City of Ruins (24 page)

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.