The lights in the room were off; only the monitor glowed, lines of code scrolling in green against black. That soft, electronic glow painted the room in muted greens and shadows. Her red hair lay strewn across the bed, as if a restless wind had come through and left every strand in disarray. She was sprawled, not in any neat posture, but in the loose, uncompromising way of someone who had been thinking faster than their body could follow.
Books and notes littered the floor—mostly manuals and thick volumes on hacking and systems. Some titles were shoved into the shelf in careless clusters, others lay open on the carpet. A glass table anchored the center of the room, its surface cluttered with coffee cups and scattered pages. There was no attempt at polished order; the place read as lived-in intelligence rather than domestic tidiness.
A soft knock sounded and Mrs. Mariam stepped in. She flicked the lights on and the room's state was revealed in unforgiving clarity. Her face flushed with annoyance as she took in the mess. She crossed to the bed, gathered the scattered figure by the arm, and sat her upright. Ilyana blinked slowly. As Mrs. Mariam met her eyes, the heat of her anger cooled—there was an intensity in those eyes, a sharp, steady focus that dissolved the scolding on the spot.
"What have you done to this room?" Mrs. Mariam demanded. Ilyana half-smiled, half-smirked, and murmured, "I'll clean it." There was that same unbothered cadence in her voice that matched the room—practical, detached. "By the way," Mariam added, "your aunt is coming over today." The word made Ilyana pause; she scooped up a handful of books in a flurry, but the room's disorder swallowed her efforts and she slipped into the wardrobe, closing the door with a soft click.
The books in her arms looked like the rough tools of some half-brewed plan. The scattered wrappers, the open notebooks, the code flickering on the screen—none of it suggested domestic order. It suggested, rather, that the room belonged to someone whose mind ran circuits where the rest of the world ran on plain rails: untidy, dangerous, brilliant.