Chapter 2

The steady beep of the hospital monitor slowly pulled me back to consciousness.

I forced my eyes open. A sharp pain throbbed through my forehead, and thick bandages were wrapped around my head.

I was alive.

"Oh, thank God! David, she's awake!"

A gentle voice, warm with relief, rang out beside me.

I turned my head stiffly and saw the middle-aged couple who had rescued me. They looked utterly exhausted, like they had been keeping watch in my hospital room for hours.

I shrank back on instinct. "I'm so sorry... the blood from my head must've stained the leather seats in your car. Once I find a part-time job, I'll figure out a way to pay you back for the cleaning."

Margaret's eyes instantly reddened. She reached out and gently stroked my hair along the edge of the bandages.

"Oh, sweetheart, don't say something so foolish. It's just a Ford. Even if the whole thing were ruined, it still wouldn't be worth more than your life. You're a good kid who's been badly hurt. Right now, you don't need to worry about a thing. Just lie back and rest."

A good kid?

For a moment, I felt dazed.

I had Asperger's. I was strange, quiet, and awkward. Compared to my delicate, beautiful older sister who danced ballet, I was nothing but an ugly duckling people couldn't stand.

When I was twelve, all I wanted for my birthday was a cake. Susan had pointed straight at me and screamed, "Your sister has the Youth Ballet Grand Prix next week, and this family already has enough expenses. How dare you ask for something so unreasonable at a time like this? You're nothing but a cold-hearted animal who only thinks about herself!"

And yet, just three months later, at Chloe's birthday party, Richard maxed out his credit cards just to buy her the latest limited-edition Chanel handbag.

Another time, Chloe twisted her ankle during rehearsal at the theater. Because I was slow to react and didn't rush over to catch her right away, Susan had slapped me hard across the face in front of everyone.

"You ugly and stupid trash! The least you could do is help your sister, and you couldn't do it right! You don't care about your own family at all. I honestly don't understand why God would dump a piece of trash like you into my home!"

Trash.

That was what I was supposed to be.

"Have some warm water, sweetheart. Your lips are cracked." Margaret brought a cup to my lips.

I obediently drank half of it. Once she saw that I had calmed down, she returned to the chair by the window and picked up a stack of papers covered in dense calculations. Less than two minutes later, her brows furrowed tightly, and she began tapping her pen against the page in frustration.

I pulled back my blanket and got out of bed, heading toward the bathroom. As I passed Margaret, I glanced down at the papers in her hands.

It was a set of extremely complex nonlinear partial differential equations. The tangled variables and topological dimensions looked like pure chaos, a mess with no visible pattern.

Margaret was clearly stuck at a singularity she couldn't get past.

But in my eyes, those seemingly chaotic symbols and numbers were already rearranging themselves.

"If you use a Poincaré map to reduce the higher-dimensional phase space..." I stopped walking. "Then introduce Fourier-transform boundary conditions, the singularity cancels out immediately."

Margaret jerked her head up and stared at me in shock.

I pointed to the third line of the page. "The parameter setup here has a logical flaw. The answer is already hidden in the variables from the line above. If you swap those two matrices, it opens right up."

Margaret froze for two seconds, then lowered her head skeptically and began working through the steps I had described, scribbling rapidly across the blank margin.

Three minutes later—

Margaret sucked in a sharp breath. The pen slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor.

David walked over in surprise. "Margaret, what happened?"

"My God..." Margaret shot to her feet, her eyes blazing as she stared at me. "Olivia, how do you know a variant of the Navier–Stokes equations? How did you do that level of computation in your head?"

"I didn't calculate it." I blinked slowly. "I just... saw the structure. The answer was right there. It was obvious."

"Genius... the extreme focus and numerical intuition that can come with Asperger's..." Margaret grabbed both my hands, her voice shaking with excitement. "David, we've found a once-in-a-generation genius!"

Her eyes shone as she looked at me.

"Olivia, let me properly introduce myself. I'm a professor of mathematics at the Stanbridge Institute for Advanced Study. We're working on a world-class mathematical problem, something that could matter to all humanity. You have a rare gift people would envy for a lifetime. Would you be willing to join my research team—and make the entire academic world go crazy on you?"