by Nic Stone
But there’s a thump and shout, and the queen gasps and turns to look at something on her right that Shuri can’t see before the Kimoyo call drops and her likeness vanishes.
“Mother!” Shuri grabs for the device, but then—
“Sist—you must retur—”
“T’Challa!” Shuri scrambles over to the vessel’s radio, thankful she took Ororo’s advice and gave him the frequency information when they last spoke, “in case of an emergency that requires the use of more vintage technology.” “T’Challa, what’s going on?”
“—breach at the wester—”
But he keeps breaking up. “Brother?”
“—vasion! Enter at the northea—”
There’s a burst of static, and he cuts out entirely.
“T’Challa? T’Challa!”
“Can we turn the alarm off?” K’Marah has appeared at Shuri’s shoulder with her hands over her ears. “I can’t hear myself think!”
“Where is Ororo?” Shuri asks, squatting down to disconnect the alarm sensor from the Predator’s speaker system. “We need to reroute.”
The interior of the cabin goes suddenly silent, and when Shuri looks up, K’Marah is gazing down at her friend with her head cocked and mouth turned down. “Who?” she says.
“Ororo Munroe, aka Storm, aka Mistress of the Elements, aka your personal heroine? Where is she?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Shuri.”
“This isn’t the time for jokes, K’Marah,” Shuri says, pushing past her friend. “Our country is being invaded, and we need to get back to it. Ororo?” she shouts, knocking on the small lavatory door. “Are you in there?”
“There is no Ororo here, Shuri,” says a voice from where K’Marah was standing …
But it no longer sounds like K’Marah.
Shuri’s pulse roars in her ears as blood rushes to her head.
Because she knows that voice.
She shuts her eyes and inhales deeply to steady herself—and then she turns.
The woman from her vision is standing between the chairs in the Predator’s open cockpit.
“There is no one here to save you, Princess.” Puffs of dust leave the woman’s mouth with each word, and when she smiles, the cracks in her skin deepen, and a few desiccated chunks drop from her face. “There is no one here to save you, and you failed to save your country—”
“NO!” Shuri surges toward her, but the woman shoves a hand forward, and the princess is thrown back against the far wall by a grit-filled wind that scorches her skin.
She cries out in pain and tries to get back on her feet.
Another wind hits her, and she inhales what feels like little pieces of burning coal. She coughs. Gags.
“Shuri—”
“Khusela, khusela …” The voices from the fire ring through Shuri’s mind.
The woman is standing over her now. She doesn’t want to give up, but what choice does she have? A fissured hand reaches toward her face, but to her surprise, the touch against her cheek is blissfully cool. Her eyelids begin to droop.
“Shuri …”
“No …” The princess whispers, sinking farther into the heat surrounding her. Everything burns. Except for her cheek …
“SHURI! DADA!”
“No …” The faintest whisper now.
“Shuri, you must wake!”
There’s a booming crack of thunder, and Shuri sits up.
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” Ororo says, placing a cool hand on her face. “You’re very warm.”
Shuri stares into Ororo’s blue eyes—searching for a tether—but doesn’t speak.
“You were having a dream,” Ororo continues. “A bad one from the looks of it. Are you all right?”
A dream.
Before she realizes it’s coming, Shuri’s cheeks are warm and wet.
“Oh dear.” Ororo kneels before the princess and takes her hands. She opens her mouth to speak but then … just smiles. “You know, this is exactly what your brother was doing when I met him.”
The stories float to the front of Shuri’s mind. T’Challa claims he saved Ororo from being kidnapped by a white man on a rainy night in the jungle, but Ororo claims she saved T’Challa from being kidnapped by a group of white men on a Kenyan plain beneath a clear, blue sky.
She peeks over her shoulder. K’Marah, still not feeling well, is curled up beneath one of the Vibranium core–weighted blankets Shuri created for those nights when she couldn’t get her brain to stop spinning. With the gentle weight and the sound absorption, she’d sleep like a newborn underneath it—sort of like her friend is doing now.
Should Shuri tell Ororo about the vision at the bonfire? About the nightmare she just had? The weather goddess is probably Wakanda’s greatest ally out in the wider world.
“I—” Shuri begins, but then there’s a ringing noise from just above the radar. “Warning: This vessel has been detected.”
And back to reality. “Are we not in Invisi-mode?” Shuri says, leaping to her feet to check the flight instruments. They’re flying over the English Channel, still a hundred and seventy kilometers or so south of London …
The cloaking mechanism is turned up to 100 percent.
Shuri huffs and shakes her head. “There must be a glitch. I tested the stealth tech numerous times, including multiple trips over the marketplace at peak hours, and even a veritable spy excursion when I followed T’Challa on one of his surveillance runs around the borders. At no point was I ‘detected’—”
Letters and numbers begin to appear on the screen of the Predator’s GPS. “What th—”
But then Shuri and Ororo are thrown sideways as the aircraft suddenly course corrects.
“Shuri!” Ororo says, trying to prevent the princess from falling. They both collide with the side wall.
“I’m not sure what’s happening,” Shuri says, doing her best to stay calm. She looks at the aircraft control panel. “How is—”
“Sorry to intrude.” A gruff male voice fills the air from the staticky radio.
Which just reminds her of that stupid dream.
“Is everything all right?” K’Marah suddenly says from the back.
Shuri and Ororo both turn to her, and then to each other.
“Wellll …” the princess says.
K’Marah, of course, notices their trepidation. “Oh no. Are we losing altitude and on course to crash into the sea in an explosion of watery glory?”
“This aircraft will be remotely directed to a secure location,” the staticky voice goes on. “Any attempts to interfere and/or regain control of the vessel will result in immediate engine failure—”
No one on board breathes as what sounds like a scuffle ensues on the other end of the radio. Voices—at least two, and both gravelly and masculine—cut in and out, but Shuri picks up on little blips like “idiot …” and “scare the …” and “protocol” and “gimme that …”
Then a voice Shuri does recognize (Ororo recognizes it, too, if the roll of her eyes is any indication) crackles through the small speaker: “Baby sis? That you? We can’t see or hear your approach, but there’s an odd winged cat–shaped mass of Vibranium crossing into UK airspace from the south …”
Now Shuri smiles and exhales. Of course a group of Wakandans would have the tools and technology to detect Vibranium in the atmosphere, even twenty-eight thousand feet up.
“ ‘Baby sis’?” K’Marah looks more baffled than if someone had told her the Dora Milaje will now be run by men.
“Oh brother,” Ororo says, staring at the radio speaker and shaking her head.
Brother, indeed. “K’Marah, you’re about to meet my adopted big bro, Hunter.”
“Hunter?” K’Marah says.
“I can’t believe I’m letting you do this,” from Ororo.
“Yes, Hunter,” Shuri continues, ignoring Ororo. “Formerly known as the White Wolf.”
In its descent, the Predator passes over the bustling city of London,
and the girls marvel as Ororo points out things they’ve only ever read about in their digital European history textbooks: the River Thames and Tower Bridge and Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. There’s even a building shaped like a space capsule and what appears to be a giant Ferris wheel—the London Eye, Ororo says it’s called.
After another three or four minutes, the vessel approaches what appears to be the warehouse portion of an industrial district, and they slow to a near-stop above a cluster of nondescript brick buildings.
Shuri glances at the control panel right as the Predator switches into hover mode.
“Whoa!” K’Marah says from her post next to one of the vessel’s one-way glass side windows. “Shuri, come look!”
The girls watch in stunned silence as the roof of a building to their right splits down the center and slides open, revealing a landing pad with a white target painted at its center.
The radio crackles again, just about scaring both girls—and Ororo—out of their skins. “Seat belts!” Hunter’s voice says. “It’s windy down here. Landing might be a little turbulent.”
And turbulent it is. In fact, by the time they touch down within the building and the roof begins to slide shut above them, Shuri is so nauseated, she can barely move.
She hears the vessel’s belly hatch yawn open, and the rhythmic thu-thunk of thick heels as someone comes on board. Then a woman she’s never seen before appears over her right shoulder. She has something shiny and black draped over her forearm, and is carrying a silver tray topped with three half-filled glasses of bubbly brown liquid. “Princess Shuri,” she says with a reverent nod of her head and slight bow. “Honored to have you with us. The polyelastane you requested.” She lifts her elbow slightly and gestures with her head to the length of what Shuri realizes is fabric.
The princess slides it off her arm. “Thank you,” she says as she takes the woman in. She has beautiful umber skin and an angular face, with extremely close-cropped blond hair. And she’s wearing an olive-colored jumpsuit—lots of pockets—and brown lace-up boots.
As Shuri’s eyes trail back up the woman’s tall frame, they stick on a patch sewn onto her left shoulder: three horizontal stripes, green at the top and bottom, red in the middle, with a centralized image of a red panther against a black circle.
The flag of Wakanda.
“I am Lena,” the woman says. “I will be the point of contact for the duration of your stay in London.” She hands each of them a glass. “Drink up.”
“What is it?” K’Marah says warily, her Dora training actually kicking into gear for once.
It makes Lena smile. “Ginger ale. To settle your stomachs. I wanted to fly you around that pocket of bumpy air, but Hunter insisted we pull you through it.” She leans forward conspiratorially and lowers her voice. “Feel free to thank him by vomiting on his alligator shoes.”
Within minutes, Lena is collecting their empty glasses—the beverage did, in fact, help easy the queasy, as K’Marah so aptly puts it—and then they’re following her out the aircraft and toward a wide steel door Shuri wouldn’t have noticed had she not been looking right at it. As they advance, an iris scanner folds down from the wall, and Lena leans in. “I have heard much of your brilliance, Princess, so you’ll have to excuse our humble base of operations,” she says as a purple laser, not unlike the one on Shuri’s palm scanner, flashes over her eyeball. “Our faction’s shift from offensive to observational has … taken some getting used to.”
Ororo snorts. “I bet.”
“At any rate, Hunter is excited to see you.” The door opens, and the pair of girls and pair of women step through.
While Shuri doesn’t know all the details of Hatut Zeraze’s disbandment, she does know that the secret police was created by her father during his reign as king. He’d appointed his adopted son, Hunter, as the leader.
Shuri also knows T’Challa decommissioned the Hatut Zeraze shortly after ascending to the throne … and that he and Hunter have never really gotten along.
Years prior to T’Challa’s birth, Hunter was taken in by King T’Chaka after a plane crash on Wakandan land killed Hunter’s birth family. Shuri suspects that Hunter resents T’Challa for … being born, really: As the birth son, it made T’Challa the rightful heir to the Wakandan throne. She also has a hunch that T’Challa, despite being the true heir, resented being in Hunter’s shadow—she’s heard the White Wolf constantly outperformed T’Challa when they were young.
Hunter had left Wakanda on assignment by the time Shuri was born, and she’s technically only met him in person twice: first at Baba’s funeral, and second at T’Challa’s coronation after he bested S’Yan to become king. And she’s heard rumors of his brutality.
But he’s always been nice to her.
“Second doorway on the left,” Lena says, stepping aside so Shuri can walk ahead of her up the bare hallway with dingy tile floors and those terrible fluorescent lights buzzing in the ceiling. “He’s waiting for you, so go right in.”
The princess’s palms dampen as the weight of this impromptu visit settles on her head like a crown of plutonium. What leads will she have if Hunter can’t get her to this Selvig fellow? What will she do? All of this time spent getting here and then—
“Well, if it isn’t my beautiful baby sister! My, how you’ve grown!” says the green-eyed man rising from behind a wide desk as Shuri and the others step into the modestly furnished room. He’s around T’Challa’s height and of a similar build, but bearded and with slick, dark hair that’s pulled into a knot on top of his head.
And also: He’s … not brown.
“That is Hunter?” K’Marah says, too stunned to keep her voice down. “But he has the complexion of a colonizer!”
Shuri feels her face heat, but the Caucasian man just laughs. “You’re very observant,” he says with a wink. “Guess you can see why they call me the ‘White Wolf.’ ”
Storm disappears on some intel-acquiring mission for the X-Men, and the princess spends the evening refining the small bit of raw Vibranium she has on board the Predator for emergencies, and works at getting it to bind with the polyelastane fabric.
To her great relief, by morning, Hunter has not only managed to locate Dr. Selvig, he also “called in a few favors” (the coldness with which he says the phrase makes Shuri’s peace-loving flesh crawl, but she soldiers on) and arranged for Shuri to have ten minutes with him.
And it’s a good thing she took K’Marah’s “ridiculous” advice and brought her dress: Her cover will involve a brief appearance as a foreign biotechnology student at a benefit gala hosted by the local university where Dr. Selvig is hidden away in an underground laboratory.
“Just be ready to smile and nod,” Lena tells her as they move throughout the city making “preparations.”
K’Marah, who claims she’s been “backhanded by a wave of nausea-inducing jet lag or something,” hangs back at the outpost while Lena takes Shuri to a Ghanaian spa in the city to be scrubbed and polished, and with as much as the princess has on her mind, the day blurs by. One minute, she’s trying not to squirm while a woman scrubs her feet, and the next, she’s back at the outpost—hair, nails, and makeup done (she can wipe off the face but is fully aware that Mother will ask questions about the mani-pedi) and smelling of amber, iris, and patchouli—with Lena helping her into her dress.
Speaking of Lena, she and the two Wakandan men who will accompany them to meet Hunter are all wearing sleek black tuxedos. They’re also traveling in a large luxury vehicle she heard someone refer to by the name of another cat of prey: the jaguar.
She hates to admit it considering the circumstances, but for the first time in her life, the princess of Wakanda feels quite fancy. Less a dolled-up bauble made to hang at the queen’s side, and more glamorous and important in her own right. The feeling fuels her: Surely T’Challa gets to feel this way all the time.
Stepping into the gala space is jarring: The princess has never seen so many pale-skinned people in one
place. With everyone in their fancy clothes, it’s like moving through a sea of colored, crystal-studded snow.
Shuri doesn’t know the backstory details that have spread about her, but as she crosses the room to meet Hunter in a side hallway as planned, more than a few people stop her to make strange comments about how “impressed” they are that a girl “like you” or “where you’re from” has been “able to accomplish so much.” One older Caucasian couple holds her fast for three solid minutes to discuss how “glad” they are she “made it out of the bastion of corruption and poverty that is sub-Saharan Africa.”
Shuri finally escapes the crowd, and as she and Hunter take one hallway and staircase after another, her mind spins through the bizarre experience. It’s clear that many of the gala attendees hold similar ideas, not only about whatever country she’s supposedly from, but about the entire continent. Which seems … silly to the princess. What would these people think if they knew about Wakanda? Would they even believe it to be real?
Shuri’s never been so relieved to exit a too-bright space and step into a darker one.
Because Dr. Erik Selvig’s lab is just that: dark.
“We must keep the light low so they don’t think we have the cube,” he says nonsensically as Shuri and Hunter enter the room. A balding white man in full lab regalia—black slacks, button-down, tie, white coat—scurries around the bizarrely furnished room. There are strange machines scattered about, each with random-looking buttons and dials, the likes of which Shuri has never seen. He bounces between them muttering what sounds to the princess like gibberish under his breath: something about a red skull and a “hydra” and “Kobik.” The only thing Shuri does recognize is the name “Captain America.”
“Dr. Selvig, you have a guest,” says the squirrelly man who escorted them through a series of high-security doors to reach the lab.
“A guest?” Selvig replies, startled. “Did they bring the cube? I don’t want the cube.” And he puts his hands up in surrender before beginning to mumble and pace again.
Shuri jumps right in: “Sir, do you know anything about Vibranium?”