Shuri has no idea if this is going to work.
“Is this going to work?” K’Marah asks from her crouch position beside the princess.
“I don’t know, K’Marah!” Shuri huffs. “For Bast’s sake, you must stop asking me these unanswerable questions. You are going to drive me mad!”
“Fine. Sheesh.”
The girls are on the ridge of a short cliff near the Sacred Mound. Which is both blessing and curse: There are so many guards stationed around the mound, Shuri and K’Marah have permission to roam the area without a squadron of Dora on top of them. (Also helpful: K’Marah was able to flex her Dora Milaje Karami status when Ayo attempted to object to the girls “going for a walk within the guarded area.”)
However, despite them being alone—and having a bit of space to enact Shuri’s plan—the area is truly full of guards. And while the presence of guards certainly hasn’t stopped their symbiote—because after a bit more research, Shuri is certain that is exactly what they are dealing with—from waltzing into the palace (twice) and traipsing through the city wrecking things, Shuri’s not sure it will come out into the open in broad daylight. Which is the only time they could attempt this considering how infrequently the princess is NOT surrounded by grown-ups.
“I really, truly, sincerely hope this works,” Shuri says into the wind.
It’s been three days since the intruder’s last “visit” to the palace, though there have been reports of it popping up in other places throughout the kingdom. Last night, the princess spent hours creating a rough replica of the nebular gem she saw in the photo online. That one is a pale pink color with an iridescent sheen, and while she’s not entirely sure she got the scale right, it seemed to her to be the size of an extra-large river pebble. Like a giant blush-colored marble, flattened out.
Little hunk of rose quartz, smoothed into shape by a diamond-grinding disk tool Shuri created when trying to get into making Vibranium jewelry (definitely a bust), then coated in kaleidoscopic mica powder and topped with a self-hardening glaze.
She placed a dozen teensy-tiny nanotech tracking devices across the glistening surface. If their intruder picks the thing up at all, at least one of them will stick to his hands. Then they’ll be able to locate it wherever it goes.
Even K’Marah was impressed. “Wow, that is beautiful!” she said, holding it up to the light to take in the shimmer. “If your whole plan is a bust, will you pull the tracking thingies off and let me have it?”
Shuri had rolled her eyes then … her best friend just couldn’t resist a shiny object.
But she’s certainly not rolling them now.
“Okay, let’s get started,” she says to K’Marah—who is in full Dora garb today. And acting as Shuri’s assistant. “I’m going to prep the drone for bait placement, and I need you to—”
“ ‘Hold your Kimoyo card up so you can see what you’re doing because you need both your hands to control the drone,’ ” K’Marah says. “You’ve only told me nine hundred and seventeen times.”
“Oh hush.”
Extra carefully, Shuri loads the gem into the small compartment on the underside of her drop-off drone. (She has a pickup one as well. It has a multi-jointed claw where this one’s containment box is.) Then she powers the machine on and puts it in stealth-mode. It disappears right before the girls’ eyes.
“Whoa!” K’Marah says.
“This is why we need the Kimoyo card. In stealth-mode, I can’t guide the thing by sight, and I couldn’t get the software to upload to my CatEyez.” It had frustrated Shuri to no end, knowing she wouldn’t be able to use the multipurpose glasses she invented precisely for tasks like this one. “Did the views from the cameras pop up?”
“Yep!” K’Marah says, holding the small screen where Shuri can see it. There are six images: one from each of the four sides of the box, giving the girls a 360-degree view, and two wide-angle ones that show what’s above the shoebox-size machine and what’s beneath it.
“Here goes,” Shuri says, pressing the button on her controller that makes the device lift into the air. “Now hold the screen as steady as possible so I don’t crash this thing.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.” And K’Marah puts the card in Shuri’s view.
It’s quite a spectacular sight, like floating over the world within a glass globe. Shuri can see the sky above and the bare earth below … nothing grows on or around the cliffs that house the Sacred Mound. There are the mountains in the distance on one view, and the towering skyscrapers of Birnan Zana on another. She almost wants to fly the thing around Wakanda just to see what it all looks like.
“Shuri, I need to tell you something,” K’Marah says, breaking the princess’s reverie. The drone takes a sharp dip to the right.
“K’Marah, you can’t startle me like that! We only have one chance to get this right today, and if I break our mode of faux-gem transport, there won’t be a chance to try again until I build a new one.”
K’Marah sighs. “Fine, fine,” she replies. “But trust me when I say you’ll one hundred percent want to hear this.”
Shuri nods once and then refocuses on the task at hand. She chose a spot near the base of a cliff across the wide valley from where the girls are now. There is absolutely nothing significant about said spot other than the fact that it is nicely shaded and easily accessed by a narrow rift that separates it from the cliff beside it. Hopefully the symbiote is looking everywhere for the gem.
“Okay, we are making our initial descent,” Shuri says.
This makes K’Marah giggle. The Kimoyo screen shakes.
“K’Marah!”
“Sorry, sorry. It’s just that you sound like a flight attendant.”
“A what?”
“Don’t worry about it, Princess. I’m sure with all your inventions and high-tech modes of transportation, you will never encounter one. I saw it in some American movie I was watching.”
“You and your American movies,” Shuri replies absentmindedly. “Okay. Almost there …”
The drone touches down a few meters away from the face of the cliff wall, and a little cloud of dust suddenly obscures the view of the underside screen.
She exhales.
“Now to drop the package and get our drone back—”
All the camera views vanish from Shuri’s Kimoyo card screen, and the beaded bracelet on her wrist begins to vibrate.
A picture of Nakia—and T’Challa’s arm draped across her shoulders, though Shuri cut the rest of him out of the photo—pops up as the card buzzes.
“Drat,” K’Marah says. “What do we do?”
“Well, we unfortunately have to answer, don’t we? Otherwise they’ll get all in a tizzy and go into panic-mode. And we will probably get grounded.”
“True,” K’Marah says.
“Just hit the button to take the call without video—”
K’Marah taps the wrong button (and, fine: On Shuri’s updated Kimoyo card, the position of the video and no-video commands are switched), and Nakia’s face fills the screen. K’Marah quickly lifts it so that only she is visible. The controller in Shuri’s hand would certainly raise some suspicion. “Hello, Nakia!” she says overenthusiastically.
“K’Marah, where is Shuri?”
“She’s, ahhh …”
Shuri quicky swivels the lever that opens the drone’s trapdoor and lets the fake nebular gem drop out. Then she shuts off the stealth-mode and commands the thing back into the air. Yes, someone might see it now, but she has a hunch that her access to the camera views will not be returned, and they need to get the thing back as quickly as possible.
“She’s in a tree!”
Shuri’s head whips left—and so does the drone. She fumbles to course correct. Then looks at her friend again like, What on earth are you doing?
“She’s what, now?” Nakia says.
K’Marah brings the card closer to her face, Shuri presumes to hide the glaringly treeless landscape behind her. “Yes. She saw some strange leaf she thought she could use for one of her experiments—you know how she is, Nakia—and despite my protests, she climbed on up!”
There’s a pause. The drone is almost back to them, about the length of one of those American “football” fields left to go (such a silly name considering they mostly use their hands, in Shuri’s humble opinion). Then Nakia says, “All right. Well, we need you both back here at the rear loading dock within the next ten minutes. It is time to return to the city for your midday meal.”
Shuri shakes her head. Ever since the second break-in, Mother has insisted that she and Shuri take all major meals—breakfast, lunch, and supper—together on a palace patio. “Stall for one more minute!” she hisses at K’Marah.
“Yes! Okay, Nakia, no problem. I will let the princess know. SHURIIII! HEY, SHURI, YOU MUST GET DOWN FROM THERE AT ONCE! WE HAVE TO RETURN TO CIVILIZATION!”
“Oh boy,” Shuri mouths. “Good thing her biggest dream was to become a Dora Milaje and not an actor …”
“See you soon, Nakia! Byyyyye!” K’Marah ends the call. “I heard what you just said, by the way,” she says to Shuri. “And you’re welcome for covering your royal butt!”
“Got it!” Shuri exclaims, landing the drone between them. She lets the tension drop from her shoulders, then moves to put the drone back in its case before shoving the whole thing into her backpack. “And thank you.” She looks up at her friend and smiles. “For all your help.”
K’Marah smiles back and lifts her chin. “Face it, Princess: You couldn’t live without me.”
The next time Shuri’s Kimoyo card starts buzzing, it’s one o’clock in the morning. And since the only person who would phone her at that hour is across the room, the princess is almost certain it’s not an incoming call. “Oh my gods!” she says. She puts down the textbook she’s reading on her bed (nuclear physics … total cakewalk, but nothing wrong with a refresher) and snatches the device from the nightstand. She takes in all the flashing yellow dots on the map of Wakanda that have appeared on her screen. There are nine in the valley just outside the Sacred Mound, and a cluster of three on the move.
She looks up at K’Marah, who is flipping through some fashion magazine in the reading nook. “K’Marah!”
“Hmmm?”
Shuri taps around on the screen, and a three-dimensional holographic version of the map appears in midair.
It takes K’Marah a second to catch on, but once she does …
“Wait. Is that—” She gasps. Then looks right at Shuri. “It actually worked?”
“I mean, unless some undiscovered species of very speedy animal came in contact with our fake gem, I would say yes! See how fast those dots are moving? And none of the world’s swiftest animals are native to our land.”
“So where is it going, do you think?” K’Marah rises from her perch to circle the floating map.
“Guess we’ll find out once it stops.”
The girls watch as their dots zip north. They go around Birnin Bashenga to the west, then swing back east and skirt the outer edge of Wakanda’s most recently developed city, Birnin T’Chaka (Shuri’s heart clenches a bit at the thought of Baba).
They begin to slow, and Shuri thinks they’re going to stop at the northern tip of the city, but they don’t. The dots continue north.
There’s only one habitable place beyond that. Well, theoretically habitable—there are people who live there, though Shuri’s never met any of them.
Their intruder couldn’t possibly be going there … could it?
“Great Bast,” K’Marah says once the dot comes to rest.
“Is it living there, do you think?” Shuri asks aloud.
But K’Marah doesn’t respond.
“K’Marah?” Shuri turns to her friend. The little Dora’s eyes are wide, and she looks as though she has stumbled onto the Djalia and come face-to-face with the spirits of the ancestors. “K’Marah, what’s the matter?”
“It went to the Jabari-Lands,” K’Marah says to no one in particular.
“Yes. And what of it?”
Now K’Marah shifts her gaze to Shuri. “Remember earlier when I told you I needed to tell you something?”
Shuri’s heart drops. “Yes … I do.”
“Well, I think now is a great time for that conversation.” K’Marah looks back at the map.
The dots haven’t moved.
“Umm … okay,” Shuri says. “What does it pertain to?”
K’Marah sighs then, and her shoulders drop. (Shuri hates when this happens. Always precedes some sort of bad news.)
“Shuri?” she says.
“Yes?”
K’Marah meets the princess’s eyes. “I think I might know who is hosting our alien.”