Nozomi by Idoru Toei
She lived in the quiet between two silences: her mother’s refusal to enter, her father’s voice blocked by the machinery that governed all contact between his household and hers. The apartment was a space she shared with someone who had stopped meeting her in it, and the loneliness had become so constant that she had stopped recognizing it as loneliness: it was simply the temperature of the air, the color of the light that fell across her monitors in the small hours.
She was fourteen, gifted in ways that set her apart, and accustomed to decoding the world alone. Then, in a news segment no one else was watching, she saw a man move through a corridor with a stillness she had not known she was looking for. The footage lasted three seconds. It changed everything.