We can get kabobs anywhere. Why do we have to get them here?

Sam chewed on his bottom lip as their ridiculous group took their places in line at Moby Dick’s House of Kabob. The restaurant was nicer than Sam had expected, even offering a pleasant seating area on the sidewalk facing N Street near Dupont Circle.

Dr. Davalos wanted to eat something as close to Mediterranean as he could get. Since they’d arrived in DC, they’d eaten Italian, Thai, Chinese, and other types of cuisine. The Doc liked a variety of different foods, but he could eat Greek food every day and never get tired of it. He got downright cranky if he didn’t eat hummus at least once a week.

Gideon and Dr. Davalos talked non-stop since the topic had shifted to literature, and for that, Sam was grateful. The more they could talk about books, the less Gideon would talk about Sam’s childhood. Much to Karl’s disappointment.

The line crawled forward.

“Oh, man, I’m starving.” Karl wiped his hands down his face dramatically. “What should I get, Mia?”

“Everything looks great,” Mia said. “But I’m going for the kebabs. Since it’s in the name, I’m guessing they’re probably pretty good.”

“Kebabs. Yeah, kebabs sound great.” Karl wiped the drool off his chin. “You know, every time we’d go somewhere, we’d always plan the vacation around the restaurants we wanted to eat at.”

“That’s dumb.” Sam turned his attention to a honking car out on Connecticut Avenue, visible from the windows of the kabob shop.

“Why?” Karl looked back at him. “Food is awesome.”

Sam scowled, but he couldn’t think of anything to say in response. It wasn’t that Karl was wrong. He was just—Karl. And Karl got on his nerves.

The food did smell amazing, Sam had to admit. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, and his stomach rumbled hollowly. The menu board boasted everything from stuffed grape leaves to gyros, rich meaty stews to platters of grilled meats, all served over seasoned rice. And kabobs, of course. Every imaginable type of kabobs, from lamb to beef to chicken and even some variations of goat and game hen.

The place was definitely more Persian than Greek, but the Doc didn’t look disappointed at all. On the contrary, his expression was one of delight and happy expectation.

Stan was a different story, though. The boy hovered by Sam’s elbow, his expression somber and pinched.

Odd. Stan’s the foodie here. He’s usually the first one in line to try a new restaurant. Maybe he’s not feeling well.

Mia’s hand touched lightly on Sam’s forearm. “Hey.”

Sam looked down at her. “Hey.”

“Thanks for being such a good sport.” Mia nudged him with her shoulder. “I know this can’t be comfortable for you, with Karl prying Gideon for stories.”

The understatement of the year.

“It’s fine,” Sam growled.

“I think Gideon is lonely,” Mia said. “He hasn’t stopped talking since we got to his house.”

“Gideon just likes to talk.” Sam huffed and glanced around the restaurant.

Red-checked tablecloths covered the tables, and simple wooden chairs and upholstered booths provided ample seating room for the dozens of customers who were already in line. At one table, a couple shared a heaping plate of warm pita bread and a giant tub of fresh hummus.

“Well, even so.” Mia faced forward. “I’m sure he’s glad that you’re here.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

Mia sighed and shifted her purse to her other shoulder, leaning forward around Sam’s chest to look at Stan. Her gentle smile turned downward at the sight of the boy’s face.

“Stan? Are you all right?”

Sam turned his eyes from Mia’s disapproving frown to Stan’s pale face. The boy’s pinched expression had only grown more extreme, and the pallor of his skin had turned nearly gray. 

Sam grabbed his shoulder gently. “Stan?”

“I’m fine.” Stan shook his head. “Honest.”

“You don’t look fine,” Sam said. “What’s going on?”

Karl looked away from the menu and focused on Stan. “Aw, dude, Fish Face. Again?”

“Again?” Sam raised his eyebrows. “Stan, are you sick?”

“I’m not sick.” Stan stretched out his neck and shoulders. “I’m just—I’ve been sensing something. I don’t know what it is.”

Mia moved in closer, lowering her voice. “Soldiers?”

“No.” Stan shook his head. “It’s not soldiers. I don’t know what it is. It’s just strong, and Kagami doesn’t like it.”

“Stan, we’ve talked about this,” Sam grunted.

“You don’t have to believe me, Sam.” Stan pinned him with a fierce stare. “But I can sense soldiers. You know I can.”

Sam met Dr. Davalos’s eyes when the older man glanced back at them, and Sam nodded slowly.

Dr. Davalos picked up his conversation with Gideon again in earnest, and Sam stepped out of line, pulling Stan with him. With a sad whine, Karl followed. Mia hurried after them. They slid into a hallway on the edge of the restaurant.

“Karl and I went out yesterday,” Stan said. “During your speech. And while we were out, I felt this—feeling. It’s like soldiers, but it’s different. Like—there’s more than one. More than ten. It’s all a blur.”

Sam exchanged a look with Mia.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Sam scowled.

“We didn’t know what it was,” Karl shrugged. “I figured he just drank a bad cup of tea or something.”

Sam snorted. Useless.

“There have been soldiers here before, right?” Stan turned his pale face to the windows.

Sam nodded. “Yeah, but that was a long time ago. I’d just been given Hinode.”

“And?” Mia asked.

“And I got rid of them all.” Sam reached for Stan’s messenger bag and slid it off his shoulder and onto his own. “Korin helped me track them down, and I destroyed them. Then—I came to San Francisco. There were no soldiers left here.”

“Maybe more came,” Karl said.

“They’re keeping quiet if they’re here,” Sam said. “Otherwise we’d have gotten some kind of report about it. The news is big into armor sightings right now.”

Stan winced and bent over, clutching his middle. “Oh, blimey.”

“Stan.” Mia knelt. “What is it?”

Stan lifted his head and stared out the front windows of the restaurant. “Sam, mate, I hate it when you’re wrong, because when it happens, it’s always a mess.”

Slowly, Sam turned and followed Stan’s wide-eyed gaze.

Across the street, standing on the roof of the beige stucco rowhouse, a gray-armored samurai soldier stared at them with flashing red eyes.

“Crap,” Sam muttered.

As he blinked, the one soldier became ten.

Karl stiffened next to him. “Lurch?”

“Yes, Karl?”

“Is that—ten soldiers?”

“Yes, Karl.”

“Crap.”

Stan straightened and moved to stand at Sam’s side. “It’s not just soldiers.”

Across the street, in the midst of the ten soldiers in gray armor, a blurry yellow form materialized. Towering over the soldiers, the figure’s yellow samurai armor glinted in the sunlight, pincer-like horns sprouting blood red from its brow.

“Jinsoku,” Sam whispered.

“Yo, Lurch?”

Sam shut his eyes. “What, Karl?”

“Is that—ten soldiers—and Jinsoku?”

“If you don’t shut up, Karl, I’m going to bash your head in myself.”

A scream sounded on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. Squealing brakes and the crash of twisting metal echoed up and down the streets as cars and trucks swerved wildly out of control.

“What do we do?” Stan asked.

“Well, there are three of us,” Karl smirked. “We can’t get in trouble for fighting alone.”

Sam looked down at Mia.

“I’ll get Grandpa and Gideon somewhere safe.” Mia stopped him before he could speak.

Sam took Stan’s bag and handed it to her, and she hurried back to Dr. Davalos and Gideon. Across the restaurant, Gideon cast his blind gaze around looking for the source of the chaos outside.

“Split up to suit up,” Sam said. “If we all go together in one space, we’re bound to draw attention.”

“Aye.” Stan ducked out the door and ran across the street.

“Sam.”

Sam paused and looked down at Karl. He almost hadn’t recognized his own name, so used to the absurd nickname Karl always used for him.

“What?”

“There are a lot of people here,” Karl said.

“Figure that out by yourself, did you?”

Karl frowned up at him, serious for once in his life. “They’re going to see this, man. Up close and personal.”

“They can already see Jinsoku right now.” Sam nodded out the doors where a truck had just t-boned a car. “You want to stay put and let them sort it out without us?”

“No. It’s just—”

“What?”

Karl licked his lips. “Nothing. Forget I said anything.” He brushed past Sam’s shoulder and ran onto the sidewalk.

Idiot.

Sam checked back on Mia, watching her pull the Doc and Gideon into the back of the restaurant. Then, he dove into the fleeing crowds on the sidewalk. He got to the other side of the restaurant and leaped into an alleyway.

Dark and damp, the alley was mostly hidden from the main sidewalk. None of the surrounding buildings even had windows that looked down into it.

Perfect.

Sam pressed his back against the brick wall and drew a long, slow breath. Calling his armor was one of the most terrifying and exciting experiences of his life. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it didn’t always feel right when the green metal closed around him, encasing him in a heavy second skin that sometimes threatened to crush him.

But he couldn’t face Jinsoku without it.

Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out the thunderbird charm. He clenched it in his palm, tight enough to leave a mark.

“Sen hifu no Hinode, seijitsu.”

The menuki in his hand pulsed with power, and a ripple of green electricity burst out of his palm, forming the shape of a dagger in his hand. The rest of his body coalesced in the wave of power, plates of green and white metal snapping into place around him.

The sub-armor layer of Reishosan Hinode shimmered around him, hot to the touch and heavy along his shoulders.

He wasn’t done yet.

“Reishosan Hinode, Hikari no Senshi. Yamada-yoroi. Seijitsu.”

A blast of light burst out of the dagger in his hand, crawling up his arm and surrounding his body. The dagger pulsed and expanded, growing into a larger sword—a wakizashi. His body convulsed with the power coming from the sword as the lightning raked across his arms and legs, his back and chest, and formed the Hinode armor around him.

Sam gasped for breath as the weight of the armor settled across his shoulders, and he stabbed the wakizashi into his belt.

No time to rest. No time to breathe.

Jinsoku was waiting.

He wrapped his armored fingers around the hilt of the sword and leaped, bounding off one side of the alley wall and then the other, back and forth until he made it to the roof of the office complex at the corner of N and Connecticut. Two cars on the street below were on fire, and sirens closed in on the area with flashing red and blue lights.

Jinsoku and the soldiers were nowhere in sight.

Sam hissed under his breath and turned in a circle on the roof. If he’d gone to all this trouble, to risk donning his armor and showing himself in public, and Jinsoku had already disappeared, there’d be hell to pay.

A loud clank shook the roof under his feet, and he whipped around, wakizashi half drawn.

“Whoa, dude! Easy!”

Karl. He stood with his hands up, which made him look even more ridiculous than normal. His orange and brown armor, Shiren, had a stout, bulky design that suited Karl’s heavy build. Studded with spikes along his back, his arms, his shoulders, his legs, Shiren would have resembled an orange porcupine if its helmet hadn’t looked so much like a lion with its flared ornaments and face shield like a fanged mouth.

“Where did they go?” Sam turned back to the edge of the roof and gazed down at the street.

“I don’t know.” Karl moved to his side and peered down at the street. “I lost them.”

A blur of blue caught Sam’s eye as Stan landed carefully on the other corner of the roof, Kagami glinting in the sunlight, the single golden horn ornament on the crown of his helmet shining.

“Did you lose them too?” Karl shouted down at him.

Stan hurried to them and rested one hand on his own wakizashi. “They can’t have gone far.” His eyes, the same color as his armor, narrowed behind the rim of his face shield.

On the street below, the crowds surged in panic-stricken waves, some running for the park at the end of Connecticut Avenue, others fleeing down Massachusetts Avenue instead. Sam spotted Mia escorting Gideon out the back entrance of the kabob shop with Dr. Davalos behind them.

“This is stupid.” Sam stepped back. “They didn’t just show up to cause a panic and then disappear.”

A glint of sun off metal.

The scream of air through a fletch.

Sam grunted in surprise as the arrow stabbed into the right corner of his chest plate hard enough to force him back a step.

“Sam!” Stan jumped up.

Too late.

A storm of arrows like hail pounded them from the taller building on the opposite corner. Another arrow stuck deep in Sam’s left shoulder.

“Get to higher ground!” Sam unsheathed his sword.

Karl had already jumped. But the idiot would never make it all the way across the intersection. Shiren wasn’t a jumper, and three soldiers had already leaped off the other building’s roof to meet him in the air.

The impact of the soldiers against Shiren sent shockwaves through the air, and the four figures dropped to the ground like a giant boulder, sending spiderweb cracks through the concrete in the intersection of N and Connecticut.

“Moron.” Sam jumped off the roof and landed with a roll.

Stan hit beside him, and in a flash of blue light, a giant three-bladed spear appeared in Stan’s hand. Kagami’s yari.

More screams.

Sam whirled.

People flooded out of the buildings, running every direction away from the intersection, except for a handful of idiots with their cellphone cameras out.

So much for being discrete.

The shine of Mia’s hair drew his eye. She and her grandfather were pulling Gideon across N Street to the alley across from the kabob shop. As they reached the sidewalk, five soldiers landed at the center of N Street and pulled out their swords.

Sam thought people had panicked before.

As the soldiers began to charge and swing, the uproar on the streets grew louder and more chaotic. He cursed under his breath and spun on his heel, racing down the street to engage the soldiers before they reached Mia.

He chopped a soldier’s head off and kicked another one away. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mia and Dr. Davalos pull Gideon down the alleyway out of danger. They disappeared down the alley.

Sam destroyed two more soldiers and closed in on the last when a blur of yellow crashed into him like a battering ram. Sam bounced off the concrete, the impact like a sledgehammer against the two wounds he’d already sustained.

He rolled and jumped up, stopping his slide with his foot, concrete bunching up beneath the ball of his armored boot.

Jinsoku flickered into sight at the center of N Street. The towering warlord strode toward the intersection with purposeful steps, his yellow armor sharp and glittering in the sunlight.

“I must say,” the warlord announced as he bore down on Sam, “I did not expect the three of you here.”

Sam flipped his sword and tensed into a defensive posture. “The feeling’s mutual.”

Sam backed up until he stood at the center of the intersection. Karl and Stan were fighting more soldiers further down Connecticut.

Jinsoku paused, just out of reach. “And where are your brothers? Still guarding San Francisco?”

“What does it matter?” Sam held out his sword, pointed at Jinsoku’s flaring red eyes. “I don’t need them to beat you. I never did.”

Jinsoku held out his hand, and a shimmering burst of light appeared in his armored palm, extending to form his doubled-bladed scythe. “Hinode, you speak as a fool.”

Sam started to reply when something broke loose inside his chest. Like his heart had stopped. Like it had turned to cold iron.

What?

He glanced toward the fight further down Connecticut, his mouth falling open.

Stan.

Stan stood, at the center of the street, soldier sword sprouting from the center of his chest plate. Blood seeped out of the wound, staining his blue armor red.

“Stan!” Karl screamed, reaching for his friend.

Hinode shivered.

It shivered.

And Shiren coalesced in a blinding blast of orange light, and a wave of power erupted from his outstretched arm, blasting a massive shockwave of energy in every direction away from him. Pounding into the concrete. Cracking the earth beneath their feet.

With a thunderous roar, Connecticut Avenue collapsed. Sam spun to jump, but the road beneath his feet disappeared. He was falling. Falling in darkness. And his body struck something hard and unyielding, sending him tumbling end over end as the world crashed down on top of him.