A little gold powder had sifted out through the seam of the sack; that was what had made her scream. She abandoned the parasol, abandoned the wine and spices, and ran to the table to untie it. The gold mole bolted the instant it opened, but before Cole could move she had it by the scruff, hauling it up.It squealed. She looked at it and swallowed, hard, and turned to Cole, her eyes complex enough to fill a million-word novel — appetite, conflict, sulking, and the faintest, barely-there flicker of conscience. She stuffed the mole back in the sack and gripped it in one black, furry fist.A long moment. Then she breathed in deep, as if she'd finally decided, and snarled: "Five copper coins, not one cent more! Now get out, you stinking thing — back to your Underfolk father, and don't let me see you or your hair again!"Cole's hand had been on the match-tattoo since she walked in. He let out a breath.She went to the bedroom, pulled a filthy yellow sock from under the pillow, dug out five

A heavy thud hit the floor, and Cole's eyes snapped open, his hand on the match. He listened — outside the store. He took his pack, crept to the door, put a cardboard box between himself and the gap, and looked out.The sky was bright. Morning.Across the way, on the second-floor walkway, a young woman in a dress stood backed against a glass railing, staring in horror at something in Cole's blind spot. The railing was half-shattered; before each of the other railings sat potted plants, but behind her, where a plant should have been, there was only spilled soil. The thing that fell — a pot. She clapped a hand over her mouth, shaking, and then spun and ran, shrieking: "They're here too! They're here, they're here—"She fled. Moments later four more people bolted from the mall.Cole waited, sure no one else would run, then drew the match and walked out. Across the second floor, blood had pooled and set on the walkway. His chest tightened; he went up.The thing the floor had hidden came i

"You can move knives now?" Cole asked."Oh — yeah, how'd you know?""Jax. He saw you move one to take the Stowaway's arm."Toby raised his right hand and pointed at the ground. A shattered rock rose, wobbling, drifting left and right like a drunk that couldn't find its feet. Cole watched it — and when it reached a meter from his face, his eyes pulled tight. In a blink it was at him.It dropped. Toby panted, wiping sweat, his fingers trembling. "Maybe three days ago I found I could move heavier things — not like the nails, not freely. A rock like this, I can shoot it fast inside a meter, no farther. And it costs a lot; I can't do it twice quickly."Cole nodded, and he meant it: "A powerful ability. It'll likely grow stronger."Toby scratched his head, sheepish. Cole wasn't comforting him. The boy's power was strong on two counts. Surprise — Cole hadn't dreamed the rock would jump to him that fast; had it been a knife, it would've been in his brow. Not a kill, but a serious wound. And —

"Following you," the scar-faced man said, and his eyes ran over Cole and stopped on his face, and every trace of his smile went out. "I can't stand a pretty-boy like Glutton. Can't kill Glutton — but I can sure as hell kill you."The instant he finished, he vanished off the stairs.Cole swung Granny Wolf's parasol up to guard his left. The man's shape appeared at his left side; the cleaver cracked across the rock-hard canopy in a spray of sparks. He hadn't expected Cole to know where he'd be; the blocked strike turned his eyes vicious, his cuts faster, denser, a wall of blade-shadow with no end to it.Cole held, and harder.He knew now who this was. Flash, the speed of the ten — faster than Lucan's file had said; he'd eaten more hearts since, and his power had climbed.Cole's remade eyes had reached a terrible sharpness, and still he couldn't track the man clean; more often he judged the next cut by the wind it split. Intuition, he'd told the man, and it hadn't been a lie — only impre

The "very fast" of A Very Fast Man wasn't really speed. It dilated the user's time. When Cole used it, time stretched out enormous; another man's blink became seconds to him, so to other eyes he simply moved too fast to follow. Top speed was the speed of sound — three hundred forty meters a second — against an ordinary man's jog of under three. Use it, and Cole's time ran roughly a hundred and twenty times the world's: another's one second, his hundred and twenty.Thirty seconds at most a use — thirty-six hundred subjective seconds, an hour. At double the lifespan cost, that one use bled two hours from his life. Drop by drop, used like Flash had used it, you'd age into the grave young. The manual looked like a leash on the power, and it was — but it also kept him from leaning on it until it killed him.He looked at the line about being fast in some respect for 24 hours, and thought, with sudden gloom, that he might never find a partner again. Use it every day, fast in some way every d