The red sea was calm.
He remembered that calm.
The world had already rotted away, and now even the sounds were gone.
Ayanami stood on the shore, looking at him. Her lips parted as though she wanted to say goodbye.
But before she could make a sound, her body collapsed. Like a pile of blocks that had lost their support, she dissolved in an instant into a puddle of LCL, splashing onto the parched ground.
She had never needed to speak. Sometimes he felt that everything truly important between them had happened in silence.
He wanted to ask her how things had ended over there.
But he knew she would not answer.
She just stood there, like an answer he would never decipher.
The plane encountered a patch of mild turbulence, and the cabin shuddered slightly. Ice cubes clinked sharply against the sides of his glass.
Lu Mingfei opened his eyes.
Above him was the cream-colored ceiling of the Sleipnir, a private Gulfstream jet. The climate control blew a gentle breeze carrying a faint fragrance.
He instinctively held his breath, raised his right hand, and felt his neck.
Nono sat on the sofa across the aisle.
She had curled her legs up on the sofa and folded her arms across her chest, staring straight at him.
"The way you sleep isn't normal," Nono said, breaking the silence first.
"What counts as normal?" Lu Mingfei picked up the ice water on the table and took a sip.
The water was cold. It slid down his throat and brought him fully awake.
"Normal people frown when they have nightmares. They sweat, cry out, tremble." Nono stared into his eyes. "Not you. You just stopped breathing. For forty-five whole seconds."
"Forty-five whole seconds. I thought you were going to die."
"And you just sat there watching. You wouldn't even make a token effort at mouth-to-mouth." Lu Mingfei set down his glass.
Nono felt unnerved. She tried to piece together Lu Mingfei's nightmare through profiling.
But she could not. This loser's life history was absurdly mundane-playing StarCraft, crushing on the prettiest girl in class, getting pushed around by his aunt all day. Yet the guy before her, who could stop breathing without so much as a twitch of his brow, seemed like some ancient monster that had crawled out of a pile of corpses.
How could two entirely different species inhabit the same person?
Nono could not be bothered to waste any more words. She pulled out a document bearing the half-withered World Tree school crest and slid it across the table to him with a slap.
"If you've had enough sleep, sign it. Cassell doesn't feed freeloaders."
Lu Mingfei did not look at the document. He looked at Nono and asked, "Do you have any long-term outposts near Hakone?"
"No permanent presence," she said. "It's not our jurisdiction."
"Whose is it?"
Nono stared at him for a while, then pushed the document in front of him.
"Sign first. Fish for information later."
"I told you, I want to take a look around Hakone first." Lu Mingfei pushed the document back untouched.
"Look at what?" Nono narrowed her eyes. "The scenery? Or an old flame?"
Lu Mingfei glanced at her without a word.
Nono was not someone who liked admitting she cared about anything, but those few minutes in the hallway really did bother her.
That feeling made her deeply uncomfortable.
"Who did you say I looked like yesterday?" Nono leaned back in her seat. "What, did that girl dump you? So you came running to Japan to throw your life away?"
"No one." Lu Mingfei looked out the window. "And I can't find her anyway."
"Did she transfer schools, or run off with someone?" Nono's sneer was deliberately provocative.
"No."
"Then is she dead?" Nono pressed relentlessly.
"She's not dead."
Lu Mingfei answered too quickly, too softly, yet his words pierced Nono's intuition like an ice needle before she could react.
Caught short by that sudden chill, Nono yanked her seat belt over and snapped it shut irritably. "We're landing. Wipe that look off your face, like you're about to swallow a mouthful of shit!"
Narita Airport bustled with voices. A sweet-sounding announcement in Japanese played over the speakers.
"Attention, all passengers..."
Lu Mingfei understood it perfectly. The next sound should have been a piercing alarm, followed by an icy mechanical female voice:
"Emergency. Angel attack. Armor plates one through eight initiating lockdown. All noncombat personnel, proceed to the shelters immediately."
But it never came. The announcement was merely reminding a passenger named Minamoto to go to his boarding gate.
Cassell College's Japan branch had already arranged a car. A black Lexus sedan waited at the curb, and a driver in a black suit respectfully opened the door.
Lu Mingfei and Nono settled into the back seat. The car pulled smoothly out of the airport and joined Tokyo's traffic.
Neon signs lit up one after another on either side of the street, their multicolored glow sliding across the windows. Beneath an overpass, groups of high school students walked along, talking and laughing. Red lanterns hung outside an izakaya, and the aroma of grilled meat drifted from its entrance.
Lu Mingfei lowered the window a little, letting the summer night breeze brush through his hair.
This place was real.
But that place had been real too.
In his memories, this city had long since ceased to exist. It had been bombed into scorched earth during the war triggered by the Second Impact. Later, people had built Tokyo-2 and Tokyo-3 to the west of the ruins-a fortress made purely for war. High-rises could sink underground, missile silos lay hidden beneath asphalt roads, and enormous cables spread through every corner of the city like blood vessels.
He looked at a towering office building beside the road. On its LED billboard, a popular female idol held up a bottle of perfume with a radiant smile.
For a moment, the building's power cut out with a bang. Great sheets of glass fell from its exterior, and thick locking bolts shot out from both sides, clamping the structure firmly in place. Then, amid the shriek of grinding machinery, the entire building began slowly sinking underground, clearing a battlefield large enough for gigantic monsters to fight to the death.
Lu Mingfei squeezed his eyes shut.
When he opened them again, the building was still just a building. The actress on the giant screen was holding up her perfume and making eyes at the camera.
That world had already rotted away before he left. Had that useless Shinji managed to hold out in the end? Was Unit-01 still hanging in the sky? He had no idea.
After passing through Tokyo for a while, the car turned onto the Tōmei Expressway.
The city lights gradually fell behind them. Ahead lay an unbroken range of dark mountains.
"We're going straight to Hakone." Nono studied the route on the navigation screen. "The branch has booked out a hotel halfway up the mountain. Another hour or so."
Lu Mingfei nodded and turned his gaze toward the darkness outside.
Hakone. Lake Ashi.
A picturesque tourist destination, with famous hot springs, a lake offering distant views of Mount Fuji, ancient shrines, and crowds of visitors.
But on Lu Mingfei's map, that place had another name.
Tokyo-3. NERV headquarters. The underground city.
"How are you planning to search once we get there?" Nono asked suddenly.
"Search for what?"
"You might fool Guderian, but you can't fool me." Nono turned to look at him in the dim light. "You're not here on vacation. You're looking for something."
Lu Mingfei was silent for a while.
"I'm not looking for anything." He watched the mountains ahead as their outlines slowly emerged. "I'm just going to see the scenery."
"Do you need help from the branch?" Nono asked. "If you're planning to head into the mountains and poke around the woods, you'd better have them send a local to guide you."
"No." Lu Mingfei refused outright.
The mountain road twisted through rugged terrain. As they rounded the last sharp bend, the view suddenly opened up.
Cradled by the mountains, a vast lake lay quietly in the night. Its surface was like a black mirror, reflecting scattered points of starlight.
It was Lake Ashi.
"Stop the car," Lu Mingfei said suddenly.
The driver paused in surprise, then braked and pulled over at the edge of the scenic overlook.
Lu Mingfei pushed the door open, got out, and walked straight to the railing, looking down over the broad expanse of water below.
"So this is the place you were so desperate to come to?" Nono walked up beside him, her long dark-red hair whipping wildly in the wind. "The scenery really is nice. Perfect for hanging yourself or jumping into the lake."
Nono watched his profile and sensed his hesitation.
Standing there, Lu Mingfei was not afraid of what might be inside.
He was afraid there would be nothing at all.
"Yeah," he murmured softly, his voice scattering in the wind.