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1. When the Mimics first attack, she runs. Her boyfriend at the time looks over towards her at the breakfast table and says: “I hear South America’s still safe.”
Rita is still into granola recipes and aromatherapy, and she listens when he goes on: “What exactly do you expect a yoga teacher and a biology professor to do against aliens, Rites?” She doesn’t call him traitor and coward and a thousand other things that will make her stomach churn with guilt during basic training when she hears his college campus was attacked, no survivors found. She takes another bite of her yogurt and replies: “I’ve always fancied Argentina.”
The Mimics come for her in the end, of course. They come for her because somewhere at the beginning of the universe, the Mimics and Rita Vrataski were written into each other’s destiny or DNA, whichever you believe in. They come for her and this time, she has only meditation crystals and her boyfriend’s corpse to fight them off instead of grenades and a suit of armor.
She’s spared the loop. That is the only mercy.
2. She’s assigned to G-Squad, instead of B- like the sandy-haired grinning stranger in front of her. It’s a bit of a relief, frankly; Toothy Grin—they call him Hendricks when they register him--has terrible taste in jokes and absolutely no idea of when they might be appropriate. Rita’s sure she’ll end up murdering him if they work together.
G-Squad is softer than the others, a good fit for a civilian going off to war for the first time. The higher ranked squads are worked harder to get them ready for the front lines; the lower ranked ones are worked harder to get them ready for any combat at all. G-Squad sleeps in longer and has a sergeant who only threatens to have their spleens removed with a spoon every other hour.
G-Squad is therefore wholly unprepared for what happens at Verdun.
Rita limps away, one of a handful of survivors. She reads months later about the Demon of Verdun in a grimy newspaper: a soldier who cracked under the pressure, turning his weapon on Mimic and comrade alike, finally intentionally slitting his own throat before anyone else could put him down. There’s a grainy photograph too, and she recognizes it vaguely as Toothy Grin.
”Not like it makes much difference.” Her bunk mate cackles when Rita points this out, showing off nicotine-stained teeth. “We’re all going to die tomorrow anyway.”
”Damn straight,” says Rita, and puts the newspaper away.
3. She wakes up for the three hundredth time in Hendricks’ arms. He chuckles a little and pulls her closer. Rita squeezes her eyes shut again and whispers, like she does every morning: “Let’s run away, the two of us.”
He laughs outright. “Where would we go?”
Nowhere, she knows. There’s no escaping the battle. But running buys them an extra few hours together before Mimic or mine or miserable accident intervenes.
”Come on, Vrataski,” Hendricks says, swinging his legs off the bed, “we’ve got Mimics to kill.” He bends down to kiss her. She already knows it’ll be the last time he’ll kiss her that day.
The battlefield is as chaotic as ever. Hendricks disappears into the mass of bodies at the beginning. The screams are almost white noise to her ears by now. Rita fires off the usual shots from her weapon; gone all too soon. She’s got one shot left, she thinks, and she has to make it count—and then Hendricks comes into view.
She has watched him die so many times. Sometimes a Mimic rips his head from his body, sometimes he takes one wrong step and she watches friendly fire rip through his belly, and one terrible time she cradled his head in her arms and watched him die of an infected wound.
Rita can’t keep him safe. She realizes that now. But what she can do for him is give him an easy death, at least this once. He’s never had that before. All too soon, the loop will reset and she will be back in his arms again, waiting only to watch him die again, but this much she can have. She raises her gun and shoots him through the head.
She fights like a whirlwind after that, because that keeps the memory of Hendricks’ confused face out of her mind, keeps the sound of his body hitting the ground out of her ears. She collapses on the edge of the battlefield and every heartbeat echoes Hendricks Hendricks Hendricks.
Dimly she hears voices above: “….hero…get her the Medal of Honor if it’s the last thing I do….astounded she’s still alive.”
”…Not for long she won’t be. Nurse! Get me one unit of red blood cells now!”
Hendricks, she thinks, and that is all.
4. The rotor blade doesn’t break off in time, the only time that matters.
5. When she’s a girl in school, Rita learns about the theories of Lamarck, about how he thought giraffes acquired long necks after generations stretched their necks out. Most of her classmates snigger at how ridiculously off-base he was, but Rita doesn’t. Instead she feels rather sorry for the poor baby giraffes, doomed to a ridiculous appearance in perpetuity simply because their parents couldn’t control their greed for more leaves or whatnot.
When she’s a decorated hero after the war, Rita doesn’t waste much time thinking of giraffes. There’s parades and press conferences to attend, award ceremonies and anniversaries to celebrate. Cage is a constant, the only constant, in a dizzying swirl of faces; he reaches out his hand and she clings to it.
They settle down in a quiet farmhouse in the countryside. Rita loves it from the moment she first sees it. “I’ve always wanted to live in a place like this,” she murmurs, one hand caressing the warm wood paneling in the kitchen and Cage smiles as though he already knew.
The wedding is a public relations coup: the Angel of Verdun and the public face of the war coming together, combined with the general air of goodwill surrounding the Mimics' rout, makes for a celebration that goes down in history. It might not be the private affair Rita had always dreamed of as a child, but she studies the clear joy on Cage's face and can't quite bring herself to care.
Before she knows it, they have Henry, Henry with his sky-blue eyes and the crooked smile that's so like his father's. Rita exchanges gunpowder for baby powder, battle plans and birthday parties, and doesn’t regret an instant of it until the day Henry toddles inside the morning he turns three and says, plaintively, “Mum, I don’t want it to be my birthday anymore.”
She still doesn’t think of giraffes, in the end, or even of recessive genes and mutations.Sins of the father is all she can remember, and as she studies Henry’s innocent eyes, it makes her shudder.
6. “Yes?” she barks. “What do you want?”
The Major–Cage, his uniform reads—laughs. Laughs and laughs so long it’s uncomfortable, uncanny.
“There was a time I would have said you,” he says at last, and Rita squares her shoulders instinctively. “I would have said—I’ve known you over hundreds of days, none of which you remember, and I’ve loved you almost as long. That you told me to find you when I woke up, and here I am.”
Rita stiffens. She remembers what she’d practiced to herself for years, in the improbable event she found another victim of the Mimics’ loop. But that makes no sense. The Mimics are gone; they’ve all heard the news.
“And then I would say, I have spent lifetime after lifetime with you. We’ve had a total of two hundred and fifty-seven children together—not all at once, obviously—and we’ve lived all over the world and done everything humanly possible. I’ve watched you die a thousand times and then, when I do, I wake up on this morning to find you all over again.”
This doesn’t sound like anything the loop does. This sounds wrong even to her ears.
Cage takes another step closer. “There’s others, too, sometimes. I’m only human, after all. But somehow,” and still another step. Rita grits her teeth and forces herself to hold her ground, “I keep on coming back to you. I can’t let go of you. So tell me, Rita—“ his teeth flash “—what do you think of that?”
She can’t breathe, shouldn’t breathe. Her blood flows sluggish in her veins, wholly human, wholly chilled.
“Rita?” he prompts.
She looks into his eyes: cold, dark, boundless. She’s gazed into a thousand like them before, and right now she misses the steel of her blade. “I think,” she says, “that I know how the Mimics were born.”