Anna spoke when she was only a few hours old.
“One. Three. Five. Eight.”
At first, her mother thought she’d imagined it. But her husband had heard it, too. Then the infant repeated the words insistently, enunciating as well as one possibly could through a newborn mouth.
“One. Three. Five. Eight.”
This continued until, hands trembling, her father wrote the numbers down. That done, Anna fell silent for a long time.
One day, her mother said, “If you don’t talk soon, we’re going to have to see a therapist.”
“Don’t worry,” said Anna.
“What?”
“I just don’t like talking.”
It was always like this. Anna was withdrawn and sullen, but rarely rebellious. She didn’t like expending serious effort, but she’d perform chores. She would even pretend to be an ordinary child when strangers were around. “So they don’t ask questions,” she said.
When she was six, her parents were considering a move. They asked her what kind of house she would like to live in. She replied with an address. It was on sale, and it was a good choice.
When she was seven, her mother caught her practicing lock-picking. “It makes me feel better,” said Anna. They let her keep the picks. As far as they could tell, she didn't mean any harm.
When she was eight, her father asked if she could pick stocks as well as she could pick locks. She replied that she could, but she wouldn’t. “It doesn’t help.”
When she was nine, they went to the opera - Verdi’s La forza del destino. During the intermission, she slipped away from her parents amid the crowd. The building was packed, and it was easy to lose them.
Weaving through the crowd, Anna ducked into the back corridors of the theater. Avoiding detection, she picked the lock on a maintenance closet, slipped inside, pulled out her flashlight, and descended into the crawlspace. It was time.
The explosives had been rigged quite thoroughly. She didn’t need to study the setup now – she knew it all too well. Every one of the bombs was hooked to a single keypad.
Getting help here had never worked. Getting the opera canceled just delayed the inevitable. If they began an evacuation with the show underway, the bomb just went off early. There was only one approach left that held any hope of ending this.
And so, gritting her teeth, Anna punched in the numbers: 1 3 5 8
The explosion was mercifully fast, and so Anna had no chance to consciously perceive it. Nobody in the building survived.
***
Anna spoke when she was only a few hours old.
“One. Three. Five. Nine.”
---
Credits
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