Gem gives her a dry smile. ‘But you’re Ester Harding.’
‘I was going to say I’m better at everything else,’ Ester says. ‘Except that would probably be rude. Is that rude?’
None of us bother to answer. Ester is Ester. We all know she would hate being a prefect. We also know she is the quintessential Orca. Her note cards are really just an emotional-support tool, like Top, because her mind holds more information about Harding-Pencroft, natural history and marine ecosystems than all the books in our recently destroyed library. She isn’t fond of humans, with the exception of Nelinha and me, and would much rather spend her time with animals. She’s a genius empath when it comes to non-verbal communication with other species. Ester can tell what animals – sometimes people, though she finds that harder – are thinking and feeling. She can predict their actions with uncanny accuracy … assuming her own raw nerves don’t overwhelm her.
Gem forges on. ‘We’re going to have to work together to figure out what happened. And what we’re going to do next. You know Hewett isn’t telling us everything.’
‘He isn’t telling us anything,’ Nelinha says.
‘But if I’m going to protect Ana –’
‘Which I didn’t ask for,’ I say.
Gemini looks like he wants to make an angry comment. He never curses. He’s super strait-laced. But I think he wants to.
‘None of us asked for this.’ He keeps his voice even. ‘We have to formulate a response. To do that, we have to know what we’re dealing with. How could Land Institute destroy our entire school?’
Ester shudders. Top immediately abandons me and jumps in her lap, forcing her to cuddle. I’ve never been so grateful that Ester, and all of us, has this fluff tornado drama king.
‘Seismic detonators,’ Nelinha theorizes. ‘One torpedo with three warheads. Simultaneous impacts at fracture points along the base of the cliffs –’
‘Hold up,’ Gem says. ‘That’s TMS. Pure science fiction. The technology doesn’t exist.’
‘Six warheads,’ Ester says. ‘You’d need six. Ana probably didn’t see the others because they were too deep. The attack would only work if they could hack the school’s security systems. Not just the grid. They’d need to fool the drones, the long-range sonar, the interceptor missiles –’
‘We have interceptor missiles?’ Nelinha demands.
Strawberries bloom on Ester’s cheeks. ‘I wasn’t supposed to say that.’
I make a note to grill Ester about that later. I’m curious to know what else she, as a Harding, might know that she isn’t supposed to say. At the moment, we have more immediate problems.
‘All the HP security systems are self-contained,’ I say. ‘The firewalls have firewalls. There’s no way anyone could hack their way in without being detected.’
‘Unless …’ Nelinha says.
My mouth turns dry. ‘Right. I overheard Bernie and Hewett talking when we got off the bus.’
‘“Overheard”？’ Gem makes air quotes around the word.
‘Okay, I read their lips.’
Gem’s eyes narrow. The particulars of Dolphin training aren’t common knowledge outside our house. I imagine he is rewinding the last two years, wondering what else I might have overheard. ‘And what did they say?’
I glance at Dr Hewett, still fiddling with his control pad. Whatever he sees in his readouts, he clearly doesn’t like it.
‘Bernie mentioned “inside help”，’ I say. ‘Which means –’
‘Someone at HP sabotaged us.’ Gem is definitely biting back a curse now. ‘And if that person didn’t want to die in the attack –’
‘They would be on this bus.’
Half an hour later, we arrive at the docks where our training vessel, the Varuna, is moored.
While the other students unload the bus’s cargo bay, I pull the Dolphins aside in the parking lot: Lee-Ann, Virgil, Jack and Halimah.
‘Tá fealltóir againn,’ I tell them.
Literally, this translates as There is a betrayer at us, which seems appropriate.
We’ve been using Irish as our internal code since the beginning of the year. Irish is so rare that the chance of anyone understanding a word we say is remote. Each class of Dolphins chooses their own language. Amelia’s learned Coptic. The juniors had Maltese. The sophomores chose Latin because they had no imagination. If you don’t have a talent for languages, you wash out of House Dolphin pretty quick.