Breathe. Oh my God. Breathe.

Well that does it, Matt thought, his head lolling deliriously upwards to look at his ghost‑white reflection in the bathroom mirror, I’m screwed. There was no way out of this one. Like he’d had some wins, you know, he was reasonably resourceful, but holy crap this was a freaking time traveller. How was he supposed to win against a time traveller? He might as well have chopped off both hands and attempted to swim the Pacific.

Except- wait. Hold on. Wait. Suddenly, Matt’s back shot up, the top of his spine banging painfully against the back of the toilet. His heart surged with a sudden, elated rush. He was alive. Impossibly, illogically, he- he was still alive! Abruptly, Matt’s brow furrowed. Why was he still alive? That didn’t make sense. The Child could have easily killed him. It could have… well heck, any number of things – a terrifying cornucopia of options actually, Matt realised, his mind suddenly awash with Wile E. Coyote-style visions of death. Traffic accident. Air bubble in his hospital line. Ball-bearing dropped out of an aircraft, cyanide in his milkshake, a precisely placed bot fly. God, any one of the many, many bullets that had been shot at him. But no. The Child hadn’t done any of those things.

Why hadn’t it?

It took Matt a few seconds of staring intently brow furrowed at the floor tiles before the answer suddenly came. Jane. Jane had the Child’s powers. Admittedly, she was still a rank amateur when it came to using them, but nevertheless, she had done it. She had successfully skimmed the surface of madness and travelled through time to save his life. Jane, the complicating factor.

Suddenly, Matt found himself leaning forward on the toilet like he was fighting a very serious poo. What if, he reasoned: what if getting Jane to copy Captain Dawn had been the only way to bring down Heydrich? And what if, logically, the only way to achieve that had been for her to take the Child’s powers? What if, to the Child, that entire play was calculated – what if they had gambled on Jane getting what they needed, going where they showed her, and then not using the ability further? Or even better, eventually giving it up? Because – and Matt’s face suddenly paled – she’d been under pressure to give it up. He had been pressuring her. And all the Child had to do was wait for her to listen – wait for Jane’s resistance to buckle against Matt’s hammering, wait for her to question herself, to believe her boyfriend’s insistent argument that it was ‘noble’ to give up power over time. And then the moment she did, well, there’d be no recourse. The Child could kill Matt immediately, without mercy, bullet through the back of the head. But so long as Jane was still standing there, so long as she held the Child’s power, any sudden and mysterious death Matt might suffer would not only send her reaching for the ability, but might also make her suspicious. Might make her practise. Might make her get better.

Holy crap. Okay. Matt’s head was reeling. That was why there’d been so many unsuccessful assassins. That was why each one had come close, but he’d never truly got hurt. Oh my God. It all made sense now. They hadn’t been meant to succeed, they’d been meant to make this last one seem sincere – to draw suspicion away from the fact that it was all a setup, that it was anything other than inevitable, some random lunatic acting of their own accord. And then, what had been the hope after? That Jane would be too scared to attempt time travel? That she would, but be unable to go deep enough? That she’d try and be swept away?

A dark cloud fell over Matt’s face. Because that, too, struck him as a plan most convenient. Jane destroys herself trying to save him; two rats with one rock. In one fell swoop, the Time Child would have eliminated him, the greatest threat to superhumans, and simultaneously destroyed the most powerful being on the planet, the only other person who could time travel. Who, for all Matt knew, might be number three on the Child’s hit list – below him and the Black Death.

Jesus Christ. It felt like someone had replaced his bones with electricity. Count to ten, Matt tried to tell himself; one, two three-. He closed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair, his fingers trembling, focusing on the count – only to abruptly stop at six and for his eyes to fly open, his mind racing with another unbidden thought.

He’d made another potentially erroneous assumption, Matt realised. He’d assumed – because he supposed he hadn’t seen any evidence to the contrary, and he guessed the magnitude of the Child’s ability had just seemed to imply – but he’d assumed the Child’s power was unique. That it was (excluding Jane) one of those one-of-a-kind powers, sort of like Captain Dawn’s, that through sheer luck or coincidence only happened to develop once. But what if it wasn’t? What if there were other people, other ‘Children’ out there in the time web, with different ideas and agendas, competing goals? What if it wasn’t the Child – their Child – trying to kill him; what if it was another one? What if the reason all the assassination attempts had failed wasn’t because the Child had set them up, but because they had prevented them?

Holy crap. Matt leaned forward, staring intently at the white cupboards beneath the sink. Okay, God, this was- well, this was somehow even more distressing. One mysterious time gremlin was concerning enough, but two? More? How many? What if there were hundreds of these little critters out there, shooting back and forth across the cosmos from thousands of years in the superhuman future, each infinitely screwing and unscrewing and re-screwing the timeline? What if whether he lived or died wasn’t a contingency; what if his very existence was a war?

I… screw me sideways, Matt thought. His brain was so hot it was practically cooking, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if any second now he started smelling burnt toast. He went to sit down again, only to realise he already was. Jesus. What did he do? Because this theory, though perhaps more complicated, was no less feasible, and definitely carried with it no less existential threat. A dozen time travellers didn’t make things better, it made them worse. Much worse. So far he’d only seen their – “their” in inverted commas – Child, the pale blue‑eyed critter, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe the others were more inconspicuous. Maybe there were rules, politics, even alliances. God help us. How in the mother‑loving heck was he supposed to navigate competing omniscient time factions? What the hell was he supposed to do?

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Breathe, Matt reminded himself, just breathe, although a panicked, snarky bit of his subconscious quickly added ‘because that’s about all you can do’. Think logically. Sort out the pieces. Which was of course freaking impossible once dumb time travel and multiple time travellers started zip‑zap-zooping all over the place with their pale skin and stupid galaxy eyes. This wasn’t even multiverse theory, this was… he didn’t even know what this was, chaos! Still. Breathe. Practical steps. What did he need to do, personally? Forget the road, focus on where to put your feet. What was the best thing he could do, right now, to maximise his chances of survival?

But did we want to survive, came a thought, blunt and unbidden. The notion took Matt slightly by surprise, as he had never considered himself even vaguely suicidal. Nevertheless, in the interest of fairness, he turned the question round and mulled it over for a few minutes, gazing with a put-off sort of expression at the drain in the tiled floor. Finally, he shooed away the notion. Yes, he did want to live actually. He acknowledged the lingering ‘blood-stolen, tyrannical anti-powers-vaccine’ potential was a problem, and probably legitimately a threat. But the precursor to that was getting his blood stolen, and the thus-far-unspoken corollary that followed was no one being able to retrieve it. Because it wouldn’t be sufficient, he now realised and reasoned, for him and Jane to simply drop the ball – the other side, the quote-unquote ‘bad guys’, had to take the ball and run the field with it. They had to get his genes and hold them long enough to make their vaccine – and in the intervening period there was Jane, all hundred suns of her, and very few places in the world she could and would not blow up. A snipped‑off lock of hair or a vial of blood wasn’t much use to anyone if it was incinerated by golden hellfire before it could be studied and reproduced.

So, alright then. Matt wanted to keep living. It was also morally justifiable, somewhat. Not quite a revelation, but good to resolve nonetheless. It was not necessary for Matt to be killed, and he rather enjoyed being alive. So that was settled. And if that was the way it was going to be, hypothetically, then was it possible to thread the needle so to speak, time‑wise and fate-wise, between having his blood stolen and ending up prematurely dead? It might be hard, Matt acknowledged; but hadn’t that sort of been what they’d already been doing? Maybe not consciously – or not conscious of the looming extra‑temporal element – but they’d been managing. Maybe he just needed to be more cautious on his slink back to normality. Maybe he needed to see Jane’s precautions as protecting him not just from overzealous gun‑nuts, but also against the very thing those zealots were trying to prevent. Plus homicidal time children.

Matt pinched his nose. Jesus Christ. When had this become his life?

Okay. Matt took a few deep breaths. So. He should continue playing safe. But did that matter? As he’d already acknowledged, if a competent time traveller wanted to kill him, well, there wasn’t much Matt could do but die. But no, Matt suddenly realised, that was the wrong way to look at it. Whether or not time travellers were going to kill him was entirely outside his control. It was like being struck by a meteorite or dying of an aneurysm, or having the Earth suddenly collide with a micro black hole. There was nothing he could do about it, so worrying was pointless. Time travellers shooting him or poisoning him or, who the hell knows, replacing his soap with a bar of anthrax, were dangers so far above his paygrade that trying to prevent them was ludicrous. They would either get him, or they wouldn’t. Life was just full of those inherent risks.

Suddenly, it hit Matt that maybe nothing he did mattered anyway. These were time travellers. They could literally change the future. They could see and hear him right now, knew exactly what he was going to do and why he was going to do it. Except – and again Matt forced himself to take a step back – that wasn’t necessarily true. It was tempting, he realised as he reviewed his own chain of thought, to equate time travel with omnipotence. But just like with the power of Dawn, when you really got down to it, time travel was just a power. It didn’t make you special, it didn’t make you God. The Black Death had still been able to get some hits on Jane, and she’d still been defenceless against telepathy (which she now rectified by taking PsyBlock). She could still be tricked, could still be caught, could still be neutralised. Remember the story she’d told him about the original Captain Dawn and that neutraliser priest in Ireland? Powers be damned, that had stumped the whole Legion. And the Time Child – or Time Children, whatever there was – had to be the same. It was just a power. A big, daunting, very scary power – but still. There was no reason they wouldn’t be vulnerable to telepathy or neutralisation or any other kind of attack. What had Cassandra said, all those months ago? Something about an airgap? It seemed like the Child had been reluctant to get too near Heydrich, maybe for this exact reason – because it was all well and good to be alive to possibilities, but another thing entirely to gamble on your reactions being faster than superspeed or telepathic thought.

So assuming the Time Child was playing by the same rules – and honestly, at this point that was a pretty big assumption – but assuming it wasn’t entirely divorced from the rest of the universe, that meant it had weaknesses. That meant, like all superpowered people, it only had the one ability. Except if it was an empath, Matt corrected himself, except no, he then corrected himself back, it couldn’t be. Jane had absorbed a power from it, and an empath couldn’t absorb powers from another empath. That didn’t work for some reason, he’d learned, they could only absorb from an original holder. So the Child must have been an innate time traveller – which meant it wouldn’t have any other powers. Which meant – and Matt’s heart suddenly raced, and he felt himself becoming disproportionately excited – that it couldn’t be psychic.

It can’t know what I’m thinking, Matt realised, and he almost punched the air. He had something. Now, even if it was just inside his head – and screw you, he was Matt Callaghan, there was no ‘just’ about it – even if it was just internal, he had somewhere he was safe. Even if the Time Child was working against him and even if it could supernaturally predict what he was going to do, it still couldn’t see his thoughts. It could intuit, sure, and listen in; but so long as Matt kept his mouth shut there was no way the Child could know.

Matt rose quietly, his eyes unfocused, and once more began to pace with slow, deliberate steps, gently rolling one shoulder at a time. Okay – he had to be careful. Extremely careful. He couldn’t – and he felt his excitement fade somewhat – he couldn’t discuss any of this with Jane. Literally not a word. The instant Matt articulated his suspicions, the Time Child could hear. So he couldn’t tell anyone. He had to… he had to somehow figure out a way to confirm that a time traveller was trying to kill him, and then figure out a way to stop said time traveller, without ever letting on that that was what he was trying to do. With nothing but bare hands and thoughts. Also there were potentially multiple time travellers. Jesus. Nothing like achievable goals.

But there was no alternative. If Matt said something to Jane, the Child might notice.

And then maybe it’d have no choice but to wipe them out.