Dragon Sword

by Mark London Williams

  Thea still has her eyes closed, and she’s still wearing my cap. It occurs to me that this ship, for her, is like a giant version of the Seals hat to me. The two halves of a time-traveling whole. Maybe not yet, but if the ship keeps thinking and changing like she says, could it grow to become part of her? What if she starts to need it for more than just travel?

  My stomach’s starting to quease out on me big time, so to take my mind off it, I try to make up a Barnstormer game in my head. Merlin is the new manager for my team, and I’ll give him the power to alter one pitch each inning after it’s been thrown — but one pitch only. And he can’t wait till the inning’s over and decide retroactively, either.

  That lasts till somewhere in the top of the first inning — I can’t concentrate. Then I remember the letter I have in my pocket, the one from Mom. Maybe that will help me focus. But it’s not like this is an airplane ride and you can flip through a magazine. Even if I do get to read the letter, it will seem like a dream later.

  I don’t even know if the paper survived the last dunking in the lake. I fish around in my pockets and find the little mirror that woman was giving away at the Fairmont Hotel. The one from the old radio show. It seems like that was ages ago. Or ages from now? Hard to tell in the Fifth Dimension.

  I finally come across the letter, a little scrunched up. It’s covered in a plastic that feels like waxed paper, which is maybe all they had back then.

  Dear lovely Sandman —

  I’d completely forgotten about that nickname my mom had for Dad; no one’s been around to use it for a long time. I know the letter’s for him, and maybe I shouldn’t read it. Maybe some things about your parents, you’re not supposed to know.

  I miss my beautiful family. I miss seeing our son grow. I miss how your eyes look in the morning.

  WHAM!

  The ship suddenly jolts.

  I need to tell you things. Things I haven’t been able to mention to anyone here. Things that scare me —

  WHAM!

  and will scare you, too.

  I can’t focus on the letter. I’m reading lines at random, and the whole thing is making me feel sad. Plus something’s wrong with the ship. Thea’s hands are knocked off the controls, and Clyne looks around to make sure we’re okay. “Strange forces,” he says. “Previously ct! unexperienced.”

  I check behind me, and Rolf is still fastened in. “What forces?”

  “I don’t know,” Thea replies. “A wave…with an emotional charge. Did anyone else feel that strong pang of sorrow?”

  “I felt a near-physical direction change,” Clyne said. “Which is snkk! truly odd since there are no ‘directions’ in this sector of spacetime.”

  Then I see what she added at Fort Point, and my stomach drops even more: I don’t know if I can ever come home…

  What? The line jumps out at me from the letter. I go back to re-read it before the next shock wave comes.

  “Roy Rogers —”

  I’m going to ignore Rolf. Though the sound of his creepy whisper has changed….

  ROLF!

  I turn, and his eyes are bugging out. The bunk bed has completely oozed around him: He’s being absorbed into the ship!

  I must have shouted his name, because Thea and Clyne shoot over to me. As much as I despise this guy, I can’t let the ship suck him up.

  “The sword will still be ours someday. I’ll come back for it.”

  That voice — his mouth isn’t even moving. It’s…the ship. The ship is speaking, or somehow amplifying Rolf’s thoughts as it sucks him into the walls. It’s not that I’m crazy about saving Rolf — but I’m afraid of what could happen if the craft fuses with him.

  I tug on his feet, but it’s like he’s slowly slipping underwater. I can see his face inside the walls of the ship.

  I yank harder, but it’s like pulling him out of a sea of glue. He’s almost budging, but then…

  The ship starts to suck me in! My arm is already inside the wall….

  “Thea!”

  She’s trying to pull me back, but it’s not working. Besides, she and Clyne have to hop now, because the floor is getting sticky under their feet.

  “Thea!”

  “What, Eli?”

  “Give…me…my…cap.”

  “What?”

  “The cap!”

  I reach out with my free arm and just barely take it from her outstretched hand. I get it on my head right before my face is sucked into the ship’s paneling, and FOOM!

  It works.

  My WOMPER-charged cap has popped me outside the ship — and I grab on, before I’m pulled away into one of the Fifth Dimension’s swirling portals. I don’t want to travel by myself. Like an astronaut on a space walk gone bad, I’m trying to stay connected to the ship until I can figure out what to do next.

  Then a hand pops out of the ship’s side.

  It could only be Rolf’s. I take it and keep pulling it through. With my other hand, I grab on to the rung of a ladder built into the ship’s exterior. I eventually get a whole arm and part of a shoulder free.

  I let go of the ship and float back into the void a little bit, while I keep hold of the arm, pulling. Eventually, I get his whole body out. “Hold on to me!” I yell. “We’ve got to try to get the others.”

  You have to shout, and even then, it still sounds like you’re miles away.

  I try to float us back toward the Saurian ship, which is now wildly morphing. The colors on the hull are changing rapidly, mirroring the colors outside. It makes a low, throaty singing sound, like a drawn-out moan.

  I don’t know what to expect from Rolf. There’s no question he looks terrible. His hair is whiter and his face more pockmarked than the last time he came through the Fifth Dimension. And the journey isn’t over yet. But even if I’m not holding my breath for a thank-you, I don’t expect him to start scratching and clawing my face.

  “No!” I shout at him. “Hold on to me!”

  But Rolf keeps grabbing, kicking, and trying to throw punches. We’re tumbling together, toward one of the color bursts looming behind him. It’s too bright for me to look at directly…too intense.

  But that gives me an idea. I reach into my pocket for the little mirror — while trying to hold him back. Rolf hangs on like a wolverine, and I can’t take the chance that he might knock the cap off my head. I find the mirror and pull it from my pocket.

  I glimpse the slogan inscribed on it — You are reflected in your friends, family, and times— then turn it toward Rolf’s face, to reflect the light behind him. Except that it’s not “light” as we know it.

  The reflection doesn’t bounce back into his eyes and distract him like I expected; instead it pours out of the mirror. The glass has now become another source of the color. And the colors begin enveloping his face.

  It’s enough to startle him into letting go. And in letting go, he’s pulled into the swirling portal behind him. The last part of him I glimpse is his mouth forming a giant NO!

  Without any kind of WOMPER-charge to guide him through the Fifth Dimension, I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. The antlers helped guide him back to Arthur’s England last time. This time, for all I know, he could be stuck inside the Fifth Dimension forever.

  The same way Thea and Clyne are stuck in the ship. I have to get back to help them. I turn my body as it’s pulled through the dimensional currents and eddies — it almost feels like I’m swimming — and glimpse the ship below me. But it’s hard to catch it, because another instant later, it’s overhead. Then distant. Then close.

  Things could go on this way until I pop out of this dimension, but the chase is interrupted with another loud WHAM! and this time the wave hits me directly.

  The colors spin around me now, and I almost pass out, as another line from Mom’s letter flickers in my mind —

  We still have to find our way across time, to stay connected to what we love — and I’m clutching the little mirror, One Man’s Family, and I realize that my family ha
s grown. It’s not just me and Mom and Dad anymore but Clyne and Thea, too, because we share the secret of this dimension together, of passing through epochs and eons, and centuries, and however far apart we are, the three of us are journeying together now somehow, no turning back, no matter what…

  I reach out and touch something smooth and sticky, like a wall of Jell-O. The side of the ship?

  It’s no longer a wall but someone’s hand. Thea? Clyne? And the light falling on my face now comes with warmth. Heat. Light from a star. A sun.

  I’ve come through the Fifth Dimension.

  And as soon as I open my eyes, I will find out where.

  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!

  Eli’s adventures continue in Episode 3!

  DANGER BOY: Episode 3

  Trail of Bones

  I believe I just talked with Thomas Jefferson. And I think Thea has been in to see me, too. But I was feverish when both things were happening, so I can’t be sure.

  And feverish or not, I don’t know which is more surprising.

  “What is happening in America that two young people show up out of nowhere, claiming to be lost, on such an otherwise pleasant afternoon?” I’m pretty sure I heard Jefferson say that. He kind of likes to talk with extra words in his sentences. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” That was Thea. She was dabbing cold rags on my head. But even if it wasn’t a dream, she’s gone now, and there are guards outside the tent to keep me from leaving. I don’t think I’m under arrest. I think they just don’t know what to do with me yet. And if I tell them the truth — that I’m from the future, that I’ve been tangled up in time after an accident in my parents’ lab — well, they sure won’t believe that my fever has passed. In fact, I might just find out where they lock up people they think are crazy or dangerous.

  I don’t even know how we got here. Where they don’t study American history in books because they are American history.

  Where they don’t have baseball.

  Where they don’t even have Barnstormers! They don’t have any Comnet games at all!

  No wonder they had so much time to be historical and do famous stuff.

  And 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.