She clicked the drop-down menu. All Categories.
Emi turned, trembling. “I thought you died. After Yuki… you just vanished.” Searching for- hikari ninomiya in-All Categorie...
Yuki had died in the tsunami. Everyone knew that. Her name brought up 1,247 results: memorials, news articles, a Wikipedia stub. But Hikari? Hikari had simply… slipped through the cracks of the database. She clicked the drop-down menu
And that, Emi realized, was the only category that truly mattered. 247 results: memorials
The cursor blinked on the cracked screen of the library’s public terminal. It was 11:47 PM, seventeen minutes before the system would automatically purge the day’s search history.
Or had she been erased?