The Vanished

by Nic Stone

“How delightful,” Shuri grumbles.

  “Just watch out for her hands. There’s something here about gloves that can eat through the densest materials on Earth. She’s, like … a really bomb inventor.”

  “A bomb inventor?”

  “That’s ‘bomb’ as in ‘cool,’ ” Riri says.

  The song ends. (Why hadn’t she thought to put it on repeat?)

  “We want the same things, you and I,” the woman continues.

  Shuri is officially against a wall now. Nowhere else to go.

  “Aren’t you sick of being sidelined, Princess? You are brilliant. And so are they.” She gestures to the clump of girls, who all look dazed. Some of them shake their heads and look around, and Shuri can tell the toxin in the air is overtaking them again.

  And with the silencer in her helmet turned off, Shuri can now hear the Garden music. Which she realizes must be used in tandem with the fragrance to keep the girls subdued.

  “She really is a genius,” Shuri mumbles as her head goes fuzzy.

  “Shuri? What’s going on?” Riri shouts into her ear. “Do I need to signal your general now?”

  “Come, Princess,” Lady N says.

  She’s so pretty. And so nice. She’ll never overlook me … The thoughts float through Shuri’s head like oil atop water.

  “Join us,” Lady N continues. “We should be ruling this world. You and I and the others. We have the smarts to end all wars. We can cure the diseases. We have the brains to create the tech that will make the world better. We can control everything, my sweet.”

  She places her hands on Shuri’s shoulders. There’s a sizzling sound, and the area beneath Lady N’s hands suddenly feels very … warm.

  “Ahhh …” the woman says. “I had a hunch there was Vibranium in this garish purple suit of yours.”

  “What?” Shuri’s eyelids begin to droop.

  “Shuri, FIGHT BACK!” comes a voice that isn’t Riri’s. Though it is familiar. The princess manages to turn her head and sees a shortish brown-skinned girl in a gray jumpsuit with her hair in braids that form a crown. She has her hands over her ears. “You’ve been training for this for months. Don’t forget who you are!”

  “K’Marah?” Shuri says.

  The girl’s eyes drop to the floor and Shuri follows them. There’s a rectangular device lying facedown.

  “You …” K’Marah falters as her French friends turn on her, back to being mindless minions. “Come ON, Shuri!”

  Shuri looks at the device again. “Riri,” she breathes out. “Please … call me.”

  “Riri?” Nightshade looks around at the girls in the room. “Who is Riri? Who are you talking to?” And she takes a step toward Shuri.

  “Huh?” comes a voice in her ear. (Or is it in her head?)

  “Call me. On the phone. Now.”

  “Shuri, how does—”

  “Please, Riri …”

  Shuri’s eyes drift shut.

  And then she’s falling.

  Falling …

  Falling …

  “WHO RUN THE WORLD? GIRLS!”

  Shuri snaps back.

  As it dawns on Nightshade (because that’s who this woman really is: a villain) that something’s wrong, Shuri shoves past the pain rippling down her arms (what is on those gloves?) and knifes her hands upward, forcing Nightshade’s hands from Shuri’s shoulders, and knocking the woman’s head off-kilter with a blow to the chin. Nightshade reels back on now-unsteady feet.

  Which the princess uses to her advantage: A quick shift in stance and a low roundhouse sweep of her right leg send the woman the rest of the way to the ground.

  But Nightshade has a trick up her sleeve.

  Literally.

  With a flick of Nightshade’s wrist—Shuri would’ve missed it if not for Kocha M’Shindi drilling the importance of paying close attention—something slides into the woman’s palm, and before the princess can react, Nightshade’s fingers close over it, and an earsplitting ring rips through air.

  Shuri—and every girl she can see from this angle—drops to her knees with her head in her hands.

  Which gives Nightshade just enough time to get to her feet.

  Shuri cries out as a boot-clad foot connects with her rib cage, knocking her to her side.

  Riri’s voice cuts through the stabbing sensation in her eardrums: “Turn your silencer back on, Shuri!”

  “I … can’t! Hurts!”

  “You have to. You’re those girls’ only hope!”

  “I …”

  “Come ON, Shuri! I believe in you! Who run the world?!”

  At the sound of those four words Shuri uses all the strength she can muster to bring her hands together so she can press the button at her wrist.

  The moment the noise cuts out, Shuri leaps to her feet (though her ears are still ringing). And she surges at Nightshade. Using a combo of swings, blows, and kicks that would make even M’Shindi applaud, she throws everything she’s got at the Mohawked woman.

  There’s a chop. And a jab. And a perfectly executed butterfly kick that knocks Nightshade’s noise remote thing high into the air. Shuri catches it and presses the button to shut the sound off. And the girls slowly lower their hands from their ears and rise to their feet.

  When Shuri sees Nightshade crab-walking backward, she knows her job is done.

  “You can signal the general now,” Shuri says to Riri.

  “Already on it,” the girl replies.

  And Shuri smiles. Because to her right, there’s a group of young geniuses, some shaking their heads and some rubbing their temples, but all rising to their feet with their gazes set on the woman trying to get away.

  And they are not happy.

  “Girls,” Shuri says, largely to herself. “Girls run the world.”

  An unforeseen benefit to Nightshade’s use of her sonic debilitation system, as Shuri calls it: The shriek displaced the auditory hypnosis sound track (also Shuri’s words), and once the princess has the latter shut down, the air is eerily quiet.

  After the engineering Garden girls have Nightshade restrained—using rope made of some sort of super-strong silk Nightshade herself invented (“Harsh,” from Riri)—a girl named Kitty Pryde leads Shuri underground to the space beneath the Hive that holds the actual control room.

  “By the way: What’s with the bees?” the princess asks en route. “They seem an interesting thing to ‘keep’ in a place like this.”

  Kitty nods. “I remember thinking the same thing when I found out about it,” she says. “I don’t really get the whole thing because I’m tech, not entomology. But from what I was told, Lady N, like … extracts, I guess, a component of the bee venom, and uses it to make some sort of paralysis liquid?”

  “Hmm …” Shuri wonders aloud. “I wonder if that’s what was in those darts.”

  Kitty shrugs. “Could be.”

  “It would certainly make sense,” Riri’s voice says in Shuri’s ear.

  Once they reach the mainframe and Shuri is able to plant the chip, Riri is able to access the Garden’s operating system. The handful of older girls round everyone up in “Hydrogen Hall,” the theater-style meeting room, and while Shuri debriefs the whole lot (124 total) and assures everyone that help is on the way, Riri shuts down the perception-warping toxin pump, and makes the place visible from the outside.

  Once she finishes what she hopes comes across as a pep talk, Shuri looks down at the red canvas jumpsuit she’s wearing and sighs. The tech girls gave it to her and dubbed her an “honorary recruit,” though the princess suspects their gift might’ve had something to do with the gaping holes in the shoulders of her polyethylene suit. Still though: Despite knowing this place isn’t as wonderful as it seemed, part of Shuri is sad that she didn’t get to spend any time here. If nothing else, she knows these girls are her people, and the veritable meeting of the minds was sure to have been an epic one.

  She wonders what will happen to the facility once they all leave it.

  Her Kimoyo card
vibrates in her pocket. (Had to turn the ringer off. A near-death experience is one way to ruin an excellent song.) “Hello?”

  “The fleet is arriving,” Riri says.

  Shuri looks around and sighs again. “Okay.”

  “All the doors should be wide open, elevator included. You can start sending the girls out, and they’ll be sorted by region.”

  That gives Shuri pause. “Uhhh … sorted by whom?”

  “Ah. Yeah, about that. I, umm … might’ve called for some backup.”

  “Backup?”

  “Yes,” Riri says without expounding. “It’ll make things run a bit smoother, I think.”

  As the girls file out, Shuri and K’Marah find their way to each other and fall in line, side by side. They don’t look at each other, and at first neither girl speaks. But as they approach the open elevator where the adventure really began, Shuri grabs K’Marah’s arm to hold her back.

  “It was me,” she says, forcing herself to look into her friend’s face. “I’m the one who said you told me about the conclave.”

  K’Marah tries to pull away, but Shuri holds her fast.

  “I’m sorry, K’Marah. I found out about it … another way, and I didn’t want my mother or T’Challa to know. Which doesn’t make what I did excusable, but I want you to know that I told Okoye the truth. She knows it wasn’t you.”

  K’Marah’s eyes narrow and she sighs through her nose. Though she still won’t look at Shuri.

  The princess goes on anyway. “That letter you left … I read it more times than I’m willing to admit. And I’ve never felt so many things at once, K’Marah. Guilt over my wrongdoing. Panic that something awful was happening to you. Fear that I’d never see you again—”

  “Sheesh with the gloom and doom, Shuri,” K’Marah says. “I get it.”

  “Well, I want you to know nothing was the same without you. Not Wakanda. Not this mission. Not … anything.”

  “Shuri?”

  “Yes?”

  Now K’Marah turns to look Shuri in the eye. “I was gone for all of five hours.”

  “Not true! You were gone for days before that! Even if you were still in Wakanda—”

  “Same could be said for you, Princess!”

  “Okay, okay, fine.” Shuri makes a swipe at her face. When had she started crying? “I just—”

  But she doesn’t get anything else out, because K’Marah is suddenly squeezing her so tightly, she can hardly breathe, let alone speak.

  “I forgive you,” the shorter (but not as shorter as she used to be) girl says. “You are pardoned. Absolved. Exonerated. In this court, declared not guilty.”

  “You are utterly dramatic,” Shuri says, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. “And absolutely vital. Wakanda needs you, K’Marah.” The princess pulls back so she can see her best friend’s face. “I need you.”

  Now K’Marah swipes at her face. “All right, all right,” she says. “Enough with the mushy-gushy. Let’s get out of this place and go home.”

  As the girls stride into the elevator hand in hand, both startled by the sight of their shared reflection in the mirrored walls—“Whoa,” K’Marah says—Shuri’s mind buzzes with questions, not unlike the giant beehive. For instance: What will happen to the bees? She makes it a point to tell whoever’s in charge of investigating the place that the bees are there and should be removed unharmed and delivered to a place they can thrive …

  And then there’s the question of the girls. What will happen to them when they return home? Many of them were reluctant to exit the Garden, tossing deeply forlorn looks over their shoulders on the way out, and Shuri can’t say she doesn’t understand why. While Shuri was only privy to a small handful of the girls’ backstories, a few she’s aware of involve not a small measure of poverty. Shuri wonders just how many of the girls were using discarded materials for their experiments. Or were on borrowed time and space in the laboratories where they were permitted to pursue their passions in their homelands.

  What will happen to the likes of Pilar? Cici? Xiang? Little Syd (who was totally onto Shuri and K’Marah the first time they infiltrated)? Will all their work be for naught because they can’t continue it?

  Looking around the atrium space with the fake wood walls, Shuri thinks about her own wildly high-tech—and surely very expensive—laboratory back in Wakanda. And her heart clenches. What will be done with this place?

  She sighs and resists the impulse to look back one more time as she and her very best friend in the world step through the formerly hidden entrance, and out into the bright desert day.

  Where they both stop dead.

  Because there in front of them is a small fleet of sleek black jets and helicopters … none of which are Wakandan.

  “What the—” K’Marah starts and breaks off. “Is that … who I think it is?”

  “Huh?”

  “There, talking to Okoye.”

  Shuri follows K’Marah’s line of sight to the general, who is standing in conversation with … “The red-and-gold robot?”

  “Oy!” K’Marah smacks her forehead. “Do you live in a cave?”

  Shuri is taken aback. “I mean, I don’t live there, but I guess the space where my laboratory is located could be considered cave-like—”

  “That’s Iron Man, Shuri. One of the most famous—and richest—American Super Heroes in the biz!” K’Marah goes back to staring. “I can’t even believe it.”

  “Well, you should,” comes a deep voice from behind the girls.

  They both jump and whip around. Which means they not only see the tall, dark-brown-skinned man with the eye patch, but also what the Garden looks like from the outside when not invisible.

  “Whoa,” Shuri says at the same moment K’Marah says, “Aren’t you hot?!” Because while Shuri is stunned by the matte-gunmetal, impeccably sharp-lined exterior of the two-story edifice that she knows is a giant hexagon, K’Marah is gaping at the man. Who, yes, is intensely overdressed: black dress shoes, slacks, and a turtleneck sweater … beneath a black trench coat.

  “You’re the infamous Princess Shuri of Wakanda, I take it?” the man says, locking Shuri in the gaze of his uncovered eye and crossing his arms.

  “I—”

  “Who wants to know?” K’Marah cuts in, stepping in front of the princess.

  The man’s eyebrows rise. “And who might you be?”

  “Your worst nightmare if you don’t get to talking—”

  “K’Marah!”

  The man chuckles and reaches into his pocket. “Colonel Nicholas Joseph Fury, Jr.,” he says, flashing a shiny badge. “I’m from S.H.I.E.L.D. Which stands for the—”

  “Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division,” Shuri says, completely in awe now.

  “Ah, okay,” K’Marah grumbles. “So you know the ridiculous name of some random organization from who-knows-where, but have no idea who Iron Man is. Typical.” She shakes her head.

  The man, Nick, chuckles again. “You’re a spunky one,” he says to K’Marah. “And yes: The princess here knows us very well. I understand we have you to thank for the mysterious cloaking technology that appeared in our design files?” He holds out a remote and points it at one of the jets. It vanishes, and the small group of adults congregated around it all stumble backward. “FURY!” one of them shouts.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Shuri says.

  “Hmm,” Nick continues. “Well, whether or not that was you, we do have you and your Chicago-based friend Riri Williams to thank for leading us to this place. Tony almost didn’t believe her when she reached out to him about it, but here we are.”

  “Tony?” Shuri says.

  “STARK,” from K’Marah. “Tony STARK, Shuri. As in IRON MAN!”

  “Red-and-gold robot guy. Got it.”

  “I just wanted to personally assure you that we’ll get all these young ladies back to their families safely,” Nick goes on. “You have my word on that.” He crosse
s his arms then. “Also clearly need to work on our cybersecurity protocols considering we’ve been hacked by two teenyboppers—”

  “Who you calling a teenybopper?!” K’Marah barks.

  It just makes Mr. Fury (what a name this guy has) laugh.

  “And what will happen to this place?” Shuri says, letting her gaze drift back to the Garden building. “There’s a giant beehive inside, by the way.”

  At first, Colonel Nicholas Joseph Fury, Jr., doesn’t respond. When Shuri looks back at him, there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “We know about the bees,” he says. “And don’t you worry: I think S.H.I.E.L.D. can find a good use for the premises.” He winks.

  “Shuri! K’Marah! We need to leave, loves,” Okoye shouts in their direction.

  “Guess that’s our cue,” Shuri says with a final sigh.

  “Yep!” K’Marah grabs her hand and begins to pull her in the direction of the (very much visible) Predator.

  “Hey, Princess?” Fury says.

  Shuri turns around. “Yeah?”

  He rocks back on his heels and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Whereabouts are you all located? Your nation, I mean.”

  At this Shuri snorts. And rotates away.

  “Like I’d tell you,” she says without looking back.

  With one day to complete three assessments—including the one Shuri bombed with M’Walimu, the dinosaur tamer—the moment Okoye and the girls are back on the ground in Wakanda, Shuri goes straight to her quarters and shoves her nose into that supervillain of a Global Diplomacy textbook. She still hasn’t quite figured out what she can do to help all the girls who were sent home from the Garden, but going to the conclave and seeing how this international relations stuff works feels like a decent place to start.

  “You made it back from your trip,” a voice says. Shuri lifts her head to find the queen mother standing in her doorway. Elegant as ever in a maroon caftan with asymmetrical “stripes” made of gold beads.

  The princess sighs. Then smiles. “I did,” she says.

  “I trust all went smoothly?”

  Shuri nods. “As silk.” She nods at her mother’s dress.

  “Excellent. You are in the midst of your studies, I see. And I commend you. But might you permit a brief interruption?”