“Against what, Wayne? I don’t see any good anchors in that direction. Besides, if I launch us backward that fast, going out the window is going to shred us and rip our bodies apart.”

“Gentlemen,” Marasi said, voice growing frantic, “it’s getting bigger.”

“Wayne can’t stop time,” Waxillium said. “Just slow it greatly. And he can’t move the bubble once he’s made it.”

“Look,” Wayne said. “Just blow the wall out. Push against the nails in the window frames and blast open the side of the building. Then you can shoot us out that direction without us running into anything.”

“Do you even listen to yourself when you say these things?” Waxillium asked, hands on hips as he regarded his friend. “That’s brick and stone. If I Push too hard, I’ll just throw myself backward into the explosion.”

“It’s getting really, really close!” Marasi said.

“So make yourself heavier,” Wayne said.

“Heavy enough so that I don’t move when an entire wall—a well-built, extremely heavy one—is ripped off a building?”

“Sure.”

“The floor would never be able to take it,” Waxillium said. “It would shatter, and…”

He trailed off.

Both of them looked down.

Snapping into motion, Waxillium grabbed Marasi, pulling her over with a yelp. He rolled onto his back, holding her tightly atop him.

The explosion was taking up most of their field of vision now, having consumed a large portion of the room. It swelled closer and closer, glowing with angry yellow light, like a bubbling, bursting pastry expanding in an enormous oven.

“What are we—” Marasi said.

“Hold on!” Waxillium said.

He amplified his weight.

Feruchemy didn’t work like Allomancy. The two categories of power were often lumped together, but in many ways, they were opposites. In Allomancy, the power came from the metal itself, and there was a limit to how much you could do at once. Wayne couldn’t compress time beyond a certain amount; Waxillium could Push only so hard on a piece of metal.

Feruchemy was powered by a sort of cannibalism, where you consumed part of yourself for later use. Make yourself weigh half as much for ten days, and you could make yourself one and a half times as heavy for a near-equal amount of time. Or you could make yourself twice as heavy for half that time. Or four times as heavy for a quarter of that time.

Or extremely heavy for a few brief moments.

Waxillium drew into himself weight he’d stored in his metalminds across days spent going around at three-quarters weight. He became heavy as a boulder, then as heavy as a building, then heavier. All this weight was focused on one small section of the floor.

The wood crunched, then burst, exploding downward. Waxillium dropped out of Wayne’s bubble of speed and hit real time, the shift jostling him. The next few moments were a blur. He heard the awesome sound of the explosion above—it hit with a wave of force. He released his metalmind and Pushed against the nails in the floor below them, trying to slow himself and Marasi.