“Force Fields has been my life saver,” Tristan admitted.
“Have many brushes with death?” asked Zac.
He paused, and chewed his lip.
“I… I suppose there’s no point in… in hiding it…”
“Hiding what?” Taylor asked.
“See… I think the reason why people with this power don’t always get home is… well… they die. They get killed by whatever world they appear in. Or they like it so much they stay,” Tristan looked like he didn’t believe the last option. “I mean, look at us! We’re in a freaking battlefield! What if we had teleported right under a bomb, or in the direct line of fire? What if –”
“We get the idea,” Taylor replied.
He wished he could send Tristan some calming emotions, but no one was feeling calm right now.
“I’m scared,” he admitted softly.
Isaac, Taylor and Zac looked at each other.
“Hey, it’s okay man,” Zac said awkwardly. “I mean, you are teleporting around to unknown locations.”
“How often does the telportation happen?” Isaac asked.
Tristan shrugged.
“Sometimes it’s days, even weeks before I have a spasm. Other times it’s only a few seconds between teleports.”
“Like what happened to us before?”
“Yes.”
It was at this point that they were interrupted. A group of soldiers descended on their position.
“I say, what are you boys doing down there?” said the leader. “Get out of there at once.”
Isaac, Taylor and Zac looked at Tristan.
“I’ve found its best to play along,” he said.
Taking this advice, the boys climbed out of the hole.
“Okay, what unit are you with?” the leader demanded.
They looked at each other.
“Going AWOL?” his eyes narrowed. “Or are you with the enemy?”
Taylor took this moment to let loose a probe, touching the leaders’ mind to get some information, and was confused by the results. Since when were England and Germany allies in any war? He had hoped for something by which to come up with an appropriate apply, but he was so surprised by what he found, he had no idea what to say.
The leader glared at them for the silence that followed.
“Fine. You’re coming with us. This way.”
The boys were forced to step into line with the soldiers. Tristan manoeuvred himself so that he was in between Zac and Isaac, just in case he had a spasm.
They were walking for about an hour before they arrived at the camp. The leader went in to talk to someone about his prisoners.
“What do you suppose is going to happen?” Zac asked.
Tristan shrugged.
“It varies,” he replied.
Taylor took this moment to quietly tell them what he had found. Tristan nodded.
“In every universe I’ve gone to there’s always something different,” he said. “Sometimes it’s really small, like someone was born a different sex. Or in one place a man will marry a particular woman, but in another he marries another woman altogether. And sometimes it’s bigger, like black people treating white people like second class citizens, or America remaining part of the British monarchy or something. I even stayed for about a week in one place where it had just come out that ‘the works of William Bryant’ were really written by his wife, Catherine Shakespeare, and there was this huge woman’s lib thing happening because of it and -”
“And let me guess, they were burning their corsets in the street,” Zac grinned.
“Yeah, they were actually.”
“Really? I was only joking.”
“Well, they did. And guess whose idea it was.”
The two laughed. Isaac and Taylor looked at each other.
“Like father, like son?” Isaac suggested with a grin.
The moment was interrupted by the arrival of the leader, and his leader. But before anything could be said, Tristan felt a spasm start, and there was just enough time for him to latch onto the Hansons before they vanished from sight.