The Gulfstream Jet Sleipnir glided silently along the runway in the night, its nose slightly raised, like a blade slicing through the darkness and thrusting straight into the sky.
Cassell College was still asleep. No one knew that the S-Rank freshman who had shone so brightly on the Day of Freedom had boarded a jet bound for the battlefield just one week after enrolling.
"At cruising speed, we'll reach the Three Gorges in fourteen hours." Zero sat on the sofa across the aisle and pushed a tablet to the edge of the table. "Then we'll transfer to a helicopter for the waters around Kui Gate. That works out to one thirty in the afternoon, Chicago time."
"The Executive Department will handle the preliminary work and wait for you to join the mission."
Lu Mingfei leaned beside the window, watching Chicago's coastline dissolve into a scattering of starlight.
"Zero," Lu Mingfei said suddenly.
"Yes?"
"What kind of person are you, really?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Lu Mingze asked you to look after me. If you're repaying a debt or following strict orders, doing your duty should be enough. But you..." Lu Mingfei turned toward her. "You've gone too far."
Zero put down the tablet and folded her hands in her lap.
"How much do you know about the boss?"
"Enough."
"Not enough," Zero said flatly. "You don't know how he found me."
Lu Mingfei tilted his head. This was the first time Zero had volunteered anything about her past.
"Until I was thirteen, I lived in Siberia, Russia. It was always ice, snow, and frozen ground there," Zero said. "For a long time after I left, no one spoke to me. I didn't dare speak to anyone else, either. My pronunciation grew stranger and stranger, until even I couldn't understand myself."
"What about your family?"
"I had one." Zero paused. "Then I didn't."
Lu Mingfei didn't press her. He had seen too many versions of "then I didn't" in Tokyo-3. None needed explaining, and none should have to be explained.
"My past is a blank expanse of frozen ground," she said. "I met him when I was thirteen. Before that, I didn't count as a living person."
Lu Mingfei supposed that was how it worked. Some people needed someone else to give their existence a direction before it could begin to flow.
"The boss went to sleep," Lu Mingfei said, "so you came to watch over me."
"You're an extension of his will." Zero nodded, then added, "And you look like you really need someone to keep you in line."
"Me?" Lu Mingfei chuckled. "If you people hadn't sprung this crap on me, I could've steamrolled all of Cassell by myself in today's exercise."
"It has nothing to do with combat ability," Zero said. "You look like someone who could end up rotting away in some ruin at any moment if no one kept an eye on you."
"So that's why you came to keep me in line." He sounded helpless. "Because I look like... something will go wrong if no one watches me?"
"It's not that something will go wrong," Zero corrected him calmly. "It's that without someone watching you, you'll use yourself up."
The cabin fell quiet for a long time, the sound of the engines filling the silence.
"Zero."
"What if Lu Mingze keeps sleeping?" Lu Mingfei turned his face toward her. "What if he never wakes up?"
"Then you'll be all that's left," Zero said.
Lu Mingfei couldn't even argue anymore.
He thought it over. The logic itself seemed sound, but something still didn't quite fit. No one he knew treated caring for another person like a mission. Some did it in passing, some out of habit, but this degree of precision and intensity...
"So when you watch me drink water and sleep, are you doing it because of him, or because of me?" Lu Mingfei tried a different question.
Zero raised her eyes and looked at him for a moment.
"Now, it's because of you," she said.
That ended their small talk. She picked up the tablet again and slid it toward Lu Mingfei. "There are three pages left in the briefing."
"Can I skip them?" Lu Mingfei asked.
"Read it." Zero pushed the tablet across the table and brought up an underwater structural diagram of the Bronze City. "Get a general idea of the terrain within thirty minutes."
Lu Mingfei looked at the screen full of Alchemical Matrices and geological data and scratched his head. "Zero, has it ever occurred to you that most people might not be able to handle this kind of forceful care?"
Zero's hand stopped turning the pages. She raised her head and looked straight at Lu Mingfei.
"Can you not handle it?"
Lu Mingfei immediately lowered his head. "I'm reading. I read pretty fast."
Zero looked away and went back to her documents. The cabin's reading light fell across her profile, and her pale blond hair hung over her chest, hiding her expression in shadow.
Thirty minutes later, Lu Mingfei pushed the tablet back.
Zero checked the pages he had browsed and quizzed him on two details at random. Once he answered both correctly, she ticked a box on her terminal. "Preparations are complete. You can get some proper rest for the next eight hours."
Lu Mingfei leaned back in his seat and turned his head toward the window full of stars.
He spoke casually. "You said you met him when you were thirteen."
"Yes."
"Before that, you were alone."
"Yes."
"Were you scared back then?"
The low hum of the engines wrapped around the question and carried it somewhere far away.
"I've forgotten," Zero said. "When something lasts long enough, it stops being a feeling."
He knew what she meant. Spend long enough submerged in LCL, and that sense of suffocation disappeared. Your lungs had already accepted it as the form air took. You no longer felt it was wrong, because you no longer remembered what was right.
They remained silent like that, one leaning beside the window, the other sitting across the aisle.
After an unknown stretch of time, fatigue washed over him. He nestled deeper into his seat and closed his eyes.
"Lu Mingfei."
"Mm..."
"Your seat is at the wrong angle. It's putting strain on your lower back."
Lu Mingfei struggled to open one eye and glance at her. "I haven't said I'm going to sleep."
"You closed your eyes." Zero had already stood up. She reached straight over and pressed the adjustment button. The backrest slowly lowered. "You need the right posture."
"You're even going to police how I sleep?"
"Yes."
"Fine."
Lu Mingfei gave up completely and let the seat lay him flat.
The girl known as Cassell's Ice Queen bent down, took out a cashmere blanket, and draped it over him. She carefully tucked it around his neck and along the edges where drafts could get in, her movements practiced and brisk.
The blanket was warm and carried a faint fragrance.
Lu Mingfei drifted for a moment, and the sharp smell of disinfectant suddenly flashed through his mind. When he had woken after the Unit-03 he piloted was torn apart by Unit-01, that short-haired girl had been standing beside his bed.
Rei Ayanami didn't know how to comfort people, nor did she understand tenderness. Everyone in that world kept their softer side locked away too tightly, as though they feared that if they loosened their grip, they too would shatter.
Lu Mingfei knew no one could replace the people from his past, just as he could never become someone else's replacement. But sometimes, there really were people in this world who carried a certain quality you recognized.
"Zero." He didn't open his eyes, and his voice was already drowsy.
"Go ahead."
"Thank you."
"...Go to sleep."