Chapter 8: The Illusory Passage, Part One
Chapter 8:
The Illusory Passage,
Part One
THE Q.R. SIGNUM TELEPORTATION wasn’t instantaneous. The traveler experienced a passage of time, however brief, as they journeyed through the domain of the Victors.
When Misato had first experienced that otherworldly realm, she’d likened the place to the roots of a forest that ran through the Earth—or a roller coaster twisting and turning underground.
But the subspace didn’t have a classically physical structure. The traveler felt no acceleration, and any branches save for the one being traveled were invisible.
Super Eva passed through the tunnel and was spat out into the air.
Shinji was fully expecting to crash into the ground, back first. He’d lowered his head and tensed his back muscles to brace himself, but no impact came. Instead, his back was skyward now, and he’d been expelled on an upward trajectory.
Apparently, a traveler left the tunnel with the same velocity they’d entered.
He looked down and saw an expansive white forest of dead trees, perhaps done in by pests or pestilence.
Super Eva’s mighty bulk reached nearly five hundred meters before descending again, and the receding landscape came rushing toward them.
Super Eva covered his face with both arms, and Shinji felt the snapping of dried-out tree limbs. In the last moment before the crash, he was once again swallowed into the ground and found himself briefly back in the tunnel before appearing near a glacier-covered mountain. He fell into a valley and leaped across space again.
Super Eva appeared near plateaus and plains, leaping from one place to the next without rhyme or reason.
“Where is this taking us?” Shinji cried out.
Super Eva was tossed out onto a peninsula buried under sea waters surging from a recent earthquake, or maybe a tsunami. A caldera rose, island-like, from the water. The ring of mountains didn’t stand as tall as they once had, but they were still tall enough to shield the city and lake nestled within from the giant waves pressing in on every side.
Inside the next tunnel, Shinji realized what he’d just seen. “That was Tokyo-3!”
He felt himself being carried farther away.
“Quatre! Take me back to where we just were!”
Quatre said nothing.
“Quatre!”
Shinji had had enough.
Wasn’t this the person who’d killed him? His hair stood on end as he relived the memory of his body boiling away under Unit Quatre’s gamma-ray laser cannon.
“Move!” he shouted.
He grabbed Quatre by the back of her collar and pushed her aside as hard as he could. She didn’t offer any resistance, floating up in the flow of the LCL, which was moving faster than normal in order to deliver enough oxygen for two.
Shinji was still gripping her collar, and the zipper of her coveralls tore open. The girl flew sideways, where, hidden behind the plug’s holographic display, she crashed into the sidewall and rebounded. But Shinji wasn’t paying any attention to her. He was staring straight ahead.
I have to go back there!
“Take me back to where we were!”
His right hand clutching the torn-off section of her uniform, its free end floating in the LCL, Shinji grabbed the control stick with his left hand and jostled it back and forth.
“Go back! Go back!”
But Shinji’s pleading went unanswered, and Super Eva raced onward through the mysterious passage.