Ester nods. Her ears turn the colour of flame angelfish.
Behind her steel-framed glasses, Ophelia’s eyes look sad. I wonder if she’s remembering my parents. ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘This way.’
Top trots along beside us. He’s the only one who doesn’t look nervous. Ophelia leads us down a corridor that is perfectly round, like it was bored into the heart of the volcano by a single massive drill bit.
‘Is Luca coming?’ I ask.
‘He’s already there,’ Ophelia says.
I’m tempted to ask where exactly there is, but I have a feeling I’ll find out soon enough. I wonder if I should have waited for Gem to come with us. I imagine he’ll give me a hard time about that later. Somehow, though, I’m not sure a hyper-protective, heavily armed bodyguard would make me any safer this morning.
At the far end of the corridor stands a metal hatch that reminds me of an old bank-vault door.
‘Was – was this here before?’ I ask. ‘I mean, in Nemo’s time?’
Ophelia looks at me curiously. ‘What makes you ask?’
I have to think about this. The door’s plating and gear work don’t show any signs of wear or corrosion. The style is similar to other alt-tech devices I’ve seen, like the LOCUS and the Leyden cannon. But the vault door seems to radiate weight and power.
‘It seems old,’ I decide. ‘Like, really old.’
Ophelia gives me a dry smile. ‘Very astute, Ana. From this point forward, we will be entering Nemo’s original base. This door was sealed by Cyrus Harding shortly after Nemo’s death. It remained shut until we excavated it two years ago, when your father opened it.’
Ester hugs her shivering arms. ‘But the volcanic eruption destroyed the island. It said that in The Mysterious Island.’
‘Yes, well …’ Ophelia peers over the top of her glasses. ‘Harding and Pencroft may have stretched the truth a bit when they spoke to Jules Verne. Adventurers and treasure hunters were less likely to search for the island if they believed it had been obliterated.’
‘So the book lied.’ Ester sounds offended, as if her meticulous note cards have betrayed her. ‘That explains …’
She stops herself. In the dim overhead light of the corridor, her skin looks like stressed coral, slowly losing its healthy pink.
‘What is that metal?’ Nelinha asks our host. ‘It isn’t steel or brass. It doesn’t seem to corrode.’
‘Ingenious, isn’t it?’ Ophelia agrees. ‘For lack of a better term, we call it nemonium. We still have not managed to re-create the alloy, though we can work with it and repurpose old pieces for our own alt-tech. As far as we can tell …’
She launches into a detailed analysis of nemonium’s tensile strength, malleability and density that I’m sure several people in the world could understand, one of them being Nelinha. Meanwhile, I turn to Ester and whisper, ‘You okay?’
She chews her thumb. I resist the urge to pull her hand away from her mouth.
‘Just be careful inside,’ she says. ‘I think it would help if you talk to it first.’
I’m not sure I understand her. One of the problems with being multilingual is that sometimes you second-guess yourself about the meanings of words. Did Ester say talk to it? Isn’t it a neutral pronoun in English? Isn’t that the language we’re speaking?
I start to say, ‘Talk to –？’
‘Ana,’ Ophelia interrupts. ‘Would you do the honours?’
She gestures to the vault door. It has a massive round gear plate in the middle, with pistons radiating outwards like the spokes of a ship’s wheel. In the centre of the gear plate, where the wheel’s spindle hole would be, is a hemisphere of nemonium, the same size as the DNA-reader I used on Dr Hewett’s nautical map.
‘Me?’ I ask, as if she might be talking to some other Ana.
‘Well, I could do it.’ From her pocket, Ophelia fishes what looks like a metal security card. ‘We were able to jury-rig the lock after your father first opened it. But since it’s already keyed to your DNA …’
She waits. I don’t know if she’s testing me or letting me test myself. I think about the unpleasantly warm electrical current that went up my arm the last time I touched a Nemo DNA-reader. Then I think about my dream of drowning – the hopeless feeling of terror as Dev reached out for me and seawater filled my lungs. I am the last Dakkar.
I press my hand against the spindle-wheel lock. The metal doesn’t shock me. The central plate rotates. Pistons retract. Air hisses around the edges of the door like I’ve broken a vacuum seal. The door itself doesn’t move, but I suspect that if I pushed it now, it would swing open easily.