“Arlington Howard!” Howe shouts. “Have you tried on the hat yet?”
Howard narrows his eyes suspiciously. “What hat?”
“The one that made you crazy!”
Howard’s eyes narrow even more.
“Oh, this is all a test, isn’t it, some kind of elaborate holographic recreation. Is it to find out if I’m still loyal? Is that it?”
Who is he talking to? Who else does he think is listening? He’s obviously been back here awhile, but hasn’t accepted it yet. And he looks terrible. I almost feel sorry for him.
“All the files you kept from me! You already knew about an ‘M. Sands’ who worked on a secret time-travel project during World War Two — and disappeared. The same project was taken over by a ‘Dr. Royd’ right after the war. You knew all this before you ever assigned me to be Sandusky’s handler!”
Disappeared again? Mom? Where was she now? And what’s a “handler?”
“And what about the file on another scientist, a Dr. Royd, recruited by our government right after World War II, who worked on different time travel research, and likewise went missing? Is somebody trying to make me disappear, too?”
“The man is touched, sir!” Howard points at Mr. Howe. “And dangerous.”
“And you, you, Mr. Arlington Howard. The family had to shorten its name after you vanished.”
“Vanished!?” Howard looks startled. “Where? When?”
“Because you were busy helping slaves escape when you were supposed to be the Treasury agent protecting the president!”
“What!? Never!”
“That’s the story that’s been passed down from generation to generation.”
“Why, Mr. Howard, I didn’t know you had it in you,” Sally says to him.
“I don’t. I won’t!”
“But Mr. Howe, shouldn’t you be proud of him if he really helped slaves?” I ask.
Mr. Howe’s eyes narrow. “Oh, yes, ask me a question and test me, Danger Boy. That story was a cover. I mean, who kept records of federal employees in 1800? Who cared? But you might, if the only trace of someone who deserts their post is a set of clothes — and this.”
Mr. Howe waves the shimmering cloth at me.
“The sklaan!” Clyne chirps. “Plasmechanical extra skin, for moderating temperature extremes. Nicely engineered. Once used by Thea.”
“The same material. Arlington Howard disappeared —”
“I did not!” Howard protests.
“—and all that was found were some of his clothes, and a snippet of this… this alien material, with cellular and molecular structures not found anywhere on Earth. It was stored in a restricted archive they didn’t want me to see. But they retrieved the sample after they found this”— and he shakes the sklaan again— “in Europe a few years ago. And because my distant ancestor was found with this same cloth on him, I find that I am a suspect. I am studied because perhaps I am something other that what I claim to be!”
“The sklaan is not meant for causing disruptions,” Clyne says. “Only comfort.”
“Comfort! Did Danger Boy’s father steal this from my office in order to comfort somebody?”
“Hmmm, intriguing,” Clyne continues. “Did Sandusky-sire say what he did take it for?”
“What for? Because you want to cut me out! You want me to be the last to know! Thirty! Sandusky! I don’t know who or how or why, but I won’t take the fall for this! I won’t be set up! I want to keep my security clearance!”
“That is quite a fever-dream of a story, sir,” Jefferson tells him. “What, pray, is ‘security clearance’?”
“And what manner of man are you?” Howard asks.
“Me? You’re just a hologram in some kind of elaborate test I’m going through! Why don’t you ask about him” — he lifts his chains and points to Clyne — “since he’s an alien trying to invade the planet! Or her” — he points to Thea — “since she’s some kind of witch or priestess from Egypt. Or him.” He points to me. “Ask him why Danger Boy keeps putting everyone else at risk by not doing exactly what we tell him to!”
So that’s it. Basically, Mr. Howe is upset with me because I don’t do what I’m told. What about all the risk I’m in? What about the fact that I don’t really have a family anymore?
Heck. Mr. Howe apparently has more family, at the moment, than I do.
“Your man is right, Mr. President. This fellow’s touched. As are they all. Including, I’m afraid, your Mr. Howard. Let’s just burn this site and get the soldiers to march everyone back to town.” It’s Claiborne again. He seems to be getting a little nervous himself. And the slaves, who’d been trying to escape, seem to be scared and angry. They’re shifting around a lot, and they’re making the soldiers and the farmers — the ones with the weapons — jittery as well.
“And to what hat did you refer?” Howard asks again. He seems to be taking it personally.
“Perhaps this hat?” Banglees says casually. “He was trying to bury it by the river when they caught him.” He points to Mr. Howe. “I jus’ dug it up.”
He tosses a muddy blob of cloth down on the ground. Then he takes out a big buck knife and peels the material back.
And there, dirty and wet, but still in one piece, is my Seals cap.
Chapter Twenty-four
Eli: Closed Loop
February 1805
Banglees slams his knife through it.
“Do not touch it. It ’as strange powers, I think.”
I look at Howe and his shredded clothes. He must have torn off pieces of his jacket to wrap around the hat. But if he’s had it with him or near him, the whole time, how has it affected him?
“I was trying to keep it safe!” Howe shouts to no one in particular. “I wasn’t going to use it! Isn’t that part of the test!?”
“He must have wound up in possession of it,” Thea tells me, her voice quiet but urgent, “when he and I fell through time together. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” I tell her. She lifts the chains to brush her fingers against my hand, to thank me, I guess, or let me know it’s okay. It’s a little bit corny, too — though not like that kiss — and I don’t know if I should brush her back because that portable soup is running down my arm and out my sleeve, and I’d get it all over her, and then she’d feel greasy…
Greasy.
I start to move my wrist inside the irons. The soup is making my arm slippery.
“Give me the hat!” Howard yells, He leaps at Banglees, who grabs it up and twirls it on the end of his knife.
“For a price, perhaps. Remember, I ’ad to find it.”
My poor Seals cap. “Hey, be careful, there’s a Joe DiMaggio autograph inside!”
Everyone looks at me like they’re going to add me to the “crazy” list.
“We need to put this place to the torch, Mr. President,” Claiborne insists again. “We need to master this situation with a firm hand.”
The restlessness of the escaped slaves is now all mixed together. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them. They’re frightened for their lives. It’s almost like I can feel what they’re feeling.
Know.
No what? Know what? Who’s talking? Why is my lingo-spot itching so much? “Know what?” I say out loud, without really intending to.
Jefferson, at least, doesn’t look at me like I’m nuts. In fact, he nods.
“The young squire is right, governor. We need to know exactly what mysteries we’re facing here. What drove the slaves to this spot. What science possesses this lad’s strange headgear. And where on earth this incognitum comes from.” Jefferson paces around while he talks, and he winds up standing directly in front of Clyne.
“Not from this Earth, mammal man.”
Jefferson looks around. “I think the enigmas we face here are much greater than the question of why slaves are escaping. We know why slaves escape.” He looks at the faces around him in the torchlight. “But we do not know what that strange apparatus i
s,” he waves his hand at Clyne’s ship. “Or how the bones of Brassy came to be buried here. Or how the incognitum came to know her.”
“I do not know her! I just tk-tk! deduce! She was a prime nexus! She had a history-changing snkt life ahead. But that was stolen from her. Everything changed knkt! on this spot.”
“Changed, you say, incognitum? For the better, or…?”
“Or for much more long-term sadness. It’s unknown sktkt! until your history works itself out.”
“Maybe, Tom,” Sally says to Jefferson, “in Brassy’s dying, there’s a lesson. About the value of things. Of persons.”
“You let her talk to you like that?” Claiborne asks.
“I think,” Jefferson continues, sighing heavily, “we need to arrange a way of keeping what happened here a secret. Until we can deduce what has transpired and what it means for America.”
“Are you saying we need to act to protect national security, sir?”
“I’m a little uncomfortable with the broadness of that phrase, Mr. Howard. But perhaps, yes. And I would like to start by relieving you of your duties until we determine your involvement with these strange personages.”
“No. No! You cannot do this to me! You will not! You must not!” Howard looks around, like he’s cornered, trapped, though no one moves toward him. Instead, he moves toward Mr. Howe — his descendant. And snatches the sklaan out of his hand. “Setting me up to take the fall with this! No! A thousand times I tell you, no! I was the one trying to maintain order! Me! Me!” And with another shake of the sklaan, he turns and sprints away toward the river, disappearing into the darkness.
He was acting just like Mr. Howe. Or, at least, the way Mr. Howe always acted until he showed up here in New Orleans.
A couple of the soldiers turn to pursue him. “No,” Jefferson says. “Desist. Let him run. We will look for him in the morning. He can’t get far tonight. And we can’t afford any more people getting lost.”
“Closed loop,” Clyne says.
“What, incognitum?”
“Closed loop. He has the sklaan now. So it can be found. And then hidden by your government. And brought back again. Closed loops. Prime nexuses. Temporal displacement. Tk-tk-tng! Much to discuss. All fascinating. Do you study such things?”
Howe stands, still a little surprised, looking at the spot where his distant relative disappeared into the trees. And then, much to my surprise, he turns to me. And isn’t mad or hysterical about something.
“I don’t want to end up like him, Eli. I don’t want to disappear.”
“None of us do.”
“She didn’t want to disappear, either.” Thea nods toward Brassy’s grave. “I wonder who she was? Or if we’ll ever know.”
“Maybe we do know,” Howe says. “Maybe it’s another secret file I haven’t come across yet.”
The whole time this is going on, I wiggle my soup-drenched wrist around more. And more. Until I almost have it —
And then I do. I have one of my wrists out of the iron. But I clench my hands together, so no one knows yet.
“So what am I to do with this hat?” Banglees waves it around on the tip of his knife. “Does anyone care to buy it from me?”
“That’s government property,” Jefferson tells him. “I am ordering you to hand it over.”
“I think, right now, it ees private property.”
“You heard the president!” Mr. Howe lunges at Banglees. The trapper steps back in surprise but flashes his knife at Mr. Howe without thinking. Howe steps to the side, but the knife just catches him on the shoulder.
My Seals cap goes flying.
“Guards! Guards!” The governor is frantically calling his men over. After the fidgety slaves, Mr. Howard’s dash into the woods, and the fight between Banglees and Mr. Howe breaking out, none of the soldiers is sure what to do, but a couple run toward us.
Clyne, who had been trying to avoid making sudden moves, so that the armed men wouldn’t get too nervous, now jumps back and forth near his ship. “Watch out for the time sphere! Watch out for the gng! sphere!”
“Put it to the flame, Mr. President!” Governor Claiborne grabs one of the torches, using the distraction to start lighting leaves and branches near Clyne’s ship. There’s smoke, and the slow lick of flames.
The cap meanwhile, has landed near the feet of Sally Hemings. She looks at me. She looks at Thea. Then she picks up a stick and uses it to toss the hat in Thea’s direction.
“Is it part of the key,” she asks, “to the doorway?”
I nod. Thea is reaching down to pick up the hat.
“Don’t, Thea! Don’t touch it!” I yell.
Howe and Banglees are still fighting. Howe uses his wrist irons to swing at Banglees. The knife has been knocked away, and the trapper’s trying to get it back.
With the spreading fire, some of the slaves have jumped to their feet. “Halt!” Claiborne yells. And then to the soldiers: “Do not fire until you hear my order!”
“No firing! No firing!” Jefferson yells back.
In the growing melee, a soldier knocks Thea down into the mud and is about to kick her. That’s when I raise my arms. I jump toward Thea, and shove the surprised soldier out of the way. He gets knocked back a few feet and crashes into the equally surprised Banglees
I pull Thea up from the ground and with my free hand, reach for the cap.
“Clyne!” I yell. “Let’s go!”
“Wait!” Jefferson pleads, “Do not leave!”
Howe staggers over to me, and collapses as he grabs my ankle. “Must protect Danger Boy… Can’t let anything else go wrong…”
“Don’t let them escape!” the governor shouts. “Stop them!” Some of the soldiers aim their guns at us.
Banglees has picked up his knife and is going to throw it at me.
Clyne’s tail knocks the blade back out of Banglees’s hand.
“Zut alors!”
“Fire!” Claiborne screams.
“Do not fire!” Jefferson yells back. “That is an order!”
It looks like one of the soldiers is intending to listen to the governor rather than the president. He sights us down his rifle.
The sky isn’t quiet anymore. There’s the crackle of more lightning in the air.
The soldier begins to squeeze the trigger.
Then Sally steps in front of him, blocking his view of us.
The soldier stops, confused, releases his finger, and looks to the governor, then to Jefferson, to figure out what to do next.
That gives Clyne enough time to jump over to us. I pull Thea closer. Howe’s fingers are locked on my ankle.
“Never chrono — zzzp! — traveled without a ship before! Hope it—”
I put the cap on my head. It’s torn and dirty, but I still feel the tingling.
“—works!”
I see the lights of the Fifth Dimension begin to swirl around me, replaced by colors that grow longer and longer…
…as the world of Lewis, Clark, North Wind Comes, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, Kentuck, and Gassy disappears.
My friends are still holding on to me and I won’t let go of them.
And this time, wherever we’re headed, we’ll get there together.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As the whole “Danger Boy” series migrates and morphs from traditionally published form into the ebook you now hold (or, at least, read on your screen), all the people who were there at the beginning, in those four previous acknowledgements, should consider themselves -- these many moons later -- still thanked, loved, appreciated: the friends and family who provided the encouragement (or sometimes the literal space to write), my former editors at (sadly now defunct) Tricycle Press, and later Candlewick, who helped whip those early manuscripts into shape. All of them -- all of you -- thanks so much for being, well, time travelers, and riding with these stories from their past, into the future.
At the present moment -- for that is all we time travelers ever actually have -- I want to espec
ially thank my agent, Kelly Sonnack, for being such a good steward of the books’ conversion to the format you currently enjoy, and as well, longstanding “Danger Boy” cover artist Michael Koelsch, who took many of his “boss” covers from the book series and worked his magic so they’d look equally cool in download land.
And of course, thank you, dear reader, for taking this story into your home, and, hopefully, your heart. Happy voyaging!
Don’t miss Eli Sands’s further adventures!
DANGER BOY: Episode 4
City of Ruins
When Thea is infected by slow pox, Eli and his friends head to ancient Jerusalem to find a cure.
DANGER BOY: Episode 5:
Fortune’s Fool
The Danger Boy stories reach a climax in the forthcoming adventure that ends in a reckoning from which no one returns unchanged.
Mark Williams is a fiction writer, playwright, and journalist. He is the author of the LA Times Bestselling Danger Boy series for young adults. As a journalist, he’s written for Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and The Los Angeles Business Journal, and is currently a columnist for Below the Line, covering Hollywood and its discontents. His plays have been produced in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London, and he’s written comic books, short stories, and video game scripts. He teaches workshops on creative writing, genre studies, and storytelling for the Walt Disney Company and other places. He lives in Southern California, raising a couple “danger boys” of his own.
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