Billy Blueblazes liked to say that while he wasn't the fastest man on the planet, he was certainly the fastest man on Earth. Doc Spectral could fly at the speed of light, line of sight or fly by wire, and Dynamann could fly in space at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour using the solar wind like a one man space-going clipper ship. Billy's teammate, the Nuclear Knight, in a cis-orbital trajectory could peak at about Mach 9 but Nukes wasn't human.

Nobody could run faster than Billy.

And surrounded by his protective cold blue flames, Billy could run so fast that he could almost break the sound barrier. Almost. Every time he had gotten that close, he'd lost control -- crashed -- twice he'd almost died. Daedalos's new boron-nitride-fiber armor with the teflon and single molecule iridium layers might just keep him alive -- if he crashed again.

Because he just had to get to the Marshalldale airport in less than an hour, a distance of 737 miles. Just a hair faster than the speed of sound, maybe only a molecule faster but Billy couldn't even try to break the sound barrier near a city, that would be too dangerous. So he'd have to try to make up a bit of time on the long empty straightaways on the interstates.

And there were mountains to climb. And when he got close to Portland, he'd have to try to decide whether to try to reach Marshalldale through Yakima or Tacoma. Either way, the last thirty miles would be on narrow, twisting mountain roads where a trip or stumble could be disaster.

Because if Billy didn't make it, somebody might die. Somebody besides Billy. He just couldn't allow that. Not and keep calling himself a hero.

* * *

Spartako liked flying the jet-assist copter almost as much as the Screamer cis-orbital. Not nearly as fast as the big scramjet but you flew close enough to the ground to see the country. Well, what you could see traveling at nearly half the speed of sound. It wouldn't be a long trip, though. Less than an hour to Marshalldale, now.

Being a cyborg wasn't all bad when you had so many neat machines to plug into, thought Spartako. He tried not to think about what he had to do when he reached

* * *

"You're kidding?" said Leo. He'd stepped away from the squabbling state and federal agents to take the portable phone handed to him by Krystal.

"Donk remembered this guy LeJeune hiring him. A crooked state cop and he's right there in Marshalldale," Candace told him, repeating the story Todd had gotten from the memories of the dead thug. "We're just turning onto I-90 now, we're about an hour away. Reception has been crap." Cellphone frequencies don't like rain and the slopes of Mt. Rainier have plenty of it.

"Yeah, but -- LeJeune is the boss of these two state goons on your lawn. They say he's got an errand at the airport then he's coming here," said Leo. Before he said anything else, Leo turned around and saw Kenny, Tessie's brother, standing behind Krystal. "I'll take care of it," he said into the phone. "Call me back in a bit," and he hung up.

"Who's watching your sister," he asked Kenny who seemed fascinated by the argument between the plainclothes police officers.

"Aunt Kendra," said Kenny.

Leo rolled his eyes, already starting for the house while considering just what to do about a crooked and possibly homocidal cop.

In the house, Kay stared at little Tessie where she crouched halfway up the wall of the cathedral-ceilinged living room. "How are you doing that?" she asked.

"Friction, I think," said the pig-tailed little blonde who used to be Urban Commando. "I can increase it or make it almost disappear. It's how I made the kidnapper's plane crash." She scooched around on the wall so she could look at Kendra without craning her neck. "At first I was too scared to try it but I'm not really scared of anything much now."