There’s no way these guns can be functional. They’re too ornate, like nineteenth-century officers’ swords or dueling pistols—works of art not meant to be used. I’ve never said this about any kind of firearm before, but they’re strangely beautiful.

“This is a Leyden gun,” Gem marvels.

The name doesn’t ring any bells. I look at Franklin, our Orca rep. House Orca knows all the obscure historical facts and weird bits of trivia. Their members could destroy anyone on Jeopardy! They excel at other things, too, but we jokingly call them House Wikipedia.

Franklin nods. “Jules Verne.”

Hewett curls his lip, like the author’s name is an unpleasant but necessary fact of life. “Yes. Well. Shockingly, he reported a few things correctly.”

I remember now. The summer before our chum year, we had to read Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, the first science fiction novels about marine technology. I’d assumed the point of the assignment was Let’s expand our minds with some “fun” (air quotes) reading about the sea! Honestly, I found the books an annoying slog. The plots were slow. The language was super dated. The characters were a bunch of harrumphing Victorian-era gentlemen I didn’t care about.

Two of the main characters in The Mysterious Island were Harding and Pencroft, men with the same surnames as the founders of our school. At the time I’d thought, Okay, that’s a little weird. Later in the book, when the crazy sci-fi submarine commander Captain Nemo revealed that his real name was Prince Dakkar, I admit I got a shiver down my back. But the books were just fiction. Seeing as the most important building at HP was Verne Hall, I supposed the school’s founders must have been hard-core Jules Verne fanboys. Maybe they recruited my family generations ago as an elaborate inside joke, because they liked our surname.

Beyond that, I had two main takeaways from Jules Verne. First, the title 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea didn’t mean what I thought it did. Old Captain Nemo hadn’t dived to a depth of 20,000 leagues. That’s 60,000 nautical miles, which would have plunged his sub through the earth and a quarter of the way to the moon. Instead, the book title meant he’d traveled a distance of 60,000 nautical miles underwater, which was still crazy by nineteenth-century standards. It meant he circled the world seven and a half times in that old rusty can, the Nautilus.

The other thing I’d taken away from the book: Verne had come up with some cool ideas that would never work. One of those was Leyden guns. I think the name came from some electrical research Dutch scientists did in the city of Leyden in the 1700s. I’m also pretty sure I got that question wrong on Dr. Hewett’s midterm.

“It can’t be real.” Tia Romero picks up another gun and removes the magazine.

“Careful, Prefect,” Hewett warns her.

I’m losing my patience.

Our school has been destroyed for I-don’t-know-what-reason. My brother may be dead. We’re on the run from Land Institute, going I-don’t-know-where. Now it turns out our big gold-level secret is that Dr. Hewett enjoys live-action role-playing.