Gem frowns. “So…nice guy.”

“A brilliant scientist,” Hewett counters, “who had personal reasons to hate imperialism.” He hesitates, as if weighing whether or not he wants to tell me about yet another family tragedy. “During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Prince Dakkar stood up against the British. In response, the British destroyed his principality and killed his wife and elder son. After that, Dakkar went into hiding, eventually becoming Captain Nemo. You, Ana, are descended from his younger son, his only living heir.”

Nobody says anything for a minute. Even though the tragedy happened generations ago, I feel a familiar aching emptiness inside me, as if Nemo’s wife and child were two more people I lost when HP crumbled into the sea.

Finally Nelinha mutters an unkind comment in Portuguese about what imperialists can do with their national flags.

As far as I know, Dr. Hewett doesn’t speak Portuguese, but he seems to understand the sentiment. He nods in sympathy.

“At any rate,” he says, “when Ned Land and Pierre Aronnax escaped the Nautilus, they were terrified by the captain’s rage and power. They made it their lives’ work to save the reigning world order from his agenda. They decided they could only do that by re-creating or stealing Nemo’s technology by whatever means necessary, claiming his power for themselves.”

Nelinha studies her nails, chipped from a hard day’s work braining enemies with her socket wrench. “So that’s where Land Institute came from. Like I said, the bad guys. They want to save the world order. What does that make us—the good-guy outlaws?” She arches her eyebrows. “For the record, I’m okay with that.”

“I’m so glad,” Hewett says dryly. “As Prefect Dakkar deduced, our school was founded by the second group who encountered Nemo—the one led by Cyrus Harding and Bonaventure Pencroft. They had the good fortune of becoming stranded on an island that happened to be one of the captain’s secret bases. He helped them survive and eventually escape.”

“He had a lot of secret bases?” Gem asks, like he’s always wanted one.

“A dozen that we know of,” Hewett says. “Perhaps more. Anyway, by the time Harding and Pencroft met Nemo, he was a different man. His personal tragedies had left him broken and disillusioned. Despite being a genius, despite possessing the most powerful submarine ever built, he had failed to make any real change in the world…. Or so he believed.”

“He died in his sub.” I didn’t realize how much I remembered about The Mysterious Island. I guess it feels different now, knowing that this guy shared my blood as well as my name. “Nemo helped the castaways escape. Then he sank the Nautilus in a subterranean lagoon or something, right before the island went up in a big volcanic explosion. The sub was his tomb.”

I can see the goose bumps ripple across Nelinha’s arms. For a genius engineer, she is pretty superstitious. Ghosts, dead people, tombs—that stuff totally freaks her out. “There wasn’t anything in that book about Harding and Pencroft starting a school,” she says.