Chapter 165 News!

• "Damn, where the hell am I supposed to go now?"
• Harman Halveg had been on the suborbital shuttle when the news feed to his implant relayed that the family compound in Finland had gone up in a focused mini-nuke blast. This was the worst event he'd experienced in his fifteen years—except for the loss of his parents four years earlier in a freak accident...it was incredibly rare for an automated car to crash...but it had happened. Then there was the loss of a small aircraft that claimed nearly fifty people—among them his uncle Karel and his two cousins.
• He had been vacationing in Atlantis Deep off the coast of Florida, taking in the marine life on the continental shelf, then was to spend the last month of his break from school at Hallbach-Sommers Institute near the Baltic coast. It hadn't hit him until a half hour later that many of his remaining relatives, like his grandparents, were now only radioactive dust. It was almost like bad luck and tragedy plagued his family more than any others...but with the destruction of the Compound, only an idiot could continue to believe that these were accidents—somebody was trying hard to erase his Line from the Earth.