Rain streaked the window of Dr. Knox's office in perfect diagonals, each droplet a variable in an equation only Lyra Vael could see.
Velocity: 2.4 meters per second. Angle of descent: 67 degrees.
She traced the paths with her fingertip against the cold glass, mapping trajectories in her mind. The world outside was a blur of greens and grays, but the rain—oh, the rain was mathematics in motion.
"Lyra?" Dr. Knox's voice was soft, practiced. "Can you tell me what you're thinking about?"
Silence.
Her father, Richard Vael, shifted in his leather chair. His tie was too tight, his jaw tighter. "She's been like this for months. No words, no eye contact. Just... numbers."
Dr. Knox slid a sheet of paper across the table. "Lyra, can you draw something for me?"
Lyra glanced at the blank page. In her mind, it was already filled—not with childish scribbles, but with patterns. The Fibonacci spiral of a seashell they'd passed in the waiting room. The fractal branching of the oak tree outside. The pulsing sine wave of her own heartbeat.
But adults never asked for real drawings.
She picked up a crayon (red, wavelength 700 nanometers) and drew a single, precise circle.
Disappointment flickered across Dr. Knox's face. "That's... nice."
Lyra's fingers twitched. They never understand.
"High-functioning autism spectrum disorder," Dr. Knox declared an hour later, flipping through a checklist. "Limited emotional reciprocity, obsessive focus on numerical patterns, delayed verbal development—"
Wrong.
Lyra wasn't delayed. She simply saw no reason to speak when the world insisted on asking the wrong questions.
Her mother, Eleanor, clutched her purse like a lifeline. "But—but she can talk. She recited pi to fifty digits last week!"
"That's rote memorization, Mrs. Vael. Not meaningful communication."
Lyra tuned them out, counting the ceiling tiles instead. Twelve by fourteen. One hundred sixty-eight total. Prime factors: 2, 2, 2, 3, 7.
Her father's voice cut through the numbers. "Can it be fixed?"
Something sharp twisted in Lyra's chest.
Fixed.
Like she was a broken appliance.
That night, Lyra sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, surrounded by vanilla wafers.
Her parents thought she was playing.
They were wrong.
Each cookie was a binary digit: whole for 1, broken for 0. Carefully, painstakingly, she arranged them into a message:
01001001 00100000 01001100 01001111 01010110 01000101 00100000 01011001 01001111 01010101
I LOVE YOU.
When her mother walked in, she froze—then burst into tears.
"Oh, Lyra... crumbs? Really?" Eleanor swept the cookies into the trash. "You're seven. You should be drawing hearts, not..." She gestured helplessly at the shattered remains.
Lyra stared at the garbage. The message was gone.
They don't see.
They never see.
At 3:17 AM, Lyra crept to her bedroom wall with a stolen marker.
Numbers bloomed under her fingertips—prime numbers, golden ratios, the elegant chaos of irrational constants spiraling outward like constellations.
By dawn, her walls were a tapestry of equations.
Her father's reaction was volcanic.
"Madness!" Richard roared, scrubbing at the ink with a sponge. "Normal girls don't do this!"
Lyra watched her numbers dissolve into gray streaks.
Normal.
A useless word.
The breaking point came at dinner.
"—and Mrs. Lawson's daughter won the spelling bee," Eleanor was saying. "Such a bright girl."
Richard stabbed his steak. "Maybe if Lyra spent less time counting and more time talking—"
Crack.
Lyra's glass slipped from her fingers, shattering on the floor.
Silence.
Then, her first words in weeks:
"The trajectory was predictable."
Her parents gaped.
She pointed to the table's uneven leg. "Tilt angle: 3.2 degrees. Coefficient of friction for polished wood: 0.2. The glass had a 92% probability of sliding off within eleven minutes."
A beat.
Richard threw his napkin down. "Enough. We're seeing a real specialist tomorrow."
As he stormed out, Lyra knelt to study the broken glass.
Refraction patterns. Interesting.
That night, Lyra invented her first cipher.
If the world demanded words, she would translate them—mathematically.
Under her blanket with a flashlight, she filled a notebook with code:
- Happiness = √(sunlight intensity × chocolate mass)
- Sadness = ∫(time × loneliness)dt
- Love...
She hesitated.
Love was harder.
Maybe it was an asymptote—always approaching, never reaching.
Outside, the stars burned cold and precise.
Lyra smiled.
Finally. A language that makes sense.