Rei Quatre

Silver hair marks Quatre out from her sisters. The later Ayanami clones emerged from production together with nearly interchangeable faces and figures, so NERV assigned each a distinct hair color for identification, and hers is the silver one. Her body corresponds to a seventeen-year-old. Supplementary notes admit that, whatever canon claims about hair being the only difference, the clones' bodies actually vary noticeably while sharing more or less one face.

Quatre starts as an empty instrument, a body without self-awareness steered from afar. Even so, she drifts into a close friendship with Shinji during their shared missions, though the story leaves open whether that warmth was hers or bleed-through from Rei II's control. The mind contamination changes everything. Where her sisters merely gain personalities, Quatre turns volatile and hostile, and after the lunar defeat she fixates on Shinji with open hatred, repeatedly attempting to kill him. Her feelings remain tangled to the point of contradiction: meeting him in person while still contaminated, she wraps him in an embrace, kisses him, and promises she will one day end his life, leaving Shinji baffled and defiant.

Quatre debuts among the Ayanami clones staffing the Sword of Damocles, an international Angel-hunting network fielded on NERV's behalf under the leadership of Rei II and Rei Trois. Lacking a soul of her own, she is remotely operated through a mental link that works like the Dummy System in reverse, serving as Rei II's body on field operations and flying a two-seat version of Unit-0.0 alongside Trois or Shinji. In Volume 1 the contamination phenomenon spreads through the clone line, and Quatre goes rogue for reasons no one initially understands, forcing Shinji and Asuka to hunt her down. After bringing down two Angel Carriers, the Type-1 and the Type-2, she comes back to NERV of her own accord, judging Armaros too dangerous to face without her.

The Moon campaign breaks her. When the Evangelion task force is routed by Armaros, Quatre suffers contamination far beyond the earlier episodes, as do Six and Cinq; Cinq is killed outright for showing true personality growth. Acting independently once again, Quatre fires point blank into Super Evangelion and escapes, only to be captured by Ryoji Kaji, who in this continuity has been brainwashed into leading SEELE and now commands NERV Japan. She resurfaces afterward as one of Shinji's most dangerous and most conflicted adversaries. Commentators note her arc echoes Four Murasame of Zeta Gundam, and her two-pilot cockpit arrangement with Shinji prefigures the way Kaworu and Shinji share Evangelion 13 in the Rebuild films.