Killmonger repaid his absence with a pounding force that threatened her skull to split. His words tipped the manic that lack of sleep and inadequate variety of human nutrition induced into a full-blown derangement. There was no denial or bargaining or even anger, only acknowledgement of her visceral need of the water-King, Feathered Serpent God and threat to all surface-dwellers.
The Black Panther could not keep herself from laughing sardonically and clutching at her head in a spasm, before her vision finally blackened to the sharp yelps of her guards.
"She is a strong human but she has overworked herself."
"The strongest human," Namor corrected. His subjects knew the matter of his defeat in great detail but he would not sully himself by suggesting anyone other than the Black Panther's wily use of vibranium technology and spears could have forced him into submission. "She has ample time. There was no need for her to work like this."
"Did you give her that impression?" Fen's face contorted into something curious, an expression rarely found on the gentle woman. "Or perhaps her intellect was over-estimated."
Namor remembered the drying trap and leveled a cool glare at Fen.
"Speak of her with respect, my child. I will not have Talokan known to Wakanda for treating their Princess as though she was a common servant."
Fen turned her away from him, not entirely to impress the disrespect forcing him to look upon her back would but enough that he cursed under his breath. Had all of his cousins and their chosen spouses grown so comfortable with his favor? Namora's increased vitriol this month implied as much.
She worked quickly in his cabin. The guards had fetched for her immediately and moved Shuri's body back to air, but word only reached Namor after Fen's absence at a meeting with Tozi. Shuri's strange liquid had worked, with healthy members of households with sick families staying healthy. Tozi request that enough of it be produced to be administered to all healthy Talokanil, not only those in the outer sectors, had been interrupted by Totl, the young man Namor remembered worked with Shuri in Juana's place. Tozi knew Namor long enough to know the ticks on his face he kept so carefully under control that she herself shooed the Feathered Serpent God away.
That, or from the glances the guards tried to sneak at him and the stifled mutters about the Princess they thought he couldn't hear, Tozi had made her own conclusions.
"Your care is generous, K'uk'ulkan, for it to extend to her people. Chac be with you and us." Fen lifted a vibranium-infused cloth to Shuri's forehead.
The Princess was resting peacefully on the… bed he himself recovered on not too long ago from wounds she inflicted. The curves of her lovely face that he had memorized while she slept conflicted with the ones before him now: eyebrows scrunched in pain, teeth gnashing, her pale neck contorted with coils of tension. Sweat pooled in small beads across her face. One rolled over her jaw and into the crevice between her neck and clavicle.
He tensed, the memory of his tongue hovering so close to that very spot flickering in his mind.
"You have also trusted her with a number of technologies," the healer continued. "Improved rebreathers, healing our own by flaunting her beads, witchcraft to alleviate this sickness and your foot where I failed…" The bitter edge in her voice gave him pause.
"What bothers you today, Fen? We are benefitting from an ally that may never repay what is owed our people. The healers are suffering twofold. Do you degrade the gifts this woman's ancestors gave her?"
Fen paused, her expression horrified. "I would never do such a thing. We are a generous people. But—" Her jaw snapped shut. She looked down at her hands, wringing them shyly. "No. My life for yours, K'uk'ulkan."
He arched an eyebrow coolly. "See to it that she wakes before night is completely upon us."
"Will you not stay?"
"No."
He wasn't the sort of man to linger over someone's weakness. Shuri would recover as she always did and had done before when he first laid her unconscious frame in these caves, and he did not see it fit for her to know he saw her like this. It was enough to simply reaffirm that she was alright and that the devotion his subjects showed him extended to her.
He would protect her in her sleep again, soon, despite her tearing his heart again with flighty promises and reminders that she would leave in mere days.
Even when she hurt him. She gave him no choice. The shell he gave her laid chipped on her stack of clothes, sparkling in the light.
People loved their gods, worshiping and sacrificing for them. But they could not have loved them the way every fiber of Shuri's being imprinted on her, lifted her from chaos only to abandon her at one, singular, impossible conclusion.
When she was eight, a chill that only the Jabari were prepared for entered all of Wakanda and sent her running to T'Chaka's arms. The man had chuckled while she complained and refused Queen Ramonda's admonishments to wear a sweater.
("Baba, the blankets will ruin this outfit."
"Am I to fight the weather itself to alleviate you of this condition?"
"Yes! You are King!"
A laugh. "How can I move the clouds themselves? I am human, my dear. Bast help the man your heart chooses one day, he will truly be something.")
And so he was. Somewhere in the moments that sluggishly passed in this grotto, she went to sleep hating this man and woke up never wanting to leave him.
He killed my mother, she cried into oblivion. Her unconsciousness did not respond. He attacked my people.
Her mother greeted her the last time she almost became someone irrevocably consumed by zeal. Where was she now? Where was her mother, telling her to stop and remember who she was?
This was who she was: a coward seduced by the madness of gods, and she didn't know whether to stop or accelerate it. Because this, at last, was proof her heart was not gone.
It seemed the more one knew the gods, the more they knew themselves. Shuri was more introspective than most, but she lived in her mind a different way than her father's traditionalism, her mother's spiritualism, or her brother's nobility. Her connection to the gods was still fragmented and worsened by her impetus to move by action. This was why engaging her grief and finally burning her ceremonial clothes took longer than the others, why she preferred to work frantically than to give herself space and time to placate the murmurs of her heart. She knew facts and logics and calculation; they were dependable and unchanging.
While Shuri could not fully explain whatever was happening to her, she would approach it the same way as building a machine. Collect facts. Gather input. Work. Arrive at a conclusion. It was with this — prayer — that she sat up, Killmonger's last words sour on her tongue. Fen watched, horrified, as she ripped the blankets off her body and leapt up, panther instincts one step ahead of her.
"You need to rest!"
"Where are the guards?" Her voice sounded hoarse and foreign to her ears. She moved methodically while numbers hovered over her Kimoyo beads. That's right, Princess. Do what needs to get done, Killmonger cheered.
"You are going somewhere in this condition?"
The day wasn't over yet. Shuri hadn't used her ten minutes to speak with Darcy today and she had no intention of wasting more time dawdling. She quickly made a secondary list as she shuffled over to her stack of clothes: Fix the black panther suit. Build the Vision-finder. Send coordinates. Build the printer. Print the flower. It would be a brutal few days, but it would be enough. Her eyes landed on the shell resting atop her tracksuit and resisted the urge to chuck it into the pond. The blasted object that started all of this, that set her heart racing and cheeks tingling.
"I need to visit the Americans. Guards!"
Fen gripped her arm. "K'uk'ulkan is extremely concerned. He would not like you going there right now."
"I don't care what he thinks!" She snatched her arm from her clutches. Don't lie to yourself. Now that Killmonger was talking again, he wouldn't shut up. "Go away."
The healer flinched. Shuri was horrified at herself. It was like swallowing a handful of Jabari fur.
"Fen — that wasn't — that wasn't directed you. I just..."
"Understood, Princess." The Talokanil replied, and that distant look that Shuri saw more frequently in their recent interactions fell across her face. She couldn't place when things had shifted but it was before Juana's injury.
"Fen, I have a question."
"I am to serve you as K'uk'ulkan orders me." Her response was frustratingly robotic, one she recognized in herself whenever proceedings at the palace had been too overwhelming and she received one too many admonishments from her mother. It was the sort one used to be eerily distant, sugary sweet to give nothing away.
"I don't want you to serve me. I want a friend." She stopped to note the impact of her words on Fen. The healer turned away. "Did I do something? I assure you, I mean no harm to you or your people."
The guards waited for Shuri to join them. She finished pulling her arms through the sleeves of her tracksuit, shell tucked beneath her beautiful dresses, when Fen answered.
"It is not what you did. It is who you are."
She smoothed down her top. "Which is?"
"A human who has distracted us and brought turmoil."
The accusation was laughable. She had known nothing but turmoil in her life. The happiness and comfort of her early years were tinged with the loss of her father, her Baba, and since then she was turmoil personified.
"The world is changing, Fen." She gestured at the ancient artifacts hanging around their room. "I regret what opening Wakanda to the world has done to your people, but I often wonder: even if we hadn't, human greed and the technology enabling it would have led them here at some point, regardless. We are not alone in the universe, did you know?" Nightmares of aliens falling through the forcefield, Wakanda's lands littered with their bodies, battling Thanos' army moments after resurrecting... "You told me you thought of me like your own. What changed?"
Fen's eyelids fluttered shut. "You began to distract our King. I did not see it earlier, and from what I hear these days, you are toying with him."
Her thoughts screeched to a halt. The guards shuffled out, though no doubt they still had their ears pointed towards the room. "Are you—" she sputtered, struggling to finish the sentence, "Are you accusing me of seducing him?" The words erupted from her as a shriek.
The woman turned purple. "Not like that." She squeaked. "Perhaps. I am unsure."
"He watched me sleep! I did no such thing!"
The healer turned a darker purple. Her rebreather exploded into cough-induced bubbles. The Talokanil grabbed furiously at the contraption, tapping and shifting it around, but her coughing refused to subside.
Shuri looked at her Kimoyo-clock again. It was almost midnight. She needed to go down to the cave, now. "If you're going to fling ridiculous accusations at me, take them up with your Feathered Serpent King." It was petulant, but her walk out of the cabin sounded like stomps. She would have time to regret her words later, but now she fumed the entire journey to the prison-cave.
Darcy was slumbering on a heap of dried kelp when Shuri walked in. Some of the other hostages groaned while the Wakandan poked incessantly at the young woman until she dragged her feet out of the cave.
"It's late, I'm sorry."
"What's the emergency? Did you locate Vision? God with a hammer show up?" Even half asleep, Darcy squinted at her like she was a specimen in a lab.
"Actually," Shuri twisted her lips into a small frown, "It is god related."
"Okay." Darcy yawned and tumbled to the grimy floor of the grotto.
"It's a private question, but I had a question about your friend, Dr. Foster. The one you mentioned was dating Thor."
"Jane? If you're asking about her book, don't. I only read the introduction because hey, astrophysicist, but the woman's a science genius, not a genius at writing. I dreamt about wormholes and worms for a solid month..." Darcy shifted to lean her head against a rock.
Shuri squeezed her eyes. Collect facts, collect facts. "No, not her book. About her relationship with Thor."
"Hmmm, yeah. They collided like the rainbow sparkly bridge and then fell apart."
"How so?"
Darcy yawned, lifting a hand to rub her eyes. Instead, she rubbed her mouth and the red of her lipstick smeared across the right side of her face. "Are you asking me for godly dating advice in the middle of a night?"
"No."
"Oh, okay, well it sorta sounds like it. Is this the feathery god they all talk about? Please tell me he's not made of actual feathers."
She rolled her eyes. "How did Dr. Foster...manage with Thor?"
"She has cancer. Stage four." Darcy was fully awake now, presumably enticed by the lure of gossip, and touched her face gingerly. She grimaced when her fingers pulled away with the red of her lipstick.
"I'm sorry to hear that. A great loss for science and the world."
Most cancers were curable in Wakanda and seldom passed stage two or three, usually having been detected and treated before then. By stage four, it was only curable with a highly trained doctor, and Wakanda right now could not offer their treatments to the world yet. Perhaps one day.
"For science." Darcy grumbled. "That's all she thinks about; her whole life's work. I think Thor struggled to understand her sometimes. He's a god with over a thousand years worth of warrior knowledge, but he didn't see eye to eye with her all the time. Was always traveling and had to leave on a whim, and then she was going around to conferences and building something here on Earth."
Shuri said nothing.
"Look, you're not the first woman to have a problem with immortals. Even Wanda with Vision, the guy was a literal computer. Until he died. Twice. Point is, life's short, aliens exist, and you don't have time to mope over these things."
"That's not what—"
"At the end of the day, Thor was over a thousand years old and fell in love with a brilliant scientist. It was inevitable. The guy's a hunk. It didn't work out but she never moped about it. She was content to love him from a distance."
She was about to ask what she initially came here to ask—how Jane stopped herself from following her god to the ends of the universe—but Darcy curled up and fell asleep on the dank grotto ground. The woman was a nightmare to carry back into the prison, not because of weight but because of the drool (the guards insisted on helping but Shuri didn't trust Darcy to not start mumbling about hot gods again), but she wondered if the American unwittingly answered a question she didn't know she had. Jane was one of the world's renown scientists. Yet, Thor was an Asgardian, a decent man and not a serpent, and he did not kill her mo—
He did not—
He—
It was inevitable. He was inevitable. She accepted it with a startlingly clarity.
The Black Panther suit was fixed that night, and by the time the vibranium sun rose, Shuri's suit glistened with new threads of vibranium reinforcing the dents and minor patches and no less than two upgrades. She didn't ponder on why it took so long to repair it when these fixes were ones she could make in her sleep with one arm tied behind her back, because she already knew the answer. In four days, she would shove it to the deepest crevices of her empty chest, but for now, she would carry out her duties with perfection.
She was no stranger to sacrifice. While Killmonger continued to rage at her nape, she adorned herself with beautiful jade jewelry and slipped into her white dress and asked the guards to escort her to the ancestors' room. Namor was not surprised. For a tranquil minute Shuri wondered, now that the tidal wave had crashed over, if he should be shining brighter in her eyes than anyone else, if her heart should be speeding up rapidly or if the lights themselves should disperse while she went to him like a water did a water-god. But nothing changed, because that had always been the case.
After they finished praying, he gave her a cordial nod, one an honorable King gave to his subjects, or stern father to his children, and she nodded in return. He didn't mention their quarrel.
She had never felt like such a girl before.
"Wait."
He waited.
"Spar with me." The suit solidified over her hardened body.
"Now, in the room of my ancestors?" Namor's tone was disbelieving, but his feet already moved into offensive stance. The beads on his neck jingled. She made the first move, dragging him out the archway and slamming him against a rock formation. The guards cursed at her in their Mayan language and brandished their spears; only his deep assurances deterred them.
There, she thought, give me a reason to feel nothing but hate towards you.
He was faster this time, uninjured and unhindered by dry-trap tactics. This was Namor with raw power. His foot connected with her abdomen and she returned the favor with three attempts to elbow his face, only one of which landed. One leg extended to connect with his sturdy thigh, but it did little. He stumbled a mere foot backwards and swung into a backflip. Sharp swipes through the air later, she was on her back, heaving and feeling as though the wind had been sucked out of the cave. Was it the adrenaline of finally having her yield to him? Was what she felt—what he made her feel—a grotesque sort of revenge for the humiliation of yielding she unleashed on him?
"We train our soldiers to be equally strong as the vibranium in their weapons." There was no aid from him in getting up, as she expected and wanted. That would've meant she yielded, and she would never yield: not to her secret, and never to this man-god mutant before her.
"As do we," she huffed and brushed herself off. Her legs ached. "I didn't grow up thinking I would be Wakanda's protector, so I wasn't trained as the others were."
"But you recreated the power of the Black Panther, for what if not to be strong?"
He's got you there. Remember what I told you, cuz.
"I am weaker than my brother was," she accepted, "but I will never yield."
He hummed to himself and left.
She spent her afternoon with Totl, apologizing for disappearing but spending hours to train him in advanced electricity as they worked. Before dinner, a working (and decidedly non-melting) prototype of a Vision-finder was completed, and she captured enough schematics in her Kimoyo beads to run by Darcy. The meeting with her this time was much more in character for the both of them, though she wasted no time in not-so-subtle references to their delirious conversation. "Bring me a pillow next time you wake me up to do girl talk" and "please tell me who this hunk is, is his hair at least better than Thor's?" were her favorite talking about.
By the end of the day, Shuri returned to her room so exhausted that she collapsed in her tracksuit.
Yes, his hair is prettier and glossier.
The next day, she wasted two minutes observing the ominous countdown she set. Three days. She dressed for her morning meditation, practiced a few punches in the air, and left for the ancestors' room confident she would beat him this time. Instead, when she called him to wait again and they brawled, he had her underneath him in even less time. Though he didn't command her to yield, he made a comment she ranked as almost as terrible.
"You are holding back."
"I am not," she declared, huffing between every word.
Namor combed his hair with a bruised hand, his eyes never leaving her heaving body. "You win with tactical brilliance, not strength alone. Training your muscles and body to move at will is as much a matter of spiritual discipline as it is a physical one; another reason we meditate. I have had almost five centuries of training in addition to countless enemies."
"Braggart. I beat you when it mattered most. Don't forget that." It was cheating and underhanded to do after he technically won, but she severed a stalagmite of two feet and hurled it at him. No severe damage was wrought, but at least he flinched and groaned, presumably remembering the destruction a pillow impressed on his stomach.
"My people and I see it every day on my walls, Princess. I do not forget, but you fought me with hate that time."
"I don't hate you anymore."
His mouth parted and voice lowered. "Then whatever you feel now, you are holding that back."
She held his gaze, confident that she had tucked away her secret so deep he would never find it, even in her eyes. "I simply don't wish to clip your wings again."
He picked up his staff and jumped into the lake, bobbing only to offer a curt nod. "Physical battle is not the only way to hurt."
She pondered him and his words again, as she too often did, and retracted her panther suit.
Later that morning, she worked to fine-tuned the Vision-finder with Darcy's feedback, and resumed pacing when she thought about the 3D printer. With the heart-shaped herb, it had been so easy (in hindsight): master robotics, solve the DNA problem, launch some code through Griot, and watch as a purple herb emerged in the middle of her lab. Here, she did not have the raw materials necessary to use as printing material to begin with even if she managed to build a printer.
Looking at the old vials of her rudimentary vaccine, she wondered if the approach in a Talokanil culture required something more biological. All this time, she'd been working with biology after all: Juana's arm, the vaccine, even the planning for genetic analysis and bloodwork. Talokanil rode whales instead of boats; used vibranium-enriched organic material instead of pure vibranium even though they had plenty to work with.
"Totl, stay here and take a seaweed break." She ordered. Her guards sent her disapproving looks as she bartered with them to let her go to the ancestors' room, and when they didn't budge, she relented and asked for Namor. He won't come, she thought but he did. The other engineers gasped and gestured at him, and he took the time to ask after them and their families before approaching her. The somber gentleness with which he treated each of his subjects, like they were his own family, stayed with her as he escorted her to the garden in the room.
"Thank you. I know you must be busy."
He stiffened. "Yes, but no need for your thanks." When he didn't turn to leave, she crouched near the garden, eyeing the different variety of flora. Griot's database could only identify about half of them. The others were extremely rare or undiscovered by humans on land. She palmed the stem of a pale yellow plant.
"Don't these need to be in water?"
"These ones can survive in air," he explained from behind her, "There are flowers that my gatherers found that can only exist underwater."
Shuri stood up. "Where are they? I'm thinking to preform gene editing on a cell of an existing plant with as many of the genes I attribute to the effects of the blue flower, and regrow it in vibranium-rich soil. You don't have to escort me there; I can go with my guards."
He waved her guards away. "They are in the palace, near my private quarters."
Considering she had been sleeping in his cabin for the better part of a month, the mention of his private spaces should not have sent her brain teetering from its precarious path she'd set it on the morning prior. But it did, and she pulled at the collar of her tracksuit as she bounded for her watersuit. She couldn't very well send him away to leave her snooping so close to his workplace. His worksplace, where he greeted Talokanil with their grievances, where he slept. She was overcome with a sudden urge to embrace him again but promptly dismissed it.
The return to the capital city was longer than the trek up to the ancestors' room. Distrustful gazes still watched her, but they were subtler in his presence. Most paused in their work or play to open the palms of their hands as he tunneled by. Eventually, they reached the palace, where he led her through the same entrance used to enter the watch room for his cousin's wedding. This time, the halls were teeming with warriors and guards armed to the teeth (literally). Clusters of them scattered to let the pair through, mutters and curious glances rippling through the crowds. They plummeted towards another hall that opened out to a wide room, revealing rows and rows of Talokanil swimming in intricate formations underneath them. She recognized Tozi leading them in a set of sharp movements and wanted to stop to convey her gratitude for defending her in front of Namor's council, but the mutant was already disappearing through another set of open archways.
Namora swam into view and stopped them in their tracks. She leveled a distrustful gaze at Namor.
"K'uk'ulkan. You bring her here?"
"My cousin," he intoned patiently. Namora's extravagant feathered hat bobbed angrily. "It concerns our flower."
The Talokanil scarcely looked Shuri in the eye the few times they had the displeasure of meeting. Shei wasn't sure if it was her status as a warrior or general personality. Still, diplomacy demanded decency, and she was a beast of a warrior who could prove useful if the Western powers arrived unexpectedly strong, so Shuri shot her a wiry smile.
"I extend my gratitude to the Talokanil for hosting me." She stamped down the annoyance remembering her and Attuma's attempt to kick her out after the explosion. "Your king is generously helping to restore the sacred plant."
Namor glanced at her strangely but Namora scowled and ignored her. "We need you today, cousin. We do not have much time left."
Namor touched his forehead to hers and muttered something under his breath before motioning to Shuri to continue following him. What was that about, she wanted to ask, but the words fizzled from her tongue when they entered another pyramid-shaped room teeming with greenery. Vines and plants and leaves twirled down from the ceiling, tangled against the walls, and sprouted from every free inch of space across the floor. Griot recognized none of them. She sighed, resigned to spending the rest of her afternoon to mastering marine biology.
"There are many others around so you may work without your guards today. I will be further down this route should you require anything."
She nodded as he exited, knowing she couldn't, wouldn't, ask him for anything more. She was preparing for a life without him. I don't require anything, she should have said.
I want everything from you, she wanted to say.
Hours of perusing through the plants delivered hopeful results. She worked through the crowded room, narrowing the options down to analyze only those plants that resembled the six-to-seven leaf plants in the murals in Namor's office. That left about a dozen options, and at the end she chose a small green plant to gather sample cells from. Griot was at 72% completion of its genetic analysis when Atzi drifted inside the—garden? greenhouse?—and shot her an apologetic smile.
"I thought I saw you swim by earlier."
"Atzi," Shuri started at the same time the Talokanil bowed.
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
Atzi scratched the back of her head. She must have been training because she was wore stiff fibered cloth and thick armbands.
"I thought over our conversation when I visited you. I may have teased you too much on what is a serious matter. I'm unsure what exactly I said, but it insulted you, and for that I'm sorry."
"Atzi." Shuri swam to her and lifted her arms in an awkward hug amidst poking leaves and a vine dangling over their heads. "Apology accepted. I'm sorry I rushed out. You made me realize that I was leaving soon and that I was getting too distracted. I needed to focus." She gestured to the room. "I think I've figured it out."
Atzi exhaled audibly. "I can't believe it."
"Neither did I with our herb until I punched the daylights out of a warrior's suit."
"What does it feel like to taste it?" Atzi extended her fingers to touch the vine above them. "The effects of huacalxochitl were passed down to us through our blood, and it will continue through our children. Only our ancestors knew what it felt like to take it for the first time and transform."
She thought about it for a minute. It was indescribable: the heightened sensitivity, the ability to carry out vengeance fully because not only did she have rage, once, but power surging through her veins that enabled her to see it through.
"Dangerous," she answered finally.
Atzi's small nose scrunched up. "That sounds...sinister. Then why restore it for us?"
"It was dangerous for me, but not anymore. Besides, you all already have gills so not sure what else it will do. Turn you into a whale?"
The Talokanil paused in the roll of her eyes and began to giggle. "Whales! Fantastic idea! I'll find Zuma."
A sense of foreboding came over Shuri.
Namor was alerted to a missing military whale thirty minutes later but by then it was too late and Tozi struggled to stifle a laugh under her decorated Captain's headpiece.
"We have two days and Ayau holds three dozen of our water bombs. What possibly amuses you at this hour?" he chastised.
Tozi pointed at the floating bag of water bombs below them, and then up at a window. A whale zipped past with three figures holding onto its fin, screaming for dear life.
"Atzi, Atzi, don't hit anyone—"
"You cannot leave without doing this at least once!"
"The Princess is right, and Tozi said—"
Atzi cackled and pushed her right heel under the whale's pectoral fin. It, named Ayau because of course Talokanil named their transport mammals like other humans named their cars and ships, lurched and made a hard left, sending them tumbling straight through a large cylinder of a marketplace. Shapes blurred past Shuri as she reexplored Talokan and relearned its faces from new angles. Her helmet bumped against Ayau's firm flesh. She tried to limit her hollering. It wasn't out of fear but the natural reaction one felt on rollercoasters or when escaping American feds on a motorcycle.
Despite herself, Shuri smiled at the memory.
A shadowed figure leapt onto the head of the whale. Ayau squirmed and slid to a stop, sending her, Zuma, and Atzi tumbling across the fishnets. Another figure joined the shadow. When she slowed, Shuri recognized Namor by his staff before his face solidified into view. Adrenaline pumped through her veins.
"You said fifteen minutes!" Atzi whined, crawling towards the front and kneeling into a reverent hand gesture in front of Namor.
Tozi frowned. "It has been twenty." She shifted her eyes towards Shuri. "Was that to your satisfaction?"
Shuri broke out into a wide grin. "That was fantastic," she said, voice full of awe. Tozi was startlingly similar to Okoye, in both mannerisms and enablement of shenanigans despite verbal protests otherwise. "But please don't let Atzi be a pilot, or whatever you call the person navigating the whales."
Tozi coughed while Atzi spluttered. Shuri looked at Namor, his face difficult to discern.
"Are you not busy with work?" he asked, finally. Shuri was thankful for the helmet and watery distance between them.
"I have made good progress."
"I see."
Atzi nodded vigorously next to her. "I saw her working. She's almost done it."
"Wonderful," He stated flatly, and leapt upwards. The flurry of his feet wings left a mini tidepool. Tozi's eyes trained on spot he'd left with a discerning look before turning towards Shuri.
Tozi and Okoye had similar knowing looks, it seemed. Shuri tilted her head and sent her a small smile while the Talokanil wrangled the whale back towards the palace. Zuma, ever-reticent and introverted, excused herself after bidding Shuri a polite goodbye, but Atzi watched her with an unnerving quiet.
Atzi followed her all the way to her lab, and it was Shuri who broke the silence.
"What happened, did the whale take the words out of you?"
Shuri felt her watch closely as she opened Griot's analyses and pulled out a vial of the plant's cells, hoping the whale-driving hadn't centrifuged them into mush. Atzi shooed Totl out of the lab before clearing her throat.
"K'uk'ulklan doesn't want you to leave."
Careful not to react the same way as she had done previously, she turned to busy her hands with the movements of a scientist: adding gene splicing enzymes, grasping a needle with nimble but shaky fingers, and sprinkling soil she'd collected from the palace plant room over a Petri dish. She could answer Atzi in three ways: by saying nothing, by joking, or by opening up her heart.
The last one was out of the question. Joking would make it seem like her and Namor were pals instead of ideological opponents allied to fight a bigger enemy, and saying nothing would be, in fact, saying something. Fortunately, but unfortunately, Atzi's Bast-damned nosiness made her continue.
"Even when I was your guard, though I didn't recognize it at the time, having never courted myself…he does not treat you with the favor of a princess, but the favor of a man. I saw you wearing a Talokanil bracelet too."
Shuri kept her back straight. She had learned, over the weeks, that turning one's back was a clear signal of rudeness in Talokan akin to a curse. But Atzi knew she was very human, a human who was busy trying to finish her last mission so that she could go home.
"Do you favor him?" Atzi squeaked. "Or am I overly prying?"
She exhaled through her mouth. "Yes." The need to run back to Namor was clawing up her spine, raw and demanding to be heard, demanding to be yielded to. She would not let it win. "To your — overly prying question. Not—favoring—Atzi, I need to finish this today. This is not a game for me. My people may be going to war."
The stark reminder cut through the bubbly fun of earlier. It dawned on her, as she hoped it would dawn on her friend, that these days would be cherished memories but would remain just that: a small blip in time, meager in the grand scheme of things, ideally. That every preparation she and they and Wakanda made now would never be needed. Yet, as her father often said, "A wise King never seeks out war but he must always be ready for it." That was what she was trying to do here, in both the wars of the world and in the turbulence of her chest.
"My apologies, Princess," Atzi said, her serious tone giving way to something more distant and professional. "You are right, of course. Thank you for your company today!"
Shuri looked over her shoulder and nodded. "Thank you. I had a lot of fun today and I hope to see you again before I leave."
"You will. We'll be coming to Wakanda."
She slowed her movements in clipping the Petri dish to a hook to stabilize it. Admittedly, she had given little thought to the exact mechanics of Namor's agreement with Okoye and Ross on the Talokanil side. Whether him and a delegation would join them in Wakanda for an official meeting, or if he would simply give them the go ahead to reveal Talokan to the Americans in return for the prisoners, was more under King M'Baku's purview than herself. And she had been distracted. So, so distracted.
"What do you mean by 'we'?"
"Our entire army." Atzi answered.
"The whole army?" All of it? Were they looking to start a war?
Her stomach dropped. It was Namor. Of course he was, of course he wasn't—but if it was the threat of war plaguing the only nation standing between Talokan...
Omission, omissions, damn omissions.
She thought fast. It could be that he meant to only intimidate. Or to be prepared for the worst case scenario, if White Vision wasn't found in time and America decided they had enough and launched a full-scale war. But Namor didn't know about Vision. All he knew was Wakanda was being intimidated by the West with a threat of attack, and he would confess to attacking both expeditions in return for Shuri's help and Wakanda's continued promise of protection.
If there truly was war ahead, as Nakia warned, then while the help of Talokanil would be crucial, was Namor taking advantage to...to...
Wage war on the surface world. Burn the world down, together.
Atzi's eyebrows knit together. "There's an army-wide debrief tomorrow. You didn't know?"
"No," Shuri muttered. He omitted that part.
She stared at the beginnings of a flower growing in the Petri dish. The vibranium soil cast a glow in the room. The powers it could grant, one could only imagine. Killmonger, of course, had done plenty of imagining. His flair. Shit, I'd marry him myself, take two thrones, raze the colonizers to the ground.
Shuri stopped by the American prison for what was hopefully the last time. She showed Darcy her fixes, and the woman made some adjusted calculations specifically attuned for White Vision's encasing of Chaos magic.
"I think you're good to go. His smell will still be detected even if he's hiding in another hex."
"What if he's on another planet?"
"Eh, I haven't tried it, but if you're saying there's only one Vision-like mind out there, then yeah, hopefully."
She wanted to scream. She knew White Vision's mind, yes, but there was so much about AI that was unknown. His mind could have changed. He could have split into four different children synthezoids and occupied an island, or turned into scrap for another Ultron.
She forced herself to take a deep breath and trust in her, and Darcy's, skills. "Okay. I'll run preliminary checks and have it started in the morning."
"Good luck," Darcy whispered.
Today and tomorrow was all that was left. Shuri woke before the equivalent of surface-dwelling dawn, put on her trusty, raggedy tracksuit, and travelled to her lab with guards hot on her heels. A bright blue glow emanated from her lab. Her eyes landed on the flower even before she entered; tendrils of woven vibranium glowed through its six leaves. A pulsing blue bulb in the middle shocked her, and the Talokanil behind her, into a quiet stillness. The leaves swayed with the currents of the water.
The guards fell into a reverent pose, hands open and looking up at the plant sitting on her lab table. She felt a sense of déjà vu while lifting it from the petri dish and scanning a Kimoyo bead over it. Griot read out a series of numbers while she set it carefully aside and turned to the Vision-finder. Its simple appearance bellied the complex wiring and vibranium nerves inside. Nerves, she termed it, because it was like building a brain, connecting every thread of vibranium together like a nerve to a synapse.
She turned it on.