The page didn't change.
Yami stared at it anyway, as if staring long enough might rewrite what was already written. The cursor blinked in the search bar, indifferent, steady. Around the empty field where his name should have appeared, the rest of the page carried on normally. Other names. Other results. Other people who had made it.
He closed the laptop slowly.
Not with frustration. Not with the dramatic slam of someone who had just lost everything. Just quietly, the way you close a door on a room you know you'll never enter again.
He sat in the silence of the apartment for a long time after that. The wall clock above the television kept its rhythm. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Outside, Tokyo moved the way it always moved - indifferently, at full speed, with no awareness that somewhere in a second-floor apartment a boy had just watched the last version of his life dissolve into a white screen.
He had known, somewhere underneath everything, that this might happen. He had prepared for it the way people prepare for storms they hope won't come - contingency plans folded and tucked away, never truly believed in. But knowing a thing might happen and having it happen are not the same. Between the two is a distance that can only be crossed in one direction, and Yami had just crossed it.
He stood up eventually. His legs carried him to the window without his permission. Below, the street was doing what streets do - people walking, a delivery scooter weaving between cars, a couple arguing quietly outside a convenience store. None of them knew. None of them would care if they did.
He pressed his forehead against the glass. It was cool. He stayed like that for a while.
His phone buzzed on the desk. He didn't look at it. He already knew who it would be. His mother, calling to confirm what she had probably already checked herself, because of course she had already checked. She had been refreshing that page since eleven o'clock, he was certain of it. The phone buzzed again. Then again. Then went quiet.
He moved to his bedroom. Sat on the edge of the bed. His backpack was on the floor where he'd left it that morning, the ksociety emblem on the sleeve facing up. He stared at it.
The door would open in a few hours. His father would walk in first, because his father always walked in first. He would set his briefcase down by the entrance the way he always did, with that particular thud that Yami had learned to dread before he understood why. His mother would follow. There would be a moment of silence - the specific silence that preceded the specific kind of storm that left no visible marks.
He knew this sequence the way he knew his own heartbeat.
His hands, resting on his knees, had stopped trembling. That was almost worse. The trembling had been something - a signal from his body that it was still processing, still fighting. The stillness that followed felt less like calm and more like the moment after a power outage when everything simply stops.
He looked at the cat.
She had been on the bed the entire time - curled into herself at the far corner, watching him with the particular attentiveness that cats reserve for moments when something is wrong. She was a small thing, grey and white, with one ear slightly folded from an old injury she'd had before he found her. He had named her Null. A programmer's joke that had stopped being funny and become simply true - she was the thing that existed where nothing else did.
She blinked at him slowly.
He reached over and placed his hand on her back. She didn't move. Just accepted the weight of his hand the way she always did, steady and present.
"We can't be here when they get back," he said quietly. He wasn't sure if he was talking to her or to himself. Maybe there was no difference anymore.
He stood up.
The packing took eleven minutes. He had always traveled light - a habit formed not from minimalism but from years of needing to be prepared to disappear. One change of clothes. His laptop. The encrypted case. The notebook. His charger. A small pouch of whatever cash he had left from the part-time work he'd done between semesters. He counted it on the bed. Enough for two or three days if he was careful. Not enough for anything beyond that.
He found Null's carrier in the closet. She watched him set it up with something that might have been suspicion. He lined it with the small blanket she slept on, the one that smelled like her, that she'd knead every night with her paws in that repetitive, ancient gesture that meant she was content.
"Come on," he said softly.
She walked in on her own. She always did.
He zipped the bag closed. Slung it over one shoulder. Lifted the carrier with his other hand. Stood in the middle of his bedroom and took one last look at the desk, the monitor, and the post-its still stuck to the wall above it.
Don't die before you live.
Root128 is not Yami. But Yami remembers Root128.
He left them there. Whoever lived in this room next could make of them what they wanted.
He walked out without closing his bedroom door.
He walked past the living room without looking at it.
He stepped into his shoes at the entrance, adjusted the carrier in his hand, and opened the front door.
The afternoon light came in flat and grey. It smelled like rain that hadn't arrived yet.
He stepped out and pulled the door shut behind him gently, so the lock barely made a sound.