“Stop!” someone shouted. “Don’t move!”
Samantha and Nipper couldn’t help it. They turned around.
A squad of shrouded bandits stood in a long, smelly line. One of them held up three shuriken with his left hand.
“Well, okay,” he said, sounding irritated. “You can turn around, but don’t move again.”
Before Samantha or Nipper could do or say anything, the ninjas sprang forward and formed a circle around them. They were surrounded.
Samantha quickly counted the ninjas. There were twenty of them. They were all dressed in black, and every one was soiled from head to toe. One of the ninjas was much shorter than the others. The stink was unbearable.
“Hand over the umbrella now,” said the ninja with the throwing stars. “Or we’ll have to cut this meeting short.”
With his free hand he drew his sword. One after the other, the ninjas unsheathed menacing silver blades. A wave of reflected light rippled around the circle.
Samantha had seen what a single samurai sword could do to a loaf of French bread. Now she faced twenty of them. She looked around the circle again. She and her brother were trapped.
She had no idea what to do. Slowly, she pulled the umbrella from her shoulder.
“Sam?” Nipper asked.
Samantha’s heart ached. She wasn’t just handing over the umbrella. She was giving away her only chance to find Uncle Paul.
Sadly, she held out the Super-Secret Plans.
“Smart girl,” the ninja snarled, stepping forward. He tucked his sword away. Then he reached out a grimy hand and grabbed the closed umbrella.
“We spent six weeks hidden on a garbage barge to get here,” he said, waving the umbrella at them. “It was the only way we could travel here without being smelled. Do you know what monkeys do in the middle of the ocean when—”
The ninja’s words were cut off in a blur of fur as Dennis leaped forward with stunning speed and precision.
Maybe he saw a moment for greatness. Maybe he wanted to save his friends. Or maybe it was because the ninja had just smeared the umbrella with bacon grease and sardine juice.
Dennis seized the umbrella and bit down. Then he was off. He bolted into Volunteer Park.
“Breeep!” the shortest ninja howled. He dropped his sword and banged his knuckles against the ground several times. Then he grabbed the sword and stood up straight again.
Samantha and Nipper pushed their way through the confused ninjas and took off after their hero pug.
It was a five-block run down the length of Volunteer Park, past the art museum and the water tower, around the reservoir and in between some Frisbee players enjoying precious hours in the sun.
Samantha and Nipper caught up with Dennis just as he reached the busy street at the bottom of the park. He stopped at the corner and looked up at them.
“Good boy,” said Nipper. He took out the plastic bag, opened it, and tossed a cracker to the dog.
Dennis dropped the umbrella and caught the cracker in midair.
Nipper picked up the umbrella and handed it back to Samantha.
“That makes four ninjas in Paris and twenty in Seattle,” said Nipper.
“How did they find us here?” Samantha asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “We’re not the ones you can smell from a mile away.”
Samantha nodded. “They must have some special way of tracking us,” she said. They turned left and sped into Capitol Hill’s business district, threading their way through shoppers, joggers, bicycles, and baby strollers.
“Excuse me,” said Samantha as she bumped into a woman juggling for people in line at a coffee cart.
“Sorry!” said Nipper as he slipped between two men doing yoga outside a café.
As they dodged parking meters and dog walkers, the smell of kerosene and used kitty litter began to catch up with them. The sound of split-toe ninja slippers slapping pavement began to grow louder.
“They’re going to chop us into little cubes!” Nipper cried, gasping for air. “We’ll be just like that French bread!”
Samantha looked around quickly. They were in the middle of the block between Coffee Mania and Seattle Fabric Center. They couldn’t outrun the ninjas. And there were too many of them to fight.
“Hold my hand,” she told Nipper.
“What?” he asked his sister. “I like you, too, Sam, but right now we—”
Samantha grabbed his hand, yanked hard, and pulled him into Seattle Fabric Center.
Some people love craft projects that involve sewing, knitting, or needlepoint. Other people become drowsy the moment they hear someone say “yarn” or “crochet.” Samantha Spinner was somewhere between the two camps. But she was confident that her brother and the twenty ninjas chasing them fell solidly into the second group.
Samantha led Nipper through the front door of the store. They passed a young woman sitting behind a glass case of ribbons and zipper parts. It looked like she was knitting a skull and crossbones, but they had no time to ask her about it. They turned and sped down an aisle lined on both sides with rotating racks of colorful felt. Then they dove behind a bin labeled “Misprinted Flannel 90% Off!” and crouched out of sight.
Immediately Nipper started yawning.
“No daw-awgs!” the woman called out in a singsong voice.
Dennis scampered around the corner and squeezed between Samantha and Nipper.
“This is the most boring store I’ve ever seen,” said Nipper. He looked around at the displays of thread and bobbins. A long sheet of woven fabric with gold braid trim dangled from the ceiling.
“Why on earth would anyone want to—”
“Shhhh!” Samantha glared at her brother.
The store was nearly silent. They could hear the muffled clicking of the woman’s needles as she knit, and the faint buzz from Dennis’s collar.
Nipper’s eyelids were half closed and his breathing was becoming slower and deeper as he petted a stack of folded lace tablecloths.
They heard the door swing open and the sound of forty sticky feet creeping one by one onto linoleum.
“Nipper?” Samantha whispered.
Her brother was sound asleep.
Samantha began to get drowsy, too. Then the strong smell of rotten pickles, corroded batteries, and moldy cat food hit her, and she snapped out of it. She could hear the ninjas shuffling around the store. They were opening and closing display cases and poking at spools of fabric and bunting with their samurai swords.
Peeking through a gap between bins, she saw two legs in black tights approaching. Someone was getting close to their aisle. She held Dennis by his muzzle to keep him from growling.
When she turned to peek through the gap again, the legs were still there, but they were wobbling.
Then the ninja fell to the floor like a bag of wet sand.
He was fast asleep.
Seconds later, she heard what sounded like nineteen more bags of wet sand hitting the floor. Ninja by ninja, the RAIN had collapsed onto the floor of Seattle Fabric Center. Samantha waited, holding her nose against the stench. Soon the sound of twenty snoring ninjas filled the store.
Samantha stood up and hoisted her sleeping brother over one shoulder. She climbed out from behind the bin and, as quietly as she could, carried him to the front of the store.
“Happens all the time,” said the woman. She paused and sniffed the air disapprovingly several times but didn’t look up from her knitting.
Samantha pushed open the door and held it for Dennis, then followed him out, carefully balancing her unconscious cargo.
She carried Nipper for half a block, set him on his feet, and shook him a few times.
“Wake up,” she said. She held out the umbrella and used it to point toward the park in the distance. “Egypt is that way.”