tear his gaze away from.
It was the five black buttons on her thick coat.
"What are you staring at?" Misato shook him by the shoulder. "Something wrong?"
"Nothing," said Shinji forcing himself to face forward. "Nothing at all."
He walked on alongside Misato, knowing that wherever he went, the five-eyed giant Eisheth Zenunim would be watching. She would send her children and touch the minds of the weak to bring humanity back to the LCL sea, and until then, she would bring chaos and destruction upon planet Earth to force mankind to despair.
And what could Shinji do to oppose her? He wasn't a pilot anymore, even with an Eva that could be driven again. He wasn't a leader or a commander, like Misato, but fate and the choices he'd made had put him in a position to be heard. That was what the conductor in the traincar had asked him to do, wasn't it? To use the fame and notoriety he'd gained for the greater good? He'd refused the conductor then, trying to stay hidden and anonymous, and watched good men fall victim to panic and dread as a result.
No longer. He couldn't afford to stay silent or hide behind a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. As he'd spoken to the carpenter when a gun was pointed to his head, Shinji could cry out against Eisheth. He would stand up and shout his belief in humanity, however much the winds of panic and doubt might whip against his face.
Next: Shinji faces the task of training a new Eva pilot. Coming soon: "The Sixth Child"
