After we rest up, I expect I’ll have to go looking for them.
There seems to be plenty to do. Time is still spinning out of control. A lot of the Bibles where the old stories were changed, where A.J. showed up — have all been gathered up and hidden.
Though Thirty came by the other day to announce they’d found a previously undiscovered Book of Huldah in some caves outside Jerusalem.
She also said there were a bunch of Shakespeare plays being produced in small theaters around the United States and up in Canada — plays that no one had ever heard of before. Or at least, half the people who went had never heard of them, and the other half insisted they’d known about the plays all their lives.
There was even a sonnet about a wolf who reads love poems to people. Thirty showed it to me before she was called back to Washington.
“You can’t just keep leaving people scattered around history like this,” she told me. “You — or somebody — is going to have to go back to get them.”
I’m not the only one “scattering” them, but Thirty doesn’t want to think about that. And anyway, I don’t know how she’ll be able to use Danger Boy to go after people if I don’t have my cap. I was lucky just to get back here.
There is some good news, though: We analyzed the water that Thea brought back from Huldah’s pool — though only a few drops survived the journey. But that was enough. They’re finding out that some kind of algae grew in that pool, and it coated minerals in the water in such a way that the body could absorb them easier. Things like magnesium and zinc, according to what Thirty was saying.
I don’t get it all, but apparently, that could help your nervous system while the slow pox was attacking — your body could still send regular messages to itself and keep functioning and not get overwhelmed by the fake nerve-system signals created by the virus.
But that particular kind of algae seems to be extinct, too, so the DARPA people may try to duplicate it in one of their labs, make a kind of vitamin thing for people who catch the kind of slow pox Thea had. The “unauthorized” kind.
Maybe DARPA can do something useful, or at least something that doesn’t have to remain a big fat secret and can actually help people.
The DARPA people are studying Thea here, too. Because there’s also something in her blood that let her react to the minerals and stuff in the water, that allowed her body to heal, the way some people have certain kinds of antibodies, or the way my body lets me time travel, with the cap. It may help speed the healing or make the recovery more complete, helping them fight a disease that wasn’t supposed to still be around.
I have some projects of my own, too. Right now, with the information A.J. gave me, dad’s trying to find out more about Porject Split Second and what really happened to my mom back in the ’60s. If we can pinpoint her again and Dad can finally learn to control, and direct, what happens with his time spheres, maybe we can bring her home at last — get to her before Rolf does — and be a family again.
But for now, it’s just Dad and Thea and me in the Moonglow. Though Thirty made sure there are still guards outside, to control who gets in — and probably who gets out.
So when Andy comes back with his family, I’ll tell them to let him in.
According to the Comnet message I got, I think they’ll be here within the hour. His parents were still touring the West, and they were planning on coming back this way.
Plus, it’s official business, since his mom is working on slow pox.
I’ve been checking up on Bible stories, too, since we’ve been back, and Jeremiah was right. Jerusalem — Israel — was eventually rebuilt. The temple, everything. But then it was destroyed again. And built back. And then invaded again, and fought over, round and round.
Like lots of places in the world.
When Andy and I were little, the only fighting we worried about was the stuff happening inside our games:
“Listen: I know we’re not as young as we used to be, but do you still play Barnstormers? I do. I’m still making up new characters. Maybe I can show you one, if we ever see each other again. I call him Rubble-Rouser. He’s a power hitter, a kind of a Golem/Frankenstein creature, who can smash things to pieces…”
Smashing things to pieces is the easy part. It’s putting them back together that’s hard.
It’s a good day here in the Valley of the Moon. A good day in a crazy world with my friend Thea and my dad.
I see one of the Twenty-Fives sort of twitching in front of the house, reacting to something he hears.
The electric hum of a van engine.
Andy’s family.
It will be good to see him again. After all this time.
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 especially 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!
And don’t miss Eli Sands’s further adventures!
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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