Chapter 8: Taro Oda's Name in the Program Log

The photograph was still warm from the camera when Io pressed it flat against Hana's kitchen table.

She had not waited for it to fully develop. She had stood in her father's office bathroom, counting seconds in the chemical dark while the image surfaced, and then she had folded it once along the center — carefully, so the crease missed the text — and tucked it inside her science notebook between pages of carbon cycle diagrams where it would survive the bus ride without bending.

She had done all of this with the steady hands of someone performing a routine task, and she had not examined what the steadiness cost until she was standing at Hana's door with the evening still pale over the harbor and something in her chest clicking quietly like a cooling engine.