Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction ❯ The Weaver ❯ Five ( Chapter 5 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: the mustachioed cat 
Anime/Manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 05.04.2006 | Updated On: 05.04.2006 | Pages: 2 | Words: 5.8K | Visits: 201 | Status: Completed
Anime/Manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 05.04.2006 | Updated On: 05.04.2006 | Pages: 2 | Words: 5.8K | Visits: 201 | Status: Completed
The Weaver
Five
Reiko Mishima worked at the information desk of the Municipal Hospital in Tokyo 3. Five days a week, from six to two, she sat behind the wide Lucite U at the hospital's North entrance. It was her job to give directions to quiet, somber families, a dozen implied tragedies passing before her eyes every day. Tomiko-chan? Ukeda, right? She is in the burn unit ICU, third wing, second floor. Only one of you can visit. The balloon won't be allowed inside.
She also handled the secretarial work for three junior associates of the hospital.
It was 8:40 on a bright and sunny morning and Naoko, the other girl who worked the day shift with Reiko, had just stepped out for a smoke. A day after the evacuation stand-down, there were almost no patients at the hospital. All invalids had been transferred to smaller regional hospitals well away from the heart of Tokyo 3. The staff calendar showed only three surgeries today. All three of the doctors Reiko worked under were off golfing, or whatever it was they did when Nerv gave them a 'snow day'. But no rest for Reiko, no. The Tokyo 3 Municipal was a public building, and had to be opened at all times, even if only retaining a skeleton staff of which Reiko was always a part.
The entrance doors slid open, and the hospital recieved its first guest of the day. A handsome, if ill-kept man approached the information desk.
"Yo," the man addressed her, leaning way over the narrow ledge of desk. "I'm looking for a woman, name's Katsuragi. Heard she came her last night, hasn't left."
Reiko's eyes darted from her computer to the stubble-faced man. Goddamn it, she cursed to herself. How come the cute ones are always looking for their girlfriends, why couldn't he be visiting his parents?
The computer search returned nothing, Reiko explained this apologetically.
"No problem, sorry, sorry, I don't think she's actually a patient," the man laughed easily. "Maybe you could help me with another name? Asuka Langley Sohryu?"
There was a name Reiko knew right away.
"1st Cranial Nerve," she said, without looking at the computer. "But that's Nerv stuff, if you don't have clearance they won't let you in."
The man laughed again, "oh, that's the least of my worries, I'm afraid." Then he walked around the desk and was gone.
The entrance doors slid open again. Reiko glanced up to see who was coming - another hot one, hopefully - then automatically looked back down.
"Organic retorted, skewed," said a flat voice, and then there was a knocking sound on the Lucite desk. "Easier to see, makes the place swim, really. Clear flesh, who'd have thought."
Reiko heard the voice, and was also completely absorbed with filtering out spam from Dr. Hanataka's inbox.
"Followed the debris-trail here. Got all sorts of stuff laying about though, can't see a thing. Looking, I think, for a dead place. A place where they store dead things?"
"The morgue?" Reiko asked, absently.
"Whatever name, wherever?"
"Downstairs. You can't go... hey!" Reiko looked up suddenly. What had she been saying? There was no one before her. There had been a voice but... no, she must have imagined it.
***
Katsuragi was sitting in a bench outside Asuka's room. She was gnawing on her thumb when she noticed Kaji approaching, at whose sight she sat up a little straighter and feigned indifference.
"Back from Kyoto, I see," the Major greeted him rather coldly. "She's hasn't woken up yet."
Kaji glided past her stiff form and sat down on the bench next to her.
"Got back from Kyoto five days ago, heard you had a little problem, was looking into it for you," the stubble-faced man smiled at her sadly. "I am... well, I don't know what to say to you Katsuragi. I heard about the Third Child, and I couldn't believe it. Still can't."
"Well, you can go down to the morgue if you want, they're keeping him down there until someone can do an autopsy," Misato's reply was bitter and angry.
"I... did not come for Asuka, Misato. You know that." The man produced a disk from his pocket. "This might have come too late, but I found some information for you, about this Weaver thing." He slid the disk across the bench, toward her, then stood and stretched.
"Sorry I wasn't here earlier, I found out about an hour ago. Shinji was pretty well-adjusted for all the shit he'd been subjected to. I think he would have turned out better then us." He passed by Misato, close, but not touching her. "Saying anything else, you'd probably kick my ass. Call me when you have the funeral arranged, huh? Anything I can do, you know I'll do it."
Kaji heard her stand, heard her take a step towards him. He waited for her to say his name, but she never did. He simply shrugged, a hard movement, and kept walking. There was something there, but it was a delicate thing. He hoped, before this entire business was concluded, he would be able to hold her again.
***
It was 8:55. Reiko was debating whether or not to make a note of Naoko's continued absence in the day log. That silly girl was always going off on some pretense. Reiko had caught her more then once chatting with her friends on that stupid pink cell phone of hers when the girl should have been working. Once or twice, her friends had even called on the hospital information line. Reiko was sick of filling in for her.
The entrance doors slide open. Reiko glanced up just in time to make out a large black shape, before she was struck and lifted out of her seat, pieces of Lucite desk and her computer flying around her. She screeched briefly before slamming into the wall. Then she dropped eight feet to the ground, and didn't make much noise at all.
***
Keiko Futanabe worked for Nerv, Section 2. Up until yesterday, she and two other agents had been assigned exclusively to the care and protection of the Third Child. Keiko had never met Shinji in person, and doubted he had even known what she looked like, but she had still formed a connection with the charmingly awkward young boy. Here had been someone with the fate of humanity in his hands, who still had trouble talking to girls his own age. Of the three children, he seemed the most human to Keiko - a subtly and not-so-subtly flawed human being. Rei Ayanami was robot, a blank slate that seemed to resist inscription, and Asuka Langley Sohryu was one of those girls Keiko had hated in high-school - the hot-shit, easily popular girl.
And now she was guarding Shinji Ikari's body, standing just outside the Tokyo 3 Municipal Hospital morgue.
The caretakers always stood down after the Children entered Nerv-proper. Shinji had left after the initial encounter with the Twelth Angel, and in the rush to implement their counter-strategy, no one had noticed the Third Child's plugsuit-signal move off Nerv premises. That was how they had found him, with a tracking device in his plugsuit. Shinji's caretakers had fucked up royal, and now the boy was dead, apparently of suicide.
Keiko didn't buy it. Her function as Shinji's watcher had been as a psychologist, mainly. She had watched the way he positioned himself in school, how far he distanced himself from the other Children. She was the only watcher in Shinji's group that conferred with the other groups on a regular basis - comparing psychological reports, making discrete and sometimes cruel bets about the Children and their various activities, and watching the psychologist assigned to Rei Ayanami twitch. Nothing Keiko had learned from her peers, or her gut feeling, added up to the Third Child's suicide. Her report was on the Commander's desk - she hoped he considered it before bumping her down to cleaning toilets.
The agent was interrupted from her introspection by a sound coming from inside the morgue. She slowly turned to the door. No one was in there. None of the resident morticians had returned from the evacuation yet, that was why Shinji's body hadn't been interred - the Commander had ordered an autopsy. The sound came again, sharper and louder, a clang she recognized.
The first sound had been the lid to the refrigerated cells being thrown open, the second sound had been the slab on which the bodies rested being pulled out.
"S-3 to other watchers, I have an intruder in the morgue," Keiko whispered into her radio.
"Say again?" came a voice fragmented by three levels of concrete.
"S-3 to watchers, someone is inside the morgue. Someone got past me and is in the morgue."
"S-1, go help S-3," the voice had grown irritable. "And remember, they only go down if you shoot them in the head."
"S-1 to S-3, on my way," came a second voice.
Keiko turned off the radio. S-2, the asshole on the radio, had been off-duty when Shinji had gone missing, and was being very vocal in blaming the other two agents for the incident. That cunt only cared about how it would effect his safety record - Shinji was just another job for him. Plus, he had been the one on duty during the now-infamous "Weaver incident", where he and A-3, the psychologist assigned to Asuka Langley Sohryu, had completely failed to prevent the assault on the Third Child. In fact, both had been found in a highly suggestive state of undress a mile down the road by other Section 2 agents during their forensic sweep of the area - though both agents claimed to have been monitoring the Children before suddenly finding themselves naked in the bushes. S-2 was obviously hoping that this screw up by Keiko and S-3 would overshadow his own. Keiko doubted it would end well for him.
S-3, Shojiro Tanaka, like Keiko, had felt a connection with the Third Child. He had been taking it harder then Keiko. Last night she had taken him to dinner while S-2 and A-1 and A-2 were on duty at the hospital.
In a little under five minutes, Shojiro came jogging down the hallway, shirt untucked, hair hastily patted down. He looked really cute like that, Keiko thought.
The male agent looked from Keiko to the door she was leaning against. Inside, there was another loud bang, and then a strange vibration that rattled the door. Both agents un-holstered their service pistols, and gave each other a look. Keiko eased away from the door, and Shojiro slipped his hand into the handle. Then he stopped, pressed his ear to the door, and listened. The deep sound came, and rattled the door again. Shojiro looked at Keiko, confused, and mouthed 'something strange' to her.
Keiko retreated a few meters and turned on her radio.
"S-3 to S-2, something strange down here, need additional support."
There was a pause - S-2 thinking of an excuse, likely. Keiko waited and waited, and no reply was forthcoming. She returned to Shojiro and shrugged, then pantomimed choking the radio. Shojiro grinned nervously, and laced his fingers through the handle again when
"Get out of there!" the radio exploded with noise. Both agents jumped away from the door.
"There's a I don't know what you have to get out of there!" S-2 was screaming, completely hysterical.
He might've been a shitty human being, but Keiko had never figured S-2 for a coward. She and Shojiro backed down the corridor. Whoever was raiding the hospital would have to come from the stairwell, there were no other routes of entry Keiko was aware of.
The two agents continued to back up, first looking behind, then in front of them. The hallway had no furniture, and the only unlocked door had been the morgue. They were completely without cover.
"Fuck-ing thing just went..." Keiko switched the radio off, cutting S-2 off mid-sentence. As the echoes of the radio died away, they were replaced by a heavy crashing sound. Neither agent could tell where it was coming from.
The double doors at the end of the hallway proximate to S-2's position were torn off their hinges, and something pushed its way out of the stairwell. It filled the brightly lit hallway, its black bulk moving awkwardly in the too-tight space, smashing lights and making the hallway appear to dilate wider as it dragged itself forward. Neither agent could make out what it was, just that something very large and fast was coming for them.
Shojiro acted first. He un-holstered his gun and turned to one of the many anonymous locked doors that lined the hallway. Keiko was moving to stop him - if one of those rooms housed a boiler or a gas main, he might cause an explosion trying to shoot off the lock - when the blackness surged forward, covering twenty meters in scant seconds, and waved a long appendage over Shojiro. For a moment Keiko thought the agent had been hit, but then he was backing away, cursing, as his gun fell to pieces.
Doesn't like guns, huh? Keiko thought as she pulled her own, and got off a single shot before pain burned through her hand. The agent tried to pull the trigger again, thought she did, but the gun failed to fire. Shojiro tackled her, pulled her away, and Keiko saw in the midst of the black mass, there dangled a slender pink object. She tried to switch hands, to get another shot off, but the pistol slipped between her fingers - blood the lubricant - and clattered on the floor. Shojiro now picked her up and was running down the hallway faster then she would have thought him capable.
At the end of the hallway Shojiro turned, and both agents saw the end of the black thing disappearing into a hole in the wall where the morgue door had been. The hallway up to that point was a half-seen disaster, all the flourescents smashed, the walls torn and bending out or listing inward. Light still came from inside the morgue, and strange shadows played across the wall opposite, which had buckled outward, making it easy to see the weird and sinuous shapes that moved inside.
The strange vibration started up again, much stronger then before. Both agents watched mutedly as something shot out of the hole the black thing had torn in the wall. What looked like a figure slammed against the buckled wall and slowly fell away from it, staggering forward. The person was strange - indistinct in ways the poor light could not account for. It appeared to look down the hall at the two agents, and had started unhurriedly in their direction when a long black arm snaked out of the hole, lifting the figure off its feet and pulling it back into the morgue.
Shojiro lowered Keiko slowly to the ground, the female agent now looking at the clean slice that had separated her trigger finger from her hand. She watched it spurt with every beat of her heart, and was making small noises like a wounded cat. The unharmed agent tore off a piece of his shirt and fashioned a bandage for the wound, then tied another piece of cloth around Keiko's wrist and used a ballpoint pen to fashion a crude tourniquet. He gently took Keiko's shaking, undamaged hand and pressed it to the pen, to hold the bandage in place. Then he walked back to where Keiko's gun had fallen and picked it up, absently wiping the blood, and glancing down the hall to Keiko, then to the morgue.
"Don't," Keiko whispered, far too low for the other agent to hear. "Don't."
Shojiro walked easily down the middle of the hall, gun gripped loosely in one hand.
Keiko tried to stand, but suddenly all she could think about was ice-cream... then the way her Aunt's flowers had been so bright she could hardly look at them. Then she thought about sand covering her body on a black beach, the small things of the ocean burrowing into her flesh beneath the surface. She saw outside herself, saw herself green in a tasteful toga that hid all her important parts - heart, lungs, brain.
Shaking, hands gripping her knees, tourniquet forgotten, Keiko Futanabe rocked back and forth in the hallway, thinking about how much stars looked like a cat's eye.
***
Kaji took point, only felt right after pulling rank on the Captain and taking command of the response unit. There were six men with him - the Captain and five others had remained on the ground floor to secure the decimated North entrance and guard the Second Child.
The Nerv special operative patted his jacket pocket, felt the sharp thing he had scavenged from the debris upstairs. Hopefully the men under his temporary command would hold their fire long enough for him to use it. There was no question in Kaji's mind that a Weaver was behind the destruction above - the way rows of waiting room chairs hand been tossed aside with casual strength, the shattered information desk (part of it embedded in the ceiling), and the people that had been in the way, the shambling figures that were wounded in strange ways or crazy or both. It fit with the report on the Third Child's first encounter with the thing, that gibbering madness that settled upon any that laid eyes on a Weaver.
The small squad reached the bottom of the stairs, edged out into a darkened hallway that bowed wide. Wherever flashlights shown, the ceiling and walls were broken. The stairwell had faired much better, with only the occasional torn guardrail. Here though, there was little doubt that one of Mieville's Weavers had passed by. Mieville, the prescient socialist revolutionary - Kaji could had managed a chuckle in different circumstances.
He watched a trickle of plaster fall from the cracked ceiling, and pulled the nearest member of the response unit close.
"Find someone in maintenance, or call someone in the tech division," Kaji told him. "It would be nice to know if the building was going to fall in on us." He watched the man leave, then turned back to the hallway and carefully advanced, picking over a floor that was torn up in places, collapsed in others. He shown his light down some of the deeper holes, into what must have been a sub-basement. He indicated the holes and signed for caution, then continued on.
Some distance down the hallway Kaji could see that the destruction ended and light was visible. He could see someone laying there in the light, bloody and unmoving. Between that person - a woman, Kaji thought - and the darkness there were a series of bloody stains. The furthest was a small puddle just in front of the unconscious woman, the ones closer to the darkness being evenly spaced - footprints.
Kaji paused, playing his light carefully over the walls, trying to figure out where the morgue was. Thirty meters down, on the left, that was all the direction he had. The slow going made distance difficult to gauge, the walls so torn out he couldn't angle the beam of his flashlight more then a few meters ahead of him.
Another few steps, and a rotten smell became apparent. A few steps more, and Kaji's flashlight played across a door, pressed deep into the right wall of the hallway. Gingerly feeling his way over to it, Kaji angled his light to the left side of the corridor, and finally found the deeper black he had been searching for.
The entire wall of the morgue appeared to be torn away. Kaji's light did not penetrate the dim by much, but he could see the clean cuts where wall should have seperated the morgue room from the hallway.
Picking over the unsteady ground, Kaji got right to the lip of the opening, then signalled an all-stop. He turned off his flashlight, and listened for a moment, trying to pick out anything against the background noise of the fidgetting men behind him. Somewhere below them, there came a groaning of pipes.
A minute passed before Kaji heard something - a faint creak that might have just been more pipes settling.
He turned on his flashlight and reached into his pocket, pulling out the object he had scavenged from the upper floor. The cheap metal the scissors were made of glinted dully beneath the flashlight. Kaji gestured a man in the squad forward, one outfitted with a scout's kit. He drew squiggles in the air, and the soldier quickly opened a vinyl flap on the arm of his uniform, revealing a narrow dry-erase board and a black marker attached to the uniform by a loop of wire. Kaji took the black marker, hesitated, unsure of what to say, then carefully inscribed 'Hello Sir' down one blade of the scissors. He then flipped the scissors over and wrote 'Are You Lost?' down the inside of the other blade.
The scout, the only one that could see what he was doing, looked at him like he was crazy. Kaji merely shrugged.
Walking over to the lip of the hole, Kaji took a deep breath then shouted:"Weaver, I have a gift for you!"
Wincing at the sound his voice had made in the small space, Kaji raised the scissors, opened them, and slid them together. He did this twice, then tossed the object into the morgue, trying to expose as little of himself as possible.
The squad waited for a minute, uneasy at Kaji's display. He heard muttering voices behind him, and signalled for everyone to be quiet.
Two minutes passed, then three. Kaji was about to peer over the lip of the hole when something hit the wall across from the hole, sending up a shower of sparks. Shortly after this, there was a sound like tearing fabric, and then
It was like waking up from a dream. The hallway seemed less treacherous, what little light they had seemed brighter. Something had left, and everyone felt much better for it. Kaji shown his light into the hole, and slowly proceeded forward.
***
Misato glared at the man in black, who in turn ignored her. She was sitting in a chair beside Asuka's bed, trying to read a magazine. They had been all set to transport the Second Child to a safer location a few minutes ago, once they got a route secured - now they just barred exit, said the situation was under control, and wouldn't tell anything beyond that.Misato was a Major in the tactical branch of Nerv, Section 2 fell under the intelligence branch. Technically, she couldn't pull rank on the goon blocking the doorway unless the Children were in danger, not in a Major's capacity but as their guardian. Apparently Asuka was no longer in harm's way, thus no authority. What she wanted to do was smack this dumb ape around until he told her just what the fuck was going on. She had tried to contact her parallel in the intelligence branch, but Nerv's directory assistance had connected her to a line with Kaji's answering machine on the other end. That had left her bewildered and fuming - she had always wondered what his official position in the chain of command was.
She finished the magazine, one of those stupid teen things Asuka would like, and tried to call Kaji again. This time, she got a busy signal. She got up and paced, waiting for a few minutes, and was about to call when the door opened and Kaji told the goon, roughly, to get out. He locked the door behind the broad man, then approached Misato.
In the thirty minutes from when Misato had last seen him, Kaji was managed to lose his jacket and acquire a thin layer of grime. He was covered from head to toe in a dusting of plaster, which was splotched green and red in places. Kaji walked up to her, wiping his face as he came, and suddenly he was kissing her, holding her shoulders carefully. The kiss lasted only a moment, he pulled away, probably for fear that Misato would first. Then he backed up.
"Downstairs," he said. "The thing, the Weaver was downstairs."
Misato, still dazed and smelling Kaji's scent beneath the heavier odor of mold, took a moment to process that.
"It... what about the..." Misato glanced at Asuka's sleeping form. "The body?"
Kaji laughed wretchedly, briefly disappearing into the room's small bathroom and reappearing with a wet towel in hand. He unbuttoned his shirt as he spoke.
"There are thirteen bodies down there," he began, sliding out of his shirt and drawing the towel across his chest and arms. "They were all... well, you should probably go see for yourself, just give me a minute to get clean."
Misato tried not to be distracted by Kaji's uncovered body. It helped that whatever the man had seen had pushed flirtation out of his mind. No motion Kaji made was overly suggestive, just a desperate bid to part with a nasty smell.
"Shinji's body, we found the remains of his plugsuit on one of the autopsy slabs, it was supposed to be in cold storage, according to the manifest. The plugsuit was... ah... empty." Kaji went back to the washroom, re-wet the towel, stopped, opened the outer door and told the goon waiting at the threshold to go get him some clothes, he didn't care from where. He returned to the room and drew the privacy curtain around Asuka's bed, then unbuckled his belt and took off his pants, make a warding-off gesture to Misato.
"There was yellow fluid standing in the plugsuit, and on the slab, and a pool of it underneath. It... ah... looked like LCL." Kaji wiped both legs down, took off his shoes and socks and wiped there too. Then he went to the restroom, got a fresh towel, and began to repeat the process.
"The other bodies... well, you'll see. You do want to go down there, right?"
Misato nodded, trying to feign indifference to Kaji's nearly-naked body.
"Well then... uh... do you have any perfume?" Kaji was smelling the towel, his arms, still making a face at what his nose was telling him.
Misato went over to tiny bereau built into the wall, where she had stored some of Asuka's personal effects. She had some lavendar perfume in there, figured Asuka would like that. She handed the bottle to Kaji, who proceeded to use half of it on himself.
"Hold out your wrist," he said. Misato complied, and Kaji sprayed her several times, until her hand was soaked with the stuff. The Special Operative was eyeing his old clothes with disdain when the goon entered without ceremony, doctor's scrubs in hand.
"Sorry sir, this was all they wanted to give me," the tall man explained, holding up the aquamarine-colored pants and shirt. Then he crinkled his nose. "What the..."
"Thanks," Kaji took the items from goon, then ushered him outside. As he pulled on the light clothing and his own socks and shoed, Kaji grinned at Misato, a bit of the old charm finally returning. "Remind you of anything, Katsuragi?"
Misato rolled her eyes.
***
Nerv technicians were already at work in the basement, stringing up lights and in several places erecting beams meant to stabilize the ceiling. Kaji and Misato still had to pick their way forward carefully, none of the holes in the floor had been covered yet.
Misato noticed that the technicians were trying to avoid looking at the large hole in the wall she assumed led to the morgue. As Misato hopped over the final tear in the floor and accepted Kaji's hand to pull her over and into the morgue, she understood why.
Thirteen bodies. Thirteen seperate earthly vessels. Old and young, male and female. One head, two legs, two arms.
All as one.
Kaji came up behind her, but Misato wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of collapsing. She locked her legs in place, kept her eyes open, and saw and saw and saw.
Legs surrounded it like gilding, supporting it. Misato could see the pallid sac between those mismatched legs was hanging just slightly off the ground. The arms had been attached, seemingly at random, to the top dome of it. Each was bent is a particular, deliberate way. One small hand flashed a victory symbol, arm bent at a right angle, while another was split down the middle, the seperation beginning at the elbow and running down to the middle finger, the two halves seperated and misaligned, the cross-section of bone and muscle apparent. Another hand had been cut in such a way that the flesh seemed to loop downwards in a spiral, the arm stretched long under its own weight, each finger a twisted gnarl of flesh twelve or more inches long. Twenty six hands, all different in mutilation.
Misato took one step forward. Another.
The outer shell was made of torso-flesh, bound tight. There was a breast, here, a navel. The patches did not exactly match up, some were hairy, others slightly darker or unusually pale. There were no apparent seams in the flesh, save where hairy flesh met smooth, tanned flesh. The whole thing was damp and translucent. Beneath the flesh Misato saw faces, which bore expressions from happiness to sadness to terror and the gamut between. Spacing apart each head and apparently accounting for most of the grotesque thing's bulk were the parts of humans one does not normally wish to see - ropey intestines, fetal-shaped kidneys, lungs, heart. Spines and ribs mixed into the mess of organs, piercing and rupturing them, from what little Misato could see.
Kaji touched her gently on the shoulder, and Misato did not even flinch.
"Around," he said gently.
They circled the thing, and on the other side Misato saw the thing had ruptured at one point. The tear in the rough sphere started halfway up the top hemisphere and extended downward. Pulped human being had spilled out, a slick tongue of bodies that extended back into the wound. Misato thrust her perfume-wet wrist under her nose.
Kaji pulled her away, or tried to.
"Katsuragi, the plugsuit, this way."
Still Misato would not budge, so Kaji picked her up and spun her around. She barely resisted at all. He spun her so she was facing the bank of refrigerated cells and steel autopsy tables. Then he got in front of her and got her eyes to track his own.
"You came down here to see what we found. Shinji, remember?"
Misato slowly nodded, wrist still close to her face.
Kaji led her forward to the middle autopsy table, on which rested a battered, half-gone plugsuit. As Kaji had said, the suit was sitting in a pool of yellow fluid. Misato reached forward and tipped the upper frame of the plugsuit up, and more fluid sluiced out of the neck. There was a pool of the stuff under the table.
As Katsuragi took in the strange remains of the Third Child, an agent came up behind Kaji.
"You should probably see this, sir," he said.
Kaji patted Katsuragi on the shoulder, and walked across the room and back out into the hall, where one of Section 2's forensic men was taking a picture a strange item embedded in the wall. The scissor he had thrown into the morgue ahead of his squad now appeared to be lodged into the wall opposite it. That sharp sound they had heard just before the Weaver left, the sparks on the wall, it must have been this, Kaji guessed.
The Weaver had apparently gotten Kaji's message, a response was embossed into the cheap metal of the scissors.
'All as one. Your' read one blade, 'exclimation point.' read the other. That was... very interesting.
Katsuragi tapped him on the shoulder. Kaji leaned to one side so the Major could see the scissors. Then he carefully lead her out of the basement.
***
They went to Asuka's room. The girl was still asleep.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to tell her," Misato said, staring at the sleeping girl.
"Maybe... well, you either tell the truth or something like it," Kaji replied as he opened all the windows in the room, trying to air out the scent of lavender.
"That, uh... the break in the side of that thing..." he began, watching Misato tense up. "There was someone inside it. He managed to tear out just as we arrived. Apparently he was one of Shinji's caretakers, serving a shift as security for Asuka. Name of Tanaka. We found another agent at the end of the hallway, relatively untouched - woman named Futanabe."
Misato was shaking now, looking down at Asuka, mouth half opened.
"What the hell is this thing?" she whispered. "Why did I have to go down there?"
"That data I gave you," Kaji said. "Read it. Try to keep in mind how very Other this thing is."
Misato found the data drive in her pocket, then started digging through the small drawer at Asuka's bedside for the girl's school laptop. Kaji watched her, watched the way she moved, absently noted the way her ass looked when she bent over. Until she had read everything he had given her, it would be useless to appeal to her for anything.
"Katsuragi, you have two hours," Kaji said, heading for the door. "After that, I'm coming in here and taking you to the closest bar we can find, you hear me?"
Misato gave no sign she had heard, instead turning on Asuka's red laptop and sliding the data drive into place. As the door opened and shut, the Major brought up the device directory and opened the file Kaji had given her.
"Perdido Street Station" read the title, centered, in e-book format, "by China Mieville."
Five
Reiko Mishima worked at the information desk of the Municipal Hospital in Tokyo 3. Five days a week, from six to two, she sat behind the wide Lucite U at the hospital's North entrance. It was her job to give directions to quiet, somber families, a dozen implied tragedies passing before her eyes every day. Tomiko-chan? Ukeda, right? She is in the burn unit ICU, third wing, second floor. Only one of you can visit. The balloon won't be allowed inside.
She also handled the secretarial work for three junior associates of the hospital.
It was 8:40 on a bright and sunny morning and Naoko, the other girl who worked the day shift with Reiko, had just stepped out for a smoke. A day after the evacuation stand-down, there were almost no patients at the hospital. All invalids had been transferred to smaller regional hospitals well away from the heart of Tokyo 3. The staff calendar showed only three surgeries today. All three of the doctors Reiko worked under were off golfing, or whatever it was they did when Nerv gave them a 'snow day'. But no rest for Reiko, no. The Tokyo 3 Municipal was a public building, and had to be opened at all times, even if only retaining a skeleton staff of which Reiko was always a part.
The entrance doors slid open, and the hospital recieved its first guest of the day. A handsome, if ill-kept man approached the information desk.
"Yo," the man addressed her, leaning way over the narrow ledge of desk. "I'm looking for a woman, name's Katsuragi. Heard she came her last night, hasn't left."
Reiko's eyes darted from her computer to the stubble-faced man. Goddamn it, she cursed to herself. How come the cute ones are always looking for their girlfriends, why couldn't he be visiting his parents?
The computer search returned nothing, Reiko explained this apologetically.
"No problem, sorry, sorry, I don't think she's actually a patient," the man laughed easily. "Maybe you could help me with another name? Asuka Langley Sohryu?"
There was a name Reiko knew right away.
"1st Cranial Nerve," she said, without looking at the computer. "But that's Nerv stuff, if you don't have clearance they won't let you in."
The man laughed again, "oh, that's the least of my worries, I'm afraid." Then he walked around the desk and was gone.
The entrance doors slid open again. Reiko glanced up to see who was coming - another hot one, hopefully - then automatically looked back down.
"Organic retorted, skewed," said a flat voice, and then there was a knocking sound on the Lucite desk. "Easier to see, makes the place swim, really. Clear flesh, who'd have thought."
Reiko heard the voice, and was also completely absorbed with filtering out spam from Dr. Hanataka's inbox.
"Followed the debris-trail here. Got all sorts of stuff laying about though, can't see a thing. Looking, I think, for a dead place. A place where they store dead things?"
"The morgue?" Reiko asked, absently.
"Whatever name, wherever?"
"Downstairs. You can't go... hey!" Reiko looked up suddenly. What had she been saying? There was no one before her. There had been a voice but... no, she must have imagined it.
***
Katsuragi was sitting in a bench outside Asuka's room. She was gnawing on her thumb when she noticed Kaji approaching, at whose sight she sat up a little straighter and feigned indifference.
"Back from Kyoto, I see," the Major greeted him rather coldly. "She's hasn't woken up yet."
Kaji glided past her stiff form and sat down on the bench next to her.
"Got back from Kyoto five days ago, heard you had a little problem, was looking into it for you," the stubble-faced man smiled at her sadly. "I am... well, I don't know what to say to you Katsuragi. I heard about the Third Child, and I couldn't believe it. Still can't."
"Well, you can go down to the morgue if you want, they're keeping him down there until someone can do an autopsy," Misato's reply was bitter and angry.
"I... did not come for Asuka, Misato. You know that." The man produced a disk from his pocket. "This might have come too late, but I found some information for you, about this Weaver thing." He slid the disk across the bench, toward her, then stood and stretched.
"Sorry I wasn't here earlier, I found out about an hour ago. Shinji was pretty well-adjusted for all the shit he'd been subjected to. I think he would have turned out better then us." He passed by Misato, close, but not touching her. "Saying anything else, you'd probably kick my ass. Call me when you have the funeral arranged, huh? Anything I can do, you know I'll do it."
Kaji heard her stand, heard her take a step towards him. He waited for her to say his name, but she never did. He simply shrugged, a hard movement, and kept walking. There was something there, but it was a delicate thing. He hoped, before this entire business was concluded, he would be able to hold her again.
***
It was 8:55. Reiko was debating whether or not to make a note of Naoko's continued absence in the day log. That silly girl was always going off on some pretense. Reiko had caught her more then once chatting with her friends on that stupid pink cell phone of hers when the girl should have been working. Once or twice, her friends had even called on the hospital information line. Reiko was sick of filling in for her.
The entrance doors slide open. Reiko glanced up just in time to make out a large black shape, before she was struck and lifted out of her seat, pieces of Lucite desk and her computer flying around her. She screeched briefly before slamming into the wall. Then she dropped eight feet to the ground, and didn't make much noise at all.
***
Keiko Futanabe worked for Nerv, Section 2. Up until yesterday, she and two other agents had been assigned exclusively to the care and protection of the Third Child. Keiko had never met Shinji in person, and doubted he had even known what she looked like, but she had still formed a connection with the charmingly awkward young boy. Here had been someone with the fate of humanity in his hands, who still had trouble talking to girls his own age. Of the three children, he seemed the most human to Keiko - a subtly and not-so-subtly flawed human being. Rei Ayanami was robot, a blank slate that seemed to resist inscription, and Asuka Langley Sohryu was one of those girls Keiko had hated in high-school - the hot-shit, easily popular girl.
And now she was guarding Shinji Ikari's body, standing just outside the Tokyo 3 Municipal Hospital morgue.
The caretakers always stood down after the Children entered Nerv-proper. Shinji had left after the initial encounter with the Twelth Angel, and in the rush to implement their counter-strategy, no one had noticed the Third Child's plugsuit-signal move off Nerv premises. That was how they had found him, with a tracking device in his plugsuit. Shinji's caretakers had fucked up royal, and now the boy was dead, apparently of suicide.
Keiko didn't buy it. Her function as Shinji's watcher had been as a psychologist, mainly. She had watched the way he positioned himself in school, how far he distanced himself from the other Children. She was the only watcher in Shinji's group that conferred with the other groups on a regular basis - comparing psychological reports, making discrete and sometimes cruel bets about the Children and their various activities, and watching the psychologist assigned to Rei Ayanami twitch. Nothing Keiko had learned from her peers, or her gut feeling, added up to the Third Child's suicide. Her report was on the Commander's desk - she hoped he considered it before bumping her down to cleaning toilets.
The agent was interrupted from her introspection by a sound coming from inside the morgue. She slowly turned to the door. No one was in there. None of the resident morticians had returned from the evacuation yet, that was why Shinji's body hadn't been interred - the Commander had ordered an autopsy. The sound came again, sharper and louder, a clang she recognized.
The first sound had been the lid to the refrigerated cells being thrown open, the second sound had been the slab on which the bodies rested being pulled out.
"S-3 to other watchers, I have an intruder in the morgue," Keiko whispered into her radio.
"Say again?" came a voice fragmented by three levels of concrete.
"S-3 to watchers, someone is inside the morgue. Someone got past me and is in the morgue."
"S-1, go help S-3," the voice had grown irritable. "And remember, they only go down if you shoot them in the head."
"S-1 to S-3, on my way," came a second voice.
Keiko turned off the radio. S-2, the asshole on the radio, had been off-duty when Shinji had gone missing, and was being very vocal in blaming the other two agents for the incident. That cunt only cared about how it would effect his safety record - Shinji was just another job for him. Plus, he had been the one on duty during the now-infamous "Weaver incident", where he and A-3, the psychologist assigned to Asuka Langley Sohryu, had completely failed to prevent the assault on the Third Child. In fact, both had been found in a highly suggestive state of undress a mile down the road by other Section 2 agents during their forensic sweep of the area - though both agents claimed to have been monitoring the Children before suddenly finding themselves naked in the bushes. S-2 was obviously hoping that this screw up by Keiko and S-3 would overshadow his own. Keiko doubted it would end well for him.
S-3, Shojiro Tanaka, like Keiko, had felt a connection with the Third Child. He had been taking it harder then Keiko. Last night she had taken him to dinner while S-2 and A-1 and A-2 were on duty at the hospital.
In a little under five minutes, Shojiro came jogging down the hallway, shirt untucked, hair hastily patted down. He looked really cute like that, Keiko thought.
The male agent looked from Keiko to the door she was leaning against. Inside, there was another loud bang, and then a strange vibration that rattled the door. Both agents un-holstered their service pistols, and gave each other a look. Keiko eased away from the door, and Shojiro slipped his hand into the handle. Then he stopped, pressed his ear to the door, and listened. The deep sound came, and rattled the door again. Shojiro looked at Keiko, confused, and mouthed 'something strange' to her.
Keiko retreated a few meters and turned on her radio.
"S-3 to S-2, something strange down here, need additional support."
There was a pause - S-2 thinking of an excuse, likely. Keiko waited and waited, and no reply was forthcoming. She returned to Shojiro and shrugged, then pantomimed choking the radio. Shojiro grinned nervously, and laced his fingers through the handle again when
"Get out of there!" the radio exploded with noise. Both agents jumped away from the door.
"There's a I don't know what you have to get out of there!" S-2 was screaming, completely hysterical.
He might've been a shitty human being, but Keiko had never figured S-2 for a coward. She and Shojiro backed down the corridor. Whoever was raiding the hospital would have to come from the stairwell, there were no other routes of entry Keiko was aware of.
The two agents continued to back up, first looking behind, then in front of them. The hallway had no furniture, and the only unlocked door had been the morgue. They were completely without cover.
"Fuck-ing thing just went..." Keiko switched the radio off, cutting S-2 off mid-sentence. As the echoes of the radio died away, they were replaced by a heavy crashing sound. Neither agent could tell where it was coming from.
The double doors at the end of the hallway proximate to S-2's position were torn off their hinges, and something pushed its way out of the stairwell. It filled the brightly lit hallway, its black bulk moving awkwardly in the too-tight space, smashing lights and making the hallway appear to dilate wider as it dragged itself forward. Neither agent could make out what it was, just that something very large and fast was coming for them.
Shojiro acted first. He un-holstered his gun and turned to one of the many anonymous locked doors that lined the hallway. Keiko was moving to stop him - if one of those rooms housed a boiler or a gas main, he might cause an explosion trying to shoot off the lock - when the blackness surged forward, covering twenty meters in scant seconds, and waved a long appendage over Shojiro. For a moment Keiko thought the agent had been hit, but then he was backing away, cursing, as his gun fell to pieces.
Doesn't like guns, huh? Keiko thought as she pulled her own, and got off a single shot before pain burned through her hand. The agent tried to pull the trigger again, thought she did, but the gun failed to fire. Shojiro tackled her, pulled her away, and Keiko saw in the midst of the black mass, there dangled a slender pink object. She tried to switch hands, to get another shot off, but the pistol slipped between her fingers - blood the lubricant - and clattered on the floor. Shojiro now picked her up and was running down the hallway faster then she would have thought him capable.
At the end of the hallway Shojiro turned, and both agents saw the end of the black thing disappearing into a hole in the wall where the morgue door had been. The hallway up to that point was a half-seen disaster, all the flourescents smashed, the walls torn and bending out or listing inward. Light still came from inside the morgue, and strange shadows played across the wall opposite, which had buckled outward, making it easy to see the weird and sinuous shapes that moved inside.
The strange vibration started up again, much stronger then before. Both agents watched mutedly as something shot out of the hole the black thing had torn in the wall. What looked like a figure slammed against the buckled wall and slowly fell away from it, staggering forward. The person was strange - indistinct in ways the poor light could not account for. It appeared to look down the hall at the two agents, and had started unhurriedly in their direction when a long black arm snaked out of the hole, lifting the figure off its feet and pulling it back into the morgue.
Shojiro lowered Keiko slowly to the ground, the female agent now looking at the clean slice that had separated her trigger finger from her hand. She watched it spurt with every beat of her heart, and was making small noises like a wounded cat. The unharmed agent tore off a piece of his shirt and fashioned a bandage for the wound, then tied another piece of cloth around Keiko's wrist and used a ballpoint pen to fashion a crude tourniquet. He gently took Keiko's shaking, undamaged hand and pressed it to the pen, to hold the bandage in place. Then he walked back to where Keiko's gun had fallen and picked it up, absently wiping the blood, and glancing down the hall to Keiko, then to the morgue.
"Don't," Keiko whispered, far too low for the other agent to hear. "Don't."
Shojiro walked easily down the middle of the hall, gun gripped loosely in one hand.
Keiko tried to stand, but suddenly all she could think about was ice-cream... then the way her Aunt's flowers had been so bright she could hardly look at them. Then she thought about sand covering her body on a black beach, the small things of the ocean burrowing into her flesh beneath the surface. She saw outside herself, saw herself green in a tasteful toga that hid all her important parts - heart, lungs, brain.
Shaking, hands gripping her knees, tourniquet forgotten, Keiko Futanabe rocked back and forth in the hallway, thinking about how much stars looked like a cat's eye.
***
Kaji took point, only felt right after pulling rank on the Captain and taking command of the response unit. There were six men with him - the Captain and five others had remained on the ground floor to secure the decimated North entrance and guard the Second Child.
The Nerv special operative patted his jacket pocket, felt the sharp thing he had scavenged from the debris upstairs. Hopefully the men under his temporary command would hold their fire long enough for him to use it. There was no question in Kaji's mind that a Weaver was behind the destruction above - the way rows of waiting room chairs hand been tossed aside with casual strength, the shattered information desk (part of it embedded in the ceiling), and the people that had been in the way, the shambling figures that were wounded in strange ways or crazy or both. It fit with the report on the Third Child's first encounter with the thing, that gibbering madness that settled upon any that laid eyes on a Weaver.
The small squad reached the bottom of the stairs, edged out into a darkened hallway that bowed wide. Wherever flashlights shown, the ceiling and walls were broken. The stairwell had faired much better, with only the occasional torn guardrail. Here though, there was little doubt that one of Mieville's Weavers had passed by. Mieville, the prescient socialist revolutionary - Kaji could had managed a chuckle in different circumstances.
He watched a trickle of plaster fall from the cracked ceiling, and pulled the nearest member of the response unit close.
"Find someone in maintenance, or call someone in the tech division," Kaji told him. "It would be nice to know if the building was going to fall in on us." He watched the man leave, then turned back to the hallway and carefully advanced, picking over a floor that was torn up in places, collapsed in others. He shown his light down some of the deeper holes, into what must have been a sub-basement. He indicated the holes and signed for caution, then continued on.
Some distance down the hallway Kaji could see that the destruction ended and light was visible. He could see someone laying there in the light, bloody and unmoving. Between that person - a woman, Kaji thought - and the darkness there were a series of bloody stains. The furthest was a small puddle just in front of the unconscious woman, the ones closer to the darkness being evenly spaced - footprints.
Kaji paused, playing his light carefully over the walls, trying to figure out where the morgue was. Thirty meters down, on the left, that was all the direction he had. The slow going made distance difficult to gauge, the walls so torn out he couldn't angle the beam of his flashlight more then a few meters ahead of him.
Another few steps, and a rotten smell became apparent. A few steps more, and Kaji's flashlight played across a door, pressed deep into the right wall of the hallway. Gingerly feeling his way over to it, Kaji angled his light to the left side of the corridor, and finally found the deeper black he had been searching for.
The entire wall of the morgue appeared to be torn away. Kaji's light did not penetrate the dim by much, but he could see the clean cuts where wall should have seperated the morgue room from the hallway.
Picking over the unsteady ground, Kaji got right to the lip of the opening, then signalled an all-stop. He turned off his flashlight, and listened for a moment, trying to pick out anything against the background noise of the fidgetting men behind him. Somewhere below them, there came a groaning of pipes.
A minute passed before Kaji heard something - a faint creak that might have just been more pipes settling.
He turned on his flashlight and reached into his pocket, pulling out the object he had scavenged from the upper floor. The cheap metal the scissors were made of glinted dully beneath the flashlight. Kaji gestured a man in the squad forward, one outfitted with a scout's kit. He drew squiggles in the air, and the soldier quickly opened a vinyl flap on the arm of his uniform, revealing a narrow dry-erase board and a black marker attached to the uniform by a loop of wire. Kaji took the black marker, hesitated, unsure of what to say, then carefully inscribed 'Hello Sir' down one blade of the scissors. He then flipped the scissors over and wrote 'Are You Lost?' down the inside of the other blade.
The scout, the only one that could see what he was doing, looked at him like he was crazy. Kaji merely shrugged.
Walking over to the lip of the hole, Kaji took a deep breath then shouted:"Weaver, I have a gift for you!"
Wincing at the sound his voice had made in the small space, Kaji raised the scissors, opened them, and slid them together. He did this twice, then tossed the object into the morgue, trying to expose as little of himself as possible.
The squad waited for a minute, uneasy at Kaji's display. He heard muttering voices behind him, and signalled for everyone to be quiet.
Two minutes passed, then three. Kaji was about to peer over the lip of the hole when something hit the wall across from the hole, sending up a shower of sparks. Shortly after this, there was a sound like tearing fabric, and then
It was like waking up from a dream. The hallway seemed less treacherous, what little light they had seemed brighter. Something had left, and everyone felt much better for it. Kaji shown his light into the hole, and slowly proceeded forward.
***
Misato glared at the man in black, who in turn ignored her. She was sitting in a chair beside Asuka's bed, trying to read a magazine. They had been all set to transport the Second Child to a safer location a few minutes ago, once they got a route secured - now they just barred exit, said the situation was under control, and wouldn't tell anything beyond that.Misato was a Major in the tactical branch of Nerv, Section 2 fell under the intelligence branch. Technically, she couldn't pull rank on the goon blocking the doorway unless the Children were in danger, not in a Major's capacity but as their guardian. Apparently Asuka was no longer in harm's way, thus no authority. What she wanted to do was smack this dumb ape around until he told her just what the fuck was going on. She had tried to contact her parallel in the intelligence branch, but Nerv's directory assistance had connected her to a line with Kaji's answering machine on the other end. That had left her bewildered and fuming - she had always wondered what his official position in the chain of command was.
She finished the magazine, one of those stupid teen things Asuka would like, and tried to call Kaji again. This time, she got a busy signal. She got up and paced, waiting for a few minutes, and was about to call when the door opened and Kaji told the goon, roughly, to get out. He locked the door behind the broad man, then approached Misato.
In the thirty minutes from when Misato had last seen him, Kaji was managed to lose his jacket and acquire a thin layer of grime. He was covered from head to toe in a dusting of plaster, which was splotched green and red in places. Kaji walked up to her, wiping his face as he came, and suddenly he was kissing her, holding her shoulders carefully. The kiss lasted only a moment, he pulled away, probably for fear that Misato would first. Then he backed up.
"Downstairs," he said. "The thing, the Weaver was downstairs."
Misato, still dazed and smelling Kaji's scent beneath the heavier odor of mold, took a moment to process that.
"It... what about the..." Misato glanced at Asuka's sleeping form. "The body?"
Kaji laughed wretchedly, briefly disappearing into the room's small bathroom and reappearing with a wet towel in hand. He unbuttoned his shirt as he spoke.
"There are thirteen bodies down there," he began, sliding out of his shirt and drawing the towel across his chest and arms. "They were all... well, you should probably go see for yourself, just give me a minute to get clean."
Misato tried not to be distracted by Kaji's uncovered body. It helped that whatever the man had seen had pushed flirtation out of his mind. No motion Kaji made was overly suggestive, just a desperate bid to part with a nasty smell.
"Shinji's body, we found the remains of his plugsuit on one of the autopsy slabs, it was supposed to be in cold storage, according to the manifest. The plugsuit was... ah... empty." Kaji went back to the washroom, re-wet the towel, stopped, opened the outer door and told the goon waiting at the threshold to go get him some clothes, he didn't care from where. He returned to the room and drew the privacy curtain around Asuka's bed, then unbuckled his belt and took off his pants, make a warding-off gesture to Misato.
"There was yellow fluid standing in the plugsuit, and on the slab, and a pool of it underneath. It... ah... looked like LCL." Kaji wiped both legs down, took off his shoes and socks and wiped there too. Then he went to the restroom, got a fresh towel, and began to repeat the process.
"The other bodies... well, you'll see. You do want to go down there, right?"
Misato nodded, trying to feign indifference to Kaji's nearly-naked body.
"Well then... uh... do you have any perfume?" Kaji was smelling the towel, his arms, still making a face at what his nose was telling him.
Misato went over to tiny bereau built into the wall, where she had stored some of Asuka's personal effects. She had some lavendar perfume in there, figured Asuka would like that. She handed the bottle to Kaji, who proceeded to use half of it on himself.
"Hold out your wrist," he said. Misato complied, and Kaji sprayed her several times, until her hand was soaked with the stuff. The Special Operative was eyeing his old clothes with disdain when the goon entered without ceremony, doctor's scrubs in hand.
"Sorry sir, this was all they wanted to give me," the tall man explained, holding up the aquamarine-colored pants and shirt. Then he crinkled his nose. "What the..."
"Thanks," Kaji took the items from goon, then ushered him outside. As he pulled on the light clothing and his own socks and shoed, Kaji grinned at Misato, a bit of the old charm finally returning. "Remind you of anything, Katsuragi?"
Misato rolled her eyes.
***
Nerv technicians were already at work in the basement, stringing up lights and in several places erecting beams meant to stabilize the ceiling. Kaji and Misato still had to pick their way forward carefully, none of the holes in the floor had been covered yet.
Misato noticed that the technicians were trying to avoid looking at the large hole in the wall she assumed led to the morgue. As Misato hopped over the final tear in the floor and accepted Kaji's hand to pull her over and into the morgue, she understood why.
Thirteen bodies. Thirteen seperate earthly vessels. Old and young, male and female. One head, two legs, two arms.
All as one.
Kaji came up behind her, but Misato wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of collapsing. She locked her legs in place, kept her eyes open, and saw and saw and saw.
Legs surrounded it like gilding, supporting it. Misato could see the pallid sac between those mismatched legs was hanging just slightly off the ground. The arms had been attached, seemingly at random, to the top dome of it. Each was bent is a particular, deliberate way. One small hand flashed a victory symbol, arm bent at a right angle, while another was split down the middle, the seperation beginning at the elbow and running down to the middle finger, the two halves seperated and misaligned, the cross-section of bone and muscle apparent. Another hand had been cut in such a way that the flesh seemed to loop downwards in a spiral, the arm stretched long under its own weight, each finger a twisted gnarl of flesh twelve or more inches long. Twenty six hands, all different in mutilation.
Misato took one step forward. Another.
The outer shell was made of torso-flesh, bound tight. There was a breast, here, a navel. The patches did not exactly match up, some were hairy, others slightly darker or unusually pale. There were no apparent seams in the flesh, save where hairy flesh met smooth, tanned flesh. The whole thing was damp and translucent. Beneath the flesh Misato saw faces, which bore expressions from happiness to sadness to terror and the gamut between. Spacing apart each head and apparently accounting for most of the grotesque thing's bulk were the parts of humans one does not normally wish to see - ropey intestines, fetal-shaped kidneys, lungs, heart. Spines and ribs mixed into the mess of organs, piercing and rupturing them, from what little Misato could see.
Kaji touched her gently on the shoulder, and Misato did not even flinch.
"Around," he said gently.
They circled the thing, and on the other side Misato saw the thing had ruptured at one point. The tear in the rough sphere started halfway up the top hemisphere and extended downward. Pulped human being had spilled out, a slick tongue of bodies that extended back into the wound. Misato thrust her perfume-wet wrist under her nose.
Kaji pulled her away, or tried to.
"Katsuragi, the plugsuit, this way."
Still Misato would not budge, so Kaji picked her up and spun her around. She barely resisted at all. He spun her so she was facing the bank of refrigerated cells and steel autopsy tables. Then he got in front of her and got her eyes to track his own.
"You came down here to see what we found. Shinji, remember?"
Misato slowly nodded, wrist still close to her face.
Kaji led her forward to the middle autopsy table, on which rested a battered, half-gone plugsuit. As Kaji had said, the suit was sitting in a pool of yellow fluid. Misato reached forward and tipped the upper frame of the plugsuit up, and more fluid sluiced out of the neck. There was a pool of the stuff under the table.
As Katsuragi took in the strange remains of the Third Child, an agent came up behind Kaji.
"You should probably see this, sir," he said.
Kaji patted Katsuragi on the shoulder, and walked across the room and back out into the hall, where one of Section 2's forensic men was taking a picture a strange item embedded in the wall. The scissor he had thrown into the morgue ahead of his squad now appeared to be lodged into the wall opposite it. That sharp sound they had heard just before the Weaver left, the sparks on the wall, it must have been this, Kaji guessed.
The Weaver had apparently gotten Kaji's message, a response was embossed into the cheap metal of the scissors.
'All as one. Your' read one blade, 'exclimation point.' read the other. That was... very interesting.
Katsuragi tapped him on the shoulder. Kaji leaned to one side so the Major could see the scissors. Then he carefully lead her out of the basement.
***
They went to Asuka's room. The girl was still asleep.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to tell her," Misato said, staring at the sleeping girl.
"Maybe... well, you either tell the truth or something like it," Kaji replied as he opened all the windows in the room, trying to air out the scent of lavender.
"That, uh... the break in the side of that thing..." he began, watching Misato tense up. "There was someone inside it. He managed to tear out just as we arrived. Apparently he was one of Shinji's caretakers, serving a shift as security for Asuka. Name of Tanaka. We found another agent at the end of the hallway, relatively untouched - woman named Futanabe."
Misato was shaking now, looking down at Asuka, mouth half opened.
"What the hell is this thing?" she whispered. "Why did I have to go down there?"
"That data I gave you," Kaji said. "Read it. Try to keep in mind how very Other this thing is."
Misato found the data drive in her pocket, then started digging through the small drawer at Asuka's bedside for the girl's school laptop. Kaji watched her, watched the way she moved, absently noted the way her ass looked when she bent over. Until she had read everything he had given her, it would be useless to appeal to her for anything.
"Katsuragi, you have two hours," Kaji said, heading for the door. "After that, I'm coming in here and taking you to the closest bar we can find, you hear me?"
Misato gave no sign she had heard, instead turning on Asuka's red laptop and sliding the data drive into place. As the door opened and shut, the Major brought up the device directory and opened the file Kaji had given her.
"Perdido Street Station" read the title, centered, in e-book format, "by China Mieville."