She was five when she said it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of their room with her pebbles arranged in front of her in the system only she fully understood, not looking up, in the tone she used when she was saying something she had been holding for a while.
"You're not like other children," she said.
Sid looked at her from the table where he was reviewing Hollis's latest books.
"You already know things," she said. "Not things you learned here. Things you came in with.' She moved a piece of quartz into its correct position. 'I've been trying to figure out what that means."
"And."
"I haven't figured it out yet." She looked up then. "But I know something happened to you before. Before here. Before us." Her eyes were steady and very clear. "I'm not asking you to explain it. I just want you to know that I see it."
He looked at his five-year-old sister who had just, in four sentences, come closer to the truth than any person in his two lives had come.
"Yes," he said. "Something happened."
"Does it hurt."
"Not anymore."
"'Good." She went back to her pebbles. "I want to help. With whatever you're building. I'm good at patterns." She held a piece of dark stone to the window light. "Better than you, probably."
"Probably," he agreed.
"Tell me when you're ready for me," she said.
He watched her differently after that.
He had always known she was sharp — she had been arranging the pebbles in increasingly complex classification systems since she was three, and the systems were real, not a child's approximation of order but an actual taxonomy that she revised as her knowledge expanded. He had known she was sharp the way you know things about people who live in the same room as you: through accumulated evidence, through daily proximity, without the specific attention that turns knowing into understanding.
After that conversation he paid attention.
What he found was that Zara processed the world through pattern and connection in a way that was different from his own processing and that filled in gaps his approach left open. He mapped systems — the how of things, the mechanism. Zara mapped relationships — the why, the cause behind the cause, the thing underneath the thing. Together the two approaches produced something neither produced alone.
He started telling her things.
Not everything — not yet. She was five and there were things she did not need to carry yet. But he started bringing her the problems that had a pattern-structure, the ones where what he needed was not strategic analysis but someone to look at the connections he was missing.
She never got one wrong.
He filed this carefully, the way he filed everything important. Zara was not a resource. She was a person he loved. But she was also, and this was not a contradiction, the sharpest mind he had encountered in two lives.
He was six years old and he had just found his partner.
He did not have that word for it yet. He would find it later. But the thing itself began that afternoon on the floor of their room in Building Four, with a piece of quartz held to the window light and a five-year-old who saw more than she was supposed to see.
Nina came home from the shift that evening and looked at the two of them at the table — Sid with his books, Zara with her pebbles, the specific quality of quiet between them that was not the quiet of two children in the same room but the quiet of two people working — and she stood in the doorway for a moment without saying anything.
Then she came in and started the food and said: "What are you two doing."
"Thinking," Zara said.
"Together," Sid said.
Nina looked at them. The look that contained more than her words. Then she turned back to the food and said nothing more.
She had known, she would tell Sid years later. She had always known.