Chapter 14: A Dark River

Chapter 14:
A Dark River

 

FAR AWAY, the fugitive Ayanami—Rei Quatre—opened her eyes with a start.

She had gained some measure of consciousness, though her sense of self was still unstable, stuck in a cycle of waking and submerging—now interrupted by searing pain.

She felt like she was burning up from the inside, and she didn’t know why.

Her breath caught. She whimpered.

I’m scared.

 

Without warning, she found herself at the mercy of a feeling no version of Ayanami Rei had ever truly experienced—terror.

A delayed realization accompanied this terror—that she and her Eva were drifting through an unfamiliar, pitch-black space.

She had no way of knowing where she was. All her Eva’s sensors read zero. Unable to process the situation, she began to panic.

As her body burned, she felt as though she were being washed away into a vast river at the bottom of the earth.

She clutched her chest.

The black heat flowed deep inside of her and began climbing its way into her brain, as if to say, I found you.

S-stop!

Her pulse thundered in her ears.

The heat was forcing information into her brain.

Her shared memories with the other Ayanamis tumbled around her mind, disjointed.

The heat pieced together words, and her lips opened by a will that was not her own.

“I…won’t allow it! I won’t allow it to exist!”

As she spoke, unbidden, a vision came to Quatre. For the first time, she saw Shinji’s new Eva.