By lap twelve I had stopped being a person and become a pair of legs with a grudge. The five clones ran in a loose ring around me, swapping places every hundred meters so I never found a clean line. Each time one of them slid past my shoulder, a stopwatch clicked and another lap landed on my tab.
"That puts you at nineteen total, field lead," the clone on my left said.
"You're making those numbers up, Captain."
"I'm a clone, so I can't make anything up." She drifted past me on the curve and clicked her watch. "That makes twenty now."
I want to state for the record that B-rank Endurance is a gift from the heavens. Six weeks ago I'd have died on lap two and been buried under the bleachers. Now my lungs simply filed a strongly worded memo every four hundred meters, and my calves sent a second memo cosigning the first. Misato's buttermilk was still warm in my blood, and that warmth was carrying me further than any human being deserved to be carried.
