“No. And if anybody does, I will put pink-ducky water wings on them and throw them overboard.”

She sniffles some more. “That was a joke, right?”

“No. But no one will hate you.”

“What about the trustees? I told you what I know. They’ll disinherit me.”

“If the trustees give you any problems, I will personally kick each and every one of them in the groin.”

Ester considers this. She doesn’t ask if I’m joking. “Okay. That’s good. I love you.”

She says it with such a flat tone that anyone else could have missed it, or taken it as a polite, meaningless phrase, like How you doing? But I know she means it.

“I love you, too,” I say. “Can I ask you one more thing?”

She nods. As she strokes Top’s ear, I notice how badly she’s chewed up her cuticles.

I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but I ask anyway. “You said you knew what was going to happen to me. What did you mean?”

She frowns at the picture on the front of the book. A dark, jagged volcano rises from the churning sea. In the foreground, a drenched dog that looks very much like Top trembles alone on a tiny outcropping of rock.

“When your parents found the Nautilus,” she says, “they tried to open it. They tried to go inside. Your dad should have been able to do it. He was a direct descendant of Nemo. I don’t know exactly what happened, but something went wrong. That’s why HP was so careful with Dev. They didn’t want him to go near the sub until they understood—”

“Wait,” I say, my head spinning. “My parents’ death was an accident.”

“I don’t think so.” For a rare moment, Ester actually meets my eyes. “The Nautilus is dangerous, Ana. I think it killed your parents. I don’t want it to kill you, too.”

Over the next two days, I try not to obsess too much about Ester’s words.

I don’t succeed. At night, I lie awake thinking about my parents’ deaths. I imagine them diving into the creepy rusted-out wreck of a sub, only to get trapped inside, or killed by some ancient booby trap. I think about Dev, and how it must have torn him up to keep so many secrets. I have nightmares about the dark arrowhead shape of the Aronnax hurtling toward us underwater, cracking the Varuna’s hull in two.

During the day, I’m too busy stressing about immediate problems to worry about problems that might kill me later. Thank goodness for small favors.

Among the low points: We’re running short of food. We’ve needed a lot more than I thought we would, and we weren’t as good about rationing as I’d hoped. This makes me feel guilty that I sneaked an extra chocolate-chip cookie after dinner the first night. (What I really wanted was a fresh-baked gujiya dipped in hot chai, but desperate times call for desperate comfort foods.)