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looking for the two-for-one when it came to causing chaos.

M Y FATHER WAITED until my second bite of breakfast on Wednesday (four scrambled eggs for my higher protein needs) for the ambush.
    He slid a newspaper across the table. “Were you planning on telling me about this?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.
    The edge in his voice took me aback, as did the faint smell of alcohol on his breath. It wasn’t really morning for him, as he’d yet to go to bed, but still. I hadn’t seen him drink—at all—since the first few months of my life Outside, when he was mourning the loss of his daughter. I’d only been living with him for a couple weeks when he received word that she’d died. Back then, I would slip out of my room—which I wasn’t supposed to do—and find him in the living room drinking scotch and staring at photos of his Ariane, which he normally kept hidden in the basement. He had not expected her to recover; I’d known that much when he’d given me her name. But that knowledge had not helped him in any way. If anything, it had only made his grief worse. He’d gone through a period where he always had a bottle in hand. But that was a long time ago.
    So I knew even before looking at the newspaper, something was very wrong.
    The article was in the middle of the paper and tucked beneath a gigantic ad for the local tire store, Rubber Mike’s. I didn’t read the whole thing; didn’t have to.
Lights Out at Ashe High
    An unexplained power surge yesterday morning shattered lightbulbs in an upper hallway of Ashe High School, raining glass shards down upon students .…
    Crap. I sucked in a breath and choked on my eggs.
    I’d stayed up late last night to watch the news and run a few Internet searches—not too many, in case GTX was monitoring—to see if the incident had caught media attention. But what wasn’t big enough for TV or showy enough for the Internet (had to leave room for imploding celebrities and cute cats stuck in boxes) was just right for the Wingate local paper.
    God, why did yesterday have to be the one day free of the small-town idiocy that normally dominated the paper, the day that someone hadn’t stolen an entire neighborhood’s worth of garden gnomes and arranged them in various sexual positions on the front lawn of the Methodist church?
    (Actually, I’d found that pretty funny at the time. You can’t get better examples of hypocrisy than people confronted with blatant—albeit gnomish—displays of sexuality. They get red-faced and blustery all the while intensely wishing they could get their significant other to try what the red gnome was doing to the blue garden fairy. You can’t hide thoughts like that from me, people, not without a lot of training and practice. Genius advancement or design flaw, take your pick.)
    Coughing, I spit the eggs into my napkin. “How bad is it?”
    “Bad enough.” My father looked grim and tired, but he wasn’t shoving me toward the back door with an urgent whisper to flee, so I wasn’t, it seemed, in immediate danger of being recaptured. I relaxed a fraction.
    “Were you going to tell me?” he asked again, tapping his finger against the paper. He looked every inch the imposing head of security that he was. He was still wearing his uniform, and his shirt bore the impressions of his shoulder harness, though it and his gun were probably already locked in the safe in his bedroom. His jacket, emblazoned with the GTX logo, hung from the back of his chair. Normally he would have put it out of sight already, knowing how much I hated it.
    (At some point in my very early life at GTX, maybe right after I was born, they’d marked me like livestock. My right shoulder blade held a tattoo of the GTX logo, a big stylized G, and my project designation, GTX-F-107, just beneath it in crude lettering. I wore a bandage over it to keep anyone from seeing it, but I still had to look at it in the mirror every day when I applied a new bandage. And the sight never