God of Luck Read Online Free Page A

wondered whether we were someplace where Moongirl might also know to come and ransom me. Certainly we couldn’t be in a foreign land, not this fast, could we?
    Finally able to throw myself onto the ladder behind Big Belly, I seized what felt like a rung.
    “Wai!” Big Belly protested.
    Recognizing my mistake, I released his sandaled feet, fumbled for the sides of the ladder, made my ascent.
    As my head poked through the hatch, fresh salt air swirled over me, cleansing. Another two steps and the stuffy heat of the hold gave way to pre-dawn cool, making me shiver; I was struck blind by a blaze of lanterns.
    Desperate to adjust my eyes so I could find Young Master and his father, I halted and blinked.
    A hand whipped out, snatched my queue, hauled me up the ladder’s final rungs. “Didn’t I say hurry?”
    At the hot spikes of pain shooting through my skull and neck, I howled, earning a stinging cuff to my ear that would have knocked me over were it not for the strongman’s grip on my queue. Deafened, I staggered, hoping Young Master and his father would appear in the flashes of captives, masts, Sleepy slouching through the hatch onto the deck. . . .
    Another vicious yank on my queue jerked me to a standstill, and in the moment it took me to see I was again behind Big Belly, the strongman grabbed my wrists and wound the gambler’s long, wiry braid around them with an expertise born of practice. From the sharp tugs at the nape of my neck, I understood Sleepy was likewise being bound with my hair.
    The shackling completed, my arms were bent at the elbow; my hands, raised high as my chest, were folded together as if in supplication. Except for my legs, I could not move without affecting the other men in line, all similarly tethered, and as we were herded ashore, my view was limited to Big Belly’s broad back, the gangplank groaning beneath our feet.

    ON THE BOAT, the strongmen and captives around me had spoken either my district dialect or Saang Wah, the city dialect that I was familiar with through merchants and Moongirl. Since the metal door of the pigpen had slammed behind us, however, I’d understood almost no one. The room, although cavernous, was packed with men, most speaking dialects I’d never before heard, and no sooner had a brawny guard unshackled me from my fellow captives then I’d lost them in the muddle. Furthermore, the din was terrible. My head felt as if it would burst from the roar of talk and inexplicable explosions of firecrackers coupled with the loud beating of gongs, my heart.
    Adding to my distress, the room’s six barred windows were sealed with grimy oystershell panes that filtered out most of the light from the sun but none of the heat. I dripped sweat from every pore. With no fresh air coming in to diffuse the firecrackers’ acrid fumes, my eyes and nose stung; my chest tightened.
    Suddenly, guards armed with clubs began rounding up men, prodding and beating the reluctant. As I tried to avoid them, others—in their own efforts to escape— pushed me into the dragnet, and I found myself driven through a side door, up a long flight of stairs.
    In the crush, all I could see were the queues, necks, and shoulders directly ahead, none of which I recognized. But the incessant jabbing from the pair I was wedged between reminded me of the sharp-boned captives in the sampan. While together in the hold, I’d noted their strong resemblance to each other and their obvious difference in age, guessed them to be father and son. Could this reminder of them be a sign from Heaven that I’d soon see Ba?
    As if in confirmation, the fug from the bodies closing me in lessened the higher we rose. By the top of the staircase, I was drawing deliciously clear breaths, and although we were crammed in a narrow hallway, my chest started to unclog; the pounding in my head eased.
    Then we were spilling through double doors into a spacious room that was startlingly bright. Quiet, too. And no wonder: Before us loomed a