by Nic Stone
“Okay, okay.” K’Marah flips onto her side to face the princess, and props her newly cornrowed-and-beaded head on her hand. “So when do we leave?”
The hairs on Shuri’s arms rise to attention. K’Marah couldn’t know they’re actually leaving, could she? “I know for a fact that I instructed you to meet me beneath the Panther effigy at the city gates, in trousers, at eight thirty.” She looks K’Marah over. “Not only are you wearing a ridiculously impractical dress, it’s—Time, please!” Shuri says to the air.
The vaguely robotic reply is instantaneous: “The time is zero six hundred hours and twenty-three minutes.”
“Six twenty-three?!” Shuri exclaims, shoving K’Marah’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” K’Marah flops onto her back and sighs. “I couldn’t sleep! I brought clothes to change into, just wanted to look like myself as I came to your quarters—”
Shuri gasps and grabs K’Marah’s arm. “How’d you get into the palace?” She turns her head, wide-eyed. “Were you questioned?” Yes, T’Challa talked Mother out of sending a Dora Milaje with Shuri to the lab, but as far as she knows, there is a leather-clad warrior woman just outside the entrance to her chambers. Raising any kind of red flags would be disastrous.
K’Marah shoos the panic away. “I took a transport car and came to stay with Uncle shortly after receiving your message last night. Ayo let me in here.”
Shuri doesn’t respond to that. Even though she does feel a certain way about this pseudo-friend of hers having such easy access to the palace.
The shorter girl leans closer and lowers her voice to a whisper. “So what are we really doing?”
Oh boy. “What do you mean?”
“The whole lab thing is a cover, right? If I know anything about you, it’s that you prefer to work alone. So if you’re asking me to be your ‘assistant,’ there is definitely something else afoot.” She taps Shuri’s nose.
Shuri is too stunned to respond.
K’Marah grins and returns to her back. “Whatever it is, I can’t wait! I figured you’d be awake by now because … well, you’re you. But at any rate, we’re both up, yeah? Why not get an earlier start?”
The princess groans and throws an arm over her face, but she’s unable to deny K’Marah’s logic. Besides, the sooner they leave, the more time to gather information. Hopefully.
“Fine,” Shuri says.
And she gets up.
Getting out of the palace earlier than Shuri reported to Mother proves a hair more difficult than Shuri expects. The Ayo part is easy: By the time Mother is awake, and the Dora has told her of the girls’ predawn departure “to the lab”—with T’Challa’s blessing—they’ll be en route to Kenya and it’ll be too late for the queen to thwart Shuri’s plan.
Slipping past the intensely stoic palace guards, though?
And they do have to slip past: While it would take fire, flood, or falling bombs for Ayo to wake the queen, the palace guards would instantly report Shuri’s movements. And Mother would have her and K’Marah held until she could storm from her chambers and interrogate Shuri.
No thanks.
“Okay, so the plan …” Shuri says to K’Marah as the shorter girl finishes the laborious task of tucking her hair into one of the classic caps the market boys wear. They’re in the cloakroom near the delivery entrance to the palace, now dressed in the sand-colored garb of male Merchant apprentices.
“Bast, these clothes are itchy,” K’Marah complains.
“No great deed was ever done without discomfort.” Shuri cracks open the door to the hallway and peeks out. “As I was saying, we need to disable three guards.” She squats to rifle through the purple velvet bag at her feet, pulling out a few items and transferring the rest to a less … conspicuous bag. One that fits their disguises. “Catch,” she says, tossing K’Marah a smoke-colored orb about the size of a yellow passion fruit.
“What is this?” the mini-Dora asks, holding it up for examination.
“That,” Shuri replies with a grin, “is phase two.” She turns back to the cracked doorway and squats, something held loosely in her hand. “Okay, so the security cameras will be playing looped footage for the next ten minutes. Here’s what’s going to happen: First, I will release a beetle-bot—”
“A what?”
“You’ll see. Then you will roll that stink bomb out—”
“Stink bomb?!” K’Marah looks at the thing in her hand like it’s grown tentacles.
“Stop interrupting! Those two should do the trick, but if not, phase three will take out the electricity on this hallway for approximately four-point-three-two seconds. I’ll lead us out with my thermal imaging goggles.”
“Thermal imaging gog—you know what, never mind. Let’s get this over with.”
As K’Marah—and the wildly unprepared guards—come to discover, a beetle-bot is just that: a robot shaped like a giant flower beetle.
When guard two notices the thing crawling up guard one’s trouser leg, he screams … and then kicks.
“Yikes!” K’Marah says as guard one goes down, the fake bug still making its way up toward the man’s head.
“Phase two!” Shuri whisper-shouts. K’Marah depresses the little button on the stink bomb as Shuri instructs. Then quick as she can, she rolls the thing into the hallway.
Shuri instantly shuts the door and yanks one of the cloaks down to stuff beneath it. “It’s very potent,” she says to K’Marah.
And then there’s a THUD. The girls look at each other, but neither speaks.
After a few breaths of silence from the other side of the door, Shuri taps one of her Kimoyo beads, and a glowing countdown leaps into the air. “Thirty-three seconds until the air is clear,” she mouths to K’Marah, who shrugs and mouths “What?” back.
When the time has elapsed, Shuri carefully removes the cloak from beneath the heavy door and hangs it up. Then even more slowly pulls the door open. A hazy, shimmering mist coats the air. The girls wave their noses, though the smell has mostly dissipated.
But then they both stop. “Uhhh … Shuri?” K’Marah asks as she takes in the scene. Before them lie three dark green heaps. The guards, one of whom has what looks like a palm-size bug perched on his cheek. “What exactly was in that thing?”
“Hydrogen and ammonium sulfides with just a pinch of methane … basically the fragrance that would come out of a big man who’d eaten spoiled luwombo. Which … maybe I overdid the methane?” She steps over to guard one to remove her mechani-bug from his face, and gives his leg a little shove with the toe of her boot. He’s out cold.
“No need for phase three, I guess?” K’Marah says.
The girls glance at each other wide-eyed and then explode into giggles.
“Let’s go,” Shuri says.
Within ten minutes, the two girls-dressed-as-boys are passing through the city gates.
“Shuri—” K’Marah begins, but the princess cuts her off.
“Shhh!” Shuri hisses, peeking behind them to make sure they aren’t being trailed.
No one even looks twice as they each move through the waking city with dingy brown rucksacks full of clothes and supplies slung over one shoulder. While Shuri forced K’Marah to leave behind most of the froufrou foolishness she’d brought to take on the journey—drapey tunics and patterned silk skirts—K’Marah did convince Shuri that she should pack one dress, just in case.
They will be interacting with royalty, after all.
After a couple of minutes of silent trekking on the side of a paved road used solely for weekly transports of Vibranium from the mines to the city, K’Marah takes a look around and then turns to Shuri with the light of many suns dancing in her eyes.
“Uhhhh—” the princess begins nervously, but that’s all she gets out because K’Marah whoops so loudly, a flock of starlings launches into the air from deep within a field nearby.
“K’Marah!”
“Shuri, we made it! Can you believe it? We made it out in broa
d daylight with everyone moving about the palace! This is next-level!”
And as much as Shuri wants to shush her now-prancing friend again, she also can’t help but smile.
They did make it out.
“We are rather enterprising, eh?” Shuri says, giving herself a mental pat on the back.
Her joy does not last, however. Not five minutes later, the girls crest the hill that will lead them down to the baobab plain, which they have to cross to reach Shuri’s lab just outside the Sacred Mound, and discover that the plain is occupied.
“Whoa!” Shuri says, grabbing K’Marah’s rucksack to pull her down so they can’t be seen.
Both girls poke their heads up just enough to see the gathering below. T’Challa stands, in full Panther garb, at the head of what looks like some sort of Taifa Ngao: War Council Edition—instead of the heads of the various tribes, a group of Wakandan generals, as evidenced by the glint of the newly risen sun off their telltale golden sashes, is gathered in a circle. Eleven men, plus Okoye, plus T’Challa. A baker’s dozen of warriors including the king.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” K’Marah whispers.
A number of terrifying topics a war council would need to discuss flash through Shuri’s head, but she manages to spit out something less dire: “My guess would be the impending Challenge Day. Perhaps they are discussing security measures. The plain is where the whole thing will take place, so it would make sense to meet there, yes?”
“You tell me, Princess,” K’Marah replies.
Just then, T’Challa’s head lifts, and Shuri knows for a fact that despite the distance—and the mask—her dear brother is looking into her eyes. It makes her breath stick right beneath the hollow of her throat.
“You know,” K’Marah says, “not to be all harbinger of doom, but I get the distinct impression they are not discussing Chall—”
“Time to move,” Shuri says, refusing to allow full vent of K’Marah’s thought into the atmosphere. “We can talk about it later, but for now, we need to get out of here.”
By the time they reach the mound—after an additional twenty-five minutes trudging largely at a slant around the field—the cloudless sky has become a curse, and both girls are sweating buckets from the sun beaming down on them without mercy.
They both flop to the floor once inside the cave-like entryway to Shuri’s lab. “Welcome to my Innovation Domicile,” the princess says, her eyes shut and chest heaving.
“This is it?” K’Marah replies. “This is your glorious laboratory?”
“Technically this is the mouth of the cavern that leads to the ID. It’s down there through those doors.” Shuri drags her arm into the air to point, then lets it drop.
“Is there water inside?” K’Marah asks.
“Of course.”
“Then let’s go.” K’Marah climbs to her feet and lifts Shuri up, pulling one of the princess’s skinny arms across her own shoulders so the pair can walk in tandem. “I’m on the brink of death from thirst.”
“That hyperbole feels wildly inappropriate considering the danger of our imminent undertaking.”
“Which you still have not told me about …”
“We’ll get there, I promise.”
The girls slog up the uneven rock floor of the nature-carved hallway, and once in front of the real entrance to the lab, Shuri slaps her hand against a palm scanner. K’Marah looks on, agog, as a purple laser light runs from the tops of Shuri’s fingertips down to her wrist and back again.
And when the clouded glass doors slide open and a disembodied female voice—which sounds suspiciously similar to the queen mother’s—proclaims, “Welcome, Princess Shuri, Ancient Future, Enlightened One, First of Her Name, Heir to the Throne, and Future Black Panther,” K’Marah, now fully alert, turns her widened eyes to her best friend.
“Oh really, now?”
“Shut up.”
As soon as they’re through the doors, K’Marah does just that.
For a moment, at least. “Holy—”
“K’Marah!”
“Sorry, I just …” Shuri watches her friend’s eyes roam around what amounts to the lab’s foyer. One wall is covered in soundproof foam (experimentation with Vibranium often involves loud noise), but all the others are made of the same thick glass as the entry doors. In a curved arc around the space lay three separate test areas where the princess executes her actual experiments.
“Impressed?” Shuri says, reveling in K’Marah’s inability to lift her unhinged jaw from the gleaming epoxy-resin floor. They make their way past the smart boards and cabinets filled with bits and bobs, and approach an open, though darkened, doorway. The moment Shuri steps within a foot of the room, a light clicks on inside, revealing a small kitchen.
“I mean, wow,” K’Marah says. Shuri reaches into a miniature cooler—run on Vibranium, of course—and hands K’Marah a small glass bottle of water. Then she uncaps one for herself, and gulps it down.
After opening a few cabinets and pulling different snacks from within to add to her rucksack—dried hibiscus calyxes and mango slices; rice crackers and a variety of hard cheeses—Shuri turns to a still-stunned K’Marah. “Ready?”
“Uhhh … I think so?”
Now the princess can’t stop smiling. “Right this way.” She heads toward what looks like nothing more than a wall. But then she lifts her wrists and taps one of her Kimoyo beads.
A hidden panel lifts straight up into the air, revealing a walkway into a dimly lit space beyond.
And when the girls get to the end of it and the automatic lights come on, Shuri doesn’t stop K’Marah from letting her curse fly this time.
In front of them hovers a relatively large, but undeniably sleek … mode of transport. Faintly shimmery and obsidian in color, the vessel gives the appearance of a gargantuan panther midleap—head tucked, both sets of strong legs extended, and long, lithe body outstretched in a perfectly curved line. Just without the tail.
“The shape is for aerodynamics,” the princess says, “because there are two modes.” She taps one of her Kimoyo beads, and a pair of sleek wings extend out from the belly region.
“But what … is it?” K’Marah begins a slow walk around the perimeter of the thing, her awestruck gaze dancing over its lustrous surface, but not daring to touch it.
“It’s how we’re going to get out of here,” Shuri replies. “There’s more. Let me see your Kimoyo bracelet.”
K’Marah holds her arm up in the air.
Shuri shakes her head. “No, silly. As in give it to me?”
“Oh …”
K’Marah does, then watches, baffled, as Shuri runs to the far side of the room and puts it on the floor before jogging back.
“Check it out …” Using her own bracelet, Shuri shifts and taps one bead, which makes the panther vessel rise higher into the air, and then when she rubs the top of a different bead, a whitish beam-looking thing shoots out from under the vessel and wraps around K’Marah’s Kimoyo bracelet—which then comes flying at them.
“Aah!” the shorter girl screams, blocking her face.
“Sorry!” from Shuri. She reaches out and snatches the soaring jewelry from the air. The beam vanishes. “Still working out the remote kinks. It’ll be smoother from the control panel inside. It’s basically a tracking apparatus that utilizes the Kimoyo signal—and can fetch. I call it Kimoyo Capture.”
“And when would you need something like that, exactly?” K’Marah asks, still shaken, as she takes her bracelet back and places it on her wrist. “Planning to lose your bracelet in the woods or something?”
Shuri shrugs. “You never know.” She lowers the vessel back down. “Lastly, watch this …”
Shuri removes her Kimoyo card from a pocket, taps around on the screen a few times, then lifts the device to eye level and flicks the top edge of it forward as though tossing something from the card into the air.
And K’Marah gasps. Because right there before both her and Shuri’s e
yes, the vessel vanishes over the course of about ten seconds: from the outstretched front paws, up over the head, and down the body to the point where the tail would be. Now K’Marah does reach out, and as her hand connects with what looks like vaguely warped nothingness—“BAST, this is amazing, Shuri!” she says—a little heart-shaped bloom of some unexpected emotion bursts open inside the princess.
Why does Mother never react this way?
“I, umm …” And Shuri has to swipe at her eyes and clear her throat before she continues. “I’ve been working on something for T’Challa, and while doing some research on twenty-first-century superhero garb, I stumbled upon a secret organization in America called S.H.I.E.L.D. I went into their digital design archives looking for garment inspiration, and found the schematics for something they call a helicarrier. The flight technology was very impressive. So I … borrowed it. And made upgrades.”
K’Marah spins to face Shuri, a look of stunned disbelief etched into her raised eyebrows. “Shuri, are you a hacker?”
“What?” Now the princess can’t meet the other girl’s eyes. “No, I … I mean, I put the details of the mirrored cloaking mechanism I added into the file as a form of payment—”
“You are totally a hacker!” K’Marah, beaming, bounds over to Shuri and wraps her in a tight hug. “I am so proud of you!”
“You’re ridiculous, let me go.”
K’Marah does with a chuckle.
“Anyway, as I was saying—” Shuri lifts her Kimoyo card again and flicks it back toward herself as though summoning something from a distance. The vessel comes back into view. “This is how we’ll be getting where we’re going.” Completely undetected, hopefully.
“Fabulous!” K’Marah replies, bouncing on her toes. “What do you call it? You have given it a name, right?”
Shuri smiles. “This”—she gestures to the vessel—“is the Panther Mobile.”
“Uhh …”
Now she turns to K’Marah. Beaming. “You and I, future Dora, are going to Kenya.”
MISSION LOG
WE MADE IT OUT—THAT IS AFTER MY “BEST FRIEND” LAUGHED IN MY FACE UPON HEARING ABOUT WHAT I CALL MY PERSONAL TRANSPORT VESSEL. SHE INSISTED THAT I CHANGE THE NAME OR SHE WOULDN’T BE STEPPING FOOT INSIDE IT (WE SETTLED ON THE PREDATOR).
