Lyra's bedroom had become a battlefield.
White. Sterile. Empty.
Her father had repainted the walls three times since the "incident"—stripping away her equations like peeling skin from a living thing. Now the surfaces gleamed like fresh snow, pristine and suffocating.
No numbers. No patterns. No voice.
Lyra sat on her bed, legs crossed, staring at the blankness. In her mind, the walls still pulsed with invisible calculations:
- The paint's drying time: 2 hours, 37 minutes.
- The number of brush strokes per square meter: 148.
- The exact shade of white (Hex FFFFFF) designed to erase her.
She pressed a fingertip to the wall. Cold.
They want silence?
I'll give them a symphony.
At 2:03 AM, when the house breathed deepest, Lyra crept to her desk.
The stolen items glowed in moonlight:
1. A permanent marker (black, alcohol-based, indelible)
2. Graph paper (stolen from her father's office)
3. Her secret weapon—a tattered copy of Advanced Number Theory from the library's discard pile
She began with the smallest prime:
2
Then 3, 5, 7, spiraling outward in a vortex of perfect, indivisible numbers. By dawn, the first wall was a galaxy of primes, each digit precise as a sniper's bullet.
But this wasn't random.
Hidden in the sequence:
- Every 7th prime circled—a musical scale
- Every 13th prime boxed—a Fibonacci marker
- And in the corner, tiny but deliberate:
7919
The 1000th prime. Her age in days.
Richard Vael's scream shook the house.
"WHAT IS THIS MADNESS?!"
Lyra stood frozen as her father stormed into her room, tie askew, face purpling. His fingers clawed at the numbers as if they were live wires.
"Nine years old and you're—you're defacing property?!"
Eleanor hovered in the doorway, hands fluttering like wounded birds. "Richard, maybe if we—"
"No!" He grabbed Lyra's shoulders, shaking her. "You will stop this! You will be normal!"
Lyra's bones rattled, but her mind was crystalline.
Anger decay rate: 0.3 intensity units per minute.
Probability of parental fracture: 87%.
Then—impact.
The marker, hurled against the wall, exploded in a black supernova. Ink dripped like tar down the sequence:
...577, 587, 593, 599...
Ruined.
That night, as punishment, Lyra was given a sponge and bucket.
"Scrub every digit," her father hissed.
But as she erased, she listened.
The primes weren't just numbers—they were notes.
- 2 (C)
- 3 (D)
- 5 (E)
- 7 (F)
A melody emerged, haunting and perfect. Her fingers moved automatically, translating the sequence into an algorithm:
include
include
include
using namespace std;
vector
void play_note(const std::string& note, float duration);
void prime_music(int limit)
{
vector
string scale[] = {"C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "A", "C"};
for (size_t i = 0; i < primes.size(); ++i)
{
int p = primes[i];
play_note(scale[p % 7], 0.5 p);
}
}
The program flickered to life on the old laptop Kai had smuggled to her. A cascade of piano notes filled the room—prime number music, beautiful and strange.
For the first time in weeks, Lyra smiled.
They see madness.
I see music.
Three days later, Richard discovered the program.
Lyra woke to the sound of shattering plastic.
Her laptop—her music—lay in pieces on the floor.
"Enough," her father whispered, trembling. "No more numbers. No more codes." He grabbed her notebook, the one where she'd been sketching a new algorithm—
The music generator.
Her first real creation.
The pages tore like skin.
Lyra didn't cry. She calculated.
- Force required to break spine of notebook: 12 newtons.
- Probability of reconstruction: 0%.
- Time until escape: 1,825 days (her 14th birthday).
As the last scrap fluttered into the trash, she made a silent vow:
Next time, I'll build something you can't break.
That night, under a blanket fort made of stolen graph paper, Lyra began again.
With a pencil stub, she drafted a new system:
1. Encryption: Hide math in "normal" things—sheet music, crossword puzzles
2. Storage: Distribute pages across school, library, Kai's treehouse
3. Backup: Memorize critical algorithms using prime-number mnemonics
As she worked, a shadow fell across the paper.
Her mother stood there, holding something behind her back.
"I... I saved this."
Eleanor extended a single sheet—the original prime number wall, transcribed in her mother's handwriting.
Lyra's breath caught.
The numbers were there. All of them.
Eleanor's whisper was barely audible:
"It was beautiful."
For a heartbeat, Lyra almost spoke—almost told her about the music, the code, the galaxies in her mind.
Then footsteps echoed downstairs. Richard.
Eleanor fled.
Lyra stared at the salvaged numbers.
One ally.
But not enough.
She folded the paper into a tiny square and swallowed it.
Now you're part of me forever.