Read We Sled With Dragons for Free Online

turn—”
    â€œShh,” Dr. Navel called. “Someone’s coming!”
    They fell silent and waited as a few stray goats ambled past the alley, joining their herders in the mob.
    â€œAnyway,” Corey whispered. “After your father turned down the wrong road, we decided we needed to take a shortcut to get back to the city, so there was this field where another herd of goats were grazing. We had no choice but to cut across it, which upset those goats and those goat herders, so they joined the chase—”
    â€œGuys,” said Celia.
    â€œWell,” Corey continued, “they started calling everyone they knew—it turns out they all have cell phones—and pretty soon there was an entire mob of angry goat herders after us.”
    â€œWhat happened to the pirates?” Oliver wondered.
    â€œGuys?” said Celia.
    â€œI don’t know what happened to the pirates,” said Corey. “I guess the goat herders took care of them.”
    â€œThey didn’t!” yelled Celia.
    Everyone turned to look at her and then to look at the other end of the alley behind them, where she was pointing.
    There stood Bonnie with five more of her pirate goons, blocking their way out.
    â€œHow nice to see you all again,” Bonnie sneered.
    â€œAha!” someone yelled from the other end of the alley. Oliver and Celia spun around to see the goat herders gathering at that end, filing into the narrow space next to the burning hotel. The angry goat herders were wielding clubs and machetes and sticks. So were the pirates.
    â€œNow what?” Oliver groaned, seeing that they were trapped between two armed groups and a burning building.
    Celia found herself wondering what the other sixth graders at her school were up to at the moment. She would have happily traded places with any of them, even if they were taking a test or giving a report or climbing a rope in gym class.
    She stopped herself. That was crazy thinking. Nothing could be worse than climbing a rope in gym class.
    â€œThis way,” a voice called to them from the roof on the building on the other side of the alley. A rope dropped down next to them.
    In storytelling, there is a trick some writers use called
deus ex machina.
It is a Latin phrase that means “a god from the machine,” and writers use it to get characters out of impossible situations by bringing in a new character or idea that comes from nowhere and saves the day. In ancient plays, the writer would actually have a god lowered onto the stage by a crane to solve all the characters’ problems. The god actually came from the machine.
    At this moment, the closest the Navels had to their own
deus ex machina
was a boy about Oliver and Celia’s age, who was standing above them on the opposite rooftop holding onto a rope. He was dressed in rags, his skin dark against the bright blue sky, and he had three thick scars in straight lines across his forehead.
    â€œOh man,” Celia whined, staring at the rope.
    â€œScarification,” Dr. Navel whispered, staring at the boy. “The marks of maturity in the Dinka tribe of Sudan.”
    â€œThe what tribe?” Oliver wondered.
    â€œThe Dinka are a Nilotic cow-herding people of the Bahr al-Ghazal region,” Professor Rasmali-Greenberg said.
    â€œNo-what-ic cow people of where?” Oliver wondered.
    â€œThe Bahr al-Ghazal is in south Sudan,” the professor answered. “It is largely inhabited by—”
    â€œCan we skip the educational programming and get out of here?” Celia pleaded.
    â€œHurry!” the boy on the roof called down.
    â€œJust like gym class,” Celia muttered as she grabbed onto the rope. More ropes dropped down and two more boys appeared next to them, smiling.
    â€œThis is the worst,” Oliver groaned as he started hauling himself up, hand over hand, beside his sister.
    â€œUse your legs more and your arms won’t get tired,”