It was 11am and Matt was bored.

Cooped up, low-key stressed and bored. He didn’t think any of those sentiments were unreasonable. He’d been studying for the last three hours, everyone in the world knew his identity, a large number of people were trying to kill him, and he wasn’t allowed outside. It was bizarre for Matt to find himself looking back with fondness at his days at the Academy – at vast swathes of time spent indulging in pointless nonsense interspersed with the occasional rush of adrenaline at someone almost uncovering his half-baked clairvoyant falsehood. At least back then most people hadn’t cared about his existence. At least then he could touch grass.

Matt sighed and tried to force his eyes back down to the textbook. Across the dining room table Giselle flicked him a small, concerned look.

They were studying law. Matt officially, Giselle unofficially, him as a special-consideration distance student for pre-law at Columbia, her just as someone who listened to the same lectures as him and happened to share his textbooks. Not that you’d know that was the way of it – Giselle seemed to lap Matt as effortlessly in academics as she did at actual running. Goddamn polymaths. Nobody in his life was normal anymore.

The idea had been inspired, originally, by their ACLU lawyer Rana, and Matt’s frustration at not being able to clearly understand about fifty percent of what was going on. Well, alright, maybe closer to twenty percent – Rana had very good interpersonal skills and the ability to compress complex legal concepts into normal human terms – but it was still overwhelming for Matt to review documents which he was expected to sign off on which were so poxy with legal jargon they may as well have been written in French. Matt hated feeling stupid. He didn’t have the urge to be intimidatingly smart – that would’ve been unrealistic – but he hated feeling dumb, or like major life decisions were being effectively made for him when documents he was expected to sign were just shoved in his face. Hence, pre‑law. Hence, his admission to Columbia, which he was quite certain would absolutely never have happened if it wasn’t for Rana’s good word and his not-insignificant celebrity.

So Matt had enrolled in college in a fit of intellectual defiance, and in what had seemed like a good idea at the time, to both whittle down the hours in this newly precautionary phase of his existence and maybe come out the other end with a good qualification once everything had settled down. Except then the defiant urge to do something bold and bettering had faded, and Matt found himself stuck with the reality of studying law, which was reading a metric tonne of incredibly long, dry judgments written by old dead men and coming to the slow, dawning realisation that you knew nothing about anything and were in fact profoundly stupid.

“Want to take a break?” Giselle asked.

To do what, Matt wanted to bitterly reply. They weren’t allowed to go anywhere. Well, he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere – Giselle could leave – but she typically wouldn’t go far without him. It seemed consensus amongst his friends and the Legion of Heroes – who were now pretty much one and the same – that he was not safe to be left alone. Someone always needed to be babysitting, in case today was the day the stupid murderous Second Amendment pricks somehow figured out which apartment he was in, remotely traced his IP address, spider-climbed the walls, set the building on fire or dropped an anvil on him from space. None of which had actually happened yet, but all of which technically remained possible.

There had been four attempts to murder Matt in the past six months, not including Klaus Heydrich or the man who’d shot/shot at him last night. The first had been in the second week after he’d come home from hospital; he’d been in his room, in bed, asleep, as had all his family, when a speedster had raced past their home and shot up the place with a semi‑automatic pistol. Fortunately for the Callaghans this attempt had been plagued by poor planning and worse execution, with the majority of the bullets levelled at the ground floor when the family’s bedrooms were upstairs, and the shooter having the stability and aim control of a Jell-o cube riding rodeo. Between the recoil, the superspeed, the low calibre of the handheld weapon and (Matt suspected) the would‑be assassin’s probable last-minute guilt about shooting up a suburban family, the majority of bullets had lodged themselves in the brickwork, the carpet, the garage or the front lawn. Nobody had been hurt, but it had been enough to alert the police and the Legion that something was afoot, and that Matt might legitimately be in danger. The shooter was picked up by police after the bullets were traced back to the store he’d purchased the gun from, and the attacker was identified as a thirty‑five year old assistant manager at a Missouri Ford dealership with no affiliation with any terrorist groups, a once‑a‑month visitation arrangement with his twin daughters, and a history of unmanaged depression.

The second attempt had come two weeks later, about a month after Matt’s return home. This one, scarily, had been much more sophisticated – a twenty-eight-year-old dishonourably discharged ex‑marine sniper teleporting into a tree across the road from the Callaghans’ house and setting up aim at Matt’s window with a high-powered rifle. This too had been foiled, but not by the shooter’s incompetence – rather, it was the Legion bodyguards, specifically Wally Cykes, who had telepathically sensed the arrival of a new hostile entity and quickly alerted the rest of the Legion to its presence. This time it was Jane who caught the culprit, descending from the sky like a furious golden meteor and pulverising the tree and the assailant before the latter had time to escape. Jane had snapped the gun in half and beaten the man near lifeless; Matt had reimbursed the neighbours for the tree the next day. Again, the attacker had no affiliations, having purchased the gun illegally and spent the three days beforehand alone in a threadbare apartment strung out on energy drinks, onion rings and dexamphetamines.

This attack, then, being more sinister and frightening than the first one, was enough to convince the Callaghans they had to move. They’d relocated to an anonymised safehouse – with the Legion and the State Department working together to set them up new identities and a new home – only for that too, somehow, to get found out and shot at after barely a month. This time, the attacker sat in a car out of sight of the Callaghans’ new residence and fired bullets around the corner – attempting to use his electro-magnetic powers to bend the projectiles in precise and unnatural arcs, which was a dangerous idea, in theory. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of the gun you were on), it turns out that bullets move very fast and that human reactions move (comparatively) very slowly; meaning that the majority of shots that were fired by the amateur assassin did not so much curve with deadly precision as wobble a little bit and fly off across the street into an old lady’s prize gardenias. When Giselle Pixus found him, alerted by the sound of gunshots, the twenty-two-year-old Walmart pallet‑loader was swearing furiously, so distracted trying to recalculate and reload his twin pistols that he failed to notice the Legion speedster approaching until his tires were slashed and he was cable-tied to a nearby telephone pole.

From there, there were no more new identities. It was clear – to Jane and the Legion at least – that whatever official relocation services were being provided were not secure; that there were holes in the government’s security, unwitting or intentional, through which confidential information could leak out. To find the hole, let alone plug it, would have required a level of effort and coordination which the police and the State Department were quite frankly unwilling to supply, being reluctant to admit they had a problem in the first place and then equally resistant to the idea of any third-party, even the Legion of Heroes, trawling for it in their databanks. So this time the Legion didn’t bother; beds were made, space was cleared, and the Callaghans were simply relocated to Morningstar Academy, the Legion’s freshly rebuilt base of operations, where they were set up in a little side-wing cottage home once made for founding member Ironbound and his wife and kids.

Stolen story; please report.

There, now, the attacks on Matt’s family stopped. It was one thing, it seemed, for a lone shooter to talk themselves into driving a few states and taking pot shots at regular people in the heart of middle America, but another thing entirely to attempt a one-man assault on the home and training ground of the very-negatively-towards-unwanted-guests-inclined Legion of Heroes and their dazzling array of superpowers and death. Even with Morningstar in a state of rebuilding and the Academy being slowly repopulated with fresh faces, the prospect of launching an attack was obviously too daunting. Matt’s family it seemed, at least for the time being, were safe.

But it soon became clear that Matt wasn’t. The fourth attack, at around ten-thirty in the morning on a mild and windy Tuesday, had taken place outside the ACLU offices as Matt and one of Rana’s paralegals had stepped outside to visit a nearby coffee cart for mid-morning coffee and bear claws. The assassin – a tall, wispy‑bearded twenty-four-year-old – had strode across the street, phased intangible through an underpass, drawn a combat shotgun from his black leather trench coat and levelled it ten feet from Matt Callaghan’s chest. Luckily, this attacker’s decision to dress exactly as one would imagine a would‑be shooter dressing, i.e. in black cargo pants, black combat boots and wrap-around black sunglasses, made his approach stand out somewhat, and Matt’s accompanying paralegal Daisy had with bulging eyes hypervoiced him so thoroughly that the shotgun flew out of the assassin’s hands and smacked him barrel-first in the eye socket. A crowd of angry onlookers had then descended on the man, who within seconds found himself dazed, deafened, disarmed and bound with someone’s purple cat‑patterned neck‑tie to the wheels of the coffee cart – his head shoved in the underbelly so that its basic range Disruptance would prevent him from phasing out. Matt made sure to generously tip the cart-owner.

This attacker, it had turned out, lived with his parents and had dropped out of film-making class at the local community college five months ago after the abrupt and messy end to a long-term relationship. There was something about the way he sobbed while being arrested, and how banal he looked once his sunglasses were removed, that Matt found particularly unsettling. He was just some guy. They were all just some guy.

Regardless, the verdict was unanimous – Matt was not allowed outside anymore. Not alone, not under any circumstances, and if a venture out became absolutely necessary then only ever accompanied by a trusted, fully-inducted member of the Legion of Heroes. Jane’s preference was, of course, for his guardian to be her and her alone, but sometimes that wasn’t possible – Lady Dawn had places to be and people to rescue. At their home, too, it was decided (over Matt’s frustrated but impotent protests) that Matt needed a bodyguard; Acolytes were okay for this, so long as they’d proven trustworthy, but again Jane’s preference was for it to be a full Legion member or her. Preferably her. When it came to Matt, Jane Walker viewed anyone who wasn’t her with suspicion, if not of their intentions then at the very least their ability to competently keep her boyfriend from being shot. This paranoia was in part why the pair had moved into the Park River apartment rather than with Matt’s family at the Academy, as on balance the possibility of one of the new Acolytes being some sort of deep‑cover infiltrator seemed to Jane greater than the benefit of more numerous powers and eyes.

And so, only a few months after they’d first started dating, Matt and Jane had moved in together. It was a quick progression, as far as romance goes, but then again so was the whole of their relationship. It was somewhat understandable. Ever since they first kissed outside the hospital, Matt and Jane had been largely inseparable, with the latter determined to keep the former ever under her protective, possessive eye, and the former fast becoming the latter’s emotional anchor and support. These long hours of togetherness, coupled with their existing friendship and (let’s be honest) probably teenage hormones, meant that to Matt and Jane it felt like they had been together for years. Moving in, therefore, was simply a natural progression. And it had been going well; the two melded in around each other with natural ease, were supportive in their cohabitation, and it was only the threat of the outside world – really, the need to keep Matt safe from violence – that seemed to sow discord in their otherwise happy home.

Matt, for his part, found the constant need for protection equal parts ridiculous, understandable and exhausting. When he was outside yeah sure, the precautions made sense. But Jane’s insistence on having someone babysit him at all hours here, in this secret unmarked penthouse nobody knew about, with fingerprint scanners, bulletproof glass and blast-proofing, just seemed like overkill. Unnecessary, soul‑destroying overkill.

It'd been three months now, give or take, since the last attack. Matt had been preparing, mentally, to make the case to Jane that maybe the madness had passed – that perhaps they could relax a little, start transitioning towards eventual freedom, maybe just at home, so he could at least poop in privacy without someone listening to him grunt. And then came last night’s knob-jockey. Planned and poised to strike with laser precision in their one visible opening. They’d put so much work into security checks; the crew, the studio audience. The effing sandwich guy. And then somehow word of where they’d been leaving had got out, and some invisible butt-monkey had been there ready to put a bullet into Matt’s brain. Or not put a bullet in his brain. Matt tried not to think about the whole time-travel originality mechanics too hard, lest he go cross‑eyed and kill himself.

The decision by all his would-be assassins to use guns spoke to a pathology which Matt found interesting, if not disturbing. Although not exactly rare, guns weren’t overly easy to get nowadays, especially not new or high-functioning ones. Despite past attitudes, as he understood them, and the whole Second Amendment thing, Matt had never known this to cause a huge amount of consternation – after all, if you could shoot laser beams out of your eyes or throw trucks at people, not having a little pew-pew pea pistol for personal protection wasn’t really that big a deal. But the decision to specifically use firearms – that one deadly method explicitly preserved in the Constitution, that was so heavily linked to this notion of personal sovereignty and rights – spoke to a certain mindset or belief system amongst his attackers that was disturbingly unified, even if their actual affiliations weren’t. It would almost have been better, Matt pondered ruefully, if they had all been part of some shadowy organisation committed to killing him. An organisation, at least, could be found, combated, broken. But a bunch of random strangers, individually arriving at the same murderous conclusion? Christ. That was like trying to prevent cancer.

This latest attacker was exactly the same, or at least (Giselle reported) as far as Legion forensics could tell. A vacuum repairman in his mid-forties, no partner, eight-years divorced. He owned a single‑stroke fishing boat moored at a local marina, a kelpie-cross named Cyclone and a criminal history of nothing worse than the occasional drive-through red light and low-range blood-alcohol. And he had, seemingly completely independently and of his own accord, come to the unshakable conclusion that Matt Callaghan’s existence posed an intolerable threat to mankind. He was an ordinary person, who through simply reading on the internet, had become convinced beyond convincing that he needed to take someone’s life.

The idea scared Matt more than he cared to admit.