The Sixth Person

The fire at the White Egret Theater claimed five lives. The official conclusion was four words: accidental fire. Six years later, a drenched woman walked into Echo House and produced a memory crystal with only three reads left. In this line of work, memories can be read. A person's final seconds are sealed into a crystal, and whoever pays can see them one more time. There is only one rule: each read uses up one chance, and the reader bleeds. Lu Zhao had been doing this for six years. She was supposed to perform an appraisal, collect six hundred yuan, and move on. But in the footage that played that day, there were five people lying down. The one standing was not on the list. “Who’s the extra one?” “...The sixth person.” She wanted to investigate the person who should not have been there. But the deeper she dug, the more she realized it was not just one name that had been erased. Someone did not want a particular person to be remembered. And her own memories from before the age of six were blank, too.