We Sled With Dragons Read Online Free Page A

suggested.
    â€œWe’re watching TV in a filthy hotel with a lizard, a chicken, and an evil celebrity impersonator while our parents, a professor, and a monkey try to rescue an actual celebrity from pirates,” said Celia. “Things are bizarre enough already.”
    â€œWhat about
Soup Wars
?” Oliver loved cooking shows.
    â€œIt’s too hot for soup,” said Celia.
    â€œ
World’s Best Rodeo Clown
?”
    â€œWe’re watching
Celebrity Fashion Crimes.
”
    â€œOh come on! Let’s just look for
World’s Best Rodeo Clown
!”
    â€œ
Celebrity Fashion Crimes.
That’s final.”
    â€œUgh,” said Oliver.
    â€œHiss,” said Beverly.
    Celia gave them both a look that silenced them. She had her mother’s gift for it. Sometimes, she thought, both brothers and poisonous lizards needed to be reminded who was the boss. She was three minutes and forty-two seconds older, after all.
    On TV, Madam Mumu, the pop star of all pop stars, was in a canoe with a sad-faced girl in a pretty sundress. The girl was holding a fishing line and looking glum.
    â€œ
You need carp
!” Madam Mumu shouted.
“A freshwater fish is the fashion-forward way to a fancy hat!”
    â€œBo-ring!” Oliver groaned.
    â€œYou’ll have to stay in cooler climates so the hat doesn’t start to smell,”
Madam Mumu was telling the girl.
“How do you feel about moving to the arctic archipelago of Svalbard? It’s cold, but you get to see the wonder of the aurora borealis glowing in the twilight sky. Some of the ice sheets off the coast are thousands of years old. They’re as thick as skyscrapers! Your outfit will really pop against that background. You’ll love it!”
    The girl on screen did not look like she would love it.
    â€œNow let’s get back to your campsite!”
said Madam Mumu.
“After this commercial break, we’ll make a dress out of your tent! It’s warm, fireproof, and almost indestructible!”
    â€œBoring, boring, boring, boring, boring,” said Oliver.
    â€œStop it,” said Celia.
    â€œBoring, boring, boring, boring, boring.”
    â€œShh.”
    â€œBoring, boring, boring, boring, boring.”
    Celia turned up the volume to drown out her brother.
    For those readers who do not yet know Celia and Oliver very well, you may wonder how they can focus so much on television under their current circumstances. You see, while some children might have been filled with anxiety about guarding a prisoner while their parents staged the daring rescue of a celebrity from a pirate stronghold in the desert outside Djibouti, Oliver and Celia were not so easily impressed.
    Danger was nothing new to them—they’d been facing danger since before they could walk. Distant lands were about as interesting for these two as folding socks. And they were certainly used to their parents running off on one foolish quest or another.
    Their mother had run off when they were eight years old to search for the Lost Library of Alexandria. After three years without a word from her, she had suddenly reappeared on a mountaintop in Tibet. She told the twins that she loved them and missed them—all that normal mother stuff—and then she told them that she was part of an ancient secret society called the Mnemones, the scribes of the Lost Library of Alexandria back before it became lost. The
M
in Mnemones is silent, just like the
D
in Djibouti.
    Being an explorer, we should note, involves lots of silent letters and secret societies.
    Their mother also told Oliver and Celia that they were the last of the Mnemones and that they had to find the Lost Library of Alexandria before Sir Edmund did or the whole world was doomed. Then she disappeared again without so much as a bedtime story.
    She showed up a few months after that in the Amazon, and then again on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean, always talking about her secret society and