At first, the hive had contained an exquisite beauty. Lost in the labyrinth of voices and opinions, Misato couldn’t see it for what it was—life, in all its messy, scattershot determination, out of control. Life wasn’t always some magical, mystical thing to be protected and cherished; sometimes it was simply greedy expanding chaos, a teeming, overwhelming force. The Foxfire had grown wild, shoveling food and people and knowledge into its mouth like a toddler left unsupervised at a buffet. A mother desperate and hungry for more children.

She could still feel the bite of the warmed plastic in her fingers as it broke in two. Unforgivable, she thought, even while controlled by Foxfire. She knew better. That was their research, their thoughts, their experiences, their knowledge, gone in a blink, and if Rosalyn did not survive, then nobody would be warned. Even with Angela gone, Misato felt instinctively that Foxfire would find a way to survive. Life was tenacious that way.

The reactor access was less webbed in gooey blue strands. She reached it through the maintenance elevators, grateful for the breach opening access to all doors and hatches. It was a given that if a breach warning went out, nobody was going to stay to loot the place; they would grab their loved ones and bolt for the pods. Radiation was probably already spreading through the station, and she wondered if that hadn’t contributed to the intense mutating nature of the cluster.

Purely academic, useless thoughts, she chided herself. Focus. She found the engineer that had tried so valiantly to obliterate Angela and her cluster. She was still as a statue, standing at the manual flow controls out on the platform near the plated core itself. The desperate thing hadn’t even bothered to put on a suit, exposing herself to dangerous levels of radiation. Clearly, she had thought it worth the risk, and Misato agreed.

She couldn’t help but feel a pang of sadness for this woman. Misato climbed out onto the platform, the great humming, thrumming plated core spinning in hypnotic intervals. It was the kind of sound that, if heard from a distance, would put one to sleep nicely. A rhythmic pulse. A steady, comforting whir. Now it was too loud to be of any comfort, like the blurred blast of a drum vibrating through her chest as it turned. So close, she heard the almost imperceptible problem, the slight out-of-kilter hitch to the turn. The engineer had tried to force the core out of its gravitational trap, but stopped just before the alignment triggered total meltdown.