During Tommy's first time riding a bike, he steered it into a mailbox. He got better. But he was still clumsy and learning when he fumbled it in front of the car.

For a split second he looked up into the grill, perfect in its detail and enormity. Then he freaked the hell out and, when he caught his breath, he was nowhere near the car but it was still only just starting to crush his bike.

It wasn't the first time.

When picked on, Tommy had this funny little habit of. Well. To him it seemed as though everything was going fine and then someone was clutching a bloody nose. His reflexes were good. He did remember, afterwards, the incoming hit and the dodge and the easy, light punch to his attacker's face. He just wasn't quite sure how it had happened.

When he described this to someone, they said, "Sounds like a psychotic episode." Tommy didn't mention it to anyone after that.

All the while he was being scolded for leaving his bike in the road, Tommy wondered if they might maybe not have been psychotic episodes after all. That night, when he inevitably woke up at 2 a.m. and wandered out of the house, he found his way to the road and sat down on the dotted line.

It took a while. He told himself he wasn't being stupid; there was plenty of room to pass him on either side and it would take only a single step in either direction to make him completely safe.

It was still, and he heard the car coming from a long way off. He faced it, staring down the tiny headlights as they grew larger. He concentrated on completely different thoughts.

You're going to die, he told himself, The car is going to hit you, and your head is going to break open and splatter on the grill (like the grill this afternoon) and your body will get pulled under and into the tires, and you'll die.

The headlights were larger, and the sound of the car echoed along the streets as though there were another one behind Tommy. Which there could be, while he was playing the fool with this one. He half-turned but stopped himself, forced himself to stare down the headlights and let the possibility loom up in his mind behind him.

The nervousness sparked into fear and Tommy was standing on the porch of his house. He blinked to himself for a moment and watched, with some confusion, as the car drove slowly by.

It took a few more tries before he got it right, before he kept running. After that, he never wanted to stop. When he did, he found he'd burned his sneakers and socks completely away except for the tops, and he had to tell his parents he lost them. He dug all his old sneakers out of his closet, even though they pinched, and after some practice he didn't burn rubber anymore--or at least, not so much. His parents blamed their shoe budget on a growth spurt, and he didn't correct them.

Once he even ran all the way to New York City because there was supposed to be things to do there, even in the middle of the night. Instead, he wound up in one of the burroughs, staring up at the endless, looming buildings illuminated by stark orange streetlights that somehow made the dark feel darker and the light feel dangerous and exposed. New York City was made of dirty, hard concrete and garbage, nothing like the tiny, forested Springfield with its whitewash paint.

Tommy ran home and knocked on his parents' bedroom and ignored the mumbling chastisements that wasn't he awfully big to be afraid of monsters? Because New York City really was some sort of monster, he was sure.

But he still went back eventually, in the daytime. He found the parks, and he sat on the swings and stared out at the fence of buildings surrounding him on all sides, and told himself that he couldn't be hurt by any monster. But when someone eventually asked where his parents were and he left, he always ran through those parts, over the concrete, until his feet hit grass again.

For awhile, running made everything better. His jittery sleep settled down. The world became smaller and more real. He had always been a bit less afraid than the other kids, the need for movement forcing him downstairs in the dark, and finally outside, farther and farther. At first, he had told himself there was nothing in the dark but animals, and that they were afraid of him. Now he told himself they had reason to be afraid.

But Tommy had to wonder. Why was he fast? Did he get hit by cosmic rays without noticing? (And here, every odd instance in his life was examined for an origin and set aside. His life was way too suburban and sheltered and boring.)

Was he always fast, and just hadn't figured it out? That seemed likely, now, but Tommy would have preferred for his little moments to be psychotic episodes. If he was born with it, then ...

Tommy was probably a mutant.

Mutants weren't people.

Mutants had to go to a special school and live apart from everyone and weren't allowed near normal places like Springfield, New Jersey. Tommy wasn't sure what would happen if one came here ... except that everyone would want them to leave. And even if they were allowed to stay, no one would talk to them, they'd just look at them funny and moms would pull on kid's arms in that annoying, don't say anything but come over here and away from there way.

So Tommy never told anyone he had powers. When he was young, he put the thought of where they came from out of his head--into the back of his mind. By the time he was 16, he ran with the distant knowledge that getting caught running meant the end of everything.

But he couldn't not run. It didn't even occur to him to try.

Instead, he made excuses and changed the subject and did it all with the small smile at the corner of his lips that meant, of course I'm up to something, I always am. The secret got mixed up in all the not-secrets of Tommy's life, because he made a habit of being dishonest but obvious, which is a very special kind of honest. He could be trusted to be doing something mischievous and attention-seeking, nothing serious.

That he got caught at all was Kang's fault. Because, like Teddy and Billy, Tommy stopped existing for a short time, disappearing right out of the timeline. Unlike Teddy and Billy, Tommy had no memory of the shifting world, no idea what had happened. He had been getting something out of his locker when he was filled with a feeling he had never contemplated, a feeling worse than thought of death: that of non-existence.

If Tommy had been asked, he would have said that that was the abyss which stares back. Not just dying and the unknown, but the possibility of flickering out of existance and ... nothing. Not even experiencing nothing, because there was no one to experience it.

Tommy freaked the hell out.

He was outside of school and on route to anywhere else when he stumbled and his shaking hands met the ground. After that, explosions, noise, dust, and when it cleared, Tommy was looking up at a tiny dot the size of the sun which was the edge of the very deep hole he'd dug himself into.

The school, he learned later, had experienced an earthquake. The noise of the explosions had sent everyone running, so they got to watch from a distance as their school sunk and crumbled into the hole, vaporizing before it could crush Tommy's head beneath it. All the injuries were from shoving and pushing, and the students thought they were the very lucky survivors of a natural disaster.

Tommy felt around in the dark, finding no escape. He had no idea what he'd done in the first place, but trying to run out was definitely a last resort move, with the walls still breaking off in places and showering him with dirt. As the hours passed, the speck of daylight far above him grew dim and finally winked out, and Tommy was left in the deepest darkness he'd ever known.

He endlessly debated the danger of trying to run out with the danger of waiting for the hole to cave in. Eventually, he heard murmurs and saw tiny moving lights above him.

He bit down on a half-formed shout. Cave-ins, right. Besides, if he could hear them, they could hear him.

"Hey," he said, keeping his voice normal, "I'm down here."

The murmurs above increased, then silenced.

"I'm down here," he repeated.

"You're alive?" It took Tommy a moment to repeat what he'd heard and translate the distant murmurs into words.

"Probably," said Tommy, at a lack for a better response.