Seventeen-year-old Hana Kimura walked the same quiet path to school every day. With her black backpack slung over one shoulder and earphones in, the world passed by in a blur of soft footsteps and the occasional breeze through the cherry blossoms. She looked like any other student, but she wasn't. Hana was an orphan—her parents had died in a mysterious car crash when she was ten. Since then, she'd grown up in a group home, shy, quiet, and mostly invisible to the world.
But she wasn't invisible to him.
He had no name, not a real one. Online, he was known only as NeonGhost, a reclusive hacker with a history as untraceable as the data he manipulated. For years, he lurked in the underbelly of the web, cracking systems, leaking secrets, erasing people. But something changed the day he stumbled on Hana's social media profile. A simple photo. A faint smile. An unguarded moment.
He became obsessed.