It was testament to Matt’s years of mental discipline that he did not immediately jump up screaming. Instead, it was as if his mind and breathing had shut down – the apartment, the others, the sound of conversation, all of it spun in a blur, circling and pressing in against his forehead. Heat spread across his face; his hands clenched into fists, balled up so hard it felt like his fingernails were going to draw blood from his palms. Suddenly, despite the night air, Matt felt himself sweating. It was all he could do not to shake.
He needed… needed somewhere to…
Sitting beside him, still engrossed in the discussion, Jane remained oblivious to Matt’s sudden distress. Slowly, forcing himself to breathe, Matt moved his fingers over to her keyboard and typed with trembling hands into the chat box, letting her read what he wrote before deleting it.
Bathroom.
Jane spared him a brief glance and nodded. A second later somebody on the conference call said something she disagreed with, and in an instant she was back to arguing. Matt slowly pushed himself to his feet, his legs feeling like they were about to give way.
He stumbled away from the dining table, through his and Jane’s bedroom and into the bathroom beyond. Trembling, his hands closed the door, and the sound of discussion in the living room fell muted. Suddenly there was silence. Suddenly, he was alone.
Matt sat lid-closed on the toilet and sucked in deep, shuddering breaths.
Almost a year ago, a Greek psychic named Cassandra Atropos had lured him and Jane to an abandoned Albanian farmstead by pretending to be clairvoyant. Rather than trying to hurt them, Cassandra’s goal seemed to have been to distract Klaus Heydrich, who had been hunting clairvoyant powers, and to give Matt just enough information to manoeuvre him where he needed to be. Chief amongst this information were numbers for the following month’s lottery. The point though was never for Matt to play them and win – the numbers were a red herring, readied evidence which Matt could release at the proper moment to keep his true humanity under wraps.
Except the numbers hadn’t actually come from Cassandra. Cassandra was merely the vessel. The true architect behind the whole scheme had been the Time Child, and in this instance, the lottery had been the Time Child’s way of keeping him safe.
And now the lottery was trying to kill him.
Which meant the Time Child was trying to kill him.
The Time Child had killed him.
Ho-lee shi-
Matt felt like he was going to hurl. All these attacks. All these coincidences. They’d spent ages discussing the kid, post Detroit, post everything – hours of huddled conversation, theorising safe from prying ears and eyes. Who they were, what they wanted, how the hell they’d just shown up. But the sudden discovery of the lottery ticket, the hand of fate swung suddenly not to save Matt’s life but to end it, turned all that on its head. Because inherent in their thinking, Matt realised now, was an assumption neither of them had realised they’d been making: that the Child was benevolent. They had assumed the boy – if it even was a boy, if it wasn’t just something that looked like a boy, if it was even real, if it was even human – had their best interests at heart, because it had seemed to be working to keep them alive, or at least move them away from imminent slaughter. Then on top of that there’d been Cassandra’s rantings, her proclamations that they were watched over and loved, which had dovetailed into a nice little presumption that the Child genuinely cared for their safety, that it was on their side.
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But that didn’t need to be true. Because Cassandra could’ve been a liar or been lied to, set up to say exactly what the Child wanted or see what it wanted, like Matt had done when the Black Death psychically scoured his mind. What if the Child had deliberately set out to create an impression that it was harmless? What if it had wanted them to think it was the good guy, or if, wait, if it was actually trying to be the good guy, but had such a wildly twisted understanding of right and wrong-
Or simply a broader view. Matt felt his face pale. What if the Time Child’s mission hadn’t simply been saving the world from the Black Death, but saving the world in general – to protect against both that enormous initial threat, and all threats yet to come? Threats not just to one person, but to all of superhumanity? And after destroying a tyrannical blood-based empath, what if the next biggest threat looming ahead on the timeline was something completely different – something like the ability to take away people’s powers and-
Oh no. Oh God. It all made sense. One of Matt’s biggest questions, something he’d never quite understood – if the Child had simply wanted to stop the Black Death, why hadn’t he just made a vaccine from Matt’s blood? Jane had thought, and he’d accepted, that it was because the process would have been too slow, that even if they’d stabbed the Black Death with some sort of anti-powers serum Heydrich would still have had too much time to run loose – but what if that wasn’t it? What if the reason was actually simpler? What if the Child never wanted an anti‑powers vaccine to exist, because the future if an anti‑powers vaccine existed was worse?
Oh God. It all made sense now. What did they actually know about the Time Child? That it played the big picture? That it was more than happy to sacrifice people to prevent disaster? And what would be the next greatest crisis looming on the horizon, after Heydrich was eliminated? Easy; the death of the superhuman. Matt’s blood, the banality inside him, extracted and extrapolated, used to put Earth’s population back under authoritarian control. To make powers a privilege, something governments didn’t have to freely tolerate, something that could be gifted or taken.
The Second Amendment people weren’t crazy. He was the next great threat to mankind.
Without even realising it, Matt had got to his feet, and now frantically paced back and forth around the confined space of the bathroom.
Of course. Of course! It all made sense now. The Child had needed him to defeat Heydrich, but the minute that was done Matt was no longer an asset but a terrible, unwitting threat. The longer he lived, the longer he publicly existed, the higher the chance of his genetic makeup getting out. They’d been vigilant so far, but in a year? Ten years? Fifty? Every move he made, every goddamn flake of dandruff, all carried with it the potential to subjugate humanity… so the Child wanted him dead. The Child needed him dead. Not out of maliciousness. But for the future of Earth.
The room spun before Matt’s eyes.
What did he do? What the hell did he do?! This wasn’t something he could prevent, this wasn’t something he could escape from; because on the one hand there was the Child, a literal time traveller, an elusive almost god-like being seemingly capable of being anywhere and doing anything, whose goal now was to kill him – but on the other hand, there was what happened if the Child failed. The looming dystopic future it was murdering him to prevent. Oh God. Matt’s legs gave way and he staggered back onto the toilet. If he died, the world lived. If he lived, the world lost.
Breathe. Oh God, breathe, he tried to tell himself. A dozen mental calming exercises rattled fruitlessly around his brain, clattering like coloured play blocks. He didn’t know- there was no- but so many things made sense now. How the killers kept finding him. How them leaving the Today Show had got out. For months now, he’d had this niggling feeling that something weird was happening. Now he understood why.
There was a conspiracy to kill him – just not in the way he’d thought.