The Vanished Read online

“Shuri, this is like your—”

  “Predator’s Invisi-mode mechanism,” the princess breathes as the shock of it all trickles down over her.

  “But how?” K’Marah breathes. “Didn’t you invent that?”

  Shuri gulps and doesn’t respond. She guesses it’s possible someone else in the world was able to devise a similar tech. But she can’t shake the feeling that this is her design. The implications of which are staggering. Because the only entity in the world that should have access to her cloaking schematic is the American counterterrorism organization she hacked when designing the Predator. She’d left the Invisi-mode details as a form of payment for the blueprints she borrowed.

  Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division: S.H.I.E.L.D.

  If S.H.I.E.L.D. is involved in this missing-girls thing …

  They need to leave. Immediately.

  “K’Marah, we have to go!” Shuri says, taking a step back as her pulse begins to race. She shakes her head in an attempt to clear it. They’ll return to Wakanda, and she will tell T’Challa everything. Even if she gets into trouble, it’s the right thing to do. Let the adults handle this one. She looks around for her friend, whom she swears was beside her just a second ago. “K’Marah, where are—”

  “SHURI!” K’Marah shouts, suddenly running in Shuri’s direction.

  The princess has never been so relieved. “There you are,” she says. “Listen, I really think we should le—”

  “You have to come!” K’Marah grabs Shuri’s arms and tries to pull her forward.

  “K’Marah! You’re not listening! We are in danger—”

  “No, you’re not listening!” K’Marah says, whipping back around to face the princess. Shuri is shocked by the elation she can see on her friend’s face through the clear mask of her suit.

  “Shuri,” K’Marah says, jubilant. “You won’t believe it! I found the door!”

  We have to go invisible,” Shuri says before taking a single step. She knows there’s no way they’ll be leaving this incongruously briny desert wasteland without going into whatever thing is hidden here in plain sight. K’Marah would pitch an entire fit.

  And fine: Shuri is also curious (though terrified).

  “What?” comes K’Marah’s reply.

  “We have to go invisible before we go in there. We should probably be invisible now. Whatever this thing is, there could be cameras.”

  “Oh … Maybe should’ve thought of that sooner?”

  “I wasn’t expecting to actually find anything!” the princess barks.

  “Okay, fine. So how do we go invisible?”

  “At the base of your left palm, where hand meets wrist, there’s a button built into the suit. Don’t press it yet because when you do, I won’t be able to see you—”

  “Isn’t that the entire point?” K’Marah snaps.

  “Look, being snippy isn’t going to get us anywhere,” the princess says. “While it’s great that you found a door, do not neglect to consider that we have precisely zero idea of what we are walking into. We don’t know why this—whatever it is—is here, hidden from view in one of the world’s most inhospitable places. We don’t know who put it here or what’s inside it. So we’d do well to proceed with caution instead of charging ahead like a pair of rhinoceroses in a pottery shop—”

  “Okay, okay!” K’Marah raises both hands in surrender. “Point taken!”

  Shuri nods, satisfied. For the moment at least. “Turn in the direction we need to walk to get to the door, and I’ll put my right hand on your right shoulder before we push our buttons.”

  “Okay.” K’Marah rotates 180 degrees so that her back is to the princess, and Shuri claps a hand on her shoulder.

  “Ready? One … two …”

  “WAIT!” K’Marah peeks back, wide-eyed. “You did test this Invisi-suit thingy, right? It’s not going to malfunction and make us permanently unseeable?”

  “Three,” Shuri says through gritted teeth. And then her hand vanishes a beat before the shoulder it’s sitting on disappears.

  “WHOA,” K’Marah’s formless voice says both out of and into what very much looks like the proverbial void. “This is … I mean, it’s like literally nothing. Yes, I can see the inside of my hood or whatever in my peripheral vision, but I feel your hand on my shoulder and my hand on the invisible kidnapper’s prison—”

  “Oh my gods. Can we just go to the door?”

  “I’m going, I’m going. It’s difficult to walk when you can’t see your feet or the thing you’re walking alongside!”

  Shuri considers this … as well as how difficult it is to walk behind someone she can’t actually see. “Fair,” she says.

  “I’m going to keep talking because if I don’t, I might start freaking out. This is … a lot. This invisibility while in pursuit of something invisible.”

  “Also fair. How much farther?”

  “It’s just ahead. I put a large hunk of oddly colored salt—that’s what most of this is, yes?—right in front of it.”

  “Ah. Okay.”

  “You’ll be proud of me,” K’Marah continues. “You’d totally zoned out, so I decided to explore a bit. I just kept my hand along the side of this thing, and eventually, there was … an anomaly, as you would put it. Like a break in the super-smooth line. Honestly, if not for all the precision exercises we have to do in Dora training, I doubt I would’ve felt it. So I guess that’s something. Anyway, I decided to follow the anomaly with my fingertips—within the suit, of course. I’m no idiot. And that’s when I discovered that it went straight up, hit a right angle, then straight across before hitting another right angle and heading back down. Voilà. A door. Here we are.”

  K’Marah turns abruptly, and Shuri crashes into her, then stumbles right, tripping over a jagged crystal-looking thing the size of a soccer ball. Not that she’s ever seen snow in person, but K’Marah’s salt hunk marker looks like the type American films tell children not to eat: It’s yellow. “Ow,” the princess says.

  “Sorry.”

  Shuri stands and dusts off—though there’s no reason to. The cloaking tech is designed to camouflage anything that sits on the suit for longer than three milliseconds. Which is how she knows that even if she were to toss a full bucket of paint at the space where K’Marah says the door is, it wouldn’t help them see it. “So … how do we get in?” she says to (perceivably) no one.

  “Right,” K’Marah’s voice replies. “That’s the part I haven’t quite figured out yet.”

  Shuri smacks her forehead. “K’Marah!”

  “What? I got us this far! You’re the supposed genius he—”

  “Please confirm the password,” comes a disembodied voice out of quite literally nowhere.

  Shuri, also quite literally, jumps. “Ummm—”

  “That is incorrect. Please confirm the password.”

  “This is bad—” K’Marah begins, but is swiftly cut off. Because the voice speaks out again: “That is incorrect. Warning: You have one final attempt. An incorrect password will result in an intruder alert.”

  Neither girl says a word. Shuri can’t breathe, let alone speak.

  She knows the same is true for K’Marah when she feels the other girl’s hand close around her wrist and squeeeeeeze—

  “Please confirm the password.”

  Shuri gulps. In spite of the cooling mechanism built into the suit, she can feel the sweat beading at her hairline and rolling down her sides from beneath her arms. They have one shot to either crack this or tuck tail and run—which will be impossible without making themselves visible, and if there are cameras, they’re surely trained on the two girls now. Totally fine as long as there’s nothing to see … But if they do have to reveal themselves? The princess doesn’t even want to think about the trouble that might be awaiting them.

  If they manage to make it inside, though, Shuri figures it’s possible to hide until whatever security entity involved does a sweep and decides the whole incident was
some sort of glitch.

  But they have to actually get in—

  “Please confirm the password.”

  Okay. Shuri can figure this out …

  “Twelve seconds to intruder alert.”

  K’Marah’s grip on Shuri’s arm tightens to the point where the princess almost cries out, but she clenches her jaw and swallows it down. She’ll punch the Dora-in-training when—if?—they make it out of this.

  “… nine … eight …”

  Think, Shuri!

  The voice definitely responded to something K’Marah was saying. When exactly had she been cut off? Could the password be one of the words she’d just spoken? The voice is saying “confirm.” Is this a stretch?

  “… five … four …”

  Stretch or not, Shuri has to say something. Fast. The alarm will go off even if they stay silent, so it’s too late to run. Might as well try?

  THINK, Shuri!

  “I got us this far …” K’Marah had said. “You’re the—”

  “Two … one …”

  “GENIUS?” Shuri shouts before wrenching away from K’Marah and whipping around to cover her ears and brace herself before the alarm sounds. She guesses if she gets captured, she can’t get grounded? Though knowing her mother, she and K’Marah will be found somehow and will be grounded after they’re rescued. If the rescuers get here in time, at least.

  How on earth did Shuri wind up here? She knew this was certain to go badly and yet—

  “Access granted.”

  There’s a sliding sound behind her and then: “You did it, Shuri!” in an ecstatic whisper. “Come on!”

  The next minutes are a blur. Shuri doesn’t fully remember rotating and crossing the threshold into the dark rectangular space that has appeared in front of them like some portal to another dimension, but she does know that the door they couldn’t see from the outside glides home, and seals them in with a whoosh and a click.

  There’s no one manning the entrance. Which suggests that whoever is occupying this space is either exceedingly confident that no person who isn’t supposed to be here could get in, or is overconfident, and therefore exceedingly stupid. Perhaps both?

  K’Marah finds Shuri’s hand again, and the Wakandan girls interlace their fingers and hold tight. While Shuri can’t see what K’Marah is up to, the princess hopes her friend is presently doing what she is: taking in their surroundings.

  There’s not a whole lot to see, though the entry hall is much taller than Shuri would’ve expected. Now that her eyes have adjusted from the brightness outside, she can see that the space is a perfect hexagon, illuminated by a line of continuous light—likely LED—that rings the room near the ceiling. The walls are bare, but painted to look like mahogany wood. Even from a distance Shuri knows it’s not real wood because … well, she doesn’t know how she knows. But she does. Right at Shuri’s eye level, there’s a multi-line design carved all the way around the otherwise empty interior: a double helix.

  What she doesn’t see is an exit. Either back out into the hostile salt flat they just escaped, or farther into the mysterious edifice. There has to be more to this place, doesn’t there? Why would someone hide an empty building in an uninhabitable desert region of Ethiopia—

  “Welcome to the Garden.”

  Shuri and K’Marah both jump—and squeak—as the same disembodied voice from outside comes at them from all directions.

  “Is that why it smells like spicy flowers in here?” K’Marah says.

  Which is when Shuri notices the smell as well, though faintly. Wherever here is, there’s enough oxygen in the air for that part of their suits to shut off.

  “We thank you for accepting our invitation and are delighted to have you with us. Please proceed to the elevator.”

  A gap appears in the smooth wall directly in front of the girls. Beyond it? A smaller hexagonal space with floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

  “How do they manage to hide all the doors?” K’Marah whispers.

  “Shh!” Shuri replies.

  “I’m just saying! That wall looked solid as stone! And speaking of looking, how weird is it to look into a mirror and see nothing—”

  “You have to stop talking so you don’t get us caught!” Though it does cross the princess’s mind that they may already be caught. They’re invisible, yes, but can the system sense their presence?

  “Hmph,” grunts K’Marah.

  Shuri tugs K’Marah forward. And she does have to tug: It seems that despite the Dora-in-training’s insistence on this entire mission, their lack of reflections in the elevator’s glass walls has finally shaken her. (You know, since the whole invisible-building-in-a-salt-flat-wasteland thing didn’t.)

  The single-panel door slides home, and Shuri’s heart makes a rapid ascent into her throat. Not because they’ve begun to move—at least she doesn’t think they have—but because K’Marah is right: Standing in a mirrored box and seeing nothing is … uncomfortable.

  “Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea—”

  “Shhhhh!” comes K’Marah’s mocking retort.

  Shuri opens her mouth to respond, but the words stick in her chest: A panel identical to the one that shut them in opens behind them, and the mirror that’s missing their reflection gives view to a flurry of girls moving through a hallway in different-colored, long-sleeved jumpsuits. Voices and music whirl into the now-open elevator. (When had they moved??)

  And then the voices fade to nothing as the brightly lab-suited lasses begin to take notice of the open elevator door.

  “What the … ?” one in blue says, stopping midstride. Shuri could swear she and the girl—about her age, with thick blond hair in a braid draped over her shoulder—are staring right into each other’s eyes.

  Shuri can’t breathe.

  Especially when a small crowd gathers around the blue-outfitted girl. A ridiculous thought arises in the princess’s mind as she looks at the multihued clump of young ladies: It’s like she and K’Marah have been caught by a gang of human hard candies.

  “Is there supposed to be a new arrival today?” comes the voice of a girl in yellow. She has beige-ish skin and wavy sandy-brown hair.

  “I think Lady N would’ve told us about it …” blue replies.

  “Also,” says a medium-brown-skinned, short-haired girl in red, “there’s nobody in there?” She pushes her glasses up on her nose.

  Shuri isn’t sure she’s ever felt so relieved—though it doesn’t last long. Because there’s no ignoring the fact that it appears K’Marah was onto something: While none of the girls they’re looking for are in the small crowd behind them, it’s hard to deny the … similarities between the ones they can see. All are female-presenting and appear to be around the same age as the Wakandan princess and her Dora-Milaje-in-training best friend.

  Shuri’s got a hunch they’re all wicked smart, too.

  “You have arrived. Please step out of the elevator.”

  (Shuri is really beginning to hate that automated voice.)

  “There’s gotta be a glitch or something,” an East Asian girl in green says with a wave of her hand. “Probably fine for now. There’s clearly no one there, so—”

  “What if someone got the coordinates?” pipes up a tiny, timid-looking brunette in pink. She appears a bit younger than the others. Likely no more than nine or ten. Her hair is pulled up high in a tight bun, and Shuri wonders how a person so small could look so … serious.

  “Syd, the elevator is literally empty, babe,” says girl in yellow.

  “Please step out of the elevator,” the voice repeats.

  “Definitely a glitch,” from red.

  “But what if they’re just like … invisible or something?”

  Now Shuri is the one squeezing the life out of K’Marah’s hand. Though she doesn’t dare move. Yes, the suits have a Vibranium-based coating and any motion should be soundless, but in this moment, the princess isn’t sure about much of anything.

  “Please step out of the elevator.”r />
  The brunette’s eyes narrow—Syd, Shuri thinks she heard the girl called—and she takes a step toward the elevator. Shuri is fairly certain her heart is no longer beating.

  But then girl in blue grabs Syd’s arm and pulls her back. “Let’s maybe not go near the demon elevator, kiddo. How about you head down to the main office and let Lady N know it opened on its own and is being weird.”

  Now Shuri does move: She rotates her body toward K’Marah’s and reaches for the Dora-in-training’s opposite hand so she can turn them both around.

  Just in time, too.

  “The elevator will now return you to the main entrance,” the voice says. And the panel begins to slide shut.

  Before she can think too much about it, Shuri steps forward and slides her foot across the threshold, hoping this elevator works the same way most others do.

  She sends a silent prayer of thanks to Bast when the door flies back open.

  “There is an obstruction blocking the elevator door,” the voice says this time.

  “Creepy,” from girl in green.

  “Definitely go tell Lady N, Syd,” red says.

  Little Syd still looks mighty suspicious, but she nods. “Okay. I will.” And she heads down the hallway to the left. The other girls don’t move, but it doesn’t matter. They’re far enough away for Shuri and K’Marah to slip by (hopefully undetected).

  “Please step out of the elevator.”

  And this time, Shuri follows the direction. With a firm pull on K’Marah’s arm, they walk out of the elevator and bank left, and Shuri exhales in relief: There’s Syd, some twenty meters ahead, bouncing on her toes as she walks with purpose.

  Shuri has no idea where they are or how they’re going to get out of here, but one thing is for sure: They have to get inside that office.

  It’s a miracle they’re able to keep sight of the small, pink-clad girl: There are so many other things vying for their attention, Shuri consistently finds her eyes pulled in various directions. In addition to the delightfully upbeat music wafting through the air—which smells the way it did in the entry hall, but stronger—there are young girls everywhere.

  And they all look … happy.