Dragon Sword (20 page)

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 has 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.