The moment Shuri steps back into her quarters some three hours later, she knows something’s off. (Though, fine: Playing Uno did make the time pass more quickly.)
She also knows that Ayo and Nakia are going to sweep the room before allowing her to enter … But she hopes to Bast that they don’t find anything—or anyone. Shuri would like to examine the area for herself.
As the Dora move through Shuri’s space, their spears at the ready, the princess makes a big show of being extra exhausted. “I mean you lovely ladies no disrespect”—big yawn and stretch for effect—“but if we could speed things up just a smidge … I am quite tired and would like to go to bed now. It is almost three a.m. after all.”
“Duly noted, Your Majesty,” Ayo replies with a reverent bow of her head. Shuri still hasn’t gotten used to that. “We will check your dressing chambers, and then I will post just outside the door. Nakia will stay in here with—”
“NO!” Shuri shouts before she can catch herself.
Ayo pulls back in alarm.
“Sorry, sorry,” Shuri says. “It’s just that … I don’t know that I’d be able to sleep with someone inside my quarters. Well … besides K’Marah.” She’s on the verge of rambling now. “But I’ve been sharing sleeping spaces with K’Marah for years, you see, so it’s very different—”
“All right, all right,” Nakia says, lifting hands in surrender. “We will both stay outside. But if you change your mind once you shut off the light and the dark settles, just shout and one of us will come in. Yes, we received the all clear from palace security, but I know how jolting these situations can be.”
“Correct,” Ayo chimes in. “So we are here for you. Another Dora will relieve me in one hour, but Nakia will be here until morning. Okay?”
Shuri nods. “Okay!” Yikes, too exuberant … “Umm … thank you both very much. For … protecting me and all that. Good night!”
She gives a little wave and turns to walk to her bed. Within a few seconds, she hears the door click shut behind her.
Which is when she jumps into her own high alert.
Someone was inside her quarters while she was not. She knows this to be fact as certainly as she knows every property of Wakandan Vibranium. She can feel it.
She hasn’t shut off the light, so she’s able to see the entire space clearly. Nothing looks out of place. But there’s something almost tangible in the air. The … ghost, for lack of a better term, of someone’s (or something’s?) presence.
She turns in a circle, taking the room in. Everything is precisely the way she left it and completely undisturbed—which, believe it or not, is easier for her to see when there’s a bit of a mess—but it clicks: The curtain that typically covers the entrance to her dressing chamber was open even before Nakia stepped a foot toward it.
Shuri always leaves it closed.
Her eyes go wide then. Because if someone was in there, it could spell Very Bad News. Especially if that someone was a black-suited, human-shaped, spider-ish creature person: She keeps a stash of Vibranium and weapons hidden inside.
No, none of the weapons are lethal: a few updated kitty cannon blasters that shoot electromagnetic energy, a pair of light gauntlets, a long-range stun gun … But in the wrong hands, they could certainly all render palace guards and/or Dora Milaje unconscious long enough to get past them. In fact, the stun gun shock is so intense that for a few minutes after coming to, the victim of one of those discharges is so disoriented, an enemy could get them to divulge just about any bit of information said enemy was after.
And there’s no telling what a non-Wakandan would do with the stash of Vibranium.
Shuri carefully approaches, her Kimoyo card in hand. If nothing else, she’ll be able to temporarily blind any intruder with the flashlight long enough to knock him (or her … or them …) to the floor. She thinks.
She sloooooowly peeks around the curtained side of the doorway … and finds her stash-away lab center partially pulled out. Shuri certainly didn’t leave it that way—she always makes sure to slide everything back in place and seal it up tight. Yes, Mother knows there’s a miniature laboratory in Shuri’s closet, but she doesn’t know how to get into it if it’s shut.
The closer Shuri gets to the scene of who-knows-what-she’ll-find, the louder her heartbeat thrums in her ears. (Too bad noise-canceling earbuds can’t cancel that.) And once she has the station completely pulled out, she stumbles backward in surprise. And not because anything’s missing …
All the things she keeps hidden—from the jars of various chemical concoctions, to the hunks of raw Vibranium, to the weapons—are knocked over and moved around.
Shuri begins to go through every jar and container she had stashed. Someone—nameless, black-clad, smile-of-death being, if she had to guess—went through them.
All of them, Shuri realizes. Every single last one.
But it doesn’t look like anything was taken.
We just want gem rings that croaky voice in her head.
He was clearly telling the truth …
But why is he so convinced that Shuri has it?
The next day, Shuri is permitted to go to her lab.
Surrounded by more guards than she’s ever seen in one place at one time.
In an armored, tank-shaped hovercraft. (Perhaps her nation is well equipped to handle an invasion of enemy forces.)
That’s a part of a fleet of similar vehicles.
Thankfully, her best friend is with her. “Ahh … this is a bit overkill, don’t you think?” K’Marah whispers from her five-point-harnessed position in the seat beside Shuri’s. (“What are we, toddlers?” she’d said quite loudly as a pair of stoic and silent male guards strapped them both in.)
“Definitely overkill,” Shuri replies. Then she leans closer to her friend. “Especially since we already know what we’re dealing with here. Sort of.”
“Was he really in your room?”
“Shhhhhh!” the princess hisses. “No one knows that but you. And I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Valid.” K’Marah nods and drags her finger and thumb across her lips in a zipping motion.
(The drama with that one.)
They ride in silence the remainder of the half-hour journey—moving in fleet-mode slows things down a bit. But the second the outer door to the lab seals itself shut—with all the security personnel outside it—Shuri launches into go-mode.
“Okay, so this is the information I was able to gather since we last saw each other.” She tells K’Marah everything she learned about the elusive nebular gem, and how Zanda was the last person known to have it. (“Too bad that tall troll of a woman didn’t accidentally disintegrate herself and ‘regenerate’ right into that churning red storm on the surface of Jupiter” was K’Marah’s reply to that part.)
And then they get to the intruder. “I only read one article,” Shuri admits. “But I felt like that was all I needed to read.”
“Uhhh … why?”
They step into the center lab station, the home of Shuri’s trusty desktop computer (which she basically rebuilds every few months to keep it current). The princess boots the machine up and the monitor comes to life. “Because it mentions S.H.I.E.L.D.”
Within forty-five minutes, the girls are collapsing on the couch in the lab’s central atrium.
“Talk about information overload,” K’Marah says.
Shuri’s reply is uncharacteristically succinct: “Tell me about it.”
Fury, surprisingly, answered on their first attempted call. Which caught both girls off guard—they usually have to call multiple times over the course of multiple hours to get hold of him. But then Shuri remembers one key fact: Her beloved big bro is on a mission with the shiny-headed man.
“Got a little free time today,” he said when he picked up. (Must not be that intense of a mission, the princess thinks.)
And free time he certainly did have. Enough, in fact, to not only tell the girls about his encounters with an “individual” he called Venom (“Not always pretty”) but also to explain precisely what Venom is: an extraterrestrial symbiote.
“Based on your description of this ‘strange visitor,’ as you put it, my guess is he’s one of the Klyntar,” Fury says. He then treats the Wakandan princess and her best friend to a rundown of the alien’s abilities and a full, extensive history of the symbiote’s kind.
Fury did ask how the symbiote managed to get into Wakanda—and seemed a little jealous. (Shuri, of course, didn’t have an answer, though she’s certainly determined to get one. She definitely didn’t tell him the intruder managed to break into the Wakandan palace. Twice.)
This is how Fury got into talking about how “the Venom symbiote,” as he kept referring to the version he was familiar with, made its way to Earth: “It’s a long story, but the gist is that a group of U.S. Super Heroes was transported against their will to some far-off planet we know only as ‘Battleworld’—”
“Wait,” Shuri said, recalling that name. “You … wouldn’t happen to know anything about something called the nebular gem, would you?”
“Can’t say I do, kid.”
Shuri rolled her eyes. She hated when he called her kid. So condescending. “Go on,” she said.
“Well, Spider-Man—”
(“I’ve seen him on PantherTube!” K’Marah interjected in the loudest whisper Shuri thinks she’s ever heard.)
Fury laughs. “Well, his suit got completely destroyed in a fight on Battleworld, and a symbiote wound up bonding to him in the form of a new suit. Then good ol’ Spidey came back to Earth with it.”
The girls learned that Spider-Man eventually rejected the sentient alien suit, and it found and bonded with a different guy. And then another and another and another.
Which is how he landed at the question that put both girls’ brains at full capacity: “So who is this one’s host?”
“Host?” Shuri replied.
“Yeah. The symbiotes are useless on their own. They gotta bond with someone. Usually someone it feels like it can relate to. Then it takes on that someone’s persona. Feels what the person is feeling and exacerbates it. Sifts through the person’s hopes and dreams, and becomes personally invested in them—”
Shuri didn’t hear much more after that. She was too struck. She vaguely hears something about Fury having an “idea” he would run by T’Challa to “get you Wakandans some assistance” before he ended the call, but her head was spinning. If the intruder really is this symbiote thing Fury is talking about, and it has taken on the “hopes and dreams” of what must be a Wakandan host (how else would it know its way around?), and it has broken into the palace twice—
“They really are a person,” K’Marah says out of the blue. “Like, partially, at least, right? Fury said these things have to have a someone to attach themselves to …”
“Yeah” is all Shuri can muster.
Because one thing is abundantly clear: She not only has to find out how the symbiote got in, but also which Wakandan is “hosting” it. And why.