Chapter 1

Marcello's POV:

I pinched the bridge of my nose for probably the 50th time in the past 36 hours. I didn't sleep well on airplanes. I never had. Not even when I hadn't slept in nearly 2 days.

Coming home was well worth it, though. As I smiled down at the plain gold band on my finger, I marveled at my perfect life. Not bad for an orphan.

My life hadn't always been perfect. My parents were killed in an automobile accident when I was 7; that's the absolute worst age to be orphaned. You're just past the age where anyone will adopt you but too young to know what's going on. All you really know is that all the people in your life that you love and care about, and that care about you, are gone.

I had no relatives. My grandparents on my mom's side were gone long before I was born. My dad's mom passed away just before my birth; he'd never known his father. Oh, I had an aunt somewhere – my mother's younger sister – but she'd left home at the age of 16 and just disappeared. No one knew where she was or what she was doing; no one could find her.

I spent my life in foster homes, group homes and halfway houses. Bet you didn't know that, did you? When you're older, after your foster parents stop caring for foster children and you're too old for group homes, they put you in halfway houses with kids who are mostly criminals. There's just no room for you anywhere else.

At first, I'd kept dreaming that my aunt – who I'd never seen and wouldn't know if I bumped into her on the street – was going to come and rescue me. Every woman I'd meet, every woman I'd see, I'd imagine was my aunt, coming for me. That lasted until just after I was 12 and was getting beaten up by a 16 year old in the group home. As I cried myself to sleep that night, I left that dream on the pillow with my tears.

I learned a few things in those places. I learned where to hit your opponent to cause the most pain and end a fight quickly. I learned how to read people, to get inside their heads and tell them what they wanted to hear. I figured out how to rely on myself. I learned that no one likes people who are smarter than they are – especially when you can prove it.

And I was smarter than most of them. Not about everything, of course, but about a lot of things. I'm not bragging; it's just a fact. See, I was a small, thin kid until my growth spurt just after my 15th birthday. Then, I was a tall, accident-prone, thin kid who could barely walk without tripping over my suddenly huge feet. I could fight – you didn't grow up in the system without learning to fight – but it wasn't my chosen field. I much preferred to let trouble pass me by; if you fight in the system, you tended to get into tons of trouble. I didn't need trouble; I had enough of it already.

So, instead of fighting, I spent most of my time in the library or on the internet. I was learning; teaching myself about anything that interested me. I had a knack of remembering things; not everything, I don't have a photographic memory or anything (and, honestly, there's no such thing as a photographic memory – that's just a fiction you find in books, movies and television), I just had a very good memory. I was also really good at applying things I learned in one field to problems I discovered in another. Correlative analysis, I think I heard someone call it once. Whatever it was, I turned out to be really, really good at it.

I graduated high school at 19, a full year early. One nice thing about being in the system, it's easy to get money for college. I mean, you have no income so it's very easy to get money from grants, student loans and the like. Between that and the academic scholarships I received (I had a straight 5.0 average due to advanced placement classes in high school) and college was pretty much set for me.

I filed my first patent at 21, when I was a sophomore in college (thanks to the advanced placement classes in high school giving me college credit and my lack of home life meaning I was taking courses year round, I was ahead in college). Like all great ideas, mine really wasn't anything new. It was the combination of a bunch of other different metals, plastics and substances into a single alloy that turned out to be even slicker than Teflon, stronger than steel and able to withstands temperatures of nearly 5,000 degrees Celsius. Plus, it didn't transmit heat from out to in; it reflected it instead. This gives it a number of applications; as an outer coating on NASA's space shuttle replacement, for example. Or, since it's also several times stronger than steel, as the material to make tanks out of.

As a matter of fact, that's exactly what it's being used for and NASA and the Department of Defense are giving me a combined 4 million a year to use it ... and not sell it to someone else.

My second patent I filed just before my 24th birthday. It was for an adhesive that bonded on the atomic level to just about anything and was so strong that, once bonded, the material would give out before the adhesive. Nasa's using it to apply Symtec to their rocket and it should be available commercially from Dupont by next year. If anything, the adhesive is making me over twice as much as Symtec and will likely make me even more.

I've got 5 others, too, that will likely be just as lucrative in a few years; a monofilament that's strong as steel and as flexible as fishing line, some software that will improve database performance by at least 12%, and so on.